This is not to make an idol of poetry. As the literary historian David
Bromwich has noted, "We have to think of the poet as nothing more
special than a representative of a community of speech, who some-
times recovers a knowledge others repress in order to live. They forget
and he [sic] sometimes remembers with a shock, how far we are at
once servants and masters of language." There is no idol here and the
complaints about poetry are very understandable in the light of the
"shock" Bromwich mentions. Poetry has been held to be arcane, im-
moral, impractical, at once coy and overbearing. What does the poem
mean? Why doesn't the poet just say it and get it over with? Why all
the breathy mincing and feinting? As a department head once re-
marked to a then 1st-year teacher of our acquaintance, "Isn't it a bit
early in the year to be getting to poetry? It's only November." Thank
goodness for prose and grammar exercises.

"Servants and masters of language," "atomic words," "release in lan-
guage": these are different takes on the same theme. Poetry is the art of
language and that is the glorious difficulty of it. To belittle our fears
about poetry either by making it cozier and more plainspoken or by ele-
vating it to an unattainable height is no answer. Even at its most expan-
sive Whitmanesque moments, poetry remains an art of essences and
essences are unnerving. Poetry is respectably referential--it talks
about the Boston Red Sox and Route 128--but it also exists unto itself
and it cares only for its own perfection--the consort of sounds, rhythm,
words, form, pauses. Poetry is a very demanding art as the poet is deal-
ing at once with words that exist meaningfully in dictionaries and con-
versations and newspaper articles and ads and with words as pure,
dumb, vocal sounds. Pigment is pigment, musical notes are musical
notes, but the words in poems are two-faced, looking both toward the
everyday world and that which is art and exists on its own terms.

It is here that teaching typically has failed poetry. The mention of
"art" brings to mind, on the one hand, a welter of rules about stanzas
and pentameters and, on the other hand, the bogey of subjectivity.
The teacher who is bound by rules may lose the spirit of the enter-
prise; the teacher who goes in fear of subjectivity may scant the tex-
ture of art for mind reading ("Who knows what the poet meant?") or
retreat to multiple-choice test objectivity ("What sort of sonnet is
this?"). The teacher who revels in poetry's subjectivity may have

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