A Fumbling Reverence for Poetry

15 Mar, 2026

I’ve begun to suspect that I enjoy reading talk about poetry more than I enjoy reading poetry itself. For one thing, the latter takes the pressure off my having to figure out what’s going on, or why a particular poem or poet is supposedly so stellar. There are exceptions, of course, to that talk about; Helen Vendler drives me up the wall, as do most critics who go line by line to inform you about meter and word placement and so forth, as if a poet’s mastery of something that feels like proving an equation would make clear why the words he’s put together are obviously mind-blowing, much less enjoyable.

But wait: isn’t it precisely that sort of irritating explication that poetry criticism is supposed to produce? Maybe so—but the variety that gets me going is best expressed by Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, which I just finished. This is how I like my talk about poetry: not as the subjection of the reader to a catechism, but as an invitation into a conversation with someone who loves the subject so much they can’t not share their enthusiasm.

Protagonist Paul Chowder, a poet who’s had a few pieces published here and there, is struggling to write an introduction to an anthology that deals with his object of devotion, rhymed poetry. Wrangling with fears, insecurities, envy, lack of financial resources, refusal to return to teaching, and the girl he’s trying to win back, in apparently avoiding the task at hand, he gives us the best intro a reader could hope for: an unashamed defense of the type of poetry he loves, one that does away with the need to be (too) technical, and also faces up to the fact that free verse is not the killjoy he’d initially asserted it to be. The feelings and possibilities brought on by a poem’s musicality are the thing—and Chowder even writes out the notation of the tunes he’s created to accompany the lines, finally finding himself singing one of these compositions to a roomful of Real Poets and Critics.

He also has to ask whether certain “stupendous poems” really were “stupendous? Or were they only good? Or were they in fact not good at all? I’m not sure.” But in its self-containment and (probable) disconnection from any other text, a poem offers a beginning, “And that’s what poetry gives me. Many many beginnings. That feeling of setting forth.” His criticism isn’t meant to demonstrate his knowledge of proper terminology, or to enforce the correct identification and classification of technique or form. Chowder knows his dactyls and anapests, trochees and spondees, “But those words are bits of twisted dead scholarship,” he says, “and you should forget about them immediately.” He thinks instead in terms of triplets and strolling, toe-tapping and dancing; of the implied, loneliness-constraining community of people who enjoy the same books; of holding on to what sustains you, “Regardless of what will or will not perish,” what’s in style or acceptable or successful or otherwise.¹

Chowder’s approach to—which amounts to his sustaining love of—poetry, and to rhyme in particular, seems representative of the way philosopher Paul Woodruff talked about reverence, which involves “stand[ing] in awe of something…. that reminds us of human limitations,” and hence that “satisfies at least one of the following conditions: it cannot be changed or controlled by human means, is not fully understood by human experts, was not created by human beings, and is transcendent.”² You’d think at first, given Woodruff’s qualifications, that this couldn’t be the case. After all poetry, and the very language that enables it, is a human creation able to be shaped, even controlled to some degree, by human means. Supplications to the muse to the contrary, it’s also not anything that could be called transcendent. But note, an object of reverence only has to satisfy one of the conditions Woodruff mentions—and I’ll wager that condition is in poetry’s not being fully understood by human experts, confident assertions by Vendler or William Empson or the That Guy in every writing workshop who’ll explain why your interpretation is wrong to the contrary. Poetry definitely reminds quite a few of us—even poets like Chowder—of our own limitations; instead of amazement at what a human being can create, we’re left with the sense that our brains are too dull to understand what we’re reading. And those critics who seem to believe they can turn engagement with poetry into an exercise of logic or mathematical demonstration: do they really grasp why such things should move us, why one person might fall for Erza Pound, while another fails to be convinced by his obscure grumblings, even if they do get all his references? Poetic-critical arguments can’t help being, in the end, arguments for taste—about which we know there’s finally no possible argument to be made.

We could go back, too, to that condition of transcendence. Woodruff thinks of it as signaling something “completely independent of the world as we experience it, otherworldly.”³ So language itself, which is something created and shaped by humans, doesn’t qualify here. On the other hand, language writ large—not the particular one you or anyone else speaks or reads or signs, but the general phenomenon itself—is greater than any of us could ever grasp or master. As Jacques Lacan knew, it was there before we were born, and had started shaping us before we even understood what it was: “Symbols,” he said, “envelop the life of man with a network so total that they join together those who are going to engender him ‘by bone and flesh’ before he comes into the world; so total that they bring to his birth…. the words that will make him faithful or renegade, the law of the acts that will follow him right to the very place where he is not yet and beyond his very death.”⁴ Chowder’s devotion to poetry, even with the confusion and frustration it brings, displays, I think, reverence for the ways in which language can work in spite of ourselves to pull us together; to share the things bigger than words that still demand expression; to keep us sane without demanding we cease fumbling about, in a world that values very little that’s intangible or impractical, imperfect or even (maybe especially) transcendent.

In other words, check out the book, even if poetry’s not your thing. You’ll at least understand that it, and its sincere devotees and creators, are often the same sorts of searching, fallible, lovable screw-ups that the rest of us are. It’s a sort of comfort that opens the door to beginnings, many many beginnings.

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