As further evidence of the dismal state of our current society - what is the last great work of fiction our culture produced? American authors once included some of the greatest storytellers (Mark Twain) of all time, those who generated moral tales that challenged Dickens and Milton (Melville and
Moby Dick,
Billy Budd), poets who produced works that told stories and actually rhymed (Whitman, Frost), realists (Hemingway, Fitzgerald), authors at the beginning of the style of writing "fiction as we think," i.e., stream-of-consciousness (Faulkner). If asked to list the greatest works of American authors and poets, I would offer the following (in order):
- Moby Dick by Melville
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Twain
- The Great Gatsby, by Fitzgerald
- A Farewell to Arms, by Hemingway
- To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
- Catcher in the Rye, by Salinger
- The Sun Also Rises, by Hemingway
- Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
- The Sound and the Fury, by Faulkner
- Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper
- Call of the Wild, by Jack London
- Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Robert Frost
- Oh Captain! My Captain!, by Walt Whitman
- The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost
- Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
- The Raven, Edgar Allen Poe
- The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
What do all of these works have in common? Every one of them? All except one -
To Kill a Mockingbird - are at least 75 years old, and TKAM is 60 years old. What happened to American literature?
What happened is that current authors have had a watered-down education. The vast majority of tudents over the past forty years, I believe, don't have the background, training or education to read or understand great literature. Not surprisingly, then, the same students are unable to author great works. Indeed, they cannot create even good literature.
Take, for example, somebody considered to be one of the best American poets the last 50 years - Maya Angelou. Because I have a degree in English, focus English literature, I have read hundreds upon hundreds of novels and hundreds of poems. Some poems are entertaining, tell a story, employ great rhyme and meter. Coleridge's
Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, for example. One stanza from that poem - read it, you will like it - from memory:
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew
The furrow followed free.
We were the first to ever burst,
Into that silent sea.
Look at all the amazing tricks of language and meter. The internal rhymes (blew, flew - first, burst), the alliteration (breeze blew, foam flew, furrow followed free, silent sea), and the perfect meter. However, the mariner by now has shot the albatross (symbol of good fortune), so Coleridge crafts a very different approach in the next stanza, explaining the plight of the sailors. Compare the meter, the "false rhyme":
The breeze drop't down, down drop't the sails,
T'was still as still could be.
And we did speak only to break
The silence of the sea.
Instead of the running alliteration and meter, internal rhyme, we have something called a "chiasmus," which shows a mirror image and is meant to be non-lyrical ("drop't down, down drop't") and a "sight rhyme" where the words look like they should rhyme but don't (speak, break). That is the work of a great poet, in a work that covers about 60 stanzas and tells an amazing story, with lines we know almost 200 years later. ("Water, water everywhere and all the boards did shrink, Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink").
Maya Angelou's poems are ... mediocre. Let's compare two stanzas, one from Whitman and the other from Maya Angelou's "great work,"
Still I rise.
Whitman's is the first, of course. When you read his stanza, you will note an internal rhythm, called "meter." A writer generates meter by alternating emphasized syllables with non-emphasized, one after the other. Doing so takes work, but results in text that sounds like music:
The SHIP is ANCHor’d SAFE and SOUND, its VOYage CLOSED and DONE,
Bad poets ignore meter and then use forced, monosyllabic rhymes because they are easy. Example:
DOES MY HAUGHTiNESS OFFend you?
DON'T YOU TAKE it AWful HARD
The lines have no meter, no lyrical rhythm. The lines are stilted, forced, about a small subject ("Oooh, poor me!"). "Cause I laugh like I got goldmines, Diggin' in my own backyard"? Really? So you're saying the mines are digging themselves?
Her "great work" has a dangling participle, for Christ's sake.