The Thinking Corner

The Fetish of Theory

I am sometimes asked what my "theory" is about the writing of a poem. The question finds me at a loss how properly to understand it. For, about the writing of a poem I have no theory if by that term is meant any notion that a poem should be in a certain style and make use of a particular type of words and concern itself with a limited field of themes. I know a poem to be just this: intensity of vision, intensity of word, intensity of rhythm plus the act of being a harmonious whole. The language may be common or kingly, the style simple or complex, the thought plain or picturesque, the emotion day-to-day or once-in-a-blue-moon. It does not matter what theme is chosen, what level of consciousness explored, what personal bent followed in manner of expression. No doubt, a certain type of poem may appeal to me more - but not for purely poetic reasons: the substance may be more in tune with my mood of the moment, my general character or my outlook on life. As art, all types are for me enjoyable and legitimate so long as those three intensities fuse and work out a harmonious whole. I should be just as hard put to it to limit my aesthetic enjoyment of the "fairness" of the fair sex. How can I bind myself, say, to admire merely this or that shape of the feminine nose and feel that other shapes cannot be formed by an equally poetic line of bone and flesh? I can stir to an aquiline swoop upon my attention as well as to a straight thrust at my heart or a breath-taking beauty that goes to my head with a retrousse leap!

Nor have I any theory to the effect that true poetry is what is written effortlessly and without toiling and moiling. Poetry is often supposed to be born perfect at one stroke, a flawless uninterrupted outburst. The result of striving and straining is declared to be no poetry. But what does Dante say about his Divina Commedia? "Si che m'ha fatto per piu anni macro" -which means that his poem made him "lean through many a

Page 1

year." If even a master-singer found that climbing Parnassian heights left hollows in his cheeks, what about less gifted folk? And the principal point is not how much you labour but what you produce thereby.

Aureoled flowers grow on the peaks of paradise: it is these that poets pluck, flowers that seem shining perfections, born without a moment's pain; but do you think they can be reached without the prodigious effort necessary to scale those peaks? To a few lucky ones the amaranthine blooms drop of themselves: the poet has only to open his palms and catch the glimmering charity. Others are not so blessed; but it is the same miracles they manifest, and these miraculous rhythms of beauty have to be considered, not the easy or arduous means employed to achieve them. Besides, some poets - especially those who receive their raptures easily -are content if their song-flowers come from heaven and do not worry whether they bring the full freshness and integrity of the altitudes. Though made of light, the petals in the act of being brought down to earth may bear stains and shadows left by the contact of mortal regions. No cheap sweat of the brain can wash them clean. The soul must travail and shed tears in order to restore that pristine perfection; and not many poets are willing to pass through this experience. Hence so very few create each time a living form of the highest radiance - a moulded flame without one flaw. Even Homer has his proverbial "nods", Shakespeare the "unblot-ted" roughnesses bewailed by Ben Jonson, and Milton the wooden sublimities he puts into the mouth of his Jehovah -yes, even Milton the arch-artist, for unfortunately his sense of art often proved stronger than his sense of inspiration and he was satisfied if his blank verse rolled majestic word and rhythm without all of it having the same fire of life. This fire, this animating breath is what the poet has to cherish; but to make each atom throb and kindle, a sleeplessly creative self-criticism is called for, a luminous labour of heart and mind.

"Creative" and "luminous" - that is what striving and straining have to be. Poetry cannot come of intellectual

Page 2

effort. But all effort is not intellectual: one can endeavour to plunge into the ultra-intellectual "inwardness" from which poetry seems mysteriously to emerge: one can labour and sweat to curb the mechanical and manufacturing intellect and make oneself a receptive instrument for "inspiration". Such labouring and sweating are often more than merely excusable: they are the sine qua non of the uniformly perfect, the necessary finishing touch that renders a piece of art supremely inspired everywhere.

*

Inspiration is not easy to "crib, cabin and confine" in a rigid theory. Even as one may approach it variously, so too one may manifest it in various shapes. A clever friend of mine remarked yesterday, apropos of the multiply-wrought character of certain poems, that to him the idea or the thing was paramount and that he preferred natural and spontaneous speech to literary expression. I could not see eye to eye with him since I felt he theorised too rigidly and made a number of arbitrary assumptions. In the correct sense, to be literary is to use language for creating vision, evoking emotion, building rhythm, in order to give a concrete state of being. To be literary is not to kill the stuff of an idea or a thing, but to set it living on our pulses. To be literary is not to be the opposite of "natural and spontaneous": on the contrary, it is to turn speech warm and winged. Warmth and wingedness are not the attributes of simplicity alone: they belong just as much to complexity. Whether one elects to be simple or complex should depend on what one's state of consciousness is. Either mode can be "natural and spontaneous". Complex richness or grandeur becomes stiff and artificial only when the idea or the thing is itself not complexly coloured or stupendous. There must be equivalence and correspondence between sense and speech: that is the true meaning of naturalness and spontaneity in the first place. In the second, the true meaning is an unforced freshness, so that nothing, however intricately opulent or

Page 3

massive, appears heavy and laboured. Poetry may mix Ormuz with Ind, but it must work with a hand that is born regal. Poetry may heap Pelion upon Ossa, but it must bring an energy intrinsically gigantic. In short, its designs, formed swiftly or slowly, must bear the look of having been executed with sovereign ease. That look, accompanying limpid effects or effects that are elaborate, is the consequence of the poet's tapping ultra-intellectual springs of creativity and that look is what proves naturalness and spontaneity. It has nothing essentially to do with writing without multiply-wrought ornament or magnitude or in a plain and straightforward manner.

There is no use in quoting in this connection Milton's dictum, "Poetry must be simple, sensuous, passionate" and underlining the word "simple" with the purpose of confuting me. We must not set the simplicity Milton had in mind at loggerheads with the complexity under discussion. Decoration, richness, pomp, magnificence, multifoliate beauty - all these are not tabooed by Milton: the ban falls only on the pedantic and the ponderous - intellectual deadweight, logical maziness - what is formed by putting parts together with an external constructive faculty instead of by a flowering out of the manifold from a vital creative centre. In short, simplicity is a synonym for the unforced freshness I have already spoken about. A contrast with complexity would come rather ill from Milton whose language no less than sentence-structure was far indeed from being plain and straightforward. It would come ill also because Milton was scholar enough to know that neither Aeschylus nor Pindar could be termed transparent or uncomplex. And he was too near the Elizabethan age to forget how gorged with metaphor linked to metaphor and how dazzling with picturesque piled-up epithets was the work of its supreme dramatists. Then there was, almost contemporary, the devious depth of Donne and the ingenious radiance of Crashaw. Had Milton lived in our own day he would have known and appreciated the whole Romantic Movement which, while markedly simple and

Page 4

direct on one side, was on the other luxuriant if not labyrinthine too. And he would have never been so foolish as to deny the furor poeticus to Francis Thompson in a passage like the following from Sister Songs:

Oh! may this treasure-galleon of my verse,

Fraught with its golden passion, oared with cadent rhyme,

Set with a towering press of fantasies,

Drop safely down the time,

Leaving mine isled self behind it far

Soon to be sunk in the abysm of seas

(As down the years the splendour voyages

From some long-ruined and night-submerged star),

And in thy subject sovereign's havening heart

Anchor the freightage of its virgin ore;

Adding its wasteful more

To his own overflowing treasury.

So through his river mine shall reach the sea.

Here is diction multiply-wrought in the extreme to a little masterpiece, effect added to exquisite and purple effect, a massing of rich details to disclose a single yet many-faced meaning, a running together of mutually illuminating images in a vivid complexity in which nothing is superfluous or awkward but everything apt and alive in conveying the poet's prayer that the verse to which his love for the child Viola Meynell had given substance and shape might survive his own death and, finding a place in the devoted heart of the man to whom she would belong in marriage, deliver its message to her most intensely and intimately.

*

Mention of images Brings me to another bit of rigid theorising: recently a critic condemned a book of poetry as "jejune and claptrap" on the sole score that the writer was using "cheap and much-flogged symbolism and metaphor".

Page 5

The criticism, without definite quotations to prove the point, is shallow, for what is important is the way symbols are employed and explored, the novel depths caught out of particular metaphors. The angle and power of sight have to be estimated - the moved precision with which the words carry their suggestive glow has to be weighed - the rhythm-lift by which the expressive effect goes home to the heart has to be measured. Once these things are found satisfying, we need make no bones about the symbolism being an old one, the metaphor familiar. If we read the Iliad in this year of grace 1945, with nearly three thousand years in-between crammed with poetic literature, we shall not find many new metaphors in it - nor, I suspect, did the ancient Greeks themselves, for all the similes were borrowed from familiar experience and were current in the unrecorded minstrelsy out of which the Iliad rose like a culminating blossom. But on that ground Homer does not become "jejune and claptrap": the splendour and nobility of his words, the swiftness and largeness of his rhythmic tone as well as the "high seriousness" of his mind of which both his word and rhythm were the expressive body remain great poetry for the good reason that they are sufficient to constitute great poetry.

By a process of abstraction - that is, pulling an image out of its context - it is possible to make out even the most striking vision-effects to be "jejune and claptrap". In poetry, the rose is an ancient symbol, both sacred and profane - it is also an ancient practice to talk of stars. I myself would advise a poet to avoid roses and stars because it is not easy to get new revelatory flashes out of them and one needs exceptionally superb language to make old revelatory flashes come through again to-day. But I would also advise a poet never to hesitate mentioning roses and stars if he could turn them to a new revealing significance, for the most profound test of originality is the distilling of such a significance from an ancient image or idea, just as the most astonishing feat of imagination is the sudden disclosure of a novel facet in scenes and experiences that are most familiar. A critic who is

Page 6

oblivious of this test has no acumen - he looks only at the superficies and judges poetry with the abstract intellect and not the concrete understanding. To the abstract intellect, fire and flame, flower and fragrance, bird and bird-song, sea and wave are all stimuli to cry "Chestnut!" Yet these phenomena can be as bright and fresh to-day in poetry as they were when the first poet spoke of them, provided, of course, genuine insight catches them up into lovely and harmonious language. The whole haunting music of Yeats's early verse could be dismissed as jejune claptrap with the charge that it is chockful of mystic roses and dim dreams and pale stars. But the fact stands that no more beautiful poetry has been written in the last fifty yeas. Yeats's verse is lyricism of the highest order because he has conjured up his vision with a new poignancy of profound emotion, a new witchery of revealing atmosphere, a new evocativeness of exquisite sound. One would be mistaken in considering any image per se, without the subtle tone and "slant" and penumbra given it by the poet in his dealing with the theme in hand.

Criticism is a difficult and delicate affair, demanding a lot of plastic self-adjustment. Catholicity of taste and sympathetic acumen are indispensable and to make a fetish of any fixed theory is to maim one's own mind.

Page 7