considered briefly and without rhapsody. Poetry as the Greeks knew when
they adopted the Drama as a cleansing rite of religion, is a form of
psycho-therapy. Being the transformation into dream symbolism of some
disturbing emotional crisis in the poet’s mind (whether dominated by
delight or pain) poetry has the power of homoeopathically healing other
men’s minds similarly troubled, by presenting them under the spell of
hypnosis with an allegorical solution of the trouble. Once the allegory
is recognized by the reader’s unconscious mind as applicable the
affective power of his own emotional crisis is diminished. Apparently on
a recognition of this aspect of poetry the Greeks founded their splendid
emblem of its power--the polished shield of Perseus that mirrored the
Gorgon’s head with no hurtful effect and allowed the hero to behead her
at his ease. A well chosen anthology is a complete dispensary of
medicine for the more common mental disorders, and may be used as much
for prevention as cure if we are to believe Mr. Housman’s argument in
“Terence, this is stupid stuff” no. LXII of his _Shropshire Lad_.
The musical side of poetry is, properly understood, not merely a
hypnotic inducement to the reader to accept suggestions, but a form of
psycho-therapy in itself, which, working in conjunction with the
pictorial allegory, immensely strengthens its chance of success.
XXX
HISTORIES OF POETRY
The History of English Poetry is a subject I hope I shall never have to
undertake, especially as I have grave doubts if there really is such a
thing. Poets appear spasmodically, write their best poetry at uncertain
intervals and owe nothing worth mentioning to any school or convention.
Most histories of English Poetry are full of talk about “schools” or
they concentrate on what they are pleased to call “the political
tendencies” of poetry, and painfully trace the introduction and
development in English of various set forms like the Sonnet, Blank
Verse, and the Spenserian Stanza. This talk about politics I read as an
excuse of the symmetrical-minded for spreading out the Eighteenth
Century poets famous in their day to a greater length than the quality
of their work can justify. As for the history of metric forms it is, in
a sense, of little more vital importance to poetry than the study of
numismatics would appear to an expert in finance.
* * * * *
An undergraduate studying English Literature at one of our oldest
universities was recently confronted by a senior tutor, Professor X,
with a review of his terminal studies and the charge of
temperamentalism.
“I understand from Prof. Y,” he explained, “that your literary judgments
are a trifle summary, that in fact you prefer some poets to others.”
He acknowledged the charge with all humility.
XXXI
THE BOWL MARKED DOG
“I am sorry, nephew, that I cannot understand your Modern Poetry. Indeed
I strongly dislike it; it seems to me mostly mere impudence.”
“But, uncle, you are not expected to like it! The old house-dog goes at
dinner time to the broken biscuits in his bowl marked DOG and eats
heartily. Tomorrow give him an unaccustomed dainty in an unaccustomed
bowl and he will sniff and turn away in disgust. Though tempted to kick
him for his unrecognizing stupidity, his ingratitude, his ridiculous
preference for the formal biscuit, yet refrain!
“The sight and smell associations of the DOG BOWL out of which he has
eaten so long have actually, scientists say, become necessary for
bringing the proper digestive juices into his mouth. What you offer him
awakes no hunger, his mouth does not water; he is puzzled and insulted.
“But give it to the puppies instead; they’ll gobble it up and sniff
contemptuously afterwards at the old dog and his bowl of biscuit.”
XXXII
THE ANALYTIC SPIRIT
In England, since--shall we name the convenient date 1851, the year of
the Great Exhibition?--the educated reading public has developed
analytic powers which have not been generally matched by a corresponding
development of the co-ordinating arts of the poet. Old charms will no
longer hold, old baits will no longer be taken; the reader has become
too wary. The triumph of the analytic spirit is nowhere better shown
than in these histories of Poetry just mentioned, where the interest in
fake poetry is just as strong or even stronger than the interest in
poetry itself.
As Religions inevitably die with their founders, the disciples having
either to reject or formularize their master’s opinions, so with Poetry,
it dies on the formation of a poetic school. The analytic spirit has
been, I believe, responsible both for the present coma of religion among
our educated classes and for the disrespect into which poetry and the
fine arts have fallen. As for these histories of poetry, the very fact
that people are interested in failures of the various “Schools” to
universalize the individual system of a master, is a great
discouragement to a poet trying by every means in his power to lay the
spirit of sophistication.
But the age of poetry is not yet over if poets will only remember what
the word means and not confuse it with acrostic-making and similar
ingenious Alexandrianisms. Earlier civilizations than ours have
forgotten the necessarily spontaneous nature of the art, and have tried
(for lack of any compelling utterance) to beat the sophisticated critics
of their day by piling an immense number of technical devices on their
verses, killing what little passion there was, by the tyranny of
self-imposed rules. The antithetical couplet of Pope or the Ovidian
hexameter-and-pentameter are bad enough, but the ancient Irish and Welsh
bards were even more restricted by their chain-rhymes and systems of
consonantal sequence, the final monstrosity being the Welsh _englyn_ of
four lines, governed by ninety-odd separate rules. The way out for
Poetry does not lie by this road, we may be sure. But neither on the
other hand do we yet need to call in the Da-da-ists.
XXXIII
RHYMES AND ALLITERATION
Rhymes properly used are the good servants whose presence gives the
dinner table a sense of opulent security; they are never awkward, they
hand the dishes silently and professionally. You can trust them not to
interrupt the conversation of the table or allow their personal
disagreements to come to the notice of the guests; but some of them are
getting very old for their work.
The principle governing the use of alliteration and rhyme appear to be
much the same. In unsophisticated days an audience could be moved by the
profuse straight-ahead alliteration of _Piers Plowman_, but this is too
obvious a device for our times. The best effects seem to have been
attained in more recent poetry by precisely (if unconsciously) gauging
the memory length of a reader’s mental ear and planting the second
alliterative word at a point where the memory of the first is just
beginning to blurr; but has not quite faded. By cross-alliteration on
these lines a rich atmosphere has resulted and the reader’s eye has been
cheated. So with internal and ordinary rhyme; but the memory length for
the internal rhyme appears somewhat longer than memory for alliteration,
and for ordinary rhyme, longer still.
XXXIV
AN AWKWARD FELLOW CALLED ARIPHRADES
Aristotle defended poetical “properties” that would correspond nowadays
with “thine” and “whensoe’er” and “flowerets gay,” by saying “it is a
great thing indeed to make proper use of these poetic forms as also of
compounds and strange words. The mere fact of their not being in
ordinary speech, gives the diction a non-prosaic character.” One
Ariphrades had been ridiculing the Tragedians on this score; and
Aristotle saw, I suppose, that a strange diction has for the
simple-minded reader a power of surprise which enables the poet to work
on his feelings unhindered, but he did not see that as soon as a single
Ariphrades had ridiculed what was becoming a conventional surprise, a
Jack-in-the-Box that every one expected, then was the time for the
convention to be scrapped; ridicule is awkwardly catching.
The same argument applies to the use of rhyme to-day; while rhyme can
still be used as one of the ingredients of the illusion, a compelling
force to make the reader go on till he hears an echo to the syllable at
the end of the last pause, it still remains a valuable technical asset.
But as soon as rhyme is worn threadbare the ear anticipates the echo and
is contemptuous of the clumsy trick.
The reader must be made to surrender himself completely to the poet, as
to his guide in a strange country; he must never be allowed to run ahead
and say “Hurry up, sir, I know this part of the country as well as you.
After that ‘snow-capped mountain’ we inevitably come to a ‘leaping
fountain.’ I see it ‘dancing’ and ‘glancing’ in the distance. And by the
token of these ‘varied flowers’ on the grass, I know that another few
feet will bring us to the ‘leafy bowers’ which, if I am not mistaken,
will protect us nicely from the ‘April showers’ for a few ‘blissful
hours.’ Come on, sir! am I guiding you, or are you guiding me?”
However, the time has not yet come to get rid of rhyme altogether: it
has still plenty of possibilities, as _Dumb Crambo_ at a Christmas party
will soon convince the sceptical; and assonances separated even by the
whole length of the mouth can work happily together, with or without the
co-operation of ordinary rhyme.
These are all merely illustrations of the general principle that as soon
as a poem emerges from the hidden thought processes that give it birth,
and the poet reviews it with the conscious part of his mind, then his
task is one not of rules or precedents so much as of ordinary
common-sense.
XXXV
IMPROVISING NEW CONVENTIONS
There is a great dignity in poetry unaffectedly written in stern stiff
traditional forms and we feel in spite of ourselves that we owe it the
reverence due to ruined abbeys, prints of Fujiyama, or Chelsea
pensioners with red coats, medals, and long white beards. But that is
no reason for following tradition blindly; it should be possible for a
master of words to improvise a new convention, whenever he wishes, that
will give his readers just the same notion of centuried authority and
smoothness without any feeling of contempt.
XXXVI
WHEN IN DOUBT
A young poet of whose friendship I am very proud was speaking about
poetry to one of those University literary clubs which regard English
poetry as having found its culmination in the last decade of the
nineteenth century and as having no further destiny left for it. He said
that he was about to tell them the most important thing he knew about
poetry, so having roused themselves from a customary languor, the young
fellows were disappointed to hear, not a brilliant critical paradox or a
sparkling definition identifying poetry with decay, but a mere rule of
thumb for the working poet:
When in Doubt
Cut it Out.
XXXVII
THE EDITOR WITH THE MUCKRAKE
Ordinary readers may deplore the habit of raking up the trivial and bad
verse of good poets now long dead, but for living poets there is nothing
more instructive in the world than these lapses, and in the absence of
honest biography they alone are evidence for what would be naturally
assumed, that these great poets in defiance of principle often tried to
write in their dull moments just because they longed for the exquisite
excitement of composition, and thought that the act of taking up a pen
might induce the hypnotic state of which I have spoken. But afterwards
they forgot to destroy what they produced, or kept it in the hope that
it was some good after all.
XXXVIII
THE MORAL QUESTION
Modern treatises on Poetry usually begin with definitions; ancient
treatises with a heavy weight of classical authority and a number of
grave reflections on the nature of the Poet, proving conclusively that
he should be a man of vast experience of life, apt judgment, versatile
talent, and above all unimpeachable moral character. Authority seems to
count for nothing in these days, compared with the value set on it by
Sir Philip Sidney in his “Apologie for Poetrie,” and the modern treatise
would never ask its reader more than to admit a negative conclusion on
the moral question, that poets who think they can combine indiscriminate
debauch with dyspeptic Bohemian squalor and yet turn out good work
merely by applying themselves conscientiously and soberly in working
hours, are likely to be disappointed; however, my personal feeling is
that poets who modify the general ethical principles first taught them
at home and at school, can only afford to purchase the right to do so at
a great price of mental suffering and difficult thinking. Wanton,
lighthearted apostasies from tradition are always either a sign or a
prophecy of ineffectual creative work.
Art is not moral, but civilized man has invented the word to denote a
standard of conduct which the mass demands of the individual and so
poetry which makes a definitely anti-moral appeal is likely to
antagonize two readers out of three straight away, and there is little
hope of playing the confidence trick on an enemy. Being therefore
addressed to a limited section even of the smallish class who read
poetry, such poetry will tend like most high-brow art to have more
dexterity than robustness.
For a complete identification of successful art with morality I always
remember with appreciation what an Irishman, a complete stranger, once
said to my father on hearing that he was author of the song “Father
O’Flynn”--“Ye behaved well, sir, when ye wrote that one.”
XXXIX
THE POET AS OUTSIDER
The ethical problem is further complicated for poets by the tussle in
their nature between the spontaneous and the critical biases. The
principle of loyalty on which the present non-religious system of
English manners depends is strained in them to breaking point by the
tendency to sudden excitement, delight or disgust with ideas for which
mature consideration entirely alters the values, or with people who
change by the same process from mere acquaintances to intimate friends
and back in a flash. Which should explain many apparently discreditable
passages in, for instance, the life and letters of Keats or Wordsworth,
and should justify Walt Whitman’s outspoken “Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”
The poet is the outsider who sees most of the game, and, by the same
token, all or nearly all the great English poets have been men either of
ungenteel birth or of good family which has been scandalized by their
subsequent adoption of unusual social habits during the best years of
their writing. To the polite society of their day--outsiders to a man.
XL
A POLITE ACKNOWLEDGMENT
DEAR SIR,--
Many thanks for the volume of your poems you have sent me. Though I
had never seen any of your compositions before, they are already
old friends--that is, I like them but I see through them.
Yours cordially, Etc.
XLI
FAKE POETRY, BAD POETRY AND MERE VERSE
As in household economics, you cannot take out of a stocking more than
has been put in, so in poetry you cannot present suffering or romance
beyond your own experience. The attempt to do this is one of the chief
symptoms of the fake poet; ignorance forces him to draw on the
experience of a real poet who actually has been through the emotional
crises which he himself wants to restate. The fake is often made worse
by the theft of small turns of speech which though not in any sense
irregular or grotesque, the poet has somehow made his own; it is like
stealing marked coins, and is a dangerous practice when Posterity is
policeman. Most poets visit Tom Tiddler’s ground now and then, but the
wise ones melt down the stolen coin and impress it with their own
“character.”
There is a great deal of difference between fake poetry and ordinary bad
poetry. The bad poet is likely to have suffered and felt joy as deeply
as the poet reckoned first class, but he has not somehow been given the
power of translating experience into images and emblems, or of melting
words in the furnace of his mind and making them flow into the channels
prepared to take them. Charles Sorley said, addressing the good poets on
behalf of the bad poets (though he was really on the other side):--
We are the homeless even as you,
Who hope but never can begin.
Our hearts are wounded through and through
Like yours, but our hearts bleed within;
We too make music but our tones
Scape not the barrier of our bones.
Mere verse, as an earlier section has attempted to show, is neither bad
poetry nor fake poetry necessarily. It finds its own categories, good
verse, bad verse and imitation. In its relation to poetry it stands as
chimpanzee to man: only the theory that a conflict of emotional ideas is
a necessary ingredient of verse to make it poetry, will satisfactorily
explain why many kinds of verse, loosely called Poetry, such as Satire
and Didactic verse are yet popularly felt not to be the “highest” forms
of Poetry. I would say that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred these
bear no real relation to Poetry, even though dressed up in poetical
language, and that in the hundredth case they are poetry in spite of
themselves. Where the writer is dominated by only one aim, in satire,
the correction of morals; in didactic verse, instruction; there is no
conflict and therefore no poetry. But in rare cases where some Juvenal
slips through feelings of compunction to a momentary mood of self-satire
and even forgets himself so much as to compliment his adversary; or in
didactic verse where a sudden doubt arises and the teacher admits
himself a blind groper after truth (so Lucretius time and time again)
and breaks his main argument in digressions after loveliness and terror,
only then does Poetry appear. It flashes out with the surprise and shock
of a broken electric circuit.
Even the _memoria technica_ can slide from verse into poetry. The rhyme
to remember the signs of the Zodiac by, ends wonderfully:--
The Ram the Bull, the Heavenly Twins,
And next the Crab, the Lion shines,
The Virgin and the Scales,
The Scorpion, Archer and He Goat,
The Man who carries the Watering Pot,
The Fish with glittering tails.
The language of science makes a hieroglyphic, or says “The sign of
Aquarius”; the language of prose says “A group of stars likened by
popular imagery to a Water Carrier”; the language of Poetry converts the
Eastern water carrier with his goatskin bag or pitcher, into an English
gardener, then puts him to fill his watering pot from heavenly waters
where the Fish are darting. The author of this rhyme has visualized his
terrestrial emblems most clearly; he has smelt the rankness of the Goat,
and yet in the “Lion shines” and the “glittering tails” one can see that
he has been thinking in terms of stars also. The emotional contradiction
lies in the stars’ remote aloofness from complications of this climatic
and smelly world, from the terror of Lion, Archer, Scorpion, from the
implied love-interest of Heavenly Twins and Virgin, and from the daily
cares of the Scales, Ram, Bull, Goat, Fish, Crab and Watering Pot.
The ready way to distinguish verse from poetry is this, Verse makes a
flat pattern on the paper, Poetry stands out in relief.
XLII
A DIALOGUE ON FAKE-POETRY
Q. When is a fake not a fake?
A. When hard-working and ingenious conjurors are billed by common
courtesy as ‘magicians.’
Q. But when is a fake not a fake?
A. When it’s a Classic.
Q. And when else?
A. When it’s “organ-music” and all that.
Q. Elaborate your answer, dear sir!
A. A fake, then, is not a fake when lapse of time has tended to
obscure the original source of the borrowing, and when the textural
and structural competence that the borrower has used in
synthesising the occasional good things of otherwise indifferent
authors is so remarkable that even the incorruptible Porter of
Parnassus winks and says “Pass Friend!”
Q. Then the Fake Poet is, as you have hinted before, a sort of
Hermit Crab?
A. Yes, and here is another parable from Marine Life. Poetry is the
protective pearl formed by an oyster around the irritations of a
maggot. Now if, as we are told, it is becoming possible to put
synthetic pearls on the market, which not even the expert with his
X-ray can detect from the natural kind, is not our valuation of the
latter perhaps only a sentimentality?
XLIII
ASKING ADVICE
There is a blind spot or many blind spots in the critical eye of every
writer; he cannot find for himself certain surface faults which anybody
else picks out at once. Especially there is a bias towards running to
death a set of words which when he found them, were quite honest and
inoffensive. Shelley had a queer obsession about “caves,” “abysses,” and
“chasms” which evidently meant for him much more than he can make us
see. A poet will always be wise to submit his work, when he can do no
more to straighten it, to the judgment of friends whose eyes have their
blind spots differently placed; only, he must be careful, I suppose, not
to be forced into making any alterations while in their presence.
A poet reveals to a friend in a fit of excitement “I say, listen, I am
going to write a great poem on such-and-such! I have the whole thing
clear in my mind, waiting to be put down.” But if he goes on to give a
detailed account of the scheme, then the act of expression (especially
prose expression) kills the creative impulse by presenting it
prematurely with too much definiteness. The poem is never written. It
remains for a few hopeless days as a title, a couple of phrases and an
elaborate scheme of work, and is then banished to the lumber room of the
mind; later it probably becomes subsidiary to another apparently
irrelevant idea and appears after a month or two in quite a different
shape, the elaboration very much condensed, the phrase altered and the
title lost.
Now this section is as suitable as any other for the prophecy that the
study of Poetry will very soon pass from the hands of Grammarians,
Prosodists, historical research men, and such-like, into those of the
psychologists. And what a mess they’ll make of it; to be sure!
XLIV
SURFACE FAULTS, AN ILLUSTRATION
The later drafts of some lines I wrote recently called CYNICS AND
ROMANTICS, and contrasting the sophisticated and ingenuous ideas of
Love, give a fairly good idea of the conscious process of getting a poem
in order. I make no claim for achievement, the process is all that is
intended to appear, and three or four lines are enough for
illustration:
_1st Draft._
In club or messroom let them sit,
Let them indulge salacious wit
On love’s romance, but not with hearts
Accustomed to those healthier parts
Of grim self-mockery....
_2nd Draft._ (Consideration:--It is too soon in the poem for the angry
jerkiness of “Let them indulge.” Also “Indulge salacious” is hard to
say; at present, this is a case for being as smooth as possible.)
In club or messroom let them sit
Indulging contraversial wit
On love’s romance, but not with hearts
Accustomed....
_3rd Draft._ (Consideration:--No, we have the first two lines beginning
with “In.” It worries the eye. And “sit, indulging” puts two short “i’s”
close together. “Contraversial” is not the word. It sounds as if they
were angry, but they are too blasé for that. And “love’s romance” is
cheap for the poet’s own ideal.)
In club or messroom let them sit
At skirmish of salacious wit
Laughing at love, yet not with hearts
Accustomed....
_4th Draft._ (Consideration:--Bother the thing! “Skirmish” is good
because it suggests their profession, but now we have three S’s,--“sit,”
“skirmish,” “salacious.” It makes them sound too much in earnest. The
“salacious” idea can come in later in the poem. And at present we have
two “at’s” bumping into each other; one of them must go. “Yet” sounds
better than “but” somehow.)
In club or messroom let them sit
With skirmish of destructive wit
Laughing at love, yet not with hearts
Accustomed....
_5th Draft._ (Consideration:--And now we have two “with’s” which don’t
quite correspond. And we have the two short “i’s” next to each other
again. Well, put the first “at” back and change “laughing at” to
“deriding.” The long “i” is a pleasant variant; “laughing” and “hearts”
have vowel-sounds too much alike.)
In club or messroom let them sit
At skirmish of destructive wit
Deriding love, yet not with hearts
Accustomed....