Bowlful of dead bees

In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster called his subject “one of the moister areas of literature – irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp … it is bounded by two chains of mountains neither of which rises very abruptly – the opposing ranges of Poetry and of History”.

Aspects of the Novel was published in 1927. A hundred years on, poetry – itself pretty moist by now – is irrigated by rills including memoir, political rant, cultural criticism and self-help, all of which expand its marshy territory. Poems about poetry, from Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711) to Karl Shapiro’s Essay on Rime (1945) and Charles Martin’s enjoyable “You Summon Me…” (from The Best American Poetry 2024) form a significant tributary, and prose about poetry (usually written by poets) is another moist area, defined at the outer limit by handbooks, anthologies and textbooks. At the heart of this prose is a discussion of how poetry works. An incomplete list of recent books in this category includes work by Louise Glück, Mark Strand, Ben Lerner, Edward Hirsch, Diane Thiel, Glyn Maxwell, Stephanie Burt, Ruth Padel, Annie Finch, Camille Paglia, Robert Pinsky and Kenneth Koch.

In our era of struggle, the self-help subcategory is also claiming its place in the critical landscape. What is poetry for? How can it help? (In prose, Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life, 1997, and David Shields’s How Literature Saved My Life, 2013, are good examples of this genre.) Now comes Dai George’s book, How To Think Like a Poet, the title of which led me to expect a discussion of poetry as practical application. But its subtitle, “The poets that made our world and why We need them”, heads in another direction, seeming to promise information about two large subjective topics: certain poets and what they have to offer us.

George’s intended genre and audience pose twin problems. The book reads like a collection of lessons or lectures; the classroom is never far away. But it could equally be a collection of blog posts about reading, teaching, travel – or poetry. The chapter on Dante evokes a trip to Ravenna to see the famed mosaics, but not before the author enjoys a soporific lunch of meatballs and peas. The air of enjoyment contrasts with the irritation on display throughout the chapter on William Wordsworth, whose lyric “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (first published 1807) provokes this bemusing response: “Wordsworth’s paean to nature sprouts a backbone that it didn’t previously seem to have”. Apropos of the first edition (1850) of The Prelude, George frets “Come on, William, you’re better than that”.

Neither the book’s title nor its subtitle hints at the double thread running through George’s chronologically arranged chapters: history and biography. George slots his poets briskly into context. Walt Whitman was born when America was forty-three years old; Wordsworth’s poetry “embodies this Romantic fusion between the self and nature”. The pace of the tour leads to some hastily worded claims that raise more questions than they answer. George’s chapter on Shakespeare, for instance, informs the reader that “language, poetry and human thought would evolve together in the centuries to come”.

If you’re looking for answers, you’ll be disappointed. How To Think Like a Poet provides no overarching sense of how to think like a poet or how poems can help us. But could anyone deliver on the airy promises of this title? If there’s one truth universally acknowledged about poetry, it’s that it contains multitudes and eludes definition. Dai George declares as much in his zestful final chapter, quoting Matthea Harvey: “Poetry is a peacock in a pea coat … Poetry is a bowlful of dead bees […] if poetry is all these things, what can’t it do?” George scurries from one poet to the next, so his book doesn’t work as self-help. As literary criticism it is superficial at best (and I cannot agree that Rupi Kaur “makes … rather original art objects out of words”). But How To Think … also has sparks of hearty energy that earn it a place on the crowded shelf of poets writing prose about poetry. Where precisely on that shelf is another question.

Rachel Hadas’s most recent collection of poems is Ghost Guest, 2023

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