Why is modern poetry so hard to read? Adam Kirsch offers a clue.

Adam Kirsch writes:

Over time, modern poetry had to become ever more subtle and surprising in order to defeat the reader’s expectations and open him or her up to the experience of transcendence.

Good point!

Old poetry is hard to read because it’s written using old-fashioned language. Yes, Shakespeare’s writing is beautiful, but it’s hard to read, at least for awhile until you read a bunch of it and get warmed up.

New poetry is hard to read because poetry is supposed to be tricky and obscure. I always wondered why this was. Even Philip Larkin, say, who’s arguably the most readable and accessible renowned literary poet of the past century (I’m excluding songwriters here), writes in that compressed way. In high school I had a friend who said that the reason Dickens went on and on is that he was paid by the word; it often seems that modern poets are paid by inverse proportion to the number of words they use.

So, I like Kirsch’s story: it gives me an explanation as to why modern poetry is so hard to read. Poets are always trying to capture the experience of transcendence, and one way to get there is to do something new and unexpected. Similarly with music.

With poetry as with music, sometimes innovation works. The Rite of Spring is new-sounding and, compared to some earlier music, hard to follow, but it sounds good in its own right. Some other modern music, though, just sounds . . . modern. I think there’s a lot of pressure on composers nowadays (actually, for the past hundred years or so) to either sound poppy or to sound innovative, “poetic” in the sense of conveying lots of information with very few tunes.

Prose writing is different, somehow. A novel can be new and still be readable and give that wonderful immersive experience that we associate with the best fiction. Movies and theater too. Although I will say that the non-revival musicals I’ve seen in the past several years have mostly been forgettable, musically speaking. Sondheim they ain’t. So maybe that’s harder.

Anyway, back to literature. Some prose is so innovative and experimental that it’s hard to follow, but mostly I’m happy with new books of prose fiction. Poetry is another story. Arguably this is because poetry is aiming for that elusive “experience of transcendence.”

Maybe there’s something similar going on with science fiction, a genre which seems progressive or sequential, unlike most other literature, and which is famously always trying to tap that “sense of wonder,” which seems to have some connection to the transcendence offered by poetry. What I mean is that with science-fiction there’s some expectation of novelty in plot and theme, and new writers in the field have seemed very aware of what’s come before. The result is that new science fiction is always leaving the comfort zone of readers, in a way that new non-sf literature does not necessarily do.

In any case, thanks, Adam Kirsch, for your insight.

P.S. This discussion reminds me of financial fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried’s justly mocked argument that William Shakespeare couldn’t be the goat of literature because, statistically speaking, there are so many more writers today than there were around 1600. A key flaw in Fried’s argument (if you can call it that) is that Shakespeare’s not just a good writer, he was also an innovator. It’s harder to be an innovator now.