Illuminations
Let's Learn the Craft
by Anthony Esolen
One of my students tells me that the other day in his poetry-writing class, the instructor wrote on the blackboard columns of abstract nouns, concrete nouns, and verbs. The students were to pick an item from each column and then make up a metaphor, mixing and matching things. Call it playing Mr. Poetry Head.
That's something like what the last fifty years of authors of hymns have been doing. You take an idea you picked up in your night-school social theology class, match it with six or seven piety-words taken at random, and paste it onto a Jesus-moment or a Yahweh-moment. The result will be bad enough if you remain on the level of the blandly abstract, and you don't strain too hard. It will be downright ridiculous if you allow yourself the illusion that you are a poet. God spare us the creativity of the pious and incompetent.
How do I loathe thee, contemporary worshippy-things? Let me count just a few of the many ways.
Words
1. Let's never think about what words mean. In particular, let's pretend that they can mean exactly and only what we want them to mean, supposing that we have a clear idea about it to begin with. Look at the first words of the hymn "Fire of God, Titanic Spirit."Yes, just those words: titanic Spirit. The first thing that any speaker of English will think of when he sees the word titanic in bright lights on the marquee will be that indestructible ship on its blind appointment with an iceberg. The second thing will be the clash of the Titans against the Olympian deities. What cruise liners and giants with a hundred arms have to do with the action of the Holy Spirit, I don't know.
The rest of the text is pretty awful too, for other reasons, but I'll just note here the first words of the second verse: "Wind of God, dynamic Spirit."The wind of God? A divine flatus indeed.
Things
2. Let's never think about the reality of things. Modernism has given people the strange idea that poets dwell in a cloudland of mystical thoughts, like, really mystical, out there, man. So poets can be forgiven if they fail to pay attention to the precise characteristics of the things they use as metaphors or exemplars. Here are the first words of the notoriously silly "Earth and All Stars": "Earth and all stars! / Loud rushing planets, / Sing to the Lord a new song!"
"Had a hard time sleeping again, dear?"
"Yeah, it was rough. Jupiter and Saturn and Mars were all in the sky last night. Damn planets."
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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