Why poetry misses the mark

For Lerner, as his use of the term the social suggests, that hope is not just individual and spiritual, but collective and political. Poetry is linked, in his vision, to the possibility of a total redemption of human society, of the kind Marxism used to call “the revolution.” In particular, his fusion of aesthetic, political, and spiritual messianism brings to mind the work of Walter Benjamin, the 20th-century German Jewish theorist. Lerner’s previous book, the novel 10:04, was saturated in the Benjaminian concept of redemption: the idea that the world as we know it carries within itself the possibility for transformation. Key to this vision is the idea that salvation will come from within, from a rearrangement of the world, rather than through an external power or a god.

In the novel, Lerner associates this idea with what he calls “the utopian glimmer of fiction.” Fiction, he suggests, anticipates redemption in its power to alter facts and timelines, to summon alternative possibilities, to transcend the given. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner makes some of the same claims for the art of poetry. “ ‘Poetry’ is a word for a kind of value no particular poem can realize: the value of persons, the value of a human activity beyond the labor/leisure divide, a value before or beyond price,” he writes. Poetry is a figure for the unalienated labor and uncommodified value that Marx thought would exist after the revolution. This is a 21st-century artist’s Marxism, one that no longer hopes for real revolution, but looks to the imagination for anticipations of what a perfected world would look and feel like.

As lerner works sinuously through a chain of texts, he draws attention to the inevitable gap between the actual poem, which can only be a series of particular words, and what he calls the “virtual poem” (borrowing a phrase from the poet and critic Allen Grossman), which we can imagine as being perfect because it remains pure potential. It is in taking the measure of that gap that we can “experience, if not a genuine poem—no such thing—a place for the genuine, whatever that might mean.” Yet this approach to reading any particular work by any particular poet also leads to a certain monotony. Because actual poems are always primarily valuable for what they are not, the many different kinds of poems Lerner invokes all supply evidence for the same argument: Look at what these lines fail to capture.

Beautiful railway bridge of the silv’ry Tay
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last sabbath day of 1879
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

This is ludicrous, of course, and Lerner shows exactly why. Yet he also suggests that the poem’s very badness is its virtue: “A less bad poet would not make the distance between the virtual and the actual so palpable, so immediate,” he writes. A bad poem can perhaps point to utopia even more effectively than a good poem can, since its very badness reminds us of the impossibility of achieving the total goodness that poetry promises.

This is the perverse logic of invoking utopia, which is a literal “no place.” Like a Romantic poet, Lerner yearns for a transformation that poetry can intimate and promise but never enact. What he largely ignores in his book is the idea that poetry can also be a means of reconciling us to our place, to “the very world, which is the world / Of all of us,—the place where, in the end, / We find our happiness, or not at all,” as Wordsworth wrote. The Hatred of Poetry is a subtle inquiry into poetry’s discontents, and a moving statement of poetry’s potential. It can also be read, though, as an example of the dead end into which modern poetic theory has been led by its grandiose aspirations. As long as we focus on what poetry isn’t and can’t be, how can we rediscover what it once was, and might be again