A reader writes – of confessional poets like Rita Dove, Ann Sexton, Sylvia Plath: “I don’t like those poems. I don’t know why poets are rewarded for creating such ugly scenery?! I’m sorry, but they make me sad. Turning us inside out, for what purpose? Afterwards, after reading the see and the saw, I feel ugly and hated. That’s not what such authors intend, but it’s the result.”
Visitors from the twenty-sixth century, if humans survive that long, may wonder what moved makers of all arts in the twentieth century to bend into bleakness, difficulty, horror, obscurity, art that initially appalls more than it appeals. Shouldn’t art solace, delight, encourage, not submerge us in gloom? “The only end of writing,” pronounced Dr. Johnson, with his usual brio, “is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.” Is art enjoyable that cannot be enjoyed?
I call this the King Lear question. Few works of art are more terrible, excruciating, joyless, and few more necessary or, to my mind, more beautiful. Fate is shown here as brutal and cruel – “Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport” – yet I return to the play as inevitably as a yoyo to its finger. I want it, need it, why?
Painful art, if it engages, strengthens us. King Lear suffered through his stupidity and hardships to attain a sort of grace. Mightn’t I? My hurts and, I hope, my harms are less, but even so I’ve writhed. Life’s an ordeal if taken seriously. Mightn’t I inure myself to its pain by sipping its poison, like Mithridates, in small doses?
Engagement is the key. We must be tempted by the art to, first, taste, and then ingest it. Here is where too many moderns fell short. They laid on horror and difficulty without sufficiently softening us with the tricks of art. Hieronymus Bosch painted a hellish hell, but he made it so witty and pretty we feel like visiting. Shakespeare enchants us with music, metaphor, suspense, which pleasurably propel our pulse before we groan.
In service to an idea of honesty, modernity often forsook pretty. Loveliness, sweetness, melody, amiability they decried as evasive. Plunge us into bleakness with no chance of reprieve!
Some makers got away with it. Many more left their audience feeling as my reader does, “ugly and hated,” saddened and begrimed by the grime of being. The same art affects different people differently. The poets whom my reader reviles, others extol as heroines. Neither’s wrong.
My timid tactic is to charm, or try to, before whacking. Blithe before blue. You are my guest here, I want you to feel at home, relax among the syllables. I mean for my music to amuse. A poem – or any art – must be enjoyed before it’s understood.
This is opinion, not polemic. One of the silliest things makers do, writers especially, is to proclaim rules, establish orthodoxies. Aesthetic manifestos make for tedious reading. Art no more has rules than lovemaking. Some like it rough, some tender; some bald, others circumspect. Some poets I’ll cherish for a while, then slap shut their book in disgust. A poem that moved me today I might remove tomorrow.
“The purpose of art,” said Picasso, “is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.” That works for me. Whether the art’s hideous or hilarious, if I love it, I emerge from its embrace fortified and cleansed, readier to meet the day. Nietzsche put the same truth differently. “We have art,” he said, “in order not to die of the truth.”