Modernism and difficulty

When I tell people that I teach poetry for a living, it is rarely long before someone says, half-guiltily and half-defiantly, ‘I don't understand poetry.’ If pressed, they will admit that they don't have a problem with nursery rhymes or Wordsworth's ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, but it's modern poetry that's so difficult. If I decide to ruin the chances of making a lasting friendship and ask what's wrong with difficult poetry, the language of discrimination swiftly follows. Modern poetry is ‘inaccessible’, as if it put its would-be reader in a wheelchair and unfairly denied her access up the steps of culture. It is ‘exclusive’, as if poetry were a universal right which the poets were deliberately keeping away from entitled citizens. And it is ‘elitist’, a poetry deliberately designed to keep ordinary people from gaining cultural authority. As well as telling me just how deeply embedded Schiller's idea that art should be democratic is, these responses viscerally connect difficulty with the feeling of being shut out.

Yet the poems which first created this alienation were meant to make reading it an absorbing experience. Stevens's dizzying switches between literal and metaphoric, or the floating syntax of The Cantos, or the hypnotising stop--start chatter of Gertrude Stein are all ways to immerse the reader's attention, and draw the reader's mind into its whole way of thinking. When we talk about difficulty, then, the paradox is that the language which makes poems difficult is both inviting and off-putting. It immerses you in a flow of words and signs, but if they can't begin to connect in your mind, the stream becomes an ice sheet which leaves you scrambling for a foothold. Presenting a welter of unresolvable points of view can make the poem seem absolutely indifferent to what its reader thinks, and yet it can also clear a space within the reader's mind for the poem to work in an unexpected and highly personal manner. Understanding why modernist poetry is difficult is understanding how difficulty can be inclusive and exclusive at the same time.