The most striking thing about contemporary poetry is that no one seems quite satisfied with it. Non-poets, who generally don’t read poetry, are only a little less enthusiastic than poets, who do. Indeed, hardly a year has gone by over the past quarter century without a poet or critic publishing an essay bemoaning the state of American poetry—from Dana Gioia’s “Can Poetry Matter?,” which appeared in this magazine in 1991, to Mark Edmundson’s 2013 lament, “Poetry Slam: Or, the Decline of American Verse.” And the sentiment dates back further. When Marianne Moore wrote a poem titled “Poetry,” she began with the words “I, too, dislike it.”
The Hatred of Poetry, an elegant new book by Ben Lerner, might sound like a contribution to this genre. (Indeed, he quotes Moore in the book’s first line.) But Lerner has not written a screed or a lament, and he offers a very original diagnosis of what is wrong with the relationship between poets and their audience. To understand the background of Lerner’s argument, it is helpful to look back at the early 19th century, when something strange happened to the way poets think about poetry.