The Unreality of Realism

Abstract

As an author who writes poetry, short stories, and novels with equal intensity, I find myself acutely aware of how different is the path taken by each of the three modes, not primarily because each makes such different demands upon the writer but because the demands of each upon its readers are so fundamentally different. Fiction has the largest number of readers, and poetry the smallest; intuition would lead one to predict that readers, therefore, have the most difficult time with poetry. This is, however, simply not true. Perhaps because no one really expects to understand a poem fully, depending as it does upon fluid and always partially obscure associative processes, the poet and the poem suffer far less from the forced marches of critics. Critics of lyric poetry tend to be highly impressionistic and habitually speak of poetry which they like as teetering wildly on the edge which divides the audience and the performer, as the senses, taking great risks and, finally, expanding the boundaries of human experience. elucidations, which were offered upon the publication of Granite Lady (New York, 1975), were pleasant, even heady, but what did they mean? They were, in their own way, no more comprehensible and no more disquieting than utterances like these: Although these poems sometimes lack the electrifying disturbance of Sylvia Plath, they offer other rewards and resonances, or, These poems fail, finally, because they do not confront the pressing issues which should be relevant to all intelligent women of our time. Evident in these comments is a shameless subjectivity which, in the language of poetry criticism, is sought after, cultivated, and admired. It is often impossible to know whether a reader of poetry under-