In another post, islandtime wrote:

Hazard Adams (love the name, but it sounds more like he should be wrestling grizzly bears than writing books) is a Univ. of Wash. professor whose new book is titled, "The Offense of Poetry."

From the UW bookstore site, here's a partial description of the book:

There is something offensive and scandalous about poetry, judging by the number of attacks on it and defenses of it written over the centuries. Poetry, Hazard Adams argues, exists to offend - not through its subject matter but through the challenges it presents to the prevailing view of what language is for. Poetry's main cultural value is its offensiveness; it should be defended as offensive.

There has certainly been a lot of discussion at PFray over the past several years about how to define poetry. Is this its definition? (If we judge poetry with an offense-o-meter, perhaps Pinsky's picks have been perfect.)

Nope. Just kidding there.

I remember once I saw a young boy stick his mom's car key in an electrical outlet. I was too far away to be able to stop him, and all I can say is, thank goodness for alternating current. Anyway, I like to think that when I read a really good poem, when the language blows me away, when the thought expressed is novel and pleasing, when the poet demonstrates an artistry hitherto unparalleled, that the same little shock runs through me, complete with a shower of sparks and a black scorch mark left on the wall like a permanent tattoo.

If that's what Adams means by offensive, I'll agree with his theory.

I seriously doubt that Prof. Adams (who is probably tenured -- only such a one could write something like this book seems to be) meant anything so relatively innocent. He does not seem to be dealing with things that are "novel and pleasing" and that cause a thrill thereby. He (if we can take the book's blurb at face value) is a revolutionary at heart -- he thinks poetry is meant to shock, not to please.

I confess I'm astonished that anyone could be "offended" or "scandalized" by poetry as such, or feel that it needed defense for that matter. What is, and is valid, does not need defense (as Mr. Spock put it in the Star Trek novel Spock's World).

What interests me is Adams' claim -- which, again I confess, is an inane red herring in my opinion -- that poetry "exists to offend - not through its subject matter but through the challenges it presents to the prevailing view of what language is for. Poetry's main cultural value is its offensiveness; it should be defended as offensive."

There are any number of cultures past and present (for example, the whole Ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean world) that would wonder (rightly so) what tree Adams had just fallen out of. (Maybe it's Linda Pastan's oak tree.) Far from taking offense at poetry, or deeming it a challenge to the prevailing view of what language is for (whether for good or evil), most cultures I know about from primitive times forward have welcomed, encouraged and even embraced the "heightened speech" that is poetry (and even more given that in antiquity, poetry was not separate from song).

In fact, for millennia people have considered poets and poetry as being divinely inspired, and therefore worthy of respect -- not offensive to their views of what language is for. (If anything, they might have gotten upset at the content. A lot of Hebrew poet-composers lost their lives that way -- they were called prophets back then.) But then, most people have had the common sense to realize what poetic language is really for: to communicate in a way that prosaic language cannot. It seems only the intellectually vain of classical and post-classical times have ever challenged poetry qua poetry, or thought that its cultural value lies in its ability to offend on the purely linguistic level.

A far more pertinent matter is expressed by this syllogism, and one can go back at least as far as Confucius if one wants to deal with it as a matter of philosophical history:

P: Fine art (music, poetry, painting, etc.) is the expression of the attitudes, emotions and desires of man.
P: Some attitudes, emotions and desires of man are not good for man to express.
C: Some fine art is not good for man to express.

This syllogism deals with what one says and how one says it in fine art -- the two are inseparable, even though either factor in a given work might be good and the other bad. In other words, fine art has ethos (moral force - the ability to change man for the better or the worse), and no branch more so than the melopoesis that is the sung poetry of high culture.

Poetry (Adams' apparent detachment from historical and cultural reality notwithstanding) is not meant to shock -- it's meant to edify. That doesn't mean that all poetry has to be "cheerful". It does mean that there's a whole gamut of content and form that expresses right attitudes, emotions and desires. The only question then is determining what those right attitudes, emotions and desires are -- and that's where the real arguments over poetry (and all fine art with it) have come in over the centuries. This is a metaphysical question, and humans are notoriously ill-equipped to answer such questions by themselves (while being just as notoriously confident that they can).

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