What does it mean to be a ‘good’ poem? It’s my job to think about poetry and I don’t know!
About ten hours after Joe Biden’s inauguration as US president, in my insomniac twitter scrolling I noticed a few tweets, some of which had been liked by literature academics, questioning the quality of the inaugural poem composed and performed by Amanda Gorman hours prior and/or labelling it as pacifying and full of platitudes. These sentiments obviously struck a chord with literary scholars who seemed to agree with them. And this got me thinking about a common occurrence in my world (an admittedly cloistered one as a Lecturer in Latin) in which scholars of literature in general and poetry in particular lay claim to a poem as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, as ‘high quality’ or ‘poor quality’.
Among other authors, I work on the didactic-epic poet Lucretius, who was writing at some point during the later days of the Roman republic, in the 1st Century BC. His poem, De Rerum Natura, or ‘On the Nature of the Universe’, is a remarkable history and aetiology of the universe that explains every phenomenon and act as having its fundamental causes in the movement and combination and recombination of atoms, building up to zoom in on our world and explain the history of of animal development, evolution, and even our very civilisation. It necessarily removes the gods from having an active role in our world, in accord with the Epicurean philosophy from which it derives its message. The epic poem ends with a bleak and anti-climactic plague that has been viewed as being too depressing to possibly be the ending that Lucretius intended.
Lucretius’ poem has had a somewhat mixed reception since the poem’s rediscovery by the famous humanist ‘book-hunter’, Poggio Bracciolini in 1417. Lucretius’ ‘biography’ by Jerome is predictably trotted out in every single introduction to the author that you can find: Lucretius, Jerome tells us, took a love potion (an ancient version of a performance-enhancing drug?), which affected his mind, and wrote the De Rerum Natura, his famous and controversial didactic-epic poem, per intervalla insaniae, ‘during periods of insanity’. It was not until 1962 that Konrad Ziegler was the first to question the claim, exposing it as an attempt by the Christian church to discredit an obviously anti-religious poem, whose message threatens the very existence of the church. Still, this biography has persisted and the very notion that the De Rerum Natura was left incomplete bears traces of it (hence, so proponents of the poem’s significant incompleteness argue, its manifold supposed flaws).
Lucretius’ poem has been seen as a patchy, uneven text, and in many ways it is. But does this mean it’s unfinished (a frequent assumption), or of poorer quality than other poems that appear more ‘complete’, neater, tidier? It is worth noting that the word ‘perfect’ comes from the Latin ‘perficio’ meaning to complete or finish off totally, meaning that in a sense the notion of completion carries with it an inevitable sense of impossible perfection. Try as one might to argue that Lucretius’ poetry has always been seen as beautiful, even sublime, one will have trouble explaining away the labelling of various passages as ‘digressive’, the removal of repetitious passages, claims that more ‘prosaic’ sections of the poem are drier and dustier, and the general assumption of incompleteness and imperfection, without admitting that readers have, since criticism on the poem began, taken a view as to what makes ‘good’ and ‘bad’ poetry, at least to some degree. I suppose the reason I am going into this is because assumptions matter, and should be questioned, even if we have to look back at the history of how a poem has been approached and how an approach affects how we read it even today.
The inaugural poem, ‘The Hill We Climb’ by Gorman has revived the discussion as to what makes good poetry, what makes good art. There can be a danger in dismissing a poem because it does not speak to us. But what a dull world if the same art spoke to us all! Added to this general point is the crucial nature of the context in which a piece of art is made. The context of the poem—literally the days immediately following the divisive and destructive Trump presidency—is important, as is the broad, simply enormous, audience to whom Gorman speaks.
It is quite a particular phenomenon to witness a claim to possession over an ultimate truth over what makes ‘good art’. Can we move beyond mere value judgements, beyond discussion of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’? What does it even mean, to be a ‘good poem’? Who gets to decide? There are more interesting questions and considerations at stake. To me, ‘The Hill We Climb’ is powerful, moving, and hopeful; it speaks to a movement to unify that is right now tied to positivity. To critique the inaugural poem because it appears to placate is to fail to see hints at something darker within a broader critical (and political) choice to move beyond criticism to see the light.
‘For there is always light,
If only we’re brave enough to see it
If only we’re brave enough to be it.’