Inspired by T S Eliot's Essay: 'The Social Function of Poetry'

Whatever else can be said about Eliot, he makes you think. Consider this extract from his essay The Social Function of Poetry:

"It matters little whether a poet had a large audience in his own time. What matters is that there should always be at least a small audience for him in every generation. Yet what I have just said suggests that his importance is for his own time, or that dead poets cease to be of any use to us unless we have living poets as well. I would even press my first point and say that if a poet gets a large audience very quickly, that is a rather suspicious circumstance: for it leads us to fear that he is not really doing anything new, that he is only giving people what they are already used to, and therefore what they have already had from the poets of the previous generation. But that a poet should have the right, small audience in his own time is important. There should always be a small vanguard of people, appreciative of poetry, who are independent and somewhat in advance of their time or ready to assimilate novelty more quickly. The development of culture does not mean bringing everybody up to the front, which amounts to no more than making everyone keep step: it means the maintenance of such an elite, with the main, and more passive body of readers not lagging more than a generation or so behind."

That art of all forms should move on, rather than be static is surely beyond dispute. We see examples all the time of copycat movies trying to emulate the success of original films in a particular genre. Rarely, if ever, do they surpass the original and the public quickly tire of them.

So far, I am wholly in agreement with Eliot although I wonder if Seamus Heaney or Maya Angelou ever wake up worrying that they have become too successful too quickly and perhaps it is because they offer nothing new? I doubt it somehow. Perhaps they, Ted Hughes, Robert Pinsky and many others are the exceptions that prove the rule? I suppose we won't know for a generation or two.

What really troubles me in this extract is the independent vanguard, the elite that are choosing the novelty that future generations are to enjoy. How do you define this group? How do we know that they haven't overlooked other, better poetry? I don't see how it works, or indeed if it can work. Blake, for example, was not widely read during his own lifetime, at least when compared to Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron. It wasn't an elite of that age that brought him a wider audience but later figures such as Yeats.

It is certainly possible to argue that it is the elite of Eliot's generation that has brought undue complexity in poetry to the fore with the result that substantial portions of the population consider poetry 'difficult'. You don't have to look too far around the internet to see that there is another sizeable group that write in styles long passed. That they can find few poetic heroes from the last century to emulate is disappointing but I don't believe they can be blamed entirely for that.

That poetry should extend the language, as Eliot argues elsewhere in his essay, is a fine concept but it must also be relevant to the experience of people. Relevance is needed if poetry is to touch people. The way it may touch them will vary: for some it will be a mirror of personal experience, for others it will be through the telling of a story, a new description of an everyday scene and yes, for some, it will be through the unraveling of a secret held within the poem. But to do so, it must reach them and to reach them it must not appear forbidding. If a large segment of the population consider poetry from the last hundred years or so 'difficult' then it is forbidding. Look at the many 100 best poem anthologies in any good bookstore. How many poems from the last hundred years are included? Too few. Those poets have not done their job as well as they might. A correction is needed.

But I digress. I am not sure who Eliot was talking about. Academics may have greater exposure to new poetry but academia can be a cloistered community and new forms arise almost spontaneously well beyond academic boundaries. Publishers see plenty of poetry but necessarily have an eye on the bottom line and so are more interested in what is selling today and not what will be selling in 50 years time. I agree with Eliot that for many poets it will be future generations that make their name rather than in their own age. I don't, however, believe it will be the result of an elite of today. Such groups have too much potential to start believing in their own self-importance and over-intellectualize and stifle rather than promote diversity.

The real judges must be the public. To bring them to see the joy, the wisdom, the experience and the sheer fun of poetry it is necessary to start young. Educators have the critical responsibility to bring fresh generations back to poetry. We may no longer see a time when a new edition of a poem by Byron would be sold out in a day, but we may still see a return of poetry to best seller lists. Reading and writing poetry should be fun. Once it is, then children will want more. Let's not over analyze Blake but teach the joy of his words on the tongue. Understanding can come later.