by Adam Kirsch

from The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry

In 1857, Matthew Arnold delivered his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, later published as "On the Modern Element in Literature." Like so many poets and critics since, Arnold was attempting to redefine the notion of modernness, expanding it from a merely temporal category to an aesthetic and even moral one. The modern element, he insists, is not to be found only in the poetry of the present, nor does it become increasingly evident as we approach the present. The literature of Periclean Athens, in Arnold's sense, is more modern than that of Victorian England, for it more completely meets his definition of modernness as "intellectual deliverance":

But first let us ask ourselves why the demand for intellectual deliverance arises in such an age as the present, and in what the deliverance consists? The demand arises, because our present age has around it a copious and complex present, and behind it a copious and complex past; it arises, because the present age exhibits to the individual man who contemplates it the spectacle of a vast multitude of facts awaiting and inviting his comprehension. The deliverance consists in man's comprehension of this present and past. It begins when our mind begins to enter into possession of the general ideas which are the law of this vast multitude of facts. It is perfect when we have acquired that harmonious acquiescence of mind which we feel in contemplating a grand spectacle that is intelligible to us; when we have lost that impatient irritation of mind which we feel in presence of an immense, moving, confused spectacle which, while it perpetually excites our curiosity, perpetually baffles our comprehension.

The immediately striking thing about Arnold's definition of the modern, to a reader a century and a half further advanced in a period that continues to orient itself around the concept of modernness (even if only in the negative form of the postmodern), is its unequivocally positive character. The artist can only become modern by mastering the civilization in which he finds himself, subduing its baffling and irritating variety through the order of art. The mark of the modern poet is his complete adequacy to a challenging world: he can, in the phrase Arnold applied to his favorite ancient modern, Sophocles, "see life steadily and see it whole."

Yet already in Arnold's lecture, it is possible to see the seeds of a later understanding of the modern, the one that T. S. Eliot would help to establish (at the expense of Arnold's own authority), and which still prevails today. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that it was the perpetual bafflement and excitement of modernity that Arnold knew firsthand, while the deliverance to which he aspired remained, like all redemption, prospective and hypothetical. Certainly, what seems modern in Arnold's poetry is not its mastery of a "copious and complex" present, but the honest confession of helplessness we find in "A Farewell": "we wear out life, alas!/ Distracted as a homeless wind,/ In beating where we must not pass,/ In seeking what we shall not find." Even in "On the Modern Element in Literature," Arnold seems to offer a covert self-portrait, not in his paeans to Sophocles and Thucydides, but in his sketch of weary, nihilistic Lucretius: "What a picture of ennui! of the disease of the most modern societies, the most advanced civilization! . . . Lucretius is, therefore, over-strained, gloom-weighted, morbid; and he who is morbid is no adequate interpreter of his age."

Arnold's hopeful, not to say wishful, definition of the modern would not be conclusively displaced until poets came to agree that, on the contrary, it is precisely the morbid poet who is the adequate interpreter of the modern age. This was the conclusion of Eliot, who scorned Arnold as a shallow Victorian optimist in order to conceal, even from himself, how many premises the two shared. Arnold's description of the modern world as "copious and complex" is almost identical to Eliot's in "The Metaphysical Poets." The difference is that, while Arnold sees modernness as the achieved mastery of complexity, Eliot sees it as willing surrender to complexity: "We can only say that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results." The modern poet's peculiar heroism is to make himself civilization's pioneer, undergoing earlier and more intensely the spiritual experiences his contemporaries have not yet learned to articulate. The best expression of this heroism, with its strange mixture of intrepidity and passivity, may be John Berryman's in The Dream Songs: "I am obliged to perform in complete darkness/operations of great delicacy/on myself."

Once the modern poet has been defined in this way, not as his age's interpreter but as its exemplary specimen or willing victim, all the virtues and vices of modern poetry, up to the present day, become almost inevitable. The virtues are daring honesty, subtle self-knowledge, an intimate (if not always explicit) concern with history, and a determination to make language serve as the most accurate possible instrument of communication, even at the risk of estrangement. The vices, which correspond to the virtues and call them into question, are sentimental egotism, an obsession with staying up-to-date, and a belief that distortion of language is interesting and praiseworthy in its own right.

The best proof that these values still guide the way we read and write poetry is that a good modern poem moves us, and a bad modern poem disgusts us, more intimately and profoundly than their equivalents from previous poetic eras. Today, as for the last two centuries, it is only poets who put themselves genuinely at risk in their work who can fulfill the expectations modern poetry has bred in us. This is the risk of admitting, contrary to Arnold, that modern experience does not admit of being mastered and interpreted, only of being accurately and passionately shared. The forms this risk assumes vary as widely as poets themselves, but the willingness to take it is what unites today's best poets with their great predecessors since Wordsworth, and especially since Eliot.

To be modern in this essential sense, however, does not mean accepting the canons of modernness that previous generations have handed down to us. In fact, the major challenge for contemporary poetry is how to find its own way of being adequately and faithfully modern, without simply aping the influential techniques of the modernists of the 1910s and 1920s, or the postmodernists of the 1960s and 1970s. In contemporary poetry, it is striking how often the tools of the modernists are used to summon a factitious authority and prestige, to obscure premises that would not bear plain examination. Still worse is the use of the ludic, fracturing techniques of postmodernism, which emphasize the poem's difficult texture in order to conceal its absence of genuine insight, accuracy, and challenge. As with any moment in the history of poetry, perhaps, our own is littered with the corpses of once-vital techniques.

In writing the essays in this book over the last ten years, I did not have the question of modernness in poetry explicitly in mind; but in retrospect, it appears to me that a concern with the modern element does unite them. In reading contemporary poetry, I have usually responded to the presence or absence of the kind of risk I have suggested is genuinely modern. At the same time, I have tried to be conscious that, in a period when modernness and risk are the preeminent values, they will often be counterfeited. Fraudulent self-exposure, which makes no inner demand on poet or reader, and otiose experimentalism, which mistakes novelty for discovery, are typical of the bad poetry of our time, just as other kinds of badness characterized earlier periods. And as Arnold wrote in "The Study of Poetry," "in poetry, more than anywhere else, it is unpermissible to confuse or obliterate" the distinction between "excellent and inferior, sound and unsound or only half-sound, true and untrue or only half-true."

If the modern is an element of our poetry in the sense of the catalyst that sparks a reaction, it is also the universal element in which we move and breathe. As a result, it is impossible for us to see our contemporaries and our period as though from the outside, with an objectivity that is perhaps only another name for indifference. Over time, it has seemed less and less likely to me that criticism ought to offer disinterested assessments. Instead, I hope that these essays, by exploring the work of significant contemporary poets, will also serve the purpose of asking what poetry can and should do today, what it is for, what it and no other art can provide. Perhaps there is still no better answer to those questions than the one Arnold gave, when he defined poetry, unfashionably but wisely and truly, as "a criticism of life."

About the Author
Adam Kirsch is the author of The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets and The Thousand Wells, winner of the 2002 New Criterion Poetry Prize. Kirsch's writing appears frequently in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The Times Literary Supplement. Book critic of the New York Sun, he lives in New York City.

The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry
W.W. Norton