Compiled from two of his lectures, this essay appeared in Donald Hall's collection Poetry and Ambition: Essays 1982-88.
In his essay, “Poetry and Ambition,” Poet Laureate Donald Hall offers sixteen points about the rôle of ambition for poets. As he focuses on this issue, he levels some important criticism at contemporary poets and poetry.
His first point claims, “I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.” In recommending “ambition” for poets, he defines the term to filter out the negative connotations that render the meaning to be more akin to “over-ambition.” Hall says, “True ambition in a poet seeks fame in the old sense, to make words that live forever.” He argues that poets need to focus more on the poems than on themselves.
Hall decries the ubiquity of poetry writing workshops that turn out poems like an assembly line; he calls these poems McPoems. And he is most emphatic about this point as he nearly rages, “Abolish the M.F.A.! What a ringing slogan for a new Cato: Iowa delenda est! Referring to the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop, of course.
He stresses Horace’s advice from “Ars Poetica”: "but let them not come forth / Till the ninth ripening year mature their worth. / You may correct what in your closet lies: / If published, it irrevocably flies." Or that poets should not publish their poems until they have worked on them for ten years. Then he refers to Alexander Pope, writing seventeen centuries later, who pared the time down to five years. Hall wishes now that poets would wait eighteen months before publishing. His point is that too much stuff gets published before anyone has actually vetted properly it value.
Hall quotes Robert Frost to support the idea that poets need to pay more attention to their poems than to their number of publications: "It's only when you get far enough away from your work to begin to be critical of it yourself that anyone else's criticism can be tolerable.” Frost said a student should bring to class only his old stuff that had lost the glow that blinds to would-be poet to his creation’s flaws. And according to Hall, this fact of writing is what makes “workshopping impossible.”
Because writer’s get their models mostly from the examples they have read, “it is essential for poets, all the time, to read and reread the great ones.” For the teacher of the workshops, this becomes difficult, because he/she is always busy reading the work of immature writers—their students. For students, they are too busy trying to garner peer praise, that they lose their ambition to make great poems, in favor of pleasing other immature writers.
He praises poets who “who stay outside the circle of peers,” pointing to Whitman, who did not attend Harvard, and Dickinson who lived a cloistered life, and Robert Frost, “who dropped out of two colleges to make his own way.” The Robert Frost reference is especially useful, because Frost referred to himself as a lone wolf, as Hall calls these independent minded poets.
Yet Hall does contradict himself slightly when he claims that most poets need the companionship of other poets. He points to Wordsworth and Coleridge, Williams, H.D, and Pound, himself, Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, and John Ashbery as examples of poets who thrived because they had poet friends.
Still the main point Hall makes in this essay is a valid one, when he admonishes poets to make the poem more important than fame and vast quantities of publications. His assignment for poet is “Be as good a poet as George Herbert. Take as long as you wish.”
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