convincing
In freshman year of college, I took a poetry workshop for non-English-majors. It was a low stakes course led by an m.f.a. candidate from the creative writing program, and only offered at all, I think, because grad students like him were available to have the work squeezed out of them. We read our student–instructor’s favorite poets and talked unsophisticatedly about theory and craft. We wrote poems of our own and tried to contribute to a Respectful Space of Critique.
One question recurred constantly in our discussions: is this convincing? Taking a poem as a whole or singling out one gesture or metaphor, we asked each other whether were convinced by it. It became a closing ritual: at the end of the period we would pass judgement, convinced or not, and honorably or dishonorably dismiss the poem.
About halfway through the semester, I realized I had no idea what to be convinced even meant.
I never brought this up in workshop, which I (stupidly) thought was a place not for worries but for opinions confidently stated as truths. And if I didn’t know exactly what made a poem convincing, I did know that, whatever it was, my poems had it.
But I was concerned: underneath all the posturing to not appear the worst non–major poet in the room, what were we all talking about?
I’ve just come across one possible answer from the philosopher Thomas Nagel:
My own philosophical sympathies and anipathies are easily stated. I believe one should trust problems over solutions, intuition over arguments, and pluralistic discord over systematic harmony. Simplicity and elegance are never reasons to think that a philosophical theory is true […]
What ties these views about philosophical practice together is the assumption that to create understanding, philosophy must convince. That means it must produce or destroy belief, rather than merely provide us with a consistent set of things to say. And belief, unlike utterance, should not be under the control of the will, however motivated. It should be involuntary.Preface to mortal questions
Our judgments in workshop were just that: essential, subjective: whether deep in our guts we believed what a poem was saying. It’s interesting that being convinced here is different from being persuaded, if persuasion is the work of rhetoric on reason and will. Of course we discussed form, meter, metaphor, word–choice, whatever — all the technical and rhetorical pieces that made a poem’s argument, gave it style — but that discussion wasn’t sufficient. A rhetorically accomplished poem didn’t necessarily convince us of its truth.
Introducing his collected pomes, W.H. Auden makes a similar point re poetry directly. But unconvincing poems were to Auden not just lesser (cf. Nagel’s “merely” consistent), but much much worse:
Some poems which I wrote and, unfortunately, published, I have thrown out because they were dishonest, or bad–mannered, or boring.
A dishonest poem is one which expresses, no matter how well, feelings or beliefs which its author never felt or entertained. […] I once wrote, “History to the defeated / May say alas but cannot help nor pardon.” To say this is to equate goodness with success. It would have been bad enough if I had ever held this wicked doctrine, but that I should have stated it simply because it sounded to me rhetorically effective is quite inexcusable. Foreword to collected poems (1965)
Pretty rhetoric can beguile in both philosophy and poetry because both are largely rhetorical pursuits. If well–put lines aren’t the end of an argument or poem, they’re not easily done without, either. The sirens are always singing their song of simplicity, elegance, and rhetorical effectiveness.
So good philosophy and good poetry must pass three tests: First and least important, is it rhetorically successful? Second, is it convincing, ie. does it produce or destroy belief? And third but foremost, does it tell the truth?
auden daysof nagel philosophy posey writing