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over, that former skills and manipulation, rhythmical, measured, musical, sensuous, visual, have by necessity been superseded?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

Hoping for lightning

John Berryman

Here’s the last paragraph of Adam Kirsch’s article on John Berryman ‘That thing on the front of your head’ from the Times Literary Supplement, Feb 6, 2015:

Randall Jarrell wrote that a poet was someone who stands outside in storms hoping to get struck by lightning. Berryman, who spent so many years waiting for genius to find him, eventually lured it by making the waiting around, with all its attendant boredom, guilt and vice, the very subject of his poetry. In 77 Dream Songs, he used every technique of artificiality — in diction, syntax, allusion, rhythm — to create a voice of shocking honesty and directness; and by achieving this paradox, he liberated himself from the impersonality (itself, perhaps, no more than ostensible) of high Modernism. If we have no poets like John Berryman today, it is not because we are less ingenious than he is, but because our poetry seems to have so much less at stake.

Randall Jarrell

Kirsch is referring to Jarrell's remarks at the very end of his essay 'Reflections on Wallace Stevens' from Poetry and the Age:

How necessary it is to think of the poet as somebody who has prepared himself to be visited by a dæmon, as a sort of accident-prone worker to whom poems happen — for otherwise we expect him to go on writing good poems, better poems, and this is the one thing you cannot expect even of good poets, much less of anybody else. Good painters in their sixties may produce good pictures as regularly as an orchard produces apples; but Planck is a great scientist because he made one discovery as a young man — and I can remember reading in a mathematician’s memoirs a sentence composedly recognizing the fact that, since the writer was now past forty, he was unlikely ever again to do any important creative work in mathematics. A man who is a good poet at forty may turn out to be a good poet at sixty; but he is more likely to have stopped writing poems, to be doing exercises in his own manner, or to have reverted to whatever commonplaces were popular when he was young. A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great. 

The mathematician referred to is the Cambridge mathematican G. H. Hardy who wrote in his 1940 book A Mathematician's Apology:

I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty. If a man of mature age loses interest in and abandons mathematics, the loss is not likely to be very serious either for mathematics or for himself. 

The image of the poet standing in a thunderstorm also puts me in mind of another figure from Cambridge: Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose explanation to his sister of his choice to be a primary school teacher after not only beginning to gain a reputation as one of the world's foremost philosophers, having already published his Tracatus, but also having given away one of Europe's largest personal fortunes which he had inherited from his father. As Norman Malcolm explains in a London Review of Books article from 19 November 1981, “Hermine Wittgenstein tells of the bewilderment of the family over Ludwig’s determination, immediately upon his return home at the end of World War One, to rid himself unconditionally of his whole fortune; and of her own dismay at his decision to become a country schoolteacher. She protested to him that his teaching in an elementary school would be like ‘using a precision instrument to open crates’. She was silenced when he replied ...

You remind me of somebody who is looking out through a closed window and cannot explain to himself the strange movements of a passer-by. He cannot tell what sort of storm is raging out there or that this person might only be managing with difficulty to stay on his feet. 

The very young Ludwig Wittgenstein

On several occasions Hermine observed Ludwig’s teaching in the boys’ school. He encouraged his pupils to invent a steam-engine and to create other constructions, steering them to correct solutions by means of questions. Tremendous interest was aroused: the boys ‘literally crawled over each other in their desire to be chosen for answers or demonstrations’. But he was impatient with untalented or lazy pupils, and his inability or refusal to soothe unsympathetic parents eventually led to his resignation.”