From “The Obscurity of the Poet”

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A few lines from Randall Jarrell:

“Anyone who has spent much time finding out what people do when they read a poem, what poems actually mean for them, will have discovered that a surprising part of the difficulty they have comes from their almost systematic unreceptiveness, their queer unwillingness to pay attention…. You need to read good poetry with an attitude that is a mixture of sharp intelligence and of willing emotional empathy, at once penetrating and generous” (12).

“People always ask: For whom does the poet write? He needs only to answer, For whom do you do good?  Are you kind to your daughter because in the end someone will pay you for being?…. The poet writes his poem for its own sake, for the sake of that order of things in which the poem takes the place that has awaited it” (26).

Then there is this, answering the complaint that contemporary poetry is “too obscure” compared to poetry of the past:

“[H]ow difficult and dull the inexperienced reader would find most of the great poetry of the past, if he could ever be induced to read it!  Yet it is always in the name of the easy past that he condemns the difficult present” (11-12).

Basically, we like the poetry we have learned how to like, the poetry with which we have taken the time to become receptive.  For English lit. scholars, that might be the canonical authors who they’ve been “taught” how to read.  For the general public condemning “difficulty” in poetry, though, one wonders if they’ve taken the time to be receptive to any of it.

Jarrell continues:

“The man who monthly reads, with vacant relish, the carefully predigested sentences which the Reader’s Digest feeds him as a mother pigeon feeds her squabs – this man cannot read the Divine Comedy, even if it should ever occur to him to try.  Yet one sort of clearness shows a complete contempt for the reader, just as one sort of obscurity shows a complete respect.  Which patronizes and degrades the reader, the Divine Comedy with its four levels of meaning, or the Reader’s Digest with its one level so low that it seems not a level but an abyss into which the reader consents to sink?  The writer’s real dishonesty is to give an easy paraphrase of the hard truth” (18).

While I feel uncomfortable, at moments, with the elitist leaning of some of the lines here, I don’t think that’s what is really at heart in this essay.  Jarrell challenges what is (or isn’t) behind claims that contemporary poetry “fails” in its obscurity where canonical writers are immediately crystal clear to their audiences.  And he challenges readers of all sorts to look for the rewards in the difficulty – to be empathetic and attentive to the “hard truth” found in art.

Jarrell, Randall.  “The Obscurity of the Poet.”  Poetry and the Age. NY: Octagon Books, 1972. pp 3-27.

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