Sugar-Coated Pills

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“Poetic expression,” says the sugar-coated-pill theory, “is the honey that makes palatable the medicine of content, be it philosophical, moral, or scientific.” It’s an old theory. It’s there even in Ancient Greek and Roman theory and practice: Lucretius dipped De rerum natura, his scientific/philosophical treatise about atoms swerving in the void, in the rhythms of dactylic hexameter. Because his doctrines will seem “harsh to those who have not used it,” he wrote, “I have chosen to set [it forth] to you in sweet-speaking Pierian song.”

This story, told by Peter Kivy, reminds us how new the idea is, that the “form” and “content” of a poem are inseparable. Lucretius had the content of his doctrine worked out well in advance, and did not think he’d thereby foreclosed any of the possible forms he might use for it, arrayed before him like so many aisles of candy.

Having proved “form/content unity” foreign to some poetic traditions, Kivy marshals additional indirect evidence against it, by constructing a speculative genealogy. He attributes to the idea’s emergence, motives not well-tuned to the truth:

by the time the eighteenth century rolled around, poetry as the source and conveyor of scientific, philosophical, or any other categorizable kind of human knowledge was a dead issue. … It would have seemed almost as absurd in the Enlightenment to assert that the poem was a vehicle for the expression of scientific or philosophical knowledge at the cutting edge as it seemed sensible and commonplace in the ages of Parmenides, Plato, and Lucretius. Poetry, it would seem, had lost pretensions to knowledge.

If the vibe was now against using verse to make philosophy tolerable, poetry needed a new function, or risk obsolescence. But all the domains of knowledge had been divvied up among the various prose-writing disciplines, physics, psychology, etc, and nothing seemed left for poetry. Surely something had been overlooked? “We must secure for the poet a kind of knowledge that only he can command.” But what could that be? Isn’t the only knowledge unique to poets, the knowledge of how to write a poem? Poetry is in bad shape if its only proper subject matter is poetic technique! Kivy channels an alternative:

if...only the poem can say what it says, then what the poem says...is an expression of content that only the poet can have “discovered.” The poet is the world’s greatest expert, the world’s only expert, on the kind of knowledge his poem expresses, because it is the only example of that kind: it is sui generis content.

If this were right, poetry’s problems would have been wiped away. Too bad, then, that it’s all a bunch of hooey. The “special content” thesis entails that the content of a poem—what it says—cannot be paraphrased, for

that paraphrase would inevitably fall into one of the categories of human knowledge populated by resident authorities who perforce would outrank the poet in expertise.

But a poem’s content can be paraphrased, Kivy thinks—or anyway, it is no less paraphrasable than the content of anything else.

In one sense, an attempt to paraphrase even the top article in today’s Times will fail to reproduce the “total effect” of reading the original—obviously, since that total effect includes the experience of reading the exact words making it up. But neither is poetry special on less demanding criteria for paraphrase. If what a news article says could have been said in different ways using different words, a poem is no different. Milton himself prefaced each book of Paradise Lost with—a prose summary of its contents.

But if poetry is not good for making philosophical knowledge pretty for the cameras; and if it’s not good for conveying some other kind of knowledge to which science, philosophy, and all other human inquiry is blind; if poetry is not a “special conduit to the font of wisdom”; if

the practice of poetry is not a way of knowing some particular kind of thing but, in one of its offices, one of the various ways we may have of expressing all kinds of things we know or believe, wish or hope, fear or value,

then the question remains: why bother expressing any of those things in poetry, rather than in some less demanding medium?

Kivy answers by quoting Arthur Danto: art, and therefore poetry,

uses the means of representation in a way that is not exhaustively specified when one has exhaustively specified what is being represented.

Yes, a poem may convey a content that could be conveyed in another way, but part of the significance of the poem lies exactly in the way; one has not fully explained or understood the poem, if one has only grasped and paraphrased that content:

one must also specify the way in which the form, the medium, is employed...the way in which the artist employs the medium is, in effect, part of the content, because it expresses something in the artist’s point of view about the content.

But in Kivy’s “solution” the problem reappears. If what the words of the poem say may be paraphrased, then so also may be what the poet or speaker expresses about it. If the “content” of

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a -flying

may be re-phrased as “don’t waste your too-short life,” then, similarly, what Robert Herricks expressed about that content (an elegiac wisdom) may also be said out loud, rather than left implicit. The Kivy/Danto distinction between what is said and what is expressed does not, by itself, give poetry a job only it can do.

But we can help it along, by bringing back to the stage the total effect of the poem. An attitude as expressed in a poem may engage responses in us far richer than those we may have to the bare information that the attitude has been expressed. Say I express my sadness in wailing and tears; whether and how you are moved would be different if, instead, I had stated flatly how I felt from behind a screen. If Kivy is right that what is expressed in a poem matters, he is wrong to suggest that this is just another “part of its content,” for an encounter with some “content”—some body of information—is far different from an encounter with a human expression of an attitude or emotion; even when the information (by which I mean a description-in-words) is that the emotion has been expressed.

Still, in prose too the way may matter; in prose as well, the effect of how the content is expressed may be lost in a paraphrase, both of what is said and how. The question of why poetry has not been answered.

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An earlier version of this essay was published in March, 2024.