"Jumping the Shark" in Poetry: How to Keep Emotions from Going Overboard

(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}

^^^^"Jumping the Shark" Part 2 of 2

Jumping the Shark, Part 2 of 2


Even though Ruskin goes out of his way to allow for strong emotions temporarily to overtake the intellect in extreme, rare cases, he always seems --to use a modern idiom–to “have his eyes on the prize”:

Therefore the high creative part might even be thought, to a great extent, impassive (as shallow people think Dante stern), receiving indeed all feelings to the full, but having a great centre of reflection and knowledge in which he stands serene, and watches the feeling from far off.

Three notions of the preceding passage -- “impassive,” “a great centre of reflection and knowledge” and the “serene” detachment as the poet “watches the feeling from far off” reverberated years later when T. S. Eliot wrote his critical essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in 1919. Eliot must have had Ruskin’s opinions in the back of his mind, if not a copy of the essay in front of him. There are several differences between the two critics, mainly in the respective topics, as Ruskin examines one particular aspect of expressing emotions whereas Eliot concentrates on a more holistic approach, the role of a poet in the modern world, as well as his preference for technique over directly emotional expression. The similarities, however, are striking, even in the selection of exemplary poets; both Ruskin and Eliot see Homer and Dante as paragons.

That Eliot favors poets from classical antiquity and medieval Europe is not surprising, given the deep respect and importance that he places upon the past or “tradition,” as the title says. Even though Eliot insists that the modern poet exude a certain “contemporaneity,” in that he must reflect the time in which he lives, it is of extreme importance that he connect with the poetry of the past, “by which his work is to be judged.” Everything a poet writes today must forge a new link in the continual chain of thought that goes all the way back to the beginning of exemplary artists. One would think that awareness of such a daunting responsibility could plunge a would-be poet into a whirlpool of nervousness; indeed, Harold Bloom, a critic of the late 20th century, examined this psychological phenomenon, calling it “the anxiety of influence,” from which the poet can emerge only by rising to the challenge. Eliot believes that only a poet who has achieved “full maturity” can master it. Readers in 2010 may perceive a certain loss of something ineffable between the poems written long ago and many of those of today, the reason for which is not easily discerned. Numerous contemporary poets do nonetheless exemplify Eliot’s idea of the “mature artist.” According to Eliot, maturity for the poet can only come through “great labour;” the hard work consists not so much in more writing but in more reading.

There is yet another difference, which Eliot likens to a scientific process:

The mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not in any variation of the personality, not being necessarily or having “more to say” but rather by being a more finely perfected medium; in which special, or very varied are at liberty to enter into new combinations.

To produce these “new combinations, the poet acts as a “catalyst” introduced into two or more elements to produce a result similar to a chemical reaction. The “poet’s mind,” Eliot writes “is a receptacle for seizing and storing up [numerous] feelings, phrases, images which remain there until all the particles can form a new compound. “ How successful the finished product is depends entirely upon how successfully the poet has subsumed his own personality, for “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates, the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.”

According to Eliot, poetry demands continual “self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” Raw, unfiltered emotions coming from the poet’s own personal experiences should not be transmitted directly to the page but transformed into a result such that the emotional effect is not the province of the poet but within the response of the “audience,” the reader, or-- as Ruskin said--the “hearer.” As an example, Eliot cites Canto XV, (the Bruno Latini episode) in which Dante “works up emotion in the situation but the effect comes from a complexity of detail.” That “complexity of detail” can only come from a mature artist who knows his craft.

The time in which Eliot wrote this essay could be a clue as what inspired it, at least partially as a reaction to the poetry written by late Victorians. Eliot seems to be urging a reversal to the excesses of the Romantic, Pre-Raphaelite, and fin de siècle poets with their fondness for unrestrained passion and sensuous imagery, and above all excessive emphasis on “feeling,” especially as expressed by the poet’s speaker. Eliot makes a direct reference to highly influential poet and apologist for the Romantic movement, Wordsworth, specifically the latter’s well-known description of the poetic process.

Eliot states that Wordsworth prescription -- “Emotions recollected in tranquilly”--is

an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not “recollected,” and they finally enter an atmosphere which is “tranquil” only in that it is a passive attending on the event.

At first, Eliot’s use of the word “passive” may be off-putting as the reader might think it has something to do with languor or lack of diligence in the task at hand. Instead this “passive attending on the event” is akin to that of Dante’s speaker whose journey did not produce a mere travelogue or a lamentation but rather poetry created from a judicial distance – as Ruskin says earlier, “from far off”-- for the poet’s mind is the cooler head that prevails from the vantage point of artistic detachment. In such a case, the poet’s own “feelings” on the matter cease to be an issue, because his personality is irrelevant. Eliot explains:

There is a great deal in the writing of poetry which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact the bad poet is usually unconscious when he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him personal. . .

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But of course only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

The “impersonal” quality which Eliot seeks is less a psychological dictum than a technique, specifically employed to divert interest from the poet himself to the poetry, forged by a willingness of the poet “surrendering himself to the work to be done.” Eliot’s essay comes to a close by making a final distinction:

There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet.

Despite the seemingly imperious nature of Eliot’s essay, there was at least one poet --an American–Marianne Moore, of whom he remarked, “She is one of those few who have done the language some service in my lifetime.”

Her poetry exhibits a understanding of the artist’s detached role; in fact, the reader has to look extremely hard to find any personal references in her lines. It is not a paradox, therefore, that much of the material which Miss Moore mined came from her own personal experiences, such as watching her beloved NY Dodgers play baseball at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field and trips to the Bronx Zoo. According to the editors of the Norton Anthology, animals fascinated Miss Moore, attracted to their “quirkiness, to their stubbornness or flexibility, their dignity or lack of it.” In an interview Miss Moore once elaborated upon why members of the animal kingdom and the human world of sports sparked her imagination:

Why an inordinate interest in animals and athletes? They are subjects for art and exemplars of it, are they not? Minding their own business. Pangolins, hornbills, pitchers, catchers do not pry or prey –or prolong the conversation, do not make us self-conscious, look their best when caring least.

Even though wildlife play a significant role in Miss Moore’s canon, she is meticulous in avoiding the pitfalls of personification which Ruskin warned about. As the Norton editors tells us,Miss Moore is more the “naturalist” than a “fabulist,” and thus depicts animals as they are, neither emblems of human vices and virtues nor anthropomorphic cartoon figures targeted toward audiences of children (or childish adults) whose willful suspension of belief accepts bears wearing hats and neckties, ducks dressed up in sailor suits, desert mammals ordering merchandise from the Acme Company – all endowed with the human power of speech, complete with regional accents. Marianne Moore of course steers clear of such silliness, though her lines often sparkle with sly – and thoroughly detached wit.

The type of personification with which Ruskin found fault was the use of natural phenomena – animal, vegetable, mineral - suddenly and miraculously displaying human emotions, contrary to common sense and natural law, especially when the situation did not call for such. When Miss Moore writes about animals, the comparison to the so-called higher species is inevitable, but in her hands, any implied emotional content is elegantly restrained, and never do her speakers fall in love with their own personal “feelings.” Instead she concentrates on what Eliot lauded as the “complexity of details,” toward which the reading audience can respond as warmly and emotionally as it desires.

This is true of her 1936 poem, “The Pangolin” depicting a species of spiny anteater whose scales “overlap” with “spruce-cone regularity;” it The pangolin’s features, traits, and activities have analogies to that of the human being; for instance, the pangolin’s “claws for digging” and its habitat are set against metaphors for iron structures and architectural structures. In the following passage, the word “vileness” initially gives the impression that the pangolin is the favored species, described as a “model of exactness” and lauded for its “grace.” Yet Miss Moore throws the reader “a curve ball,” so to speak, in setting up
a side-by-side comparison:

Sun and moon and day and night and man and beast
each with a splendor
which man in all his vileness cannot
set aside, each with an excellence!

Even so, the poet tells us “the self, the being we call human” is rife with contradictions: “Unignorant, modest, and unemotional and all emotion.” Not only that, his courage is both stalwart yet questionable: “Not afraid of anything is he,/ and then goes cowering forth.” Marianne Moore puts the pangolin and man up against each other to measure them scientifically– as “mammals”: “Consistent with the formula–warm blood, no gills, two pairs of hands and a few hairs”– perhaps a coldly clinical assessment, though the later refined if not redeemed by an allusion to his continually-renewed resilience in the concluding lines of the poem:

Again the sun!
Anew each day, and new and new,
that comes into and steadies my soul.

Finally, from Marianne Moore’s favored topic we return to the metaphor of the aquatic creature that opened this essay. It isn't a pathetic fallacy but a popular misconception that the shark has to keep moving or die. The mature poet won't "die" --at least physically-- if he stops sharpening his craft, but he does have to “keep moving,” constantly seeking out, reading, and retaining the poetry of the past and keeping current with what is being written in the present, as well as assiduously learning and developing new techniques for the future. As far as “having something to say,” the mature poet recognizes the probability that everything has already been said, but perhaps not said in every conceivable way or form. In their innocence, poets who have not yet been exposed to a wide spectrum of already-published poetry and/or have notreached the optimal level of maturity may not have acquired the ability to discern the fresh from the stale, the original from the trite.

What these lyrical “sharks” –the mature poets– realize most strongly is that the concept of “self-expression” is relevant only when the emphasis shifts from the former to the latter, less “self,” more “expression.” As Eliot reminds us, there is a vast difference between the emotions of life and the emotions of literature. Some writers tread dangerous water when they confuse the two.

For the emotions of life are not necessarily suitable for public consumption; the emotions of literature are the stuff of poetry, of art. This is not to say that the emotions of life are of lesser quality, yet unabashed “self-expression” resonates as poetry only in rare cases. Feelings – ramped up, blatantly literal, generic, easily digestible -- belong in the realm of personal declarations of love, messages of appreciation to one’s personal family and friends, akin to the easily accessible verses in a greeting card, available at a retail price, the purchase and transmission of which is almost always well-intended, not unlike the heartfelt sentiment behind giving one’s pet a Christmas present, a practice that is straightforwardly sentimental and sincere.

very interesting read, thanks for posting this :)

I must say that was an eye-opener. I hadn't thought about it as my earliest good English teacher told us to avoid all emotions when writing and let the reader find them for themselves - and don't worrry, they will.

He was right, and it saves the writer a lot of time, but I didn't realise other people were unaware of this

As an admirer of Eliot's and Moore's poetry, I found this a great read. I can't stand poetry with raw emotional guts on display. Hey any high school writer can do that. And frankly, while the reader may sympathize, he will also say, so what? We all have emotions. Poetry is ultimately about language, not about emotion.

A fascinating and informative post.

Poetry was my own way of dealing with a very traumatic life episode, and in particular the highly disciplined sonnet form was effective.
Certainly there is in many cases an emotional springboard for the writer, but it must be remembered that the poem is the medium, it is not the message.
For me. discipline was the answer and the discipline of the sonnet form was, quite literally, a life saver. Survival guilt takes no prisoners.

Enough rambling from a self-taught doggerel producer. If you have read this far, thank you for your patience

An excellent read. Glad I finally found this thread. Much to think about.

Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor STATELY

Me too!

I wonder if the phrase that something is "over the top" refers back to this shark incident. A quick search also suggests it might have originated with someone in trench warfare committing suicide by going over the top of the trench: http://www.urbandictionary.com/defin...m=over+the+top

When I read people from the 18th through the mid-20th centuries, I remind myself that their views of reality may have been extreme. Metaphors describing their universe, since they would likely have been educated, would involve something rather small, billiard-ball deterministic, eternal and as dead as a zombie. So, if they wrote that poetry should constrain its displays of emotions to conform to an intellectual perspective that may have been then in vogue, I would have to think twice about their motivations or following their advice.

Some religions differ on whether their specific sacred texts imply a closed or a continuing revelation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_revelation This parallels a literary conflict. Can one expect a contemporary writer to out-do Shakespeare or are contemporary writers trapped by Bloom's "influence"? Has everything of value already been objectified in some set of texts? That would mean the only thing any of us need do is read those sacred/literary texts and possibly write commentaries, lectures or sermons on them. Is the literary canon closed? It should be obvious that having a closed revelation, whether sacred or not, is very convenient for anyone marketing those texts. Personally, I don't think it is possible to completely objectify our subjectivity.