by Lorraine Schein
Comics, one of the most American of art forms, have increasingly appeared in American poetry over the last fifty years. Yet poets have been interested in, intrigued or angered by comics, and worried about the increasing popularity of visual imagery in print material over oral traditions of poetry for a long time.
In an 1846 sonnet titled “Illustrated Books and Newspapers,” William Wordsworth wrote:
…Then followed Printing with enlarged command
…Now prose and verse sunk into disrepute…
…A backward movement surely have we here,
From manhood,–back to childhood; for the age—
Avaunt this vile abuse of pictured page!
Must eyes be all in all, the tongue and ear
Nothing? Heaven keep us from a lower stage!1
Wordsworth was responding to the greater availability of illustrated material in newspapers and magazines, due to improvements in printing processes in the 1800s. He seems alarmed in this poem that the “pictured page” would eclipse the popularity of “verse” (“the tongue and ear”) — and his prediction has generally come true.
These innovations in mass printing of images allowed newspapers to develop the comic strip. American comic strips (which later evolved into comic books) are generally thought to have started with the appearance of the 1896 strip, The Yellow Kid. The early comic books were simply reprints of newspaper strips. Eventually, though, comic books began to feature original material, foremost among them the appearance of Superman in 1938’s Action Comics. The 1940s, known as the “Golden Age” of comics, was the time when they reached the height of their popularity. But the 1950s saw the shadow cast on comics by psychologist Frederic Wertheim, who popularized the view that reading comics promoted violence, and were the heyday of opposition to them by religious and civic groups.
How does poetry relate to comics? At first glance, the two forms seem far apart.
One way is through myth. Our culture does not have many common myths—stories that everyone recognizes and knows. Fewer people today know the Greek and Roman myths than ever before. It can be argued that comics and popular culture in general now serve as our unifying myths, so it is not surprising they have increasingly begun appearing in our poetry and literature.
Comic book historians have written a great deal about the growing interest of intellectuals in comics in the 1940s and 1950s. But this interest was usually not favorable– many New York intellectuals associated mass culture with conformist culture and vulnerable to totalitarian propaganda.
In a 1952 piece titled “Masterpieces as Cartoons,” poet and essayist Delmore Schwartz gave a close reading to several issues of Classics Illustrated saying, “that the bottom of the pit has been reached, I think, in the cartoon books which are called Classics Illustrated, a series of picture-and-text versions of the masterpieces of literature.”
Schwartz saw comics as somehow tainting the literacy, ability and desire of children to ever appreciate “high” art, especially poetry. But not every poet agreed with this dim view. Several years earlier, the poet E.E. Cummings had written an essay praising the strip Krazy Kat.
Other poets were beginning to appreciate comics too. The mostly hostile attitude by 1950s writers towards taking comics seriously began to change with the growing acceptance of popular culture. This was most evidenced by the use of comics in poems by the poets and artists of the New York School, who helped erase the distinction between “high” and “low” art made by earlier writers.
The New York School was a style of poetry that began around 1960. Its writers were strongly influenced by the visual arts, as many of the poets involved were friendly with and/or collaborated with the Abstract Expressionist painters and artists in New York at the time. The poetry of the New York School also had an urban, humorous sensibility, and drew its material from daily life (as in O’Hara’s Lunch Poems). So it is not surprising that some of these poets incorporated the language of comics and cartoons into their work.
John Ashbery, one of the leading poets associated with the New York School, used characters from comics and cartoons in his poems “Daffy Duck In Hollywood” and “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” which uses the characters from Popeye. Kenneth Koch and Joe Brainard also used comics in their work, often mixing its visual elements with their writing.
Collaborations between poets and comics artists have continued from the days of the New York School. In 2008, the Poetry Foundation launched “The Poem as Comic Strip” experiment. They asked graphic novelists to choose poems from their extensive archive to interpret visually. Responses on their website ranged from those who praised the project as a way to popularize poetry and make it more accessible to readers, to those who felt illustrating poems was redundant, because of its inherent imagery and diminished its intrinsic value.
Poets have continued to use and be inspired by comics in our time. Lucille Clifton wrote a series of poems called "Notes to Superman/Clark Kent.” Simon Armitage's "Kid" is about Batman and Robin, and Amiri Baraka has several radio and comic book heroes in his poems. Bryan Dietrich’s book, Krypton Nights, a book of poems about Superman, won the Paris Review prize in 2001.
The view held of illustrated text (and later, comics) by poets has changed since Wordsworth’s time — from alarm to acceptance and celebration. As Scott McCloud states in his book Understanding Comics: “The comics creator asks us to join in a dance of the seen and unseen. The visible and the invisible.”2 This is a good definition of what poetry tries to do also.
FOOTNOTES
1. Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, eds., Arguing Comics (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2004), p. vii Intro.
2. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1994), p. 92.