Whither Beauty

A few months ago I read Toni Bentley’s and Gelsey Kirkland’s ballet memoirs, and acquired a bad case of self-pity: here was an art so unlike poetry, where the practice was excruciatingly difficult, but the reward so concrete.
As in sports, one can still speak of beauty in ballet. Brian Phillips, in his article “Poetry and the Problem of Taste,” in this month’s Poetry magazine, claims it’s been two centuries since we could speak confidently of beauty, and asks “When was the last time ‘sublimity’ was a relevant idea?” Well, it’s relevant to Barbara Guest, and John Ashbery, and David Shapiro, and dozens of poets who haven’t completely acquiesced to the literalism of society in the age of mechanical reproduction. It’s relevant, possibly, to those of us who find the pop scientism of our day—“Blondness evolved in the north so that men could tell who was young under all those clothes!” “Music evolved so men could impress women!”—so banal as to make Creationists look good. At least, they have better stories.

So maybe the old sublime, our-reach-exceeds-our-grasp aesthetic, which some of us hang onto for dear life, is not dead, just—like ballet—not popular. But one thing we know for sure. Beauty doesn’t mean putting blinkers on against the ugliness daily churned out of our media outlets (you see, I haven’t been able to give up the news after all). I think Wallace Stevens’s insight is severely underestimated: that the imagination is violent in proportion to the violent pressure of reality.
Great poetry is violent in the same way ballet is violent: it reshapes our “natural” contours. It is not realistic.