No valiance in poetry

Are contemporary American poets "cowards?" 

University of Virginia English Professor Mark Edmundson seems to think so.

Edmundson has launched a 6000 word "jeremiad" against the pusillanimity of a majority of present day American poets in Harper Magazine. 

Heads that roll: Ranging from John Ashbery to Sharon Olds to even Robert Pinsky.

Poets of today are "oblique, equivocal, painfully self-questioning...timid, small, in retreat...ever more private, idiosyncratic and withdrawn," says Edmundson.

What are they retreating from?

From large, cataclysmic public events of today, including political and climatic one's:

Our poets today are too timid to say, “‘we,’ to go plural and try to strike a major note . . . on any fundamental truth of human experience [...] in the face of war, environmental destruction and economic collapse, they write as though the great public crises were over and the most pressing business we had were self-cultivation and the fending off of boredom. All that matters to these narcissistic singers is the creation of a “unique voice.”

Nigerian-American novelist Chimamanda Ngochi had made a similar complaint, albeit in muted tones, against modern British and American fiction writers. The prioritizing of the "unique" voice over everything else, including ideological commitment, has come under much attack lately.

I think that artists shouldn't be the only ones to be blamed for retreating into "little" things; people at large in our times could be best described as "disengaged." Ask about politics and see them grimacing in distaste, as though to cultivate political wills or perspectives or any other form of engagements (there are so many) in things political, were secondary or inferior to cultivating, as Edmundson writes, private taste.

Art carries the baggages, I feel, of the zeitgeist in which it's produced.

Having said that I wanted to try out the truth value of Edmundson's claim that while modern poets are good in their individual ways, they aren't good enough because they "don't slake a reader's thirst for meanings that pass beyond the experience of the individual poet and light up the world we hold in common."

I chose a poem from the New Yorker, one that I liked for its linguistic and small-scale imagistic effects:

Xanthopsia

It wasn’t absinthe or digitalis
in the Yellow House the two of them shared
that led him to layer the chrome coronas
or yellow the sheets in the bedroom in Arles
or tinge the towel negligently hung
on the hook by the door, or yellow the window,
be it distant view or curtain, yolk-lick
the paintings on the wall by the monkish bed.

After going on, a bit abstrusely, I have to say, about what the causes of "his" xanthopsia weren't, the poem ends on a note of what I thought was an answer to the implied question: Did Van Gogh have xanthopsia, and if so what caused it? An extended question on the plethora of chrome or yellow in Van Gogh's paintings: Why so yellow?

I'd juxtapose a few lines from T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland with the lines from the Xanthopsian poetic regime:

The Wasteland: The Burial of the Dead
APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering 5
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, 10
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie, 15
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

There are abstruse little images here as well, but they get dispersed in the beautiful echoes of history, mythology, past and present. The chiaroscuro of the male figure holding on to Marie, for fear of falling is there for a reason.

It's no wonder that recently Dan Chiasson came up empty handed when he looked around for poems on the Boston bombing. 

The poems he found had oblique references to this seismic event (seismic not in the sense of numbers and scale of destruction, but in the sense of International politics, war strategies, etc: events affect policies, which in turn affect lives), and had comfortably retreated into the intricacies of the private lives and feelings. 

Chiasson then went back in literary history and dug up lines from the fourteenth-century English poem Piers Plowman.