Six Necessary Books on the Art of Poetry

This is a list of books that could help poets like myself.

“Strange things happening to poetry in the 21st century.” Those were the words a poet wrote on my manuscript four years ago. I had reached out to him to read this thing I considered a manuscript; he read my work and responded generously. The words return to me often, because strange, strange things are happening to poetry today.

I had come up with much of the writing in this post before I saw the list from The Atlantic, “The Best American Poetry of the 21st Century (So Far).” Those who came up with the list said they consulted with some 450 people (“publishers, editors, and informed readers from a variety of fields”) and wanted “work that felt consequential.”

That list is not much good. I should expect no better, but the thing is sad. Three of the finest American poets working today (each of whom has published at least two books in this century) are not on it. Again, I should not be surprised that Atsuro Riley—perhaps the most lyrically inventive American poet alive—and Ishion Hutchinson and Christian Wiman (widely regarded as the greatest living American poet) are not represented. Still. The so-called “informed readers” thought more highly of Crush and Whereas and of Citizen (a book stunning in its mediocrity, I have read few things that are so lackluster) than they did of Heard-Hoard or House of Lords and Commons or of Every Riven Thing?

Just now, I was reading “Poetry In the Age of Tin” (the introductory essay to William Logan’s fourth book of criticism), an essay I have read before but return to when I feel the need to hear another person say it: “Perhaps there is a place for disposable poetry; but let’s not fool ourselves that it’s better than it is, simply because the times are what they are.” The kind of times that these are: I don’t need to go beyond that Atlantic list to know.

The danger in all these is that younger poets have a hard time knowing how to walk. If you keep consuming the poetry of the age (of course, there are a few good ones, I have mentioned some of them in this post) and listening to the advice from those same poets and reading their so-called “craft books,” you will be doing yourself “a great disservice.”

Below, I have listed six books that you should check out if you want to better your craft as a poet. These are not “craft books”: craft books on poetry are of very little worth. Great poets do not write craft books, the term is a ploy. Serious poets write criticism, and you learn to write poetry by reading great poems and listening to poets talk about poetry.

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1. The Sacred Wood: G. K. Chesterton had a phrase—“the democracy of the dead.” What T. S. Eliot did in his first book of critical essays was to provide an estimate of the weight of their vote (that is, the vote of the dead). Those centuries-dead white male poets matter, they matter to any poet who would find his footing in the language: this is partly what Eliot argues in his classic, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Sacred Wood is a good place to start, but the country long.

2. Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism: Randall Jarrell referred to the first half of the twentieth century (from the time when Eliot published Sacred Wood to the fifties, say) as “The Age of Criticism” (in an essay of that title). He noted that much of it was “not only bad or mediocre, it is dull.” But still it was a glorious age for the critical enterprise. Praising It New, edited by Garrick Davis and with an introduction by Bill Logan, contains the weightiest stuff from an age that was (compared to our time) bubbling gold. Essays by Jarrell, Eliot, R. P. Blackmur, Hugh Kenner, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate (etc.) are included. Each essay is a masterclass on the art of poetry. And: many of these essays are lively.

3. Last Looks, Last Books: The first book by the late Helen Vendler that I read was Poets Thinking (I recommend that, too), but I like Last Looks better. The insights in each of the six essays in this book are more profound, more intuitive and less forced (less forced into a formula), though they fit well into the larger argument of the book. I particularly like the third chapter (on Sylvia Plath’s Ariel): it could help poets in our age who are trying to imitate Plath but are not aware of the dangers that she had to wrestle with in her craft, dangers they are more liable to fall prey to. Vendler is also brilliant on Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop.

4. The English Poetic Mind: Written by Charles Williams (a theologian and a friend of C. S. Lewis), this book appeared in 1932. It is a linked study of genius in Shakespeare through John Milton and then Wordsworth, the three greatest poets in the English language (we could add T. S. Eliot as the fourth). In this comprehensive work of criticism, Williams reads poetry with poetry. It is a great work.

5. Alienated Majesty: I don’t know how I came about Geoffrey Hill’s work; I have been attempting, for days now, to backtrack and see—to no avail. It is one of the best things I have done—reading him. Alienated Majesty is the last book in his Collected Critical Writings. The title is a phrase from Ralph Waldo Emerson, but Hill impregnates or discovers in it a more robust implication than Emerson intended. In fact, Hill takes issue with the statement of Emerson’s in which the phrase appears. But with that phrase, he conducts a study on Emerson, Whitman, and Hopkins; and on F. H. Bradley and T. S. Eliot; and then on “modernist poetics.” Why should you read Hill? I know of no one who took words with more seriousness than Hill did. Read him to learn how much words mean.

6. “Sir Geoffrey Hill: The Oxford Lectures: 2010—2015”: This is not a book, it’s a series of lectures 13 hours long. From the preceding recommendation, you must have got a sense of the value I accord Hill. But let me offer a brief biographical note.

Hill passed in 2016, aged 84. For five years before his death, he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Since the 1970s, when Hill published Somewhere Is Such a Kingdom: Poems 1952—1971 (comprising his first three books), the consensus among critics (including people like Harold Bloom and Christopher Ricks) was that Hill was the greatest poet working in the English language in the second-half of the previous century.

Not only was he a great poet, Hill was a powerful critic. Here is what William Logan had to say about Hill’s first two books of criticism, “The Lords of Limit (1984) and The Enemy’s Country (1991) . . . are among the most painstaking, brilliant, and claustrophobic analyses of literature in our century, elaborate in their concern for the guilts and guiles of language and the moral recognitions of the word.” (My Italics.)

Why am I emphasizing Hill’s greatness?

The Oxford Lectures are a culmination of six decades of painstaking study into the art of what he calls “rhetoric,” they are the fruits of a mighty keen attention to poetry: 13 hours of instruction in the craft from such a man is not only essential, it is absolutely necessary for anyone who wants to make a mark writing poems. In my humble estimation, those lectures are worth three MFAs. And yet they are available on YouTube. You could start with “Monumentality and Bidding,” a very good one. 🔷

Next month, I will be teaching a poetry workshop in Lagos (physically), somewhere in Ikeja. I will be putting up a call for applications (and sponsorships) by the next week at the latest. Please look forward to that. Thank you. I trust you all are keeping well.