Gerald Schwartz wrote:
> Can there be truly objective criteria for judging a poem?
>
> G. E. Schwartz
>
I'm supposed to be away from my computer by now but got delayed by a
touch of some virus (at least, that's all I hope it is). So I'm still
at home able to argue (alas). My response: there's no way to be truly
objective about anything, but there are ways to be reasonably close to
it. Instead of going into how one can do this, because of my excuse (my
virus), I'm going to skip to a prediction of mine:
It will eventually be possible objectively to evaluate the amount of
pleasure a given poem gives a given subject at a given time via
neurophysiological readings. (I consider a priori that pleasure,
finally, is all we're after--in poetry and everything else.) So, a
reasonably objective evaluation of that poem for that person would be
the average of a number of readings, and a reasonably objective
evaluation of the poem for everyone, the average of such readings for
everyone who experiences the poem. Forever.
I'm speaking of the consumer value of the poem. That's not all that
counts, for me. I've long yammered that a bad poem can still be an
/important /poem if it provides poets with some new tool of value. So,
a poem can be extremely effective, as many of Robert Frost's are, for
me, but not important because they don't do anything of consequence
particularly well. Ditto for all of Shakespeare's poetry (I consider
his plays drama, not poetry). Pound's /Cantos/, as a whole, is not an
effective poem but a highly important one--again, for me. Some of E. E.
Cummings's poems are both effective and important.
To judge the importance of a poem would involve determining what other
poems used the tool it was the first to use, of first to use well, and
how good they were.
In any case, there are certainly degrees of objectivity--e.g., judging a
poem a good one because one's grandfather wrote it is clearly less
objective than judging a poem a good one because it contains fresh
metaphors about a subject a consensus of intelligent. informed observers
rates as important.
I'm now going back to bed.
--Bob
|