Foreign contexts

Back in P. N. Review 175 James Sutherland-Smith in his Letter from Belgrade described well the attraction of living immersed a foreign language:  “… the advantage to a poet of not understanding. For poets whose gift is to write poems where their language is distilled to the highest proof, a babble around them, or at best only a surface understanding of the others languages spoken around them, creates no interference with the language within them. It permits an enormous concentration. For poets, whose gift is to clarify meaning, attention to the babble around them is useful training for the poetic processes of making meaning precise and lucid.”

I am not sure which of these varieties of poet Sutherland-Smith considers himself ... back in an even earlier Letter from Belgrade (PNR 169) he wrote: “When I write a poem I have the desire to make something potentially useful for the English language. ‘Potentially’ is the whole of it, either to indicate a direction the language can take or to conserve a way of saying something that is in danger of being confined to the notes in the OED. ... There is also a measure of self-assertion when I write a poem. I am establishing and making public my own idiolect.”

Of course not everyone takes that approach — I cannot imagine Berryman’s idiolect, no matter how much he drank, ever getting close to the syntax of his poems.

But Sutherland-Smith is right about the effects of being in foreign parts. When you have to express yourself in a language you have only a weak grasp of, or say something unambiguously to someone who has rudimentary English, it focuses the mind on how meaning is conveyed and on how it can be undermined, for instance by the use of idiomatic turns of phrase.

As one ventures into reading poetry in another language and attempting to translate it, one quickly appreciates the impossibilities, and how the deep contextual associations at the level of each single word are utilized to establish meaning, tone, effect.

Former skills

 “Are we to believe that a mutation has occurred in the required or essential nature of verse? That — for instance — flat, linear, untextured arrangement has properly taken over, that former skills and manipulation, rhythmical, measured, musical, sensuous, visual, have by necessity been superseded? Is all previous poetry now useless? Not unless man has mutated into a new species.” 

—Geoffrey Grigson, The Private Art (1982), p.17

“For centuries, poets have had an implicit contract with the reader that poems mean something or some things, that they aren’t exercises in endless deferral of meaning.” 

—Craig Raine, My Grandmother’s Glass Eye: A Look at Poetry (2016), p.6

To some extent meaning per se might be seen as an inhibiting limitation: we have to lean Raine's thought up against Robert Frost's often misquoted statement. 

“I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.”

— Robert Frost, Conversations on the Craft of Poetry (1959)

Donald Hall — the early Donald Hall in an early interview — talks of how the “real energy” of a poem will come from its images and should not need the support of the “crutches” of the “old methods of construction.” To which the interviewers (one of whom was Ian Hamilton, whose voice I fancy I hear here) responded “This new poetry will open the floodgates to a lot of crap, surely?” adding “it’s very difficult to work out ways in which you begin to discriminate between kinds of nonsense.”

Are we to think of the “old methods of construction” as Hall puts it, or the “former skills” as Grigson says, as “crutches” that should be cast aside, or as vital supports without which we are breaking Raine's “implicit contract”? 

In another very early interview Hall himself might have the answer: “Freedom is the expression of the will and art is not free because the will is a servant of the Muse.”

Devoted to the Impossible

Henry Moore

In the book Life Work Donald Hall recounts the last conversation he had with the sculptor Henry Moore. Hall asks “Now that you’re eighty, you must know the secret of life. What is the secret of life?”

With anyone else the answer would have begun with an ironic laugh, but Henry Moore answered me straight: “The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is – it must be something you cannot possibly do.”

T. S. Eliot – who was ten years older than Moore – captures something of the mechanism which makes the sort of creative life that Moore describes a good life. 

“That excitement, that joyful loss of self in the workmanship of art, that intense and transitory relief which comes at the moment of completion and is the chief reward of creative work.” T. S. Eliot in ‘Matthew Arnold’ from The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, p.108.

But of course the mathematician and the scientist are equally creative and can be absorbed in their task every bit as joyfully as the painter or the writer. In his 1956 book Science and Human Values, Jacob Bronowski writes:

The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations – more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or the artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art.

p.29 

Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her. We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself recreates them. They are the marks of unity in variety; and in the instant when the mind seizes this for itself, in art or in science, the heart misses a beat.

p.30

The steady shape of the mind

A few quotations from the foreword of Jacob Bronowski's wonderful book The Poet's Defence, which I have referred to before, a book in which he “tried to write criticism as reasoned as geometry.” [p. 8]. 

“One belief is that poetry is worthy in itself. Another is that this worth must be judged, not measured. That is, this worth cannot be abstracted from the poem like the wavelength of a light from its colour, and given a measure. It must be judged, as it must be made, by the whole soul of a man. That is why great criticism, like great poems, has not been written by little men.” [pp. 8‒9]

He observes there has been a historical development of ideas against this belief, a denial of the belief “by Coleridge and now by his pupil I.A. Richards” who hold the contrary “unspoken belief that only that can be judged which can be measured. It is the belief that science is the only way to knowledge. This belief has grown as science has grown wider. From the hopes of the Augustans it has grown to the boundless pride of to-day. I do not think that it is chance that poets have grown so much worse in the same time.” [p.9]

Bronowski, a passionate advocate for the role of science in the world, and famous for his TV Series The Ascent of Man, stands for the distinct form of truth which poetry strives for, distinct from the kinds of truth accessible by science. 

“In science, that is true which can be checked by others. Science therefore finds its knowledge of the world by mass measurement, that is by social means. It finds it through the senses, and what it finds is never true but more and more nearly true. This holds of physics, of history, and also of psychology.” [p.10]

The kind of truth that poetry can access is of a different order: “I believe that the mind of man has a steady shape which is the truth. We know the truth about the mind by looking from this a priori truth outward.” [p.10]

“Great poets have thought that poetry is its own end. Had they thought otherwise they would have turned to something which is an end. Only small poets like Shelley have held to poetry although they have not thought it an end.” [p.16]

Onomatopoeia

It has been observed (but where? I don’t recall) that to some extent all words are onomatopoeic: ‘dog’ after all is a very doggy word for native speakers. But this is a reductive notion, and as little use as limiting the meaning of onomatopoeia to the trivially obvious: boom, bang, crash, clang, murmur and the Classical Greek root of ‘barbarian’ οι βάρβαροι: the people who made a sound like ‘bar bar bar.’

Context can heighten the sense of onomatopoeia in words. A good example is in the opening lines of Kubla Khan, where Coleridge uses a restricted range of vowel sounds at the lighter end of the spectrum so that when the word ‘down’ comes at the start of line 5 it comes as a change to a lower aural register and thus enacts its meaning with its sound:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
   Down to a sunless sea.

The Great Forms Disappear

A. D. Hope in 1963 

In his 1965 book of essays, The Cave and the Spring, A. D. Hope compares the landscape of poetry with its diverse forms to a natural ecosystem, and laments the loss of so much. “One after another the great forms disappear; the remaining forms proliferate and hypertrophy and display increasing eccentricity and lack of control. A general erosion of the mind proceeds with more and more acceleration. A desert ecology replaces the ecology of the rain forest. The forms are few, small, hardy, and reflect the impoverished soil in which they grow.”

Mary Kinzie, in her essay ‘The Rhapsodic Fallacy’ echoed and cited Hope’s essay, down to similarly laying blame at the feet of Edgar Allen Poe, and his The Poetic Principle, for the malaise of modern verse. 

Hope quotes Poe's statement “That degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length.” He then goes on to entertainingly remark: “Poe's opinion hardly deserves a serious answer. He might just as well have maintained that love consists only of brief passages of intense excitement in secual intercourse, and that, because a man cannot prolong these moments indefinitely, he is never in love except when he is in bed.”

Best poetry fertilizer

Zbyszek Herbert

Leopold Tyrmand’s diary describes his friend Zbigniew Herbert’s office work in the peat industry, one of a long series of underpaid low level jobs he held.

“Wieczorem Herbert i czytał nowe wiersze. Wydaje się, że praca w torfie wpływa nań użyźniająco. Do roboty nie ma tam nic, czytać gazet w godzinach urzędowych nie wypada, wobec tego Zbyszek siedzi przy biurku i pisze wiersze i bajki. Każdy myśli, jaki on przykładny i gorliwy, podczas gdy Zbyszek boryka się z obsesją zmarnowanego życia, co - jak wiadomo - stanowi najlepszy nawóz sztuczny poezji. W wierszach daje wyraz obawom i przygnębieniu, że nie zostawi śladu istnieniem. Przeraża go grząskość ludzkiego losu. Powiedziałem mu, że jest to uczucie naturalne wśród torfowisk. Musi zmienić pracę i poszukać czegoś w cemencie czy betonie .” (Dziennik 1954, s.168)

“February 5: Herbert in the evening ... read new poems. It seems that work in peat has a fertilizing effect. There is nothing to do there, you shouldn't read newspapers during office hours, so Zbyszek sits at his desk and writes poems and fables. Everybody thinks he’s an exemplary and zealous worker, while Zbyszek struggles with his obsession — that of a wasted life, which, as we know, is the best fertilizer for poetry. In his poems, he expresses his fear and depression that he will not leave a trace of existence. The mire of human fate scares him. I told him it was a natural feeling among the peat bogs. He has to change jobs and look for something in cement or concrete.”