Badness in Poetry
Il faut dissiper un malentendu: nous sommes pourris d’art!
_Le Corbusier-Saugnier_.
The theory of badness in poetry has never received the study
which it deserves, partly on account of its difficulty. For with
bad art even more than with good unless we are careful to distinguish
the communicative from the value aspects, even when these are
connected, we shall find the issues obscured. Sometimes art is
bad because communication is defective, the vehicle inoperative;
sometimes because the experience communicated is worthless; sometimes
for both reasons. It would perhaps be best to restrict the term
bad art to cases in which genuine communication does to a considerable
degree take place, what is communicated being worthless, and
to call the other cases defective art. But this is not the usual
practice of critics, any work which produces an experience displeasing
to the critic being commonly called bad, whether or not this
experience is like that responsible for the work.
Let us begin by considering an instance of defective communication;
choosing an example in which it is likely that the original experience
had some value.
THE POOL
Are you alive?
I touch you.
You quiver like a sea-fish.
I cover you with my net.
What are you—banded one?
I take a complete work to avoid possible unfairness. Here we
have the whole of the link which is to mediate between the experiences
of the author and of the reader. Aristotle, in a different connection,
it is true, and for different reasons, affirmed that a work of
art must possess a certain magnitude, and we can adapt his remark
here. Not the brevity only of the vehicle, but its simplicity,
makes it ineffective. The sacrifice of metre in free verse needs,
in almost all cases, to be compensated by length. The loss of
so much of the formal structure leads otherwise to tenuousness
and ambiguity. Even when, as here, the original experience is
presumably slight, tenuous and fleeting, the mere correspondence
of matter to form is insufficient. The experience evoked in the
reader is not sufficiently specific. A poet may, it is true,
make an unlimited demand upon his reader, and the greatest poets
make the greatest claim, but the demand made must be proportional
to the poet’s own contribution. The reader here supplies too
much of the poem. Had the poet said only, “I went and poked about
for rocklings and caught the pool itself”, the reader, who converts
what is printed above into a poem, would still have been able
to construct an experience of equal value; for what results is
almost independent of the author.
To pass to a case in which communication is successful, where
the objection lies to what is communicated:
After the fierce midsummer all ablaze
Has burned itself to ashes and expires
In the intensity of its own fires,
Then come the mellow, mild, St Martin days
Crowned with the calm of peace, but sad with haze.
So after Love has led us, till he tires
Of his own throes and torments, and desires,
Comes large-eyed Friendship: with a restful gaze
He beckons us to follow, and across
Cool, verdant vales we wander free from care.
Is it a touch of frost lies in the air?
Why are we haunted with a sense of loss?
We do not wish the pain back, or the heat;
And yet, and yet, these days are incomplete.
As to the success of the communication there can be no question.
Both the popularity of the author, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, of whose
work this is a favourable specimen, and records of the response
made by well-educated persons, who read it without being aware
of the authorship, leave this beyond doubt. It reproduces the
state of mind of the writer very exactly. With a very numerous
class of readers pleasure and admiration ensue. The explanation
is, probably, in the soothing effect of aligning the very active
Love-Friendship groups of impulses with so settled yet rich a
group as the Summer-Autumn simile brings in. The mind finds for
a moment an attitude in which to contemplate a pair of situations
(Love and Friendship) together, situations which are for many
minds particularly difficult to see together. The heavy regular
rhythm, the dead stamp of the rimes, the obviousness of the descriptions
(‘mellow, mild, St Martin’; ‘cool verdant vales’) their alliteration,
the triteness of the close, all these accentuate the impression
of conclusiveness. The restless spirit is appeased, one of its
chief problems is made to seem as if, regarded from a lofty,
all-embracing standpoint, it is no problem but a process of nature.
This reconciliation, this appeasement, is common to much good
and to much bad poetry alike. But the value of it depends upon
the level of organisation at which it takes place, upon whether
the reconciled impulses are adequate or inadequate. In this case
those who have adequate impulses as regards any of the four main
systems involved, Summer, Autumn, Love, Friendship, are not appeased.
Only for those who make certain conventional, stereotyped maladjustments
instead, does the magic work.
The nature and source of these stock conventional attitudes is
of great interest. Suggestion is very largely responsible for
them. The normal child under the age of ten is probably free
from them, or at least with him they have no fixity or privileged
standing. But as general reflection develops the place of the
free direct play of experience is taken by the deliberate organisation
of attitudes, a clumsy and crude substitute. ‘Ideas’, as they
are commonly called, arise. A boy’s ‘Idea’ of Friendship or of
Summer or of his Country is not, though the name would seem to
imply it, primarily an intellectual affair. It is rather an attitude,
or set of attitudes, of tendencies to act in certain fashions
rather than others. Now reflection, unless very prolonged and
very arduous, tends to fix the attitude by making us dwell in
it, by _removing us from experience_. In the development
of any attitude there are stages, points of rest, of relatively
greater stability. These, as we dwell in them, become more and
more difficult to pass, and it is not surprising that most people
remain all their lives in various halfway houses.
These stages or levels of emotional adjustment seem, for the
most part, to be fixed not by any special suitability to circumstances,
certainly not to present circumstances, but much more by social
suggestion and by accidents which withdraw us from actual experience,
the one force which might push us further. At present bad literature,
bad art, the cinema, etc., are an influence of the first importance
in fixing immature and actually inapplicable attitudes to most
things. Even the decision as to what constitutes a pretty girl
or a handsome young man, an affair apparently natural and personal
enough, is largely determined by magazine covers and movie stars.
The quite common opinion that the arts have after all very little
effect upon the community shows only that too little attention
is being paid to the effects of bad art.
The losses incurred by these artificial fixations of attitudes
are evident. Through them the average adult is worse, not better
adjusted to the possibilities of his existence than the child.
He is even in the most important things functionally unable to
face facts: do what he will he is only able to face fictions,
fictions projected by his own stock responses.
Against these stock responses the artist’s internal and external
conflicts are fought, and with them the popular writer’s triumphs
are made. Any combination of these general Ideas, hit at the
right level or halting point of development, is, if suitably
advertised, certain of success. Best-sellers in all the arts,
exemplifying as they do the most general levels of attitude development,
are worthy of very close study. No theory of criticism is satisfactory
which is not able to explain their wide appeal and to give clear
reasons why those who disdain them are not necessarily snobs.
The critic and the Sales Manager are not ordinarily regarded
as of the same craft, nor are the poet and the advertising agent.
It is true that some serious artists are occasionally tempted
into poster designing. It is, however, doubtful whether their
work pays. But the written appeals which have the soundest financial
prospects as estimated by the most able American advertisers
are such that no critic can safely ignore them. For they do undoubtedly
represent the literary ideals present and future of the people
to whom they are addressed.[67] They are tested in a way which
few other forms of literature are tested, their effects are watched
by adepts whose livelihood depends upon the accuracy of their
judgment, and they are among the best indices available of what
is happening to taste. Criticism will justify itself as an applied,
science when it is able to indicate how an advertisement may
be profitable without necessarily being crass. We shall see later
under what conditions popularity and possible high value are
compatible.
The strongest objection to, let us say, the sonnet we have quoted,
is that a person who enjoys it, through the very organisation
of his responses which enables him to enjoy it, is debarred from
appreciating many things which, if he could appreciate them,
he would prefer. We must not, of course, forget those variations
in psychological efficiency discussed in Chapter XXII as degrees
of vigilance. Even a good critic at a sufficiently low ebb of
neural potency might mistake such a sonnet for one of Shakespeare’s
or with more ease for one of Rossetti’s. But when vigilance was
restored he would see, or at least feel, the differences. The
point is that a reader who, at a high degree of vigilance, thoroughly
enters into and enjoys this class of verse, is necessarily so
organised that he will fail to respond to poetry. Time and much
varied experience might change him sufficiently, but by then
he would no longer be able to enjoy such verse, he would no longer
be the same person.
A general statement such as this about the incompatibility of
inexpressibly complex adjustments must naturally be incapable
of strict proof. Individuals with alternating personalities and
subject to fugues would have to be considered. So would the phenomena
of ‘mutations of regime’ unaccompanied by change of vigilance
if such occur. None the less very much evidence substantiates
the statement. The experience of all those who have passed through
the stages in the development of attitudes presupposed by great
poetry is probably conclusive.
Even though the intricacies of the nervous system should be capable
of getting round this objection, there remain sufficient other
reasons why indulgence in verse of this character should be condemned.
There can be no doubt whatever that the value of the experience
which results from it is small. On a pleasure theory of value
there might well be doubt, since those who do enjoy it certainly
appear to enjoy it in a high degree. But on the theory here maintained,
the fact that those who have passed through the stage of enjoying
the _Poems of Passion_ to that of enjoying the bulk of the
contents of the _Golden Treasury_, for example, do not return,
settles the matter. We must bear in mind, of course, the conditions
which have to be satisfied before this test is conclusive. That
a man who has passed through the stage of drinking nothing but
beer to the stage of drinking nothing but brandy rarely returns,
does not prove that brandy is the better drink. It merely proves
that it is the more efficient intoxicant. We have to ask in applying
the test what the responses in question are, and in the case
of poetry they are so varied, so representative of all the activities
of life, that actual universal preference on the part of those
who have tried both kinds fairly is the same (on our view) as
superiority in value of the one over the other. Keats, by universal
qualified opinion, is a more efficient poet than Wilcox, and
that is the same thing as saying that his works are more valuable.
[67] A specimen: “The thoughtful man, the man on business bent,
wends his way to Wembley with definite purpose. He seeketh knowledge,
desireth increase of commerce or willeth to study new epoch-making
inventions.”—_Official Advertisement_.