Poetic consistency

[JBI]

A thought has been poking around in my head - how do we judge poets, and how consistent are the poets we judge.

For instance, Wordsworth, a great poet, produced more mediocre poems than good ones, and went on a 30 year bad poem writing spree after 1807, until finally he redeemed himself with the posthumous publication of Prelude.

Keats too seems to have written more bad poems than good poems, and his career is founded on about 15 or so poems, many of them superb beyond belief.

Whitman, Tennyson, virtually everyone who published or wrote a large number of poems, seems to fall under a similar diagram.

Does this mean we should only read selected works, that is, the works that are good, or read the complete set? Even Shakespeare has a few rather mediocre sonnets in with his masterworks.

So, a few questions that have been plaguing me,

1) Should we judge poets on their masterworks, or their total works?
2) Should we read the complete poems of a poet, or just the good ones?
3) Should we ignore all the rest of the poems of poets whose work is supported by one or two perfect lyrics?
4) Should we judge a poet more important by the number of great poems, or the quality of a few or one great poem?

[Jozanny]

Perhaps this is why Proust and Flaubert revised relentlessly JBI, although even I find it curious that I bring up master prose stylists when you are looking at the problem of poetic output. I don't know what it is about the nature of verse which makes it so. I have published hundreds of poems, written hundreds more, and between myself and my pets recycled much of that piss poor verbiage. I am proud of maybe 5 of my poems altogether. Perhaps 15 are decent, and more active editors changed some of my erotic work about married men into something evocative and more sexually threatening simply by cutting out most of the whole piece. But I think what Browning had to go through to produce The Ring and the Book was worth it. I started reading it for my own historical narrative on the Medici, and I consider it a masterwork which stands in its own right.

[mortalterror]

A thought has been poking around in my head - how do we judge poets, and how consistent are the poets we judge.

For instance, Wordsworth, a great poet, produced more mediocre poems than good ones, and went on a 30 year bad poem writing spree after 1807, until finally he redeemed himself with the posthumous publication of Prelude.

Keats too seems to have written more bad poems than good poems, and his career is founded on about 15 or so poems, many of them superb beyond belief.

Whitman, Tennyson, virtually everyone who published or wrote a large number of poems, seems to fall under a similar diagram.

Does this mean we should only read selected works, that is, the works that are good, or read the complete set? Even Shakespeare has a few rather mediocre sonnets in with his masterworks.

So, a few questions that have been plaguing me,

1) Should we judge poets on their masterworks, or their total works?
2) Should we read the complete poems of a poet, or just the good ones?
3) Should we ignore all the rest of the poems of poets whose work is supported by one or two perfect lyrics?
4) Should we judge a poet more important by the number of great poems, or the quality of a few or one great poem?

I think that a large part of good writing does not consist in writing well. It consists in not making common mistakes that novices are prone to. That is how I account for the phenomenal success of War and Peace. I've seen just about everything done in that book done better by some other writer, but never so long or on such a scale. Consistency counts. Earlier this month, I was reading Lucan's Pharsalia. For the first three books I thought, "Wow, this is one of the best poems ever written. Why isn't this epic more popular?" Then it had a tonal shift and went into the toilet for seven books. I can only account for this on the basis that Lucan died around the same age as Keats and his work while inspired is also prone to juvenile mistakes.

I know you like Shakespeare but you might be understating the case against him with "a few rather mediocre sonnets." Try Henry VI parts I-III, A Winters Tale, Cymbeline, Pericles, Henry VIII. He goes through a juvenilia and later a dotage.

It happens even with writers who don't produce a great deal of writing. Look at Hemingway. You have Across the River and Into the Trees, Death in the Afternoon, and To Have and Have Not. Part of being a great artist means trying different things, challenging yourself, and stretching out into territory you aren't always prepared for.

A lot of great writers camouflage their hackwork and sneak it into their masterpieces. Long works are notoriously uneven. For instance, you could probably throw out three hundred pages of Les Miserables, and I'm guessing at least a thousand pages of In Search of Lost Time and make them better books. There's a saying, I heard recently that goes "Even Homer nods."

As per your questions about how we ought to rate a writer, I'd say it depends. If a person only writes one great book and little else then they can be considered a master. Cervantes did that. I think Joseph Heller spoiled his chances of an equal fame by writing more books which turned out to be far inferior. That's the dirty little secret of literature. Not all great books are written by great authors. There is a phenomenon called the one hit wonder which gets very little lip service in our academic institutions. It endangers the elite status of high brow art itself with it's great man model of history. I think many people define genius not by an act alone, not by results, but by the ability to reproduce said results on demand.

Qualitatively, the best of Shakespeare's plays never reach the level of Dante's Divine Comedy but for some reason he enjoys the better favor. There is a degree of quantitative bias in our critical system.

[JBI]

Yes, the reason however, I didn't bring in prose writers, was the fact that they produce longer volumes, and therefore can be read in only one or two books. Poets however, average around an inch-thick collected poems, and therefore the problem arises of how much of the book is worth reading.

[stlukesguild]

J.L Borges has an essay somewhere in which he ponders over the question of perfection and artistic merit. He notes, for example, that even a great many of the second-rate poets succeed at writing that single "perfect" or "flawless" sonnet. And then, on the other hand, there is Don Quixote which is unquestionably flawed. Just the inclusion of Cervantes poetry should have been enough to permanently mar the work, for he was no second-rate poet... or even third-rate. He was a wretched poet. Borges goes on to conclude that scale most certainly matters... or at least it is part of what goes into evaluating an artist. Scale goes along with breadth and depth. If we turn to the visual arts Michelangelo stands virtually unrivaled. He certainly has his weaknesses. His women often lack any feminine grace or sensuality. His landscapes are but rudimentary at best, and in the Sistine ceiling he unfortunately did not benefit from the use of the best pigments: especially the lapis lazuli which gave such a rich glow to Giotto's blue backgrounds. There are many other paintings that I could name that to my eye are far more perfect... flawless... but no one approaches Michelangelo for maintaining such an incredible degree of artistic brilliance over so vast a scale. Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth etc... have poems that are incredibly brilliant. Combined as a whole they lend enough weight to these poets that they certainly earn their rank as great poets, yet none of these on its own (or even collected) will match or surpass Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, or the Comedia.

[Jozanny]

As per your questions about how we ought to rate a writer, I'd say it depends.

In terms of how we rate poets, I have to agree that merely reading their best poetry doesn't offer the complete picture, but to stick to Browning, I confess I'd have a hard time getting through some of his earlier efforts. If memory serves, even Wordsworth could offer little sympathy for some of the manuscripts the young Robert sent him. How much a reader cares relates directly to how much a reader should learn about a poet's total output.

[Virgil]

I tend to rate all artists by their best efforts. Now to be truely great their has to be a minimum critical mass of quantity to sustain that evaluation. What that quantity is I guess is debateable. One can throw out an artists lesser efforts. Does anyone think lesser of Shakespeare because he wrote Ttius Andronicus, The Winter's Tale, and King John?

[JBI]

The Winter's Tale is generally regarded as a masterpiece, but the other two... well, you know.

[Virgil]

The Winter's Tale is generally regarded as a masterpiece, but the other two... well, you know.

Well we just read Winter's Tale and while it might not be as bad as the other plays I mentioned, i didn't think it so great. I'd take Cymbeline and Coriolanus over it.

[stlukesguild]

I tend to rate all artists by their best efforts. Now to be truely great their has to be a minimum critical mass of quantity to sustain that evaluation. What that quantity is I guess is debateable.

Coleridge seems to have entered the "canon" on the basis of 3 poems. The German, Novalis, largely on the basis of a single longer poem (Hymns to the Night). In the visual arts, Picasso probably produced more crap than any single artist in history... but he can also be credited with more brilliant work than anyone else in the last 250 years+

[Virgil]

Great points StLukes. I would argue that Colridge entered the cannon because of his association with Wordsworth. No Wordsworth, no Colridge.

[JCamilo]

Talking about Borges, he certainly ranked Coleridge by his own merit (Coleridge and Blake of the romantic sexted were the only who had a chapter of his english literature teaching. But simple as saying that ancient Mariner thing would probally place anyone in the stars, but of course, without Wordsworth to work as fuel, the romantic movement in england would not move for long enough).
Keeping Borges, it is natural for him to think about flaws. Perfection is a bit of nightmare for him (Which could bring a funny idea of a writer so good that wrote several crap works to raise the vallue of his masterpieces) since it is some short of infite and continual absence of mistakes. He often argued that one single memorable line was worth of joy.
I would say that every great name did something crap (quoting Borges again, no one ceases to be a poet, he is always one during his lifetime) but names like Virgil or Dante seems almost perfect because they had the benefict of not registering everything. But a great name would produce memorable lines in a bad poem (Keats was very good doing it for example), a couple of average poems that seems more like a approach of what would be his great themes.
With a Romance is harder, a romance if full of ups and downs - they way it is produced, even by those like Proust, calls for irregularities. I think of Brothers Karamazov, a very unperfect (and hence great) book with a great chapter in the middle (the great inquisitor one).