Every few years, someone writes an essay arguing that poetry has become too difficult for its own good — too allusive, too syntactically knotted, too willing to withhold a plain meaning from a reader who came in good faith. There is a version of this complaint that I take seriously, and a version I don't. The version I take seriously is about honesty: a poem that is difficult purely to seem important, with nothing underneath the difficulty, is a bad poem, and no amount of theory rescues it. The version I don't take seriously is the one that treats difficulty itself as the problem, as though the job of a poem were the same as the job of an instruction manual. It isn't. And I think most of what poetry actually does — the thing that makes it worth the trouble of reading at all — depends on it not being.
The Case Against Difficulty
The argument against difficulty is usually made on democratic grounds: poetry is already a niche art, the complaint goes, and making it harder to access just shrinks the niche further. There's real force to this. A poem that exists only to be decoded by people with the right graduate degree is doing something closer to gatekeeping than art, and plenty of poetry from the mid-twentieth century onward is guilty of exactly that. Reginald Shepherd, writing about this problem, distinguished between difficulty that opens a poem up and difficulty that simply refuses to let you in — a useful line, and one worth holding onto. But the conclusion that follows from noticing bad difficulty isn't that all difficulty is bad. It's that difficulty needs to be doing something.
What Difficulty Actually Does
What good difficulty does, most often, is refuse to let a feeling get smaller than it actually is. Grief, desire, the particular ache of a specific memory — these things resist plain statement not because poets are being coy, but because plain statement flattens them. Say “I miss my father” and you've said something true and said almost nothing. A poem that approaches the same feeling sideways, through image, through syntax that hesitates where the feeling hesitates, through a metaphor that doesn't fully resolve, is often doing more accurate work than the plain sentence, even though it's harder to paraphrase. Difficulty, in this sense, isn't an obstacle between the reader and the meaning. It's closer to the shape the meaning actually has.
A poem that is easily decoded is easy to be done with. I don't think poems are supposed to be things we get over with.
The Poem You Can't Throw Away
There's an argument, made well in a Ploughshares essay on poetic difficulty, that a poem you can fully decode on the first pass is a poem you're finished with. You take it apart, you find the meaning it was hiding, and then there's nothing left to do but set it down. A poem that resists that kind of full explication — that leaves something unresolved no matter how many times you return to it — earns a different relationship with a reader. You don't finish it. You keep it. This is, I think, part of why certain poems survive decades of changing taste while more immediately satisfying ones don't: the ones that last are usually the ones that still have something left to give you on the tenth reading, which is nearly always the harder ones.
Reading Slower, on Purpose
None of this is an argument for difficulty as a pose, or for confusing obscurity with depth — plenty of genuinely difficult poems are also genuinely bad, for reasons that have nothing to do with how hard they are to parse. But I'd rather a poet risk asking too much of me than assume, in advance, that I can't be asked for anything. The close readings we publish here exist for exactly this reason: not to explain a difficult poem away, but to show what slowing down for one actually gives back. If you want the fastest possible route through a poem, difficulty is the enemy. If you want the poem to still be doing something to you a decade later, it might be the whole point.
