Some of the poems I've seen in response to the attack on the Capitol Building--in the press, in the literary reviews, at W@1--got me to thinking about our next project: sentiment in poetry. We started talking about it last week in our Zoom salon, talking around the edges of it at least: what is sentiment; is sentiment a good or a bad thing or both; do "sentiment" and "sentimentality" differ and, if they do, how? The title of this post is tongue-in-cheek, of course, but only partly so. It bears a kernel of truth, I think, about sentimental poetry.
Cry babies cry for no good reason. They cry just to be crying or, more to the point, they cry to be heard crying. They're after your pity. How loudly and shrilly they cry or scream or whine or how long they stamp their feet matters only if you give them the pity they want. Often, our recently denied president was a cry baby. A cry baby poet.
Likewise, sentimental poetry. A sentimental poem wants you to feel its pain. Or its joy. Or its cleverness. Anger. Melancholy. Happiness. Indignation. Hurt. Etc. It doesn't care so much whether you appreciate its artistry or complexity. Complexity only gets in the way. Complexity and artistry are "too intellectual" (sneer). The sentimental poem doesn't try to examine the emotion it expresses; it's satisfied with the expression alone.
I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed!
Certain subjects expose us poets to sentimentality, or at least the threat of it: cats and dogs, of course; grandchildren and daddies; frail grannies and flowers after rainfall; moonlight; trees and honeybees; broken hearts and childhood memories; injustice, unfairness, poverty, under-doggedness; clouds, sunrises, rainbows; angels, Jesus; villains, too, and Good and Evil. (Note: click on "Read more" below to get to the project for Feb. 10, plus more discussion of sentiment in poetry.)
Project for February 10 (anticipating Valentine's Day)
Write a "sentimental" poem. In honor of Valentine's Day, let yourself go: write a poem that drips with sentiment, if you like. Let's broaden our definition of "Valentine's Day" and include passions other than love in our list of sentiments to emphasize in a poem or through a poem. You can write an angry poem or a dreamy poem, a weepy or a happy poem. You can wallow in self-pity for awhile. (Be advised, even political diatribe can be nothing more than self-pity, just directed outwardly, as if to say "I'm outraged, and it's THEIR fault!") What we'll look for on the 10th is where to place your poem along a "continuum of sentimentality," with sentiment in the service of art at one extreme and a self-serving, self-regarding sentiment at the other. For the former, you might read some of Shakespeare's sonnets or some love poems by John Donne, Robert Herrick, Kenneth Koch, Pablo Neruda, C. P. Cavafy, Gary Snyder, Sonya Sanchez. For the latter, there's always Joyce Kilmer, but also some poems of Sylvia Plath, Mary Oliver, Kenneth Patchen, William Carlos Williams, Amiri Baraka, Emily Dickinson, even Walt Whitman.
The sentimentalist cries, "But that's how I feel!" and expects to be rewarded, thought better of, or at least appreciated for his pathos. The sentimentalist never likes to have his emotion put under the microscope, by himself or by others. Doing so is . . . cynical (but see above). The sentimentalist cries "we murder to dissect!"
The literary critic I. A. Richards wrote, "So far as an impulse owes its character to its stimulus . . . so far is it a reference," that is, a mental event in which we substitute the impulse for thought or cognition. Puppies make me feel good, and so I write about my happiness borne of puppies. Same goes for babies, first loves, first jilts, and so on. When we talk about "warm and fuzzy feelings," we're talking about sentiments unattached from any clarity of understanding or self-examination; we're talking about SELF-REGARD. The sentimental poem is all about the writer, not the poem. Warm and fuzzy don't even exist in the same zip code as the art of a poem.
A poem as lovely as a tree . . .
Like everything else in human experience (namely, writing), sentiment is a relative thing. Most poetry has sentimental value; "Since feeling is first," wrote E. E. Cummings. (If you read his little poem, you'll note that he doesn't try to say that it's also middle and last, or even foremost. Poetry does much else, if it's poetry.)
There is a sliding scale of sentimental poetic value with, let's say, John Donne's and Robert Herrick's love poems at one extreme and Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" at the other. In between, you'll find room for all kinds of poetry, good and bad or rather, better and worse, more and less artistic. That scale can be seen within a poet's body of work, too. Emily Dickinson could write incisive, biting, ironic, hard-as-diamonds poems that plumb our human depths; and she could write something as gauzy & gassy as this:
That never wrote to Me--
The simple news that Nature told--
With tender Majesty
Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see--
For love of Her--Sweet--countrymen--
Judge tenderly--of Me.
Blah blah blah. Even the pause-inducing dashes add to the treacle!
Here are some other examples of poems that are more or less, for better or worse, shrines to Sentiment:
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