Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

"Poetry" by Michael Collins is a meditation on the role and impact of poetry in human life, framed through a reflection on the life and work of Ezra Pound. The poem is a query, an examination, and a partial defense of the art form. It questions the power of poetry to cohere the disparate elements of life into a meaningful whole, and wonders if it could potentially serve as a moral guidepost, given that even accomplished poets like Pound can fall victim to the seductive ideologies like fascism.

Collins begins by invoking Pound's famous phrase "make it cohere," from his longer work, "The Cantos," and questions his own position to attempt something that even Pound failed at. "Who am I, small-voiced, half-blind, to interfere / with what people like to do to each other?" The lines are imbued with a sense of humility, setting the stage for the exploration of poetry's limitations.

The poem then pivots to explore the "lunatic aggressions" of human behavior, touching on the limitations of poetry to influence or change this. The reference to "Götterdämmerung's cork" evokes the tragic and destructive twilight of the gods, questioning if poetry can do anything more than offer "part-time transcendence." By highlighting that Pound, a master of language and literature, "famously fell for Mussolini," Collins questions the extent to which the mastery of an art form can guide moral or ethical behavior. The juxtaposition of Pound's "discipleship to Dante and Sextus Propertius" with his political choices forces us to question whether poetry can lead to moral righteousness, thus echoing Plato's critique of poetry as leading to "dime-a-dozen passions."

However, the final part of the poem offers a kind of rebuttal to this skepticism. Collins describes a woman on the street as embodying the sheer power of presence, likening her to a poem. Her appearance arrests men in their tracks, pulling them "out of time, stopped like clocks." In this fleeting moment, poetry, embodied in this woman, has the power to change perception and to shift the focus of the everyday. It offers not a moral compass, but a momentary "impetus to the herd."

Michael Collins' "Poetry" is an insightful dialogue with and about the role of the art form. It ponders the weighty questions of what poetry can achieve, whether it can serve as a moral or social guide, and how it fits into the messy complexity of human life. The poem does not provide definitive answers but instead lingers in the questions, embracing the complexities that come with attempting to make life "cohere." In doing so, it becomes an emblematic example of the very art form it seeks to understand.

POEM TEXT:

If Ezra Pound couldn't make it cohere
who am I, small-voiced, half-blind, to interfere
with what people like to do to each other?

Why try to make sense of lunatic aggressions,
knives in the sweetest backs, corkscrew passions
in Götterdämmerung's cork, and poetry that no matter

How many knots in feeling it loosens, teaches nothing
but part-time transcendence, or godlike phrases any worldling
can mouth? Ezra famously fell for Mussolini

despite discipleship to Dante and Sextus Propertius
and others who are sacred to love.
Was Plato right, saying poetry leads us

into unguardianlike, dime-a-dozen passions that can
grind Achilles in the dust? But Plato, some say, was a bit
of a fascist himself, eager to make mankind fit

procrustean forms. That woman on the street
in her high heeled slippers, a tattooed dragon
curled round her ankle, a lotus pattern blossoming on

her shimmering dress, the top like a rhyme against her breasts,
her large eyes fixed far off on some complex concern-
all the men she passes feel their leaping minds caught,

pulled out of time, stopped like clocks: She could set
them to any hour she chooses with a single word.
That's what poetry can do: give its passing impetus to the herd.

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