Poetry & Democracy
Tocqueville & the Sorry State of the Arts
by Anthony Esolen
On January 20, 2021, a young woman named Amanda Gorman recited a poem she had written to celebrate the inauguration of Joseph Biden as president of the United States. It was a pretty bad poem, breathlessly vague and full of platitudes about the promise we are going to “glade” [sic], for “when day comes, we step out of the shade, aflame and unafraid.”
I could point out that, if you think about what night and day are, you see that until the day comes, there isn’t any shade to come out of. I could point out that the rhyme in that line I have quoted is sing-song, and it is made worse by the assonance with “day” and “aflame.” I could point out how likely we are to embarrass ourselves when we are all full of how glorious we are. I could point out every cliché, every fuzzy use of a term, every word that shouts, “Hey, look at me; I’m a rhyme!”
A waste of effort. For what puzzles me about the event is not that a young woman wrote a lousy poem. Young women have been writing lousy poems for a long time. Young men, too, though maybe our permission to tell them that they are lousy poets protects them and us from their creativity. What puzzles me is that no one seemed to be bothered by how bad it was. Peter Armenti, writing at a poetry blog for the Library of Congress, said with great delight that Gorman had become “an overnight literary sensation.” Indeed, he said, “educators have also been quick to seize on a unique opportunity to introduce poetry in a relatable way to their students. Lesson plans for ‘The Hill We Climb’ are already available through PBS and The New York Times.”
A Puzzling Lack of Embarrassment
A mystery, as it is a mystery to me how someone associated with the Library of Congress can write, evidently without embarrassment, a phrase as overblown and clumsy as “to seize on a unique opportunity to introduce poetry in a relatable way.” But such mysteries puzzle me wherever I turn.
A few months ago, I was in the downtown area of an old mill village in Vermont, looking at the public buildings. They date from the late nineteenth century, and they are handsome, architecturally adorned without being fussy. All the elements, all the various details—doors, windows, posts, lintels, suggestions of lunettes, eaves, gables, variations in the brickwork, with bronze accents to line a roof or a sill—combine to form harmonious and pleasing wholes. Then, round the corner, I came upon the ugliest building in town, a slovenly and clumsy and cheap-looking thing, no doubt quite expensive to build. It was the new center for the arts. And I wondered that no one saw the bald contradiction. No one was embarrassed by it.
I have listened to broadcasts of the Catholic Mass from a diocese in England, and I have heard real hymns—though with sometimes badly jiggered texts to get rid of “thou” and “thee,” which people can apparently understand when they are praying the Our Father but not understand when they are singing “Be Thou My Vision.” But mixed in with those hymns are recently composed songs that are, like the center for the arts, like Miss Gorman’s poem, embarrassingly bad: musically awkward and unmemorable, poetically foolish, and theologically dubious.
It is not like going from Bach to the Scottish Psalter. That is to go from classical music of the highest order to folk music that fairly breathes with the heather and the streams of the land it came from. It is not like going from a Louis XV armoire to a Shaker table, good and solid and handsome and enduring. It is like going from either the armoire or the table to a pasteboard makeshift that buckles as soon as you put something on it.
What is going on? What has happened to render us insensible?
The Democratic Mode of Poetry
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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