Who decides whether a piece of literature is good or not? Is there a committee somewhere that decides by a process of selection? Does it allow for vote by proxy? Is there a monarch or a king that raises his scepter in approbation? Perhaps all the people of the world can gather together and conduct some magnificent survey. Or should we only allow those within the profession to be among the approving voices? If you win the Pulitzer or Pushcart or you a shoe-in? Can we vote you off the island if we don’t find your style or personality agreeable? How is literature, or poetry to be exact, determined to be of value?
This question has been at the forefront of literary analysis for most of history. That we are still discussing it is a testament to the difficulty of an answer. All of us, to be sure, have our tastes, our preferences, even our prejudices. We know what we like and we know what we don’t.
Perhaps we can say there is some kind of Akashic record that tallies all the ‘yea’ votes in the hearts of lit lovers from eons back to eons forward and at the end of time we will know who has received the most tallies. But would that be fair to those in late-coming centuries? Perhaps we can divide those tallies by an appropriate time measure and record an aggregated average.
This all may seem silly, but it’s a complicated matter. How much should we make technical considerations a part of the calculation? How about creativity? Imagination? Passion?
Quantifying a subjective is about as simple as picking up a handful of water. It may be that these are all the wrong questions. Is Shakespeare better than Homer? Will Walt Whitman win the award for most unique voice in history, or should that go to Aesop? Comparisons such as these, in literature, make about as much sense as playing baseball in zero gravity. But that is not to say that judging the value of poetry is impossible. I believe it is. Though that value is not computed by ordinary means.
How To Judge The Value Of Literature
There will always be someone who doesn’t like a great work of art. One person detests Moby Dick; another reads it cover to cover once a year. Someone else swears by Dickens while his sister-in-law calls him a senseless hack. Jane Austen may be brilliant to one reader, but quite nuts to another. Literature is, at its most basic, a subjective experience. As such, its value is personal.
But what if a million readers like a particular story or poem? Does it then have more value than the work that is enjoyed by merely one hundred? Not necessarily. Suppose those one hundred readers are contemporary readers to the artist and all personal friends to the author whose first book was published just last week. But in the former case, the million readers are readers that span the sequence of centuries for a timeless and well-known classic. There is hardly a comparison there now is there?
And that brings me to my point: The value of literature, though it be subjective, is intrinsically wrapped up in time. This, of course, must rule out those works that never see the light of day. If it is unpublished and remains so then no one can judge. But it’s entirely feasible, and has been done many times, that an artist can go a lifetime without receive the accolades of contemporaries only to enjoy achievements beyond imagination in the afterlife. Immortality may be in the realm of God, or the gods, but it is accessible to man by reputation.
Though time may be the variable involved, it would be a mistake to consider that value is based on some aggregation of fans. A million fans over the course of one hundred centuries doesn’t afford any special favors opposed to one hundred thousand fans over the same time period, or one hundred thousand fans over the course of one thousand years is no better than two hundred thousand over the course of three times as long. Rather, the time value of literature may be judged by how long a particular work or artist may enjoy a fanbase at all beyond their lifetime.
Writers who achieve great fame during their lifetimes then fade into oblivion may be good cultural artists, but their achievements pale in comparison to, say, Homer or Sappho. Literature may be subjective, but it is not wholly so, for it also bears a cultural imprint as well as an epochal one. It takes considerably more talent to be understood and valued cross-culturally during one period than it does to be understood and valued by a single culture of that same time period, but it also takes more talent to be understood and valued by a variety of cultures across time. Readers today understand Shakespeare because we understand courage, honor, deceit, love, and the human passions about which he wrote. But if knowledge of a particular culture or artifact is necessary in order to understand a literary work then when that culture or artifact is no longer alive people will find it difficult to relate. And that’s why I say that work which touches upon the human condition beyond a mere time and place is to be preferred over any other. It has more value to more people in more places and more times. It is that time value in which we can trust.
It’s always an interesting question.
I doubt that any generation has *ever* been so pampered as the baby-boom generation. They created their own industry and were, generously, their own critics. The “best poetry” came to be defined as whatever best described their own talents. After the generation of T.S. Eliot, Yeats, Frost, Williams, Stevens, I honest to god have a hard time thinking of a single poet who rises above mediocrity – only Mary Oliver. I can’t speak for foreign language poets.This last generation, in my opinion, is a wasteland of self-congratulatory mediocrity – and I would include “critics” in this generational morass. All sense of greatness and uniqueness was drowned in a swamp of self-indulgence.
I agree that greatest poetry is about people, not the age they live in. We know it when we read it. It’s not all subjective though. There are objective reasons why great poetry is great, but great poetry has to have great readers. It takes considerably more talent to be a great poet, but it also takes considerably more talent to be a great reader.
Patrick Gillespies last blog post..Opening Book: Unbidden Page 78 (Final Poem of the Book)
Patrick, I agree. Postmodernism ruined American poetry. I guess we’re talking about after the 1950s. I tried to think of a single U.S. poet who rises to a level of greatness after Frost. No one comes to mind. Mary Oliver is certainly up there. Though Galway Kinnell and Seamus Heaney are damned good. Robert Pinsky isn’t bad. Pablo Neruda certainly hits the mark, but he’s one of those foreign poets you mentioned.
There were some, like Amiri Baraka, who have had their moments, but they often slide into silliness or self-congratulatory narcissism. Probably, the best poets of the last half century were folk lyricists (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young).
Galway Kinnell and Seamus Heaney are “up there”, but are best read in anthologies. Galway is perhaps the best of his generation (and I’ve heard him read) but none of his poetry is lodged in memory. The rink-a-tink-tink of his onomatopoetisms go skittering across his pages like broken Christmas baubles. Heaney is the most powerfully imagistic of contemporary poets and occasionally builds some beautiful conceits:
And here is love
like a tinsmith’s scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.
But, like Kinnell, he just doesn’t seem able or interested in building larger poems with the sweep of a single thought. His imagery is strung like multi-colored beads along the string of his lines – each indifferent to the other.
Patrick Gillespies last blog post..Opening Book: Unbidden Page 78 (Final Poem of the Book)