D. H. Tracy's essay "Bad Ideas" in the latest Poetry is rich and fun to read, thanks in part to his own apt similes, and thanks also to his outlining a scheme for analyzing and appreciating poetry on the level of one's own premises about life. But aside from those, I take personal interest in the way some of his examples relate to a recent posting here ("Faith as Rational as Language?").
His scheme borrows from a 1947 article in which an "unserious" poet is dismissed by a "serious" critic, "serious" denoting "an awareness of premises, a belief in the validity of those premises to the exclusion of competing ones, and the will to execute them." Understanding the seriousness of a poet or a critic aids one in understanding their work, in ways that Tracy describes.
Along the way, Tracy employs some striking imagery of his own. A certain critic judges a poem "upstream of the poetry itself," meaning that he's critiquing the poet's philosophical forebears before he even gets to the text. He contrasts the seriousness of Milton to the unseriousness of Donne and Marvell, "playing with ideas like brokers playing with pork bellies." I like "bees and butterflies," his analogy for contrasting serious and unserious poets. And, at least for Dante's unserious readers, Dante's Divine Comedy is "a kind of theme park for medieval theology."
I'm interested in some bits that Tracy takes from poets' works and letters. William Butler Yeats received this note from his father about William Blake:
I know that Blake's poetry is not intelligible without a knowledge of Blake's mystical doctrines. Yet mysticism was never the substance of his poetry, only its machinery.... The substance of his poetry is himself, revolting and desiring. His mysticism was a make-believe, a sort of working hypothesis as good as another.
That's so sensible, especially when contrasted with the junior Yeats' lifelong efforts to "cobble together a mythology that was not make-believe." In my personal reflection on faith and metaphor, I opined that the metaphors of faith are useful for thinking about one's experiences and choices regardless of whether the metaphors are "make-believe." How would one even know the difference? I did add that the metaphors and mythology of Christian faith stand up to experience and strike me as more true than more worldly wisdom.
But when a friend of Gerard Manley Hopkins expressed something along the lines of what I just wrote, the poet chided, "It is long since such things [i.e. the doctrines and stories of faith] had any significance to you. But what is strange and unpleasant is that you sometimes speak as if they had in reality none for me." The whole time that I was writing my own reflection last week, I was hearing the voice of one of my guiding lights, Flannery O'Connor, saying, "If the sacraments are just a metaphor, to hell with them."
Now, aside from that, I also like these lines by James Merrill (sorry, I've never heard of him), expressing an "unserious" look at the world and poetry:
Not for nothing had the Impressionists
Put subject-matter in its place, a mere
Pretext for iridescent atmosphere.
I've written something along those lines about my favorite detective novelists, how the story is just an avenue, and the interest in the sights passed along the way.
Finally, Tracy quotes from a long poem "Essay on Psychiatrists" by Robert Pinsky, and these make me want to read the rest. In the lines cited by Tracy, a professor addresses his young Lit. students about the very thing I loved in the eighteenth century poets, how
...Sometime in the middle
Of the Eighteenth Century, along with the rise
Of capitalism and scientific method, the logical
Foundations of Western thought decayed and fell apart.
When they fell apart, poets were left
With emotions and experiences, and with no way
To examine them. At this time, poets and men
Of genius began to go mad....
...and the ideas which were vital
To them are mere amusement to you.from Robert Pinsky's Essay on Psychiatrists
full text
Tracy admits that "Whoever holds ideas to be more than mere amusement will at the very least risk being unappealing," but he admires their courage.
Poetry | Religion
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