THE TEN MOST OVERRATED POETS

September 16, 2022 at 1:20 am (Ezra Pound, Geoffrey Hill, Hart Crane, John Donne, Marianne Moore, Ocean Vuong, Pablo Neruda, Robert Lowell, Seamus Heaney, William Carlos Williams)

William Cullen Bryant—he’s not on this list!

TEN. Sir Geoffrey Hill (d. 2016) Starting in 2006 many in Great Britain and America said he was the greatest poet in the world. I don’t think he will be overrated much longer because he’s already being forgotten. He was never very good. Only bombastic. Here’s the second stanza of “Funeral Music,” considered one of his best poems. The dullness will be immediately apparent. (And all his work is like the sample below. It never drops this mask. Reading him is like being trapped inside a hedge.) What’s it about? Who knows? Who cares?

For whom do we scrape our tribute of pain—
For none but the ritual king? We meditate
A rueful mystery; we are dying
To satisfy fat Caritas, those
Wiped jaws of stone. (Suppose all reconciled
By silent music; imagine the future
Flashed back at us, like steel against sun,
Ultimate recompense.) Recall the cold
Of Towton on Palm Sunday before dawn,
Wakefield, Tewkesbury: fastidious trumpets
Shrilling into the ruck; some trampled
Acres, parched, sodden or blanched by sleet,
Stuck with strange-postured dead. Recall the wind’s
Flurrying, darkness over the human mire.

NINE. Pablo Neruda. (d. 1973) His poetry has always seemed to me written by someone just trying to get laid. But he’s much admired, so he made this list.

EIGHT. Marianne Moore. (d. 1972) The only woman who gets to suit up with Team High Modernism and she’s so obviously the token woman of the group (no real enthusiasm for her) this alone puts her in the overrated camp—her most popular poem calls poetry “all this fiddle”—which describes exactly what she writes: brittle, busy, shrill, sermonizing. Fiddle. Or as she puts it in the same poem by way of defining good poetry: “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” Real toads? Really?

SEVEN. Hart Crane. (d. 1932) We all know he wrote something called “The Bridge” and jumped off a boat into the ocean. He’s the reckless, out-of-control modern who wrote nothing memorable but is nonetheless admired for writing the kind of clanging, noisy poetry popular between the wars. The fact is, almost anyone can write ‘show-off-y’ poetry which really makes no sense, if they put their mind to it. Critics who encourage this are foolish. One stanza from “The Bridge” will make it clear what I mean:

Damp tonnage and alluvial march of days—
Nights turbid, vascular with silted shale
And roots surrendered down of moraine clays:
The Mississippi drinks the farthest dale.

There’s something utterly childish about Crane: how to write about a large bridge? “Damp tonnage” of course. “Nights turbid” —or should it be, “Poetry turbid?” What is “roots surrendered down of moaraine clays” but the same sort of thing? His poetry goes on and on like this. This sample is enough. God rest his poor soul. Some might argue the point of Crane’s Modernist work is to expand poetry’s reach from human romance to a romance of things. But poems about watering cans help neither the watering can nor the poem. Love, on the other hand, is never a trivial thing. We know that much.

SIX. Seamus Heaney. (d. 2013) In his most anthologized poem, “Digging,” we find his chief fault, which is a good one to have, since metaphor (which Heaney loves) underlies it. Nearly every reader of poetry is a sucker for metaphor—but here’s the problem: ‘that is like this,’ overdone, can turn ‘that’ into a bridge to nowhere. “Digging” labors with forced metaphors: a spade becomes a pen and a gun. Observing his digging dad’s rump, Heaney wants his readers to appreciate rump and head, spade and pen. The suck and muck of his poetry’s sound, combined with an affection for simile, creates a recognizable, charming style—which stays away, in almost every instance, from the sublime.

FIVE. Ocean Vuong. (b. 1988) He’s overrated, like Heaney, for something all poets strive to do—and which Vuong does very well. Vuong fails spectacularly in a manner in which many modern poets fail—making him popular with those who embrace the Modernist aesthetic. The trope I refer to is the one in which everything in a Vuong poem is highly personal—the sky, the pavement, the room, the father, the mother, etc are his—and the glimpses of these things in fragmented and rapid fire epiphanies cause us to witness these things in awe and sympathy and respect—but it is precisely this experience which inhibits the grasping it as a poem. Vuong is building on a Modernist method practiced since the Imagists: the poet essentially says to the reader: This object, image, experience, is so important to me personally and exists in such a genuine manner as a thing outside the poem, that only through a unique, personal transcendence can you understand my poem. The reader is so ashamed at not being able to do this, they decide to pretend they can. I peruse a typical Vuong poem and am unmoved—precisely because Vuong has succeeded so well in making the poem his.

FOUR. John Donne (d. 1631) is a great poet, make no doubt about it. He’s in the top five poets most anthologized, since T.S. Eliot famously praised the Metaphysical Poets 100 years ago in a bizarre theory claiming Donne and the Metaphysicals (Samuel Johnson coined the term) were united in their sensibility, whereas the Romantics, for instance, were not. Eliot was merely trying to make a name for himself as a critic by saying odd, controversial things (it worked). Isn’t it obvious to everyone Donne was mostly re-writing Shakespeare’s Sonnets? (Donne’s most famous poem, “Death Be Not Proud,” is brilliant but sounds like Shakespeare Sonnet 146) The Sonnets, which predate Donne, are as “metaphysical” as any group of poems could possibly be. Can it be that T.S. Eliot the Modernist, was truly enamored of lines like this?

Only our love hath no decay;

This, no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday;

Running, it never runs from us away,

But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.

“The Anniversary” (Donne)

THREE. Robert Lowell. (d. 1977) His reputation depended solely on the fortunate dilemma—was the Lowell name being exploited by him more or by others? No one, not even his masters Ransom at Kenyon, Engle at Iowa, or various ambitious academics like M.L. Rosenthal quite knew. His poetry never enlightens or wrestles with anything; like the writing of another wealthy heir, Henry James, it listlessly records. It was supposed to be a big deal when the “cooked” guy (electro-shock therapy) embraced the “raw” (the drugged Beats) but this was only a meds adjustment. The poetry was comfortably numb until the end. (It must have thrilled his young BU students, Plath and Sexton, to quickly discover “gee, my work is better than teacher’s!”) His most anthologized poem is about a skunk—or something else, we’re not sure.

TWO. William Carlos Williams (d. 1963) He rhymed unsuccessfully in the beginning of his career and was already in his 40s when his Wheelbarrow haiku got attention. The New Critics admired Williams. Poet Louis Ginsberg (Allen’s nudist colony dad) belonged to Williams’ artist clique—which included Man Ray. The WCW plums poem is the worst poem ever written. When I read this poem I eat a refrigerated plum. My teeth hurt. This is all Williams has ever done for me. Why do people like his work so much? My guess is it’s the Ginsberg connection. Or the “bad-poetry-admired club” to which bad poets (Williams was its first member) belong.

ONE. Ezra Pound (d. 1972) —Crackpot literary theories such as saying it doesn’t matter which leg you work on first when you make a table —ABC of Reading chap. 7— and ranking his friend Henry James as the most important of the modern writers while downplaying every beloved English speaking poet who ever lived—to seem eclectic. His Cantos is collage-–the worst thing ever invented for art and poetry. Unfocused, pretentious cheapening. He was a social butterfly more than a man of letters. His most anthologized poem, “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” isn’t his; he was a borrower and a thief in his work; similar to how he lived—off his family and rich women. He made a great show of lamenting the decline of civilization—but he belongs to its decline. “Make the old—new!” he cried. Whatever that means.