Poetry and truth

https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2015/4/poetry-truth

Extract:

“For Winters, poetry—and, in its concision, lyric poetry, especially—is the highest linguistic form because, taken together, connotation and denotation compose the “total content” of language. It’s true that the two exist together in other kinds of writing, a novel, say, but poetry, by dint of its meters, lines, and highly wrought rhythms, modulates feeling with the greatest control. Connotation in poetry, then, acquires what Winters thinks of as a “moral” dimension. In order to render human experience truthfully, connotation or “feeling” must be precisely managed:

The artistic process is one of moral evaluation of human experience, by means of a technique which renders possible an evaluation more precise than any other. The poet tries to understand his experience in rational terms, to state his understanding, and simultaneously to state, by means of the feelings we attach to words, the kind and degree of emotion that should properly be motivated by this understanding.

The term “moral,” then, refers—at least in this instance—to a fairly technical process of selecting the best words in the best order for a given subject. “In so far as the rational statement is understandable and acceptable, and in so far as the feeling is properly motivated by the rational statement, the poem will be good,” he tells us.

Winters’s detractors—who feel that he, in his adherence to reason, quashes emotion in poetry—miss the point, I think. For Winters, emotion, expressed in the proper degree, is the whole ballgame. But this question of degree is crucial; if the feeling in a poem is either overstated or understated, the poem falls down. Excessive emotion, a form of sentimentality, obscures the experience under consideration, while the opposite of sentimentality—a kind of cold reportage—can also be a failure of evaluation. Understatement of the emotion robs experience of its humanity. The statement “Three prisoners were publicly executed in a detention center” crisply relates the facts, but in “The Shield of Achilles” Auden affords the reader some inkling of the feelings involved:

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot

     Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)

And sentries sweated for the day was hot:

     A crowd of ordinary decent folk

     Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke

As three pale figures were led forth and bound

To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all

     That carries weight and always weighs the same

Lay in the hands of others; they were small

     And could not hope for help and no help came:

     What their foes liked to do was done, their shame

Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride

And died as men before their bodies died.