Has the Best Literature Already Been Written?

It’s very easy to fall into the mindset that there’s not much point in writing anymore, since the best writing has already been written. After all, who is going to write a lyric poem better than Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments...”? Who could out-do his Sonnet 55, “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme...” so bold in its claim, so democratic in its implications.

The Bard Guy

But imagine if all the writers since Shakespeare had thrown away their quills or pens or clunky manual typewriters with stuck keys and said, “No way I’m going to measure up to the Bard Guy.” Think of the many thousands of works of literature we wouldn’t have, from Wordsworth’s sonnets to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God to Neruda’s poems of surrealist angst in Residencia en tierra? Make your own list. Probably the majority of great literature was written after the Golden Age of Petrarch to Shakespeare was ancient history.

You might still say that the works of even those more recent classic writers I just listed are out of reach now, since our daily speech has declined in the age of texting and singers with dollar signs in their names to the point where we can’t reach the peaks of the literary sublime. Maybe. But what an interesting challenge that is, to try to create a moment of heightened language and emotion in a world where that is not the norm, where new literary classics are as rare as pulling an emerald from the dirt!

Rather than assume that literature has seen its best days, why not think of what literature has not been attempted yet?

Have we melded literature as fully as we can with the other arts and technologies? Heck, no. (Who said that?)

Have we taken literature authentically into the realms of intimacy that have been so private up till now?

Have we written about the new shapes that relationships and families are taking in our world?

Have we laid out the radical equality and justice and sustainability that will allow our world to survive this age of splits—of faiths, families, nations, and atoms?

Yes, there may be a trade-off. We may not be able to duplicate the lacy sounds of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter, or the intricate dance of Dante’s terza rima. But we have the benefit of hundreds of years of history and change since Jacobean England and Trecento Italy, change that has given us, I hope, new insights. There are new musics, new asymmetries of elegance to reveal.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
How to Be an American Writer

Why Write Poetry, Part 2: Political Statement

 There are many ways of making political statements: speeches, nonfiction writing, posters—even literary fiction. Why bother to use poetry, a much more labor-intensive and rarified type of communication?

As a form of political speech, I find poetry the most persuasive. By putting a political statement into poetic language, the writer is challenged to make the diction as fresh, immediate, and original as possible.  

In his landmark essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell defines good writing as “picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer.” That’s exactly what poetry does at its best.

Let me give you an example of how poetry can bring to life a political argument. Here are the opening lines of one of my favorite poems by June Jordan, the great poet who passed away ten years ago:

Infinity doesn’t interest me

not altogether

anymore

I crawl and kneel and grub about

I beg and listen for

what can go away

                        (as easily as love)

or perish

like the children

running

hard on oneway streets/infinity

doesn’t interest me

(“On a New Year’s Eve”)

If you were to make the argument of this poem in nonfiction prose, it would most likely fall flat on its face: “I believe that living creatures are much more important than abstract concepts.” Boring. It’s the way that June Jordan tackles the subject in poetry that makes it unforgettable and convincing. First of all, she takes on “infinity.” You can’t take that type of verbal leap in a speech. That one word, infinity, evokes so many things. Here, June Jordan seems to be alluding to the tendency of organized religions to focus on the otherworldly, as opposed to the here and now. It’s much more interesting and verbally efficient of her to take on “infinity” as her antithesis, instead of an elaborate prosy construct like the one I put into the previous sentence, or the paraphrase in quotes above.

Then June Jordan gives such a specific contrast to infinity: children. But not just any children, “children/running/hard on oneway streets”—an image as vivid as a film clip. June Jordan also uses the hard rhythms of the language to suggest those sneakers smacking asphalt. She mentions “oneway streets,” as opposed to the two-way streets of genuine dialogue and opportunity. These children might not be fortunate enough to live on those wider and more prosperous boulevards. June Jordan uses all these strategies to  keep us involved in what is really a political and philosophical argument. Could prose do that? And look: “infinity” appears again, but this time right after the children, on the same line as their running on the streets, as if “infinity” applies to the running children instead of being a mere abstraction, as it becomes again in the following line.

I could give many other examples of poetry producing some of the most memorable political statements. There is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandius,” mocking the shattered statue of a fallen tyrant. What about Pablo Neruda’s hymn to the Spanish Republic, “I Explain A Few Things,” with its aching refrain, “Come see the blood in the streets”?

Or Paul Eluard’s lyrical anthem to the resistance to fascism in World War II, “Liberty,” which was actually scattered by allied airplanes as a leaflet when they flew over occupied France.

There are also Nazim Hikmet’s great statements of the importance of life, such as his poem “Living is no laughing matter.” 

None of the political speeches made on those same subjects have endured as long as those poems, or retain as much universality.

Other recent posts about writing topics:
Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer