Throughout English-speaking history, until about fifty years ago, there had always been men in their time who were famous for writing beautiful poetry, from William Shakespeare to Lord Byron and Robert Frost. But unfortunately, today our society does not consider the poet as a male figure at all.
This erasure of male voices in poetry was no accident. Like so much of our society’s ills, it was created by a left-wing elite in the academy and publishing industry who felt that women’s voices had been ignored for too long and men’s too widely celebrated.
(Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)
Suddenly, over the past year, we’ve seen a slew of articles and think pieces asking: whatever happened to the literary man?
What happened, more or less, was a disastrous decision to tell young men that there is nothing masculine about literature, especially poetry.
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This idea that the literary arts are somehow feminine in nature is anhistorical nonsense. If we go back to King David, strong men closed their eyes in search of a muse of fire who could ascend the brightest heavens of invention.
Robert Frost, poet from Amherst, New Hampshire, sits and enjoys a book. (Getty Images)
The pinnacle of male poetry may well have been the First World War, when endless time in the trenches produced literary gold from the likes of Siegfried Sassoon, Joyce Kilmer, Wilfried Owen and Robert Graves.
Take this passage from Graves’ masterpiece, ‘The Next War’
Kaisers and Tsars will take the stage
Once more with pomp and circumstance and fury;
Courtly ministers will stop
Home and fight to the last drop;
By the million men will die
In a new, terrible pain;
And children here will bump and prod,
Shoot and die, and laugh at the joke,
Of bows and arrows and wooden spears,
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Graves emerged from a tradition of literary men like Rudyard Kipling, whose poems like “If” and “Gunga Din” were anything but a manual for upright manly behavior, and are still close to the hearts of many men today.
In ‘If’ Kipling insists:
If you can fill the brutal minute
With a distance run of sixty seconds,
Yours is the earth and everything in it,
And – what is more – you will be a Man, my son!
So what happened? Why don’t we have Kipling now? Or even an EE Cummings or TS Eliot?
I asked Joseph Massey, one of the few men in poetry today charting a bold course.
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“When I see how postmodernism, as channeled through academia, has neutered poetry, I recall a line from Whitman’s foreword to Leaves of Grass: ‘The expression of the American poet must be transcendent and new… big, rich and strong.’ Young men, men of all ages, would benefit from absorbing language full of meaning in a world broken by fatigue and nihilism,” he told me.
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Massey would add that poetry is “far from a eunuch’s hobby, despite what is taught and promoted in MFA programs,” and that’s exactly right. Poetry is not mere observation or the spilling of emotions, it is conquest, a triumph of understanding and reason.
Peter Weir’s film ‘Dead Poets Society’ (Photo by Francois Duhamel/Sygma via Getty Images) (Francois Duhamel/Sygma via Getty Images)
In fact, the male urge to write poetry is even more fundamental than understanding the world, because we can be almost certain that many of the earliest forms of verse were invented to woo women, and that these have quite a track record.
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There is hope that our current drought of poetry is just a blip. Next year will see the release of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” which will hopefully encourage young men to read Homer’s original male poem, and America’s 250th birthday should include the celebration of our great poets.
But most of all, we need to banish from our minds the idea that poetry, writing and marveling at the impossible beauty of it all is somehow an accessible pursuit, because let’s face it: few of us are in a position to test our masculinity against the WWI poets of the trenches.
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Do you want to raise a good son? Give him Kipling for backbone, Yeats for heart, Eliot for wisdom, and Frost for common sense, and he will be fooled by nothing in this world.
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It was the French poet Louis Aragon who wrote: ‘Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry and all that past of that poetry. I am extremely sensitive to those poor, beautiful words left in our dark night by some men I never knew.
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A few ‘men’ he never knew.
Allow me to leave you with one final thought. The problem is not just the fact that our young men don’t read poetry, it’s that they don’t write any. Without it, where will come from the poor, beautiful words that we leave to posterity?
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