If you'd walked past my Literary Theory class at the right time today, you might have heard me reading aloud stanzas from James Whitcomb Riley's dreadful poem "The Happy Little Cripple," or William McGonagall's tone-deaf take on "The Tay Bridge Disaster," or midwestern poet Lillian E. Curtis's ode to "The Potato," which begins thus:
What on this wide earth,
That is made, or does by nature grow,
Is more homely, yet more beautiful,
Than the useful Potato?
What would this world full of people do,
Rich and poor, high and low,
Were it not for this little-thought-of
But very necessary Potato?
Curtis claims that the homely potato improves on acquaintance, but the poem, sadly, does not.
Why read bad poetry? We've been reading Hume on taste and Burke on the sublime and Schiller on the power of fine art to develop character, and I wanted students to get some practice in putting their principles to work. What makes great poetry great? To tackle the question, I decided we needed to experience some not-so-great poetry by poets who once enjoyed a healthy readership.
And so I read them some sentimental drivel, and then we looked at a short poem by Wordsworth ("I Travelled among Unknown Men") alongside James McIntyre's "Ode on the Mammoth Cheese", that which there is no poem more cheesy. We quickly agreed that the Wordsworth poem was "better," but then it took quite a while to pin down the principles informing our judgment. If there are universal principles determining the worth of a poem, why can't we articulate them? Are these principles purely personal, or are they constructed anew by each community of readers? Or is the whole idea of universal principles bogus?
It was a lively discussion, full of laughter and passion and philosophical concepts, but the cheese poem made me hungry, not to mention the paean to the potato. Put those two poems together and you'll have a feast you won't soon forget.
2 comments:
Thanks for the links! "The Happy Little Cripple" was new to me, and is easily one of the worst poems I have ever read.
Seeing a poem with so much dialect reminded me of Eugene Fields' "Jest 'Fore Christmas," which I promptly went and reread. By comparison with "The Happy Little Cripple," Fields' poem (which I've never particularly liked) suddenly looks really good!
I concur with your judgment on "The Happy Little Cripple," not least because of Riley's attempt to rhyme "cryin'" with "curvature of the spine." But I'm reminded that James Whitcomb Riley was so well respected as a poet in the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries that you can find his name inscribed in marble in the Indiana State library building, where Riley's name mingles with those of great thinkers and writers of the ages: Homer, Milton, Shakespeare, and so on. It's kind of amusing to think of the writer of "The Happy Little Cripple" being immortalized in such august company.
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