Cultural Ghosts: Sound

TV Professor Frank C. Baxter attempts to lay those cultural ghosts that have too long haunted the house of literature in "The Nature of Poetry" (Spoken Art 703, 275 Seventh Avenue, New York 1; 12" LP, $4.98). He comes not to praise but to bury once and for all those "badly calcified young men limp at the wrists" and "spinsters with long jade earrings" who have cursed poets with their friendliness and have confused poetry in the public mind with their own mooning over sunsets, the fronds of ferns, rosy babies in cribs, and sparrows near rain puddles.

It's a sorrow to report that Professor Baxter has unleashed a few unsavory demons of his own in rushing to poetry's defense. The first trouble, I suspect, is his own huskily intense voice, one that constantly verges on just the sentimentality he rightly rejects in poetry's falsetto friends. His voice embodies the very cultural puritanism that has given the arts a bad name in America.

Secondly, his poetics are on the same shaky emotional ground that vitiates the ladies' parlor approach to the muses: he cites approvingly Housman's shaving-safety theory of poetic recognition; it's just this over-emotive concept of poetry that the modern sensibility has rejected. And his narrow choice of themes weakens his attempt to reveal poetry's wide appeal; the funereal chants of "Twa Corbies," Tichborne's "Elegy," one of Wordsworth's "Lucy" poems; the intellectual gusto of Keats' tribute to Chapman's Homer; the nature wisdom of Whitman's infidel-staggering mouse and Tennyson's flower in the crannied wall.

These suggest a mighty small sector of the poetic spectrum. Shakespeare is represented by Sonnet 29; Jonson by "Hymn to Diana." Where, one wonders, are the modern poets? A puny jeremiad against modern poetry's lack of heart and arrogant intellectualism concludes the record, explaining Baxter's hesitance to explain poetry to the modern reader through the poetry of his own age.

One can only conclude that Baxter has stopped reading poetry; for, to take but two examples, Philip Booth and Robert Francis (see Ballantine's paperback, New Poems by American Poets, edited by Rolfe Humphries) demolish Baxter's canard that modern poetry cannot fuse intellect and emotion in crystal-clear statements. He also makes too much of poetry's quasi-philosophical wisdom; too little of its power both to celebrate life and to expose the trite. Spoken Art Records present a much more effective strategy for naturalizing poetry in "Irish Ballads, Folksongs and Lyrics Read by Siobhan McKenna" (707, 12" LP, $4.98).

On one side she reads in an enchanting voice sixteen poems by William Butler Yeats; I wish I had had her reading of "The Wild Swans at Coole" when I taught it last. The other side is more diverse but equally interesting: translations from the Gaelic by James Stephens; three Joyce poems; one by Padriac Colum, who also explains the special need for oral interpretation in Irish verse on the album cover; and several ballads. James Mason has rendered with equal effectiveness three of Browning's dramatic monologues (Caedmon, TC 1048, 12" LP, $5.95): he captures remarkably the frustrated and cancerous pride of the cleric in "The Bishop Orders His Tomb"; the compromised idealism of "Andrea del Sarto"; and the intermingling of soul and sensuality in "Fra Lippo Lippi."

This is the way to take the hex off poetry; have students hear it sensitively embodied. With apologies to Mr. MacLeish, a poem must be, before it means anything to anyone.

Poetry first needs artists to bring it into decent existence; then, perhaps explicators are necessary.