★☆☆☆☆ There is such a thing as artistic merit...

The Prophet

Khalil Gibran

...and this ain't it.

The characters of Herman Wouk's Inside, Outside have opinions about The Prophet

“He’s so mature, so thoughtful, so wise, Izzy, and he gets all his philosophy from this one book.”...
“What book, Bobbie?”
“The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran,” she said. “It’s so deep, and he reads it aloud so beautifully.”
I had never heard of The Prophet or Gibran, but said I would get hold of it.
“Oh, do, Izzy. You’ll learn so much. You need that book...
Next day I asked Peter Quat about Kahlil Gibran. Oh yes, he said, his doormat mistress had treasured The Prophet, and could reel off whole pages by heart.
“What’s it all about?”
“It’s utter horsepoop*,” Peter snapped... So I hunted up a copy and read it, and Peter was right on the mark.

I first encountered The Prophet as a high-school student. We did a unit on poetry, and a few of Gibran's effusions were presented as "Prose Poems". I immediately decided it was utter horsepoop. My judgment was unanimously opposed by all my classmates and my teacher. (In later years I came to feel pride that, even as a high school student, I had that much literary taste, and also that I had the guts to maintain my opinion against all comers. If you remember your teenage years, you will recognize that that took courage.)

Wikipedia informs me that "Gibran is also considered to be the third-best-selling poet of all time, behind Shakespeare and Laozi." The Prophet is, in my opinion, one of the best examples of the proposition that popularity is not an infallible sign of artistic merit.

As a teenager I interpreted differently. The popularity of The Prophet led me to suspect that there was no such thing as artistic merit -- there was only a vast chaos of individual tastes. Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin played a role in convincing me that there is more to the idea than that. I was a grad student at Stanford when I read a translation of Eugene Onegin, and I knew nothing more about it than that it was considered to be the magnum opus of Russia's greatest poet. As I read I came upon some verses about feet (yes, really), that completely floored me -- they were so passionate and powerful. Later I learned that these verses are among Pushkin's most famous. So maybe there is something in this idea of artistic merit. I think there is.

My belief in the possibility of artistic merit coexists with an absolute belief in your right to enjoy what you enjoy. If you love The Prophet, you have no need to apologize. If you want to adorn your home with black velvet Elvis paintings, you should do that thing. If you think Windy is the last word in music, listen and enjoy!

I came back to The Prophet because it is required reading for a course I'm taking. I read it yesterday evening. It's one of those books you may need to read because so many of the people who surround you have read it that it becomes a necessary part of the common language. As such, The Prophet has two merits. (1) It is short -- I read it in less than an hour. (2) It's in the public domain, so it is free.

*Note: The word "horsepoop" appears nowhere in Wouk's book. I have substituted it for a different word that I cannot include in an Amazon review.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

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