Most recent poll question: Poetry should never be: (1) political, (2) sad, (3) easy, (4) philosophical, (5) senti-mental.
According to 42% of the poll takers, poetry should never be easy. Should poetry be political? No, according to 4%, and 3% say poetry should never be philosophical. Sad and sentimental were nixed by 2% each.
That poetry should never be easy received the most votes can be easily explained: Most people think poetry is difficult. All of my experience working with poetry and people from junior high school students to the general public confirms that fact. College students believe that a poem can mean anything you want it to mean: that helps alleviate the difficulty. You do not have to think about it much, if whatever you say it means is correct.
If the poem were “easy, “ there would be no need to reduce its meaning to having the modeling-clay-like quality of meaning anything you happened to want it to mean. If it were “easy,” a person could read the poem and immediately understand what it means. So 42% believe that a poem should never be easy.
At 4%, 3%, and 2% political, philosophical, sad, and sentimental poetry is more acceptable. And it makes good sense that of these qualifications, the political is less acceptable; after all, most readers associate poetry with self-expression not reportage of the outside world. Similarly with philosophical, most readers do not expect poetry to expound theories. That fewest felt sentimental and sad were not the purview of poetry is also understandable, because most readers do associate poetry with emotion.
Poetry is Flexible
Poetry is so flexible and varied that it can profess most of the qualities I offered in the poll: political, philosophical, sad, and easy. Sentimentality is usually disdained by poets, literary critics, and scholars. More on this later.
I would like to offer an example of a poem that exemplifies most of these qualities; the poem is Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” a poem Hughes wrote when he was only eighteen years old.
Easy
The poem is easy; it speaks in a cosmic voice similar to Walt Whitman’s. The only difficulty it might cause novice poetry readers is the claim, “I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.” The beginning reader will wonder how someone born in 1902 could be claiming to have “raised the pyramids.” But then when the reader sees in the next line that the speaker is also claiming to have been present in Abe Lincoln’s time, the mystery is solved: the cosmic voice of the speaker allows him to be present anywhere at anytime.
Political
The poem has a political reference in Abe Lincoln’s flatboat trip to New Orleans in 1830, where the future president probably witnessed a slave auction, the absurdity of which later influenced Lincoln’s policies resulting in the Emancipation Proclamation.
Those three lines are cheerful: “I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln / went down to New Orleans / and I've seen its muddy / bosom turn all golden in the sunset.” The river sang and turned golden because this future president would be responsible for eliminating slavery in his country.
Philosophical
The poem is philosophical in the very definition of the word philosophy, or love of wisdom. The speaker is laying his claim to wisdom when he asserts twice, "My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” Soul-awareness includes an intuitive knowledge that is both more accurate and more powerful than mere empirical information. The speaker’s knowledge comes from a source deeper than blood and ancient like the meandering qualities of rivers.
Sentimental and Sad
Most poets, literary critics, and scholars disdain verse that that they label sentimental. They argue that sentimental verse offers emotion for emotion’s sake, that the emotion is often unearned, that it fake, that it attempts to elicit stock responses, that the language is clichéd, dull, and unoriginal. Hughes' “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” has none of those negative qualities associated with sentimentality.
Sadness may be elicited by the historical allusions to slavery in the building of the Pyramids and Abe Lincoln, but as we mentioned earlier, the allusion to Lincoln suggests the positive events that occurred during his presidency. The speaker does not offer the actual perspective of the Pyramid reference: it could be the Pharaoh Khufu who “looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.”
Poetry Contains Multitudes
As Walt Whitman claims in Song of Myself, “I am large, I contain multitudes,” poetry is also large and contains a multitude of possibilities. One last word about “easy”—that quality is definitely in the eye of the beholder. For the reader who already knows the allusions included in poem, the poem would be easier to understand sooner than for the reader who had to do some research into the unknown allusions. But that does not make the poem difficult; it just makes it a task master.
Article on Langston Hughes’ poetry: Hughes’ ”Harlem: A Dream Deferred”
More articles on Polls: Emily’s Favorite, Poetry and You
