The Hatred of Poetry
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15
Ratings3
Average rating4
"No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore. "Many more people agree they hate poetry," Ben Lerner writes, "than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore."In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible"--
"The novelist and poet Ben Lerner argues that our hatred of poetry is ultimately a sign of its nagging relevance"--
Reviews with the most likes.
Picked up in place of a more instructive book on the same subject, this brief criticism (more an exploration, albeit with sharp edges) felt unique and playful throughout, with a pace just quick enough to keep me turning the page, but not so much as to let me pass through without the pang of regret for want of a nice pencil or, at the least, a highlighter.
Probably the best exploration of poetry I've read, and I'm still debating whether the parts that bothered me should or not... or if I even care.
The main argument is that we hate poetry because it doesn't match up with a platonic ideal of what poetry could be, or could do. Sometimes tho, I have no idea what poetry is trying to do so I'm glad to read someone else talk about it. I was also glad when Lerner, in talking about the desire for poetry to be both individual + universal, points out the bias of one critic in assuming only white men can really speak for everyone and that no men could relate to Sylvia Plath's “Daddy” or example.
