Truth and Lies in Poetry

By Robyn Sarah

Some years ago, at a poetry event, I heard a fellow poet preface his reading with the remark, “A good poem is like a good lie.” He meant, I assume, that both are verbal constructions that succeed based on the extent to which they can persuade us to believe them. Maybe he was half tongue-in-cheek, intending to be provocative, but nobody around me seemed provoked. I understood what he meant, but my own thought at the time was, “I could not disagree with you more.”

A successful lie manipulates language to achieve the effect of truth, but to me, a good poem is true. The power of the words comes from authentic emotion which is the moving spirit behind the poem. The words move us because the poet has been moved to words. Or, as I put it in the concluding sentences of my essay, “Poetry’s Bottom Line”: “Whatever else it is or does, a poem should deliver to us unmistakably the sense of an urgency behind the words. The sense that there was a need to say this. That the poet means it. That every word is a meant word.”

All too often, reading contemporary poetry, what I feel is, So many dishonest lines! Lines that sound beautiful but that aren’t meant. If you aren’t really paying attention, you can be seduced by them. But if you’re listening closely, they don’t ring true. They have the sound of trying too hard, or of trying to put something over. They sound as though they are listening to themselves, admiringly, rather than speaking from a real place inside the poet. The words may be gorgeous, they may be clever, they may have dazzle or flash, but they aren’t speaking in a real voice.

Recently, I came across this quote that I copied into my journal, from an essay on Auden in the Spring 2003 issue of The Hudson Review (“Vin Audenaire” by Joseph Epstein):

“More than 40 years ago… I heard the poet and critic Elder Olson read a long passage from The Waste Land, close the book, sigh, remark on its beauty, then add, ‘What a pity that I cannot believe a word of it!’ I’m not sure that I now believe in it either, but I have no doubt that T. S. Eliot did, just as he believed every semicolon in his Four Quartets. And, one might add, as Robert Frost believed in those Two Tramps in Mud Time or Wallace Stevens in the view of the world of that woman in her peignoir sitting of a Sunday morning in her sunny chair with her coffee and oranges… The Auden problem, for me, is not only do I not believe in many of the ideas behind his earlier poetry, but I am far from sure he believed in them himself.”

Epstein’s verdict resonated for me; it helped explain why I have always felt much cooler towards Auden than I do toward Eliot, Frost, and Stevens. Auden’s rhetoric persuades me of his skill in rhetoric, but only rarely does it persuade me of much more. The poets who matter to me are the ones about whom I’m persuaded they believe their own poems. But what is this quality in a poem, that makes you feel, “The poet means it”? How do we begin to name such a thing?

I suspect that in what I would call a true poem, the words come from the emotion. In a poem that I would call just an exercise in verse, the emotion (if it is achieved at all) comes from the words. Both poems can be satisfying to read, but one is a lesser art. It goes without saying that primacy of emotion by itself is not sufficient to ensure a true poem—I am presupposing a high level of artistry with language in the poet. But it is emotion that should inspire a poet’s words, and not vice versa. If the emotion is primary, the words will transmit that emotion to others. Words—the poet’s own words—should not be what inspires the poet’s emotion. He should not be using his virtuosity with language to convince himself that he’s feeling something.

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“Poetry’s Bottom Line: Towards an Essay in Poetics” is from Little Eurekas: A Decade’s Thoughts on Poetry (Biblioasis, 2007).

Thanks to The Hudson Review and Joseph Epstein for gracious permission to quote from his essay.