The Poetics of Self-Improvement, part 1

I know a guy who likes guns and gardens, killing and camping, dogs and early mornings, church and state. He is somewhat of a Dutch oven enthusiast, as unfulfilling as that sounds, and he is a resident doctor in my old town. Of course, this might describe many of the men in the church I attended, but this guy seemed like the best of examples. I used to see him on the bus reading history books, and once I asked him about it, and he said it was part of a self-improvement plan, trying to learn about things he wasn’t familiar with.

I always thought that was nice if, again, unfulfilling to some extent. I often wonder why I read The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harpers on the bus or during lunch, and it is probably part of an unconscious self-improvement plan too. This particular friend recently sent me an email asking for poetry recommendations. He mentioned that he was completely unfamiliar with poetry and that he would like to get to know it better. I have to admit, I was immediately skeptical, thinking that his kind of poetry would be the kind like the Dead Poets Society special, in which poetry is used as a masculinist halftime speech loaded with Victorian elocutions and Olympic traditions. I actually like that kind of poetry, but I like it in spite of its quotability in church and its general off-putting force.

I recall growing up with a small volume of poetry, scarlet with gold lining, called “101 Famous Poems,” which I think my dad bought as one of his own self-improvement plans. I read it all the time as part of my young self-improvement plan. I was one of those kids that took the uninformed position that old literature in scarlet binding was inevitably better than new literature. I don’t know how I acquired that opinion, but I had it, and I remember telling Mrs. Vice, my seventh-grade humanities teacher, that anything written after 1960 wasn’t worth my time. She smiled and asked if I had ever read anything that was written after 1960, and I responded confidently in the negative. I think she was trying to teach me a lesson, but my seventh-grade confidence took it as validation.

My friend’s request for a book of poetry sent me back to my early self, reading Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus” or Oliver Wendell Holmes “Old Ironsides” in 101 Famous Poems. I even sometimes take out that volume of poetry again when I visit my mom just to remember my childhood self supposedly improving. What was my childhood self doing when it was reading that poetry? What will my friend be doing when and if he reads the books of poetry I recommended? What was my dad doing when he bought that poetry? What are we doing by reading poetry?

I am going to assume, as me, my friend, and my dad did, that poetry is thought of as self-improvement. But before I make that unconscious assumption, let me quickly say that this assumption is as old as the Pantheon (I don’t take it all the way back to Greece, where the big philosophers had a thing against poetry from the start because they thought it was like the bubblegum pop music of the time).  Horace famously found the purpose of poetry in teaching and delighting, suggesting that the combination of teach and delight is pretty potent in some way or another.

But this assumption is sketchy. Why is poetry thought of as a medium of self-improvement? Does it have something to do with expression? Does it have something to do with content? If everyone who reads this gets really lucky, I will try to answer that question by looking at some random poems. It sounds boring, but it’s not.