The Thinking Corner

A Poet on Poetry

By far the boldest definition of poetry is A.E. Housman's in that much-in-little of a book, The Name and Nature of Poetry, which I have recently read again. Yes, the boldest - and yet it seems to be both natural and penetrating, a logical completion of the hints thrown out by other poets concerning their own art. Wordsworth's is well-known: "All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Byron, with his usual turn for rhetoric, expresses this spontaneity and power in a more impressive, almost threatening manner: "Poetry is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake." Shelley has a less psychoanalytic idea and prefers a philosophic statement when he is not making a highly poetic one: "Poetry is not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind, and its birth and recurrence have no necessary connection with the consciousness and will." How many poets must recognise in these dignified phrases a cri du coeur about the divine caprices of the Muse! Still more discouraging appears Keats, quite a wet blanket with his simple and pointed utterance: "If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all." Of course anybody who knows Keats's own methods of composition will not commit the mistake of confusing naturalness with immediate fluency. A tree does not put forth its leaves all at once or in a full-grown condition - shape by shape and by various stages "the limpid glory" is born - and though some works of art may take birth like the Indian magician's mango tree, there are many and perhaps most that follow Nature's patient and progressive curve. So Keats's wet blanket is meant not for imaginative creators, however slow and piecemeal their labours, but for intellectual constructors without that something elemental which is evidently the sum and substance of what Wordsworth and Byron and Shelley are also driving at. Now comes Housman, himself a fine poet, and says that if poetry is not intellectual

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at its core and if its function is rather to transfuse emotion than convey thought, it must be defined essentially as independent of intellectual meaning and as consisting of a sort of thoughtless thrill! Indeed a dangerous view to broadcast when significance and unity are terribly at a discount in modern poetic experiments: it seems to put a crown on the head of gibberish and phantasmagoria - but one's fears are laid at rest by Housman. He illustrates his thesis by choosing no less a genius than Blake: this choice is a very nugget of the true gold of critical perception.

The traditional example of poetry neat and pure is Coleridge's Kubla Khan. Housman plunges still nearer the heart of things by selecting work which goes even beyond the non-moral, non-intellectual, sheer visionary delight of Xanadu. There is in Coleridge's perfect picture a meaning seizable by the normal intelligence - not surely a logical formula but all the same a harmony of images recognisable by the mind. The stately pleasure-dome, the underground river, the sunless sea, the caves of ice, the woman wailing for her demon lover, the maiden with a dulcimer, the poet-wizard with flashing eyes and floating hair are certainly uncommon, yet they are all made to cohere in a clear whole of revelation: though enchanted beyond humdrum reality, one understands these rare sights because the language renders each vivid and distinct and clean-cut. Blake, on the other hand, deals often in "embryo" images and "mysterious grandeurs": nothing is evolved, nothing given a definite mental verisimilitude. Take Housman's first quotation:

Hear the voice of the Bard,

Who present, past and future sees;

Whose ears have heard

The Holy Word

That walked among the ancient trees,

Calling the lapsed soul

And weeping in the evening dew;

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That might control

The starry pole,

And fallen, fallen light renew.

'O Earth, O Earth, return!

Arise from out the dewy grass;

Night is worn,

And the morn

Rises from the slumbrous mass.

Turn away no more;

Why wilt thou turn away?

The starry floor,

The watery shore

Is given thee till the break of day.'

Impossible not to be stirred by this music and this mystery, impossible, again, not to feel that a momentous message is spoken, a perfect harmony created though in a region other than the normal mind. But from what region has the poem derived?

Housman supplies a tentative answer. He says that all poetry goes back to "something in man which is obscure and latent, something older than the present organisation of his nature, like the patches of fen which still linger here and there in the drained lands of Cambridgeshire". His statement combines a deep truth with a disappointing ambiguity. "Obscure, latent, older" are correct terms because the region of poetry in us is unusual and secret and it is reached more through the ancient immediacies of sense and emotion than the intellect's sober newly-evolved poise. But sense and emotion do not per se make poetry: they are its effective mediums. It passes from the delight of sense to a subtle discovery behind appearances and plucks some central satisfying soul-thrill from transitory emotion. Laurence Binyon's

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And sweet the rose floats on the arching briar's

Green fountains sprayed with delicate frail fires

has a texture and range of vision to which the acutest sense-perception would seem rough and myopic, while his

What has the ilex heard,

What has the laurel seen

That the pale edges of their leaves were stirred?

What spirit stole between?

sheds a glimmer unknown to outward observation. Consider the speech put into Gruach's mouth by Gordon Bottomley: Gruach fastens in the lacing of her bodice below her throat the flower that has fallen from her lover's cap -

Lie there; move with my life-breath; ah, look up

And breathe again to me his earlier warmth,

As if the vital tremor of his person

Mixed with my heat that veins thy texture now.

Thou hast been set above his brow; sink down,

Bring down to me his head in here, in here.

Is that emotion? Yes and no. It "registers" natural passion with a strange revealing eye, it fills out with keen unnoticed relevancies a simple gesture and makes it ideally complete. Poetry conveys with intense word and rhythm an apt amazement, a flush of insight which brings in powers larger, subtler, more gripping than sense and emotion, in the same way as the "high seriousness" of a Sophocles and the profound charm that emanates from a Wordsworth are not intellectual ingredients so much as a wider revelation pitched in the key of the intellect. No doubt, poetry functions in us through a faculty which has not emerged altogether, but it is not sub-mental: its sweep and boldness and sudden spell or its slow masterful invasion and sorcery pierce through the crust of a theme by a supra-intellectual excitement. It is

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obscure too, but only with a superior light that is still hidden. In itself quick with a quintessence of our powers of sense, emotion, intellect, it may incline towards thought or towards feeling or towards sensuous rapture; its mark everywhere is a sovereign glow of concrete perception deeply penetrating into a thing - widely circling for all that is in vital connection with it - harmonising diverse matters by a touch on some basic substance in which they partake of one another's nature and attitude - arriving at its disclosures through a quick identification of subject and object as if whatever is external in appearance were really internal to the poet's self -and finally striking on a form of word and rhythm which seems to have an absolute and irreproachable beauty like a divine archetype. For the sake of a compact label, we may designate this manifold process as creative intuition.

Critics generally employ the term imagination. But that is inadequate because imagination is just the outer aspect of the activity present in the poetic phenomenon. What gets expressed through a poet is something more magical than his imagining; for, his imagination does not bring about an actual identity with its object so that the very heart of the object is shown forth under the colour of the moment's mood, nor an actual experience of the hidden oneness of several objects despite their differences, nor an actual participation in some realm of perfect beauty. In a poem, with its revelatory inwardness about things and its multiple felicity of illumining significance-expanding similes and metaphors and its expression as of an archetypal form, there is accomplished what the poet seldom accomplishes in his own consciousness - a contact with a single Cosmic Life whose common essence permits the interfusion of different parts, a contact with an Overworld of Perfection which the world here seeks to manifest. His imagination is the channel conducting a greater power to embodiment. It is the surface-display of a secret faculty that is more than human. At times the secret faculty comes to the surface in the poet's mind and then he feels he is not merely a mouthpiece of the Gods but

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himself a God for a few flashes. Mostly he remains no more than a medium who is worked from behind without being made truly aware of the greatness moving through him, somewhat as his own hand is worked by his brain without becoming truly conscious of the marvel it transmits to paper. So it is advisable to distinguish between imagination and intuition by saying that the poet imagines but the poem intuits!

All art is intuition self-expressed - in stone, colour, sound or language. And just because Blake in some of his poems provides us with the language of intuition in a mode that is least mixed with logico-intellectual elements - elements having the smallest importance in poetry - Housman's choice of him is so admirable: he catches the nectar of poetry at its very fount. Unfortunately, however, he is led in general to a theory that is one-sided. When he declares, "Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it", he means that an emotional turn of expression gives the poetic effect. Yet, if poetry is the rhythmic word of intuition, then surely the thing said has undeniable value. Not that any special theme or content is more suitable than another; but whatever the theme or content, the expression must be of its intuitive core. Always that intuitive core must be the thing said. Clothe something else than this core in language and the poetry is bound to suffer, no matter how emotional the manner of expression. Just as the poetic substance is seized as something other than a thought - it has undertones and overtones of suggestion the pure idea sadly lacks - so also no amount of emotive tremolo can supply it. The emotion, whether definite because of the clarity of the idea accompanying it or indefinite as in Blake's poem because the idea is "unev-olved", does not suffice. Just by being divested of a clear idea it does not grow the pure poetic stuff: it merely becomes nondescript and baffling. Where the intellectual content is elusive, the emotional too is the same: this is all that happens when in poetry the emotion is as sheer and neat as possible: no pure poetic stuff results.

That stuff is intuition - a type of substance sui generis,

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which without being itself thought or emotion bears the seed-form of both and wears the outward look of either, when it arrives through an atmosphere of the intelligence or of the heart; only, there is a magic transfiguration wherever it passes. But we must remember that intuition is not devoid of significance: Housman's dictum - "Meaning is of the intellect, poetry is not" - cannot be accepted without any reserve. He himself means and rightly enough that poetry is not determined by logical clarity or precision: to measure it by some accurate mental formulation of its meaning is to degrade if not to nullify its glory and beauty. But there can be a significance which is implicit, which is not exactly formulable -and that is the stuff of poetry. Besides, words have meaning and as poetry is the art of words it must have an articulate background more specific than any other art's - something more interpretatively opposed than in any other art to unrelated emotion-waves or to a series of sense-shocks constituting a helter-skelter of pictorial points. Else the dethronement of meaning might be used in justification of a would-be-profound turbidity, a confusingly colourful mysta-gogism or the vagaries of surrealist composition. Housman is far from that pitfall; the modern irrationalists are not. Blake is mysterious in essentially the same sense as, say, Shakespeare. "After life's fitful fever he sleeps well" moves us as art in the same essential way as anything from Blake, because in both cases the art-thrill is due to the fiery particle called intuition - the sole difference lying in the fact that through Blake the spark leaps from a level of consciousness other than the one from which it makes its saltus through Shakespeare. It seems vague to the normal perceptive power because that power is not accustomed to this kind of manifestation by the poetic particle, but there is here an order, a consistency just as concrete and real to a reader who is at home in mystic intuition as Shakespeare's poetry has for those who can grasp intuition on a "vitalistic" plane. In other words, Blake possesses a concrete and convincing substance, however difficult it may be for normal perception to appre-

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ciate his unusual vision; and just because that substance, that vision, is concrete and convincing at bottom, we are so moved by it in spite of its appearing to be vague and without an outward hought-texture. We cannot be moved in a similar fashion by a Cummings, a Raymond Lulle or a Tristan Tzara. To knock off meaning and pick up the raw emotion or the amorphous subconscious is not necessarily to get quintessential poetry.

In consequence, the test of poetry is not a certain quizzical state or a befuddlement caused in the reader; it is rather a sense of enlightenment, of a secret harmony, of a completeness that satisfies no matter in how mysterious a manner. The deep excitement it creates may show itself in physical symptoms such as Housman describes; yet to write as he does - "Poetry indeed seems to be more physical than intellectual" - is unwittingly to state a half-truth. While removing stress from the intellect it magnifies an accidental series of emotive reactions instead of the true intuitive satisfaction which alone discovers poetry. A sentimentalist will feel like crying, or find his hair bristle, or experience a sudden spearing of the solar plexus, when the villain of a story overpowers the beautiful heroine or the heroine falls into the hero's arms and is locked in the terrible suffocation of a never-ending kiss. On contacting great poetry a mind above tosh may have the physical disturbances Housman speaks of, but it will know great poetry even without them. Its presence is felt as in the words of Eliphas the Temanite quoted by Housman: "A spirit passed before my face." That, like Eliphas, Housman could also say, "The hair of my flesh stood up" shows, however, a noble sensitivity on his part, even if it takes us no nearer a criterion of poetic appeal. What that sensitivity can reveal to us is amply demonstrated throughout his book by his comparative responses to poetry. A more pointed and clear survey of the various grades of poetic excellence is not to be found elsewhere. As a theorist he may not be fully illuminating; as a practical critic he is at once brilliant and exquisite with an infallible taste.

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