The Two DNA Strands of all Literature

If there’s one question every English teacher is asked every single year, it’s this one:

What’s the point?

It is literally my least favorite question in the world, but I acknowledge that it’s a legit one that everyone has a right to ask. 

“What’s the point,” students ask, “of this poem? What’s the point of this novel? This play? This short story?”

I have a few different, general answers to this question (and I have a few pointed questions about the question itself), but one of my answers is as follows:

The “point” of this literary work (if there must be a point) is to celebrate or lament something in our world—or, if it’s a particularly fine work of art, to do both.

I associate “celebration” with life and joy.  W.H. Auden says that the first job of poetry is “to praise what is.”  Poetry should be an existential affirmation of the goodness of both the material and spiritual world.  Poetry, as I say (paraphrasing Yeats), should begin with “the heavy, spillable cup.”

But not everything material is wonderful—particularly because nothing material or physical lasts forever.  So I associate “lamentation” with sorrow and death. 

Celebrating life and lamenting mortality (to me) seem to be the two DNA strands of all works of art. Some works of art only do “one thing”—either celebrate or lament—while others do “many things” or “both things.”  It just depends on the work of literature. 

This dichotomy (like all binaries) is a bit Draconian, but I find it to be a useful skeleton key for lots of works of literature—especially poems:

One of my favorite questions to ask of a poem is “What IS this text?”  And I find that answering that question by stating, “This poem is a celebration of . . .” or “This poem is a lamentation of . . .” often helps me—and students—“into” the poem.[1]

Life and love, sorrow and death—celebrated and lamented over and over again in literature and art because we are never done with one . . . or the other.

Try it out yourself and see.  :)

[1] Occasionally I’ll add the word “indictment” to “celebration and lamentation”—so a poem (or other work of literature) can be “An indictment or critique of . . .”