Poetry and the Politics of Self-Expression

- William Butler Yeats

Some years ago, a mentor of mine put forth the argument: "Would you try to build a cabinet when you did not possess even the rudimentary woodworking skills or knowledge of the tools necessary to build the cabinet? Of course not, then why do so many people think they can write poetry without an iota of preparation?"

Still, many do. But then, we live in an age of postmodern malaise where pop vocalists pose as opera singers, art museums exhibit installations the cleaning staff mistakes for trash and obscenity-riddled doggerel, imposed over rhythm tracks, is thought to be music, or at the very least, insightful social commentary. So why should poetry be held to any standard – other than the "validation" of its author and his inalienable right to self-expression?

Numerous surveys, declining SAT scores, and classroom anecdotes have established that many (and their numbers are growing) young Americans can barely read, cannot spell or do arithmetic, and know next to nothing of their own history; but they do not let mere ignorance get in the way of self-expression. And this popular wave of "self-expression," more often than not, takes the form of poetry. This is not to say that we’ve become a nation of Whitmans, Dickensons, and Frosts. Far from it, it is far more likely to fall into what a friend of mine refers to as "solipsistic prose arranged in random line breaks."

Many, if not most, teenagers write poetry. Most of it is bad. Fortunately, this poetry, like many communicable childhood diseases such as mumps, chickenpox and measles afflicts its author for a short duration and then they are forever immune to the pathogen. Of course, these "poems" are sincere, but as Oscar Wilde advised us, "all bad poetry is sincere. These "journals" – notebooks filled with angst, self-loathing, raging egotism and cryptic marginalia are then shut forever, packed away in mom and dad’s attic, forgotten, and if there is any justice in the universe, eventually incinerated.

Occasionally, a well-meaning English teacher in a misguided attempt to promote "self-esteem" (of which self-expression is an ancillary component) encourages the young poets to explore their feelings and present these exercises in therapeutic catharsis in some sort of school-sponsored publication. There seems to be little harm done on the surface, but in the ego-centered world of the young and semi-literate, it only creates the illusion that there might be a talent denied – cruelly suppressed by the capricious, unfeeling (and profoundly unjust) critical standards of the literary establishment.

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