The Sentimentality Trap—Ben Myers

by Ben Myers

How Much Emotion?

Sentimentality is the aesthetic sin that so easily besets Christian art. The Christian artist, in as much as he or she seeks an audience within the church, will be constantly tempted toward the sentimental. But what do we mean when we describe a work of art as “sentimental”?

I wish to stress from the beginning that sentimentality is not simply too much emotion, but rather an imbalance of emotion, an over-investment of emotion relative to that in which it is invested. Sentimentality is a misdirection of emotion, emotion for its own sake without a reference in the tangible world. Rejecting sentimentality does not mean rejecting emotion as a fundamental part of aesthetic experience. I have never put down a poem and complained that it was too moving, too resonant. Sentimentality, on the other hand, I find immediately repulsive.

What is Sentimentality?

Sentimentality is a defect in the quality, not the quantity, of feeling in a poem. But how is a writer or a reader to recognize this defect in feeling that we are calling sentimentality? The best guide is a wide experience of the art. The great tradition is a highly reliable guide in this matter, and, reading those poets we have, by an election lasting generations, inducted into the canon, one finds very little that is sentimental.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, working in the nineteenth century, an age in which sentimentality enjoyed a great vogue, often approaches the sentimental but stops short of indulging in it, as in the stark and restrained closing lines of the “terrible sonnet” usually referred to as “Carrion Comfort”: “Cheer whom though? The hero whose heaven-handling flung me, foot trod / Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year / Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.” There is here none of the pharisaical self-righteousness that one finds in so much Christian sentimentality. Rather, Hopkins gives a frank, unflinching, and unexaggerated account of his spiritual struggles. The poet’s restraint puts parentheses around the exclamation, a device that prevents the awe from disproportionately ruling the line. With the emotion in proper proportion, we do not lose sight of the physical reality behind the poem, a reality subtly conveyed in the verb lay. The specificity of the verb gives us a glimpse of a real man passing sleepless nights upon his cot. It is clear that Hopkins learned much of his craft from reading the Psalms. The poem, though focused on spiritual struggle, is far from abstract sentimentality.

The wrongness of sentimentality comes in inverse proportion to the rightness of concrete images and diction. In, to take another example which I encourage you to read for yourself, T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” the emotion resides in the images, strange and evocative, rather than in abstractions overlaid them like a cheap enamel. The poem is spiritually serious and, despite Eliot’s warning about emotion, profoundly moving, but there is not a trace of sentimentality in it. Rather, there is real feeling attached to the real world, the world of both spiritual and physical reality.

The best education in reading and in writing is reading. If one develops a familiarity with great poetry, which is almost never sentimental, one will find that sentimentality is simply no longer satisfying. Once one knows the real thing, the artificial substitute no longer will do.

Sentimentality and Pornography

The problem with sentimentality is that it offers us the dubious chance to feel, while bypassing the messiness of any real human engagement: not too much feeling but too thin an experience. This is what the great southern novelist Flannery O’Connor meant when she wrote, “We lost our innocence in the Fall, and our return to it is through the Redemption which was brought about by Christ’s death and by our slow participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which strongly suggests its opposite. Pornography . . . is essentially sentimental, for it leaves out the connection of sex with its hard purpose, and so far disconnects it from its meaning in life as to make it simply an experience for its own sake.” Sentimentality is emotional satisfaction without emotional connection, an agreement between the artist and the audience to skip straight to the gratification, which, due to the skipping, is not so gratifying after all—as Shakespeare knowingly suggests in his Sonnet 129 (“Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame”). That is why O’Connor links it to pornography.

The popular painter Thomas Kinkade’s cozy little cottages, for instance, offer all the warmth of home—something I certainly enjoy—but what is the warmth of home without knowing the coldness of the world? What is homecoming without the hard journey? In Hebrews, we read that “These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.” (11:13–14). We are at home on the earth, which is God’s creation, and not at home on the earth, which is cursed by our fall. To live in this tension is to live in the truth, and even the reader who knows nothing of Christianity’s emphasis on the in-betweeness of present human existence will feel that reality has been missed when the search for a country has been omitted from a work of art. Kinkade’s error is not in depicting the homecoming; it is in ignoring the seeking. That is why, when a student told me that she lovingly sends a Kinkade postcard to her grandmother once a month, I blurted, “Stop sending pornography to your grandma!” Art must be truthful in what it says about the world and our sojourn in it. Lying down in green pastures is a great goal for an artist, but he must not attempt to get there without walking through the valley of the shadow of death. If he does, he is a liar.

Sentimentality is really yet another form of that deadly heresy of Gnosticism, which prefers airy spiritualization to God’s actual creation. Christian sentimentality wants to transcend the material reality of the world, gesturing toward it only with stock abstractions—Grandma’s hands, baby feet, home sweet home—that have no correspondence with the actual physical world, in order to get to a prearranged rendezvous of feeling. Like the gnostic, the sentimentalist denies the incarnation. This denial comes most often in the form of a blindness to the particularity of creation, the same kind of blindness that has burdened so many of our Sunday-school classroom walls with a generalized, handsome, and Teutonic Jesus when in fact our Lord was and is no doubt far more Semitic, and probably rugged, in his actual appearance. In other words, the problem with poems about “Grandma’s hands” is not the subject matter per se but rather that the creator of such a poem has little regard for the actual hands of the lady in question. The woman’s body parts are turned into cheap vehicles for cheap spiritual gratification, a kind of pornography.

The same is true of poems about “baby feet” and “innocent smiles” and any such stock image. Such poems ignore the state of actual, particular children in the world. Perhaps even worse, they cover up even the existence of particular children, real beings in possession of both the imago Dei and fallen human nature. I sometimes think any Christian poet caught blathering about “the innocence of childhood” should be forced to read St. Augustine’s Confessions and made to work twenty hours in the church nursery. Anyone caught posting such a poem on the church bulletin board should be assigned to monitor the fourth-grade boys’ Sunday school class.

Sentimentality and Contemporary Poetry

Sentimentality is a temptation not just for those working within the church. Sentimentality is the sin that so easily besets the new group of poets often referred to as “instapoets,” after the medium, Instagram, through which they share their work. The most prominent of these poets are Tyler Knott Gregson and Rupi Kaur, and their work has now made its way from the internet into big-box bookstores around the country. Many contemporary poets and critics feel that the instapoets write badly, but secular aesthetics is somewhat at a loss when it comes to justifying that opinion, unable as postmodern aesthetics are to ground its judgments in anything deeper or larger than personal preference. Without a grounding metaphysic, what can the defender of literary values say of the instapoet other than a general charge of being naïve, or, in other words, of being unhip?

On the other hand, the defenders of the instapoets are apt to say that just being popular does not make the instapoets’ poems bad. That is true enough. Both Byron and Tennyson managed, despite a great amount of fame and rock-star-like attention, to write poems that will be read for as long as poetry is savored.

I am afraid, however, that being bad is exactly what has made the poems of the instapoets popular. Like pornography, sentimentality avoids engagement with real emotion or relationships and goes instead for cheap feeling, an approach that flatters readers with the perceived correctness of their sentiments. Both pornography and Gnosticism tend to feed narcissism. It is no wonder that such poetry has wide appeal in an age in which we have elevated “self-esteem” above the classical virtues of self-sacrifice and nobility.

Of course, the problem with instapoetry is not sentiment but sentimentality. One may read many poems on Instagram about the purported resilience, emotional and physical, of the poet, the “I never give up” theme being a go-to for these poets. This is not a bad theme; it was, after all, good enough for Homer and his Odyssey. But it is rarely handled well by these poets. For contrast, visit the Instagram account of Tyler Knott Gregson and read the poem that begins with the line “I kept going,” and then consider this simple and beautiful poem about perseverance by the great Langston Hughes:

Well, son, I’ll tell you:

Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

It’s had tacks in it,

And splinters,

And boards torn up,

And places with no carpet on the floor –

Bare.

But all the time

I’se been a climbin’ on,

And reachin’ landin’s,

And turnin’ corners,

And sometimes goin’ in the dark

Where there ain’t been no light.

So boy, don’t you turn back.

Don’t you set down on the steps

’Cause you find it’s kinder hard.

Don’t you fall now—

For I’se still goin’, honey,

I’se still climbin’,

And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

Notice how Hughes’s poem works in the exact opposite direction from the abstract and self-obsessed poetry of Gregson. Hughes looks toward others and toward the physical world. Hughes follows his speaker’s metaphor to concentrate a lifetime of challenges into a clear picture that keeps us grounded in physical reality. Notice, too, that Hughes puts all the wisdom in the mouth of somebody else. He rejects the temptation to make himself the hero of his own poem and thus escapes the gnostic sentimentality of self-congratulation that plagues Gregson’s poems and instapoetry in general.

Our Sentimental Age

Sentimentality abounds perhaps especially in American Christian culture and saturates the reading done by American Christians. Sentimentality is no doubt one aspect of the more general superficiality of our cultural moment in and outside of the church. Many prominent publishers of Christian books offer extensive lines of novels in the “Amish romance” genre as well as an endless supply of spiritually-tinted self-help books but little in terms of Christian classics and no poetry in a contemporary vein. Christian booksellers sometimes offer the poetry of Amy Carmichael, whose life and work certainly inspire but whose verse is flat and sugary, but they sell nothing from contemporary poetry’s most prominent Christian poets, such as Denise Levertov, Richard Wilbur, and Mark Jarman. As Todd Brenneman argues in his recent book, Homespun Gospel: The Triumph of Sentimentality in Contemporary American Evangelicalism, sentimentality may be a defining characteristic of religious life for many Americans, and so most readers in the dominant evangelical culture, outside of a few hip and urban churches, are more likely to encounter the treacly poetry of Ruth Bell Graham than the spiritually searing work of R. S. Thomas or T. S. Eliot.

Why are so many Christian writers and readers drawn to sentimentality? Why is it that if one Googles the phrase “Christian poetry” one has to wade through pages of results with titles like “Grandma’s Praying Hands” and “Childhood Smiles” before getting to Dante, George Herbert, and Paul Mariani? I suspect it has to do with a misguided interpretation of the verse with which I began this book, Philippians 4:8, “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” This verse is often evoked in admonition to avoid the garbage of popular entertainment, and rightly so. Pursuing what is lovely should leave no room in our life for cultivating the spiritual and ethical ugliness of much of our popular culture. But the verse should also be taken as a call to pursue closeness to God by seeking out and cherishing truth, goodness, and beauty. The Philippians 4:8 way of life does not mean that we should model our mental and emotional lives on those three monkeys who hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil. Unfortunately, forgetting the apostle’s direction toward honesty, many Christians seem to believe that what Scripture means by “pure” and by “lovely” is merely the pleasant and the naive, the Hallmark Channel, not the reality of a world in need of redemption.

Yet, looked at through the initially disorienting but ultimately corrective lens of Scripture itself, what is more pure and lovely than the cross? One might answer, “the resurrection,” but there is no resurrection without crucifixion. The Christian sentimentalist wants the bliss of Easter morning without the pain of Good Friday or the sorrow of Holy Saturday, reducing the great joy of Easter to the pleasantness of a watercolor sunrise on a greeting card. The sacrifice of our savior is lovely. His blood is pure. If we can look on these things and know they are good, then we, in a deeply Christian art, should not fear looking at the hard realities of our fallen world. Dostoevsky has demonstrated this principle clearly with novels like Crime and Punishment. The Christian artist who wraps himself in sunbeams and daffodils fails to be Christian at all, producing a bloodless, lifeless art that pleases a middle-class consumerism or a postmodern self-esteem, not an authentic Christian encounter with a hurting world.

Walking a Fine Line

In my introductory poetry workshop, I find I need to discourage half the class from writing about puppies, rainbows, and Grandmother’s praying hands, but another kind of sentimentality also threatens. It turns away from Hallmark naivete, but then cultivates the stereotypical gritty irony of the television cop program, second-rate punk rock, or hackneyed attempts at film noir. Thus I have to steer the other half of the class away from an equal and opposite form of sentimentality. These students, raised on The Hunger Games and postmodern hip, fill their poems with broken glass and the smell of urine in alleyways. Surprisingly, there is really very little difference between the two tones; both are shortcuts and generalizations. Neither version, one a stock sentimentality and the other its snit-sentimental mirror image, is truly incarnational; both are comprised of commonplace images only seemingly aimed at the actual world.

Given the choice, I suppose I would prefer to read a student’s version of Baudelaire rather than of Swinburne, but both are failures of art, failures at creation. The writer, especially the Christian, is today as obligated to avoid the sentimental anti-sentimentality of the edgy as he is to avoid puppies and Pollyanna. Both reflect shoddy workmanship. Both are cheap goods made cheaply.

But should we insist on well-made things, on bespoke poems that might be “beyond the masses”? It has sometimes been suggested to me that my position on sentimentality might be “elitist,” and, if by “elitist” we mean only, as is sometimes the case, the preference for things that are better over things that are inferior, then I am guilty as charged. It is, after all, my project in this book to argue for the preference of some poems over others.

What people usually seem to mean by elitism, however, is mere snobbery, looking down on an entire class of people for their membership in that class. In that case, it seems to me that it is rather more elitist to suggest that the masses are incapable of appreciating better art than it is to insist that they have a chance to appreciate something finer. Isn’t it more “elitist” to keep Bach to myself while smiling patronizingly at the unwashed and their pop music than it is to take the time to introduce my neighbor to better music? It is the exact inverse of snobbery to suggest that the average man or women on the street, or in the pews, is fully capable of enjoying an aesthetic experience superior to mass-produced sentimental dreck.

I come from a long line of oil field workers and farmers. My father had only a high school education and, through long bouts of unemployment, often took odd jobs to make ends meet. In short, I come from the very hoi polloi—around here we’re just called “rednecks”—that some would suggest are incapable of eating solid intellectual and spiritual food, and, having spent my life among rural working people, I can assure you that we are as capable of reading Dostoevsky (whom I discovered on my father’s bookshelf) as we are of reading Chicken Soup for the Soul. If the latter is more often the fare we are discovered eating, that is because it is all too often the only food we have been offered.

The Apostle Paul suggests that some can only digest milk, but he says this is because they are “not yet ready” for solid food. The very purpose of his epistle is to goad them toward better fare. The failure to “put away childish things” can, in its extreme, be a form of perversion and is not a way of life the thoughtful Christian should encourage for anyone.

If followed to its logical conclusion, the idea that we should just lighten up and let the masses have their sentimentality contributes to the push to remove consideration of the true, the good, and the beautiful from our schools and colleges. Why teach Beethoven to our fifth-grade music students? Just have them sing some Beatles songs, and “Let [them] be.” Or, better yet, get rid of music all together: they can spend more time in “STEM” classes. Why keep that difficult, elitist old Shakespeare around our state schools and community colleges? Television studies for all!

It is not an enforcement of Spartan toughness upon the average reader to suggest that he or she eschew sentimentality, as the rejection of sentimentality is not the rejection of emotion itself. It is, rather, an invitation to a more sumptuous and nourishing feast. There is nothing “elitist” in wishing all people access to truly great art any more than there would be something “elitist” in wishing all people access to healthy, nourishing, and delicious food. The human soul is the same, educated elite or hoi polloi, and it, despite all its corruption, is nobly made. I would no sooner let be a soul drowning in kitsch than I would let be a man on a sinking raft.

Don’t get me wrong. I agree with Ted Kooser, who argues in his excellent Poetry Home Repair Manual that it is far better to risk being sentimental than it is to accept a dry, emotionless kind of poetry. I sometimes think, in fact, that the closer one gets to sentimentality without actually giving in to it, the better. Or to put that in terms more in tune with what I have been arguing, it is a great accomplishment in a poem to take content that is very close to a common emotional experience that can easily be sentimentalized but render it with a depth of feeling and attention to the particular that is entirely unsentimental.

I can immediately think of two great poems that do just that. The first is Robert Hayden’s classic “Those Winter Sundays,” a portrait of an emotionally distant father, which begins with an account of the hard-working and temperamental father rising every day, even on Sunday, to warm the house by building back up the previous night’s fire.

This poem could easily have focused on the coziness of the fire, or painted an unmixed and all-admiring portrait of the father. Alternately, it could have railed like a cardboard Sylvia Plath against the evils of patriarchy. But instead, Hayden took the tougher road of telling us about his particular father and their relationship, and as he looks back he sees harshness but also love in his boyhood home. In that particularity there is a power to impart universal truth about the complexity of family relationships, something no sentimental poem can achieve.

The other poem that springs to mind is Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall.” The images are fresh and striking in their particularity:

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

The poem places its sense of loss into particular images of “Goldengrove unleaving” and “worlds of wanwood” that “leafmeal lie.” Through these images, Hopkins tackles tricky subjects, subjects that could easily lure one into sentimentality, such as the passing of time and the value and loss of innocence. The poet, however, avoids sentimentality by keeping the poem grounded in the particular, emphasizing real vegetation and a real child, the Margaret, of the first and last lines. The poem is an excellent example of a poet engaging with strong emotion and age-old truths, of a poet risking sentimentality, without giving in to the sentimental impulse.

Once the Christian reader has dined on poetic fare as rich as this, how could he or she be satisfied with the thin gruel of sentimentality or with the hard biscuit of the cynical? Once we have known the sacred touch of real love, two made one flesh, both gift from God and image of God’s love for us, how could we ever again be content with poetic pornography?

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This article has been excerpted from Ben’s brief but masterful book, A Poetics of Orthodoxy from Wipf and Stock. The chapter this article is excerpted from also began as an essay prepared for First Things.

Benjamin Myers is the director of OBU's Great Books Honors Program. He is the author of four books of poetry and two books of nonfiction, and he was the 2015-2016 poet laureate of the state of Oklahoma. His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Image, The Christian Century, Rattle, and many other widely-circulated journals, and he has written essays for many prominent outlets, including First Things, The American Conservative, and The Gospel Coalition. Dr. Myers is a member of Chandler First Baptist Church, where he teaches adult Bible study and serves as a deacon.

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