(Part One of Two. Part Two immediately follows.)
“Most artists are sincere and most art is bad; some insincere art (sincerely insincere) can be quite good.”
–Igor Stravinsky
“Jumping the Shark” in Poetry: How to Keep Emotions from Going Overboard
Longtime fans of television sitcoms and scholars of American pop culture may be familiar with the term “jumping the shark.” The expression refers to a very specific episode, the final part of the 1977 three-part season premiere of Happy Days, a situation comedy that had already been wildly popular for several years. The writers, however, felt as if they were running out of both gags and gas and hence raised the stakes. By alluding to two other pop culture items of the era -- the wildly successful Jaws movie franchise and Evel Knievel, famous for sailing his motorcycle over dangerous obstacles -- the finished script, both baffling and bizarre, featured the quintessentially “cool” character “Fonzie” executing a surfboarding stunt in which he hydroplaned over a shark. Although the series continued for another seven seasons, from that time forward “jumping the shark” has described any situation that goes “over the top” in order to regain ratings or kick-start interest in a project; the often egregious results gives the description of “jumping the shark” a highly negative connotation usually applicable to television and the movies but also, for our purposes, literature and specifically, poetry.
Composing verse these days is never an easy task. Even so, not all published poetry is perfect; conversely, a small canon of verse long stashed in a desk drawer could one day reveal its hidden genius, à la Emily Dickinson. Generally speaking, though, after nearly a half century of looking at the works of polished craftsmen as well as that of students as well as those who’ve been told they have “a way with words” proudly displayed in community publications, I can safely say that poetry of the past four decades has been marked with two disparate strands. One is a trend in which some of the poetry seemed directed toward an acquired taste, appreciated by a tiny, rarefied pocket of the population who apparently has the capacity to understand it, for the works themselves seem abstruse and all but incomprehensible, though one can hardly hold the poet responsible for the gaps in the reader’s education. Such an approach may have been engendered, I believe, by the desire to have the written word become a counterpart to abstract art, in the sense of mimicking the sensibility of a painting that is not at all representational but nonetheless striking in its insistence that the audience look not just for superficial meaning but what can be found in the various displays of color and shape. Such abstract poetry can be concrete when it presents itself visually, or in the pattern it makes upon the page or aurally, in which case the sound takes precedence over sense. This kind of poetry, whether bad or good, seldom “jumps the shark.”
The kind of poetry that does splash into such dangerous waters is the kind that fails to handle emotions appropriately: by that I mean acutely autobiographical verse in which the “I” of the poem is invariably the poet himself or herself with the lines ending in an particularly personal blind alley; overly-earnest and excruciatingly sincere lamentations and declarations of eternal devotion expounding upon non-specific, abstract, and land-locked terms such as “loneliness” or “love;” or verses that, were they written in prose, would be akin to what the French call “reportage,” for the would-be poet seems like an acutely sensitive street correspondent, including every last precious detail he can remember so that he or she can be 100% faithful to the particular incident which inspired the piece, and which he cherishes as if it were his child. I like to call that third example the “Potted Plant Syndrome,” in which no element of the setting of the incident suffers for lack of attention; for instance, if a dog should trot by to do its business whilst the speaker strolls down the lane with his lady friend, then that image goes in, regardless of any symbolic value, intended or not. Such an admonition did not originate with me but none other than Pope: "It is a great fault in descriptive poetry to describe everything."
For reasons not completely understood, an inexperienced writer chooses to reject the subtlety advised by the aforementioned Miss Dickinson: “Tell the truth but tell it slant;” for the young writer’s verse declares exactly how he “feels” with the urgency of a flare from a distressed ship at sea. His lines all but pant with emotion as the verse itself seems nonetheless a direct statement – a proclamation, really – that is one-dimensional, albeit earnestly-wrought and undeniably “sincere.” As a result, he has imposed severe limits not only upon the work itself and any possible response from a reader.
In my opinion a poet can sail clear of these ravenous sharks and learn how to handle emotional content appropriately. This essay, presented as a general guide of suggestions for poets who wish to improve their craft and especially for those inclined to access the works of others, calls upon the assistance of three masters: two famous critics, one from the mid-nineteeth century and one from the early years of the last, and an illustrative poem by an American woman from the twentieth century.
First off, let’s take a look at how the art critic John Ruskin
(1819-1900) discusses the appropriate use of emotions in poetry through his seminal essay of 1819: “On the Pathetic Fallacy.” Assuming that the reader already knows the meaning of “fallacy,” I hope it’s not insulting to remind him or her that in this instance “pathetic” doesn’t carry the same contemporary catch-all connotations as it does in, “Ew, Tiffany you’re going to wear that? That’s just pathetic.” Just as Ruskin description of a French poem as “terrible,” doesn’t mean it stinks– -
au contraire! he finds it exemplary–it’s important to know what “pathetic” means in the way Ruskin uses it, as the adjective form of “pathos,” a term of Greek origin meaning “the quality in something experience or observed which arouses feelings of pity, sorrow, sympathy, or compassion,” or what we might understand “emotions” of the sad variety. According to Ruskin, the difference between a poet of “the first order” and one of “the second order” is the way in which he manages emotions, specifically by depicting with images that are true, rather than untrue. After citing a line from Alton Locke-- “They rowed across the rolling foam,/The cruel, crawling foam,” Ruskin reminds us that sea foam is “not cruel and doesn’t crawl.” The image is false because the poet makes the foam “a living creature by a mind unhinged by grief.” That “unhinged” idea can make the speaker of a poem appear nearly “irrational,” he says: “All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.” The pathetic fallacy is usually as bad as it sounds, but sometimes-- sometimes!-- it is actually appropriate, as Ruskin later explains.
A poet can become susceptible to the pathetic fallacy in the belief that strong emotions are “eminently a character of poetical description, and the temper of mind in which we allow it as one eminently poetical, because [it is] passionate.” Once again Ruskin makes an important critical distinction: “the greatest poets do not often admit this kind of falseness –that is only the second order of poets who much delight in it.” As a example Ruskin shows how Dante depicts “spirits falling from Acheon ‘as dead leaves flutter from a bough’ with the best image possible, of their utter lightness, feebleness, passiveness, and scattering agony of despair, without for instant losing his own clear perception that these are souls and those are leaves. By contrast, Coleridge’s line about leaves –“The one red leaf, the last of its clan/That dances as often as dance it can” – makes a “morbid” (false) impression about the leaf, as it “imagines a life in it doesn’t have” and as it “confuses its powerlessness with choice, its fading death with merriment, and the wind that shakes it with music.” Similarly, Ruskin looks a passage from the original Odyssey which was not originally a pathetic fallacy until the 18th century when Alexander Pope took a stab at translating it in such a way that Ruskin says “has set our teeth on edge.” According to Ruskin, the kind of poets who commit the pathetic fallacy possess “a mind and body in some sort too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them. . .borne away, or over-clouded, or over-dazzled by emotion.” Yet Ruskin is realistic enough
to admit that on some extremely rare occasions, the emotional burden can be too heavy for even the most stalwart intellect to bear. After all, poets are only human, not soulless machines:
for it is no credit to a man that he is not morbid or inaccurate in his perceptions, when he has no strength of feeling to warp them, and it is in general a sign of higher capacity and stand in the ranks of being, that the emotions should be strong enough to vanquish partly the intellect, and make it believe what they choose.
On the other hand –
But it is still a grander condition when the intellect also rises, till it is strong enough to assert its rule against, in together with, the utmost efforts of the passions; and the whole man stands in an iron glow, white hot, perhaps, but still strong, and in no wise evaporating; even if he melts, losing none of his weight.
Ruskin therefore forgives poets their emotional excesses when extreme situations warrant them, yet he quickly makes an important distinction: “as long as the feeling is true, we pardon, or even are pleased by the confessed fallacy of sight which it induces,” citing the previous example of Kingsley’s tailor-poet telling little white lies about the sea-foam “not because they fallaciously describe foam but because they faithfully describe sorrow.”
Still, the use of ostensibly false expressions to describe emotions without honest feeling behind them is to Ruskin one of the worst things a poet can do:
“. . .[T]he moment the mind of speaker becomes cold, that moment every such expression becomes untrue, as being untrue in the external facts . . .And there is no greater baseness in literature than the habit of using these metaphorical expressions in cold blood.” One has to wonder, then, what Ruskin might have thought about the twentieth century composer’s thoughts about “sincere” and “insincere art. By “cold blood” I think Ruskin means writers who realize that their descriptions are contrary to truth yet deliberately and with cynical affectation include them for their possible effects on the audience, not from an earnest desire to express the truth and,-- if a brief wade into contemporary waters might be indulged-- exactly what the Happy Days writers did when they “jumped the shark.” In these cases the poets (and sitcom writers) are certainly not straightforwardly sincere, nor even Stravinsky’s favored “sincerely insincere” but instead “insincerely sincere”-- where “such expressions are not ignorantly and feelinglessly caught up but, by some master in handling, yet insincere and deliberately wrought out with chill and studied fancy”-- a condescending attitude toward the work that’s just as bad if not worse (Ruskin believes) than one who is sincerely overly-emotional.
In the concluding segments, Ruskin seems to imply that the poet should approach his work with serious intent, and should he come upon emotional shoals, not to cheat his way out with expressions that are consciously and deliberately false. The entire essay itself seems to urge an appropriate balance between staying faithful to intellectual truth and admitting emotional content when appropriately expressed, all the while remaining open to the occasional burst of wild passion which temporarily washes over pure rationality. Although Ruskin does not directly state this, he nonetheless makes us aware of the vast ocean of difference between carefully navigated pathos and “bathos,” in which mundane, trivial quasi-emotions set sail in over-the-top, grandiose vessels.
“It is one of the signs of the highest power in a writer to check all such habits of thought, and keep his eyes fixed firmly on the pure fact, out of which if any feeling comes to him on his reader he knows it to be a true one.” Ruskin follows this with a number of exemplary passages to show their “greater dignity [in which they] limit their expression to pure fact, and leave the hearer to gather what he can from it.” (Hold on to those notions about how “feeling comes to the reader,” and “hearer” which will be discussed in the second part of this essay.)
Meanwhile Ruskin brings into harbor his treatise, which he docks with an eloquent conclusion: “Passion will indeed go far in deceiving itself, but it must be a strong passion, not the simple wish of a lover to tempt his mistress to sing.”
{Part Two continues below}