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.
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| 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
