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over, that former skills and manipulation, rhythmical, measured, musical, sensuous, visual, have by necessity been superseded?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.”

Tradition as Muse

The recent brief uproar on plagiarism still vexes me. There was much public condemnation of poetic processes which involved shallow reworkings, borrowings, appropriation, and theft - choose your terminology to match your level of moral outrage. The first instance that came to my attention was the case of an Australian poet who had apparently lifted phrases from a considerable number of sources to concoct a prize-winning poem.

How would such a process work? One might start with some simple idea, such as that writing a poem is a lot of hard work, a struggle like that of Sisyphus, and thinking of "ars longa" one could take some relevant lines from an established and competent poet ... let's take Longfellow ...

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
  And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
  Funeral marches to the grave

And now that we are thinking of funerals, graves, and cemeteries, Thomas Gray's Elegy could very easily spring to mind, so let's grab a few lines from there ...

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

We might decide to jettison the image of the ocean and say that the gems are hidden far from picks and drills ... that might even be an improvement, keeping the imagery earthy.

Now we can put the whole thing together: the Sisyphus, the Longfellow, and the Gray. If we then translate the whole thing into French and smooth out the sound of it, we end up with a passable pastiche.

Pour soulever un poids si lourd,
Sisyphe, il faudrait ton courage!
Bien qu'on ait du coeur à l'ouvrage,
L'Art est long et le Temps est court.
Loin des sépultures célèbres,
Vers un cimetière isolé,
Mon coeur, comme un tambour voilé,
Va battant des marches funèbres.
— Maint joyau dort enseveli
Dans les ténèbres et l'oubli,
Bien loin des pioches et des sondes;
Mainte fleur épanche à regret
Son parfum doux comme un secret
Dans les solitudes profondes.

— Charles Baudelaire (plagiaire??)

Geoffrey Grigson noted these borrowings in his note-book published as The Private Art.

Monstrous Certainty

Janice Harayda has given her 'Gusher Award' for hyperbole in reviewing to Clive James for a recent essay in Poetry. She points out sentences, such as “Nobody who has ever read that poem can possibly have forgotten that moment.” Interestingly, James can spot a similar tendency in others: "Though Grigson was an excellent editor and an unrivalled anthologist, his own poetry, nervously echoing Auden's oratorical verve, was never distinctive enough to establish his credentials for such an ex cathedra confidence."

In his wonderfully wide-ranging, entertaining, and enlightening Cultural Amnesia James maintains a tough line on intellectuals who failed to stand up against the totalitarianism of the 20th century - Sartre and Borges for example get the treatment; Camus gets a commendation. But James' tone is ex cathedra - more so than Camus' at times whose doubts and uncertainties show through his pronouncements - and it was Camus who said the only party he'd belong to is the one that's not sure that it is in the right. I'm rather vague as to the source of this pseudo-quote of Camus' - but then James remarks that Borges was often very approximate about the details of his enthusiasms, as if to score a point, although James himself elsewhere writes: "Listening on the same day to the Lester Young quintet and a string quintet by Ravel ... " A wonderfully eclectic playlist no doubt, but is there a string quintet by Ravel???? I am reminded of some lines from Geoffrey Hill "I tell myself don't wreck a good phrase simply to boost sense."

Camus is on the money - certainty and ex cathedra judgement is where the danger lives. I'll leave the final words to that great polymath & humanist Jacob Bronowski, in his 'Knowledge and Certainty' episode of The Ascent of Man:

The Principle of Uncertainty is a bad name. In science--or outside of it--we are not uncertain; our knowledge is merely confined, within a certain tolerance. We should call it the Principle of Tolerance. And I propose that name in two senses: First, in the engineering sense--science has progressed, step by step, the most successful enterprise in the ascent of man, because it has understood that the exchange of information between man and nature, and man and man, can only take place with a certain tolerance. But second, I also use the word, passionately, about the real world. All knowledge--all information between human beings--can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance. And that is true whether the exchange is in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics, or in any form of thought that aspires to dogma. It's a major tragedy of my lifetime and yours that scientists were refining, to the most exquisite precision, the Principle of Tolerance--and turning their backs on the fact that all around them, tolerance was crashing to the ground beyond repair.

The Principle of Uncertainty or, in my phrase, the Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930s it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it, the ascent of man, against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty.

Bronowski concludes the episode by wading in his suit into the mud and slime of a pool of water at Auschwitz into which the ashes of the slaughtered were flushed, his final imploration that we must 'touch people' made as he reaches down and drags up a fistful of the greasy mud:

It is said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That is false: tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality--this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods. Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken." I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leó Szilárd, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here, to stand here as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.