"The Poetry Circus" by Stanton A. Coblentz (Hawthorn Books, 1967)

This is "a frontal attack on the sloppiness, pretence, and just plain sensationalism that prevails in much of contemporary poetry". The blurb says that he's "the first to say what many think: that the Emperor of Modern Poetry is wearing no clothes ... He takes some well-known modern poems and runs the lines together into prose to show how dull they really are; ... He inverts the line order of other poems to show that even that doesn't seem to change the effect". It's an empirical approach that appeals to me.

His views of what poetry should aim for include

• to comfort the lonely
• to see beyond; to hint at hidden strangeness and splendour
• to celebrate the beautiful

Chapters include "How to Write a Modern Poem", "Strutters, Swaggerers, and Gesticulators", "Clarity Is No Crime", "Critics under a Cloud", and "Must We End in the Wasteland?"

He shows passages laid out as verse and passages laid out as prose, asking us to guess which appeared in poetry books. The texts are by Auden, Jack London, Encyclopedia Britannica, Jeffers, etc. For example, consider

This rise of capitalism parallels the advance of romanticism And the individual is dominant until the close of the nineteenth century. In our own time, mass practices have sought to submerge the personality By ignoring it, which has caused it to branch out in all directions

and

As the nineteenth centry advanced and as the anti-Jacobin spirit receded, Humanitarianism invaded one province of life after another, Softening the rude and often brutal temper of the past, And fostering instead a cheerful benevolence of heart sometimes running to sentimentality

The first is the start of a John Ashbery poem from the TLS. The second is from a history book by G.M Trevelyan. Yes, I know about found poetry, but all the same, the Ashbery poem doesn't impress me.

He gives examples of how a straight piece of prose might be poetised - made more sophisticated until it's unintelligible. He rewrites Tennyson in the modern style. To see how poetizing has evolved look at "Moves in contemporary poetry" which has examples of "Correcting a cliche", "Definition or description by negation", etc.

He says what he thinks good poetry should be, and what modern poetry aspires to

• In place of the mellifluous lines of Shelley, Keats and Poe, we have work that is deliberately raucous and consciously shocking ... we have the apotheosis of triviality
• one of the prime modern assumptions or dogmas: Poetry should be novel, and never hackneyed or trite ... They forget that a poem may have a good overall effect even when it contains phrases frequently used.
• Poetry has been prayer and beauty, wonder and illumination; but above all this and beyond all this it has been the evocation of things not seen or known, the clutching at lights and meanings beyond the doors of the senses. This, and not the technique that has given it effect, has principally set poetry off from prose.
• While man naturally turn to prose to express the things of every day, poetry has hisorically been concerned more with vital experience - with man's inner life, his rousing adventures, his dreams, his fantasies, his secret tumults and aspirations, his clutches at meanings and goals denied to the plodder in the street
• Beauty has been proscribed, along with other stuffy ancient qualities, such as goodness and truth, honor and love
• What do [modernists] say to comfort the grieved, soothe the weary, guide the doubting, exalt the seeker, or shed an illumination as man pursues his blundering way amid life's shoals and fogs?
• there are areas in which, by the consensus of mankind, there has been little or no past disagreement. Thus it has been acknowledged, with no dissent that I have ever heard, that lilies and sunsets and rainbows and foam-splashed ledges are by their very nature beautiful
• the modern objective method [] results in no responsive throb in the reader, no warmth of insight or of fellow feeling
• Modern poets' realism ... often has little relation to reality ... it overstresses exceptional phases of life, until the abnormal and the aberrant appear typical
• imaginative depth, allusions, suggestions, figures, and pictures [] have characterized the poetic art in all ages and lands before our own

He thinks that anybody with a "sensitive ear attuned to the shades and modulations of sound" will be able to hear what's wrong with modern poetry.

He provides many examples of right and wrong poetry. Names are named. Ezra Pound gets a clobbering, but he's not the only one.

• Insanity? Or mere tomfoolery? The charitable reader may prefer to call it the latter. Yet, tomfoolery or not, splutterings of this sort [Xaipe by E.E. Cummings] have been greeted with widespread critical applause
• in virtually all the offerings of Miss [Marianne] Moore, the poetry is difficult if not impossible to discover
• I confess that I have been unable to discover what this [quote from "Egghead" by Ted Hughes] means, or to divine its relationship to poetry. All that I can see is an awkward effort to strike a pose.
• Dylan Thomas, has provided some work so strained, clumsy, and turgid that the name poetry can be applied to it only as an undeserved courtesy
• He quotes from Eliot and Wallace Stevens and says "Try to recite any of these selections, try to make it trip from your tongue, try to put it to music, try to memorize it, and you will realise how far it departs from all standards that poets in the past have set for themselves. The best that can be said for these passages is that they have about the flow of an ice jam"
• With its clogging heavy feet and its excess of consonants, this [poetry by Hopkins] moves along with about the ease of rusty wheels on a rocky road
• it is evident that [Edith Sitwell] set out to write a poem of the emotions without having the emotional equipment of poetry. It should surprise no one if the results verge upon the ridiculous
• The last 8 lines of "The Waste Land" are "mere affected drivel, mere playacting unrelated to poetry, obscure gibberish meant to impress but not to communicate"

He writes "the poet has not been changed by the fluctuations in society. Nor has the nature of poetry been altered". The poet's "function has been to make life melodious, to probe beneath its surface to its hidden strangeness and splendour, to unbare veiled beauty, and to disclose truths otherwise unrevealed." I think the nature of poetry has changed. After all, the nature of other arts has. In some West European cultures, Art glorified god and represented stories from the Bible and Greek Myths. Then there was Bosch, the Dutch school, the rediscovery of primitive art. And I'm not as sure as he seems to be about the status of poets. To me, poets have a status in society that minstrels and court jesters had in court - entertaining, maybe intellectually stimulating. Who has ever thought of going to poets for insights into society or the human condition? People like Heaney were respected quite widely, but the poetry world I see is fragmented - poets in niches and readers in niches.

He seems to think that the visible, vaunted poetry world is monolithic, that the avant-garde is the new orthodoxy. Maybe it was in his day, in the USA. He writes that "most current periodicals and anthologies and individual books of verse, and likewise the awards of prize committees, give you no idea at all of the existence of much of the best modern poetry, if indeed they introduce you to any poetry whatever". He provides anecdotes about how people he's known have tried to be trendy, changing their style to suit the market.

He has doubts about critics and reviewers. He mentions Ern Malley (I hadn't realised that one of the hoaxers ended up being a literature professor), and other examples where critics were fooled or cowardly. He gives extracts from reviews and essays. When critics say that lines indicate a "superficially relaxed but subtly masterful technique" what do they mean? He writes that "New Bearings in English Poetry" (F.R. Leavis) "is marked by such intellectual snobbishness, such presumptions and such condescension that it would not be worth mentioning did it not perfectly illustrate a type". Anthologies (edited by the trendy new poets) don't represent the range of poetry being written. He gives long lists of poets (including the UK's Eva Dobell, unknown to me) who have been unjustly omitted from all the major anthologies he could find.

In a chapter called "Opportunities the moderns miss" he lists some areas that the poets could explore instead of obsessing about "the trivial, the eccentric, and the repulsive". He doesn't think that poetry can be written about everything but "In no previous era have the world's panoramas expanded so startlingly or provided such fresh opportunities", he writes, suggesting areas such as Science, World Wars, decolonialism, mass migration, Urbanisation and related social problems, providing examples of neglected poets who have successfully tackled those topics - Ficke succeeds while the more famous Wendell Berry fails.

He's not against change. He thinks that no "single technical device apart from a regular rhythm is indispensable for the poet". But there are limits. He thinks the use of profanity and "gutter filth" is an abuse of freedom. He writes "Poetry, we are told, should express itself in the forms and in the idiom of our era; its garb should be adapted to our era; it should reflect the agitation, the nervousness, the conflict, the confusion of today. This, although it has been accepted as almost axiomatic, is as perfect a non sequitor as you could find". He thinks that this "delusion revolves about the idea that the apparel is all-important, that the forms are what count most." I struggled to follow his argument until he showed in an example what he means - that e.g. to describe a confused state one needn't write confusing text. He thinks that modern poets don't absorb tradition. They start again, return to the primitive, wanting to owe "no debt to the preceding centuries". He points out that though there are similar trends in Art and Music, there's still a respect for Rembrandt and Mozart.

He agrees that ugliness became of interest to Victorian poets, but that was because they were surrounded by pre-industrial ugliness. Besides, they wrote about daffodils too. He criticizes the limited viewpoints of modern poets who, unlike Dante etc, aren't men of the world.

I'm surprised that he doesn't have a dig at Confessionalism. And he only covers US and UK poetry. If (say) Spanish poetry isn't so bad, what factors are different in that country?

His arguments aren't as sophisticated as Dana Gioia's. His views of what poetry should aim for include

• to comfort the lonely
• to see beyond; to hint at hidden strangeness and splendour
• to celebrate the beautiful

I find it hard to sympathise with these aims. His idea of how poems should work on the reader is limited too. The word/world interface seems transparent to him, and poems primarily mimetic. Assumptions include

• An appeal to common-sense aesthetics. Flowers are beautiful. Trash isn't. So poets should write about beautiful things to make their poems beautiful
• An assumption that poets are trying to communicate - Criticing Dylan Thomas, he writes that "surely, if Thomas had any clear perception, he would have been able to transmit it clearly - would have wanted to transmit it clearly". I think poets may be expressing what they feel, or just trying to produce text that people want to read.
• Loyalty to the traditional canon - surely centuries of poets can't be wrong - What I learn from history is that work which looks mainstream to us now (Constable's paintings for example, or Wordsworth's poems) were once considered challenging. Canon-making neglects the unpopular, and the canon changes - he doesn't include Martial or Sappho. He trusts the white, male canon-makers of yore. I suspect there have been more poetry experts since 2000 than in all the years before then added together - the majority of poets haven't lived in the past; they're here now.

• he thinks that poems can't "be" (he lays into MacLeish's "Ars Poetica")
• he dismisses collage, lists and mood pieces. He wants if not narrative then at least development.

His extracts of old and new work (that he seems to present as self-evidently good and bad respectively) aren't always convincing.

When I try to formulate an aesthetic I find poems that I like which break my rules. I like poems now that I didn't used to like - which, indeed, I criticised as being shams. And yet, I think many of the examples of bad poetry he presents are bad, irrespective of whether they're considered poetry or prose. I too am prepared to dump whole categories/eras of works (Abstract Art for example).

However, that said, I think there are useful things in the book - obvious things for the most part, but it does no harm being reminded of them.

• The testing, by experiment, of layout changes is worth pursuing.
• Obfuscation, as much as blandness, needs to be challenged. Clever-sounding obfuscation, like sentimentality, is suspiciously easy to do.
• Avoidance of the trite doesn't necessarily produce good poetry.
• Cliches are ok in small quantities - they may be the clearest way to express something.
• Novelty for its own sake gets tedious.
• Too much of poetry is just portentous, leaden prose.
• Too many poets conform to fashion.

I blushed more than once while reading examples of what he described as "modern excesses", because they reminded me too much of my own. E.g.

• "you hear the cracking twigs again, squandering pleasantries."
• "My insignia have become this opened bedroom window,"