No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by
poets: I, too, dislike it, wrote Marianne Moore. Many more people agree
they hate poetry, Ben Lerner writes, than can agree what poetry is. I,
too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not
experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of
poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore.
In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as
the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's
greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city
had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young)
and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close
readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others.
Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of
every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the
experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The
Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and
entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being
impossible.
