Considerations, Part 2 of 10: Louis Simpson on Narrative Poetry

The following is an excerpt from the essay "Reflections on Narrative Poetry" by Louis Simpson, 1981.

Why tell stories in lines of verse? Isn't prose a more suitable medium?

It would be, if poets only had ideas and wished to convey them. But feeling is more urgent, and their feelings are expressed by the movement of lines. In poetry, the form, more than the idea, creates the emotion we feel when we read the poem.

In everything else the poets share the concerns of the writers of prose, and may indeed learn more about writing narrative poems from the novelist than from other poets, for in the last two hundred years it has been the novelist whose labor it was to imitate life, while the poet prided himself on his originality, his remoteness from the everyday. "Life" was the business of the middle class and the novelists who entertained it.

As a result, poetry has been impoverished. In the theory of poetry held by Poe and his French translators, poetry is lyrical and intense, the reflection of an unearthly beauty. Many people believe that poetry is a language we do not speak, and that the best poetry is that which we are least able to understand.

I wish to discuss another kind of poetry, that which undertakes to be an imitation of life. The aim of the narrative poet is the same as for the writer of prose fiction: to interpret experience, with the difference I have mentioned: his writing will move in measure. And this measure evokes a harmony that seems apart from life. I say "seems" because it would be impossible to prove that it exists. Readers of poetry, however, feel it. This harmony is what poetry is, as distinct from prose.

What else can one possibly say on this subject? There is one thing: one can say, as an absolute rule, that poets must not use words loosely.

When I was a young man I wrote a poem in which I said that poetry had made me "nearly poor." I showed this to a friend, himself a writer, and he advised me to change "nearly poor" to "poor"---it would be more striking. I kept the line as it was, and never again did I pay attention to anything this critic had to say.

Poets try to think of new images. But it does not matter whether the image be new or old---what matters is that it be true. Poets who think that by producing far-fetched images they are changing our consciousness are doing nothing of the kind. One comes to expect the unexpected.

As the painter Margritte points out, everyone is familiar with the bird in a cage. Anyone can visualize a fish in a cage, or a shoe. But these images, though they are curious, are, unfortunately, arbitrary and accidental. If you wish to surprise, alarm, and alert the reader on the deeper levels of consciousness, visualize a large egg in the cage.

Imagine that you are reading your poem aloud, and that two or three people whose intelligence you respect are sitting in the audience. If you say something banal, or try to conceal a poverty of thought in a cloud of verbiage, you will see them yawn, their eyes beginning to close.

"Most artists and critics," said Susan Sontag, writing in the sixties, "have discarded the theory of art as representative of outer reality in favor of art as sujective expression."

Critics define movements in art just as they come to an end. For twenty years we have been reading poetry that expressed the personal feelings and opinions of the poet. The movement is exhausted---this is apparent in the visual arts as well as poetry and fiction. People long for understanding and a community of some kind.