All Good Poems Tell Stories

People do not love literary forms. They love stories.

Poetry has declined in importance in our culture, almost to the point of extinction in the general literary landscape. I bring this up because of a post by Roseanne T. Sullivan reviewing a recent poetry collection. Read the article for the context, but what I said in my comment was:

To me, it seems quite obvious why poetry lost its place in the center of culture. It stopped telling stories. People do not love literary forms. They love stories. They love jokes. They love romance. They love adventure. Put those things in novels, and they will read novels. Put those things in movies, and they will watch movies. Put those things in poems, and they will read poems. But no one puts those things in poems anymore. Poems are now written by and for people who love poetry as a form, and such people are few, as they have always been few.

To which she replied:

I've been considering what you wrote in light of how much I appreciated the poetry I learned as a kid. I am trying to assess what made that poetry memorable to me, and why most of the competent and clever poems I read now do not make a lasting impression. I don't think it's because they don't include jokes, stories, and romance, as you suggest, but I don't know what it is.

I have no way of knowing what it is for Sullivan, but it occurred to me that I should test my own assertion by examining the poetry that is memorable to me. A few examples, in the order in which they sprang to mind:

Had we but world enough and time
This coyness Lady were no crime

Andrew Marvelle’s To His Coy Mistress is an attempt at seduction, but is it a story? Is it the story that makes it memorable? It is, in fact, a story within a story. The outer story is the story of a seduction. The inner story is the imaginative counter-story, the endless courtship through endless ages, which is the alternative to the rapid consummation that the lover seeks. And it is this counter-story that we catch the character of the lover and the beloved of the outer story.

Poems do not always tell stories the way that novels do. Novels lay out the entire story, beginning, middle, and end. Some poems do this too. The great foundational poems, the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, and Beowulf, all tell stories in full. So do the Canterbury Tales and the plays of Shakespeare.

But a story does not have to be told in full. The originality and effectiveness of a story do not lie in its exposition of plot. Many plots are essentially the same. Whole genres have been built around a single plot endlessly repeated. What makes a story original and effective is its particularity of character and incident. There is nothing unfamiliar about the story of a man trying to talk a woman into bed. We know that story. All that can make that story worth telling yet again is the particularity of its characters and incidents. And these things can be captured in a single scene, a single speech, as so vividly in To His Coy Mistress.

A similar case of a familiar story archetype given particularity of character and incident by a single speech is Robert Browning’s Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister.

Gr-r-r--there go, my heart's abhorrence!
 Water your damned flower-pots, do!
If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,
 God's blood, would not mine kill you!

The whole poem is a monk venting his vitriol against the saintly Brother Lawrence, ascribing to him all the sins that, as we recognize, are really those of the speaker, who plots to trick Brother Lawrence into damnation by slipping him the dirty novel the speaker himself has been reading.

Or, my scrofulous French novel
 On grey paper with blunt type!
Simply glance at it, you grovel
 Hand and foot in Belial's gripe;
If I double down its pages
 At the woeful sixteenth print,
When he gathers his greengages,
 Ope a sieve and slip it in't?

Of course, we know who is really going to take the downward staircase in this story. And that is the point, it is a story because the tale expands in our imagination from the one speech that we are given, a speech which establishes the particularity of the characters and the situation. We see in this one speech the slow unravelling of the relationship, the boiling up of spiritual envy and hatred. One could compose an entire novel around this one scene, this one speech, and that is because the heart of the story is captured in this one speech.

Another case of a story told in a single moment, a single speech, is found in Yeats’ The Stolen Child:

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Here, the whole arc of the child’s seduction and the parent’s grief is captured in the faery’s song of seduction.

Keats’ The Eve of St. Agnes tells a complete story. Young lovers elope into the storm, fleeing from her murderous relatives. (Yes, you’ve heard this story before!)

St. Agnes' Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
       The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
       The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass,
       And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
       Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told
       His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
       Like pious incense from a censer old,
       Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.

Another example from Keats, another song of fairy seduction, La Belle Dame sans Merci:

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
       Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
       And no birds sing.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
       So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
       And the harvest’s done.

I see a lily on thy brow,
       With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
       Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,
       Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
       And her eyes were wild.

Or, for that matter, there is that old high-school textbook standard, Ode on a Grecian Urn, a reflection upon the stories frozen in time in the pictures on the Urn.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
         To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
         And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
         Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
                Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?

Its power comes largely from this invitation to imagine the particularities of the stories that are glimpsed in the pictures on the urn.

But let me put this in a wider context. The reason I say that good poems tell stories is not anything specific to poetry. My main contention is that story is the element of literature with the greatest power to communicate, to move, and to create powerful impressions. All the other elements of literature are merely the lieutenants of story. Story is the general. Story has the strategic vision. Story commands the big guns.

It is true that there are other elements of literature that can have strong effects, but their full weight is only felt when they work in support of story. Certainly, individual readers can have deep affection for other elements, for description, for the sound of a well-crafted sentence or a piquant phrase, for spectacle or speculation, for mystery, for humor, for avocation or affirmation, or for sensuality in its many forms. It is certainly possible, then, for an individual to have favorite poems that do not tell stories. Similarly, for short stories and novels that do not tell stories, or in which the story is demoted to corporal for the duration.

But for the mass of humanity, it is story that rules because it is story that has the greatest and most universal reach and power, and thus I say that all good literature tells a story. From which it follows that every good poem tells a story.

But this does not mean that every work of literary genius tells a story. Genius constitutes some extraordinary faculty in a particular endeavour. There are many elements that go into making a novel or a poem. General Story has many able lieutenants. It is possible for a writer to be a genius in these ancillary arts and to exalt them over story in a work that we can rightly call a work of genius, though one that very few people will ever want to read.

The last century has seen the arts fragment and artists focus on the pieces rather than the whole. Thus in art, we have abstraction that focuses on shape and color without representation or story. In music, we have improvisation in jazz, dissonance in modern classical, beat in rock and roll, rhythm in rap, and whole genres dedicated to a single mood, such as blues. In literature, a fault line opened between literary fiction and genre fiction, in which literary fiction is described as character-driven and genre fiction as plot-driven. There are whole genres dedicated to a single theme or mood or setting. And in poetry, we have seen the abandonment of rhythm and rhyme and storytelling and a turn to prose moods, impressionism, and the capture of still moments.

This fracturing of the arts means that we can have works of undoubted genius in one or more of the elements of an art without producing a work of genius storytelling, works that appeal to small audiences of particular tastes, but don’t appeal to the public at large. You can argue if you like that such works have always existed, and perhaps they have. But this kind of thing dominates the scene today. And, we might note, there are also genius-level storytellers who are pedestrian at best in the ancillary arts of literature, but they sell millions of books because story is the one thing that appeals to the broad reading public. We are wired for story at a very basic level.

Interestingly, it is when genius is found in the parts rather than the whole that we are most inclined to notice it as genius. When genius produces a complete work, we are so enthralled by the work itself that we are less apt to see the marks of genius in its individual aspects. But when genius is displayed in individual elements of the work, the genius is the first and principal thing we notice, perhaps because we don’t have the energy of story to distract us. Slog on, we are told, it gets good later. It’s a work of genius. Absent the enthrallment of story, genius in the parts stands out like a sore thumb, so that we notice the genius before we even notice the thing that genius has wrought.

If you read Jane Austen, you are reading the work of a literary genius, but you are not likely to think that at the time, because you are so completely engaged in the story she is telling. When you read James Joyce, you are also reading the work of a literary genius, but it is the genius you are more apt to notice because you are not engaged in the story in the same way you are when reading Austen. (Okay, maybe you are, but most of us aren’t.)

Joyce, I am convinced, was self-consciously being a genius and seeking to stamp his genius on every line, whereas I doubt it ever crossed Austen’s mind that she was being a genius or that she ever sought to do anything other than tell her story as best she could.

It is fine to admire genius in the several elements of poetry and in literature, but genius in the elements alone, however superlative, is incomplete. This distinction is hugely important. To say that something is a work of genius is to say that it required an exceptional mind to create it. It is not to say that the product is useful or meritorious in the general case. Jane Austen was a literary genius, and two centuries later, her work is still accessible to and enjoyable by the average intelligent reader of today. James Joyce was a literary genius, but, despite the fact that only one century has elapsed since he wrote, his work is not accessible or enjoyable to the average intelligent reader of today. For that matter, it wasn’t accessible or enjoyable to the average intelligent reader of his own day.

I cast no shade on those who enjoy the genius of a James Joyce. It is genius indeed, and worthy of praise and of study on that account. But it is culture in the corner. And if one is going to argue that art is vital to society, as I certainly do, then one cannot base that claim on culture in the corner, no matter how brilliant it may be. Culture in the corner does not touch enough of society to sustain the argument that it is vital to it.

To be sure, no work of art touches the whole of society directly. If the effect reaches down to every person, much of it will occur indirectly, and it will be hard to trace its influence in any definitive way. The direct effect of the piece on its actual readers will be filtered down to others by how it changes their behavior and their ways of thinking and speaking. And, of course, we don’t need any one work of art to filter down to the whole population to justify art’s impact on society as a whole. But we do need a body of art that is both substantial and broadly accessible to make any reasonable claim of art’s importance. Culture in the corner, however much a work of genius it may be, serves only to intensify the ghettoization of its particular corner of the culture, isolating, rather than extending its impact.

Of course, being accessible to the average intelligent reader is not the sole criteria of art. Harry Potter is accessible to the average intelligent reader of today, but, brilliant as it is in some respects, it is still a work of shallow entertainment. Tolkien is not perhaps a literary craftsman of the calibre of James Joyce, but The Lord of the Rings is a better work of art than Finnegan’s Wake because it is both a work of serious depth and accessible and enjoyable to the average intelligent reader.

So if you want to argue that Finnegan’s Wake is a better work of literary craft than The Lord of the Rings, I will be happy not to argue the point. I am not among those who consider The Lord of the Rings the summit of literary achievement. My point is that Finnegan’s Wake is culture in the corner. The Lord of the Rings is culture in the centre. That is the distinction that matters to me.

I don’t share the degree of admiration that many of the people I know and correspond with have for The Lord of the Rings. I don’t consider it to be a work of the caliber of, say, Brideshead Revisited or The Power and the Glory. But it is, like them, a work in the center, not part of a corner culture like Finnegan’s Wake. I also don’t share the literary adulation of Flannery O’Connor that many of my fellow Catholic authors express, not because I don’t agree that she was a genius. She undoubtedly was. But she too worked in the corner, not the center.

To produce a work of genius in the center, a work of serious depth and acute insight that is accessible and enjoyable to the average intelligent reader, is an order of magnitude more difficult than producing a work of partial genius in a corner. One can point to individual skills in which it would be reasonable to claim that James Joyce was the equal or better than any writer who ever lived. Genius in the parts of an art is indeed something that one can admire if one is interested in those parts of the art. But it does not constitute genius in the whole. A writer can be less skilled in every part of the art and still be a greater artist if they are sufficiently skilled in the whole.

And that is the problem in poetry today. It is entirely consumed in the perfection of the parts and gives no credit or regard to the whole. When the whole of literary art is present, it takes the form of a story, either explicitly or by suggestion. The various separated parts of literary art have their fans and their advocates, but the average intelligent reader wants a story. Story is the universal. We are wired for story. All good poems tell stories.