ON
ENGLISH POETRY
_POEMS BY ROBERT GRAVES_
FAIRIES AND FUSILEERS [1918]
COUNTRY SETTLEMENT [1920]
THE PIER-GLASS [1921]
ON ENGLISH POETRY
_Being an Irregular Approach to the Psychology
of This Art, from Evidence Mainly Subjective_
BY ROBERT GRAVES
[Illustration: colophon]
NEW YORK ALFRED·A·KNOPF MCMXXII
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
_Published, May, 1922_
_Set up and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y. Paper
furnished by Henry Lindenmeyr & Sons, New York, N. Y. Bound by the
H. Wolff Estate, New York, N. Y._
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_To T. E. Lawrence of Arabia and All Soul’s College, Oxford, and to
W. H. R. Rivers of the Solomon Islands and St. John’s College,
Cambridge, my gratitude for valuable critical help, and the
dedication of this book._
... Also of the Mustarde Tarte: Suche
problemis to paynt, it longyth to his arte.
JOHN SKELTON.
Poetry subdues to union under its light yoke
all irreconcilable things.
P. B. SHELLEY.
NOTE
The greater part of this book will appear controversial, but any critic
who expects me to argue on what I have written, is begged kindly to
excuse me; my garrison is withdrawn without a shot fired and his
artillery may blow the fortress to pieces at leisure. These notebook
reflections are only offered as being based on the rules which regulate
my own work at the moment, for many of which I claim no universal
application and have promised no lasting regard. They have been
suggested from time to time mostly by particular problems in the writing
of my last two volumes of poetry. Hesitating to formulate at present a
comprehensive water-tight philosophy of poetry, I have dispensed with a
continuous argument, and so the sections either stand independently or
are intended to get their force by suggestive neighbourliness rather
than by logical catenation. The names of the glass houses in which my
name as an authority on poetry lodges at present, are to be found on a
back page.
It is a heartbreaking task to reconcile literary and scientific
interests in the same book. Literary enthusiasts seem to regard poetry
as something miraculous, something which it is almost blasphemous to
analyse, witness the outcry against R. L. Stevenson when he merely
underlined examples of Shakespeare’s wonderful dexterity in the
manipulation of consonants; most scientists on the other hand, being
either benevolently contemptuous of poetry, or if interested,
insensitive to the emotional quality of words and their associative
subtleties, themselves use words as weights and counters rather than as
chemicals powerful in combination and have written, if at all, so
boorishly about poetry that the breach has been actually widened. If any
false scientific assumptions or any bad literary blunders I have made,
be held up for popular execration, these may yet act as decoys to the
truth which I am anxious to buy even at the price of a snubbing; and
where in many cases no trouble has apparently been taken to check
over-statements, there is this excuse to offer, that when putting a cat
among pigeons it is always advisable to make it as large a cat as
possible.
R. G.
Islip,
Oxford.
CONTENTS
I DEFINITIONS, 13
II THE NINE MUSES, 15
III POETRY AND PRIMITIVE MAGIC, 19
IV CONFLICT OF EMOTIONS, 22
V THE PATTERN UNDERNEATH, 24
VI INSPIRATION, 26
VII THE PARABLE OF MR. POETA AND MR. LECTOR, 27
VIII THE CARPENTER’S SON, 31
IX THE GADDING VINE, 33
X THE DEAD END AND THE MAN OF ONE POEM, 36
XI SPENSER’S CUFFS, 38
XII CONNECTION OF POETRY AND HUMOUR, 40
XIII DICTION, 41
XIV THE DAFFODILS, 42
XV VERS LIBRE, 45
XVI MOVING MOUNTAINS, 50
XVII LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI, 50
XVIII THE GENERAL ELLIOTT, 55
XIX THE GOD CALLED POETRY, 62
XX LOGICALIZATION, 66
XXI LIMITATIONS, 69
XXII THE NAUGHTY BOY, 71
XXIII THE CLASSICAL AND ROMANTIC IDEAS, 72
XXIV COLOUR, 76
XXV PUTTY, 78
XXVI READING ALOUD, 81
XXVII L’ARTE DELLA PITTURA, 82
XXVIII ON WRITING MUSICALLY, 83
XXIX THE USE OF POETRY, 84
XXX HISTORIES OF POETRY, 86
XXXI THE BOWL MARKED DOG, 87
XXXII THE ANALYTIC SPIRIT, 88
XXXIII RHYME AND ALLITERATION, 89
XXXIV AN AWKWARD FELLOW CALLED ARIPHRADES, 90
XXXV IMPROVISING NEW CONVENTIONS, 92
XXXVI WHEN IN DOUBT..., 93
XXXVII THE EDITOR WITH THE MUCKRAKE, 94
XXXVIII THE MORAL QUESTION, 94
XXXIX THE POET AS OUTSIDER, 96
XL A POLITE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT, 97
XLI FAKE POETRY, BAD POETRY AND MERE VERSE, 97
XLII A DIALOGUE ON FAKE POETRY, 101
XLIII ASKING ADVICE, 102
XLIV SURFACE FAULTS, AN ILLUSTRATION, 103
XLV LINKED SWEETNESS LONG DRAWN OUT, 106
XLVI THE FABLE OF THE IDEAL GADGET, 108
XLVII SEQUELS ARE BARRED, 111
XLVIII TOM FOOL, 111
XLIX CROSS RHYTHM AND RESOLUTION, 113
L MY NAME IS LEGION, FOR WE ARE MANY, 116
LI THE PIG BABY, 121
LII APOLOGY FOR DEFINITIONS, 122
LIII TIMES AND SEASONS, 124
LIV TWO HERESIES, 125
LV THE ART OF EXPRESSION, 126
LVI GHOSTS IN THE SHELDONIAN, 129
LVII THE LAYING-ON OF HANDS, 130
LVIII WAYS AND MEANS, 132
LIX POETRY AS LABOUR, 134
LX THE NECESSITY OF ARROGANCE, 134
LXI IN PROCESSION, 137
APPENDIX: THE DANGERS OF DEFINITION, 143
I
DEFINITIONS
There are two meanings of Poetry as the poet himself has come to use the
word:--first, Poetry, the unforeseen fusion in his mind of apparently
contradictory emotional ideas; and second, Poetry, the more-or-less
deliberate attempt, with the help of a rhythmic mesmerism, to impose an
illusion of actual experience on the minds of others. In its first and
peculiar sense it is the surprise that comes after thoughtlessly rubbing
a mental Aladdin’s lamp, and I would suggest that every poem worthy of
the name has its central idea, its nucleus, formed by this spontaneous
process; later it becomes the duty of the poet as craftsman to present
this nucleus in the most effective way possible, by practising poetry
more consciously as an art. He creates in passion, then by a reverse
process of analyzing, he tests the implied suggestions and corrects them
on common-sense principles so as to make them apply universally.
Before elaborating the idea of this spontaneous Poetry over which the
poet has no direct control, it would be convenient to show what I mean
by the Poetry over which he has a certain conscious control, by
contrasting its method with the method of standard Prose. Prose in its
most prosy form seems to be the art of accurate statement by suppressing
as far as possible the latent associations of words; for the convenience
of his readers the standard prose-writer uses an accurate logical
phrasing in which perhaps the periods and the diction vary with the
emotional mood; but he only says what he appears at first to say. In
Poetry the implication is more important than the manifest statement;
the underlying associations of every word are marshalled carefully. Many
of the best English poets have found great difficulty in writing
standard prose; this is due I suppose to a sort of tender-heartedness,
for standard prose-writing seems to the poet very much like turning the
machine guns on an innocent crowd of his own work people.
Certainly there is a hybrid form, prose poetry, in which poets have
excelled, a perfectly legitimate medium, but one that must be kept
distinct from both its parent elements. It employs the indirect method
of poetic suggestion, the flanking movement rather than the frontal
attack, but like Prose, does not trouble to keep rhythmic control over
the reader. This constant control seems an essential part of Poetry
proper. But to expect it in prose poetry is to be disappointed; we may
take an analogy from the wilder sort of music where if there is
continual changing of time and key, the listener often does not “catch
on” to each new idiom, so that he is momentarily confused by the changes
and the unity of the whole musical form is thereby broken for him. So
exactly in prose poetry. In poetry proper our delight is in the
emotional variations from a clearly indicated norm of rhythm and
sound-texture; but in prose poetry there is no recognizable norm. Where
in some notable passages (of the Authorised Version of the Bible for
instance) usually called prose poetry, one does find complete rhythmic
control even though the pattern is constantly changing, this is no
longer prose poetry, it is poetry, not at all the worse for its
intricate rhythmic resolutions. Popular confusion as to the various
properties and qualities of Poetry, prose poetry, verse, prose, with
their subcategories of good, bad and imitation, has probably been caused
by the inequality of the writing in works popularly regarded as
Classics, and made taboo for criticism. There are few “masterpieces of
poetry” that do not occasionally sink to verse, many disregarded
passages of Prose that are often prose poetry and sometimes even poetry
itself.
II
THE NINE MUSES
I suppose that when old ladies remark with a breathless wonder “My dear,
he has _more_ than _mere talent_, I am convinced he has a _touch of
genius_” they are differentiating between the two parts of poetry given
at the beginning of the last section, between the man who shows a
remarkable aptitude for conjuring and the man actually also in league
with the powers of magic. The weakness of originally unspontaneous
poetry seems to be that the poet has only the very small conscious part
of his experience to draw upon, and therefore in co-ordinating the
central images, his range of selection is narrower and the links are
only on the surface. On the other hand, spontaneous poetry untested by
conscious analysis has the opposite weakness of being liable to surface
faults and unintelligible thought-connections. Poetry composed in sleep
is a good instance of the sort I mean. The rhymes are generally
inaccurate, the texture clumsy, there is a tendency to use the same
words close together in different senses, and the thought-connections
are so free as to puzzle the author himself when he wakes. A scrap of
dream poetry sticks in my mind since my early schooldays:
“It’s Henry the VIII!
It’s Henry the VIII!
I know him by the smile on his face
He is leading his armies over to France.
Here _eighth_ and _face_ seemed perfect rhymes, to the sleeping ear, the
spirit was magnificent, the implications astonishing; but the waking
poet was forced to laugh. I believe that in the first draft of
Coleridge’s _Kubla Khan_, _Abora_ was the rhyme for _Dulcimer_, as:--
“A damsel with a dulcimer
Singing of Mount Abora”
because “saw” seems too self-conscious an assonance and too far removed
from “Abora” to impress us as having been part of the original dream
poem. “Could I revive within me” again is surely written in a waking
mood, probably after the disastrous visit of the man from Porlock.
Henceforward, in using the word _Poetry_ I mean both the controlled and
uncontrollable parts of the art taken together, because each is helpless
without the other. And I do not wish to limit Poetry, as there is a new
tendency to do, merely to the short dramatic poem, the ballad and the
lyric, though it certainly is a convenience not to take these as the
normal manifestations of Poetry in order to see more clearly the
inter-relation of such different forms as the Drama, the Epic, and the
song with music. In the Drama, the emotional conflict which is the whole
cause and meaning of Poetry is concentrated in the mental problems of
the leading character or characters. They have to choose for instance
between doing what they think is right and the suffering or contempt
which is the penalty, between the gratification of love and the fear of
hurting the person they love, or similar dilemmas. The lesser actors in
the drama do not themselves necessarily speak the language of poetry or
have any question in their minds as to the course they should pursue;
still, by throwing their weight into one scale or another they affect
the actions of the principals and so contribute to the poetry of the
play. It is only the master dramatist who ever attempts to develop
subsidiary characters in sympathy with the principals.
The true Epic appears to me as an organic growth of dramatic scenes,
presented in verse which only becomes true poetry on occasion; but these
scenes are so placed in conflicting relation that between them they
compose a central theme of Poetry not to be found in the detachable
parts, and this theme is a study of the interactions of the ethical
principles of opposing tribes or groups. In the Iliad, for instance, the
conflict is not only between the Trojan and Greek ideas, but between
groups in each camp. In the Odyssey it is between the ethics of
sea-wandering and the ethics of the dwellers on dry land. I would be
inclined to deny the _Beowulf_ as an epic, describing it instead as a
personal allegory in epical surroundings. The Canterbury Tales are much
nearer to an English Epic, the interacting principles being an imported
Eastern religion disguised in Southern dress and a ruder, more vigorous
Northern spirit unsubdued even when on pilgrimage.
The words of a song do not necessarily show in themselves the emotional
conflict which I regard as essential for poetry, but that is because the
song is definitely a compound of words and music, and the poetry lies in
this relation. Words for another man’s music can hardly have a very
lively independent existence, yet with music they must combine to a
powerful chemical action; to write a lyric to conflict with imaginary
music is the most exacting art imaginable, and is rather like trying to
solve an equation in _x_, _y_ and _z_, given only _x_.
I wonder if there are as many genuine Muses as the traditional nine; I
cannot help thinking that one or two of them have been counted twice
over. But the point of this section is to show the strong family
likeness between three or four of them at least.
III
POETRY AND PRIMITIVE MAGIC
One may think of Poetry as being like Religion, a modified descendant of
primitive Magic; it keeps the family characteristic of stirring wonder
by creating from unpromising lifeless materials an illusion of
unexpected passionate life. The poet, a highly developed witch doctor,
does not specialize in calling up at set times some one particular minor
divinity, that of Fear or Lust, of War or Family Affection; he plays on
all the emotions and serves as comprehensive and universal a God as he
can conceive. There is evidence for explaining the origin of poetry as I
have defined it, thus:--Primitive man was much troubled by the
phenomenon of dreams, and early discovered what scientists are only just
beginning to acknowledge, that the recollection of dreams is of great
use in solving problems of uncertainty; there is always a secondary
meaning behind our most fantastic nightmares. Members of a primitive
society would solemnly recount their dreams to the wise ones of the clan
and ask them to draw an inference. Soon it happened that, in cases of
doubt, where the dream was forgotten and could not be recalled, or where
it was felt that a dream was needed to confirm or reverse a decision,
the peculiarly gifted witch doctor or priestess would induce a sort of
self-hypnotism, and in the light of the dream so dreamed, utter an
oracle which contained an answer to the problem proposed. The compelling
use of rhythm to hold people’s attention and to make them beat their
feet in time, was known, and the witch doctor seems to have combined the
rhythmic beat of a drum or gong with the recital of his dream. In these
rhythmic dream utterances, intoxicating a primitive community to
sympathetic emotional action for a particular purpose of which I will
treat later, Poetry, in my opinion, originated, and the dream symbolism
of Poetry was further encouraged by the restrictions of the _taboo_,
which made definite reference to certain people, gods and objects,
unlucky.
This is not to say that verse-recital of laws or adventures or history
did not possibly come before oracular poetry, and whoever it was who
found it convenient that his word stresses should correspond with beat
of drum or stamp of feet, thereby originated the rhythm that is common
both to verse and to poetry. Verse is not necessarily degenerate poetry;
rhymed advertisement and the _memoria technica_ have kept up the honest
tradition of many centuries; witty verse with no poetical pretensions
justifies its existence a hundred times over; even the Limerick can
become delightful in naughty hands; but where poetry differs from other
verse is by being essentially a solution to some pressing emotional
problem and has always the oracular note.
Between verse, bad poetry and fake poetry, there is a great distinction.
Bad poetry is simply the work of a man who solves his emotional problems
to his own satisfaction but not to anybody else’s. Fake poetry, the
decay of poetry, corresponds exactly with fake magic, the decay of true
magic. It happens that some member of the priestly caste, finding it
impossible to go into a trance when required, even with the aid of
intoxicants, has to resort to subterfuge. He imitates a state of trance,
recalls some one else’s dream which he alters slightly, and wraps his
oracular answer in words recollected from the lips of genuine witch
doctors. He takes care to put his implied meaning well to the fore and
the applicants give him payment and go away as well pleased with their
money’s worth as the readers of Tupper, Montgomery and Wilcox with the
comfortable verses supplied them under the trade name of “Poetry.”
Acrostics and other verses of _wit_ have, I believe, much the same
ancestry in the ingenious _double entendres_ with which the harassed
priestesses of Delphi insured against a wrong guess.
IV
CONFLICT OF EMOTIONS
The suggestion that an emotional conflict is necessary for the birth of
true poetry will perhaps not be accepted without illustrative instances.
But one need only take any of the most famous lines from Elizabethan
drama, those generally acknowledged as being the most essential poetry,
and a battle of the great emotions, faith, hope or love against fear,
grief or hate, will certainly appear; though one side may indeed be
fighting a hopeless battle.
When Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is waiting for the clock to strike twelve
and the Devil to exact his debt, he cries out:
That Time may cease and midnight never come
_O lente, lente currite noctis equi_.
Scholastic commentators have actually been found to wonder at the
“inappropriateness” of “Go slowly, slowly, coursers of the night,” a
quotation originally spoken by an Ovidian lover with his arms around the
mistress from whom he must part at dawn. They do not even note it as
marking the distance the scholar Faustus has travelled since his first
dry-boned Latin quotation _Bene disserere est finis logices_ which he
pedantically translates:
Is, to dispute well, Logicke’s chiefest end.
Far less do they see how Marlowe has made the lust of life, in its
hopeless struggle against the devils coming to bind it for the eternal
bonfire, tragically unable to find any better expression than this
feeble over-sweetness; so that there follows with even greater
insistence of fate:--
The starres moove stil, time runs, the clocke wil strike,
The divel wil come and Faustus must be damnd.
When Lady Macbeth, sleep-walking, complains that “all the perfumes of
Arabia will not sweeten this little hand,” these perfumes are not merely
typically sweet smells to drown the reek of blood. They represent also
her ambitions for the luxury of a Queen, and the conflict of luxurious
ambition against fate and damnation is as one-sided as before. Or take
Webster’s most famous line in his Duchess of Malfi:
Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young,
spoken by Ferdinand over the Duchess’ body; and that word “dazzle” does
duty for two emotions at once, sun-dazzled awe at loveliness,
tear-dazzled grief for early death.
The effect of these distractions of mind is so often an appeal to our
pity, even for the murderers or for the man who has had his fill of
“vaine pleasure for 24 yeares” that to rouse this pity has been taken,
wrongly, I think, as the chief end of poetry. Poetry is not always
tragedy; and there is no pity stirred by Captain Tobias Hume’s love song
“Faine would I change this note, To which false love has charmed me,” or
in Andrew Marvell’s Mower’s address to the glow-worms:
Ye country comets that portend
No war nor prince’s funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grass’s fall.
There is no pity either for Hume’s lover who suddenly discovers that he
has been making a sad song about nothing, or for Marvell’s glow-worms
and their rusticity and slightness of aim. In the first case Love stands
up in its glory against the feeble whining of minor poets; in the
second, thoughts of terror and majesty, the heavens themselves blazing
forth the death of princes, conflict ineffectually with security and
peace, the evening glow-worm prophesying fair weather for mowing next
morning, and meanwhile lighting rustic lovers to their tryst.
V
THE PATTERN UNDERNEATH
The power of surprise which marks all true poetry, seems to result from
a foreknowledge of certain unwitting processes of the reader’s mind, for
which the poet more or less deliberately provides. The underlying
associations of each word in a poem form close combinations of emotion
unexpressed by the bare verbal pattern.
In this way the poet may be compared with a father piecing together a
picture-block puzzle for his children. He surprises them at last by
turning over the completed picture, and showing them that by the act of
assembling the scattered parts of “Red Riding Hood with the Basket of
Food” he has all the while been building up unnoticed underneath another
scene of the tragedy--“The Wolf eating the Grandmother.”
The analogy can be more closely pressed; careless arrangement of the
less important pieces or wilfully decorative borrowing from another
picture altogether may look very well in the upper scene, but what
confusion below!
The possibilities of this pattern underneath have been recognized and
exploited for centuries in Far Eastern systems of poetry. I once even
heard an English Orientalist declare that Chinese was the only language
in which true poetry could be written, because of the undercurrents of
allusion contained in every word of the Chinese language. It never
occurred to him that the same thing might be unrecognizedly true also of
English words.
VI
“INSPIRATION”
People are always enquiring how exactly poets get their “inspiration,”
perhaps in the hope that it may happen to themselves one day and that if
they know the signs in advance, something profitable may come of it.
It is a difficult conundrum, but I should answer somehow like this:--The
poet is consciously or unconsciously always either taking in or giving
out; he hears, observes, weighs, guesses, condenses, idealizes, and the
new ideas troop quietly into his mind until suddenly every now and again
two of them violently quarrel and drag into the fight a group of other
ideas that have been loitering about at the back of his mind for years;
there is great excitement, noise and bloodshed, with finally a
reconciliation and drinks all round. The poet writes a tactful police
report on the affair and there is the poem.
Or, to put it in a more sober form:--
When conflicting issues disturb his mind, which in its conscious state
is unable to reconcile them logically, the poet acquires the habit of
self-hypnotism, as practised by the witch doctors, his ancestors in
poetry.
He learns in self-protection to take pen and paper and let the pen solve
the hitherto insoluble problem which has caused the disturbance.
I speak of this process of composition as self-hypnotism because on
being interrupted the poet experiences the disagreeable sensations of a
sleep-walker disturbed, and later finds it impossible to remember how
the early drafts of a poem ran, though he may recall every word of a
version which finally satisfied his conscious scrutiny. Confronted
afterwards with the very first draft of the series he cannot in many
cases decipher his own writing, far less recollect the process of
thought which made him erase this word and substitute that. Many poets
of my acquaintance have corroborated what I have just said and also
observed that on laying down their pens after the first excitement of
composition they feel the same sort of surprise that a man finds on
waking from a “fugue,” they discover that they have done a piece of work
of which they never suspected they were capable; but at the same moment
they discover a number of trifling surface defects which were invisible
before.
VII
THE PARABLE OF MR. POETA AND MR. LECTOR
Mr. Poeta was a child of impulse, and though not really a very careful
student of Chaucer himself, was incensed one day at reading a literary
article by an old schoolfellow called Lector, patronizing the poet in an
impudent way and showing at the same time a great ignorance of his best
work. But instead of taking the more direct and prosaic course of
writing a letter of protest to the review which printed the article, or
of directly giving the author a piece of his mind, he improvised a
complicated plot for the young man’s correction.
On the following day he invited Mr. Lector to supper at his home and
spent a busy morning making preparations. He draped the dining-room
walls with crape, took up the carpet, and removed all the furniture
except the table and two massive chairs which were finally drawn up to a
meal of bread, cheese and water. When supper-time arrived and with it
Mr. Lector, Mr. Poeta was discovered sitting in deep dejection in a
window seat with his face buried in his hands; he would not notice his
guest’s arrival for a full minute. Mr. Lector, embarrassed by the
strangeness of his reception (for getting no answer to his knock at the
door he had forced his way in), was now definitely alarmed by Mr.
Poeta’s nervous gestures, desultory conversation and his staring eyes
perpetually turning to a great rusty scimitar hanging on a nail above
the mantelpiece. There was no attendance, nor any knife or plate on the
board. The bread was stale, the cheese hard, and no sooner had Mr.
Lector raised a glass of water to his lips than his host dashed it from
his hands and with a bellow of rage sprang across the table. Mr. Lector,
saw him seize the scimitar and flourish it around his head, so for want
of any weapon of defence, the unfortunate young man reacted to
terror-stricken flight. He darted from the room and heard the blade
whistle through the air behind him.
Out of an open window he jumped and into a small enclosed yard; with the
help of a handy rainwater tub he climbed the opposite wall, then dashed
down a pathway through a shrubbery and finding the front door of a
deserted cottage standing open, rushed in and upstairs, then
breathlessly flinging into an empty room at the stairhead, slammed the
door.
By so slamming the door he had locked it and on recovering his presence
of mind found himself a close prisoner, for the only window was stoutly
barred and the door lock was too massive to break. Here then, he stayed
in confinement for three days, suffering severely until released by an
accomplice of Mr. Poeta, who affected to be much surprised at finding
him there and even threatened an action for trespass. But cold, hungry
and thirsty, Mr. Lector had still had for companion in his misery a
coverless copy of Chaucer which he found lying in the grate and which he
read through from beginning to end with great enjoyment, thereupon
reconsidering his previous estimate of the poet’s greatness.
But he never realized that every step he had taken had been
predetermined by the supposed maniac and that once frightened off his
balance, he had reacted according to plan. Mr. Poeta did not need to
pursue him over the wall or even to go any further than the dining-room
door; he counted on the all-or-none principle of reaction to danger
finishing the job for him. So out at the window went Mr. Lector and
every recourse offered for escape he accepted unquestioningly. Mr. Poeta
knew well enough that Mr. Lector would eventually treasure that copy of
Chaucer prepared for him, as a souvenir of his terrible experience, that
he would have it rebound and adopt the poet as a “discovery” of his own.
The reader in interpreting this parable, must not make too close a
comparison of motives; the process is all that is intended to show. The
poet, once emotion has suggested a scheme of work, goes over the ground
with minute care and makes everything sure, so that when his poem is
presented to the reader, the latter is thrown off his balance
temporarily by the novelty of the ideas involved. He has no critical
weapons at his command, so he must follow the course which the poet has
mapped out for him. He is carried away in spite of himself and though
the actual words do not in themselves express all the meaning which the
poet manages to convey (Mr. Poeta, as has been said, did not pursue) yet
the reader on recovering from the first excitement finds the implied
conclusion laid for him to discover, and flattering himself that he has
reached it independently, finally carries it off as his own. Even where
a conclusion is definitely expressed in a poem the reader often deceives
himself into saying, “I have often thought that before, but never so
clearly,” when as a matter of fact he has just been unconsciously
translating the poet’s experience into terms of his own, and finding the
formulated conclusion sound, imagines that the thought is originally
his.
VIII
THE CARPENTER’S SON
Fables and analogies serve very well instead of the psychological jargon
that would otherwise have to be used in a discussion of the poet’s
mental clockwork, but they must be supported wherever possible by
definite instances, chapter and verse. An example is therefore owed of
how easily and completely the poet can deceive his readers once he has
assumed control of their imagination, hypnotizing them into a receptive
state by indirect sensuous suggestions and by subtle variations of
verse-melody; which hypnotism, by the way, I regard as having a physical
rather than a mental effect and being identical with the rhythmic
hypnotism to which such animals as snakes, elephants or apes are easily
subject.
Turn then to Mr. Housman’s classic sequence “A Shropshire Lad,” to No.
XLVII “The Carpenter’s Son,” beginning, “Here the hangman stops his
cart.” Ask any Housman enthusiasts (they are happily many) how long it
took them to realize what the poet is forcing on them there. In nine
cases out of ten where this test is applied, it will be found that the
lyric has never been consciously recognized as an Apocryphal account of
the Crucifixion; and even those who have consciously recognized the
clues offered have failed to formulate consciously the further daring
(some would say blasphemous) implications of its position after the last
three pieces “Shot, lad? So quick, so clean an ending,” “If it chance
your eye offend you” and the momentary relief of “Bring in this timeless
grave to throw.”
Among Jubilee bonfires; village sports of running, cricket, football; a
rustic murder; the London and North Western Railway; the Shropshire
Light Infantry; ploughs; lovers on stiles or in long grass; the ringing
of church bells; and then this suicide by shooting, no reader is
prepared for the appearance of the historic Son of Sorrow. The poet has
only to call the Cross a gallows-tree and make the Crucified call His
disciples “Lads” instead of “My Brethren” or “Children,” and we are
completely deceived.
In our almost certain failure to recognize Him in this context lies, I
believe, the intended irony of the poem which is strewn with the
plainest scriptural allusions.
In justification of the above and of my deductions about “La Belle Dame
sans Merci” in a later section I plead the rule that “Poetry contains
nothing haphazard,” which follows naturally on the theory connecting
poetry with dreams. By this rule I mean that if a poem, poem-sequence or
drama is an allegory of genuine emotional experience and not a mere
cold-blooded exercise, no striking detail and no juxtaposition of
apparently irrelevant themes which it contains can be denied at any rate
a personal significance--a cypher that can usually be decoded from
another context.
IX
THE GADDING VINE
When we say that a poet is born not made, it is saying something much
more, that Poetry is essentially spontaneous in origin, and that very
little of it can therefore be taught on a blackboard; it means that a
man is not a poet unless there is some peculiar event in his family
history to account for him. It means to me that with the apparent
exceptions given in the next section, the poet, like his poetry, is
himself the result of the fusion of incongruous forces. Marriages
between people of conflicting philosophies of life, widely separated
nationalities or (most important) different emotional processes, are
likely either to result in children hopelessly struggling with
inhibitions or to develop in them a central authority of great resource
and most quick witted at compromise. Early influences, other than
parental, stimulate the same process. The mind of a poet is like an
international conference composed of delegates of both sexes and every
shade of political thought, which is trying to decide on a series of
problems of which the chairman has himself little previous
knowledge--yet this chairman, this central authority, will somehow
contrive to sign a report embodying the specialized knowledge and
reconciling the apparently hopeless disagreements of all factions
concerned. These factions can be called, for convenience, the poet’s
sub-personalities.
It is obviously impossible to analyze with accuracy the various elements
that once combined to make a phrase in the mind of a poet long dead, but
for the sake of illustration here is a fanciful reconstruction of the
clash of ideas that gave us Milton’s often quoted “Gadding Vine.” The
words, to me, represent an encounter between the poet’s
sub-personalities “B” and “C.” Says “B”:--
“What a gentle placid fruitful plant the vine is; I am thinking of
putting it in one of my speeches as emblem of the kindly weakness of the
Vegetables.”
C replies very tartly:--
“Gentle placid fruitful fiddle-sticks! Why, my good friend, think of the
colossal explosive force required to thrust up that vast structure from
a tiny seed buried inches deep in the earth; against the force of
gravity too, and against very heavy winds. Placidity! Look at its leaves
tossing about and its greedy tendrils swaying in search of something to
attack. Vegetable indeed! It’s mobile, it’s vicious, it’s more like a
swarm of gad-flies.” B continues obstinate, saying “I never heard such
nonsense. A vine is still a vine, in spite of your paradoxes.”
“Anyhow, the juice of the vine makes you gad about pretty lively,
sometimes,” says C.
“Grapes are the conventional fruit for the sick-room,” retorts B.
“Well, what did the Greeks think about it?” pursues C. “Wasn’t Dionysos
the god of the Vine? He didn’t stop rooted all his life in some
miserable little Greek valley. He went gadding off to India and brought
back tigers.”
“If you are going to appeal to the poets,” returns B, “you can’t
disregard the position of the vine in decorative art. It has been
conventionalized into the most static design you can find, after the
lotus. When I say _Vine_, that’s quite enough for me, just V for
vegetable.”
They are interrupted by A the master spirit who says with authority:--
“Silence, the two of you! I rule a compromise. Call it a “gadding vine”
and have done with it.”
* * * * *
The converse of the proposition stated at the beginning of this section,
namely that every one who has the sort of family history mentioned above
and is not the prey of inhibitions, will become a poet, is certainly not
intended. Poetry is only one outlet for peculiar individual expression;
there are also the other arts, with politics, generalship, philosophy,
and imaginative business; or merely rhetoric, fantastic jokes and
original swearing--
X
THE DEAD END AND THE MAN OF ONE POEM
The question of why Poets suddenly seem to come to a dead end and stop
writing true Poetry, is one that has always perplexed literary critics,
and the poets themselves still more. The explanation will probably be
found in two causes.
In the first case the poet’s preoccupation with the clash of his
emotions has been transmuted into a calmer state of meditation on
philosophic paradox: but poetry being, by accepted definition, sensuous
and passionate is no vehicle of expression for this state. Impersonal
concepts can perhaps be expressed in intellectual music, but in poetry
the musical rhythm and word-texture are linked with a sensuous imagery
too gross for the plane of philosophic thought. Thus dithyramb, by which
I mean the essentially musical treatment of poetry in defiance of the
sense of the words used, is hardly a more satisfactory medium than
metaphysical verse: in which even a lyrical sugar-coating to the pill
cannot induce the childish mood of poetry to accept philosophic
statements removed beyond the plane of pictorial allegory.
In the second case the conflict of the poet’s subpersonalities has been
finally settled, by some satisfaction of desire or removal of a cause of
fear, in the complete rout of the opposing parties, and the victors
dictate their own laws, uncontradicted, in legal prose or (from habit)
in verse.
Distinction ought to be drawn between the poet and the man who has
written poetry. There are certainly men of only one poem, a James
Clarence Mangan, a Christopher Smart, a Julian Grenfell (these are
instances more convenient than accurate) who may be explained either as
born poets, tortured with a lifelong mental conflict, though able
perhaps only once in their life to “go under” to their own
self-hypnotism, or as not naturally poets at all but men who write to
express a sudden intolerable clamour in their brain; this is when
circumstances have momentarily alienated the usually happy members of
their mental family, but once the expression has brought reconciliation,
there is no further need of poetry, and the poet born out of due time,
ceases to be.
This temporary writing of poetry by normal single-track minds is most
common in youth when the sudden realization of sex, its powers and its
limited opportunities for satisfactory expression, turns the world
upside down for any sensitive boy or girl. Wartime has the same sort of
effect. I have definite evidence for saying that much of the
trench-poetry written during the late war was the work of men not
otherwise poetically inclined, and that it was very frequently due to an
insupportable conflict between suppressed instincts of love and fear;
the officer’s actual love which he could never openly show, for the boys
he commanded, and the fear, also hidden under a forced gaiety, of the
horrible death that threatened them all.
XI
SPENSER’S CUFFS
The poet’s quarrelsome lesser personalities to which I have referred are
divided into camps by the distinction of sex. But in a poet the dominant
spirit is male and though usually a feminist in sympathy, cannot afford
to favour the women at the expense of his own sex. This amplifies my
distrust of poets with floppy hats, long hair, extravagant clothes and
inverted tendencies. Apollo never to my knowledge appears in Greek art
as a Hermaphrodite, and the Greeks understood such problems far better
than we do. I know it is usual to defend these extravagances of dress by
glorifying the Elizabethan age; but let it be remembered that Edmund
Spenser himself wore “short hair, little bands and little cuffs.”
If there is no definite sexual inversion to account for breaking out in
fancy dress, a poet who is any good at all ought not to feel the need of
advertising his profession in this way. As I understand the poet’s
nature, though he tries to dress as conventionally as possible, he will
always prove too strong for his clothes and look completely ridiculous
or very magnificent according to the occasion.
This matter of dress may seem unimportant, but people are still so shy
of acknowledging the poet in his lifetime as a gifted human being who
may have something important to say, that any dressing up or unnecessary
strutting does a great deal of harm.
I am convinced that this extravagant dressing up tendency, like the
allied tendency to unkemptness, is only another of the many forms in
which the capricious child spirit which rules our most emotional dreams
is trying also to dominate the critical, diligent, constructive
man-spirit of waking life, without which the poet is lost beyond
recovery. Shelley was a great poet not because he enjoyed sailing paper
boats on the Serpentine but because, in spite of this infantile
preference he had schooled his mind to hard thinking on the
philosophical and political questions of the day and had made friends
among men of intellect and sophistication.
It is from considerations rather similar to these that I have given this
book a plain heading and restrained my fancy from elaborating a gay
seventeenth-century title or sub-title:--“A Broad-side from Parnassus,”
“The Mustard Tart,” “Pebbles to Crack Your Teeth,” or “Have at you,
Professor Gargoyle!” But I am afraid that extravagance has broken down
my determination to write soberly, on almost every page. And ... no, the
question of the psychology of poetesses is too big for these covers and
too thorny in argument. When psycho-analysis has provided more evidence
on the difference between the symbolism of women’s dreams and men’s,
there will be something to say worth saying. Meanwhile it can only be
offered as a strong impression that the dreams of normally-sexed women
are, by comparison with those of normally-sexed men, almost always of
the same simple and self-centred nature as their poetry and their
humour.
XII
CONNECTION OF POETRY AND HUMOUR
It was no accident that gave Chaucer, Shakespeare and Keats a very sly
sense of humour, because humour is surely only another product of the
same process that makes poetry and poets--the reconciliation of
incongruities.
When, for instance, Chaucer says that one of his Canterbury characters
could trip and dance “after the schole of Oxenforde” he is saying two
things:--
I. That Absalom thought he could dance well.
II. That the professors of the University of Oxford are hardly the
people from whom one would expect the most likely instruction in
that art,
and to point the joke he adds to “trip and dance” the absurd “and with
his legges casten to and fro.” A sympathetic grin, as poets and other
conjurors know, is the best possible bridge for a successful illusion.
Coleridge was the first writer, so far as I know, to see the connection
between poetry and humour, but his argument which uses the Irish Bull “I
was a fine child but they changed me” to prove the analogy, trails off
disappointingly.
XIII
DICTION
Ideally speaking, there is no especially poetic range of subjects, and
no especially poetic group of words with which to treat them. Indeed,
the more traditionally poetical the subject and the words, the more
difficult it is to do anything with them. The nymph, the swain, the
faun, and the vernal groves are not any more or less legitimate themes
of poetry than Motor Bicycle Trials, Girl Guides, or the Prohibition
Question, the only difference being a practical one; the second category
may be found unsuitable for the imaginative digestion because these
words are still somehow uncooked; in the former case they are unsuitable
because overcooked, rechauffé, tasteless. The cooking process is merely
that of constant use. When a word or a phrase is universally adopted and
can be used in conversation without any apologetic accentuation, or in a
literary review without italics, inverted commas or capital letters,
then it is ready for use in poetry.
As a convenient general rule, Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie has pointed out
in his admirable pamphlet “Poetry and Contemporary Speech,” the poet
will always be best advised to choose as the main basis of his diction
the ordinary spoken language of his day; the reason being that words
grow richer by daily use and take on subtle associations which the
artificially bred words of literary or technical application cannot
acquire with such readiness; the former have therefore greater poetic
possibilities in juxtaposition.
* * * * *
An objection will be raised to the term “universal” as applied to the
audience for poetry; it is a limited universality when one comes to
consider it. Most wise poets intend their work only for those who speak
the same language as themselves, who have a “mental age” not below
normal, and who, if they don’t perhaps understand all the allusions in a
poem, will know at any rate where to go to look them up in a work of
reference.
XIV
THE DAFFODILS
Art of every sort, according to my previous contentions, is an attempt
to rationalize some emotional conflict in the artist’s mind. When the
painter says “That’s really good to paint” and carefully arranges his
still life, he has felt a sort of antagonism between the separate parts
of the group and is going to discover by painting on what that
antagonism is founded, presenting it as clearly and simply as he knows
how, in the slightly distorting haze of the emotion aroused. He never
says, “I think I’ll paint a jug or bottle, next,” any more than the poet
says “I’ve a free morning on Saturday; I’ll write an ode to the Moon or
something of that sort, and get two guineas for it from the _London
Mercury_.” No, a particular jug or bottle may well start a train of
thought which in time produces a painting, and a particular aspect of
the moon may fire some emotional tinder and suggest a poem. But the Moon
is no more the _subject_ of the poem than the murder of an Archduke was
the cause of the late European War.
Wordsworth’s lines “I wandered lonely as a cloud” are, as he would have
said, about “something more” than yellow daffodils at the water’s brim.
I have heard how schoolmasters and mistresses point out in the “Poetry
Lesson” that the whole importance of this poem lies in Wordsworth’s
simple perception of the beauty of Spring flowers; but it seems to me to
be an important poem only because Wordsworth has written spontaneously
(though perhaps under his sister’s influence) and recorded to his own
satisfaction an emotional state which we all can recognize.
These daffodils have interrupted the thoughts of an unhappy, lonely man
and, reminding him of his childhood, become at once emblems of a golden
age of disinterested human companionship; he uses their memory later as
a charm to banish the spectres of trouble and loneliness. I hope I have
interpreted the poem correctly. Let us now fantastically suppose for the
sake of argument that Wordsworth had been intentionally seeking solitude
like a hurt beast hating his kind, and had suddenly come across the same
daffodil field: he surely might have been struck with a sudden horror
for such a huge crowd of flower-faces, especially if his early memories
of flower picking had been blighted by disagreeable companionship and
the labour of picking for the flower market. He would then have written
a poem of exactly the opposite sense, recording his sudden feeling of
repulsion at the sight of the flowers and remarking at the end that
sometimes when he is lying on his couch in vacant or in pensive mood,
they flash across that inward eye which is the curse of solitude,
“_Oh then my heart with horror fills_
_And shudders with the daffodils._”
For readers to whom he could communicate his dislike of daffodils on the
basis of a common experience of brutal companionship in childhood and
forced labour, the poem would seem a masterpiece, and those of them who
were schoolmasters would be pretty sure to point out in _their_ Poetry
Lessons that the importance of the poem lay in Wordsworth’s “perception
of the dreadfulness of Spring Flowers.”