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
I can venture part of an answer to a part of the phenomenon.
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that democracies, like aristocracies, tend to produce characteristic modes of poetry. Since the democratic man spends most of his time “in a state of incessant change of place, feelings, and fortunes,” and since he is mainly taken up in practical life and its struggles, he will want his literature on the quick.
“Literature in democratic ages,” then, “can never present, as it does in the periods of aristocracy, an aspect of order, regularity, science, and art,” and form will be “slighted, sometimes despised.” Tocqueville wrote those words before Walt Whitman ever breathed upon earth. The democratic style, he says, “will frequently be fantastic, incorrect, overburdened, and loose—almost always vehement and bold.” And that was written while Herman Melville, whose mighty virtues and glaring faults appear on every page of his fire-forged poetic prose, was a teenage boy working in a haberdashery.
What do democratic poets write about? Not antiquity, not settled and venerable institutions. For democracy “gives men a sort of instinctive distaste for what is ancient.” Is the present, then, the great thing dearly to be loved? Not exactly, since the principle of equality, says Tocqueville, robs democratic poets of much of the present, too. That is because everywhere he turns, democratic man sees men like himself, and that is no great thing, for in democratic communities, “men are all insignificant and very much alike.”
Tocqueville wrote those words long before the relentless leveling influence of mass media, which has left us in a rage for “diversity” at just the time when any two Americans, whatever their race or the creed of their forefathers, are as indistinguishable as one patch of mud from another. So, then, the principle of equality “has dried up most of the old springs of poetry.” But the principle does disclose a new spring, one that I believe has been virtually exhausted, and all we get from it now is muddy water and frogs. This new spring helps me understand where we are now, when bad taste, political fever, and moral and intellectual lassitude are to be found all at once.
“The ideas of progression and of the indefinite perfectibility of the human race,” says Tocqueville, “belong to democratic ages. Democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be.” Americans do not see the forests “until they fall beneath the hatchet. Their eyes are fixed upon another sight: the American people views its own march across these wilds—drying swamps, turning the course of rivers, peopling solitudes, and subduing nature.”
That is the myth, a kind of half-breed bastard of the Christian story of salvation, that has given to democratic man all his most powerful poetry. You can still hear it in the split infinitive of the old Star Trek television series, where space, not the heart of sinful man, is “the final frontier,” and our mission is “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Mostly that old series went boldly back into Shelleyan and Byronic readings and misreadings of Milton and the book of Genesis, while the succeeding series made a lateral move to the faculty lounge, the soap opera, and a posh beer joint on the main street of a college town.
Under the Spell of Manifest Destiny
But the course of literature has shown Tocqueville to be as prescient in his analysis of democratic letters as he was in his analysis of democratic politics. In democracies, positive religions lose much of their power, but a certain abstract divinity “is more and more manifest to the human mind in full and entire majesty.” We may call it Manifest Destiny, if we like. Amanda Gorman is as much under its fascinating spell as was the journalist who coined the phrase. The spirit that saw the Indians as savages to be tamed and ushered into the chief river of history now sees every remnant of a genuine human culture as detritus to be hosed down and washed away. We must make the world safe for Facebook.
Americans seem, with few exceptions, to take this premise for granted. Whether they caught the infection from Europe, and Europe caught it back again from them, is immaterial. It breathes in those German cardinals who see the next Great Leap Forward in human affairs as an ancient Roman bathhouse, with a crucifix for decoration. It breathes in the mad dreams of technocrats, who hope that men will soon make the next evolutionary leap and become robots, programmed to be deplorable nevermore. It breathes in a “living Constitution,” meaning, of course, a dead letter, as it breathes in “open marriage,” meaning, of course, no marriage but a sham. Only say the word progress, and we will forget that we have any souls to be healed. It was the religion of Harry Emerson Fosdick, who cared less about who Christ was than about the Christs we were all going to be.
Hard to shake off, this religion. “Looking at the human race as one great whole,” says Tocqueville of democratic men, “they easily conceive that its destinies are regulated by the same design; and in the actions of every individual they are led to acknowledge a trace of that universal and eternal plan on which God rules our race.”
That sounds fine. I grant that there is a rare nobility to the vision, and to the literary and artistic works that did spring immediately from it. Tocqueville expresses it better than I can:
The destinies of mankind—man himself, taken aloof from his age and his country, and standing in the presence of Nature and of God, with his passions, his doubts, his rare prosperities and inconceivable wretchedness—will become the chief, if not the sole theme of poetry among these nations.
Losing Both God & Man
And now let us pause and consider.
Every literary and artistic revival I know of has occurred when men have returned to forgotten springs; when they have gone back behind the recent past to a more distant past, not as antiquarians but as people really seeking to remember, and to bring into a new world those things from that distant past that are still powerfully alive because they are permanently alive; they are true. Wordsworth went behind Pope to Milton and Spenser. Donatello unearthed Roman copies of Greek statuary, and went on to sculpt the first nude, in the round, since classical antiquity. Eugene O’Neill went behind Edwardian plays of manners to Sophocles and Euripides.
These were revolutions in style only because they were recoveries of wisdom. But the democratic impulse, now thoroughly embedded in our schools, has rendered such ressourcement a practical impossibility. We are still, I may say, fettered by a rusty chain to that same old, same old future, to the airy visions of Woodrow Wilson, to being on the right side of history, and so on, in saecula saeculorum.
Meanwhile, though, the old bottles have failed to contain the corrosive. Democratic man has gone so far as to deny the existence of Man. For that, too, would bind him to standards beyond his choice. We are no longer members of a body, but indiscriminate atoms in a mass. As such, we must sink into utter irrelevance and anonymity, except that now we assert, with real desperation, that our individual choices constitute who we are.
Since most people cannot compose a memorable melody or build a handsome theater or write a good poem, they fall back upon the most obvious arena for self-expression, which is not so much expression as it is a shrill and frantic cry to be noticed. They fall back upon the sexual. “Give me liberty, or give me death,” said the agrarian patriot Patrick Henry. “Give me my sexual self-definition, or I might as well not exist at all,” says the democratic man of our time.
Having lost God, we have lost Man, and having lost Man, we would have all the universe be borne upon the slender reed of the Self. We do so even in the name of a socialism that is deeply antisocial, and of a democracy that is far more intrusive and all-controlling than anything ever dreamed of by an aristocrat maddened with authority.
But the Self is a kind of abstraction. Unattached selves do not exist. “It is not good for the man to be alone,” said God. We might say that if man is alone, he is not man at all. But the democratic ideology severs man from his own past, as Tocqueville suggests, and its friend, the principle of equality, eventually unmoors him both from standards against which he must measure himself, and from Man, Man with his own inherent and discoverable nature.
All this happens while his sense of the holy is attenuated. He is not so much in terror of the holy as he is irritated at the very idea that there is such a thing, because it runs athwart his “choice.” Add in for good measure his now almost complete severance from the natural world, and what is there left for him to portray or to embody or to imitate or to praise in his art?
Nothing, nothing at all.
God’s Unsearchable Providence
Our poets, our artists, and our composers have nothing to think about but the stale notions of a future beyond hope and even common sense and plain human decency. It is not just that they neglect to go to the old springs. Their education has filled the old springs with asphalt and cement. If they do try to write about God or Man, they cannot get a sentence out before they return to the myth of infinite perfectibility, which their hearts tell them is a lie. The result is not confident joy but bluster and bluff when it is cheerful, and angry threats when it is not. They “sing a new Church into being,” as one of the silliest of the new hymns would have us do. What it means is this: “Sing our political slogans, buddy, or shut up.”
And yet, and yet, God does not abandon us. If there is no “right side” of human history, there is also, thankfully, no merely human and political end to history, no end outside of God and his unsearchable providence. When the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins looked out at the dreary, machine-ridden, industrial war-scapes of nineteenth-century English cities, which were both uglier and more beautiful, more wicked and yet far more innocent, than our cities now, he did not despair. Nor must we:
Yet for all this, Nature is never spent:
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things,
And though the last lights off the black west went,
Oh, morning at the brown brink eastward springs,
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.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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