Facing the facts

Donald Hall, in an interview in 1963, remarked: “Poetry is becoming impoverished by facts.” But what did he mean? That a poem should not be considered journalistic reportage? That the facts might get in the way? 

Ian Sansom in his recent (2019) book ‘on’ Auden’s poem ‘September 1, 1939’ (‘on’ is no doubt not really the right word here, as the book self-admittedly meanders through a landscape of thoughts the author had had over the course of 25 years spent trying to write about book about Auden) relates the story of how Tennyson stuck with 600 in ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ because it was metrically better than the more accurate 700, and remarks “Poets are not historians, or statisticians.”

And of course we would not want Tennyson to have maimed his poem with an awkward scansion. Peter Porter did ‘correct’ the last line of his relatively early poem ‘Phar Lap in the Melbourne Museum’ which orginally read:

It is Australian innocence to love
The naturally excessive and be proud
Of a thoroughbred bay gelding who ran fast.

Which I greatly prefer to the later corrected version:

It is Australian innocence to love
The naturally excessive and be proud
Of a big-boned chestnut gelding who ran fast.

So what are we to think? I do prefer the original line, it is predominantly a phonetic and rhythmic preference I think: the balance of word-lengths, the assonance of ‘bred’ and ‘geld’ as well as the doubling of the ‘b’ sound work very well to give both a memorable line and a sense of closure. The factually more accurate line ‘big-boned chestnut’ is to me more awkward: the juxtaposition of the ‘g’ and ‘b’ sounds in ‘big-boned’ slows the line right down — the sort of encumbering effect you find Shakespeare using to slow down the end of a declamatory line, as in “And when I ope my lips let no dog bark!” from The Merchant of Venice, or Dylan Thomas uses perhaps somewhat excessively in the line “one big bird gulp” in Under Milkwood, and of course is especially useful when the phonetic effect is used to somehow enact the meaning presented in the words, such as happens with a pairing such as ‘lag behind’ or in Shakespeare’s line ‘Drag back our expedition’ — Porter’s ‘big-boned’ gives a clumsy feeling to the phrasing which ‘chestnut’ only amplifies. The echoing of ‘chest’ and ‘geld’ is not as effective as the ‘bred’/‘geld’ pairing, in part because that ’s’ sound gets in the way, and partly in the lumpy rhythm with ‘chest’ carrying a full stress, whereas the subsidiary and subtle stress on ‘bred’ in ‘thoroughbred’ leading into the almost-spondee of ‘bay gelding’ is far superior. Perhaps this is all personal and subjective, having myself come-of-age as it were partly under the spell of Pound’s rhythms and having a fondness for spondees, near-spondees, the hints of triple rhythm — never let to run away like an Assyrian coming down like a wolf on the fold — all the technical apparatus deployed to “break the pentameter” (which of course ended up with effects not all that different from what emerges from pentameters written along the lines of Bridges’ sensitive reading of Milton’s prosody). This is however a topic for an entirely different post.

I have digressed, but suffice to say that I prefer the two near-spondees of ‘bay gelding’ and ‘ran fast’ to the trochaic clutter of ‘big-boned chestnut gelding,’ and would agree with Hall that facts have effected some impoverishment.

But I also suspect that both Hall and Sansom are in danger of being somewhat partial in relation to various genres of poetry. I have quoted elsewhere A.D.Hope’s remark from 1965: “One after another the great forms disappear; the remaining forms proliferate and hypertrophy.” There has seemingly been a reduction in the variety of commonly used genres, but is this just a false impression caused by the vast preponderance of a certain few types just swamping and hiding from view a greater diversity?