Obstacles to Enjoying Poetry: Is Poetry Effeminate?
Many people, especially today, find Poetry intimidating or off-putting. And even if we have the desire to read and appreciate poetry, we find it alien and difficult, quickly giving it up. Louis Untermeyer, in his book Doorways to Poetry, addresses a few of the objections people commonly make against poetry, in an attempt to make Poetry less foreboding to the average person. Although his vocabulary is often peculiar and his examples and references are sometimes dated (it was first published in 1938), his conversational style is extremely approachable and elucidating.
The following is an excerpt from his book, addressing a common objection raised to poetry, which I think is still a very common objection today, especially for young men: Poetry is effeminate.
Is Poetry Effeminate?
Some readers explain that they turn away from poetry because it is written by queer individuals; boys sometimes scorn it because they think it is foolish and “effeminate.” It is strange how this belief persists for there is little truth in it. A few creators have been eccentric and abnormal, but most of them have been anything but weak, incompetent, or “unmanly” creatures. The great poets have been great – and vigorous – persons. They had little leisure to pose or moon about; they did not resemble the comic cartoons of the long-haired poet paying no attention to things of everyday.
They were constantly called on to perform unusual tasks; they meditated, so to speak, in the midst of action. Shakespeare was an actor, a theatrical manager, a country landowner, and a busy playwright, besides being the greatest poet of all time. Dante, author of the world’s most colossal epic, was an important Florentine envoy. Milton, another epic poet, was Cromwell’s choice for secretary of foreign affairs. Chaucer, called “the father of English poetry,” was an important ambassador, and instead of shunning common people (as poets are supposed to do) he kept company with miller and shipmen as well as with knights and priests. The French poet, François Villon lived in the gutter. Robert Burns was a plowboy. Ben Jonson was a bricklayer. Goethe, the German poet and dramatist who was called “the monarch of European letters,” was the aut****hor of Faust and the Prime Minister of the Duchy of Weimar
Instead of lacking competence or masculinity, the poet has usually been a man among men, even an outstanding worker among workers. T. W. H. Crosland, an authority on the sonnet, answers the charge that poets are touch-me-not people or persons of abnormal behavior by saying, “The great poets are not only the sanest people in the world, but physically and temperamentally the toughest.” This seems logical, for people with frail bodies and high-strung nerves wear themselves out in no time. Great forces shape great men; it might even be said the greater the poet the greater the man. We think of Keats as a fragile spirit, but, before he succumbed to tuberculosis, Keats was not only a healthy but a well-balanced athletic youth, a good cricket-player, a keen boxer, and an all-round good fighter. Emerson is usually pictured as a cross between a New England preacher and an ancient Hebrew prophet, but he was so rugged a lover of outdoors that he knew the wildwood better than most guides and he still went swimming in Walden Pond at the age of seventy-eight. Whittier, another of New England poets, began life as a chore-boy, cobbled shoes, and grew up to be one of the most courageous fighters against slavery. Tennyson, who composed some of the most exquisite lyrics in the language, was anything but a delicate soul. His strength was so prodigious that he could hurl a crowbar farther than any farmer in the village; it was said he could bend horseshoes; and once, when a pony injured itself, he picked it up and carried it in his arms. William Morris was another who was laughed at for being a victim of the “artistic temperament.” Yet he was one of the busiest workers the world has ever produced; besides being a poet, Morris was a painter, an architect, a designer of tapestries, a manufacturer of furniture (the Morris chair is still called after him), a skilled typographer, a pioneer in illustrated books – he founded the Kelmscott Press – and a superb craftsman in every field. Paul Laurence Dunbar, the American Negro poet, ran an elevator before his genius was discovered.
