Can you appreciate both or do you take sides?

 How do we assign value to the poetry of one person and not to the poetry of another?

When I started reading poetry, I found that I liked some poets and disliked others. But these likes and dislikes seemed to go beyond a matter of taste. My reactions seemed to involve values, and values often conflict.

A poet who values ambiguity isn’t going to appeal to readers who value clarity. And so people who love one poet find that they almost automatically dislike a poet who upholds different values.

If Donald Davie didn’t actually say that one can more readily serve God and Mammon than admire both Pound and Stevens, he should have.

I’m thinking about things that I should have thought about at 22, when an English professor flipped the light on for me.

I was about to graduate from a university when the counselors discovered that I didn’t have a single credit of English. Since my degree had involved a lot of writing, it seemed pointless to make me take freshman composition. So some dean decided that justice would be served if I took a sophomore poetry course.

I went with a sour attitude. Three weeks into the course I vowed that I would be a lifelong reader of poetry.

I’m grateful, but I missed a lot by not spending more time in the English Department. I am just now getting to some of the questions I should have explored 45 years ago.

Why, exactly, do I react so strongly in favor of one poet and so strongly against another? Is this just taste or are these reactions connected to my values in some way?

When someone is to be consulted on some puzzling question, it’s often Montaigne for me. Here he is, writing about the poetry and criticism of his day:

 

Here is something of a marvel: we now have far more poets than judges and connoisseurs of poetry. It is far easier to write poetry than to appreciate it. At a rather low level you can judge it by the rules of art: but good, enrapturing, divine poetry is above reason and rules. Whoever can distinguish its beauties with a firm and settled gaze does not in fact see it all, no more than we see the brilliance of a flash of lightning.

 

I’m still thinking, but I’ve been warned.

• Sources: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 260. The note about Donald Davie comes from Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets; London: Phoenix, 1998, p. 707. I think the remark is more Schmidt than Davie.