THE MAKING OF THE POEM
A DECLARATION of the independence of the poem naturally causes a
change in the attitude of the poet towards himself. This does not
mean that the poet ceases to be important; he merely acquires a new
sense of privacy which his relation to the poem in the old regime made
impossible. He shrinks from the strenuous publicity into which he might
be dragged by the author-worship of traditional poetry or the abnormal
sense of self-importance usually displayed in the official programmes
of such dead movements as Imagism. E. E. Cummings’ foreword to his
volume ‘is 5’ is undoubtedly inspired by a distaste for the sentimental
display by which the poet has in the past been expected to advertise
himself; and perhaps explains his tendency, the modernist tendency in
general, to let the poem take precedence over the poet:
On the assumption that my technique is either complicated or original
or both, the publishers have politely requested me to write an
introduction to this book.
At least my theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from
original; nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words,
by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk, viz.
“Would you hit a woman with a child?--No, I’d hit her with a brick.”
Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision
which creates movement.
If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very
little--somebody who is obsessed by Making. Like all obsessions, the
Making obsession has disadvantages; for instance, my only interest
in making money would be to make it. Fortunately, however, I should
prefer to make almost anything else, including locomotives and roses.
It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring
electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara
Falls) that my “poems” are competing. They are also competing with
each other, with elephants and with El Greco.
Ineluctable preoccupation with The Verb gives a poet one priceless
advantage: whereas non-makers must content themselves with the merely
undeniable fact that two times two is four, he rejoices in a purely
irresistible truth (to be found, in abbreviated costume, upon the
title page of the present volume).
Cummings, then, writing according to what would seem to the reader to
be a very carefully constructed poetic system, refrains from delivering
a critical key to his poems except as a semi-prefatorial confidence.
Indeed the more independent poems become, the less need or sense there
is in accompanying them with a technical guide for their understanding.
This would seem to imply that, the more difficult poems become, the
less chance there would be of understanding them. But in fact it
would only mean that the reader was becoming less and less separated
from poetry by the technique that had formerly been concentrated on
connecting him with it. Technique itself has then taken on a different
character; it is no longer the way a poem is presented to the reader,
but the way it corresponds in every respect with its own governing
meaning. For in making a poem the poet may be said to be governed
by this meaning, which may only be the necessity of the poem to be
written: in this foreshadowing, inevitable meaning the poem really
exists even before it is written. This it is that Cummings should
mean by ‘the obsession of making’ and this it is that the reader will
have to reckon with if poetry continues in its present tendency of
forcing him inside the framework of the poem and making him repeat
the steps by which it came to be. So that technique in the modernist
definition does not refer to the method by which a poem is written but
that evolutionary history of the poem which is the poem itself. The
Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk in literary terms are:
“Do you write poems with a prearranged technique?--No, I write them
with a pen.” Meaning: the question of technique in the writing of a
poem is irrelevant to the writing of it. If one talks about poems as
being mechanically put together by the poet, then the pen is the thing
that does it. Like the brick, it is the only practical answer possible
to a theoretical question conditioned by an irrelevant practical
qualification.
This brings us to the crucial complication in the adjustments to be
made between poetry itself and the reader of poetry, who is unable
to have a free and straightforward personal intimacy with a poem but
is continually haunted by the idea of the presence of the poet in
the poem. Between the reader and the poem therefore there is this
embarrassment caused by the reader’s awareness of the poet. He is not
at his ease with the poem: it is never entirely his own--he reads the
poem with the uncomfortable feeling that the poet’s eyes are on him
and that he will be expected to say something when he is finished. The
reader cannot get over the idea that the poet had designs on him in
writing the poem, to which he must respond. With traditional poetry
the reader is less embarrassed because, although he is aware of the
poet in a formal way, he is not made particularly self-conscious by
him. He knows what to expect, since traditional poetry is formed
with an eye to its serviceability as reading matter. We may compare
traditional poetry in this sense with the conservative, well-appointed
restaurant where the customer is placed in a soft light, the waiters
address him in a respectful monotone and he is left to himself to eat.
Modern poetry of the dead-movement sort, of which Imagism is a complete
example, bears a resemblance to the ‘artistic’ tea-room where the
customer finds himself besieged by orange curtains, Japanese prints,
painted furniture, art-china instead of the plain white service of
the ordinary restaurant, and conversational waitresses in smocks who
give the personal touch with a cultured accent. As a result, the plain
eater goes back to his corner restaurant and the tea-room becomes a
dead movement. _Modernist_ as distinct from _modern_ poetry
is, at its most uncompromising, neither the corner restaurant nor the
tea-room. It seems inaccessible to the plain reader: the approach to
it is like the front of a private residence and he is afraid that he
is expected to lunch personally with the poet. So in this case again
he goes back to the corner restaurant where he can at least reduce
the personality of the waiters to a minimum. Actually, if the plain
reader could conquer his initial self-consciousness before it he would
find an interior in which it should be possible to be on completely
unembarrassed and impersonal terms with poetry: he would find himself
alone with it. But this is only theoretically possible. For the plain
reader does not really want to be left all alone with poetry. The
mental ghosts, which only poets are supposed to have natural commerce
with, assail him. The real discomfort to the reader in modernist poetry
is the absence of the poet as his protector from the imaginative
terrors lurking in it.
What the reader, then, calls the clearness of a poem often means
merely its freedom from those terrors which he, in his defence
against them, attacks as obscurities. Clearness for him is really
the suppression of everything in the poem over and above the average
standard of comprehension--of everything likely to disturb normal
ease. A poem, therefore, that really is potentially superior to the
average standard of comprehension and which nevertheless conforms to it
actually obscures its real meaning the more it observes this standard,
_i.e._ the _clearer_ it is to the average reader. A poem
that is potentially superior to the average standard of comprehension
and which, disregarding it, fulfils all its potentialities, makes its
real meaning clearer and clearer, as it retreats from this average,
_i.e._ as it becomes more and more obscure to the average
reader. The trouble is not with the reader or with the poem but with
the government of criticism by the sales-principle, which must make
an average standard of public taste allowing for the most backward
reader of each of the three reading classes corresponding with the
three different degrees of popular education. If a variable standard
of comprehension were admitted, the poem would have the privilege of
developing itself to the degree of clearness corresponding with the
degree of comprehension in the reader most above the average. As the
poet himself would thus be allowed as a possible reader of his own
poem, it would be encouraged to attain its maximum, not its minimum, of
real clearness; and the word _obscure_ would disappear from the
vocabulary of criticism except to denote the obscurity of particular
references. _Bad_ would be the only possible critical term by
which a poem could be categorically dismissed: at the present time,
regardless of the possible classification of a poem as _good_ or
_bad_ according to the standards it suggests, it is enough for
the critic to call a poem _obscure_ to relieve himself of the
obligation of giving a real criticism of it.
Here is an example, in the first eighteen lines of what might be called
a modernist poem, of the ‘obscurity’ which would probably cause it
to be put aside by the critic after he had allowed it the customary
two-minute reading (for if the poet has obeyed all the rules, this is
long enough to give a rough idea of what the poem is all about--and
that is all that is generally wanted). Or if by chance the critic is
‘advanced’, serving such a limited public that his criticism is mere
literary snobbery, he may pretend to understand it and dislike it
equally, because he does not understand it; or, if he does, he may
dislike it all the same because it is ‘too simple’ (a common charge
against the ‘obscure’ poem when its obscurity is seen to have been only
excessive clearness).
The rugged black of anger
Has an uncertain smile-border.
The transition from one kind to another
May be love between neighbour and neighbour;
Or natural death; or discontinuance
Because so small is space,
The extent of kind must be expressed otherwise;
Or loss of kind when proof of no uniqueness
Strikes the broadening edge and discourages.
Therefore and therefore all things have experience
Of ending and of meeting,
And of ending, that much being
As grows faint of self and withers
When more is the intenser self
That is another or nothing.
And therefore smiles, when least smiling--
The gift of nature to necessity
When relenting grows involuntary.
The reaction, then, will be either one of ‘blank incomprehension’ or,
since the critic-reader recognizes a few long words and a certain
atmosphere created by the poet’s ‘saying what he means’, one of
antagonism due to the impression that the poem gives of being didactic.
The reaction of blank incomprehension will be commonest. “What, in so
many words”, the critic-reader will ask, “is this all about?” Now, to
tell what a poem is all about in “so many words” is to reduce the poem
to so many words, to leave out all that the reader cannot at the moment
understand in order to give him the satisfaction of feeling that he is
understanding it. If it were possible to give the complete force of
a poem in a prose summary, then there would be no excuse for writing
the poem: the ‘so many words’ are, to the last punctuation-mark,
the poem itself. Where such a prose summary does render the poem in
its entirety, except for rhymes and other external dressings, the
poem cannot have been a complete one; and indeed a great deal of
what passes for poetry is the rewriting of the prose summary of a
hypothetical poem in poetical language. Before further discussing this
particular poem, let us quote the beginning of a ballad by Mr. Ezra
Pound in illustration of the prose-idea poeticalized:
THE BALLAD OF THE GOODLY FERE[1]
(_Simon Zelotes speaketh it somewhile after the Crucifixion_)
Ha’ we lost the goodliest fere o’ all
For the priests and the gallows tree?
Aye, lover he was of brawny men
O’ ships and the open sea.
When they came wi’ a host to take Our Man
His smile was good to see,
“First let these go!” quo’ our Goodly Fere,
“Or I’ll see ye damned”, says he.
Aye, he sent us out through the crossed high spears,
And the scorn of his laugh rang free,
“Why took ye not me when I walked about
Alone in the town?” says he.
Oh, we drank his “Hale” in the good red wine
When we last made company,
No capon priest was the Goodly Fere
But a man o’ men was he.
I ha’ seen him drive a hundred men
Wi’ a bundle o’ cords swung free
When they took the high and holy house
For their pawn and treasury....
Stripped of its imitated antiqueness, the substance of all this
could be given simply as follows: “It would be false to identify the
Christ of the sentimentalists with the Christ of the Gospels. So far
from being a meek or effeminate character He strikes us as a very
_manly_ man, and His disciples, fishermen and others, must have
reverenced Him for His manly qualities as much as for His spiritual
teaching. His action in driving the money-changers from the Temple with
a scourge of cords is a proof of this. So is His courageous action when
confronted by the soldiers of the High Priest sent to arrest Him--He
mockingly enquired why they had not dared arrest Him previously when He
walked about freely in the city of Jerusalem, and consented to offer
no resistance only if His disciples were allowed to escape. The Last
Supper was surely a very different scene from the Church Sacrament
derived from it, where a full-fed priest condescendingly officiates;
it was a banquet of friends of which the Dearest Friend was Our
Saviour.” Here we see that the poeticalization has in fact weakened the
historical argument. By using the ballad setting Mr. Pound has made the
fishermen of Galilee into North-country sailors of the Patrick Spens
tradition and given them sentiments more proper to the left wing of the
Y.M.C.A.
The extravagant use of metaphor and simile in poetry is thus seen to
be governed by the necessity of making a poem of this sort equal the
prose summary which really is dictating it. This practice is founded
on two fallacies, one of which follows from the other: the first,
that the poet is not saying what he means but something _like_
what he means in prettier language than he uses to himself about it;
the second, from which the first is deduced, that the ideas of truth
in which poetry deals are not agreeable in themselves but that a
distinction is to be made by the poet between what is pretty and not
pretty, poetical and not poetical. When, therefore, bare, undressed
ideas are found in poetry instead of the rhetorical devices by which
poets try to ‘put over’ their ideas, such poetry is naturally accused
of being didactic. Another way of saying this is that the poet has cut
off all his communications. As a matter of fact all that has happened
is that he has made the poem out of the poem itself: its final form
is identical in terms with its preliminary form in the poet’s mind,
uncorrupted by hints to the reader, familiar asides to make it less
terrifying, and flattering conceits to enliven, to entertain and to
display the poet’s virtuosity. But it is almost impossible for a poet
who does really mean what he says to make the critic-reader believe
that he does: the more he means what he says and the more earnest he is
to make this clear, the more he will be thought to be concealing his
meaning in clever evasions called ‘obscurity’.
If, then, the author of the lines beginning ‘The rugged black of anger’
were asked to explain their meaning, the only proper reply would be to
repeat the lines, perhaps with greater emphasis: by which, presumably,
they would only become more obscure. If the poet were pressed to employ
some familiar metaphor or simile to explain them, then he would have to
prefix his remarks with some such insult: “At your request I shall make
my poem into a bad imitation of itself. I shall, in fact, call this
version _your_ poem, the more yours the sillier it grows. But you
must promise not to deceive yourself that this is what the poem means.
It is rather what it does not mean.” This method of understanding a
poem may be called Smoking Out The Meaning. To consider how the meaning
may be smoked out here let us put these lines into the first metaphor
that occurs to us. Indeed it is not wholly impossible that the first
two lines may conceal an incidental satire on the popular poetical
sentiment:
Look around and you will find
Every cloud is silver-lined.
The sun still shines
Although the sky’s a gray one....
It’s a short life but a gay one.
If such is the interpretation suggested by the first two lines, then
they are being treated as the prose idea from which the real poem,
apparently unwritten, is derived. That is, the ordinary translation
system of poetry, thus:
(I.)
A B C
_Poet’s prose idea_ _Poem_ _Reader’s prose summary_
1. | 1. | 1.
2. | 2. | 2.
3. | 3. | 3.
4. | 4. | 4.
is assumed to have been reversed, thus:
(II.)
A B C
_Poem (suppressed)_ _Prose idea as poem_ _Reader’s poetical summary_
1. | 1. | 1.
2. | 2. | 2.
3. | 3. | 3.
4. | 4. | 4.
The truth is that there is no fundamental difference between these two
systems. The same principle that 1 = 1 = 1 prevails (_i.e._ that
prose ideas have their exact equivalents in poetry, and many of them
to one idea); though in a different order, we find the same categories
representing the stages of the poem from creation to criticism. And
the fact that the reader finds it necessary to make a poetical rather
than a more strictly prose summary in (II.) would really make no
appreciable difference in his enjoyment of the poem if it were really
written as set forth in (II.). For the element of strangeness and
excitement would perhaps be added to his enjoyment if the ordinary
system were reversed: the novelty would at least last for a few poems
of this sort, as it lasted for the first year or two of the recent
_Vers Libre_ movement, a dead movement which tried to coué poetry
back into health by depriving it of its crutches. But if the lines in
question were not the prose idea as poem--B of (II.)--that is, the
prose idea in a slightly poetical form which the reader had to amplify
along suggested poetical lines, a discrepancy would appear between
the poem as it stands and the reader’s poetical summary of it, should
he find it possible to make one: we should have not two equivalent
meanings but one meaning and another gratuitous meaning derived from
it. B1 would not equal C1, but C1 would merely be X1, one of the many
possible derived meanings of B1, but not the real meaning. B and C of
(II.) would therefore read:
B C
1. | X 1
2. | X 2
3. | X 3
4. | X 4
X 1-2-3-4 being but a digression from B, B then would not be the
prose idea as poem, but the poem itself. If, as such, without the
addition of any associations not provided in the poem, or of collateral
interpretations, it could reveal an internal consistency strengthened
at every point in its development and free of the necessity of external
application, that is, complete without criticism--if it could do this,
it would have established an insurmountable difference between prose
ideas and poetic ideas, prose facts and poetic facts. This difference
would mean the independence of poetic facts, as real facts, from any
prose or poetical explanation in the terms of practical workaday
reality which would make them seem unreal, or poetical facts.
If we assume that the first two lines here do not mean what they
say, and accept the silver-lined cloud explanation, we find that
we are brought into a sentimental personal atmosphere in which
_anger_ is anger as felt by someone, or bad-luck seen as the
anger of providence or fate, and in which _smile-border_ is
either personal happiness or good luck. Any such interpretation of
_anger_ and _smile-border_, indeed, would involve us in some
such sympathetic history of the poem. But if we consult the poem itself
we find, after the first two lines, that any possible parallelism with
an interpretation of this sort ends: _anger_ means just anger,
_smile-border_ just smile-border. So much so do they mean just
what they are that the rest of the poem is developed from their being
just what they are: _anger_, anger; _smile-border_, the
smiling border of anger which apparently separates it from some other
kind, or concept, whose border separating it from anger might equally
be called an ‘anger-border’. What are we to do, then, since the poem
really seems to mean what it says? All we can do is to let it interpret
itself, without introducing any new associations or, if possible, any
new words.
The rugged black of anger
Has an uncertain smile-border.
The transition from one kind to another,
As from anger, rugged black,
To what lies across its smile-border,
May be love between neighbour and neighbour
(Love between neighbouring kind and kind);
Or natural death (death of one,
Though not of the other); or discontinuance
(Discontinuance of kind,
As anger no more anger)
Because so small is space
(So small the space for kind and kind and kind),
The extent of kind must be expressed otherwise
(The extent of kind beyond its border
Is end of kind, because space is so small
There is not room enough for all
Kinds: anger _angrier_ has to be
Expressed otherwise than by anger,
So by an uncertain smile-border);
This will serve as a sufficient illustration of the method of letting
the poem interpret itself. It was done without introducing any words
not actually belonging to the poem, without throwing any of the poem
away as superfluous padding and without having recourse to a prose
version: the poem interpreted is practically itself repeated to three
times its own length. It may be objected that it is still not entirely
clear, but not that it is not _any_ clearer, that it could not
be made clearer still by an increase in length proportionate to the
need of the reader in question. For instance, if the reader is puzzled
by the sixth of the original lines and cannot at the first reading
persuade himself that _Because so small is space_ really means
_Because so small is space_, yet sees that it can mean nothing
else, he can repeat to himself:
Because so small is space,
Because so small is space,
until he is convinced; or, perhaps,
Because space is so small,
Because space is so small,
an inversion which the poet would surely mind less than the use of a
prose summary, such as a philosophical reading: “Because so small is
Space or the Universe or the Human Mind, not allowing Ideas to reach
their full development but crowding them into cramped quarters so that
they have a hard time keeping their independence and are often even
completely extinguished.”
The important thing that would be revealed by a wide application of
this method to the reading of poems that really mean what they say
(for obviously it could not be applied to poems that do not) would
be that much of the so-called obscurity of poems was created by the
laziness of the plain reader, who wishes to hurry through poetry as
quickly as he does through prose, not realizing that he is dealing
with a kind of thought which, though it may have the speed of prose to
the poet, he must follow with a slowness proportionate to how much he
is not a poet. Indeed, with a just realization of this proportion it
should be possible for the plain reader to read a very difficult poem
without even adding any repetitional lines. Increasing the time-length
of reading is one way of getting out of the prose and into the poetic
state of mind, of developing a capacity for minuteness, for seeing all
there is to see at a given point and for taking it all with one as one
goes along. We have forgotten, however, that the plain reader, while
he does not object to the poetic state of mind in the poet, has a fear
of cultivating it in himself. This is why he prefers the prose summary
to the poem and to see the poem, as it began in the poet’s mind, as a
genial prose idea free of those terrors which the poet is supposed to
keep to himself or carefully disguise. Part of the reader’s reaction
to what he calls the obscurity of certain poems is really his nervous
embarrassment at feeling himself left alone with the meaning of the
poem itself.
But whatever may be the cause of the reader’s embarrassment with the
poem, the important fact is, from the point of view of the poem and the
poet, that the ‘making’ poet does not write because of the demand of
the reader to be fed with poetry but because certain poems demand to be
written and the poet is ‘somebody who is obsessed by Making’. Once the
poems are ‘made’, his personal activity ceases in them. They begin a
life of their own toward which he has no responsibility of advertising
or selling: that they reach the reader at all is an accident, an affair
entirely between them and the reader. This, by the way, is not what
used to be meant by ‘art for art’s sake’. ‘Art for art’s sake’ was as
if a cook should say, “I am employed as a cook, I know, but I am such
a superior cook that what I cook is not to be eaten, it is a purely
esoteric culinary mystery.” The modernist poet will not adopt this
attitude at all, because he will not start with the sense of being an
artist in an official, public-service sense.
The purpose of printing in book-form poetry construed in this private
sense is not to convert it into a selling product but merely to give it
an identity separate from the author’s; and the disinterested anxiety
of poets to get their work printed must be attributed partly to this
desire to see it as a separate life. It is practically impossible for
a poet to read his own poetry intelligently unless separated from
him in some way. The easiest and most obvious way is to have it set
down in print, since his own handwriting is like a physical part of
himself: the printed page acts as a mirror. This explains the mystery
of Shakespeare’s failure to have his plays uniformly printed in his
lifetime: they had become sufficiently externalized by being presented
on the stage. But the process of externalization must be seen to have
two aspects: externalization for the sake of a legitimate vanity in the
poet, a curiosity in him about his own poems; and externalization as a
poet’s duty toward his poem. When both of these aspects are balanced,
the poem has an outward and an inward sincerity. When externalization,
or formalizing, has only what we may call the _printing_ aspect,
which has only to do with the poem as something made by the poet and
read by the reader--a theatrical ‘showing off’ on the part of the poet;
when it means only this and has no _creative_ aspect, then the
more facile the poem is as a printed piece the more insincere it is as
a private, independent poem-person.
In a great deal of traditional poetry the problem of externalizing his
work is an easy one for the poet because there is a whole apparatus
of conventions at his service ready to give it a formal literary
independence of him. But as such conventions (stanza, rhyme, poetical
punctuation, etc.) are really the conventions of the printing, not
of the making, of poetry, this independence is only an artificial
one. Of course there undoubtedly are really independent poems written
in traditional forms, for which such conventions have only meant an
additional guarantee of their individuality. But as these conventions
give an artificial appearance of independence to poems, they are
a constant temptation to people who are not poets to write things
that look like poems and to poets themselves to be lazy, because the
finality of traditional verse-forms can make an incomplete poem seem
complete (‘incomplete’ meaning, of course, “not thoroughly separated
from the poet”). Poetry like this, then, principally composed of
literary conventions, is bound sooner or later to show its shabbiness;
and attempts to smarten it up again only change the old conventions
for new ones instead of striking at the underlying fallacy, that it
is completeness of method that turns out good poems, or technical
indefatigability, rather than an indefatigable obsession for making
until the poem is made.
For if the poet has poems in him they will get themselves made
regardless of the poet’s method of setting them down. No technical
method, whatever its merits, can extract poems where there are no
poems: a method can _seem_ to make, it cannot _make_. The
Imagists, for example, did not make new poems, only a new kind of
stanza which seemed to them more real than traditional stanza-forms
because it was new. When Mr. Cummings says that his ‘poems are
competing with locomotives and roses’ he means that they were made as
real entities, whether mechanical or natural. He does not claim to have
a sure method to be used over and over again in making more and more
poems, but to be irresistibly besieged by poems of even contradictory
natures and of contradictory principles of growth, each with its own
separate method of being made. All that the methodist poet boasts,
however, is a trick for producing things that resemble locomotives or
roses. In constantly repeating his method in poems he is only saying
over and over again that two times two is four. The making poet, on
the other hand, has no method, but a faculty for allowing things to
invent themselves. As he cannot then write a poem unless there is one
to write and is consequently incapable of repeating himself, he is
declaring, with each new poem, a new truth, a complete truth, even a
contradictory truth. He is allowing two times two (or truth) to become
all it is possible for it to be, since truth cannot be reduced to a
fixed mathematical law any more than poetry to a fixed literary method:
two times two, like poetry, may be everything and anything.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Mate or companion.]