101. "Hokum" and its Hazards

Wasn't it fun calling lines by W. H. Auden "hokum" (Post #100, below)? There he was in all the anthologies, the whole educated world was cheering, but we weren't fooled, no, we hung in there and nailed him. And best of all, we got his blessing for it! He knew he was off base.

Auden strayed into lofty words, a view of history from too far up. When you asked for details — the support, the goods, the beef — he, unlike the historian, could only wave. Can we say that, in principle, loftiness in poetry is a bad thing?

If we do we've got poets like Yeats to deal with. Here's Yeats in "Two Songs from a Play":

Odor of blood when Christ was slain

Made all Platonic tolerance vain

And vain all Doric discipline.

How's that for lofty? And later he says,

The Roman Empire stood appalled:

It dropped the reins of peace and war

When that fierce virgin and her Star

Out of the fabulous darkness called.

You can't get any loftier than that. And you with the Midwest accent, are you ready to make your speech to the cheering world? "Got to have some facts naow. Pretentious nonsense. Pretentious nonsense."

Who wants to say anything like that about Yeats's words? I don't. I get a tingle just typing them out. So, should we academics shun these these blunt terms? We've got so many of them — claptrap, bunk, eyewash, bullshit, hogwash, humbuggery, malarkey, moonshine, poppycock, tommyrot — and so few fit a subject this complicated. They may be all right for the street, but literary criticism? Please.

I think the test will come when we're facing a poem for which all our other words seem inadequate. Like Ossian's Fionnghall, the poem the intelligentsia of Europe (including Napoleon and Goethe) called the great primitive epic, and we call...well, let's wait. It's not an epic at all, it's just full of epicky details, exactly the ones the primitivists of the time would lap up — the battles, the speeches, the lifestyle (oh the lifestyle, the noble, savage lifestyle) of the ancient Highland chiefs. We don't have to wait to find out it's all a fake ("Ossian" was a smart contemporary Scotsman named Macpherson) to start calling it names. It's not poetry, it's a lifestyle pitch. Pure, pure...ah yes, hokum! That Macpherson, could he ever sell snake oil.

I would also, with qualifications, nominate Alan Ginsberg's "Howl," the defining poem of the Beat Generation with the famous beginning:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix...

Who says those are the best minds of Ginsberg's generation? Ginsberg does. Trust him. Did we trust Auden when he told us the thirties were low and dishonest? If we did we shouldn't have, and in the end he was embarrassed for wanting us to. We, and apparently he, saw hokum in the loftiness.

Ginsberg is lofty (on war and capitalism and the military industrial complex) but memories of Yeats have undermined our easy use of "hokum" for loftiness so we hold back. Then we finish "Howl" and realize that the whole thing is lifestyle. Nothing but one picture after another of the way Ginsberg and his friends lived — sitting up "smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,...investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets," and so on. Cool, but still only lifestyle. And with a pitch. Ginsberg is selling it. Is there any word better than "hokum" for this?