Sentimentality & Dogma: A Craft Talk by Kevin Prufer
Many years ago, I was asked to give a short talk on the subject of sentimentality. I’d planned to talk about the way people deploy the term most frequently against subject matter that probably ought to be important to us: children, parenthood, love, death, beauty. Sentimentality was, I was going to say, often part of a gendered criticism leveled against women more than men. My students were afraid of it, but they were usually unable to define it. All this I meant to say, but first I had to figure out what the word sentimentality actually meant. Because I knew it when I saw it, but I, too, was hard pressed to come up with a definition that fit all of its circumstances.
According to every dictionary definition I could find, sentimentality (as opposed to sentiment) always combined a kind of over-abundance with contrivance: Too much emotion in a cooked-up situation. One writer offered an example: the poet bursts into tears (overabundance) when he steps on a discarded flower (contrivance).
I wasn’t convinced, however, and I read further, encountering along the way a number of clearly sentimental poems that seemed to me to offer neither overabundance nor contrivance. For instance, Brian Wilkie (who sixty years ago wrote an excellent essay on the subject) offers the example of the temperance song “Come Home, Father,” by Henry Clay Work, a truly sentimental piece of nonsense. In the song, we meet “Daddy,” who is out drinking while “poor Benny,” his son, lies in bed at home dying of consumption. The song frequently returns to Benny’s sister’s plaintive refrain: “Come home! Come home! Come home! / Please, father, dear father, come home.” And poor Benny’s dying words? “I want to kiss Papa good night.”
Truly sentimental. . . but not according to the dictionary definitions I’d consulted. As Brian Wilke and others concluded, before me, much that we would call sentimental does not involve an overabundance of emotion. It would, after all, be wrong to say that a poem about a child dying while his father is out drinking is too sad. That it ought to be a little bit lighter. Nor, in this case and many others, is the sentimental work necessarily contrived. Instead, the situation is completely believable and not extraordinary. Children in Henry Clay Work’s time died all the time. They still do. Fathers are frequently alcoholics. Mothers often feel helpless. As a dramatic situation, “Come Home, Father” is no more contrived than any other dramatic situation.
The point I finally came to is this: Despite all the dictionary definitions, sentimentality has little to do with overabundance or contrivance, though those might be present in any literary work. Sentimentality has to do with the opposite of overabundance because it tends to reduce what might be an enormously complex situation or feeling to a single pure channel, thereby making a realistic situation feel contrived and doing little service to the purported subject of the work. For instance, in “Come Home, Father,” Work never considers the complexity of the mother’s situation at all, reducing her to pure helplessness. Nor does he consider the father’s situation, beyond the booze. Why does he drink? What of the society that puts a family in this kind of state? Is alcohol entirely to blame? Might there be other forces at work? What will the future be for them? What led them to this place? Does the mother still love the father? Does the father love little Benny? All of this possibility for thought, exploration, consideration has been done away with in the reductive movement of “Come Home, Daddy,” from complexity to pure simplicity. To pure, trite sadness. To sentimentality.
And, of course, the same movement—from complexity to simplicity—exists as much in the political sphere as it does in the emotional sphere. Here, when we take the enormously complex situation of, for instance, immigration—a subject any thoughtful person must have conflicting, complicated feelings about—and we reduce it to the Trumpian phrase “Build a wall!,” we call that political dogma. “Make America Great Again”: also dogma because it takes enormous subject matter—“America” “greatness”—and reduces it to a single, dangerous channel.
Thought of this way, dogma and sentimentality are. . . if not the same thing, related things. Both are reductive. Both pick up on complex subject matter and simplify it. Both can be dangerous. Consider the sentimental poems of Jesse Pope, calling on British young men to join up to fight in The Great War—“the red crashing game of the fight”—or those frequent 19th century sentimental images of happy slaves, or. . . I could go on and on. My point is, this kind of reductiveness, whether we call it sentimentality or dogma, is not good for thought and has been (and continues to be) dangerous because it is simplifying, seductive, unthinking, and far too comfortable.
I think of my students who have strong feelings—about politics, about love, about death. These are good feelings, rich and smart. When they bring me a poem on a subject they feel strongly about, though, I often find myself in the situation of asking them to complicate things, to consider this or that other position one might take. This isn’t because I think their subject matter is sentimental—there’s no such thing as sentimental subject matter—but because strong feelings often lead writers to reductive thinking. And we need to be aware of that. If the experience of reading a great poem might be likened to the experience of listening in on a brilliant mind as it wrestles with an unsolvable problem or a complex feeling—well, that’s often enough. And it’s almost always more interesting than being presented with whatever solution that mind comes to, no matter whether we believe strongly in it or not.
The question that helps us write better poems, then, might be this: not how can I express my strong feelings or knowledge clearly and plainly, but how can I do justice to the complexity of my feelings and thoughts, how can I communicate that to readers who will certainly be of different minds? How can I think about this better—and on the page?
KEVIN PRUFER's ninth collection of poetry, The Fears (Copper Canyon, 2023) received the 2024 Rilke Prize. His first novel, Sleepaway, is just out from Acre Books.