Peter Lattu

Name Dropping with Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia’s book Break Blow Burn about forty-three of the greatest poems in the English language certainly elicits questions about her choice. I am not going to dip into the long past history of poetry from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century. Even there, one wonders about her omissions and balance. I am going to look exclusively at the moderns.

Modern poetry starts with Walt Whitman and Paglia includes Whitman. That’s a good choice. The great-grandfather of contemporary poetry should be in a collection of the greatest.

Paglia, a Dickinson scholar, has chosen three of Emily Dickinson’s poems to round out the nineteenth century. Three Dickinsons seem to be too many. She could have chosen something by Alfred Lord Tennyson, A.E. Housman, or Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Then we turn to the early twentieth century. She picked two poems each by Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and William Butler Yeats and three poems by Theodore Roethke. Why so much by so few? Certainly one could choose a Robert Frost or two: “Mending Wall”; “The Road Not Taken”; or “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”. Perhaps one could include Sandberg’s “Fog” or Masefield’s “Sea Fever”. Why no T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound? Maybe choose a poem by Robinson Jeffers, W. H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, or Langston Hughes. Surely there was better verse written in the early twentieth century than some of her choices.

Paglia’s selections among contemporary poets raise question. There is nothing by Billy Collins, Mary Oliver, Grace Paley, Robert Haas… Maryland poet Linda Pastan merits inclusion. Among poems by African-American writers, Nikki Giovanni’s “Knoxville, Tennessee” and Rita Dove’s “Ripont” would be far better choices than the strident “Wanda Why Aren’t You Dead” by Wanda Coleman.

She also picks one song as a poem, “Woodstock” by Joni Mitchell. That opens a door to the wide range of outstanding songwriters. One could just as easily choose songs by Jim Morrison, Carole King, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Brian Wilson, The Beatles, or Paul Simon, among many possibilities.

Paglia is bold to try to select the best poems in English. Her choices in modern poetry are suspect, but then wouldn’t any choices be second-guessed? We are all Monday morning quarterbacks. Her book promotes thought and discussion. That is good.

{Written by Peter Lattu}