Pleasure and Poetry: A Hedonist's Guide to Reading and Teaching Poetry

In much of the morose educational discourse about preparing the young for whatever the adults intend to prepare them for (it varies by educational philosophy)—college, life, participation in the workforce, citizenship, sanctity, productivity, etc.—we rarely hear about pleasure or enjoyment. Nevertheless, one of the seldom acknowledged purposes of true education is to afford the young an occasion for and assistance in cultivating their capacity to enjoy good things. Yes, it’s absurd that it takes work for us to develop the ability to enjoy things—to feel pleasure—but there it is. Of course, some experiences require more work than others, but generally, most high, noble, or exquisite pleasures take some training.

We sometimes hear about the “willing suspension of disbelief” necessary to read and enjoy fiction competently. This is because the literalist or empiricist approaches the opportunity of fiction with the wrong tools of enjoyment, like bringing a chain saw to the dinner table instead of a knife.

To read poetry with pleasure requires another kind of suspension. It is difficult to render the kind of suspension poetry requires in as succinct a form as to say: disbelief. Pleasure in poetry often requires suspension of part—only part—of our critical faculties. It requires an accentuation of the critical faculties in other ways, but to read a poem with pleasure, one has to be willing to hear the poem, the narrator, the poet’s voice, as something other than a political proposition or an argument for a particular act. We have to suspend the part of our critical faculty that evaluates operational propositions and judges actions. Pleasure in poetry derives chiefly from its being rather than its doing. I'll explain.

Imagine that the poet is like a potter turning clay on his wheel in order to shape something beautiful and substantial. The potter uses clay while the poet takes ideas and affects and renders them in language. We would mistake the potter's creation if we judged it only by the filthy hands of the potter at work, or the bucket of raw clay on the floor. It is the same if we reject a poem because an idea or particular image in it bothers us or resists our understanding. The poet and the potter are fashioning objects that are best used and enjoyed in their whole whole form rather than deconstructed into bits. If you're misusing the bowl, don't blame the potter.

For example, let's take Robert Herrick's “Julia.” To read this poem with the most pleasure we need to feel the elegant eroticism of the silk garment hugging Julia’s form.

Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes. 

Next, when I cast mine eyes, and see
That brave vibration each way free,
O how that glittering taketh me!

If we read this poem and fail to suspend the political or propositional we're likely to end up in one of two conclusions.

1) The poem is bad because it's potentially titillating. This is the moralist’s objection which would reject pottery because it requires getting one's hands dirty.

2) The poem is unsatisfying because it takes too much effort to imagine the beautiful Julia and she's not there to be grabbed at anyway. This is the philistine's objection which rejects all the potter's vessels because he prefers simply to muck around in the clay himself. Both of these positions neglect the full potential for pleasure in poetry by inappropriately operationalizing the poem.

Another way to make the point involves the distinction between being and doing. I don't want to make too much of this distinction, but poetry is at its best for those who see poems as objects, who interact with them like things rather than reading them as invitations or provocations to some action. These are not mutually exclusive categories, of course, but rather, tendencies that different forms of language exhibit. I don't want to exaggerate the difference in tendency because there is very real pleasure in the doing required for being—pleasure in the feel of the clay slipping between the fingers as one forms a vessel; pleasure in the breathing, eating, and drinking that our own being requires. (Do I need to say more about the pleasures involved in sustaining human being?) But the tendency of poetry is toward objectivity while the tendency of operational or political language is toward activity.

When we acknowledge the artifactuality of poetry—its chief glory residing in its existence as a thing fashioned from words and sounds by human invention—we learn a little better how to enjoy it. We enjoy it the way we enjoy a particularly fine piece of pottery, a bowl say, which helps nourish you both by holding milk and by being well-wrought and beautiful. So with a particular poem which nourishes you not as an abstraction (I don't think those nourish) but as an artifact of sound and sense which takes its place in your mind and memory.

The great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz once pronounced that poetry is not sophisticated. For many who have yet to learn how to enjoy poetry, I suspect that one of the chief obstacles is that it seems so sophisticated—an elaborate abstraction made of insubstantial words. If this was, in fact, what poetry was, I at least would be unable to enjoy it as I do. I prefer my words incarnate.

No, poems cannot simply be abstractions, (though sometimes they use abstraction the way a potter might use negative space). They are objects. Earthy, articulate objects full of sound and sense. Because of this warriors, mothers, and savvy teachers have always known to memorize, recite, declaim, and hand down the best poems and songs.

The beauty of treating poems like things--like artifacts--is that doing so quiets the part of us that judges and criticizes actions. Remember poems are being rather than doing. You can hear Herrick celebrate Julia in silk without jumping into bed with her. You can see the poet turn an image or idea every which way in the light of his own intellect without committing yourself to an ideology or course of action. You can relish drinking from a bowl without being a bowl, or voting for bowls, or becoming an activist for bowldumb.

Of course, some poets intend some activism in their poetry and every poem will fall somewhere on a scale between political or practical speech in verse and lyric object / artifacts of pure contemplation. I am not intending to argue for some hierarchy of value between these two poles—though my own preference in both reading and writing is for the lyric—but to acknowledge the breadth of the genre while still insisting that a key to unlocking the most pleasure and enjoyment in reading or hearing poetry is to think of poems (and if you are a teacher, to teach them) not as arguments but as objects.

We could go on and on about what poems are for, since every good object has some purpose it serves, but that is for another essay. The briefest introduction to the topic of what poems are for is that they impart shape and distinction to experience.

A few examples of an artifactual approach to poetry:

In Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost appears a lyrical winter poem plain to see as an object rather than an argument. It bursts with the sense of a particular season and the simple, earthy, pains and pleasures of the season.

When icicles hang by the wall
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When Blood is nipped and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-who;
Tu-whit, tu-who: a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all aloud the wind doth blow,
And coughing drowns the parson's saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marian's nose looks red and raw
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-who;
Tu-whit, tu-who: a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

This lyric, so apt at capturing a wintry state, does not ask us to believe something about the characters, or about winter, or about anything. It just gives itself to you and can shape your experience of every object in the poem—wood, ice, fire, owls—knitting together / integrating the reader’s physical experience, cognition, and memory.

You might not prefer his work, but Walt Whitman is famous (or infamous) for his long collections of things presented in lists.

     I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
     Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
     The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
     The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
     The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
     The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench...

Whitman did not originate this approach. The list is an old and venerable poetic form. And of course it is. The Iliad and other ancient epics feature lists of weapons, places, and people. One of the reasons we make lists is to gather things together which we want to keep together or to hold in some relation to one another. Not only is this a mirror of the process of writing a poem, but it mirrors the effect of analogy itself whereby the yoking of unlike things in a shared context or environment yields a new thing. The classic example of this is “lion” and “heart” brought together tell us something about bravery and magnanimity in the soul of a man. When reading a Whitman poem we can do several things: enjoy the spectacle of the panorama or menagerie and ask what it means to have all these objects brought together in this new object?

One last example: memorized poems are perhaps the most artifactual. (A related aside: there is a fruitful self-giving between memory and the arts. In Greek mythology the muses are the daughters of memory [mnemosyne] and generate the artifacts which we possess through the exercise and integration of memory, re-seeding memory, if you will, as it gives birth to the muses.) Gerard Manley Hopkins' “Spring and Fall” with its quintessentially autumnal tones: “Margaret are you grieving over golden grove unleaving…” has been a companion for many autumnal walks amidst the falling leaves. It serves to shape and make sensible the wistful experience of winter's onset.

Two final observations about method which are implied by my argument. For poets, abstraction and sophistication are neutral at best and should be deployed reluctantly. If you’ll permit me one more analogy….For most of us, the enjoyment of a nice car is in the way it throws you back against the seat when accelerating and in the way it handles curves and bumps. Then there are connoisseurs who will want to study the engine and chassis for the craftsman's signature. But of course, no one cares to have a car that cannot drive. Most of us will not spend significant time studying the mechanics of a poem. Its strength needs to be apparent from the outside, especially for beginners. When you step on it, it needs to GO. Some connoisseurs will want to explore its structure and prosody, pop the hood and tinker around, but not all, and it's not necessary in order to drive the thing.

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

For teachers, I hope all of the above suggests a method by which to introduce students to poetry.

-First, possession and use. In our analogy, this is like eating or drinking from a well-wrought bowl or driving a finely-tuned vehicle. Spend some time with the thing as you would with any valuable object. And if you're trying to attract students to it, make sure it's a good one. For poetry this means reading, reciting out loud, and memorization.

-Second, introduce students to the making or fashioning of the poem. Playing with clay and the potter's wheel or working on some part of an engine is like learning and practicing prosody or writing intentionally mimetic verse.

-Finally, show them the greatest poems ever written. Their experience tinkering with prosody will help them to see how great is the achievement of a Shakespeare or a Milton. If you get them this far, you have given them a treasury full of priceless objects that are theirs for no cost but the time spent enjoying them.

And only those with a special vocation as potter, mechanic, or poet need go any further than this. And if they do go further, they should take care to resist becoming obnoxious by excessive specialization, abstraction, and sophistication… or by writing long essays about how to enjoy poetry.