Matthew Carey Salyer : part five

Why is poetry important? 

The question’s a bit of a Rorschach test. Consider how Percy Bysshe Shelley might answer it: “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.” What grand, aphoristic nonsense. Shelley’s father, Sir Timothy, was an MP for Horsham – and later Shoreham – who sent him to Eton and Oxford. We should not be surprised to see Sir Timothy’s son assuming a close correlation between imaginative speech and his right to legislate. Great privilege often assumes a promethean ethos, then as now. Compare this to John Clare: “I am – yet what I am none cares or knows.” There is something far more radical and more democratic in Clare’s line than in all of Shelley’s poetics. The speaker of “I Am!” – the self-described “self-consumer of my woes” – is not useful to others but neither can he be used or made useless to his own poetic act. “And yet I am,” Clare reflects, “and live.” So much of the commercial and political – and, yes, literary – language that we encounter on any given day, oriented to what Orwell called “the defense of the indefensible,” legislates us without our acknowledgement. We use it to self-legislate and legislate others without mutual recognition. A poem can be remarkable because it confronts us with the real choice of submission to language. In Clare’s case, for example, we grant brief precedence to a voice about which “none cares or knows,” but that nonetheless “is.” Otherwise, we cannot read Clare. In other words, reading frees us, it dignifies us as something other than consumers, when we decide to accept what for lack of a better word is the poem’s alternative “consciousness.” I have been thinking about this in terms of my own work. Some reviewers find it pugilistic or “inaccessible.” I am not sure what to make of this. The function of the lyric poet is to build a proper house for the speaker, not the reader. In that context, I assume the risk of determining the right relationship between the occasion of the poem and the world that occasioned it, but I would not presume to know anything about something as gnomic as “the reader.” Any actual reader is a guest in the speaker’s house. Wipe your feet at the door. Milk and two sugars, ta.