Politics & Culture
Punk Rock, Prufrock, and
the Words We Live By—
The Importance of Poetry
By Thomas H. Landess
If you’re a businessman you don’t have time for poetry, unless, of
course, you happen to enjoy it the way other businessmen enjoy Monday
Night Football. Certainly you don’t feel you have to read it. There’s no poetry in the Wall Street Journal or Barron’s,
unless you are one whose heart is stirred by the language of the New
York Stock Exchange, where on occasion “To be or not to
be . . .” is the drabbest kind of prose compared with “up
two points.” No, poetry has nothing to do with business and the more
important aspects of modern life.
Well, what about “popular poetry”? What about song lyrics? What about
punk rock? If in addition to being a businessman you are also a
middle-aged parent—particularly one who gave up listening to disc
jockeys in the 1950s—you’ve been reluctant to think about punk rock, much less to listen to it with any degree of seriousness.
You’ve heard it screeching and pulsating under the doors of your
teenagers’ rooms; maybe it suddenly shattered your eardrums one morning
when you turned on the automobile ignition; or you became aware of it
more gradually as you drove along with your daughter and realized that
you were about to scream because the four-speaker stereo had been
playing just below the level of conversation for the last ten minutes.
Yet the time comes when the one-eyed monster dragging itself up and down
the hallways of your house has grown so hulking and raucous that you
can’t ignore it any longer. It seems to have possessed the souls of your
once-angelic children. They walk and talk differently. They give you
surly looks at the dinner table. Your son gets a mohawk.
So one night—despite the fact that poetry is irrelevant to business—you
charge downstairs, pound on the door, and say, “O.K. I want you to tell
me what you see in this noise anyway!” After their inarticulate
explanation—punctuated by long silences and heavy breathing—you snatch
up a stack of albums, haul them off to your study, and begin to listen
to them with your best critical ear.
The result is—to say the least—disturbing. It occurs to you that the TV
evangelists who shout and wave their arms may be right about one thing.
As the gospel song says, “We need a whole lot more about Jesus, and a
lot less rock-and-roll.”
In addition to the music itself, most of which is childlike in its
simplicity, you are struck by the monotony of the lyrics, the heavily
ironic denunciations of the social order or else the shrill affirmation
of the glory and centrality of self. It’s nothing like the good,
wholesome music you used to listen to.
As best you can recall, in the songs of Irving Berlin the chief pronoun
was the second person plural. In rock-and-roll it is more often the
first-person singular; there are all sorts of songs about the necessity
to be your own kind of person, to do your own thing, celebrations of the
self and its intensely felt experience of sexual joy and political
pain. Or else there is no “I” or “you” at all but a sinister “they,” a
third-person plural which seems to be responsible for all discomfort and
inconvenience on the face of the earth, to say nothing of mere
injustice and oppression.
Realizing all this you go back downstairs and tell your children to
listen to Mozart or Scarlatti; but they answer
that punk rock is where the spirit of the age lives—curled up on a
littered floor, its head resting on a stack of empty beer cans, whining
about the oppressiveness of society. Punk rock, you are told, is
America. If Mozart and Scarlatti were just starting out these days
they’d be punk rockers. So would Byron and Shelley. So would the Prophet
Isaiah.
From Irving Berlin to Sid Vicious
You have to agree that there’s a little of each of these in the songs
you’ve listened to (Mozart and Scarlatti used some of the same notes),
but there’s something else as well, besides the incorrigible ignorance
of the young. You see evidence of a pride that sets itself against the
most basic prescriptions of Western civilization without so much as the
slightest blush or apology. You see it in the eyes of the performers as
they glare out at you from angry album covers, filled with graphic
oddities, pretentious satanist symbols, and casual obscenity. Mostly the
rock groups are pictured in performance, dressed in outright costume or
else ersatz shabby. Their names suggest their contempt for the things
that others hold in highest esteem: Crass, The Clash, Social Distortion,
The Circle Jerks, The Dead Kennedys. And more to the point: Bad
Religion, Crucifix, The Lords of the New Church.
Is it all a bad joke or are these people serious? In one sense, of
course, they couldn’t possibly be serious any more than a ten-year-old
could be seriously in love. In another sense—the more obvious sense—it’s
hard to tell. You can see the black humor in someone calling himself
“Sid Vicious,” as did one of The Sex Pistols. But when he murders his
girlfriend and then dies of an overdose, perhaps we should begin to
assume that the symbolism of these names is serious indeed.
But the only way to tell for sure is to examine the lyrics of punk rock
and try to see what it claims for itself. Here are a couple of examples,
the first from a group called The Lords of the New Church, the second
from The Clash.
The City eats its children of dust from the cradle to grave.
Drag their captives through the deep-sleeps of life.
Ghosts of dream-dwelling slaves.
The stranger scares the creatures of night.
Corpse of sluggards fall.
First you called it experiment, and then the terror called.
The subterranean escapes the light to an
empty space.
I’ll do my time prowling in the streets
behind a human face.
and
Thank God for the rain to wash the trash off the sidewalk.
Listen, here is a man who would not take it anymore,
A man who stood up against the scum.
The filth now I see clearly.
Personally I know the alley
Where Jack feeds on the birds of night. Not
even bobbies on bicycles, two by two, Can
stop the blood and feathers flying.
The more you examine these lyrics the more you realize that you’ve heard
this kind of talk before. Thirty, maybe forty years ago—in an English
class on modern poetry. The memory eludes you like—like voices dying
from a dying fall. Who was it who wrote this way, with that marvelous
discontinuity of images, the fine illogic, the ironic tonal qualities
that excited you when you were nineteen or twenty years old? There is
nothing, you suddenly remember, quite so exciting as being young and
world-weary. And thirty years ago no one spoke so persuasively to your
imagination as did T. S. Eliot in The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land.
It was T. S. Eliot who invented this kind of verse! The revelation takes
you by surprise. You’re shocked; then skeptical. You take out your
Norton Anthology, and sure enough—there it is, on page 1786: The Waste Land.
“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
“What is that noise?”
The
wind under the door.
Eliot, of course, is a classic American poet, one whose mature
commitment to traditional Christian institutions and attitudes was
central to an understanding of his overall achievement as a man of
letters. Yet it is surely from his early work and from the work of his
followers and imitators that punk rock derives much of its poetics, if
“poetics” is not too foolish a word to use here.
Waste Land of Language
Note, for example, the line, “The city eats its children of dust from
the cradle to grave.” First, there is the balancing of the genuinely
innovative phrase with the cliche. Such ironic juxtapositions were
characteristic of Eliot (see the seduction and pub scenes in The Waste Land),
and were derived, at least in part, from his early contempt for
everyday life and for the community at large, which he suggested was
either effete (as exemplified by Prufrock) or brutal (as exemplified by
Sweeney). He seemed to believe that modern society was made up of human
beings toward whom he could feel morally as well as intellectually
superior, and he mocked such people by throwing their own banal language
back in their teeth. So did Sinclair Lewis. So did Hemingway. So in
more recent times has Walker Percy.
Today it’s old hat. Yet Eliot’s use of debased slang and middle-class
cant was new to poetry in the years immediately following World War I,
and the ironic tone produced by the introduction of such language was to
affect virtually every major American poet for the next twenty-five or
thirty years. It was fresh and exciting sixty-five years ago, and it fed
the tendency of many educated people to think themselves a higher breed
than the Prufrocks and Babbitts. They adopted Eliot’s irony, and with
it they put on the mantle of skepticism as well; because you can’t use a
rhetoric for long without assuming the virtues and vices that lie
behind it. Soon several generations of college graduates were speaking
and thinking according to the example of Eliot’s voices.
The second characteristic of Eliot’s poetry which one finds in the punk
rock passages quoted above is a kind of deliberate vagueness of diction
that is maddening to a literalist and exciting to a certain kind of
poetic sensibility. The sentence “The subterranean escapes the light to
an empty space,” for example, can’t be paraphrased or even completely
explained. Indeed Eliot himself, in responding to bemused questioners at
public lectures, was perfectly willing to accept any reading that was
suggested to him.
The origins of this view of language are multiple and mysterious. But
one point stands out for purposes of our discussion: Eliot believed that
language was by definition vague and imprecise, and that the poet’s
task was not to imitate and explain the world but to stir up
associations and feelings, to deal with the subjective rather than the
objective. For him and for a whole generation to follow, the word was
one thing, the thought a second, and the object a third—and there was no
necessary connection between any two of them.
Such a theory of language might well lead one to question whether or not
experience has any concrete meaning that can be stated in words. If the
tree you think you see is not necessarily there, and if other people
don’t necessarily think they see the same tree that you do, then how can
we possibly say that the word “tree” has any meaning? (If all this
seems a little difficult to understand it’s not merely because I’m not
explaining it very well, since at least some of the difficulty lies with
the maddening subjectivity of modern philosophy.)
The third characteristic of Eliot’s poetry that is also a trait of punk
rock is the abrupt shifting of focus from one image to another without
benefit of conventional transitions. Note in the examples above how
fragmentary everything seems, as if the poem or song had been cut up
with scissors, then a few of the phrases and sentences pasted back
together in no particular order. Again Eliot’s discovery and use of such
a device tells us something about the way he wants his readers to
perceive the world of the poem. The mind of Prufrock and the observer of
The Waste Land are, by strong implication, fragmented and
incoherent. Prufrock is what we would now call a “wimp,” a man who is so
intimidated by the world around him that he can neither love nor act in
the way he wishes but is finally paralyzed by his fear of social
convention, despite the fact that he regards society as empty and
hypocritical. Likewise Tiresias (or the speaker) in The Waste Land
sees the present as a broken mosaic of the past, a meaningless collage
of unpleasant sensations which might take on renewed significance only
when rejuvenated by a vital past or the infusion of values from another
culture, one in which religion and sexuality play an important role.
Thus the world as viewed in these poems is incoherent and sordid—sordid,
in part, because it is incoherent. Eliot is suggesting that the loss of
any sort of metaphysical orthodoxy makes it impossible to find vitality
and purpose in life; yet modern man, while recognizing his predicament,
can do very little about it, except perhaps to flirt with Eastern
religions or to re-read the classics.
These three technical aspects of Eliot’s work—the ironic use of
language, the vagueness of imagery and diction, the disjointed movement
of the poem—all combine to emphasize his thematic concerns at this stage
of his career; and if you don’t draw too neat a picture you can show
that the technique and the meaning of the poem are perfectly wedded to
one another, not only in Eliot’s work but in the songs of The Clash and
The Lords of the New Church as well.
Undressing the Old Order
For an understanding of what Eliot was saying about the world in 1917 you have only to examine the following passage in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the one which tells us all we need to know about the hero’s physical appearance:
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
One of the most important things that Eliot tells us in this segment of
the poem is the way which Prufrock dresses and the manner in which the
reader is supposed to respond to this mode of dress. The description
means less and less to us as the memory of even the recent past fades,
but Eliot’s first readers would have understood that Prufrock was
following a very rigid and explicit code for dressing before the hour of
six: black morning coat, gray vest, ascot tie, striped pants, black
shoes, spats. And on the head nothing else but a bowler.
All the men wore the same thing. It was like a uniform at a military
academy, and the implications of wearing it were essentially the same:
the individual was less important than the community. Oh, you could wear
a highly personal stick pin if you wanted to, though nothing too
flashy, nothing that would set you apart radically from the other men at
the occasion, whether tea dance or music recital. It all sounds bizarre
to those of us who live in an age when shirts and slacks are as
colorful as the plumage of Australian birds.
And in contrast to the conventionally dressed Prufrock, whose
inhibitions and frustration are expressed in his conformity, you have
only to look and listen to understand how different is the world of punk
rock. Everyone is dressed according to his own private code. Everyone
is therefore in costume—bizarrely, uniquely himself in the fatigues of
Che Guevara, or tight jeans with only a vest for a top, or at times near
nakedness, and public nakedness at that.
And the same might be said of “characters” in punk rock songs, most of
whom, when they are rendered visually, are depicted in the act of sexual
intercourse. In effect they are “dressed” or “undressed” in stark
contrast to Prufrock. It might even be argued that they are the men that
Prufrock is longing to become—rebellious, self-assertive, sexually
aggressive. All ego.
The more you think about it, the more you realize that like the punk
rockers he spawned Eliot in his ironic juxtapositions, his vague
language, and his disjointed imagery was attacking civilization itself,
or at least society as he understood it in his own time. He was
suggesting in his portrait of Prufrock that the manners and conventions
of the social order—as symbolized by its clothes—were empty and
inhibiting, mere form without the vitality that human institutions must
exhibit in order to nurture the heart and the soul. The attack is a
linguistic one and has as its ultimate intent the destruction of an
older decorative language, the sort of rhetoric used by most
nineteenth-century public men and in the twentieth century only by such
splendid anachronisms as Douglas MacArthur and Winston Churchill.
That the attack was successful is evidenced by the obscene irreverence
for all things traditional that is so widespread and so much a part of
our world that it blares over our children’s radios sixteen hours a day
and leers at us from every TV and movie screen. “Get rid of those
clothes,” Eliot told a small readership in the years immediately
following World War I. “Get rid of those clothes,” say the punk rockers
in four-letter words and obscene gestures. And today all over America
and Europe people are doing just that—and by the millions.
Prufrock was stilted and diffident in his relations with women because
of the outmoded restraints of social convention; today, while punk
rockers scream the same message that Eliot spoke so quietly and archly,
we’re no longer worried about the strictures of society so much as the
spread of AIDS and herpes and a rate of illegitimate births that soars
in direct proportion to the amount of contraceptives, birth control
pamphlets, and abortions sponsored by government at every level.
And clothes today are so clearly a mockery of traditional modes of dress
that our schools and colleges are all too often a battleground on which
armies of polo players and alligators march into a kind of sartorial
Armageddon, fighting it out with rock T-shirts and black chrome-ringed
bondage pants ordered from the ads in the back of Rolling Stone.
Of course the dress is just as stylized as it ever was: one army
defends an ignorant,
nouveau-riche consumerism while the other fights for the enthronement of
garbage-man chic. Neither would wear a morning coat because, on the one
hand, they wouldn’t be able to tell its quality without an outside
label and, on the other hand, they couldn’t wear it thin enough to
affect proletarian poverty.
Selfishness, Earth Deity of Oz
To summarize, then, the language of the first half of the twentieth
century has brought us to a crisis in the second half, when the world of
punk rock and the world of middle America are more and more
indistinguishable from one another, as evidenced by the increasingly
formless way in which most Americans live their lives, their almost
immeasurable self-indulgence as revealed in statistics on alcoholism,
drug addiction, shoplifting, divorce, suicide, murder, rape.
The truth is, the society that Eliot satirized and the punk rockers are
attacking doesn’t really exist any more. It’s been done in. In recent
years the apparent triggermen have been the opinion-makers of the media:
the earnest-eyed, deadpanned news correspondents who, for the sake of a
Higher Good, have hidden or distorted opposing opinions, jerry-rigged
film clips, faked news events, made up entire histories, staged
demonstrations, and above all turned the English language into a
graduate assistant in Sociology in order to bring about a political
change with which everybody will be immediately dissatisfied; the
film-makers and TV producers who have recognized the potential for
prurience in all human communities and for money have made us believe
that lust, which was once regarded among the Seven Deadly Sins, is in
fact a great virtue among free people or at best an amusing and harmless
overflow of natural appetite; the holding companies which now own most
of the major publishing houses and as a matter of course demand that
editors seek books which will yield a high short-term profit by
appealing to the public’s growing addiction to sensationalism; the
recording studios which are doing the same thing, even in areas like
country music, which were once more closely attuned to the sensibilities
of small-town America than the other segments of popular music.
But as much as the explanation may satisfy us, it’s wrong to blame the
media for this phenomenon of disintegration. In the first place, “media”
is a plural noun (though most people don’t seem to know it) and there
is every opportunity for a diversity of opinion, style, and taste to
assert itself. The New York Times, MGM, the television newscasters, and Norman Lear have not entered into a conspiracy to corrupt a good and simple people.
With almost no exception that comes immediately to mind, the men and
women whose work appears on the editorial pages of the great Eastern
opinion mills or on the screens of your television set are badly
educated and ill-trained. Their attitudes are conditioned by four years
at what are still called (and once were) “the best schools,” followed by
life in one of the great coastal metropolises, which is a little like
living in the Emerald City—it’s the biggest, flashiest thing around, but
its way of life and its philosophical attitudes are controlled by a
wizened little charlatan who hides behind a screen and pretends he is
the Great and Powerful Oz. His name, as some of us know, is really
Selfishness.
These people are mostly too ordinary and unimportant to be responsible
for the tremendous changes that have taken place in our time. None of
them is Genghis Khan. They’re not even privates in the barbarian army.
They’re merely camp followers, tagging along behind, hoping to turn a
trick and make a buck, all the while absolutely certain they’re serving
some marvelous earth deity who will liberate the human spirit from its
old enemy the Lord God Jehovah.
No, the real destroyers of our society, as I have already suggested, are
words, which are the clothes we wear to tell the world and God who we
are. And if we want to find out what kind of dress the next generation
will choose we had better consult the poets, in whose hands the language
is always resting, like a still-beating heart waiting to be
transplanted into the body politic.
Civic Duty of Poets
And how is this so? Ezra Pound gave as good an explanation as any when
he wrote: “Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That
is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn’t matter whether
the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the bad writer wants to
do harm. Language is the main means of human communication. If an
animal’s nervous system does not transmit sensations and stimuli, the
animal atrophies. If a nation’s literature declines, the nation
atrophies and decays.”
Let me hasten to explain that Pound is not saying the poet should write
about the ills of society, that he should prescribe solutions to
problems. To the contrary, he says that those things don’t matter as
much as the poet’s responsibility to purify and reinvent the diction and
syntax of literature in accordance with the true world in which he
lives, as opposed to the false world created by false language. The
poet, he tells us, restyles our rhetorical clothing constantly so that
practical men and women can go into the community as competent human
beings and carry on its business. If the poet does his job well then presidents, businessmen, and plumbers can do their jobs well.
So how long does it take the poet to reclothe the community? Well, the
day after Prufrock was published the American flag still flew over the
Boston post office. It flies there today, but it doesn’t quite stand for
the same thing it stood for in 1917. Yet such change takes place
slowly. At first it affects only a few literate and highly influential
people. Later it reaches a wider and less esoteric audience. Eventually
it seeps down to the lowest level of society, which is where popular
music lives. At that point it is still alive culturally but
intellectually dead. Thus the lyrics of Irving Berlin were late
nineteenth-century Romanticism, served up as hash for the most mawkish
of sensibilities; while, as we have seen, the Sex Pistols follow Eliot
by a mere sixty years.
But the punk rock composer is not like the genuine poet. He is merely a
reflection of popular political attitudes turned sour, the revolution of
the 1960s nostalgically revisited. The revolution itself was the major
catastrophe caused by the poetry of the ’20s and ’30s. Read the slogans
in the signs of antiwar demonstrators and gay liberation paraders. They
are the greeting cards of the past, messages from poets dead and buried
in the grave of memory.
But what can we do about it? Just knowing that Eliot and his generation
are responsible for the punk rock element in America doesn’t really help
us, does it, any more than it would help a man dying of rabies to be
introduced to the rat that bit him?
It’s a desperate situation. If the problem is language then no ordinary
political solution is possible—no program, no decision by the Supreme
Court, no amendment to the United States Constitution. Can’t you imagine
the President’s Blue Ribbon Commission on the Restoration of Good
Language reporting to the nation on what the government ought to do to
spur the poets into performing their civic duty? No, it wouldn’t even
work if we held guns to their heads and said to them, “Write us poems
that will clothe us in the language of hope and love and peace.” A good
poet would rather be shot than to work under such circumstances.
It must all happen quietly and secretly in the souls of a few men, but
it can and does happen, always it happens, if the situation is desperate
enough. As an illustration of this final point let me remind you that
the first great poet of Western civilization wrote an epic narrative
which was in part about the need for the right language in order to
create the proper clothing for society. The poet is Homer and the poem
is The Odyssey.
You may remember that as the narrative opens Odysseus, the hero, is
living on an island with Calypso, a woman who looks surprisingly like Bo
Derek and will never look any worse since she is an immortal goddess.
She is in love with Odysseus, a mere man, and she has a great deal to
offer him. She owns a liquor store, all the fast-food franchises, a
twenty-five-inch Curtis Mathes with a Betamax. It goes without saying
that she offers herself as well. But there is one more gift, the most
precious of all—that of eternal life. She has connections in high
places. She will make him a god. Who here today could refuse that offer?
Clothed by the Living Word
But Odysseus does refuse. He’s had propositions like this before. Circe,
who turns men into pigs, wanted him to stay with her as well; but
Odysseus was as adamantly opposed to being a pig as to being a god. He
chooses instead to be a man and return to his wife and son. That is, he
chooses to die. (And remember that he has heard Achilles down in Hades
tell him that he would rather be a living slave than a dead shadow
floating in that perpetually doomed twilight. Odysseus knows as well as
we do what it means to die.)
Yet he puts to sea, only to suffer one last indignity. He is caught up
in a terrible storm. His clothes are stripped from his body. Finally he
is tossed on the shores of Phaiakia where he is discovered by the
princess of the realm and her retinue. What is he to do? Though a king,
he appears to be no more than a worm—naked, completely naked, dirty,
covered with the salt slime of the sea, divested of the fine trappings
of civilization—for all the princess knows, a barbarian. A lesser man
might have turned and fled.
But Odysseus is no coward. He begins to speak, and she is enchanted by
the clear beauty and high formality of what he says. Though the
handmaidens flee with the first words, the princess remains—to listen,
then to offer him the hospitality of the palace itself; for she is
convinced that he is a man of great nobility and stature.
What he has done on this primitive island, literally thousands of years
ago, is something we must do through our poets in our own time. He has
reclothed himself with nothing more than language so that he stands
before her in the ancient and uniquely human robes of rhetoric, a
creature of dignity, something more than the pig that Circe (the punk
rockers) would make of him, something less than the arrogant gods of
Calypso’s (Eliot’s) promise. That is what Odysseus’ language says of his
nature, that he holds firm to that middle ground in the hierarchy of
Being where man has always stood, where he is something more than
animal, something less than angel.
Make no mistake—it is a place of splendor, and it belongs to us no less
than to Odysseus, and perhaps we will reaffirm it soon, not because we
have earned it, not because we ever could, but because it was given to
us graciously, out of an Infinite Mystery that finally demands of us
more than we ourselves would presume to be.
For before time began we were clothed by the Living Word, by God
Incarnate, accepting the humanity of words, condescending to define
Himself by noun, verb, adjective—by all the finite parts of speech that
through Him bind us forever and inextricably into the Wonder of Being.
It is a mystery that He would want us to speak at all. It is glory
enough, after all, to make us keep absolute silence, this knowledge that
whenever we speak we speak His Name.
Thomas H. Landess, who died on January 8, taught
literature and creative writing in colleges and universities for
twenty-four years. A true man of letters, he published several books and
hundreds of articles and poems. This article is based on a paper he
delivered at Hillsdale College in March 1984 for a seminar on the topic
“Language Under Siege.” It is reprinted with permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.
