Welcome to the Goretti Publications Podcast; this is Donald Goodman. This is Season 1, Episode 5: the accessibility of poetry. One is sometimes confronted with the notion that poetry just isn't accessible to normal people; it's too intellectual, too obscure, too difficult for the average man. This is often closely tied into notions that poetry just isn't very *masculine*; it's sensitive, feelings-based, and thus not a fit activity for a masculine man. It's difficult for your humble host to conceive how such a notion could develop, given the source of most poetry in history; and so, let's take a look at the concept, and examine whether there's anything to it. The oldest poetry in the Western world, of course, are the great works of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey (the Epic of Gilgamesh is Eastern rather than Western). And given that both arise entirely out of a huge, cataclysmic Aegean war, and that both were listened to as oral compositions at parties by large groups of otherwise uneducated warriors, one might consider the subject-matter quite masculine and quie accessible. Indeed, at points it becomes positively gruesome, with all the detail of a modern action movie: The bold Antilochus the slaughter led, the first who struck a valiant Trojan dead: at great Echepolus the lance arrives, razed his high crest, and through his helmet drives warm'd in the brain the brazen weapon lies, and shades eternal settle o'er his eyes. ... Trojans and Greeks now gather round the slain; The war renews, the warriors bleed again: As o'er their prey rapacious wolves engage, Man dies on man, and all is blood and rage. It is often deeply emotional, of course, as when the tragedy of death presses in on the warriors and the people who sent them to war, as we read only shortly thereafter in Book IV of the Iliad: In blooming youth fair Simoisius fell, ... Short was his date! by dreadful Ajax slain, He falls and renders all their (his mother's) cares in vain! ... Thus pierced by Ajax, Simoisius lies Stretch'd on the shore, and thus neglected dies. ... A chief stood nigh, who from Abydos came, Old Priam's son, Democoon was his name. The weapon entered close above his ear, Cold through his temples glides the whizzing spear; With piercing shrieks the youth resigns his breath, His eye-balls darken with the shades of death; Ponderous he falls; his clanging arms resound, And his broad buckler rings against the ground. This is brutal, yet very sensitive and emotional material, but it is material that every human being can immediately relate to and understand, and I would further suggest that no one could appropriately call it *feminine*. It's martial, violent, strong—yet it does not ignore the existence of emotion in even the strongest warriors. Indeed, it was written for warriors, to entertain warriors, to remind them of the glories of their battles and their ancestors; and yet it touches deep and emotional tones throughout its great length. And these warriors were not educated scholars, not the students of Aristotle; they were largely uneducated, sometimes even illiterate themselves, just as the poet himself may well have been. These poems were written for *everyone*—and, indeed, enjoyed by everyone, as their survival these thousands of years testifies. Poetry is very often about *love*, of course, a topic to which we all can relate. Once upon a time, any young man courting a young lady would compose her some poetry, which was naturally of varying quality; but the poetry itself was not considered beyond a normal lad to write, or a normal lady to read, understand, and appreciate. And yes, *emotions* may at first seem like a rather stereotypically feminine topic; however, much of the best such poetry is about love from a decidedly masculine perspective. Consider Lovelace's “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars”: Tell me not (Sweet) I am unkind, That from the nunnery Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind To war and arms I fly. True, a new mistress now I chase, The first foe in the field; And with a stronger faith embrace A sword, a horse, a shield. Yet this inconstancy is such As you too shall adore; I could not love thee (Dear) so much, Lov'd I not Honour more. Does he speak about his deep and abiding love for his lady? Yes; but he also speaks of his need to do his duty, to fight for his country. The pain of leaving love to embrace the necessity of battle; the deep love for the lady who must be left behind; the sorrow of the lady who sees her love depart for death and carnage; these are universal concepts, and anyone of normal intelligence and acumen can read, understand, and appreciate these verses. And indeed, our ancestors did so. Siegfried Sassoon, a mighty English poet doing most of his best writing during and after the First World War, channelled all the emotion, trauma, and violence of that destructive conflict into some deeply moving, very accessible, and intensely masculine poetry. Consider “Suicide in Trenches”: I knew a simple soldier boy Who grinned at life in empty joy, Slept soundly through the lonesome dark, And whistled early with the lark. In winter trenches, cowed and glum With crumps and lice and lack of rum, He put a bullet through his brain. No one spoke of him again. You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go. No man worth the name can read or hear such words without shivering with the horrors that these brave, hapless boys went through in the trenches. And to speak of public appreciation for such work, the phrase “where youth and laugher go” entered into the popular lexicon as a reminder of the soul-destroying terror of modern warfare, used for everything from the trenches of World War I to the jungles of Vietnam and the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan. This is poetry for the world, not for the scholars; it is a deeply masculine, deeply *human* reflection that everyone can read and immediately understand. Or consider “Atrocities”, perhaps Sassoon's most violent poem, even in his edited and complete version: You told me, in your drunken-boasting mood, How once you butchered prisoners. That was good! I'm sure you felt no pity while they stood Patient and cowed and scared, as prisoners should. How did you do them in? Come, don't be shy: You know I love to hear how Germans die, Downstairs in dug-outs. “Camerad!” they cry; Then squeal like stoats when bombs begin to fly. And you? I know your record. You went sick When orders looked unwholesome: then, with trick And lie, you wangled home. And here you are, Still talking big and boozing in a bar. But his original version, unedited and unfinished, is still more powerful: You bragged how once in savage mood Your men butchered some Saxon prsioners; that was good. I trust you felt no pity as they stood Patient and cowed and scared as prisoners should. How did you kill them? speak now, don't be shy, You know I love to hear how Germans die Downstairs in dug-outs, “Camerad!” they cry; And squeal like stoats when bombs begin to fly. Alone in no-man's land when no one can shield you from the horror of the night. There's blood upon your hands. Now go out and fight. I hope those Huns will haunt you with their screams And make you gulp their blood in ghoulish dreams. You're great at murder; tell me, can you fight? The notion that this art is somehow “girly”, or even “feminine”, is self-evidently absurd. This is profoundly, intensely masculine work, that speaks nevertheless to the entirety of the human experience and the human spirit. And what is confusing about this? What is hard to understand, or inaccessible to anyone reading it? It is immediately clear to everyone: Sassoon is scorning the big-talking cowards who bluster and murder, but are scared to put their own lives at risk in open combat. He hates his countrymen who use the war as an excuse for their own cruelty. This is immediately evident, yet it far more poignantly, accurately, and succintly expressed in his verse than it could possibly have been in prose. Already by this time, though, before the First World War, the modern poetry movement had begun and gathered steam, and accessible poetry like Sassoon's was being derided as doggerel, too simple and understandable to be real poetry. The academics needed more obscurantism, poetry understandable *to them*, not understandable by the poor fools fighting it out in the trenches, dragging the plows, running the assembly lines of the world. But the greatest target of such academic poets is Joyce Kilmer, a great poet but derided by the moderns, perhaps the surest sign that his poetry is truly worth hearing. Often derided as a sentimentalist (and to be fair, his poetry is often quite sentimental), Kilmer, most famous for the simple poem “Trees” (“I think that I shall never see / a poem as lovely as a tree”), is for modernity the symbol of all that is wrong with pre-modern poetry. It was readable; it was comprehensible; it was, above all, *accessible*. He said exactly what he meant in a straightforward, comprehensible way, an unforgivable sin in the eyes of modern poetry. Yet read Kilmer! His works are often excellent, not only “Trees” but many others; “Said the Rose” is another particularly powerful piece. But Kilmer knew what the moderns said about his work, which was nevertheless quite popular among people, and he blamed poets themselves for this assumption of feminine weakness behind the craft, addressing those individuals in his assemblage of couplets, “To Certain Poets”: Now is the rhymer’s honest trade A thing for scornful laughter made. The merchant’s sneer, the clerk’s disdain, These are the burden of our pain. Because of you did this befall, You brought this shame upon us all. You little poets mincing there With women’s hearts and women’s hair! How sick Dan Chaucer’s ghost must be To hear you lisp of “Poesie”! A heavy-handed blow, I think, Would make your veins drip scented ink. You strut and smirk your little while So mildly, delicately vile! Your tiny voices mock God’s wrath, You snails that crawl along His path! Why, what has God or man to do With wet, amorphous things like you? This thing alone you have achieved: Because of you, it is believed That all who earn their bread by rhyme Are like yourselves, exuding slime. Oh, cease to write, for very shame, Ere all men spit upon our name! Take up your needles, drop your pen, And leave the poet’s craft to men! Kilmer, himself a brave warrior who was killed by a sniper while scouting enemy machine-gun positions in July 1918, wrote a lot of very feeling-focused poetry; but no one could reasonably call him “feminine”. And every single poem of his is perfectly accessible, perfectly comprehensible to a normally educated person, despite its often deep and engaging subject-matter. The problem with poetry's image in our day—that is, its image as the province of effete weaklings, with no place among normal, masculine men—is precisely as Kilmer identified: weak, pathetic, snooty poets, who scorn the verse that a normal man can appreciate and consider only verbose, convoluted, impenetrable poetry to be worthy examples of the craft. These poets, to whom Whitman is greater than Chaucer, Cummings the equal of Shakespeare, turned poetry away from being an *art* and toward being a *specialty*. Poetry was, for nearly all of human history, a common art, even a peasant's art. The masses flocked to hear the lilting poetry of Shakespeare's plays; the people who put on Passion plays and morality acts in medieval villages memorized verse, rather than merely lines of dialogue, and loved it. But for these modern, enlightened poets, poetry was a fine art, to be written for and enjoyed by the educated elites; and if it was beyond the masses, so be it. So it increasingly began to be seen as obscure, impenetrable nonsense, the domain of sensitive, effete academics, rather than the universal inheritance of mankind. So never mind that the roughest, most uncouth, uneducated warriors in history listened to the sagas, the odes of Beowulf, the violent rhythms of the Iliad; never mind that the great defenders of Christendom fed themselves on the refrains of El Cid, the tragedy of Roland, and most especially the strange, haunting melodies of the psalms. Never mind that *all* could appreciate these public, common expressions of poetic genius, just as all could appreciate the carvings of the cathedral, the brushstrokes of the icon, the twinkling light of the stained glass. No, *poetry*, to these poets, is a specialty, to be appreciated by other poets in journals of poetry, and not by the mere hoi polloi working in the mills, plowing the fields, digging in the mines, or fighting in the trenches. And so it grew further and further from the ethos of the people, until now, when scarcely anyone ever thinks of it at all; and when they do, they think of it as the elites wanted it to be: as purely academic, obscurantist nonsense, as convoluted hokum, directly opposed to “plain language”. But poetry *is* plain language; it is, in fact, the plain language that has informed nearly all of our history. It is modern poetry, the corrupted pseudo-poetry of our age, that is obscurantist nonsense; true poetry is true language, the way that words make their best impression upon mankind. The modern poets, producing Kilmer's “lisp[s] of ‘Poesie’”, have destroyed Everyman's linguistic art and turned it into a laughingstock, the domain of the effete and elite rather than the universal inheritance of mankind. Even recently, even in American history, poetry was once a popular pursuit. Every young man composed poetry for the girl he was courting; farmers discussed the latest Kilmer work they had read in the paper; gruff New York longshoreman talked _The Raven_ amongst themselves on the docks. Now, the elitism of modern free-verse, obscurantist poetry has rendered this once-universal art into an elite enjoyment; indeed, an enjoyment even most of the elite will avoid. Only an academic can love the modern productions, and barely anyone else can be induced to even read it, much less enjoy it. “I just don't get poetry.” Surely not! If a medieval peasant could belt out the lines of _Everyman_ from memory, and his neighbors could love it the way they clearly did, how can a modern, educated man claim not to ⃜“get it”? We don't “get it” because it's become a joke, an opaque, nonsensical specialty; the art that it once was, and can be again, we all certainly “get”. More poets need to be producing more poetry, better poetry, and encouraging our neighbors and friends to read it, to listen to it, to understand it. Only then can we reclaim this art for mankind. For our original poem this week, we review “Death Has Been Cheated Once”: Often in my prayers I wonder when cruel time my life shall plunder; will he come with noise and thunder, or in silence wisp away? Short or lengthy, will I linger when the Reaper points his finger; will I in the end malinger, or go manfully that day? Some have tread that path already, facing forward, always steady, made themselves a tranquil eddy in the foaming rush of strife; By their valor in the racing, though their deathly pallor facing, at the finish they are placing, through the labor of their life. Tired and weary in the running, long bereft of all their cunning, they have time itself been stunning as they run this awful race; through exhaustion, they keep going, by their perseverence showing without noise or boastful crowing how the Reaper we should face. But when they've the race completed, they might yet still be defeated; Death has only once been cheated, and his time is not yet here. Though they are the finish sighting, At their heels the scythe is biting; now the fight they must be fighting, as they know their end is near. Pound for pound, they keep contending, to us their example lending, mighty powers their backs bending; but those backs will never break. Strengthened by another power, eyeing e'er their final hour, even Death himself must cower, when at last he them can take. Victory is not required for the warriors thus sired; though to death they are now tired, still they stretch out weary limbs; arms which, in the combat's bleakness, conquer through their very weakness; arms which are the one uniqueness which the Reaper never dims. Mighty combat they are waging, battle never disengaging, but without that reckless raging which so often mars our lives; Ever flight they are refusing from this battle of their choosing; th' only victory is losing; towards defeat the soldier strives. Follow, run until depleted! Fight until you are defeated! Death has once before been cheated, and our time has now arriv'd! Fear the tomb less than the flying! Fear surrender more than trying! To the Lord of Battle crying; from defeat a win deriv'd! This poem explores the notion of J. R. R. Tolkien's “long defeat”, described in his Letter 195: “Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’—though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.” In this poem, we see that Death, which has only once been cheated, will eventually conquer us all; that is, that we are fighting a long defeat against it. Yet, through this long defeat, in which we rely on those who have fought it before us, we will also be able to cheat Death's victory over us again, deriving a win from defeat. I hope that this poem represents a good example of what we've discussed above: a poem that is technically expert, lyrically sound, deeply meaningful and symbolic, and yet clear. Thank you for listening; until next time, this has been the Goretti Publications Podcast.