Adventures in Criticism

Poetic Appreciation-Prejudices,Principles,Perversities

Prejudices, Principles, Perversities

Whoever wishes to catch the essence of poetry must throw aside all his pet prejudices about both the matter and the manner of art. No doubt, poetry of a particular type holds a special appeal for him, but that should not debar him from distilling the last drop of enjoyment from other types of verse or lead him to label them as artistic failures. For, all art is an attempt to express the various forces of man's being in a beautifully measured way, and so long as the measure of beauty is somehow obtained it would be preposterous as well as pitifully self-privative to denounce from the artistic standpoint a poem for the nature of the force expressed in it.

The Victorians could not relish the beginning of Swinburne's Anactoria, where the poet voices Sappho's yearning in a mood of cruel and morbid exultation for the body of the girl Anactoria whom she loves — perhaps the most sadistic cry in English literature:

I would find grievous ways to have thee slain,

Intense device and superflux of pain;

Vex thee with amorous agonies, and shake

 Life at thy lips and leave it there to ache;

Strain out thy soul with pangs too soft to kill,

Intolerable interlude and infinite ill;

Relapse and reluctation of the breath,

Dumb tunes and shuddering semi-tones of death...

Take thy limbs living and new-mould with these

A lyre of many faultless agonies.

Though the passage is perverse, the language gives us no mere pathology bluntly describing a "complex". There is a heat of the imagination captured in verbal appositeness and a masterfully modulated rhythm, the violence is rich enough

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with a deft control for a strong though not throughout a great beauty to shine through the savage motif. And where sense and sound have been mated in precise and moving words with a result of beauty, poetry as such undeniably exists, whatever the theme and style.

Here, of course, it is the theme that proved a rock of offence: the style is not startlingly unexpected — beyond the freshness and vividness indispensable to poetic activity. No sudden gaps are left in the language, the phrases are not pithed to the point of making them stand without any marked transition-link — compact stepping-stones set at difficult distances for a series of leaps from author to reader. Such a style may not prove everybody's delight — at least it did not please Ruskin when Browning indulged in it; yet to reject it just because it is wanting in effect shading off into effect is to take too facilely the intuitive faculty in us on which the poetic moment always impinges with its open or its subtle concords. And where the intuitive faculty is concerned, there can also be no rigid ruling about the texture of language any more than about the movement of it. The intuitive faculty recognises indeed a norm which persists, but the persistence is in the thick of diversities and never clings to a monotonous or single-track method. Many shades and grades of words must be permitted: The vocabulary of Donne need not be cast out by Milton's, the Hopkinsian by that of Bridges. To be able to appreciate the poetic moment — even while noting the absence of one's favourite themes and turns and tones — constitutes, besides an enviably large capacity for enjoyment, the soul of criticism.

Catholicity of outlook, however, must avoid being a weak tolerance: in our zeal to show an impartial mind we must not let our aesthetic acumen be blunted by the interestingness or momentousness of the subject, the sincerity or novelty of the treatment. Though we may value Wordsworth's psychological observations, he can never be forgiven for enfeebling his discoveries by deficient technique or setting marvellous lines to voyage, lonely and depressed, half their freshness lost,

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through a strange waste of watery verse like much of Prelude — in the literal and most damnatory connotation of the term, blank verse. Similarly, just because we do not judge from personal temperament, The Waste Land of T.S. Eliot's labyrinthine cross-lit fitfulness need not be accepted as a poetic paradise. In every department of art, what is required is not only "significant form" nor, as the modern temperament inclines to believe, a mere energy glorying in its own caprice: what is fundamental is a thrill of significant form, spontaneous energy in love with meaning and measure. And great poetry, like any other art attaining greatness, is a rapture, a peace or a pain, according to its creator's mood, in which a significance is shaped out with a glow and a tingle as if some secret from beyond the outer consciousness pushed through, bringing with it splendours and sweetnesses and poignancies far wider and deeper than the common range to which that consciousness is accustomed. Words become wings and in each movement of sound and sense some fiat as of a god strikes us, asserting by means of any part of man's being and through any mode of word-design and pattern of rhythm a unique inevitable loveliness.

No better example, perhaps, of a certain style of great poetry can be produced than the closing lines of the quotation from Swinburne:

...Take thy limbs living and new-mould with these

A lyre of many faultless agonies.

Their excellence is wrought, on the side of rhythm, by a keen yet sublime movement disposing stresses irregularly in the first line to indicate the change spoken of there, and in the second approximating as closely as possible to the normal iambic base in order to represent the strangely flawless result of the new-moulding: within this general music there is a play of assonances and alliterations, the press forward and suspense of sound echoing the significance, the long lingering last syllable of "agonies" that creates an intensifying

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effect. On the verbal side, the success is due to the surprise of the image-word "lyre" which not only gives the idea a concrete quality but also tunes it up to its extreme pitch of expression through the most rhapsodical figure possible to it, and the epithet "faultless" glorifies in a vein equally original the ravage caused by that violent hunger for physical beauty, a ravage this spell-binding beauty bears like a melody in which pain has found a perfect voice. The meaning is demoniac but chiselled with strokes which bring forth poetic greatness from a crude passion; for this greatness arises when the light of a new imaginative idea clarifies an emotion and a rare emotional heat vivifies an imaginative idea and their interfusion is then reflected, rather embodied, in a just arrangement of words remarkable for their accuracy and their combined vibration ringing apt changes on a fixed base of metre.

Such a description is not likely to go down the modernist gullet, for it seethes not at all with the anarchy in aesthetic values that is behind modernist poetry. Indeed, this poetry is so many different things that it is difficult to catch its essence in a definition — unless one says that it is a poetry of revolt against everything that can be revolted against! Each poet fixes upon a bugbear from the past and performs a dance of destruction on its body. One expresses his contempt for the traditional method of arranging lines, by distributing words and phrases in drunken zigzags across the page; another is less fantastic to the eye but yaps barbarically in the ear by a supreme disdain for metrical rhythm and imaginative nobility; a third believes in presenting raw sensation or incoherent chunks of the subconscious as a legitimate sample of art; a fourth less typically abreast of the times is yet intolerant of the old poetic purple and insists on the simple life to the point of colloquial drabness. All these and many other tendencies have a centre of gravity, so to speak, amidst their irresponsible exaggerations, and some genuine success is perceptible in each departure from the norm; but a large amount of modernist poetry revolts in no other sense than

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that it is revolting to one's finest instincts.

The cult of the capricious, the violent, the crude cannot lead anywhere, whether practised with simple jerks or complicated jumps; not even when a semblance of formal dignity is kept and there is no cutting up of lines and phrases and even words to make a Cummings-holiday. We cannot expect even a Masefield to come off with flying colours where a Browning has failed: Browning with his vehement genius tried the effects of expressive cacophony and proved to his own cost that, though he could sometimes distil a pungent dramatic flavour out of them, sheer poetry was in the majority of experiments bound to suffer a dissolution. In fact, to suggest the harsh or the grotesque it is sufficient to employ a certain image-power coupled with strength of diction without resorting to ugly phraseology, clotting one's consonants and loading the back of one's metre to a breaking point. Sandberg and his free-versifying tribe produce better work than the cacophonists, but Whitman whose elemental enthousiasmos none of the recent free-versifiers have matched revealed the high-water mark possible to the new medium and at the same time the sure though subtle loss it involved when used to voice the "immortal longings" of life. He had the eagle's heart, the eagle's vision, but without the wings of metrical rhythm he was, on the whole, baulked of his right to the utter zenith — for, metre by its marked flux and reflux endows verbal music with a distinctness, a stability, a haunting power, a magic memorableness, whereby the idea and emotion expressed acquire a definite and sustained charm of vitality which evokes more easily than any other rhythm a strong sympathetic correspondence in the reader.

As regards the right of the chaotic, in the subconscious or in sensation, to the poetic domain, one half of the truth was touched by the Symbolist Movement in France which attempted to exploit the value of strange associations and intermingling sense-suggestions free from the intellect's logical and explanatory devices — but not without the aid of beautiful rhythm and metre: in short, a new method for

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giving poetic pleasure. The other half which even those arch-symbolists Mallarmé and Rimbaud often missed was that the flow of associations and symbols, if restricted to form a particular poem, must carry in it by virtue of that restriction a coherence which can be perceived as however subdued a single effect: some undercurrent must convey itself to the reader, providing a means of instinctively feeling if not logically understanding the poem as a whole. What the present unintelligibles forget is both sides of the truth: they crush completely the poetic art by heaping a Pelion of inharmony on an Ossa of incoherence.

Mistaken also in their extremism are those who, while preserving the metrical basis and avoiding verbal savagery as well as imaginative freakishness, yet object to any transcendence of the conversational turn and temper. The latter is no defect in itself; what the poet has to be on guard against is the bathetic or the prosaic. Professor Campbell has observed that Homer could speak of Ulysses' dog Argos as being full of lice without sacrificing all that Arnold claimed for him — rapidity, simplicity, nobility — because the phrase in Greek had a rich rhythm and dignity side by side with its fluent naturalness: "full" there is enipleios and "lice" kynoraisteôn — both polysyllables combining resonance and splendour with a clear delicacy as the same description in English most flatly refuses to do. And if poetry is to be something finer than mere metrical prose — that is to say, not an artificiality — it must seek a mode of utterance unlike conversation when the common idiom proves incapable of answering its noble needs. Phonetic values are indispensable to versecraft and in this respect the arrangement of words must be studied no less than their individual quality, so that at the same time the meaning emerges effectively and the rhythm builds itself to a fresh pattern without losing grip on the metrical beat as it dangerously tends to do in the efforts of Abercrombie and Drinkwater to equate blank verse with oral speech. The poet has often to employ a delicate spell of remoteness from the ordinary language, for his art consists in a certain specialness

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of expressive mood which goes home by a rhythmical lift and intensity in phrase and metre. He may be straightforward and simple and even conversational provided he conjures up that subtle strangeness. Wordsworth did so at his best and Shakespeare almost always when he wanted to say anything worth saying in a swift and clear fashion which was less crowded with images than his usual style. But the important principle in poetry is not plainness, conversational or otherwise, though that has a legitimate place: it is the artistic treatment which matters. To eschew vague ornamentation and rhetoric is no doubt a true instinct, and the modern recoil from the heavy exuberance in some of the early work of Laurence Binyon or the inflated emptiness of William Watson in particular moods makes for a healthy tension and pithiness; yet it is purblind folly and a deafness of ear to run down as too elaborate the lyric exquisiteness of colourful phrase Binyon could display —

And sweet the rose floats on the arching briar's

Green fountain sprayed with delicate frail fires —

or the epic grandeur of a packed sonnet-close like this from Watson —

And over me

The everlasting taciturnity,

The august, inhospitable, inhuman night

Glittering magnificently unperturbed.

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