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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d7b82bc --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +*.txt text eol=lf +*.htm text eol=lf +*.html text eol=lf +*.md text eol=lf diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6312041 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..93c7729 --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #50174 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50174) diff --git a/old/50174-0.txt b/old/50174-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index c50313a..0000000 --- a/old/50174-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,4421 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg EBook of On English Poetry, by Robert Graves - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with -almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license - - -Title: On English Poetry - Being an Irregular Approach to the Psychology of This Art, - from Evidence Mainly Subjective - -Author: Robert Graves - -Release Date: October 10, 2015 [EBook #50174] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON ENGLISH POETRY *** - - - - -Produced by MWS, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was -produced from images generously made available by The -Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries) - - - - - - - - - - ON - ENGLISH POETRY - - - - - _POEMS BY ROBERT GRAVES_ - - - FAIRIES AND FUSILEERS [1918] - COUNTRY SETTLEMENT [1920] - THE PIER-GLASS [1921] - - - - - ON ENGLISH POETRY - - _Being an Irregular Approach to the Psychology - of This Art, from Evidence Mainly Subjective_ - - BY ROBERT GRAVES - - [Illustration: colophon] - - NEW YORK ALFRED·A·KNOPF MCMXXII - - COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY - ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. - - _Published, May, 1922_ - - _Set up and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y. Paper - furnished by Henry Lindenmeyr & Sons, New York, N. Y. Bound by the - H. Wolff Estate, New York, N. Y._ - - MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - - _To T. E. Lawrence of Arabia and All Soul’s College, Oxford, and to - W. H. R. Rivers of the Solomon Islands and St. John’s College, - Cambridge, my gratitude for valuable critical help, and the - dedication of this book._ - - ... Also of the Mustarde Tarte: Suche - problemis to paynt, it longyth to his arte. - JOHN SKELTON. - - Poetry subdues to union under its light yoke - all irreconcilable things. - P. B. SHELLEY. - - - - -NOTE - - -The greater part of this book will appear controversial, but any critic -who expects me to argue on what I have written, is begged kindly to -excuse me; my garrison is withdrawn without a shot fired and his -artillery may blow the fortress to pieces at leisure. These notebook -reflections are only offered as being based on the rules which regulate -my own work at the moment, for many of which I claim no universal -application and have promised no lasting regard. They have been -suggested from time to time mostly by particular problems in the writing -of my last two volumes of poetry. Hesitating to formulate at present a -comprehensive water-tight philosophy of poetry, I have dispensed with a -continuous argument, and so the sections either stand independently or -are intended to get their force by suggestive neighbourliness rather -than by logical catenation. The names of the glass houses in which my -name as an authority on poetry lodges at present, are to be found on a -back page. - -It is a heartbreaking task to reconcile literary and scientific -interests in the same book. Literary enthusiasts seem to regard poetry -as something miraculous, something which it is almost blasphemous to -analyse, witness the outcry against R. L. Stevenson when he merely -underlined examples of Shakespeare’s wonderful dexterity in the -manipulation of consonants; most scientists on the other hand, being -either benevolently contemptuous of poetry, or if interested, -insensitive to the emotional quality of words and their associative -subtleties, themselves use words as weights and counters rather than as -chemicals powerful in combination and have written, if at all, so -boorishly about poetry that the breach has been actually widened. If any -false scientific assumptions or any bad literary blunders I have made, -be held up for popular execration, these may yet act as decoys to the -truth which I am anxious to buy even at the price of a snubbing; and -where in many cases no trouble has apparently been taken to check -over-statements, there is this excuse to offer, that when putting a cat -among pigeons it is always advisable to make it as large a cat as -possible. - -R. G. - -Islip, -Oxford. - - - - -CONTENTS - - -I DEFINITIONS, 13 - -II THE NINE MUSES, 15 - -III POETRY AND PRIMITIVE MAGIC, 19 - -IV CONFLICT OF EMOTIONS, 22 - -V THE PATTERN UNDERNEATH, 24 - -VI INSPIRATION, 26 - -VII THE PARABLE OF MR. POETA AND MR. LECTOR, 27 - -VIII THE CARPENTER’S SON, 31 - -IX THE GADDING VINE, 33 - -X THE DEAD END AND THE MAN OF ONE POEM, 36 - -XI SPENSER’S CUFFS, 38 - -XII CONNECTION OF POETRY AND HUMOUR, 40 - -XIII DICTION, 41 - -XIV THE DAFFODILS, 42 - -XV VERS LIBRE, 45 - -XVI MOVING MOUNTAINS, 50 - -XVII LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI, 50 - -XVIII THE GENERAL ELLIOTT, 55 - -XIX THE GOD CALLED POETRY, 62 - -XX LOGICALIZATION, 66 - -XXI LIMITATIONS, 69 - -XXII THE NAUGHTY BOY, 71 - -XXIII THE CLASSICAL AND ROMANTIC IDEAS, 72 - -XXIV COLOUR, 76 - -XXV PUTTY, 78 - -XXVI READING ALOUD, 81 - -XXVII L’ARTE DELLA PITTURA, 82 - -XXVIII ON WRITING MUSICALLY, 83 - -XXIX THE USE OF POETRY, 84 - -XXX HISTORIES OF POETRY, 86 - -XXXI THE BOWL MARKED DOG, 87 - -XXXII THE ANALYTIC SPIRIT, 88 - -XXXIII RHYME AND ALLITERATION, 89 - -XXXIV AN AWKWARD FELLOW CALLED ARIPHRADES, 90 - -XXXV IMPROVISING NEW CONVENTIONS, 92 - -XXXVI WHEN IN DOUBT..., 93 - -XXXVII THE EDITOR WITH THE MUCKRAKE, 94 - -XXXVIII THE MORAL QUESTION, 94 - -XXXIX THE POET AS OUTSIDER, 96 - -XL A POLITE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT, 97 - -XLI FAKE POETRY, BAD POETRY AND MERE VERSE, 97 - -XLII A DIALOGUE ON FAKE POETRY, 101 - -XLIII ASKING ADVICE, 102 - -XLIV SURFACE FAULTS, AN ILLUSTRATION, 103 - -XLV LINKED SWEETNESS LONG DRAWN OUT, 106 - -XLVI THE FABLE OF THE IDEAL GADGET, 108 - -XLVII SEQUELS ARE BARRED, 111 - -XLVIII TOM FOOL, 111 - -XLIX CROSS RHYTHM AND RESOLUTION, 113 - -L MY NAME IS LEGION, FOR WE ARE MANY, 116 - -LI THE PIG BABY, 121 - -LII APOLOGY FOR DEFINITIONS, 122 - -LIII TIMES AND SEASONS, 124 - -LIV TWO HERESIES, 125 - -LV THE ART OF EXPRESSION, 126 - -LVI GHOSTS IN THE SHELDONIAN, 129 - -LVII THE LAYING-ON OF HANDS, 130 - -LVIII WAYS AND MEANS, 132 - -LIX POETRY AS LABOUR, 134 - -LX THE NECESSITY OF ARROGANCE, 134 - -LXI IN PROCESSION, 137 - - APPENDIX: THE DANGERS OF DEFINITION, 143 - - - - -I - -DEFINITIONS - - -There are two meanings of Poetry as the poet himself has come to use the -word:--first, Poetry, the unforeseen fusion in his mind of apparently -contradictory emotional ideas; and second, Poetry, the more-or-less -deliberate attempt, with the help of a rhythmic mesmerism, to impose an -illusion of actual experience on the minds of others. In its first and -peculiar sense it is the surprise that comes after thoughtlessly rubbing -a mental Aladdin’s lamp, and I would suggest that every poem worthy of -the name has its central idea, its nucleus, formed by this spontaneous -process; later it becomes the duty of the poet as craftsman to present -this nucleus in the most effective way possible, by practising poetry -more consciously as an art. He creates in passion, then by a reverse -process of analyzing, he tests the implied suggestions and corrects them -on common-sense principles so as to make them apply universally. - -Before elaborating the idea of this spontaneous Poetry over which the -poet has no direct control, it would be convenient to show what I mean -by the Poetry over which he has a certain conscious control, by -contrasting its method with the method of standard Prose. Prose in its -most prosy form seems to be the art of accurate statement by suppressing -as far as possible the latent associations of words; for the convenience -of his readers the standard prose-writer uses an accurate logical -phrasing in which perhaps the periods and the diction vary with the -emotional mood; but he only says what he appears at first to say. In -Poetry the implication is more important than the manifest statement; -the underlying associations of every word are marshalled carefully. Many -of the best English poets have found great difficulty in writing -standard prose; this is due I suppose to a sort of tender-heartedness, -for standard prose-writing seems to the poet very much like turning the -machine guns on an innocent crowd of his own work people. - -Certainly there is a hybrid form, prose poetry, in which poets have -excelled, a perfectly legitimate medium, but one that must be kept -distinct from both its parent elements. It employs the indirect method -of poetic suggestion, the flanking movement rather than the frontal -attack, but like Prose, does not trouble to keep rhythmic control over -the reader. This constant control seems an essential part of Poetry -proper. But to expect it in prose poetry is to be disappointed; we may -take an analogy from the wilder sort of music where if there is -continual changing of time and key, the listener often does not “catch -on” to each new idiom, so that he is momentarily confused by the changes -and the unity of the whole musical form is thereby broken for him. So -exactly in prose poetry. In poetry proper our delight is in the -emotional variations from a clearly indicated norm of rhythm and -sound-texture; but in prose poetry there is no recognizable norm. Where -in some notable passages (of the Authorised Version of the Bible for -instance) usually called prose poetry, one does find complete rhythmic -control even though the pattern is constantly changing, this is no -longer prose poetry, it is poetry, not at all the worse for its -intricate rhythmic resolutions. Popular confusion as to the various -properties and qualities of Poetry, prose poetry, verse, prose, with -their subcategories of good, bad and imitation, has probably been caused -by the inequality of the writing in works popularly regarded as -Classics, and made taboo for criticism. There are few “masterpieces of -poetry” that do not occasionally sink to verse, many disregarded -passages of Prose that are often prose poetry and sometimes even poetry -itself. - - - - -II - -THE NINE MUSES - - -I suppose that when old ladies remark with a breathless wonder “My dear, -he has _more_ than _mere talent_, I am convinced he has a _touch of -genius_” they are differentiating between the two parts of poetry given -at the beginning of the last section, between the man who shows a -remarkable aptitude for conjuring and the man actually also in league -with the powers of magic. The weakness of originally unspontaneous -poetry seems to be that the poet has only the very small conscious part -of his experience to draw upon, and therefore in co-ordinating the -central images, his range of selection is narrower and the links are -only on the surface. On the other hand, spontaneous poetry untested by -conscious analysis has the opposite weakness of being liable to surface -faults and unintelligible thought-connections. Poetry composed in sleep -is a good instance of the sort I mean. The rhymes are generally -inaccurate, the texture clumsy, there is a tendency to use the same -words close together in different senses, and the thought-connections -are so free as to puzzle the author himself when he wakes. A scrap of -dream poetry sticks in my mind since my early schooldays: - - “It’s Henry the VIII! - It’s Henry the VIII! - I know him by the smile on his face - He is leading his armies over to France. - -Here _eighth_ and _face_ seemed perfect rhymes, to the sleeping ear, the -spirit was magnificent, the implications astonishing; but the waking -poet was forced to laugh. I believe that in the first draft of -Coleridge’s _Kubla Khan_, _Abora_ was the rhyme for _Dulcimer_, as:-- - - “A damsel with a dulcimer - Singing of Mount Abora” - -because “saw” seems too self-conscious an assonance and too far removed -from “Abora” to impress us as having been part of the original dream -poem. “Could I revive within me” again is surely written in a waking -mood, probably after the disastrous visit of the man from Porlock. - -Henceforward, in using the word _Poetry_ I mean both the controlled and -uncontrollable parts of the art taken together, because each is helpless -without the other. And I do not wish to limit Poetry, as there is a new -tendency to do, merely to the short dramatic poem, the ballad and the -lyric, though it certainly is a convenience not to take these as the -normal manifestations of Poetry in order to see more clearly the -inter-relation of such different forms as the Drama, the Epic, and the -song with music. In the Drama, the emotional conflict which is the whole -cause and meaning of Poetry is concentrated in the mental problems of -the leading character or characters. They have to choose for instance -between doing what they think is right and the suffering or contempt -which is the penalty, between the gratification of love and the fear of -hurting the person they love, or similar dilemmas. The lesser actors in -the drama do not themselves necessarily speak the language of poetry or -have any question in their minds as to the course they should pursue; -still, by throwing their weight into one scale or another they affect -the actions of the principals and so contribute to the poetry of the -play. It is only the master dramatist who ever attempts to develop -subsidiary characters in sympathy with the principals. - -The true Epic appears to me as an organic growth of dramatic scenes, -presented in verse which only becomes true poetry on occasion; but these -scenes are so placed in conflicting relation that between them they -compose a central theme of Poetry not to be found in the detachable -parts, and this theme is a study of the interactions of the ethical -principles of opposing tribes or groups. In the Iliad, for instance, the -conflict is not only between the Trojan and Greek ideas, but between -groups in each camp. In the Odyssey it is between the ethics of -sea-wandering and the ethics of the dwellers on dry land. I would be -inclined to deny the _Beowulf_ as an epic, describing it instead as a -personal allegory in epical surroundings. The Canterbury Tales are much -nearer to an English Epic, the interacting principles being an imported -Eastern religion disguised in Southern dress and a ruder, more vigorous -Northern spirit unsubdued even when on pilgrimage. - -The words of a song do not necessarily show in themselves the emotional -conflict which I regard as essential for poetry, but that is because the -song is definitely a compound of words and music, and the poetry lies in -this relation. Words for another man’s music can hardly have a very -lively independent existence, yet with music they must combine to a -powerful chemical action; to write a lyric to conflict with imaginary -music is the most exacting art imaginable, and is rather like trying to -solve an equation in _x_, _y_ and _z_, given only _x_. - -I wonder if there are as many genuine Muses as the traditional nine; I -cannot help thinking that one or two of them have been counted twice -over. But the point of this section is to show the strong family -likeness between three or four of them at least. - - - - -III - -POETRY AND PRIMITIVE MAGIC - - -One may think of Poetry as being like Religion, a modified descendant of -primitive Magic; it keeps the family characteristic of stirring wonder -by creating from unpromising lifeless materials an illusion of -unexpected passionate life. The poet, a highly developed witch doctor, -does not specialize in calling up at set times some one particular minor -divinity, that of Fear or Lust, of War or Family Affection; he plays on -all the emotions and serves as comprehensive and universal a God as he -can conceive. There is evidence for explaining the origin of poetry as I -have defined it, thus:--Primitive man was much troubled by the -phenomenon of dreams, and early discovered what scientists are only just -beginning to acknowledge, that the recollection of dreams is of great -use in solving problems of uncertainty; there is always a secondary -meaning behind our most fantastic nightmares. Members of a primitive -society would solemnly recount their dreams to the wise ones of the clan -and ask them to draw an inference. Soon it happened that, in cases of -doubt, where the dream was forgotten and could not be recalled, or where -it was felt that a dream was needed to confirm or reverse a decision, -the peculiarly gifted witch doctor or priestess would induce a sort of -self-hypnotism, and in the light of the dream so dreamed, utter an -oracle which contained an answer to the problem proposed. The compelling -use of rhythm to hold people’s attention and to make them beat their -feet in time, was known, and the witch doctor seems to have combined the -rhythmic beat of a drum or gong with the recital of his dream. In these -rhythmic dream utterances, intoxicating a primitive community to -sympathetic emotional action for a particular purpose of which I will -treat later, Poetry, in my opinion, originated, and the dream symbolism -of Poetry was further encouraged by the restrictions of the _taboo_, -which made definite reference to certain people, gods and objects, -unlucky. - -This is not to say that verse-recital of laws or adventures or history -did not possibly come before oracular poetry, and whoever it was who -found it convenient that his word stresses should correspond with beat -of drum or stamp of feet, thereby originated the rhythm that is common -both to verse and to poetry. Verse is not necessarily degenerate poetry; -rhymed advertisement and the _memoria technica_ have kept up the honest -tradition of many centuries; witty verse with no poetical pretensions -justifies its existence a hundred times over; even the Limerick can -become delightful in naughty hands; but where poetry differs from other -verse is by being essentially a solution to some pressing emotional -problem and has always the oracular note. - -Between verse, bad poetry and fake poetry, there is a great distinction. -Bad poetry is simply the work of a man who solves his emotional problems -to his own satisfaction but not to anybody else’s. Fake poetry, the -decay of poetry, corresponds exactly with fake magic, the decay of true -magic. It happens that some member of the priestly caste, finding it -impossible to go into a trance when required, even with the aid of -intoxicants, has to resort to subterfuge. He imitates a state of trance, -recalls some one else’s dream which he alters slightly, and wraps his -oracular answer in words recollected from the lips of genuine witch -doctors. He takes care to put his implied meaning well to the fore and -the applicants give him payment and go away as well pleased with their -money’s worth as the readers of Tupper, Montgomery and Wilcox with the -comfortable verses supplied them under the trade name of “Poetry.” - -Acrostics and other verses of _wit_ have, I believe, much the same -ancestry in the ingenious _double entendres_ with which the harassed -priestesses of Delphi insured against a wrong guess. - - - - -IV - -CONFLICT OF EMOTIONS - - -The suggestion that an emotional conflict is necessary for the birth of -true poetry will perhaps not be accepted without illustrative instances. -But one need only take any of the most famous lines from Elizabethan -drama, those generally acknowledged as being the most essential poetry, -and a battle of the great emotions, faith, hope or love against fear, -grief or hate, will certainly appear; though one side may indeed be -fighting a hopeless battle. - -When Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is waiting for the clock to strike twelve -and the Devil to exact his debt, he cries out: - - That Time may cease and midnight never come - _O lente, lente currite noctis equi_. - -Scholastic commentators have actually been found to wonder at the -“inappropriateness” of “Go slowly, slowly, coursers of the night,” a -quotation originally spoken by an Ovidian lover with his arms around the -mistress from whom he must part at dawn. They do not even note it as -marking the distance the scholar Faustus has travelled since his first -dry-boned Latin quotation _Bene disserere est finis logices_ which he -pedantically translates: - - Is, to dispute well, Logicke’s chiefest end. - -Far less do they see how Marlowe has made the lust of life, in its -hopeless struggle against the devils coming to bind it for the eternal -bonfire, tragically unable to find any better expression than this -feeble over-sweetness; so that there follows with even greater -insistence of fate:-- - - The starres moove stil, time runs, the clocke wil strike, - The divel wil come and Faustus must be damnd. - -When Lady Macbeth, sleep-walking, complains that “all the perfumes of -Arabia will not sweeten this little hand,” these perfumes are not merely -typically sweet smells to drown the reek of blood. They represent also -her ambitions for the luxury of a Queen, and the conflict of luxurious -ambition against fate and damnation is as one-sided as before. Or take -Webster’s most famous line in his Duchess of Malfi: - - Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young, - -spoken by Ferdinand over the Duchess’ body; and that word “dazzle” does -duty for two emotions at once, sun-dazzled awe at loveliness, -tear-dazzled grief for early death. - -The effect of these distractions of mind is so often an appeal to our -pity, even for the murderers or for the man who has had his fill of -“vaine pleasure for 24 yeares” that to rouse this pity has been taken, -wrongly, I think, as the chief end of poetry. Poetry is not always -tragedy; and there is no pity stirred by Captain Tobias Hume’s love song -“Faine would I change this note, To which false love has charmed me,” or -in Andrew Marvell’s Mower’s address to the glow-worms: - - Ye country comets that portend - No war nor prince’s funeral, - Shining unto no higher end - Than to presage the grass’s fall. - -There is no pity either for Hume’s lover who suddenly discovers that he -has been making a sad song about nothing, or for Marvell’s glow-worms -and their rusticity and slightness of aim. In the first case Love stands -up in its glory against the feeble whining of minor poets; in the -second, thoughts of terror and majesty, the heavens themselves blazing -forth the death of princes, conflict ineffectually with security and -peace, the evening glow-worm prophesying fair weather for mowing next -morning, and meanwhile lighting rustic lovers to their tryst. - - - - -V - -THE PATTERN UNDERNEATH - - -The power of surprise which marks all true poetry, seems to result from -a foreknowledge of certain unwitting processes of the reader’s mind, for -which the poet more or less deliberately provides. The underlying -associations of each word in a poem form close combinations of emotion -unexpressed by the bare verbal pattern. - -In this way the poet may be compared with a father piecing together a -picture-block puzzle for his children. He surprises them at last by -turning over the completed picture, and showing them that by the act of -assembling the scattered parts of “Red Riding Hood with the Basket of -Food” he has all the while been building up unnoticed underneath another -scene of the tragedy--“The Wolf eating the Grandmother.” - -The analogy can be more closely pressed; careless arrangement of the -less important pieces or wilfully decorative borrowing from another -picture altogether may look very well in the upper scene, but what -confusion below! - -The possibilities of this pattern underneath have been recognized and -exploited for centuries in Far Eastern systems of poetry. I once even -heard an English Orientalist declare that Chinese was the only language -in which true poetry could be written, because of the undercurrents of -allusion contained in every word of the Chinese language. It never -occurred to him that the same thing might be unrecognizedly true also of -English words. - - - - -VI - -“INSPIRATION” - - -People are always enquiring how exactly poets get their “inspiration,” -perhaps in the hope that it may happen to themselves one day and that if -they know the signs in advance, something profitable may come of it. - -It is a difficult conundrum, but I should answer somehow like this:--The -poet is consciously or unconsciously always either taking in or giving -out; he hears, observes, weighs, guesses, condenses, idealizes, and the -new ideas troop quietly into his mind until suddenly every now and again -two of them violently quarrel and drag into the fight a group of other -ideas that have been loitering about at the back of his mind for years; -there is great excitement, noise and bloodshed, with finally a -reconciliation and drinks all round. The poet writes a tactful police -report on the affair and there is the poem. - -Or, to put it in a more sober form:-- - -When conflicting issues disturb his mind, which in its conscious state -is unable to reconcile them logically, the poet acquires the habit of -self-hypnotism, as practised by the witch doctors, his ancestors in -poetry. - -He learns in self-protection to take pen and paper and let the pen solve -the hitherto insoluble problem which has caused the disturbance. - -I speak of this process of composition as self-hypnotism because on -being interrupted the poet experiences the disagreeable sensations of a -sleep-walker disturbed, and later finds it impossible to remember how -the early drafts of a poem ran, though he may recall every word of a -version which finally satisfied his conscious scrutiny. Confronted -afterwards with the very first draft of the series he cannot in many -cases decipher his own writing, far less recollect the process of -thought which made him erase this word and substitute that. Many poets -of my acquaintance have corroborated what I have just said and also -observed that on laying down their pens after the first excitement of -composition they feel the same sort of surprise that a man finds on -waking from a “fugue,” they discover that they have done a piece of work -of which they never suspected they were capable; but at the same moment -they discover a number of trifling surface defects which were invisible -before. - - - - -VII - -THE PARABLE OF MR. POETA AND MR. LECTOR - - -Mr. Poeta was a child of impulse, and though not really a very careful -student of Chaucer himself, was incensed one day at reading a literary -article by an old schoolfellow called Lector, patronizing the poet in an -impudent way and showing at the same time a great ignorance of his best -work. But instead of taking the more direct and prosaic course of -writing a letter of protest to the review which printed the article, or -of directly giving the author a piece of his mind, he improvised a -complicated plot for the young man’s correction. - -On the following day he invited Mr. Lector to supper at his home and -spent a busy morning making preparations. He draped the dining-room -walls with crape, took up the carpet, and removed all the furniture -except the table and two massive chairs which were finally drawn up to a -meal of bread, cheese and water. When supper-time arrived and with it -Mr. Lector, Mr. Poeta was discovered sitting in deep dejection in a -window seat with his face buried in his hands; he would not notice his -guest’s arrival for a full minute. Mr. Lector, embarrassed by the -strangeness of his reception (for getting no answer to his knock at the -door he had forced his way in), was now definitely alarmed by Mr. -Poeta’s nervous gestures, desultory conversation and his staring eyes -perpetually turning to a great rusty scimitar hanging on a nail above -the mantelpiece. There was no attendance, nor any knife or plate on the -board. The bread was stale, the cheese hard, and no sooner had Mr. -Lector raised a glass of water to his lips than his host dashed it from -his hands and with a bellow of rage sprang across the table. Mr. Lector, -saw him seize the scimitar and flourish it around his head, so for want -of any weapon of defence, the unfortunate young man reacted to -terror-stricken flight. He darted from the room and heard the blade -whistle through the air behind him. - -Out of an open window he jumped and into a small enclosed yard; with the -help of a handy rainwater tub he climbed the opposite wall, then dashed -down a pathway through a shrubbery and finding the front door of a -deserted cottage standing open, rushed in and upstairs, then -breathlessly flinging into an empty room at the stairhead, slammed the -door. - -By so slamming the door he had locked it and on recovering his presence -of mind found himself a close prisoner, for the only window was stoutly -barred and the door lock was too massive to break. Here then, he stayed -in confinement for three days, suffering severely until released by an -accomplice of Mr. Poeta, who affected to be much surprised at finding -him there and even threatened an action for trespass. But cold, hungry -and thirsty, Mr. Lector had still had for companion in his misery a -coverless copy of Chaucer which he found lying in the grate and which he -read through from beginning to end with great enjoyment, thereupon -reconsidering his previous estimate of the poet’s greatness. - -But he never realized that every step he had taken had been -predetermined by the supposed maniac and that once frightened off his -balance, he had reacted according to plan. Mr. Poeta did not need to -pursue him over the wall or even to go any further than the dining-room -door; he counted on the all-or-none principle of reaction to danger -finishing the job for him. So out at the window went Mr. Lector and -every recourse offered for escape he accepted unquestioningly. Mr. Poeta -knew well enough that Mr. Lector would eventually treasure that copy of -Chaucer prepared for him, as a souvenir of his terrible experience, that -he would have it rebound and adopt the poet as a “discovery” of his own. - -The reader in interpreting this parable, must not make too close a -comparison of motives; the process is all that is intended to show. The -poet, once emotion has suggested a scheme of work, goes over the ground -with minute care and makes everything sure, so that when his poem is -presented to the reader, the latter is thrown off his balance -temporarily by the novelty of the ideas involved. He has no critical -weapons at his command, so he must follow the course which the poet has -mapped out for him. He is carried away in spite of himself and though -the actual words do not in themselves express all the meaning which the -poet manages to convey (Mr. Poeta, as has been said, did not pursue) yet -the reader on recovering from the first excitement finds the implied -conclusion laid for him to discover, and flattering himself that he has -reached it independently, finally carries it off as his own. Even where -a conclusion is definitely expressed in a poem the reader often deceives -himself into saying, “I have often thought that before, but never so -clearly,” when as a matter of fact he has just been unconsciously -translating the poet’s experience into terms of his own, and finding the -formulated conclusion sound, imagines that the thought is originally -his. - - - - -VIII - -THE CARPENTER’S SON - - -Fables and analogies serve very well instead of the psychological jargon -that would otherwise have to be used in a discussion of the poet’s -mental clockwork, but they must be supported wherever possible by -definite instances, chapter and verse. An example is therefore owed of -how easily and completely the poet can deceive his readers once he has -assumed control of their imagination, hypnotizing them into a receptive -state by indirect sensuous suggestions and by subtle variations of -verse-melody; which hypnotism, by the way, I regard as having a physical -rather than a mental effect and being identical with the rhythmic -hypnotism to which such animals as snakes, elephants or apes are easily -subject. - -Turn then to Mr. Housman’s classic sequence “A Shropshire Lad,” to No. -XLVII “The Carpenter’s Son,” beginning, “Here the hangman stops his -cart.” Ask any Housman enthusiasts (they are happily many) how long it -took them to realize what the poet is forcing on them there. In nine -cases out of ten where this test is applied, it will be found that the -lyric has never been consciously recognized as an Apocryphal account of -the Crucifixion; and even those who have consciously recognized the -clues offered have failed to formulate consciously the further daring -(some would say blasphemous) implications of its position after the last -three pieces “Shot, lad? So quick, so clean an ending,” “If it chance -your eye offend you” and the momentary relief of “Bring in this timeless -grave to throw.” - -Among Jubilee bonfires; village sports of running, cricket, football; a -rustic murder; the London and North Western Railway; the Shropshire -Light Infantry; ploughs; lovers on stiles or in long grass; the ringing -of church bells; and then this suicide by shooting, no reader is -prepared for the appearance of the historic Son of Sorrow. The poet has -only to call the Cross a gallows-tree and make the Crucified call His -disciples “Lads” instead of “My Brethren” or “Children,” and we are -completely deceived. - -In our almost certain failure to recognize Him in this context lies, I -believe, the intended irony of the poem which is strewn with the -plainest scriptural allusions. - -In justification of the above and of my deductions about “La Belle Dame -sans Merci” in a later section I plead the rule that “Poetry contains -nothing haphazard,” which follows naturally on the theory connecting -poetry with dreams. By this rule I mean that if a poem, poem-sequence or -drama is an allegory of genuine emotional experience and not a mere -cold-blooded exercise, no striking detail and no juxtaposition of -apparently irrelevant themes which it contains can be denied at any rate -a personal significance--a cypher that can usually be decoded from -another context. - - - - -IX - -THE GADDING VINE - - -When we say that a poet is born not made, it is saying something much -more, that Poetry is essentially spontaneous in origin, and that very -little of it can therefore be taught on a blackboard; it means that a -man is not a poet unless there is some peculiar event in his family -history to account for him. It means to me that with the apparent -exceptions given in the next section, the poet, like his poetry, is -himself the result of the fusion of incongruous forces. Marriages -between people of conflicting philosophies of life, widely separated -nationalities or (most important) different emotional processes, are -likely either to result in children hopelessly struggling with -inhibitions or to develop in them a central authority of great resource -and most quick witted at compromise. Early influences, other than -parental, stimulate the same process. The mind of a poet is like an -international conference composed of delegates of both sexes and every -shade of political thought, which is trying to decide on a series of -problems of which the chairman has himself little previous -knowledge--yet this chairman, this central authority, will somehow -contrive to sign a report embodying the specialized knowledge and -reconciling the apparently hopeless disagreements of all factions -concerned. These factions can be called, for convenience, the poet’s -sub-personalities. - -It is obviously impossible to analyze with accuracy the various elements -that once combined to make a phrase in the mind of a poet long dead, but -for the sake of illustration here is a fanciful reconstruction of the -clash of ideas that gave us Milton’s often quoted “Gadding Vine.” The -words, to me, represent an encounter between the poet’s -sub-personalities “B” and “C.” Says “B”:-- - -“What a gentle placid fruitful plant the vine is; I am thinking of -putting it in one of my speeches as emblem of the kindly weakness of the -Vegetables.” - -C replies very tartly:-- - -“Gentle placid fruitful fiddle-sticks! Why, my good friend, think of the -colossal explosive force required to thrust up that vast structure from -a tiny seed buried inches deep in the earth; against the force of -gravity too, and against very heavy winds. Placidity! Look at its leaves -tossing about and its greedy tendrils swaying in search of something to -attack. Vegetable indeed! It’s mobile, it’s vicious, it’s more like a -swarm of gad-flies.” B continues obstinate, saying “I never heard such -nonsense. A vine is still a vine, in spite of your paradoxes.” - -“Anyhow, the juice of the vine makes you gad about pretty lively, -sometimes,” says C. - -“Grapes are the conventional fruit for the sick-room,” retorts B. - -“Well, what did the Greeks think about it?” pursues C. “Wasn’t Dionysos -the god of the Vine? He didn’t stop rooted all his life in some -miserable little Greek valley. He went gadding off to India and brought -back tigers.” - -“If you are going to appeal to the poets,” returns B, “you can’t -disregard the position of the vine in decorative art. It has been -conventionalized into the most static design you can find, after the -lotus. When I say _Vine_, that’s quite enough for me, just V for -vegetable.” - -They are interrupted by A the master spirit who says with authority:-- - -“Silence, the two of you! I rule a compromise. Call it a “gadding vine” -and have done with it.” - - * * * * * - -The converse of the proposition stated at the beginning of this section, -namely that every one who has the sort of family history mentioned above -and is not the prey of inhibitions, will become a poet, is certainly not -intended. Poetry is only one outlet for peculiar individual expression; -there are also the other arts, with politics, generalship, philosophy, -and imaginative business; or merely rhetoric, fantastic jokes and -original swearing-- - - - - -X - -THE DEAD END AND THE MAN OF ONE POEM - - -The question of why Poets suddenly seem to come to a dead end and stop -writing true Poetry, is one that has always perplexed literary critics, -and the poets themselves still more. The explanation will probably be -found in two causes. - -In the first case the poet’s preoccupation with the clash of his -emotions has been transmuted into a calmer state of meditation on -philosophic paradox: but poetry being, by accepted definition, sensuous -and passionate is no vehicle of expression for this state. Impersonal -concepts can perhaps be expressed in intellectual music, but in poetry -the musical rhythm and word-texture are linked with a sensuous imagery -too gross for the plane of philosophic thought. Thus dithyramb, by which -I mean the essentially musical treatment of poetry in defiance of the -sense of the words used, is hardly a more satisfactory medium than -metaphysical verse: in which even a lyrical sugar-coating to the pill -cannot induce the childish mood of poetry to accept philosophic -statements removed beyond the plane of pictorial allegory. - -In the second case the conflict of the poet’s subpersonalities has been -finally settled, by some satisfaction of desire or removal of a cause of -fear, in the complete rout of the opposing parties, and the victors -dictate their own laws, uncontradicted, in legal prose or (from habit) -in verse. - -Distinction ought to be drawn between the poet and the man who has -written poetry. There are certainly men of only one poem, a James -Clarence Mangan, a Christopher Smart, a Julian Grenfell (these are -instances more convenient than accurate) who may be explained either as -born poets, tortured with a lifelong mental conflict, though able -perhaps only once in their life to “go under” to their own -self-hypnotism, or as not naturally poets at all but men who write to -express a sudden intolerable clamour in their brain; this is when -circumstances have momentarily alienated the usually happy members of -their mental family, but once the expression has brought reconciliation, -there is no further need of poetry, and the poet born out of due time, -ceases to be. - -This temporary writing of poetry by normal single-track minds is most -common in youth when the sudden realization of sex, its powers and its -limited opportunities for satisfactory expression, turns the world -upside down for any sensitive boy or girl. Wartime has the same sort of -effect. I have definite evidence for saying that much of the -trench-poetry written during the late war was the work of men not -otherwise poetically inclined, and that it was very frequently due to an -insupportable conflict between suppressed instincts of love and fear; -the officer’s actual love which he could never openly show, for the boys -he commanded, and the fear, also hidden under a forced gaiety, of the -horrible death that threatened them all. - - - - -XI - -SPENSER’S CUFFS - - -The poet’s quarrelsome lesser personalities to which I have referred are -divided into camps by the distinction of sex. But in a poet the dominant -spirit is male and though usually a feminist in sympathy, cannot afford -to favour the women at the expense of his own sex. This amplifies my -distrust of poets with floppy hats, long hair, extravagant clothes and -inverted tendencies. Apollo never to my knowledge appears in Greek art -as a Hermaphrodite, and the Greeks understood such problems far better -than we do. I know it is usual to defend these extravagances of dress by -glorifying the Elizabethan age; but let it be remembered that Edmund -Spenser himself wore “short hair, little bands and little cuffs.” - -If there is no definite sexual inversion to account for breaking out in -fancy dress, a poet who is any good at all ought not to feel the need of -advertising his profession in this way. As I understand the poet’s -nature, though he tries to dress as conventionally as possible, he will -always prove too strong for his clothes and look completely ridiculous -or very magnificent according to the occasion. - -This matter of dress may seem unimportant, but people are still so shy -of acknowledging the poet in his lifetime as a gifted human being who -may have something important to say, that any dressing up or unnecessary -strutting does a great deal of harm. - -I am convinced that this extravagant dressing up tendency, like the -allied tendency to unkemptness, is only another of the many forms in -which the capricious child spirit which rules our most emotional dreams -is trying also to dominate the critical, diligent, constructive -man-spirit of waking life, without which the poet is lost beyond -recovery. Shelley was a great poet not because he enjoyed sailing paper -boats on the Serpentine but because, in spite of this infantile -preference he had schooled his mind to hard thinking on the -philosophical and political questions of the day and had made friends -among men of intellect and sophistication. - -It is from considerations rather similar to these that I have given this -book a plain heading and restrained my fancy from elaborating a gay -seventeenth-century title or sub-title:--“A Broad-side from Parnassus,” -“The Mustard Tart,” “Pebbles to Crack Your Teeth,” or “Have at you, -Professor Gargoyle!” But I am afraid that extravagance has broken down -my determination to write soberly, on almost every page. And ... no, the -question of the psychology of poetesses is too big for these covers and -too thorny in argument. When psycho-analysis has provided more evidence -on the difference between the symbolism of women’s dreams and men’s, -there will be something to say worth saying. Meanwhile it can only be -offered as a strong impression that the dreams of normally-sexed women -are, by comparison with those of normally-sexed men, almost always of -the same simple and self-centred nature as their poetry and their -humour. - - - - -XII - -CONNECTION OF POETRY AND HUMOUR - - -It was no accident that gave Chaucer, Shakespeare and Keats a very sly -sense of humour, because humour is surely only another product of the -same process that makes poetry and poets--the reconciliation of -incongruities. - -When, for instance, Chaucer says that one of his Canterbury characters -could trip and dance “after the schole of Oxenforde” he is saying two -things:-- - - I. That Absalom thought he could dance well. - - II. That the professors of the University of Oxford are hardly the - people from whom one would expect the most likely instruction in - that art, - -and to point the joke he adds to “trip and dance” the absurd “and with -his legges casten to and fro.” A sympathetic grin, as poets and other -conjurors know, is the best possible bridge for a successful illusion. -Coleridge was the first writer, so far as I know, to see the connection -between poetry and humour, but his argument which uses the Irish Bull “I -was a fine child but they changed me” to prove the analogy, trails off -disappointingly. - - - - -XIII - -DICTION - - -Ideally speaking, there is no especially poetic range of subjects, and -no especially poetic group of words with which to treat them. Indeed, -the more traditionally poetical the subject and the words, the more -difficult it is to do anything with them. The nymph, the swain, the -faun, and the vernal groves are not any more or less legitimate themes -of poetry than Motor Bicycle Trials, Girl Guides, or the Prohibition -Question, the only difference being a practical one; the second category -may be found unsuitable for the imaginative digestion because these -words are still somehow uncooked; in the former case they are unsuitable -because overcooked, rechauffé, tasteless. The cooking process is merely -that of constant use. When a word or a phrase is universally adopted and -can be used in conversation without any apologetic accentuation, or in a -literary review without italics, inverted commas or capital letters, -then it is ready for use in poetry. - -As a convenient general rule, Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie has pointed out -in his admirable pamphlet “Poetry and Contemporary Speech,” the poet -will always be best advised to choose as the main basis of his diction -the ordinary spoken language of his day; the reason being that words -grow richer by daily use and take on subtle associations which the -artificially bred words of literary or technical application cannot -acquire with such readiness; the former have therefore greater poetic -possibilities in juxtaposition. - - * * * * * - -An objection will be raised to the term “universal” as applied to the -audience for poetry; it is a limited universality when one comes to -consider it. Most wise poets intend their work only for those who speak -the same language as themselves, who have a “mental age” not below -normal, and who, if they don’t perhaps understand all the allusions in a -poem, will know at any rate where to go to look them up in a work of -reference. - - - - -XIV - -THE DAFFODILS - - -Art of every sort, according to my previous contentions, is an attempt -to rationalize some emotional conflict in the artist’s mind. When the -painter says “That’s really good to paint” and carefully arranges his -still life, he has felt a sort of antagonism between the separate parts -of the group and is going to discover by painting on what that -antagonism is founded, presenting it as clearly and simply as he knows -how, in the slightly distorting haze of the emotion aroused. He never -says, “I think I’ll paint a jug or bottle, next,” any more than the poet -says “I’ve a free morning on Saturday; I’ll write an ode to the Moon or -something of that sort, and get two guineas for it from the _London -Mercury_.” No, a particular jug or bottle may well start a train of -thought which in time produces a painting, and a particular aspect of -the moon may fire some emotional tinder and suggest a poem. But the Moon -is no more the _subject_ of the poem than the murder of an Archduke was -the cause of the late European War. - -Wordsworth’s lines “I wandered lonely as a cloud” are, as he would have -said, about “something more” than yellow daffodils at the water’s brim. -I have heard how schoolmasters and mistresses point out in the “Poetry -Lesson” that the whole importance of this poem lies in Wordsworth’s -simple perception of the beauty of Spring flowers; but it seems to me to -be an important poem only because Wordsworth has written spontaneously -(though perhaps under his sister’s influence) and recorded to his own -satisfaction an emotional state which we all can recognize. - -These daffodils have interrupted the thoughts of an unhappy, lonely man -and, reminding him of his childhood, become at once emblems of a golden -age of disinterested human companionship; he uses their memory later as -a charm to banish the spectres of trouble and loneliness. I hope I have -interpreted the poem correctly. Let us now fantastically suppose for the -sake of argument that Wordsworth had been intentionally seeking solitude -like a hurt beast hating his kind, and had suddenly come across the same -daffodil field: he surely might have been struck with a sudden horror -for such a huge crowd of flower-faces, especially if his early memories -of flower picking had been blighted by disagreeable companionship and -the labour of picking for the flower market. He would then have written -a poem of exactly the opposite sense, recording his sudden feeling of -repulsion at the sight of the flowers and remarking at the end that -sometimes when he is lying on his couch in vacant or in pensive mood, -they flash across that inward eye which is the curse of solitude, - - “_Oh then my heart with horror fills_ - _And shudders with the daffodils._” - -For readers to whom he could communicate his dislike of daffodils on the -basis of a common experience of brutal companionship in childhood and -forced labour, the poem would seem a masterpiece, and those of them who -were schoolmasters would be pretty sure to point out in _their_ Poetry -Lessons that the importance of the poem lay in Wordsworth’s “perception -of the dreadfulness of Spring Flowers.” - -Again the scholastic critic finds the chief value of Wordsworth’s -“Intimations of Immortality” in the religious argument, and would not be -interested to be told that the poet is being disturbed by a melancholy -contradiction between his own happy childhood, idealistic boyhood and -disappointed age. But if he were to go into the psychological question -and become doubtful whether as a matter of fact, children have not as -many recollections of Hell as of Heaven, whether indeed the grown mind -does not purposely forget early misery and see childhood in a deceptive -haze of romance; and if he therefore suspected Wordsworth of reasoning -from a wrong premise he would have serious doubts as to whether it was a -good poem after all. At which conclusion even the most pagan and -revolutionary of modern bards would raise a furious protest; if the poem -holds together, if the poet has said what he means honestly, -convincingly and with passion--as Wordsworth did--the glory and the -beauty of the dream are permanently fixed beyond reach of the scientific -lecturer’s pointer. - - - - -XV - -_VERS LIBRE_ - - -The limitation of _Vers Libre_, which I regard as only our old friend, -Prose Poetry, broken up in convenient lengths, seems to be that the poet -has not the continual hold over his reader’s attention that a regulated -(this does not mean altogether “regular”) scheme of verse properly used -would give him. The temporary loss of control must be set off against -the freedom which _vers libre_-ists claim from irrelevant or stereotyped -images suggested by the necessity of rhyme or a difficult metre. - -This is not to say that a poet shouldn’t start his race from what -appears to hardened traditionalists as about ten yards behind scratch; -indeed, if he feels that this is the natural place for him, he would be -unwise to do otherwise. But my contention is that _vers libre_ has a -serious limitation which regulated verse has not. In _vers libre_ there -is no natural indication as to how the lines are to be stressed. There -are thousands of lines of Walt Whitman’s, over the pointing of which, -and the intended cadence, elocutionists would disagree; and this seems -to be leaving too much to chance. - -I met in a modern _vers libre_ poem the line spoken by a fallen angel, -“I am outcast of Paradise”; but how was I to say it? What clue had I to -the intended rhythm, in a poem without any guiding signs? In regulated -verse the reader is compelled to accentuate as the poet determines. Here -is the same line introduced into three nonsensical examples of -rhyming:-- - - Satan to the garden came - And found his Lordship walking lame, - “Give me manna, figs and spice, - I am outcast of Paradise.” - -or quite differently:-- - - “Beryls and porphyries, - Pomegranate juice! - I am outcast of Paradise - (What was the use?) - -or one can even make the reader accept a third alternative, impressively -dragging at the last important word:-- - - He came to his Lordship then - For manna, figs and spice, - “I am chief of the Fallen Ten, - I am outcast of Paradise.” - -The regulating poet must of course make sure at the beginning of the -poem that there is no possible wrong turning for the reader to take. -Recently, and since writing the above, an elder poet, who asks to remain -anonymous, has given me an amusing account of how he mis-read -Swinburne’s “Hertha,” the opening lines of which are:-- - - I am that which began; - Out of me the years roll; - Out of me, God and man; - I am equal and whole; - God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily. I am the soul. - -My informant read the short lines as having four beats each:-- - - I´ am thát || whích begán; - Oút of mé || the yeárs róll; - Oút of mé || Gód and mán; - I´ am équal || ánd whóle - -and thought this very noble and imposing, though the “équal ánd whóle” -was perhaps a trifle forced. The next stanza told him that something was -amiss and he discovered that it was only a two-beat line after all. “It -was Swinburne’s impudence in putting the Almighty’s name in an -unaccented place of the line, and accenting the name of Man, that put me -on the wrong track,” he said. Swinburne’s fault here, for such as agree -with the accusation, was surely in his wrong sense of material; he was -making muslin do the work of camel’s hair cloth. He was imposing a metre -on his emotions, whereas the emotions should determine the metre--and -even then constantly modify it. Apropos of the _vers libre_-ists, my -friend also denied that there was such a thing as _vers libre_ possible, -arguing beyond refutation that if it was _vers_ it couldn’t be truly -_libre_ and if it was truly _libre_ it couldn’t possibly come under the -category of _vers_. - -Perhaps the most damaging criticism (if true) of the _vers libre_ school -of today is that the standard which most of its professors set -themselves is not a very high one; with rhythmic freedom so dearly -bought, one expects a more intricate system of interlacing implications -than in closer bound poetry. Natural rhythms need no hunting; there is -some sort of rhythm in every phrase you write, if you break it up small -enough and make sufficient allowances for metric resolutions. There is -often a queer, wayward broken-kneed rhythm running through whole -sentences of standard prose. The following news item has not had a word -changed since I found it in _The Daily Mirror_. - - Jóhn Fráin - Of Bállyghaderéen - Was indícted at Roscómmon for the múrder of his fáther; - He báttered his fáther, an óld man, to deáth with a poúnder; - The júry foúnd him unáble to pléad - And hé was commítted - Tó an as´ylum. - -One doesn’t “listen” when reading prose, but in poetry or anything -offered under that heading a submerged metre is definitely expected. -Very few readers of Mr. Kipling’s “Old Man Kangaroo” which is printed as -prose, realize that it is written in strict verse all through and that -he is, as it were, pulling a long nose at us. The canny _vers librist_ -gets help from his printer to call your attention to what he calls -“cadence” and “rhythmic relations” (not easy to follow) which might have -escaped you if printed as prose; _this_ sentence, you’ll find, has its -thumb to its nose. - - - - -XVI - -MOVING MOUNTAINS - - -Perhaps some people who buy this book will be disappointed at not being -told the correct way of writing triolets and rondeaux. Theirs is the -same practical type of mind that longs to join a Correspondence School -of Art and learn the formulas for drawing a washer-woman or trousers or -the stock caricature of Mr. Winston Churchill. - -But poetry is not a science, it is an act of faith; mountains are often -moved by it in the most unexpected directions against all the rules laid -down by professors of dynamics--only for short distances, I admit; -still, definitely moved. The only possible test for the legitimacy of -this or that method of poetry is the practical one, the question, “Did -the mountain stir?” - - - - -XVII - -LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI - - -The psalmist explains an outburst of sorrowful poetry as due to a long -suppression of the causes of his grief. He says, “I kept silent, yea, -even from good words. My heart was hot within me and while I was thus -musing, the fire kindled, and at the last I spake with my tongue.” So -it was I believe with Keats in the composition of this compellingly -sorrowful ballad. Sir S. Colvin’s “Life of Keats” gives the setting well -enough. We do not know exactly what kindled the fire but I am inclined -to think with Sir S. Colvin, that Keats had been reading a translation -ascribed to Chaucer from Alan Chartier’s French poem of the same title. -The poet says:-- - - “I came unto a lustie greene vallay - Full of floures ... - ... riding an easy paas - I fell in thought of joy full desperate - With great disease and paine, so that I was - Of all lovers the most unfortunate ...” - -Death has separated him from the mistress he loved.... We know that -Keats’ heart had been hot within for a long while, and the suppressed -emotional conflict that made him keep silent and muse is all too plain. -He has a growing passion for the “beautiful and elegant, graceful, -silly, fashionable and strange ... MINX” Fanny Brawne; she it was who -had doubtless been looking on him “as she did love” and “sighing full -sore,” and this passion comes into conflict with the apprehension, not -yet a certainty, of his own destined death from consumption, so that the -Merciless Lady, to put it baldly, represents both the woman he loved and -the death he feared, the woman whom he wanted to glorify by his poetry -and the death that would cut his poetry short. Of shutting “her wild, -wild eyes with kisses four” which makes the almost intolerable climax to -the ballad, he writes in a journal-letter to his brother George in -America, with a triviality and a light-heartedness that can carry no -possible conviction. He is concealing the serious conditions of body and -of heart which have combined to bring a “loitering indolence” on his -writing, now his livelihood; he does not want George to read between the -lines; at the same time it is a relief even to copy out the poem. George -knows little of Fanny beyond the purposely unprepossessing portraits of -her that John himself has given, but the memory of their beloved brother -Tom’s death from consumption is fresh in the minds of both. George had -sailed to America not realizing how ill Tom had been, John had come back -tired out from Scotland, to find him dying; he had seen the lily on -Tom’s brow, the hectic rose on his cheek, his starved lips in horrid -warning gaping, and, as the final horrible duty, had shut his brother’s -wild staring eyes with coins, not kisses. Now Fanny’s mocking smile and -sidelong glance play hide and seek in his mind with Tom’s dreadful -death-mask. It was about this time that Keats met Coleridge walking by -Highgate Ponds and it is recorded that Keats, wishing with a sudden -sense of the mortality of poets, to “carry away the memory” of meeting -Coleridge, asked to press his hand. When Keats had gone, Coleridge, -turned to his friend Green and said, “There is death in that hand.” He -described it afterwards as “a heat and a dampness”--but “fever-dew” is -Keats’ own word. - -There are many other lesser reminiscences and influences in the poem, on -which we might speculate--Spenser’s “Faery Queen,” the ballad of Thomas -the Rhymer, Malory’s “Lady of the Lake,” Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” with -its singing maiden and the poet’s honey-dew, traceable in Keats’ “honey -wild and manna dew,” an echo from Browne “Let no bird sing,” and from -Wordsworth “her eyes are wild”; but these are relatively unimportant. - -History and Psychology are interdependent sciences and yet the field of -historical literary research is almost overcrowded with surveyors, while -the actual psychology of creative art is country still pictured in our -text-books as Terra Incognita, the rumoured abode of Phoenix and -Manticor. The spirit of adventure made me feel myself a regular Sir John -Mandeville when I began even comparing Keats’ two descriptions of Fanny -as he first knew her with the lady of the poem, noting the “tolerable” -foot, the agreeable hair, the elfin grace and elvish manners, in -transformation: wondering, did the Knight-at-arms set her on his steed -and walk beside so as to see her commended profile at best advantage? -When she turned towards him to sing, did the natural thinness and -paleness which Keats noted in Fanny’s full-face, form the -association-link between his thoughts of love and death? What was the -real reason of the “kisses four”? was it not perhaps four because of -the painful doubleness of the tragic vision--was it extravagant to -suppose that two of the kisses were more properly pennies laid on the -eyes of death? - -The peculiar value of the ballad for speculation on the birth of poetry -is that the version that we know best, the one incorporated in the -journal-letter to America, bears every sign of being a very early draft. -When Keats altered it later, it is noteworthy that he changed the -“kisses four” stanza to the infinitely less poignant:-- - - ... there she gazed and sighèd deep, - And here I shut her wild sad eyes-- - So kissed asleep. - -Sir S. Colvin suggests that the kisses four were “too quaint”: Keats may -have told himself that this was the reason for omitting them, but it is -more likely that without realizing it he is trying to limit the painful -doubleness: the change of “wild wild eyes” which I understand as meaning -“wild” in two senses, elf-wild and horror-wild, to “wild sad eyes” would -have the same effect. - -In writing all this I am sorry if I have offended those who, so to -speak, prefer in their blindness to bow down to wood and stone, who -shrink from having the particular variety of their religious experience -analyzed for them. This section is addressed to those braver minds who -can read “The Golden Bough” from cover to cover and still faithfully, -with no dawning contempt, do reverence to the gods of their youth. - - - - -XVIII - -THE GENERAL ELLIOTT - - -It is impossible to be sure of one’s ground when theorizing solely from -the work of others, and for commenting on the half-comedy of my own, -“The General Elliott,” I have the excuse of a letter printed below. It -was sent me by an American colonel whose address I do not know, and if -he comes across these paragraphs I hope he will understand that I -intended no rudeness in not answering his enquiries. - -This is the poem:-- - -THE GENERAL ELLIOTT - - He fell in victory’s fierce pursuit, - Holed through and through with shot, - A sabre sweep had hacked him deep - Twixt neck and shoulderknot ... - - The potman cannot well recall, - The ostler never knew, - Whether his day was Malplaquet, - The Boyne or Waterloo. - - But there he hangs for tavern sign, - With foolish bold regard - For cock and hen and loitering men - And wagons down the yard. - - Raised high above the hayseed world - He smokes his painted pipe, - And now surveys the orchard ways, - The damsons clustering ripe. - - He sees the churchyard slabs beyond, - Where country neighbours lie, - Their brief renown set lowly down; - _His_ name assaults the sky. - - He grips the tankard of brown ale - That spills a generous foam: - Oft-times he drinks, they say, and winks - At drunk men lurching home. - - No upstart hero may usurp - That honoured swinging seat; - His seasons pass with pipe and glass - Until the tale’s complete. - - And paint shall keep his buttons bright - Though all the world’s forgot - Whether he died for England’s pride - By battle, or by pot. - -And this is the letter: - -“April, 1921. - -“_My dear Mr. Graves_,-- - - “Friday, I had the pleasure of reading your lines to “The General - Elliott” in _The Spectator_. Yesterday afternoon, about sunset, on - returning across fields to Oxford from a visit to Boar’s Hill, to - my delight and surprise I found myself suddenly confronted with the - General Elliott himself, or rather the duplicate presentment of - him--nailed to a tree. But could it be the same, I asked. He did - not grip the tankard of brown ale that spills a generous foam--nor - did his seasons seem to pass with pipe and glass--and alas, nor did - paint keep his tarnished buttons bright. In spite of your - assertion, is the general’s tale not already complete? Was he not - (like me) but a “temporory officer”? Or have I perhaps seen a - spurious General Elliott? He _should_ not die; the post from which - he views the world is all too lonely for his eyes to be permitted - to close upon that scene, albeit the churchyard slabs do not come - within the range.... May _I_ help to restore him? - -“Sincerely, - -“J---- B---- - -“Lt. Col. U. S. A.” - - - -To which letter I would reply, if I had his address:-- - -_My dear Colonel B_---- - - ... The poet very seldom writes about what he is observing at the - moment. Usually a poem that has been for a long while maturing - unsuspected in the unconscious mind, is brought to birth by an - outside shock, often quite a trivial one, but one which--as - midwives would say--leaves a distinct and peculiar birthmark on the - child. - - The inn which you saw at Hinksey is the only “General Elliott” I - know, but I do not remember ever noticing a picture of him. I - remember only a board - - +---------------------------+ - | THE GENERAL ELLIOTT. | - | MORRELL’S ALES AND STOUT. | - +---------------------------+ - - and have never even had a drink there; but once I asked a man - working in the garden who this General Elliott was, and he answered - that really he didn’t know; he reckoned he was a fine soldier and - killed somewhere long ago in a big battle. As a matter of fact, I - find now that Elliott was the great defender of Gibraltar from 1779 - to 1783, who survived to become Lord Heathfield; but that doesn’t - affect the poem. Some months after this conversation I passed the - sign board again and suddenly a whole lot of floating material - crystallized in my mind and the following verse came into my - head--more or less as I quote it:-- - - “Was it Schellenberg, General Elliott, - Or Minden or Waterloo - Where the bullet struck your shoulderknot, - And the sabre shore your arm, - And the bayonet ran you through?” - - On which lines a poem resulted which seemed unsatisfactory, even - after five drafts. I rewrote in a different style a few days later - and after several more drafts the poem stood as it now stands. - There appear to be more than one set of conflicting emotions - reconciled in this poem. In the false start referred to, the 1. A. - idea was not properly balanced by 1. B. and 1. C., which - necessitated reconstruction of the whole scheme; tinkering wouldn’t - answer. I analyze the final version as follows:-- - - 1. - - A. Admiration for a real old-fashioned General beloved by his whole - division, killed in France (1915) while trying to make a broken - regiment return to the attack. He was directing operations from the - front line, an unusual place for a divisional commander in modern - warfare. - - B. Disgust for the incompetence and folly of several other generals - under whom I served; their ambition and jealousy, their - recklessness of the lives of others. - - C. Affection, poised between scorn and admiration, for an - extraordinary thick-headed, kind-hearted militia Colonel, who was - fond enough of the bottle, and in private life a big farmer. He was - very ignorant of military matters but somehow got through his job - surprisingly well. - - 2. - - A. My hope of settling down to a real country life in the sort of - surroundings that the two Hinkseys afford, sick of nearly five - years soldiering. It occurred to me that the inn must have been - founded by an old soldier who felt much as I did then. Possibly - General Elliott himself, when he was dying, had longed to be back - in these very parts with his pipe and glass and a view of the - orchard. It would have been a kind thought to paint a signboard of - him so, like one I saw once (was it in Somerset or Dorset?)--“The - Jolly Drinker” and not like the usual grim, military scowl of - “General Wellington’s” and “General Wolfe’s.” - - B. I ought to have known who Elliott was because, I used once to - pride myself as an authority on military history. The names of - Schellenberg, Minden, Malplaquet, The Boyne (though only the two - middle battles appear on the colours as battle honours) are - imperishable glories for the Royal Welch Fusilier. And the finest - Colonel this regiment ever had, Ellis, was killed at Waterloo; he - had apparently on his own initiative moved his battalion from the - reserves into a gap in the first line. - - 3. - - A. My own faith in the excellent qualities of our national - beverage. - - B. A warning inscription on a tomb at Winchester over a private - soldier who died of drink. But his comrades had added a - couplet--“An honest soldier ne’er shall be forgot, Whether he died - by musket or by pot.” - -There are all sorts of other sentiments mixed up, which still elude me, -but this seems enough for an answer.... - -Yours sincerely, - -R. G.--(late Captain R. W. F.) - - -Poe’s account of the series of cold-blooded deliberations that evolved -“The Raven” is sometimes explained as an attempt in the spirit of “Ask -me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies,” to hoodwink a too curious -Public. A juster suggestion would be that Poe was quite honest in his -record, but that the painful nature of the emotions which combined to -produce the poem prompted him afterwards to unintentional dishonesty in -telling the story. In my account of “The General Elliott” there may be -similar examples of false rationalization long after the event, but that -is for others to discover: and even so, I am not disqualified from -suggesting that the bird of ill omen, perching at night on the head of -Wisdom among the books of a library, is symbolism too particularly -applicable to Poe’s own disconsolate morbid condition to satisfy us as -having been deducted by impersonal logic. - -It is likely enough that Poe worked very hard at later drafts of the -poem and afterwards remembered his deliberate conscious universalizing -of an essentially personal symbolism: but that is a very different -matter from pretending that he approached “The Raven” from the first -with the same cold reasoning care that constructed, for instance, his -Gold-Bug cipher. - - - - -XIX - -THE GOD CALLED POETRY - - -A piece with this title which appeared in my “Country Sentiment” was the -first impulse to more than one of the main contentions in this book, and -at the same time supplies perhaps the clearest example I can give of the -thought-machinery that with greater luck and cunning may produce -something like Poetry. I wrote it without being able to explain exactly -what it was all about, but I had a vision in my mind of the God of -Poetry having two heads like Janus, one savage, scowling and horrible, -the face of Blackbeard the Pirate, the other mild and gracious, that of -John the Evangelist. Without realizing the full implication of the -symbolism, I wrote:- - - Then speaking from his double head - The glorious fearful monster said, - “I am _Yes_ and I am _No_ - Black as pitch and white as snow; - Love me, hate me, reconcile - Hate with love, perfect with vile, - So equal justice shall be done - And life shared between moon and sun. - Nature for you shall curse or smile; - A poet you shall be, my son.” - -The poem so far as I can remember was set going by the sight of ... a -guard of honour drilling on the barrack-square of a camp near Liverpool! -I was standing at the door of the Courts-Martial room where I was -shortly to attend at the trial of a deserter (under the Military Service -Act) who had unsuccessfully pleaded conscientious objection before a -tribunal and had been in hiding for some weeks before being arrested. -Now, I had been long pondering about certain paradoxical aspects of -Poetry and, particularly, contrasting the roaring genius of Christopher -Marlowe with that of his gentle contemporary Shakespeare; so, standing -there watching the ceremonial drill, I fancifully made the officer in -command of the guard, a young terror from Sandhurst, into a Marlowe -strutting, ranting, shouting and cursing--but making the men _move_; -then I imagined Shakespeare in his place. Shakespeare would never have -done to command a guard of honour, and they would have hated him at -Camberley or Chelsea. He would have been like a brother-officer who was -with me a few weeks before in this extremely “regimental” camp; he hated -all the “sergeant-major business” and used sometimes on this barrack -square to be laughing so much at the absurd pomposity of the drill as -hardly to be able to control his word of command. I had more than once -seen him going out, beltless, but with a pipe and a dog, for a pleasant -walk in the country when he should really have been on parade. In -France, however, this officer was astonishing: the men would do anything -for him and his fighting feats had already earned him the name of _Mad -Jack_ in a shock-division where military fame was as fugitive as life. -This brother-officer, it is to be noted, was a poet, and had a violent -feeling against the Military Service Act. I wondered how he would behave -if he were in my place, sitting on the Court-Martial; or how would -Shakespeare? Marlowe, of course, would thunder “two years” at the -accused with enormous relish, investing the cause of militarism with a -magnificent poetry. But Shakespeare, or “Mad Jack”? - -That night in the quarters which I had once shared with “Mad Jack,” I -began writing:-- - - _“I begin to know at last,_ - _These nights when I sit down to rhyme,_ - _The form and measure of that vast_ - _God we call Poetry...._ - - _ ... I see he has two heads_ - _Like Janus, calm, benignant this,_ - _That grim and scowling. His beard spreads_ - _From chin to chin; this God has power_ - _Immeasurable at every hour...._ - - _The black beard scowls and says to me_ - _“Human frailty though you be_ - _Yet shout and crack your whip, be harsh;_ - _They’ll obey you in the end,_ - _Hill and field, river and marsh_ - _Shall obey you, hop and skip_ - _At the terrour of your whip,_ - _To your gales of anger bend._ - - _The pale beard smiles and says in turn_ - _“True, a prize goes to the stern_ - _But sing and laugh and easily run_ - _Through the wide airs of my plain;_ - _Bathe in my waters, drink my sun,_ - _And draw my creatures with soft song;_ - _They shall follow you along_ - _Graciously, with no doubt or pain._” - - _Then speaking from his double head, etc._ - -The rather scriptural setting of what the pale beard said was probably -suggested by the picture I had formed in my mind of the conscientious -objector, whom I somehow sympathetically expected to be an earnest -Christian, mild and honest; as a matter of fact, he turned out to be the -other kind, violent and shifty alternately. He was accordingly sentenced -by Major Tamburlaine and Captains Guise and Bajazeth, to the customary -term of imprisonment. - -And by the way, talking of Marlowe and Shakespeare;-- - - Here ranted Isaac’s elder son, - The proud shag-breasted godless one - From whom observant Smooth-cheek stole - Birth-right, blessing, hunter’s soul. - - - - -XX - -LOGICALIZATION - - John King is dead, that good old man - You ne’er shall see him more. - He used to wear a long brown coat - All buttoned down before. - - -Apparently a simple statement, this rustic epitaph has for any sensitive -reader a curiously wistful quality and the easiest way I can show the -mixed feelings it stirs, is by supposing a typical eighteenth-century -writer to have logicalized them into a polite epigram. The poem would -appear mutilated as follows:-- - - Hereunder lies old John Brown’s honoured dust: - His worthy soul has flown to Heav’n we trust. - Yet still we mourn his vanished russet smock - While frowning fates our trifling mem’ries mock. - -Many of the subtler implications are necessarily lost in the formal -translation for in poetry the more standardized the machinery of logical -expression, the less emotional power is accumulated. But the force of -the words “he used to wear” is shown in more obvious opposition to the -words “dead” and “good.” The importance of “good” will appear at once if -we substitute some word like “ancient” for “good old” and see the -collapse of the poetic fabric, still more if we change “good” to “bad” -and watch the effect it has in our imaginations on the “you ne’er shall -see him more,” the cut of his coat, and the reasons John King had for -buttoning it. _Good_ John King wore a long brown coat because he was old -and felt the cold and because, being a neat old man, he wished to -conceal his ragged jacket and patched small-clothes. _Bad_ John King -kept pheasants, hares, salmon and silver spoons buttoned for concealment -under his. How did good John King die? A Christian death in bed -surrounded by weeping neighbours, each begging a coat-button for -keepsake. Bad John King? Waylaid and murdered one dark night by an -avenger, and buried where he fell, still buttoned in his long brown -coat. - -The emotional conflict enters curiously into such one-strand songs as -Blake’s “Infant Joy” from the _Songs of Innocence_, a poem over which -for the grown reader the sharp sword of Experience dangles from a single -horsehair. The formal version (which I beg nobody to attempt even in -fun) logicalized in creaking sonnet-form would have the octave filled -with an address to the Melancholy of Sophistication, the sestet reserved -for:-- - - But thou, Blest Infant, smiling radiantly - Hast taught me etc, etc. - -An immoral but far more entertaining parlour game than -logicalization--perhaps even a profitable trade--would be to extract the -essentials from some long-winded but sincere Augustan poem, disguise -the self-conscious antitheses, modernize the diction, liven up the -rhythm, fake a personal twist, and publish. Would there be no pundit -found to give it credit as a poem of passion and originality? I hope -this suggestion for a New-Lamps-for-Old Industry will not meet the eye -of those advanced but ill-advised English Masters who are now beginning -to supervise with their red-and-blue pencils the writing of English -Poetry in our schools. - -Now, the trouble about the use of logic in poetry seems not to be that -logic isn’t a very useful and (rightly viewed) a very beautiful -invention, but that it finds little place in our dreams: dreams are -illogical as a child’s mind is illogical, and spontaneous undoctored -poetry, like the dream, represents the complications of adult experience -translated into thought-processes analogous to, or identical with, those -of childhood. - -This I regard as a very important view, and it explains, to my -satisfaction at any rate, a number of puzzling aspects of poetry, such -as the greater emotional power on the average reader’s mind of simple -metres and short homely words with an occasional long strange one for -wonder; also, the difficulty of introducing a foreign or unusual prosody -into poems of intense passion: also the very much wider use in poetry -than in daily speech of animal, bird, cloud and flower imagery, of -Biblical types characters and emblems, of fairies and devils, of -legendary heroes and heroines, which are the stock-in-trade of -imaginative childhood; also, the constant appeal poetry makes to the -childish habits of amazed wondering, sudden terrors, laughter to signify -mere joy, frequent tears and similar manifestations of uncontrolled -emotion which in a grown man and especially an Englishman are considered -ridiculous; following this last, the reason appears for the strict -Classicist’s dislike of the ungoverned Romantic, the dislike being -apparently founded on a feeling that to wake this child-spirit in the -mind of a grown person is stupid and even disgusting, an objection that -has similarly been raised to the indiscriminate practice of -psycho-analysis, which involves the same process. - - - - -XXI - -LIMITATIONS - - -One of the most embarrassing limitations of poetry is that the language -you use is not your own to do entirely what you like with. Times -actually come when in the conscious stage of composition you have to -consult a dictionary or another writer as to what word you are going to -use. It is no longer practical to coin words, resurrect obsolete ones -and generally to tease the language as the Elizabethans did. A great -living English poet, Mr. Charles Doughty, is apparently a disquieting -instance to the contrary. But he has lost his way in the centuries; he -belongs really to the sixteenth. English has never recovered its -happy-go-lucky civilian slouch since the more than Prussian stiffening -it was given by the eighteenth century drill-sergeants. - -It is intolerable to feel so bound compared with the freedom of a -musician or a sculptor; in spite of the exactions of that side of the -art, the poet cannot escape into mere rhythmic sound; there is always -the dead load of sense to drag about with him. I have often felt I would -like to be a painter at work on a still life, puzzling out ingenious -relationships between a group of objects varying in form, texture and -colour. Then when people came up and asked me: “Tell me, sir, is that a -Spode jar?” or “Isn’t that a very unusual variety of lily?” I would be -able to wave them away placidly; the questions would be irrelevant. But -I can’t do that in poetry, everything _is_ relevant; it is an omnibus of -an art--a public omnibus. - -There are consolations, of course; poetry, to be appreciated, is not, -like music, dependent on a middleman, the interpretative artist; nor, -once in print, is it so liable to damage from accident, deterioration or -the reproducer as the plastic arts. - - - - -XXII - -THE NAUGHTY BOY - - -Bound up with the business of controlling the association-ghosts which -haunt in their millions every word of the English language, there is the -great mesmeric art of giving mere fancy an illusion of solid substance. -The chief way this is done, and nobody has ever done it better than -Keats, is constantly to make appeals to each of the different bodily -senses, especially those more elementary ones of taste, touch, smell, -until they have unconsciously built up a scene which is as real as -anything can be. As an example of the way Keats rung the changes on the -senses, take his “Song about Myself”:-- - - There was a naughty Boy - And a naughty boy was he - He ran away to Scotland - The people for to see - Then he found - That the ground - Was as hard, - That a yard - Was as long, - That a song - Was as merry, - That a cherry - Was as red-- - That lead - Was as weighty, - That fourscore - Was as eighty, - That a door - Was as wooden - As in England-- - - So he stood in his shoes - And he wonder’d, - He wonder’d, - He stood in his shoes - And he wonder’d. - -Here we have a succession of staccato notes, but in the “Eve of St. -Agnes” or “Ode to Autumn” almost every phrase is a chord, the individual -notes of which each strike a separate sense. - - - - -XXIII - -THE CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC IDEAS - - -When Aristotle lays down that poets describe the thing that might be, -but that the historian (like the natural historians above mentioned) -merely describes that which has been, and that poetry is something of -“more philosophic, graver import than history because its statements are -of a universal nature” so far his idea of poetry tallies with our own. -But when he explains his “might be” as meaning the “probable and -necessary” according to our every-day experience of life, then we feel -the difference between the Classical and Romantic conceptions of the -art--Aristotle was trying to weed poetry of all the symbolic -extravagances and impossibilities of the dream state in which it seems -to have originated, and to confine it within rational and educative -limits. Poetry was with him only an intuitive imitation of how typical -men think and react upon each other when variously stimulated. It was -what we might call the straight goods of thought conveyed in the -traditional magic hampers; but there proved to be difficulties in the -packing; the Classical ideal was, in practice, modified by the use of -heroic diction and action, conventional indications to the audience that -“imitation” was not realism, and that there must be no criticisms on -that score; every one must “go under” to the hypnotic suggestion of the -buskin and the archaic unnatural speech, and for once think ideally. For -the same reason the Classical doctrine lays stress on the importance of -the set verse-forms and the traditional construction of drama. For the -benefit of my scientific readers, if my literary friends promise not to -listen to what I am saying, I will attempt a definition of Classical and -Romantic notions of Poetry:-- - -Classical is characteristic and Romantic is Metamorphic, that is, though -they are both expressions of a mental conflict, in Classical poetry this -conflict is expressed within the confines of waking probability and -logic, in terms of the typical interaction of typical minds; in -Romantic poetry the conflict is expressed in the illogical but vivid -method of dream-changings. - -The dream origin of Romantic Poetry gives it the advantage of putting -the audience in a state of mind ready to accept it; in a word, it has a -naturally hypnotic effect. Characteristic poetry, which is social rather -than personal, and proudly divorced from the hit-and-miss methods of the -dream, yet feels the need of this easy suggestion to the audience for -ideal thinking; and finds it necessary to avoid realism by borrowing -shreds of accredited metamorphic diction and legend and building with -them an illusion of real metamorphism. So the Hermit Crab, and once it -has taken up a cast-off shell to cover its nakedness, it becomes a very -terror among the whelks. The borrowed Metamorphism is hardened to a -convention and a traditional form, and can be trusted almost inevitably -to induce the receptive state in an average audience wherever used. Such -a convention as I mean is the May-day dream of the Mediaeval rhymed -moralities or the talking beasts of the fabulists. - -Sometimes, however, owing to a sudden adventurous spirit appearing in -the land, a nation’s Classical tradition is broken by popular ridicule -and the reappearance of young Metamorphic Poets. But after a little -paper-bloodshed and wranglings in the coffee-houses, the Classical -tradition reappears, dressed up in the cast-off finery of the pioneer -Metamorphics (who have by this time been succeeded by licentious and -worthless pyrotechnists), and rules securely again. It is only fair to -observe that the Romantic Revivalist often borrows largely from some -Classical writer so obscured by Time and corrupt texts as to seem a -comparative Romantic. This complicated dog-eat-dog process is cheerfully -called “The Tradition of English Poetry.” - -There is an interesting line of investigation which I have no space to -pursue far, in a comparison between the Classicism of Wit and the -Romanticism of Humour. - -Wit depends on a study of the characteristic reactions of typical men to -typically incongruous circumstances, and changed little from -Theophrastus to Joe Miller. It depends for its effect very largely on -the set form and careful diction, e. g:-- - -A certain inn-keeper of Euboea, with gout in his fingers, returned to -his city after sacrificing an Ox to Delphic Apollo.... The celebrated -wit, Sidney Smith, one day encountered Foote the comedian, in the -Mall.... An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotchman agreed on a wager of -one hundred guineas.... - -That is Classicism. - -Romantic humour is marked by the extravagant improbability of -dream-vision and by the same stereoscopic expression as in Romantic -poetry. - -Would Theophrastus have deigned to laugh at the _fabliau_ of “The Great -Panjandrum himself with the little round button at top?” I think not. -Our leading living Classical poet was recently set a Romantic riddle as -a test of his humour, “What did the tooth-paste say to the tooth brush?” -Answer: “Squeeze me and I’ll meet you outside the Tube.” The bard was -angry. “Who on earth squeezes his tube of tooth-paste with his tooth -brush? Your riddle does not hold water.” He could understand the fable -convention of inanimate objects talking, but this other was not “the -probable and necessary.” - - - - -XXIV - -COLOUR - - -The naming of colours in poetry may be used as a typical instance of the -circumspection with which a poet is forced to move. The inexperienced -one drenches his poems in gold, silver, purple, scarlet, with the idea -of giving them, in fact, “colour.” The old hand almost never names a -colour unless definitely presenting the well-known childish delight for -bright colours, with the aid of some other indication of childhood, or -unless definitely to imply a notable change from the normal nature of -the coloured object, or at least some particular quality such as the -ripeness of the cherry in Keats’ song just quoted. But even then he -usually prefers to find a way round, for the appeal to the sense of -colour alone is a most insecure way of creating an illusion; colours -vary in mood by so very slight a change in shade or tone that pure -colour named without qualification in a poem will seldom call up any -precise image or mood. - -To extemporize a couple of self-conscious blackboard examples:-- - - I. “Then Mary came dressed in a robe that was green - And her white hands and neck were a sight to be seen.” - - II. “Mary’s robe was rich pasture, her neck and her hands - Were glimpses of river that dazzled those lands.” - -The first couplet has not nearly so much colour in it as the second, -although in the first the mantle is definitely called green and the -lady’s hands and neck, white, while in the second no colour is mentioned -at all. The first robe is as it were coloured in a cheap painting-book; -the green paint has only come off the cake in a thin yellowish solution -and the painting-book instructions for colouring the hands and neck were -“leave blank.” The second robe derives its far richer colour from the -texture that the pasture simile suggests; the flesh parts get their -whiteness from the suggestion of sun shining on water. - - - - -XXV - -PUTTY - - -The conscious part of composition is like the finishing of roughly -shaped briars in a pipe factory. Where there are flaws in the wood, -putty has to be used in order to make the pipe presentable. Only an -expert eye can tell the putty when it has been coloured over, but there -it is, time will reveal it and nobody is more aware of its presence now -than the man who put it there. The public is often gulled into paying -two guineas for a well-coloured straight-grain, when a tiny patch of -putty under the bowl pulls down its sentimental value to ten shillings -or so. - -It is only fair to give an example of putty in a poem of my own; in -writing songs, where the pattern is more fixed than in any other form, -putty is almost inevitable. This song started sincerely and cheerfully -enough:-- - - Once there came a mighty furious wind - (So old worthies tell). - It blew the oaks like ninepins down, - And all the chimney stacks in town - Down together fell. - That was a wind--to write a record on, - to hang a story on, - to sing a ballad on, - To ring the loud church bell! - But for one huge storm that cracks the sky - Came a thousand lesser winds rustling by, - And the only wind that will make me sing - Is breeze of summer or gust of spring - But no more hurtful thing. - -This was leading up to a final verse:-- - - Once my sweetheart spoke an unkind word - As I myself must tell, - For none but I have seen or heard - My sweetheart to such cruelty stirred - For one who loved her well. - That was a word--to write no record on, - to hang no story on, - to sing no ballad on, - To ring no loud church bell! - Yet for one fierce word that has made me smart - Ten thousand gentle ones ease my heart, - So all the song that springs in me - Is “Never a sweetheart born could be - So kind as only she.” - -Half-way through this verse I was interrupted, and had to finish the -poem consciously as best I could. On picking it up again, apparently I -needed another middle verse of exactly the same sort of pattern as the -first, to prepare the reader for the third. Searching among natural -phenomena, I had already hit on drought as being a sufficiently -destructive plague to be long remembered by old worthies. This would -make the second verse. - -So without more ado I started:-- - - Once there came a mighty thirsty drought - (So old worthies tell). - The quags were drained, the brooks were dried, - Cattle and sheep and pigs all died, - The parson preached on Hell. - That was a drought--to write a record on etc. - -So far I had concealed the poverty of my inspiration well enough, I -flattered myself, but here we were stuck, my self-conscious muse and I. -What was a pleasing diminutive of _drought_?--Pleasant sunshine? Not -quite; the thirstiness of nature doesn’t show in pleasant sunshine at -all. So, knowing all the time that I was doing wrong, I took my putty -knife and slapped the stuff on thick, then trimmed and smoothed over -carefully:-- - - But for one long drought of world-wide note - Come a thousand lesser ones on man’s throat, - And the only drought for my singing mood - Is a thirst for the very best ale that’s brewed, - Soon quenched, but soon renewed. - -In manuscript, the putty didn’t show, somehow, but I am ashamed to say I -published the song. And in print, it seemed to show disgracefully. “It -was the best butter,” said the _March Hare_. “It was the best putty,” I -echoed, to excuse myself. But there is too much of it; the last half of -the last verse even, is not all sound wood. This poem has been on my -conscience for some time. - -If spontaneous poetry is like the Genie from Aladdin’s Lamp, this -conscious part of the art is like the assemblage of sheet, turnip-head, -lighted candle and rake to make the village ghost. - - As I were a trapesin’ - To Fox and Grapes Inn - To get I a bottle of ginger wine - I saw summat - In they old tummut - And Lordie how his eyes did shine! - - _Suffolk rhyme._ - (_Cetera desunt_) - -The Genie is the most powerful magic of the two, and surest of its -effect, but the Turnip Ghost is usually enough to startle rustics who -wander at night, into prayer, sobriety, rapid movement or some other -unusual state. - - - - -XXVI - -READING ALOUD - - -Though it is a sound principle that the poet should write as if his work -were first of all intended to be repeated from mouth to mouth, -recitation or reading aloud actually distracts attention from the -subtler properties of a poem, which though addressed nominally to the -ear, the eye has to see in black and white before they can be -appreciated. A beautiful voice can make magic of utter nonsense; I have -been taken in by this sort of thing too often. The eye is the most -sophisticated organ of sense and is therefore the one to which the poet -must make a final appeal in critical matters, but as limited an appeal -as possible when he is engaged in the art of illusion. The universal use -of printing has put too much work on the eye: which has learned to skip -and cut in self-defence. Ask any one who has read CRIME AND PUNISHMENT -the name of the hero. It is probable that he will remember the initial -letter, possible that he will be able to repeat the whole name more or -less recognizably, unlikely that he will be able to spell it correctly, -almost certain that he will not have troubled to find out the correct -pronunciation in Russian. - - - - -XXVII - -L’ARTE DELLA PITTURA - - -A scientific treatise _could_, I suppose, be written on how to -manipulate vowels and consonants so as to hurry or slow down rhythm, and -suggest every different emotion by mere sound sequence but this is for -every poet to find out for himself and practise automatically as a -painter mixes his paints. - -There was once an old Italian portrait painter, who coming to the end of -his life, gathered his friends and pupils together and revealed to them -a great discovery he had made, as follows:-- - -“The art of portrait painting consists in putting the High Lights in -exactly the right place in the eyes.” - -When I come to my death-bed I have a similarly important message to -deliver:-- - -“The art of poetry consists in knowing exactly how to manipulate the -letter S.” - - - - -XXVIII - -ON WRITING MUSICALLY - - -In true poetry the mental bracing and relaxing on receipt of sensuous -impressions, which we may call the rhythm of emotions, conditions the -musical rhythm. This rhythm of emotions also determines the -sound-texture of vowels and consonants, so that Metre, as schoolboys -understand it when they are made to scan:--Friĕnds, Rōm|ans, -count|rymēn, lĕnd mē|your eārs!, has in spontaneous poetry only a -submerged existence. For the moment I will content myself by saying that -if all words in daily speech were spoken at the same rate, if all -stressed syllables and all unstressed syllables, similarly, were dwelt -on for exactly the same length of time, as many prosodists assume, -poetry would be a much easier art to practise; but it is the haste with -which we treat some parts of speech, the deliberation we give to others, -and the wide difference in the weight of syllables composed of thin or -broad vowels and liquid or rasping consonants, that make it impossible -for the Anglo-French theory of only two standardized sound values, long -or short, to be reasonably maintained. A far more subtle notation must -be adopted, and if it must be shown on a black-board, poetry will appear -marked out not in “feet” but in convenient musical bars, with the -syllables resolved into quaver, dotted crotchet, semibreve and all the -rest of them. Metre in the classical sense of an orderly succession of -iambuses, trochees or whatnot, is forced to accept the part of policeman -in the Harlequinade, a mere sparring partner for Rhythm the Clown who -with his string of sausages is continually tripping him up and beating -him over the head, and Texture the Harlequin who steals his truncheon -and helmet. This preparatory explanation is necessary because if I were -to proclaim in public that “the poet must write musically” it would be -understood as an injunction to write like Thomas Moore, or his disciples -of today. - - - - -XXIX - -THE USE OF POETRY - - -At this stage the question of the use of poetry to its readers may be -considered briefly and without rhapsody. Poetry as the Greeks knew when -they adopted the Drama as a cleansing rite of religion, is a form of -psycho-therapy. Being the transformation into dream symbolism of some -disturbing emotional crisis in the poet’s mind (whether dominated by -delight or pain) poetry has the power of homoeopathically healing other -men’s minds similarly troubled, by presenting them under the spell of -hypnosis with an allegorical solution of the trouble. Once the allegory -is recognized by the reader’s unconscious mind as applicable the -affective power of his own emotional crisis is diminished. Apparently on -a recognition of this aspect of poetry the Greeks founded their splendid -emblem of its power--the polished shield of Perseus that mirrored the -Gorgon’s head with no hurtful effect and allowed the hero to behead her -at his ease. A well chosen anthology is a complete dispensary of -medicine for the more common mental disorders, and may be used as much -for prevention as cure if we are to believe Mr. Housman’s argument in -“Terence, this is stupid stuff” no. LXII of his _Shropshire Lad_. - -The musical side of poetry is, properly understood, not merely a -hypnotic inducement to the reader to accept suggestions, but a form of -psycho-therapy in itself, which, working in conjunction with the -pictorial allegory, immensely strengthens its chance of success. - - - - -XXX - -HISTORIES OF POETRY - - -The History of English Poetry is a subject I hope I shall never have to -undertake, especially as I have grave doubts if there really is such a -thing. Poets appear spasmodically, write their best poetry at uncertain -intervals and owe nothing worth mentioning to any school or convention. -Most histories of English Poetry are full of talk about “schools” or -they concentrate on what they are pleased to call “the political -tendencies” of poetry, and painfully trace the introduction and -development in English of various set forms like the Sonnet, Blank -Verse, and the Spenserian Stanza. This talk about politics I read as an -excuse of the symmetrical-minded for spreading out the Eighteenth -Century poets famous in their day to a greater length than the quality -of their work can justify. As for the history of metric forms it is, in -a sense, of little more vital importance to poetry than the study of -numismatics would appear to an expert in finance. - - * * * * * - -An undergraduate studying English Literature at one of our oldest -universities was recently confronted by a senior tutor, Professor X, -with a review of his terminal studies and the charge of -temperamentalism. - -“I understand from Prof. Y,” he explained, “that your literary judgments -are a trifle summary, that in fact you prefer some poets to others.” - -He acknowledged the charge with all humility. - - - - -XXXI - -THE BOWL MARKED DOG - - -“I am sorry, nephew, that I cannot understand your Modern Poetry. Indeed -I strongly dislike it; it seems to me mostly mere impudence.” - -“But, uncle, you are not expected to like it! The old house-dog goes at -dinner time to the broken biscuits in his bowl marked DOG and eats -heartily. Tomorrow give him an unaccustomed dainty in an unaccustomed -bowl and he will sniff and turn away in disgust. Though tempted to kick -him for his unrecognizing stupidity, his ingratitude, his ridiculous -preference for the formal biscuit, yet refrain! - -“The sight and smell associations of the DOG BOWL out of which he has -eaten so long have actually, scientists say, become necessary for -bringing the proper digestive juices into his mouth. What you offer him -awakes no hunger, his mouth does not water; he is puzzled and insulted. - -“But give it to the puppies instead; they’ll gobble it up and sniff -contemptuously afterwards at the old dog and his bowl of biscuit.” - - - - -XXXII - -THE ANALYTIC SPIRIT - - -In England, since--shall we name the convenient date 1851, the year of -the Great Exhibition?--the educated reading public has developed -analytic powers which have not been generally matched by a corresponding -development of the co-ordinating arts of the poet. Old charms will no -longer hold, old baits will no longer be taken; the reader has become -too wary. The triumph of the analytic spirit is nowhere better shown -than in these histories of Poetry just mentioned, where the interest in -fake poetry is just as strong or even stronger than the interest in -poetry itself. - -As Religions inevitably die with their founders, the disciples having -either to reject or formularize their master’s opinions, so with Poetry, -it dies on the formation of a poetic school. The analytic spirit has -been, I believe, responsible both for the present coma of religion among -our educated classes and for the disrespect into which poetry and the -fine arts have fallen. As for these histories of poetry, the very fact -that people are interested in failures of the various “Schools” to -universalize the individual system of a master, is a great -discouragement to a poet trying by every means in his power to lay the -spirit of sophistication. - -But the age of poetry is not yet over if poets will only remember what -the word means and not confuse it with acrostic-making and similar -ingenious Alexandrianisms. Earlier civilizations than ours have -forgotten the necessarily spontaneous nature of the art, and have tried -(for lack of any compelling utterance) to beat the sophisticated critics -of their day by piling an immense number of technical devices on their -verses, killing what little passion there was, by the tyranny of -self-imposed rules. The antithetical couplet of Pope or the Ovidian -hexameter-and-pentameter are bad enough, but the ancient Irish and Welsh -bards were even more restricted by their chain-rhymes and systems of -consonantal sequence, the final monstrosity being the Welsh _englyn_ of -four lines, governed by ninety-odd separate rules. The way out for -Poetry does not lie by this road, we may be sure. But neither on the -other hand do we yet need to call in the Da-da-ists. - - - - -XXXIII - -RHYMES AND ALLITERATION - - -Rhymes properly used are the good servants whose presence gives the -dinner table a sense of opulent security; they are never awkward, they -hand the dishes silently and professionally. You can trust them not to -interrupt the conversation of the table or allow their personal -disagreements to come to the notice of the guests; but some of them are -getting very old for their work. - -The principle governing the use of alliteration and rhyme appear to be -much the same. In unsophisticated days an audience could be moved by the -profuse straight-ahead alliteration of _Piers Plowman_, but this is too -obvious a device for our times. The best effects seem to have been -attained in more recent poetry by precisely (if unconsciously) gauging -the memory length of a reader’s mental ear and planting the second -alliterative word at a point where the memory of the first is just -beginning to blurr; but has not quite faded. By cross-alliteration on -these lines a rich atmosphere has resulted and the reader’s eye has been -cheated. So with internal and ordinary rhyme; but the memory length for -the internal rhyme appears somewhat longer than memory for alliteration, -and for ordinary rhyme, longer still. - - - - -XXXIV - -AN AWKWARD FELLOW CALLED ARIPHRADES - - -Aristotle defended poetical “properties” that would correspond nowadays -with “thine” and “whensoe’er” and “flowerets gay,” by saying “it is a -great thing indeed to make proper use of these poetic forms as also of -compounds and strange words. The mere fact of their not being in -ordinary speech, gives the diction a non-prosaic character.” One -Ariphrades had been ridiculing the Tragedians on this score; and -Aristotle saw, I suppose, that a strange diction has for the -simple-minded reader a power of surprise which enables the poet to work -on his feelings unhindered, but he did not see that as soon as a single -Ariphrades had ridiculed what was becoming a conventional surprise, a -Jack-in-the-Box that every one expected, then was the time for the -convention to be scrapped; ridicule is awkwardly catching. - -The same argument applies to the use of rhyme to-day; while rhyme can -still be used as one of the ingredients of the illusion, a compelling -force to make the reader go on till he hears an echo to the syllable at -the end of the last pause, it still remains a valuable technical asset. -But as soon as rhyme is worn threadbare the ear anticipates the echo and -is contemptuous of the clumsy trick. - -The reader must be made to surrender himself completely to the poet, as -to his guide in a strange country; he must never be allowed to run ahead -and say “Hurry up, sir, I know this part of the country as well as you. -After that ‘snow-capped mountain’ we inevitably come to a ‘leaping -fountain.’ I see it ‘dancing’ and ‘glancing’ in the distance. And by the -token of these ‘varied flowers’ on the grass, I know that another few -feet will bring us to the ‘leafy bowers’ which, if I am not mistaken, -will protect us nicely from the ‘April showers’ for a few ‘blissful -hours.’ Come on, sir! am I guiding you, or are you guiding me?” - -However, the time has not yet come to get rid of rhyme altogether: it -has still plenty of possibilities, as _Dumb Crambo_ at a Christmas party -will soon convince the sceptical; and assonances separated even by the -whole length of the mouth can work happily together, with or without the -co-operation of ordinary rhyme. - -These are all merely illustrations of the general principle that as soon -as a poem emerges from the hidden thought processes that give it birth, -and the poet reviews it with the conscious part of his mind, then his -task is one not of rules or precedents so much as of ordinary -common-sense. - - - - -XXXV - -IMPROVISING NEW CONVENTIONS - - -There is a great dignity in poetry unaffectedly written in stern stiff -traditional forms and we feel in spite of ourselves that we owe it the -reverence due to ruined abbeys, prints of Fujiyama, or Chelsea -pensioners with red coats, medals, and long white beards. But that is -no reason for following tradition blindly; it should be possible for a -master of words to improvise a new convention, whenever he wishes, that -will give his readers just the same notion of centuried authority and -smoothness without any feeling of contempt. - - - - -XXXVI - -WHEN IN DOUBT - - -A young poet of whose friendship I am very proud was speaking about -poetry to one of those University literary clubs which regard English -poetry as having found its culmination in the last decade of the -nineteenth century and as having no further destiny left for it. He said -that he was about to tell them the most important thing he knew about -poetry, so having roused themselves from a customary languor, the young -fellows were disappointed to hear, not a brilliant critical paradox or a -sparkling definition identifying poetry with decay, but a mere rule of -thumb for the working poet: - - When in Doubt - Cut it Out. - - - - -XXXVII - -THE EDITOR WITH THE MUCKRAKE - - -Ordinary readers may deplore the habit of raking up the trivial and bad -verse of good poets now long dead, but for living poets there is nothing -more instructive in the world than these lapses, and in the absence of -honest biography they alone are evidence for what would be naturally -assumed, that these great poets in defiance of principle often tried to -write in their dull moments just because they longed for the exquisite -excitement of composition, and thought that the act of taking up a pen -might induce the hypnotic state of which I have spoken. But afterwards -they forgot to destroy what they produced, or kept it in the hope that -it was some good after all. - - - - -XXXVIII - -THE MORAL QUESTION - - -Modern treatises on Poetry usually begin with definitions; ancient -treatises with a heavy weight of classical authority and a number of -grave reflections on the nature of the Poet, proving conclusively that -he should be a man of vast experience of life, apt judgment, versatile -talent, and above all unimpeachable moral character. Authority seems to -count for nothing in these days, compared with the value set on it by -Sir Philip Sidney in his “Apologie for Poetrie,” and the modern treatise -would never ask its reader more than to admit a negative conclusion on -the moral question, that poets who think they can combine indiscriminate -debauch with dyspeptic Bohemian squalor and yet turn out good work -merely by applying themselves conscientiously and soberly in working -hours, are likely to be disappointed; however, my personal feeling is -that poets who modify the general ethical principles first taught them -at home and at school, can only afford to purchase the right to do so at -a great price of mental suffering and difficult thinking. Wanton, -lighthearted apostasies from tradition are always either a sign or a -prophecy of ineffectual creative work. - -Art is not moral, but civilized man has invented the word to denote a -standard of conduct which the mass demands of the individual and so -poetry which makes a definitely anti-moral appeal is likely to -antagonize two readers out of three straight away, and there is little -hope of playing the confidence trick on an enemy. Being therefore -addressed to a limited section even of the smallish class who read -poetry, such poetry will tend like most high-brow art to have more -dexterity than robustness. - -For a complete identification of successful art with morality I always -remember with appreciation what an Irishman, a complete stranger, once -said to my father on hearing that he was author of the song “Father -O’Flynn”--“Ye behaved well, sir, when ye wrote that one.” - - - - -XXXIX - -THE POET AS OUTSIDER - - -The ethical problem is further complicated for poets by the tussle in -their nature between the spontaneous and the critical biases. The -principle of loyalty on which the present non-religious system of -English manners depends is strained in them to breaking point by the -tendency to sudden excitement, delight or disgust with ideas for which -mature consideration entirely alters the values, or with people who -change by the same process from mere acquaintances to intimate friends -and back in a flash. Which should explain many apparently discreditable -passages in, for instance, the life and letters of Keats or Wordsworth, -and should justify Walt Whitman’s outspoken “Do I contradict myself? -Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” - -The poet is the outsider who sees most of the game, and, by the same -token, all or nearly all the great English poets have been men either of -ungenteel birth or of good family which has been scandalized by their -subsequent adoption of unusual social habits during the best years of -their writing. To the polite society of their day--outsiders to a man. - - - - -XL - -A POLITE ACKNOWLEDGMENT - - - DEAR SIR,-- - - Many thanks for the volume of your poems you have sent me. Though I - had never seen any of your compositions before, they are already - old friends--that is, I like them but I see through them. - -Yours cordially, Etc. - - - - - - -XLI - -FAKE POETRY, BAD POETRY AND MERE VERSE - - -As in household economics, you cannot take out of a stocking more than -has been put in, so in poetry you cannot present suffering or romance -beyond your own experience. The attempt to do this is one of the chief -symptoms of the fake poet; ignorance forces him to draw on the -experience of a real poet who actually has been through the emotional -crises which he himself wants to restate. The fake is often made worse -by the theft of small turns of speech which though not in any sense -irregular or grotesque, the poet has somehow made his own; it is like -stealing marked coins, and is a dangerous practice when Posterity is -policeman. Most poets visit Tom Tiddler’s ground now and then, but the -wise ones melt down the stolen coin and impress it with their own -“character.” - -There is a great deal of difference between fake poetry and ordinary bad -poetry. The bad poet is likely to have suffered and felt joy as deeply -as the poet reckoned first class, but he has not somehow been given the -power of translating experience into images and emblems, or of melting -words in the furnace of his mind and making them flow into the channels -prepared to take them. Charles Sorley said, addressing the good poets on -behalf of the bad poets (though he was really on the other side):-- - - We are the homeless even as you, - Who hope but never can begin. - Our hearts are wounded through and through - Like yours, but our hearts bleed within; - We too make music but our tones - Scape not the barrier of our bones. - -Mere verse, as an earlier section has attempted to show, is neither bad -poetry nor fake poetry necessarily. It finds its own categories, good -verse, bad verse and imitation. In its relation to poetry it stands as -chimpanzee to man: only the theory that a conflict of emotional ideas is -a necessary ingredient of verse to make it poetry, will satisfactorily -explain why many kinds of verse, loosely called Poetry, such as Satire -and Didactic verse are yet popularly felt not to be the “highest” forms -of Poetry. I would say that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred these -bear no real relation to Poetry, even though dressed up in poetical -language, and that in the hundredth case they are poetry in spite of -themselves. Where the writer is dominated by only one aim, in satire, -the correction of morals; in didactic verse, instruction; there is no -conflict and therefore no poetry. But in rare cases where some Juvenal -slips through feelings of compunction to a momentary mood of self-satire -and even forgets himself so much as to compliment his adversary; or in -didactic verse where a sudden doubt arises and the teacher admits -himself a blind groper after truth (so Lucretius time and time again) -and breaks his main argument in digressions after loveliness and terror, -only then does Poetry appear. It flashes out with the surprise and shock -of a broken electric circuit. - -Even the _memoria technica_ can slide from verse into poetry. The rhyme -to remember the signs of the Zodiac by, ends wonderfully:-- - - The Ram the Bull, the Heavenly Twins, - And next the Crab, the Lion shines, - The Virgin and the Scales, - The Scorpion, Archer and He Goat, - The Man who carries the Watering Pot, - The Fish with glittering tails. - -The language of science makes a hieroglyphic, or says “The sign of -Aquarius”; the language of prose says “A group of stars likened by -popular imagery to a Water Carrier”; the language of Poetry converts the -Eastern water carrier with his goatskin bag or pitcher, into an English -gardener, then puts him to fill his watering pot from heavenly waters -where the Fish are darting. The author of this rhyme has visualized his -terrestrial emblems most clearly; he has smelt the rankness of the Goat, -and yet in the “Lion shines” and the “glittering tails” one can see that -he has been thinking in terms of stars also. The emotional contradiction -lies in the stars’ remote aloofness from complications of this climatic -and smelly world, from the terror of Lion, Archer, Scorpion, from the -implied love-interest of Heavenly Twins and Virgin, and from the daily -cares of the Scales, Ram, Bull, Goat, Fish, Crab and Watering Pot. - -The ready way to distinguish verse from poetry is this, Verse makes a -flat pattern on the paper, Poetry stands out in relief. - - - - -XLII - -A DIALOGUE ON FAKE-POETRY - - - Q. When is a fake not a fake? - - A. When hard-working and ingenious conjurors are billed by common - courtesy as ‘magicians.’ - - Q. But when is a fake not a fake? - - A. When it’s a Classic. - - Q. And when else? - - A. When it’s “organ-music” and all that. - - Q. Elaborate your answer, dear sir! - - A. A fake, then, is not a fake when lapse of time has tended to - obscure the original source of the borrowing, and when the textural - and structural competence that the borrower has used in - synthesising the occasional good things of otherwise indifferent - authors is so remarkable that even the incorruptible Porter of - Parnassus winks and says “Pass Friend!” - - Q. Then the Fake Poet is, as you have hinted before, a sort of - Hermit Crab? - - A. Yes, and here is another parable from Marine Life. Poetry is the - protective pearl formed by an oyster around the irritations of a - maggot. Now if, as we are told, it is becoming possible to put - synthetic pearls on the market, which not even the expert with his - X-ray can detect from the natural kind, is not our valuation of the - latter perhaps only a sentimentality? - - - - -XLIII - -ASKING ADVICE - - -There is a blind spot or many blind spots in the critical eye of every -writer; he cannot find for himself certain surface faults which anybody -else picks out at once. Especially there is a bias towards running to -death a set of words which when he found them, were quite honest and -inoffensive. Shelley had a queer obsession about “caves,” “abysses,” and -“chasms” which evidently meant for him much more than he can make us -see. A poet will always be wise to submit his work, when he can do no -more to straighten it, to the judgment of friends whose eyes have their -blind spots differently placed; only, he must be careful, I suppose, not -to be forced into making any alterations while in their presence. - -A poet reveals to a friend in a fit of excitement “I say, listen, I am -going to write a great poem on such-and-such! I have the whole thing -clear in my mind, waiting to be put down.” But if he goes on to give a -detailed account of the scheme, then the act of expression (especially -prose expression) kills the creative impulse by presenting it -prematurely with too much definiteness. The poem is never written. It -remains for a few hopeless days as a title, a couple of phrases and an -elaborate scheme of work, and is then banished to the lumber room of the -mind; later it probably becomes subsidiary to another apparently -irrelevant idea and appears after a month or two in quite a different -shape, the elaboration very much condensed, the phrase altered and the -title lost. - -Now this section is as suitable as any other for the prophecy that the -study of Poetry will very soon pass from the hands of Grammarians, -Prosodists, historical research men, and such-like, into those of the -psychologists. And what a mess they’ll make of it; to be sure! - - - - -XLIV - -SURFACE FAULTS, AN ILLUSTRATION - - -The later drafts of some lines I wrote recently called CYNICS AND -ROMANTICS, and contrasting the sophisticated and ingenuous ideas of -Love, give a fairly good idea of the conscious process of getting a poem -in order. I make no claim for achievement, the process is all that is -intended to appear, and three or four lines are enough for -illustration: - -_1st Draft._ - - In club or messroom let them sit, - Let them indulge salacious wit - On love’s romance, but not with hearts - Accustomed to those healthier parts - Of grim self-mockery.... - -_2nd Draft._ (Consideration:--It is too soon in the poem for the angry -jerkiness of “Let them indulge.” Also “Indulge salacious” is hard to -say; at present, this is a case for being as smooth as possible.) - - In club or messroom let them sit - Indulging contraversial wit - On love’s romance, but not with hearts - Accustomed.... - -_3rd Draft._ (Consideration:--No, we have the first two lines beginning -with “In.” It worries the eye. And “sit, indulging” puts two short “i’s” -close together. “Contraversial” is not the word. It sounds as if they -were angry, but they are too blasé for that. And “love’s romance” is -cheap for the poet’s own ideal.) - - In club or messroom let them sit - At skirmish of salacious wit - Laughing at love, yet not with hearts - Accustomed.... - -_4th Draft._ (Consideration:--Bother the thing! “Skirmish” is good -because it suggests their profession, but now we have three S’s,--“sit,” -“skirmish,” “salacious.” It makes them sound too much in earnest. The -“salacious” idea can come in later in the poem. And at present we have -two “at’s” bumping into each other; one of them must go. “Yet” sounds -better than “but” somehow.) - - In club or messroom let them sit - With skirmish of destructive wit - Laughing at love, yet not with hearts - Accustomed.... - -_5th Draft._ (Consideration:--And now we have two “with’s” which don’t -quite correspond. And we have the two short “i’s” next to each other -again. Well, put the first “at” back and change “laughing at” to -“deriding.” The long “i” is a pleasant variant; “laughing” and “hearts” -have vowel-sounds too much alike.) - - In club or messroom let them sit - At skirmish of destructive wit - Deriding love, yet not with hearts - Accustomed.... - -_6th Draft._ (Consideration:--Yes, that’s a bit better. But now we have -“_des_tructive” and “_der_iding” too close together. “Ingenious” is more -the word I want. It has a long vowel, and suggests that it was a really -witty performance. The two “in’s” are far enough separated. “Accorded” -is better than “accustomed”; more accurate and sounds better. Now -then:--) - - In club or messroom let them sit - At skirmish of ingenious wit - Deriding love, yet not with hearts - Accorded etc. - - (Consideration:--It may be -rotten, but I’ve done my best.) - -The discussion of more radical constructive faults is to be found in -PUTTY and THE ART OF EXPRESSION. - - - - -XLV - -LINKED SWEETNESS LONG DRAWN OUT - - -In this last section, besides an attempt at a greater accuracy of -meaning and implication than the first slap-dash arrangement of words -had provided, there may have been noticed three other technical -considerations which are especially exacting in this case, where I am -intending by particularly careful craftsmanship to suggest the -brilliance of the conversation I am reporting. - -The first is a care to avoid unintentional echoes, as for example “_In_ -club or messroom ... _in_dulging.” - -The second is a care which all song writers and singing masters -understand, to keep apart words like “indulge salacious,” where the j -and s sound coming together interfere with easy breathing. - -The third is an attempt to vary the vowel sounds so far as is consistent -with getting the right shade of meaning; it pleases the mental ear like -stroking pleases a cat (note the vowel sequence of the phrase that heads -this section. John Milton knew a thing or two about texture, worth -knowing). At the same time I am trying to arrange the position of -consonants and open vowels with much the same care. - -But all these three considerations, and even the consideration for -lucidity of expression, can and must be modified where an emotional mood -of obscurity, fear, difficulty or monotony will be better illustrated by -so doing. - -Keats was very conscious of the necessity of modification. Leigh Hunt -recounts in his Autobiography:-- - -“I remember Keats reading to me with great relish and particularity, -conscious of what he had set forth, the lines describing the supper[1] -and ending with the words, - - “‘And lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon.’” - - [1] St. Agnes’ Eve. - -Mr. Wordsworth would have said the vowels were not varied enough; but -Keats knew where his vowels were _not_ to be varied. On the occasion -above alluded to, Wordsworth found fault with the repetition of the -concluding sound of the participles in Shakespeare’s line about bees:-- - - “‘The _singing_ masons _building_ roofs of gold.’” - -This, he said, was a line which Milton would never have written. Keats -thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with the -continued note of the singers, and that Shakespeare’s negligence, if -negligence it was, had instinctively felt the thing in the best manner.” - -Keats here was surely intending with his succession of short i-sounds, a -gourmet’s fastidious pursing of lips. Poets even of the -Virgil-Milton-Tennyson-Longfellow metrical tradition will on occasion -similarly break their strict metric form with an obviously imitative -“quadrepedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum,” but the manipulation -of vowels and consonants is for them rather a study in abstract grandeur -of music than a relation with the emotional content of the poetry. - - - - -XLVI - -THE FABLE OF THE IDEAL GADGET - - -No poem can turn out respectably well unless written in the full -confidence that this time at last the poet is going to attain perfect -expression. So long as this confidence survives he goes on revising the -poem at intervals for days or months until nothing more can be done, and -the inevitable sense of failure is felt, leaving him at liberty to try -again. It is on this inevitable failure that the practice of every art -is made conditional. - - * * * * * - -A man once went into an ironmonger’s shop and said hesitatingly, “Do you -sell those gadgets for fixing on doors?” - -“Well, sir,” replied the assistant, “I am not quite sure if I understand -your requirements, but I take it you are needing a patent automatic -door-closer?” - -“Exactly,” said the customer. “One to fix on my pantry door which, by -the way, contains a glass window.” - -“You will want a cheap one, sir?” - -“Cheap but serviceable.” - -“You will prefer an English make, sir?” - -“Indeed, that’s a most important consideration.” - -“You will perhaps want one with ornamentations, scroll work and roses -for instance?” - -“Oh no, nothing of that sort, thank you. I want it as plain and -unobtrusive as possible.” - -“You would like it made of some rustless metal, sir?” - -“That would be very convenient.” - -“And with a strong spring?” - -“Well, moderately strong.” - -“To be fixed on which side, sir?” - -“Let me see; the right-hand side.” - -“Now, sir,” said the assistant, “I will go through each point, one by -one. You want an efficient (but not too costly) English made, -unobtrusive, rustless, unornamented, patent automatic door closer, to be -fixed right-handed with a moderately strong spring to a pantry door with -a glass window. Is there any further desideratum, sir?” - -“Well, it’s very good of you to help me like this (“Not at all, sir”). I -should like it easily adjusted and easily removed, and above all it must -not squeak or need constant oiling.” - -“In fact, sir, you want an apparatus combining a variety of qualities, -in a word, an absolutely silent, efficient, economical, invisible, -corrosive proof, unornamented, not-too-heavily-springed, easily -adjustable, readily removable, British-made, right-handed, patent -automatic door closer, ideally fitted in every possible respect for -attaching to your pantry door which (I understand you to say) contains a -glass window. How is that, sir?” - -“Splendid, splendid.” - -“Well, sir, I regret that there has never been any article of that -description put on the market, but if you care to visit our wholesale -department across the road, you may perhaps be able to make your choice -from a reasonably large selection of our present imperfect models. Good -day, sir.” - - - - -XLVII - -SEQUELS ARE BARRED - - -If you solve a problem to the best of your ability, it never bothers you -again. Enough said: but the following emblem may be taken to heart:-- - -EPITAPH ON AN UNFORTUNATE ARTIST - - He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits: - This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid. - So in the end he could not change the tragic habits - This formula for drawing comic rabbits made. - - - - -XLVIII - -TOM FOOL - - -There is a saying that “More people know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows”; -that may be all right if it means recognizing him in the street, but he -has to be a wonder before he can, without eccentricity, make his work -immediately recognized in print and be even distinguishable from the -best efforts of imitators. This proverb was obviously in the head of the -man or woman who wrote the following sonnet, in the _Spectator_ (I -think) about a year ago; I have lost the cutting and the reference, and -ask to be pardoned if I misquote:-- - - Cunning indeed Tom Fool must be to-day - For us, who meet his verses in a book, - To cry “Tom Fool wrote that.... I know his way.... - ... Unsigned, yet eyed all over with Tom’s look.... - Why see! It’s pure Tom Fool, I’m not mistook.... - Fine simple verses too; now who’s to say - How Tom has charmed these worn old words to obey - His shepherd’s voice and march beneath his crook? - Instead we ponder “I can’t name the man, - But he’s been reading Wilde,” or “That’s the school - Of Côterie.... Voices.... Pound ... the Sitwell clan ...” - “_He_ ‘knows his Kipling’” ... “_he_ accepts the rule - Of Monro ... of Lord Tennyson ... of Queen Anne” - How seldom, “There, for a ducat, writes, - TOM FOOL. - -The writer evidently had a keen eye for the failings of others, but is -convicted out of his own mouth, for I have met nobody who can identify -this particular Tom Fool for me. - -Hateful as is the art of the parodist when it spoils poems which have -delighted and puzzled us, parody has its uses. A convincing parody is -the best possible danger signal to inform a poet that he is writing -sequels, repeating his conjuring tricks until they can be seen through -and ridiculously imitated. “That awkward fellow Ariphrades,” much as we -dislike him, is one of the most useful members of our republic of -letters. - - - - -XLIX - -CROSS RHYTHM AND RESOLUTION - - -I have already attempted to show Poetry as the Recorder’s _précis_ of a -warm debate between the members of the poet’s mental Senate on some -unusually contraversial subject. Let the same idea be expressed less -personally in the terms of coloured circles intersecting, the space cut -off having the combined colour of both circles. In the Drama these -circles represent the warring influences of the plot; the principal -characters lie in the enclosed space and the interest of the play is to -watch their attempts to return to the state of primary colouring which -means mental ease; with tragedy they are eventually forced to the -colourless blackness of Death, with comedy the warring colours disappear -in white. In the lyrical poem, the circles are coinciding -stereoscopically so that it is difficult to discover how each individual -circle is coloured; we only see the combination. - -If we consider that each influence represented by these circles has an -equivalent musical rhythm, then in the drama these rhythms interact -orchestrally, tonic theme against dominant; in lyrical poetry where we -get two images almost fused into one, the rhythms interlace -correspondingly closely. Of the warring influences, one is naturally -the original steady-going conservative, the others novel, disquieting, -almost accidental. Then in lyrical poetry the established influence -takes the original metre as its expression, and the new influences -introduce the cross rhythm modifying the metre until it is half -submerged. Shakespeare’s developments of blank verse have much -distressed prosodists, but have these ever considered that they were not -mere wantonness or lack of thought, that what he was doing was to send -emotional cross-rhythms working against the familiar iambic five-stress -line? - -I remember “doing Greek iambics” at Charterhouse and being allowed as a -great privilege on reaching the Upper School to resolve the usual -short-long foot into a short-short-short or even in certain spots into a -long-short. These resolutions I never understood as having any reference -to the emotional mood of the verse I was supposed to be translating, but -they came in very conveniently when proper names had too many short -syllables in them to fit otherwise. - -A young poet showed me a set of English verses the other day which I -returned him without taking a copy but I remember reading somewhat as -follows:-- - - T-tum, t-tum, t-tum, t-tum, t-tum - A midnight garden, where as I went past - I saw the cherry’s moonfrozen delicate ivory. - -“Good heavens,” I said, “what’s that last line all about?” - -“Oh, it’s just an experiment in resolution.” - -“Take a pencil, like a good fellow, and scan it for me in the old -fashioned way as we used to do at school together.” - -He did so:-- - - I sāw | thĕ cherr|(y’s) moŏnfrōz|ĕn dĕl|ic(ate) īv|(ory) - -“It’s a sort of anapaestic resolution,” he explained. - -“Anapaestic resolution of what?” - -“Of an iambic decasyllabic line.” - -“Excuse me, it’s not. Since we’re talking in that sort of jargon, it’s a -spondaic resolution of a dactylic line.” - -“What do you mean?” - -“Well, you’ve put in four extra syllables for your resolution. I’ll put -in a fifth, the word “in.” Now listen! - - Swimmery | floatery | bobbery | duckery | divery-- - _I_ saw the | cherries moon | frozen in | delicate | ivory - -In this case the cross-rhythm, which my friend explained was meant to -suggest the curious ethereal look of cherry blossoms in moonlight, had -so swamped the original metre that it was completely stifled. The poet -has a licence to resolve metre where the emotion demands it, and he is a -poor poet if he daren’t use it; but there is commonsense in restraint. - - - - -L - -MY NAME IS LEGION, FOR WE ARE MANY - - -One goes plodding on and hoping for a miracle, but who has ever -recovered the strange quality that makes the early work (which follows a -preliminary period of imitation) in a sense the best work? There is a -fine single-heartedness, an economy of material, an adventurous delight -in expression, a beginner’s luck for which I suppose honest hard work -and mature observation can in time substitute certain other qualities, -but poetry is never the same again. - -I will attempt to explain this feeling by an analogy which can be -pressed as closely as any one likes: it is an elaboration of what has -been said of the poet as a “peculiarly gifted witch doctor.” Cases of -multiple personality have recently been investigated in people who -believed themselves to be possessed by spirits. Analysis has proved -pretty conclusively that the mediums have originally mimicked -acquaintances whom they found strange, persons apparently selected for -having completely different outlooks on life, both from the medium and -from each other, different religions, different emotional processes and -usually different dialects. This mimicry has given rise to unconscious -impersonations of these people, impersonations so complete that the -medium is in a state of trance and unconscious of any other existence. -Mere imitation changes to a synthetic representation of how these -characters would act in given circumstances. Finally the characters get -so much a part of the medium’s self that they actually seem to appear -visibly when summoned, and a sight of them can even be communicated to -sympathetic bystanders. So the Witch of Endor called up Samuel for King -Saul. The trances, originally spontaneous, are induced in later stages -to meet the wishes of an inquisitive or devout séance-audience; the -manifestations are more and more presented (this is no charge of -charlatanism) with a view to their effect on the séance. It is the -original unpremeditated trances, or rather the first ones that have the -synthetic quality and are no longer mere mimicry, which correspond to -Early Work. - -But it is hardly necessary to quote extreme cases of morbid psychology -or to enter the dangerous arena of spiritualistic argument in order to -explain the presence of subpersonalities in the poet’s mind. They have a -simple origin, it seems, as supplying the need of a primitive mind when -confused. Quite normal children invent their own familiar spirits, their -“shadows,” “dummies” or “slaves,” in order to excuse erratic actions of -their own which seem on reflection incompatible with their usual habits -or code of honour. I have seen a child of two years old accept -literally an aunt’s sarcasm, “Surely it wasn’t my little girl who did -that? It must have been a horrid little stranger dressed just like you -who came in and behaved so badly. My little girl always does what she’s -told.” The child divided into two her own identity of which she had only -recently become conscious. She expected sympathy instead of scolding -when the horrid little stranger reappeared, broke china and flung water -all over the room. I have heard of several developments of the dummy, or -slave idea; how one child used his dummy as a representative to send out -into the world to do the glorious deeds which he himself was not allowed -to attempt; on one occasion this particular dummy got three weeks’ -imprisonment after a collision with the police and so complete was his -master’s faith in the independent existence of the creature that he -eagerly counted the days until the dummy’s release and would not call on -his services, however urgently needed, until the sentence had been -completed. Another child, a girl, employed a committee of several -dummies each having very different characteristics, to whom all social -problems were referred for discussion. - -Richard Middleton, the poet, in a short essay, “Harold,” traces the -development of a dummy of this sort which assumed a tyranny over his -mind until it became a recurrent nightmare. Middleton says, and it -immensely strengthens my contention if Middleton realized the full -implications of the remark, that but for this dummy, Harold, he would -never have become a poet. - -Two or three poets of my acquaintance have admitted (I can confirm it -from my own experience) that they are frequently conscious of their own -divided personalities; that is, that they adopt an entirely different -view of life, a different vocabulary, gesture, intonation, according as -they happen to find themselves, for instance, in clerical society, in -sporting circles, or among labourers in inns. It is no affectation, but -a _mimesis_ or sympathetic imitation hardened into a habit; the -sportsman is a fixed and definite character ready to turn out for every -sporting or quasi-sporting emergency and has no interest outside the -pages of the _Field_, the clerical dummy pops up as soon as a clergyman -passes down the road and can quote scripture by the chapter; the rustic -dummy mops its brow with a red pocket handkerchief and murmurs “keeps -very dry.” These characters have individual tastes in food, drink, -clothes, society, peculiar vices and virtues and even different -handwriting. - -The difficulty of remaining _loyal_, which I mention elsewhere, is most -disastrously increased, but the poet finds a certain compensation in the -excitement of doing the quick change. He also finds it amusing to watch -the comments of reviews or private friends on some small batch of poems -which appear under his name. Every poem though signed John Jones is -virtually by a different author. The poem which comes nearest to the -point of view of one critic may be obnoxious to another; and _vice -versa_; but it all turns on which “dummy” or “sub-personality” had -momentarily the most influence on the mental chairman. - -In a piece which represents an interlude in a contemplated collection of -poems, the following passage occurs to give the same thought from a -different angle. I am asking a friend to overlook irreconcilabilities in -my book and refer him to two or three poems which are particularly -hostile to each other. - - “Yet these are all the same stuff, really, - The obverse and reverse, if you look closely, - Of busy imagination’s new-coined money-- - And if you watch the blind - Phototropisms of my fluttering mind, - Whether, growing strong, I wrestle Jacob-wise - With fiendish darkness blinking threatfully - Its bale-fire eyes, - Or whether childishly - I dart to Mother-skirts of love and peace - To play with toys until those horrors leave me, - Yet note, whichever way I find release, - By fight or flight, - By being wild or tame, - The Spirit’s the same, the Pen and Ink’s the same.” - - - - -LI - -THE PIG BABY - - -“Multiple personality, perhaps,” says some one. “But does that account -for the stereoscopic process of which you speak, that makes two -sub-personalities speak from a double head, that as it were prints two -pictures on the same photographic plate?” The objector is thereupon -referred to the dream-machinery on which poetry appears to be founded. -He will acknowledge that in dreams the characters are always changing in -a most sudden and baffling manner. He will remember for example that in -“Alice in Wonderland,” which is founded on dream-material, the Duchess’ -baby is represented as turning into a pig; in “Alice through the Looking -Glass” the White Queen becomes an old sheep. That is a commonplace of -dreams. - -When there is a thought-connection of similarity or contrast between two -concepts, the second is printed over the first on the mental -photographic plate so rapidly that you hardly know at any given moment -whether it is a pig or a baby you are addressing. “You quite make me -giddy,” said Alice to the Cheshire Cat who was performing similar -evolutions. One image starts a sentence, another image succeeds and -finishes it, almost, but the first reappears and has the last word. The -result is poetry--or nonsense. With music much the same happens; I -believe that those wonderful bursts of music heard in sleep are -impossible to reproduce in a waking state largely because they consist -of a number of melodies of different times and keys imposed on one -another. - - - - -LII - -APOLOGY FOR DEFINITIONS - - -In my opening definition I have given rather an ideal of English Poetry -than an analysis of the ruling poetics of this, that and the other -century. If those who rally to the later Pope and those who find in the -prophetic Blake the true standard of Poetry, equally deny that my -definition covers their experience of the word, I admit that in an -encyclopediac sense it is quite inadequate, and indeed a fusion of two -contradictory senses; indeed, again, a typically poetic definition. - -But how else to make it? Blake’s poetry dictated by angels (a -too-impulsive race) with its abstruse personal symbolism and tangled -rhythms, and Pope’s elegantly didactic generalizations, in rigidly -metrical forms, on the nature of his fellow man, have a common factor so -low as hardly to be worth recovering; my justification is based on the -works of our everywhere acknowledged Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, -Keats, Shelley and the rest, where the baffling Metamorphism of Romance -and the formal Characterism of Classical Poetry, often reconcile their -traditional quarrel and merge contentedly and inseparably as Jack Spratt -and Mrs. Spratt, dividing the fat and the lean in equable portions. - - * * * * * - -Here let me then, for the scientific interest, summarize my conception -of the typical poet:-- - -A poet in the fullest sense is one whom some unusual complications of -early environment or mixed parentage develop as an intermediary between -the small-group consciousnesses of particular sects, clans, castes, -types and professions among whom he moves. To so many of these has he -been formally enrolled as a member, and to so many more has he virtually -added himself as a supernumerary member by showing a disinterested -sympathy and by practising his exceptionally developed powers of -intuition, that in any small-group sense the wide diffusion of his -loyalties makes him everywhere a hypocrite and a traitor. - -But the rival sub-personalities formed in him by his relation to these -various groups, constantly struggle to reconciliation in his poetry, and -in proportion as these sub-personalities are more numerous more varied -and more inharmonious, and his controlling personality stronger and -quicker at compromise, so he becomes a more or less capable spokesman of -that larger group-mind of his culture which we somehow consider greater -than the sum of its parts: so that men of smaller scope and more -concentrated loyalties swallow personal prejudices and hear at times in -his utterances what seems to them the direct voice of God. - - - - -LIII - -TIMES AND SEASONS - - -Each poet finds that there are special times and seasons most suitable -for his work; for times, I have heard mentioned with favour the hour -before breakfast and the hour after the usual bed-time, for seasons, the -pause between the exuberance of Spring and the heaviness of Summer seems -popular, also the month of October. There are also places more free from -interruption and distraction than others, such as caves, attics barely -furnished, lonely barns, woods, bed, which make the hypnotic state -necessary for poetry easier to induce. The poet has to be very honest -with himself about only writing when he feels like it. To take pen in -hand at the self-conscious hour of (say) nine A.M., for a morning’s -poetry, and with a mental arena free of combatants, is to be -disappointed, and even “put off” poetry for some time to come. - -I have often heard it said that a poet in intervals between inspirations -should keep his hand in by writing verse-exercises, but that he should -on such occasions immediately destroy what he has written. - -That seems all wrong, it is an insult to the spontaneity of true poetry -to go through a ritual farce of this sort and the poet will only be -blunting his tools. He ought not to feel distressed at the passage of -time as if it represented so many masterpieces unwritten. If he keeps -mentally alive and has patience, the real stuff may arrive any moment; -when it doesn’t, it isn’t his fault, but the harder he tries to force -it, the longer will it be delayed. - - - - -LIV - -TWO HERESIES - - -Among the most usual heresies held about poetry is the idea that the -first importance of the poet is his “message”; this idea probably -originated with the decline of polite sermon-writing, when the poet was -expected to take on the double duty; but it is quite untenable. The poet -is only concerned with reconciling certain impressions of life as they -occur to him, and presenting them in the most effective way possible, -without reference to their educational value. The cumulative effect of -his work is to suggest a great number of personal obsessions the sum of -which compose if you like his “message,” but the more definitely -propagandist the poet, the less of a poet is the propagandist. - -With this is bound up a heresy of about the same standing that poetry -should only be concerned with presenting what is beautiful, beautiful in -the limited sense of the picture-postcard. This romantic obsession -(using the word “romantic” in the sense of optimistic loose thinking) is -as absurd as that of the blood-and-guts realists. Poetry is no more a -narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bitter-sweet mixture for -all possible household emergencies, and its action varies according as -it is taken in a wineglass or tablespoon, inhaled, gargled, or rubbed on -the chest (like the literary Epic) by hard fingers covered with rings. - - - - -LV - -THE ART OF EXPRESSION - - -It is as foolish to sneer at the Very Wild Men as it is to assume that -the Very Tame Men are all right because they are “in the tradition.” The -Very Wild Men are at any rate likely to have done work which has -explored the desert boundaries of the art they profess, and the Very -Tame Men have never done anything worth doing at all. The only excusable -quarrel is with the pretended Wild Men who persist in identically -repeating the experiments in which their masters have already failed, -and with those whose Very Wilderness is traceable to this--that they -are satisfied with the original spontaneity of their work and do not -trouble to test it in the light of what it will convey to others, whom -they then blame for want of appreciation. What seems to be the matter -with Blake’s Prophetic Books is just this, he connected his images by a -system of free association the clue to which was lost by his death: for -instance his enemy, Schofield, a soldier who informed against him, -suddenly enters “Jerusalem” and its strange company of abstractions, in -the guise of a universal devil “Skofeld.” - -Suppose that one Hodge, a labourer, attempted in a fit of homicidal -mania to split my skull with a spade, but that my faithful bloodhound -sprang to the rescue and Hodge barely escaped with his life. In my -imagination, Hodge’s spade might well come to symbolize murder and -madness, while the bloodhound became an emblem of loyal assistance in -the hour of discomfiture. With this experience in my mind I might be -inclined to eulogize a national hero as - - “Bloodhound leaping at the throat of Hodge - Who stands with lifted spade,” - -and convey a meaning directly contrary to the one intended and having an -apparent reference to agrarian unrest. But conscious reflection would -put my image into line with a more widely favoured conception of Man the -Attacker, and Dog the Rescuer; I would rewrite the eulogy as - - “_Watchdog_ leaping at the _burglar’s_ throat - Who stands with _pistol aimed_.” - -One of the chief problems of the art of poetry is to decide what are the -essentials of the image that has formed in your mind; the accidental has -to be eliminated and replaced by the essential. There is the double -danger of mistaking a significant feature of the image for an accident -and of giving an accident more prominence than it deserves. - -Too much modern country-side poetry is mere verbal photography, -admirably accurate and full of observation but not excited by memories -of human relationships, the emotional bias which could make Bunyan see -the bee as an emblem of sin, and Blake the lion’s loving-kindness. - -Now, if Wordsworth had followed the poetical fashion of the day and told -the world that when wandering lonely as a cloud he had seen a number of -vernal flowers, the poem would have fallen pretty flat--if however, -anticipating the present century he had quoted the order, the species -and the subspecies and remarked on having found among the rest no fewer -than five double blooms, we would almost have wished the vernal flowers -back again. - -Mr. Edmund Blunden lately called my attention to a message from Keats to -John Clare sent through their common publisher, Taylor. Keats thought -that Clare’s “Images from Nature” were “too much introduced without -being called for by a particular sentiment.” Clare, in reply, is -troubled that Keats shows the usual inaccuracies of the townsman when -treating of nature, and that when in doubt he borrows from the Classics -and is too inclined to see “behind every bush a thrumming Apollo.” - - - - -LVI - -GHOSTS IN THE SHELDONIAN - - -The most popular theory advanced to account for the haunting of houses -is that emanations of fear, hate or grief somehow impregnate a locality, -and these emotions are released when in contact with a suitable medium. -So with a poem or novel, passion impregnates the words and can make them -active even divorced from the locality of creation. - -An extreme instance of this process was claimed when Mr. Thomas Hardy -came to Oxford to receive his honorary degree as Doctor of Literature, -in the Sheldonian Theatre. - -There were two very aged dons sitting together on a front bench, whom -nobody in the assembly had ever seen before. They frowned and refrained -from clapping Mr. Hardy or the Public Orator who had just described him -as “Omnium poetarum Britannicorum necnon fabulatorum etiam facile -princeps,” and people said they were certainly ghosts and identified -them with those masters of colleges who failed to answer Jude the -Obscure when he enquired by letter how he might become a student of the -University. It seems one ought to be very careful when writing -realistically. - - - - -LVII - -THE LAYING ON OF HANDS - - -While still in my perambulator about the year 1899,[2] I once received -with great alarm the blessing of Algernon Charles Swinburne who was -making his daily journey from “The Pines” in Putney to the _Rose and -Crown_ public house on the edge of Wimbledon Common. It was many years -before I identified our nursery bogey man, “mad Mr. Swinburne,” with the -poet. It interests me to read that Swinburne as a young man once asked -and received the blessing of Walter Savage Landor who was a very old man -indeed at the time, and that Landor as a child had been himself taken to -get a blessing at the hand of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and that the great -lexicographer in his childhood had been unsuccessfully “touched” by -Queen Anne for the King’s Evil. And what the moral may be, I cannot say, -but I have traced the story back to Queen Anne because I want to make my -grimace at the sacerdotalists; for I must confess, I have been many -times disillusioned over such “poetry in the great tradition” as -Authority has put beyond criticism. - - [2] See Mr. Max Beerbohm’s AND EVEN NOW, page 69. - -In caution, and out of deference to my reader’s sensibilities I will -only quote a single example. Before reading a line of Swinburne I had -been frequently told that he was “absolutely wonderful,” I would be -quite carried away by him. They all said that the opening chorus, for -instance, of _Atalanta in Calydon_ was the most melodious verse in the -English language. I read: - - When the hounds of Spring are on Winter’s traces, - The Mother of months in meadow and plain, ... - -and I was not carried away as far as I expected. For a time I persuaded -myself that it was my own fault, that I was a Philistine and had no -ear--but one day pride reasserted itself and I began asking myself -whether in the lines quoted above, the two “in’s” of _Spring_ and -_Winter_ and the two “mo’s” of _Mother_ and _Months_ did not come too -close together for euphony, and who exactly was the heroine of the -second line, and whether the heavy alliteration in _m_ was not too -obvious a device, and whether _months_ was not rather a stumbling-block -in galloping verse of this kind, and would it not have been better.... - -Thereupon faith in the “great tradition” and in “Authority” waned. - -Still, I would be hard-hearted and stiff-necked indeed if I did not -wish to have had on my own head the blessing that Swinburne received. - - - - -LVIII - -WAYS AND MEANS - - -It is true that Genius can’t lie hid in a garret nowadays; there are too -many people eager to get credit for discovering and showing it to the -world. But as most of the acknowledged best living poets find it -impossible to make anything like a living wage from their poetry, and -patronage has long gone out of fashion (a great pity I think) the poet -after a little fuss and flattery is obliged to return disconsolately to -his garret. The problem of an alternative profession is one for which I -have never heard a really satisfactory solution. Even Coleridge (whose -Biographia Literaria should be the poet’s Bible) could make no more -hopeful suggestion than that the poet should become a country parson. - -Surely a most unhappy choice! The alternative profession should be as -far as possible removed from, and subsidiary to, poetry. True priesthood -will never allow itself to become subordinate to any other calling, and -the dangerous consanguinity of poetry and religion has already been -emphasized. It is the old difficulty of serving two masters; with the -more orthodox poets Herbert and Vaughan, for example, poetry was all -but always tamed into meek subjection to religious propaganda; with -Skelton and Donne it was very different, and one feels that they were -the better poets for their independence, their rebelliousness towards -priestly conventions. - -Schoolmastering is another unfortunate subsidiary profession, it is apt -to give poetry a didactic flavour; journalism is too exacting on the -invention, which the poet must keep fresh; manual labour wearies the -body and tends to make the mind sluggish; office-routine limits the -experience. Perhaps Chaucer as dockyard inspector and diplomat, -Shakespeare as actor manager, and Blake as engraver, solved the problem -at best. - -These practical reflections may be supplemented by a paragraph lifted -from the New York _Nation_ _apropos_ of a trans-Atlantic poet whose -works have already sold a million copies; a new volume of his poems has -evidently broken the hearty muscular open-prairie tradition of the -’fifties and ’sixties and advanced forty years at a stride to the -Parisian ecstasies of the naughty ’nineties;-- - - “That verse is in itself a hopelessly unpopular - form of literature is an error of the sophisticated - but imperfectly informed. Every period has its - widely read poets. Only, these poets rarely rise - into the field of criticism since they always echo - the music of the day before yesterday and express - as an astonishing message the delusions of the - huge rear-guard of civilization.” - - - - -LIX - -POETRY AS LABOUR - - -A book of verses must be either priceless or valueless and as the -general reading public is never told which by the council of critics -until fifty years at least after the first publication, poets can only -expect payment at a nominal rate. If they complain that the labourer is -worthy of his hire, the analogy is not admitted. The public denies -poetry to be labour; it is supposed to be a gentle recreation like -cutting out “Home Sweet Home” from three-ply wood with a fretsaw, or -collecting pressed flowers. - - - - -LX - -THE NECESSITY OF ARROGANCE - - -To say of any poet that there is complete individuality in his poems -combined with excellent craftsmanship amounts to a charge of arrogance. -Craftsmanship in its present-day sense seems necessarily to imply -acquaintance with other poetry; polish is only learned from the -shortcomings and triumphs of others, it is not natural to the -back-woodsman. A poet who after reading the work of those whom he -recognizes as masters of the craft, does not allow himself to be -influenced into imitation of peculiar technical tricks (as we often find -ourselves unwittingly influenced to imitate the peculiar gestures of -people we admire or love), that poet must have the arrogance to put his -own _potential_ achievements on a level with the work he most admires. - -Then is asked the question, “But why _do_ poets write? Why do they go on -polishing the rough ideas which, once on paper, even in a crude and -messy form, should give the mental conflict complete relief? Why, if the -conflict is purely a personal one, do they definitely attempt to press -the poem on their neighbour’s imagination with all the zeal of a -hot-gospeller?” - -There is arrogance in that, the arrogance of a child who takes for -granted that all the world is interested in its doings and clever -sayings. The emotional crises that make Poetry, imply suffering, and -suffering usually humiliation, so that the poet makes his secret or open -confidence in his poetic powers a set-off against a sense of alienation -from society due to some physical deformity, stigma of birth or other -early spite of nature, or against his later misfortunes in love. - -The expectation and desire of a spurious immortality “fluttering alive -on the mouths of men” is admitted by most poets of my acquaintance, both -the good and the bad. This may be only a more definitely expressed form -of the same instinct for self-perpetuation that makes the schoolboy cut -his name on the leaden gutter of the church porch, or the rich man give -a college scholarship to preserve his name _in perpetuo_. But with the -poet there is always the tinge of arrogance in the thought that his own -poetry has a lasting quality which most of his contemporaries cannot -claim. - -The danger of this very necessary arrogance is that it is likely so to -intrude the poet’s personal eccentricities into what he writes that the -reader recognizes them and does not read the “I” as being the voice of -universality.... It was the first night of a sentimental play in an -Early English setting; the crisis long deferred was just coming, the -heroine and hero were on the point of reconciliation and the long -embrace, the audience had lumps in their throats. At that actual instant -of suspense, a man in evening-dress leaped down on the stage from a box, -kicked the ruffed and doubleted hero into the orchestra, and began to -embrace the lady. A moment’s silence; then terrible confusion and rage. -The stage manager burst into tears, attendants rushed forward to arrest -the desperado. - -“But, ladies and gentlemen, I am the author!! I have an artist’s right -to do what I like with my own play.” - -“Duck him! scratch his face! tar and feather him!” - - * * * * * - -Arrogance? Yes, but a self-contradictory arrogance that takes the form -of believing that there is nobody beside themselves who could point out -just where in a given poem they have written well, and where badly. -They know that it contains all sorts of hidden lesser implications -(besides the more important ones) which, they think, a few sensitive -minds may feel, but none could analyze; they think that they have -disguised this or that bit of putty (of which no poem is innocent) so -that no living critic could detect it. They are arrogant because they -claim to understand better than any rivals how impossible an art poetry -is, and because they still have the courage to face it. They have most -arrogance before writing their poem of the moment, most humility when -they know that they have once more failed. - - - - -LXI - -IN PROCESSION - - -This piece was written a few weeks after the remainder of the book: I -had no cold-blooded intention of summarizing the paradox of poetic -arrogance contained in the last section, but so it happened, and I print -it here. - - Donne (for example’s sake) - Keats, Marlowe, Spenser, Blake, - Shelley and Milton, - Shakespeare and Chaucer, Skelton-- - I love them as I know them, - But who could dare outgo them - At their several arts - At their particular parts - Of wisdom, power and knowledge? - In the Poet’s College - Are no degrees nor stations, - Comparisons, rivals, - Stern examinations, - Class declarations, - Senior survivals; - No creeds, religions, nations - Combatant together - With mutual damnations. - Or tell me whether - Shelley’s hand could take - The laurel wreath from Blake? - Could Shakespeare make the less - Chaucer’s goodliness? - - The poets of old - Each with his pen of gold - Gloriously writing - Found no need for fighting, - In common being so rich; - None need take the ditch, - Unless this Chaucer beats - That Chaucer, or this Keats - With other Keats is flyting: - See Donne deny Donne’s feats, - Shelley take Shelley down, - Blake snatch at his own crown. - Without comparison aiming high, - Watching with no jealous eye, - A neighbour’s renown, - Each in his time contended - But with a mood late ended, - Some manner now put by, - Or force expended, - Sinking a new well when the old ran dry. - So, like my masters, I - Voice my ambition loud, - In prospect proud, - Treading the poet’s road, - In retrospect most humble - For I stumble and tumble, - I spill my load. - - But often half-way to sleep, - On a mountain shagged and steep, - The sudden moment on me comes - With terrible roll of dream drums, - Reverberations, cymbals, horns replying, - When with standards flying, - A cloud of horsemen behind, - The coloured pomps unwind - The Carnival wagons - With their saints and their dragons - On the screen of my teeming mind, - The _Creation_ and _Flood_ - With our Saviour’s Blood - And fat Silenus’ flagons, - With every rare beast - From the South and East, - Both greatest and least, - On and on, - In endless variable procession. - I stand on the top rungs - Of a ladder reared in the air - And I speak with strange tongues - So the crowds murmur and stare, - Then volleys again the blare - Of horns, and Summer flowers - Fly scattering in showers, - And the Sun rolls in the sky, - While the drums thumping by - Proclaim me.... - Oh then, when I wake - Could I recovering take - And propose on this page - The words of my rage - And my blandishing speech - Steadfast and sage, - Could I stretch and reach - The flowers and the ripe fruit - Laid out at the ladder’s foot, - Could I rip a silken shred - From the banner tossed ahead, - Could I call a double flam - From the drums, could the Goat - Horned with gold, could the Ram - With a flank like a barn-door - The dwarf and blackamoor, - Could _Jonah and the Whale_ - And the _Holy Grail_ - With the “_Sacking of Rome_” - And “_Lot at his home_” - The Ape with his platter, - Going clitter-clatter, - The Nymphs and the Satyr, - And every other such matter - Come before me here - Standing and speaking clear - With a “how do ye do?” - And “who are ye, who?” - Could I show them to you - That you saw them with me, - Oh then, then I could be - The Prince of all Poetry - With never a peer, - Seeing my way so clear - To unveil mystery. - - Telling you of land and sea - Of Heaven blithe and free, - How I know there to be - Such and such Castles built in Spain, - Telling also of Cockaigne - Of that glorious kingdom, Cand - Of the Delectable Land, - The Land of Crooked Stiles, - The Fortunate Isles, - Of the more than three score miles - That to Babylon lead, - A pretty city indeed - Built on a foursquare plan, - Of the land of the Gold Man - Whose eager horses whinney - In their cribs of gold, - Of the lands of Whipperginny - Of the land where none grow old. - - Especially I could tell - Of the Town of Hell, - A huddle of dirty woes - And houses in endless rows - Straggling across all space; - Hell has no market place, - Nor point where four ways meet, - Nor principal street, - Nor barracks, nor Town Hall, - Nor shops at all, - Nor rest for weary feet, - Nor theatre, square or park, - Nor lights after dark, - Nor churches nor inns, - Nor convenience for sins, - Hell nowhere begins, - Hell nowhere ends, - But over the world extends - Rambling, dreamy, limitless, hated well: - The suburbs of itself, I say, is Hell. - - But back to the sweets - Of Spenser and Keats - And the calm joy that greets - The chosen of Apollo! - Here let me mope, quirk, holloa - With a gesture that meets - The needs that I follow - In my own fierce way, - Let me be grave-gay - Or merry-sad, - Who rhyming here have had - Marvellous hope of achievement - And deeds of ample scope, - Then deceiving and bereavement - Of this same hope. - - - - -APPENDIX:--THE DANGERS OF DEFINITION - - -The following letter I reprint from Tract No. 6 issued by the Society -for Pure English, but put it as an appendix because it explains my -attitude to the careful use of language by prose writers as well as by -poets. It is intended to be read in conjunction with my section on -_Diction_. - - - _To the Editor of the S. P. E. tracts._ - - SIR, - - As one rather more interested in the choice, use, and blending of - words than in the niceties of historical grammar, and having no - greater knowledge of etymology than will occasionally allow me to - question vulgar derivations of place-names, I would like to sound a - warning against the attempt to purify the language too much--“one - word, one meaning” is as impossible to impose on English as “one - letter, one sound.” By all means weed out homophones, and wherever - a word is overloaded and driven to death let another bear part of - the burden; suppress the bastard and ugly words of journalese or - commerce; keep a watchful eye on the scientists; take necessary - French and Italian words out of their italics to give them an - English spelling and accentuation; call a bird or a flower by its - proper name, revive useful dialect or obsolescent words, and so on; - that is the right sort of purification, but let it be tactfully - done, let the Dictionary be a hive of living things and not a - museum of minutely ticketed fossils. A common-sense precision in - writing is clearly necessary; one has only to read a page or two of - Nashe, Lyly, or (especially) the lesser Euphuists to come to this - conclusion; their sentences often can have meant no more to - themselves than a mere grimace or the latest sweep of the hat - learned in Italy. A common-sense precision, yes, but when the - pedantic scientist accuses the man in the street of verbal - inexactitude the latter will do well to point out to the scientist - that of all classes of writers, his is the least accurate of any in - the use of ordinary words. Witness a typical sentence, none the - better for being taken from a book which has made an extremely - important contribution to modern psychological research, and is - written by a scientist so enlightened that, dispensing almost - entirely with the usual scientific jargon, he has improvised his - own technical terms as they are needed for the argument. Very good - words they are, such as would doubtless be as highly approved by - the Society for Pure English, in session, as they have been by the - British Association. This Doctor X is explaining the unaccountable - foreknowledge in certain insects of the needs they will meet after - their metamorphosis from grub to moth. He writes: - - ... This grub, after a life completely spent within the channels in - a tree-trunk which it itself manufactures.... - - “Yes,” said Doctor X to me, “somehow the two it’s coming together - look a bit awkward, but I have had a lot of trouble with that - sentence and I came to the conclusion that I’d rather have it - clumsy than obscure.” I pointed out have the “tree-trunk which” was - surely not what he meant, but that the faults of the sentence lay - deeper than that. He was using words not as winged angels always - ready to do his command, but as lifeless counters, weights, - measures, or automatic engines wrongly adjusted. A _grub_ cannot - _manufacture_ a _channel_. Even a human being who can manufacture a - boot or a box can only _scoop_ or _dig_ a channel. And you can only - have a _channel_ on the outer surface of a tree; inside a tree you - have _tunnels_. A tunnel you _drive_ or _bore_. A grub cannot be - _within_ either a channel or a tunnel (surely) in the same way as a - fly is found _within_ a piece of amber. Doctor X excused himself by - saying that “scientists are usually functionally incapable of - visualization,” and that “normal mental visualization is dangerous, - and abnormal visualization fatal to scientific theorizations, as - offering tempting vistas of imaginative synthetical concepts - unconfirmed by actual investigation of phenomena”--or words to that - effect. Unaware of the beam in his own eye, our Doctor complains - more than once in his book of the motes in the public eye, of the - extended popular application of scientific terms to phenomena for - which they were never intended, until they become like so many - blunted chisels. On the other hand, he would be the first to - acknowledge that over-nice definition is, for scientific purposes, - just as dangerous as blurring of sense; Herr Einstein was saying - only the other day that men become so much the slaves of words that - the propositions of Euclid, for instance, which are abstract - processes of reason only holding good in reference to one another, - have been taken to apply absolutely in concrete cases, where they - do not. Over-definition, I am trying to show, discourages any - progressive understanding of the idea for which it acts as - hieroglyph. It even seems that the more precisely circumscribed a - word, the less accurate it is in its relation to other - closely-defined words. - - There is a story of a governess who asked her charges what was the - shape of the earth? “It may conveniently be described as an oblate - spheroid” was the glib and almost mutinous answer. “Who told you - girls that?” asked the suspicious Miss Smithson. A scientific elder - brother was quoted as authority, but Miss Smithson with commendable - common sense gave her ruling, “Indeed that may be so, and it may be - not, but it certainly is _nicer_ for little girls to say that the - earth is more or less the shape of an orange.” - - From which fruit, as conveniently as from anywhere else, can be - drawn our homely moral of common sense in the use of words. As - every schoolboy I hope doesn’t know, the orange is the globose - fruit of that rutaceous tree the _citrus aurantium_, but as every - schoolboy certainly is aware, there are several kinds of orange on - the market, to wit the ordinary everyday sweet orange from Jaffa - or Jamaica, the bitter marmalade orange that either comes or does - not come from Seville, the navel orange, and the excellent “blood,” - with several other varieties. Moreover the orange has as many - _points_ as a horse, and parts or processes connected with its - dissection and use as a motor-bicycle. “I would I were an Orange - Tree, that busie Plante,” sighed George Herbert once. I wonder how - Herbert would have anatomized his Orange, then a rarer fruit than - today when popular affection and necessary daily intercourse have - wrapped the orange with a whole glossary of words as well as with - tissue-paper. Old gentlemen usually _pare_ their oranges, but the - homophonic barrage of puns when Jones _père_ prepares to pare a - pair of--even oranges (let alone another English-grown fruit), has - taught the younger generations either to peel a norange or skin - their roranges. _Peel_ (subst.) is ousting _rind_; a pity because - there is also _peal_ as a homophone; but I am glad to say that what - used to be called _divisions_ are now almost universally known as - _fingers_ or _pigs_ (is the derivation from the tithe-or parson’s - pig known by its extreme smallness?); the seeds are “pips,” and - quite rightly too, because in this country they are seldom used for - planting, and “pip” obviously means that when you squeeze them - between forefinger and thumb they are a useful form of minor - artillery; then there is the white pithy part under the outer rind; - I have heard this called _blanket_, and that is pretty good, but I - have also heard it called _kill-baby_, and that is better; for me - it will always remain _kill-baby_. On consulting _Webster’s - International Dictionary_ I find that there is no authority or - precedent for calling the withered calix on the orange the _kim_, - but I have done so ever since I can remember, and have heard the - word in many respectable nurseries (it has a fascination for - children), and I can’t imagine it having any other name. Poetical - wit might call it “the beauty-patch on that fairy orange cheek”; - heraldry might blazon it, on _tenne_, as a _mullet, vert, for - difference_; and contemporary slang would probably explain it as - that “rotten little star-shaped gadget at the place where you shove - in your lump of sugar”; but _kim_ is obviously the word that is - wanted, it needs no confirmation by a Dictionary Revisal Committee - or National Academy. There it is, you can hardly get away from it. - Misguided supporters of the Society for Pure English, resisting the - impulse to say casually “the yellow stuff round my yorange” and - “the bits inside, what you eat,” and knowing better than to give us - _exocarp_, _carpel_, and _ovule_, will, however, perhaps - misunderstand the aims of the Society by only using literary and - semi-scientific language, by insisting on _paring_ the _integument_ - and afterwards removing the _divisions_ of their fruit for - _mastication_. But pure English does not mean putting back the - clock; or doing mental gymnastics. Let them rather (when they don’t - honestly push in that lump of sugar and suck) _skin_ off the - _rind_, ignoring the _kim_ and scraping away the _kill-baby_, then - pull out the _pigs_, _chew_ them decently, and put the _pips_ to - their proper use. - - Good English surely is clear, easy, unambiguous, rich, - well-sounding, but not self-conscious; for too much pruning - kills.... - - THE END - - * * * * * - - Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber: - - He fell in victory’s pierce pursuit=> He fell in victory’s fierce - pursuit {pg 55} - - - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of On English Poetry, by Robert Graves - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON ENGLISH POETRY *** - -***** This file should be named 50174-0.txt or 50174-0.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/5/0/1/7/50174/ - -Produced by MWS, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was -produced from images generously made available by The -Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions -will be renamed. - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no -one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation -(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without -permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license - - -Title: On English Poetry - Being an Irregular Approach to the Psychology of This Art, - from Evidence Mainly Subjective - -Author: Robert Graves - -Release Date: October 10, 2015 [EBook #50174] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON ENGLISH POETRY *** - - - - -Produced by MWS, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was -produced from images generously made available by The -Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries) - - - - - - -</pre> - -<hr class="full" /> - -<p class="r"><span style="margin-right: 4em;">ON</span><br /> -ENGLISH POETRY</p> - -<p><a name="page_001" id="page_001"></a> </p> - -<p class="figcenter"> -<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="" height="" alt="bookcover" title="" /> -</p> - -<p><a name="page_002" id="page_002"></a> </p> - -<div class="boxx"><div class="bboxx"> -<p><i>POEMS BY ROBERT GRAVES</i></p> - -<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary=""> - -<tr><td><small><b>FAIRIES AND FUSILEERS [1918]<br /> -COUNTRY SETTLEMENT [1920]<br /> -THE PIER-GLASS [1921]</b></small></td></tr> -</table> - -</div> - -<p><a name="page_003" id="page_003"></a> </p> -</div> - -<h1>ON ENGLISH POETRY</h1> - -<div class="poetry"><div class="poem"> -<i>Being an Irregular Approach to the Psychology<br /> -of This Art, from Evidence Mainly Subjective</i><br /> -</div></div> - -<p class="cb"> <br /> -<span class="smcap">By</span> ROBERT GRAVES<br /> -<br /> -<img src="images/colophon.png" -width="100" -height="62" -alt="colophon image not available" /> -<br /> -<br /> -<span class="smcap">New York</span> <span style="margin:auto -2em auto 2em;">ALFRED·A·KNOPF</span> <span class="smcap">Mcmxxii</span><a name="page_004" id="page_004"></a><br /> -<br /> -COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY<br /> -ALFRED A. KNOPF, <span class="smcap">Inc.</span><br /> -<br /> -<i>Published, May, 1922</i><br /> -</p> - -<div class="poetry"><div class="poem"><i>Set up and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y.<br /> Paper -furnished by Henry Lindenmeyr & Sons, New York, N. Y.<br /> Bound by the -H. Wolff Estate, New York, N. Y.</i> -<br /><br />MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA</div></div> - -<p><a name="page_005" id="page_005"></a></p> - -<div class="blockquott"><p><i>To T. E. Lawrence of Arabia and All Soul’s College, Oxford, and to -W. H. R. Rivers of the Solomon Islands and St. John’s College, -Cambridge, my gratitude for valuable critical help, and the -dedication of this book.</i></p></div> - -<p><a name="page_006" id="page_006"></a></p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">... Also of the Mustarde Tarte: Suche<br /></span> -<span class="i0">problemis to paynt, it longyth to his arte.<br /></span> -<span class="i15"><span class="smcap">John Skelton.</span><br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Poetry subdues to union under its light yoke<br /></span> -<span class="i0">all irreconcilable things.<br /></span> -<span class="i14"><span class="smcap">P. B. Shelley.</span><br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p><a name="page_007" id="page_007"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="NOTE" id="NOTE"></a>NOTE</h2> - -<p>The greater part of this book will appear controversial, but any critic -who expects me to argue on what I have written, is begged kindly to -excuse me; my garrison is withdrawn without a shot fired and his -artillery may blow the fortress to pieces at leisure. These notebook -reflections are only offered as being based on the rules which regulate -my own work at the moment, for many of which I claim no universal -application and have promised no lasting regard. They have been -suggested from time to time mostly by particular problems in the writing -of my last two volumes of poetry. Hesitating to formulate at present a -comprehensive water-tight philosophy of poetry, I have dispensed with a -continuous argument, and so the sections either stand independently or -are intended to get their force by suggestive neighbourliness rather -than by logical catenation. The names of the glass houses in which my -name as an authority on poetry lodges at present, are to be found on a -back page.</p> - -<p>It is a heartbreaking task to reconcile literary and scientific -interests in the same book. Literary enthusiasts<a name="page_008" id="page_008"></a> seem to regard poetry -as something miraculous, something which it is almost blasphemous to -analyse, witness the outcry against R. L. Stevenson when he merely -underlined examples of Shakespeare’s wonderful dexterity in the -manipulation of consonants; most scientists on the other hand, being -either benevolently contemptuous of poetry, or if interested, -insensitive to the emotional quality of words and their associative -subtleties, themselves use words as weights and counters rather than as -chemicals powerful in combination and have written, if at all, so -boorishly about poetry that the breach has been actually widened. If any -false scientific assumptions or any bad literary blunders I have made, -be held up for popular execration, these may yet act as decoys to the -truth which I am anxious to buy even at the price of a snubbing; and -where in many cases no trouble has apparently been taken to check -over-statements, there is this excuse to offer, that when putting a cat -among pigeons it is always advisable to make it as large a cat as -possible.</p> - -<p class="r"> -R. G.<br /> -</p> - -<p class="nind"> -Islip,<br /> -Oxford.<br /> -</p> - -<p><a name="page_009" id="page_009"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2> - -<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary=""> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#I">I</a></td><td valign="top">DEFINITIONS,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_013">13</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#II">II</a></td><td valign="top">THE NINE MUSES,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_015">15</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#III">III</a></td><td valign="top">POETRY AND PRIMITIVE MAGIC,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_019">19</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#IV">IV</a></td><td valign="top">CONFLICT OF EMOTIONS,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_022">22</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#V">V</a></td><td valign="top">THE PATTERN UNDERNEATH,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_024">24</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#VI">VI</a></td><td valign="top">INSPIRATION,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_026">26</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#VII">VII</a></td><td valign="top">THE PARABLE OF MR. POETA AND MR. LECTOR,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_027">27</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#VIII">VIII</a></td><td valign="top">THE CARPENTER’S SON,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_031">31</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#IX">IX</a></td><td valign="top">THE GADDING VINE,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_033">33</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#X">X</a></td><td valign="top">THE DEAD END AND THE MAN OF ONE POEM,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_036">36</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XI">XI</a></td><td valign="top">SPENSER’S CUFFS,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_038">38</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XII">XII</a></td><td valign="top">CONNECTION OF POETRY AND HUMOUR,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_040">40</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XIII">XIII</a></td><td valign="top">DICTION,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_041">41</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XIV">XIV</a></td><td valign="top">THE DAFFODILS,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_042">42</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XV">XV</a></td><td valign="top">VERS LIBRE,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_045">45</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XVI">XVI</a></td><td valign="top">MOVING MOUNTAINS,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_050">50</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XVII">XVII</a></td><td valign="top">LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_050">50</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XVIII">XVIII</a></td><td valign="top">THE GENERAL ELLIOTT,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_055">55</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XIX">XIX</a></td><td valign="top">THE GOD CALLED POETRY,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_062">62</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XX">XX</a></td><td valign="top">LOGICALIZATION,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_066">66</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XXI">XXI</a></td><td valign="top">LIMITATIONS,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_069">69</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XXII">XXII</a></td><td valign="top">THE NAUGHTY BOY,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_071">71</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XXIII">XXIII</a></td><td valign="top">THE CLASSICAL AND ROMANTIC IDEAS,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_072">72</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XXIV">XXIV</a></td><td valign="top">COLOUR,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_076">76</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XXV">XXV</a></td><td valign="top">PUTTY,<a name="page_010" id="page_010"></a></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_078">78</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XXVI">XXVI</a></td><td valign="top">READING ALOUD,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_081">81</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XXVII">XXVII</a></td><td valign="top">L’ARTE DELLA PITTURA,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_082">82</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XXVIII">XXVIII</a></td><td valign="top">ON WRITING MUSICALLY,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_083">83</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XXIX">XXIX</a></td><td valign="top">THE USE OF POETRY,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_084">84</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XXX">XXX</a></td><td valign="top">HISTORIES OF POETRY,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_086">86</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XXXI">XXXI</a></td><td valign="top">THE BOWL MARKED DOG,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_087">87</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XXXII">XXXII</a></td><td valign="top">THE ANALYTIC SPIRIT,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_088">88</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XXXIII">XXXIII</a></td><td valign="top">RHYME AND ALLITERATION,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_089">89</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XXXIV">XXXIV</a></td><td valign="top">AN AWKWARD FELLOW CALLED ARIPHRADES,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_090">90</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XXXV">XXXV</a></td><td valign="top">IMPROVISING NEW CONVENTIONS,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_092">92</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XXXVI">XXXVI</a></td><td valign="top">WHEN IN DOUBT...,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_093">93</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XXXVII">XXXVII</a></td><td valign="top">THE EDITOR WITH THE MUCKRAKE,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_094">94</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XXXVIII">XXXVIII</a></td><td valign="top">THE MORAL QUESTION,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_094">94</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XXXIX">XXXIX</a></td><td valign="top">THE POET AS OUTSIDER,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_096">96</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XL">XL</a></td><td valign="top">A POLITE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_097">97</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XLI">XLI</a></td><td valign="top">FAKE POETRY, BAD POETRY AND MERE VERSE,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_097">97</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XLII">XLII</a></td><td valign="top">A DIALOGUE ON FAKE POETRY,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_101">101</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XLIII">XLIII</a></td><td valign="top">ASKING ADVICE,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_102">102</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XLIV">XLIV</a></td><td valign="top">SURFACE FAULTS, AN ILLUSTRATION,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_103">103</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XLV">XLV</a></td><td valign="top">LINKED SWEETNESS LONG DRAWN OUT,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_106">106</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XLVI">XLVI</a></td><td valign="top">THE FABLE OF THE IDEAL GADGET,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_108">108</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XLVII">XLVII</a></td><td valign="top">SEQUELS ARE BARRED,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_111">111</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XLVIII">XLVIII</a></td><td valign="top">TOM FOOL,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_111">111</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#XLIX">XLIX</a></td><td valign="top">CROSS RHYTHM AND RESOLUTION,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_113">113</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#L">L</a></td><td valign="top">MY NAME IS LEGION, FOR WE ARE MANY,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_116">116</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#LI">LI</a></td><td valign="top">THE PIG BABY,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_121">121</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#LII">LII</a></td><td valign="top">APOLOGY FOR DEFINITIONS,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_122">122</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#LIII">LIII</a></td><td valign="top">TIMES AND SEASONS,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_124">124</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#LIV">LIV</a></td><td valign="top">TWO HERESIES,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_125">125</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#LV">LV</a></td><td valign="top">THE ART OF EXPRESSION,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_126">126</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#LVI">LVI</a></td><td valign="top">GHOSTS IN THE SHELDONIAN,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_129">129</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#LVII">LVII</a></td><td valign="top">THE LAYING-ON OF HANDS,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_130">130</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#LVIII">LVIII</a></td><td valign="top">WAYS AND MEANS,<a name="page_011" id="page_011"></a></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_132">132</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#LIX">LIX</a></td><td valign="top">POETRY AS LABOUR,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_134">134</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#LX">LX</a></td><td valign="top">THE NECESSITY OF ARROGANCE,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_134">134</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td align="right" valign="top"><a href="#LXI">LXI</a></td><td valign="top">IN PROCESSION,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_137">137</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td> </td><td><a href="#APPENDIX_THE_DANGERS_OF_DEFINITION">APPENDIX</a>: THE DANGERS OF DEFINITION,</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_143">143</a></td></tr> - -</table> - -<p><a name="page_012" id="page_012"></a></p> - -<p><a name="page_013" id="page_013"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I<br /><br /> -DEFINITIONS</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HERE are two meanings of Poetry as the poet himself has come to use the -word:—first, Poetry, the unforeseen fusion in his mind of apparently -contradictory emotional ideas; and second, Poetry, the more-or-less -deliberate attempt, with the help of a rhythmic mesmerism, to impose an -illusion of actual experience on the minds of others. In its first and -peculiar sense it is the surprise that comes after thoughtlessly rubbing -a mental Aladdin’s lamp, and I would suggest that every poem worthy of -the name has its central idea, its nucleus, formed by this spontaneous -process; later it becomes the duty of the poet as craftsman to present -this nucleus in the most effective way possible, by practising poetry -more consciously as an art. He creates in passion, then by a reverse -process of analyzing, he tests the implied suggestions and corrects them -on common-sense principles so as to make them apply universally.</p> - -<p>Before elaborating the idea of this spontaneous Poetry over which the -poet has no direct control, it would be convenient to show what I mean -by the Poetry over which he has a certain conscious control, by -contrasting its method with the method of standard<a name="page_014" id="page_014"></a> Prose. Prose in its -most prosy form seems to be the art of accurate statement by suppressing -as far as possible the latent associations of words; for the convenience -of his readers the standard prose-writer uses an accurate logical -phrasing in which perhaps the periods and the diction vary with the -emotional mood; but he only says what he appears at first to say. In -Poetry the implication is more important than the manifest statement; -the underlying associations of every word are marshalled carefully. Many -of the best English poets have found great difficulty in writing -standard prose; this is due I suppose to a sort of tender-heartedness, -for standard prose-writing seems to the poet very much like turning the -machine guns on an innocent crowd of his own work people.</p> - -<p>Certainly there is a hybrid form, prose poetry, in which poets have -excelled, a perfectly legitimate medium, but one that must be kept -distinct from both its parent elements. It employs the indirect method -of poetic suggestion, the flanking movement rather than the frontal -attack, but like Prose, does not trouble to keep rhythmic control over -the reader. This constant control seems an essential part of Poetry -proper. But to expect it in prose poetry is to be disappointed; we may -take an analogy from the wilder sort of music where if there is -continual changing of time and key, the listener often does not “catch -on” to each new idiom, so that he is momentarily confused by the changes -and the unity of the whole musical form is thereby broken for him. So -exactly in prose<a name="page_015" id="page_015"></a> poetry. In poetry proper our delight is in the -emotional variations from a clearly indicated norm of rhythm and -sound-texture; but in prose poetry there is no recognizable norm. Where -in some notable passages (of the Authorised Version of the Bible for -instance) usually called prose poetry, one does find complete rhythmic -control even though the pattern is constantly changing, this is no -longer prose poetry, it is poetry, not at all the worse for its -intricate rhythmic resolutions. Popular confusion as to the various -properties and qualities of Poetry, prose poetry, verse, prose, with -their subcategories of good, bad and imitation, has probably been caused -by the inequality of the writing in works popularly regarded as -Classics, and made taboo for criticism. There are few “masterpieces of -poetry” that do not occasionally sink to verse, many disregarded -passages of Prose that are often prose poetry and sometimes even poetry -itself.</p> - -<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II<br /><br /> -THE NINE MUSES</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span> SUPPOSE that when old ladies remark with a breathless wonder “My dear, -he has <i>more</i> than <i>mere talent</i>, I am convinced he has a <i>touch of -genius</i>” they are differentiating between the two parts of poetry given -at the beginning of the last section, between the man who shows a -remarkable aptitude<a name="page_016" id="page_016"></a> for conjuring and the man actually also in league -with the powers of magic. The weakness of originally unspontaneous -poetry seems to be that the poet has only the very small conscious part -of his experience to draw upon, and therefore in co-ordinating the -central images, his range of selection is narrower and the links are -only on the surface. On the other hand, spontaneous poetry untested by -conscious analysis has the opposite weakness of being liable to surface -faults and unintelligible thought-connections. Poetry composed in sleep -is a good instance of the sort I mean. The rhymes are generally -inaccurate, the texture clumsy, there is a tendency to use the same -words close together in different senses, and the thought-connections -are so free as to puzzle the author himself when he wakes. A scrap of -dream poetry sticks in my mind since my early schooldays:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“It’s Henry the VIII!<br /></span> -<span class="i1">It’s Henry the VIII!<br /></span> -<span class="i1">I know him by the smile on his face<br /></span> -<span class="i1">He is leading his armies over to France.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>Here <i>eighth</i> and <i>face</i> seemed perfect rhymes, to the sleeping ear, the -spirit was magnificent, the implications astonishing; but the waking -poet was forced to laugh. I believe that in the first draft of -Coleridge’s <i>Kubla Khan</i>, <i>Abora</i> was the rhyme for <i>Dulcimer</i>, as:—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“A damsel with a dulcimer<br /></span> -<span class="i1">Singing of Mount Abora”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p><a name="page_017" id="page_017"></a></p> - -<p class="nind">because “saw” seems too self-conscious an assonance and too far removed -from “Abora” to impress us as having been part of the original dream -poem. “Could I revive within me” again is surely written in a waking -mood, probably after the disastrous visit of the man from Porlock.</p> - -<p>Henceforward, in using the word <i>Poetry</i> I mean both the controlled and -uncontrollable parts of the art taken together, because each is helpless -without the other. And I do not wish to limit Poetry, as there is a new -tendency to do, merely to the short dramatic poem, the ballad and the -lyric, though it certainly is a convenience not to take these as the -normal manifestations of Poetry in order to see more clearly the -inter-relation of such different forms as the Drama, the Epic, and the -song with music. In the Drama, the emotional conflict which is the whole -cause and meaning of Poetry is concentrated in the mental problems of -the leading character or characters. They have to choose for instance -between doing what they think is right and the suffering or contempt -which is the penalty, between the gratification of love and the fear of -hurting the person they love, or similar dilemmas. The lesser actors in -the drama do not themselves necessarily speak the language of poetry or -have any question in their minds as to the course they should pursue; -still, by throwing their weight into one scale or another they affect -the actions of the principals and so contribute to the poetry of the -play. It is only<a name="page_018" id="page_018"></a> the master dramatist who ever attempts to develop -subsidiary characters in sympathy with the principals.</p> - -<p>The true Epic appears to me as an organic growth of dramatic scenes, -presented in verse which only becomes true poetry on occasion; but these -scenes are so placed in conflicting relation that between them they -compose a central theme of Poetry not to be found in the detachable -parts, and this theme is a study of the interactions of the ethical -principles of opposing tribes or groups. In the Iliad, for instance, the -conflict is not only between the Trojan and Greek ideas, but between -groups in each camp. In the Odyssey it is between the ethics of -sea-wandering and the ethics of the dwellers on dry land. I would be -inclined to deny the <i>Beowulf</i> as an epic, describing it instead as a -personal allegory in epical surroundings. The Canterbury Tales are much -nearer to an English Epic, the interacting principles being an imported -Eastern religion disguised in Southern dress and a ruder, more vigorous -Northern spirit unsubdued even when on pilgrimage.</p> - -<p>The words of a song do not necessarily show in themselves the emotional -conflict which I regard as essential for poetry, but that is because the -song is definitely a compound of words and music, and the poetry lies in -this relation. Words for another man’s music can hardly have a very -lively independent existence, yet with music they must combine to a -powerful chemical action; to write a lyric to conflict with imaginary -music is the most exacting art imaginable,<a name="page_019" id="page_019"></a> and is rather like trying to -solve an equation in <i>x</i>, <i>y</i> and <i>z</i>, given only <i>x</i>.</p> - -<p>I wonder if there are as many genuine Muses as the traditional nine; I -cannot help thinking that one or two of them have been counted twice -over. But the point of this section is to show the strong family -likeness between three or four of them at least.</p> - -<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III<br /><br /> -POETRY AND PRIMITIVE MAGIC</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">O</span>NE may think of Poetry as being like Religion, a modified descendant of -primitive Magic; it keeps the family characteristic of stirring wonder -by creating from unpromising lifeless materials an illusion of -unexpected passionate life. The poet, a highly developed witch doctor, -does not specialize in calling up at set times some one particular minor -divinity, that of Fear or Lust, of War or Family Affection; he plays on -all the emotions and serves as comprehensive and universal a God as he -can conceive. There is evidence for explaining the origin of poetry as I -have defined it, thus:—Primitive man was much troubled by the -phenomenon of dreams, and early discovered what scientists are only just -beginning to acknowledge, that the recollection of dreams is of great -use in solving problems of uncertainty; there is always a secondary -meaning behind our most fantastic nightmares. Members of<a name="page_020" id="page_020"></a> a primitive -society would solemnly recount their dreams to the wise ones of the clan -and ask them to draw an inference. Soon it happened that, in cases of -doubt, where the dream was forgotten and could not be recalled, or where -it was felt that a dream was needed to confirm or reverse a decision, -the peculiarly gifted witch doctor or priestess would induce a sort of -self-hypnotism, and in the light of the dream so dreamed, utter an -oracle which contained an answer to the problem proposed. The compelling -use of rhythm to hold people’s attention and to make them beat their -feet in time, was known, and the witch doctor seems to have combined the -rhythmic beat of a drum or gong with the recital of his dream. In these -rhythmic dream utterances, intoxicating a primitive community to -sympathetic emotional action for a particular purpose of which I will -treat later, Poetry, in my opinion, originated, and the dream symbolism -of Poetry was further encouraged by the restrictions of the <i>taboo</i>, -which made definite reference to certain people, gods and objects, -unlucky.</p> - -<p>This is not to say that verse-recital of laws or adventures or history -did not possibly come before oracular poetry, and whoever it was who -found it convenient that his word stresses should correspond with beat -of drum or stamp of feet, thereby originated the rhythm that is common -both to verse and to poetry. Verse is not necessarily degenerate poetry; -rhymed advertisement and the <i>memoria technica</i> have kept up the honest -tradition of many centuries; witty verse<a name="page_021" id="page_021"></a> with no poetical pretensions -justifies its existence a hundred times over; even the Limerick can -become delightful in naughty hands; but where poetry differs from other -verse is by being essentially a solution to some pressing emotional -problem and has always the oracular note.</p> - -<p>Between verse, bad poetry and fake poetry, there is a great distinction. -Bad poetry is simply the work of a man who solves his emotional problems -to his own satisfaction but not to anybody else’s. Fake poetry, the -decay of poetry, corresponds exactly with fake magic, the decay of true -magic. It happens that some member of the priestly caste, finding it -impossible to go into a trance when required, even with the aid of -intoxicants, has to resort to subterfuge. He imitates a state of trance, -recalls some one else’s dream which he alters slightly, and wraps his -oracular answer in words recollected from the lips of genuine witch -doctors. He takes care to put his implied meaning well to the fore and -the applicants give him payment and go away as well pleased with their -money’s worth as the readers of Tupper, Montgomery and Wilcox with the -comfortable verses supplied them under the trade name of “Poetry.”</p> - -<p>Acrostics and other verses of <i>wit</i> have, I believe, much the same -ancestry in the ingenious <i>double entendres</i> with which the harassed -priestesses of Delphi insured against a wrong guess.<a name="page_022" id="page_022"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV<br /><br /> -CONFLICT OF EMOTIONS</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE suggestion that an emotional conflict is necessary for the birth of -true poetry will perhaps not be accepted without illustrative instances. -But one need only take any of the most famous lines from Elizabethan -drama, those generally acknowledged as being the most essential poetry, -and a battle of the great emotions, faith, hope or love against fear, -grief or hate, will certainly appear; though one side may indeed be -fighting a hopeless battle.</p> - -<p>When Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is waiting for the clock to strike twelve -and the Devil to exact his debt, he cries out:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">That Time may cease and midnight never come<br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>O lente, lente currite noctis equi</i>.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>Scholastic commentators have actually been found to wonder at the -“inappropriateness” of “Go slowly, slowly, coursers of the night,” a -quotation originally spoken by an Ovidian lover with his arms around the -mistress from whom he must part at dawn. They do not even note it as -marking the distance the scholar Faustus has travelled since his first -dry-boned Latin quotation <i>Bene disserere est finis logices</i> which he -pedantically translates:<a name="page_023" id="page_023"></a></p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Is, to dispute well, Logicke’s chiefest end.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>Far less do they see how Marlowe has made the lust of life, in its -hopeless struggle against the devils coming to bind it for the eternal -bonfire, tragically unable to find any better expression than this -feeble over-sweetness; so that there follows with even greater -insistence of fate:—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">The starres moove stil, time runs, the clocke wil strike,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The divel wil come and Faustus must be damnd.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>When Lady Macbeth, sleep-walking, complains that “all the perfumes of -Arabia will not sweeten this little hand,” these perfumes are not merely -typically sweet smells to drown the reek of blood. They represent also -her ambitions for the luxury of a Queen, and the conflict of luxurious -ambition against fate and damnation is as one-sided as before. Or take -Webster’s most famous line in his Duchess of Malfi:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young,<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">spoken by Ferdinand over the Duchess’ body; and that word “dazzle” does -duty for two emotions at once, sun-dazzled awe at loveliness, -tear-dazzled grief for early death.</p> - -<p>The effect of these distractions of mind is so often an appeal to our -pity, even for the murderers or for the man who has had his fill of -“vaine pleasure for 24 yeares” that to rouse this pity has been taken,<a name="page_024" id="page_024"></a> -wrongly, I think, as the chief end of poetry. Poetry is not always -tragedy; and there is no pity stirred by Captain Tobias Hume’s love song -“Faine would I change this note, To which false love has charmed me,” or -in Andrew Marvell’s Mower’s address to the glow-worms:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Ye country comets that portend<br /></span> -<span class="i2">No war nor prince’s funeral,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Shining unto no higher end<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Than to presage the grass’s fall.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>There is no pity either for Hume’s lover who suddenly discovers that he -has been making a sad song about nothing, or for Marvell’s glow-worms -and their rusticity and slightness of aim. In the first case Love stands -up in its glory against the feeble whining of minor poets; in the -second, thoughts of terror and majesty, the heavens themselves blazing -forth the death of princes, conflict ineffectually with security and -peace, the evening glow-worm prophesying fair weather for mowing next -morning, and meanwhile lighting rustic lovers to their tryst.</p> - -<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V<br /><br /> -THE PATTERN UNDERNEATH</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE power of surprise which marks all true poetry, seems to result from -a foreknowledge of certain unwitting processes of the reader’s mind, for -which the poet more or less deliberately<a name="page_025" id="page_025"></a> provides. The underlying -associations of each word in a poem form close combinations of emotion -unexpressed by the bare verbal pattern.</p> - -<p>In this way the poet may be compared with a father piecing together a -picture-block puzzle for his children. He surprises them at last by -turning over the completed picture, and showing them that by the act of -assembling the scattered parts of “Red Riding Hood with the Basket of -Food” he has all the while been building up unnoticed underneath another -scene of the tragedy—“The Wolf eating the Grandmother.”</p> - -<p>The analogy can be more closely pressed; careless arrangement of the -less important pieces or wilfully decorative borrowing from another -picture altogether may look very well in the upper scene, but what -confusion below!</p> - -<p>The possibilities of this pattern underneath have been recognized and -exploited for centuries in Far Eastern systems of poetry. I once even -heard an English Orientalist declare that Chinese was the only language -in which true poetry could be written, because of the undercurrents of -allusion contained in every word of the Chinese language. It never -occurred to him that the same thing might be unrecognizedly true also of -English words.<a name="page_026" id="page_026"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI<br /><br /> -“INSPIRATION”</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">P</span>EOPLE are always enquiring how exactly poets get their “inspiration,” -perhaps in the hope that it may happen to themselves one day and that if -they know the signs in advance, something profitable may come of it.</p> - -<p>It is a difficult conundrum, but I should answer somehow like this:—The -poet is consciously or unconsciously always either taking in or giving -out; he hears, observes, weighs, guesses, condenses, idealizes, and the -new ideas troop quietly into his mind until suddenly every now and again -two of them violently quarrel and drag into the fight a group of other -ideas that have been loitering about at the back of his mind for years; -there is great excitement, noise and bloodshed, with finally a -reconciliation and drinks all round. The poet writes a tactful police -report on the affair and there is the poem.</p> - -<p>Or, to put it in a more sober form:—</p> - -<p>When conflicting issues disturb his mind, which in its conscious state -is unable to reconcile them logically, the poet acquires the habit of -self-hypnotism, as practised by the witch doctors, his ancestors in -poetry.</p> - -<p>He learns in self-protection to take pen and paper and let the pen solve -the hitherto insoluble problem which has caused the disturbance.<a name="page_027" id="page_027"></a></p> - -<p>I speak of this process of composition as self-hypnotism because on -being interrupted the poet experiences the disagreeable sensations of a -sleep-walker disturbed, and later finds it impossible to remember how -the early drafts of a poem ran, though he may recall every word of a -version which finally satisfied his conscious scrutiny. Confronted -afterwards with the very first draft of the series he cannot in many -cases decipher his own writing, far less recollect the process of -thought which made him erase this word and substitute that. Many poets -of my acquaintance have corroborated what I have just said and also -observed that on laying down their pens after the first excitement of -composition they feel the same sort of surprise that a man finds on -waking from a “fugue,” they discover that they have done a piece of work -of which they never suspected they were capable; but at the same moment -they discover a number of trifling surface defects which were invisible -before.</p> - -<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII<br /><br /> -THE PARABLE OF MR. POETA AND MR. LECTOR</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">M</span>R. POETA was a child of impulse, and though not really a very careful -student of Chaucer himself, was incensed one day at reading a literary -article by an old schoolfellow called Lector, patronizing the poet in an -impudent<a name="page_028" id="page_028"></a> way and showing at the same time a great ignorance of his best -work. But instead of taking the more direct and prosaic course of -writing a letter of protest to the review which printed the article, or -of directly giving the author a piece of his mind, he improvised a -complicated plot for the young man’s correction.</p> - -<p>On the following day he invited Mr. Lector to supper at his home and -spent a busy morning making preparations. He draped the dining-room -walls with crape, took up the carpet, and removed all the furniture -except the table and two massive chairs which were finally drawn up to a -meal of bread, cheese and water. When supper-time arrived and with it -Mr. Lector, Mr. Poeta was discovered sitting in deep dejection in a -window seat with his face buried in his hands; he would not notice his -guest’s arrival for a full minute. Mr. Lector, embarrassed by the -strangeness of his reception (for getting no answer to his knock at the -door he had forced his way in), was now definitely alarmed by Mr. -Poeta’s nervous gestures, desultory conversation and his staring eyes -perpetually turning to a great rusty scimitar hanging on a nail above -the mantelpiece. There was no attendance, nor any knife or plate on the -board. The bread was stale, the cheese hard, and no sooner had Mr. -Lector raised a glass of water to his lips than his host dashed it from -his hands and with a bellow of rage sprang across the table. Mr. Lector, -saw him seize the scimitar and flourish it around his<a name="page_029" id="page_029"></a> head, so for want -of any weapon of defence, the unfortunate young man reacted to -terror-stricken flight. He darted from the room and heard the blade -whistle through the air behind him.</p> - -<p>Out of an open window he jumped and into a small enclosed yard; with the -help of a handy rainwater tub he climbed the opposite wall, then dashed -down a pathway through a shrubbery and finding the front door of a -deserted cottage standing open, rushed in and upstairs, then -breathlessly flinging into an empty room at the stairhead, slammed the -door.</p> - -<p>By so slamming the door he had locked it and on recovering his presence -of mind found himself a close prisoner, for the only window was stoutly -barred and the door lock was too massive to break. Here then, he stayed -in confinement for three days, suffering severely until released by an -accomplice of Mr. Poeta, who affected to be much surprised at finding -him there and even threatened an action for trespass. But cold, hungry -and thirsty, Mr. Lector had still had for companion in his misery a -coverless copy of Chaucer which he found lying in the grate and which he -read through from beginning to end with great enjoyment, thereupon -reconsidering his previous estimate of the poet’s greatness.</p> - -<p>But he never realized that every step he had taken had been -predetermined by the supposed maniac and that once frightened off his -balance, he had reacted according to plan. Mr. Poeta did not need to -pursue him over the wall or even to go any further than the<a name="page_030" id="page_030"></a> dining-room -door; he counted on the all-or-none principle of reaction to danger -finishing the job for him. So out at the window went Mr. Lector and -every recourse offered for escape he accepted unquestioningly. Mr. Poeta -knew well enough that Mr. Lector would eventually treasure that copy of -Chaucer prepared for him, as a souvenir of his terrible experience, that -he would have it rebound and adopt the poet as a “discovery” of his own.</p> - -<p>The reader in interpreting this parable, must not make too close a -comparison of motives; the process is all that is intended to show. The -poet, once emotion has suggested a scheme of work, goes over the ground -with minute care and makes everything sure, so that when his poem is -presented to the reader, the latter is thrown off his balance -temporarily by the novelty of the ideas involved. He has no critical -weapons at his command, so he must follow the course which the poet has -mapped out for him. He is carried away in spite of himself and though -the actual words do not in themselves express all the meaning which the -poet manages to convey (Mr. Poeta, as has been said, did not pursue) yet -the reader on recovering from the first excitement finds the implied -conclusion laid for him to discover, and flattering himself that he has -reached it independently, finally carries it off as his own. Even where -a conclusion is definitely expressed in a poem the reader often deceives -himself into saying, “I have often thought that before, but never so -clearly,” when as a matter of<a name="page_031" id="page_031"></a> fact he has just been unconsciously -translating the poet’s experience into terms of his own, and finding the -formulated conclusion sound, imagines that the thought is originally -his.</p> - -<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII<br /><br /> -THE CARPENTER’S SON</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">F</span>ABLES and analogies serve very well instead of the psychological jargon -that would otherwise have to be used in a discussion of the poet’s -mental clockwork, but they must be supported wherever possible by -definite instances, chapter and verse. An example is therefore owed of -how easily and completely the poet can deceive his readers once he has -assumed control of their imagination, hypnotizing them into a receptive -state by indirect sensuous suggestions and by subtle variations of -verse-melody; which hypnotism, by the way, I regard as having a physical -rather than a mental effect and being identical with the rhythmic -hypnotism to which such animals as snakes, elephants or apes are easily -subject.</p> - -<p>Turn then to Mr. Housman’s classic sequence “A Shropshire Lad,” to No. -XLVII “The Carpenter’s Son,” beginning, “Here the hangman stops his -cart.” Ask any Housman enthusiasts (they are happily many) how long it -took them to realize what the poet is forcing on them there. In nine -cases out of ten<a name="page_032" id="page_032"></a> where this test is applied, it will be found that the -lyric has never been consciously recognized as an Apocryphal account of -the Crucifixion; and even those who have consciously recognized the -clues offered have failed to formulate consciously the further daring -(some would say blasphemous) implications of its position after the last -three pieces “Shot, lad? So quick, so clean an ending,” “If it chance -your eye offend you” and the momentary relief of “Bring in this timeless -grave to throw.”</p> - -<p>Among Jubilee bonfires; village sports of running, cricket, football; a -rustic murder; the London and North Western Railway; the Shropshire -Light Infantry; ploughs; lovers on stiles or in long grass; the ringing -of church bells; and then this suicide by shooting, no reader is -prepared for the appearance of the historic Son of Sorrow. The poet has -only to call the Cross a gallows-tree and make the Crucified call His -disciples “Lads” instead of “My Brethren” or “Children,” and we are -completely deceived.</p> - -<p>In our almost certain failure to recognize Him in this context lies, I -believe, the intended irony of the poem which is strewn with the -plainest scriptural allusions.</p> - -<p>In justification of the above and of my deductions about “La Belle Dame -sans Merci” in a later section I plead the rule that “Poetry contains -nothing haphazard,” which follows naturally on the theory connecting -poetry with dreams. By this rule I mean that if a poem, poem-sequence or -drama is an allegory<a name="page_033" id="page_033"></a> of genuine emotional experience and not a mere -cold-blooded exercise, no striking detail and no juxtaposition of -apparently irrelevant themes which it contains can be denied at any rate -a personal significance—a cypher that can usually be decoded from -another context.</p> - -<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX<br /><br /> -THE GADDING VINE</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">W</span>HEN we say that a poet is born not made, it is saying something much -more, that Poetry is essentially spontaneous in origin, and that very -little of it can therefore be taught on a blackboard; it means that a -man is not a poet unless there is some peculiar event in his family -history to account for him. It means to me that with the apparent -exceptions given in the next section, the poet, like his poetry, is -himself the result of the fusion of incongruous forces. Marriages -between people of conflicting philosophies of life, widely separated -nationalities or (most important) different emotional processes, are -likely either to result in children hopelessly struggling with -inhibitions or to develop in them a central authority of great resource -and most quick witted at compromise. Early influences, other than -parental, stimulate the same process. The mind of a poet is like an -international conference<a name="page_034" id="page_034"></a> composed of delegates of both sexes and every -shade of political thought, which is trying to decide on a series of -problems of which the chairman has himself little previous -knowledge—yet this chairman, this central authority, will somehow -contrive to sign a report embodying the specialized knowledge and -reconciling the apparently hopeless disagreements of all factions -concerned. These factions can be called, for convenience, the poet’s -sub-personalities.</p> - -<p>It is obviously impossible to analyze with accuracy the various elements -that once combined to make a phrase in the mind of a poet long dead, but -for the sake of illustration here is a fanciful reconstruction of the -clash of ideas that gave us Milton’s often quoted “Gadding Vine.” The -words, to me, represent an encounter between the poet’s -sub-personalities “B” and “C.” Says “B”:—</p> - -<p>“What a gentle placid fruitful plant the vine is; I am thinking of -putting it in one of my speeches as emblem of the kindly weakness of the -Vegetables.”</p> - -<p>C replies very tartly:—</p> - -<p>“Gentle placid fruitful fiddle-sticks! Why, my good friend, think of the -colossal explosive force required to thrust up that vast structure from -a tiny seed buried inches deep in the earth; against the force of -gravity too, and against very heavy winds. Placidity! Look at its leaves -tossing about and its greedy tendrils swaying in search of something to -attack. Vegetable indeed! It’s mobile, it’s vicious, it’s more<a name="page_035" id="page_035"></a> like a -swarm of gad-flies.” B continues obstinate, saying “I never heard such -nonsense. A vine is still a vine, in spite of your paradoxes.”</p> - -<p>“Anyhow, the juice of the vine makes you gad about pretty lively, -sometimes,” says C.</p> - -<p>“Grapes are the conventional fruit for the sick-room,” retorts B.</p> - -<p>“Well, what did the Greeks think about it?” pursues C. “Wasn’t Dionysos -the god of the Vine? He didn’t stop rooted all his life in some -miserable little Greek valley. He went gadding off to India and brought -back tigers.”</p> - -<p>“If you are going to appeal to the poets,” returns B, “you can’t -disregard the position of the vine in decorative art. It has been -conventionalized into the most static design you can find, after the -lotus. When I say <i>Vine</i>, that’s quite enough for me, just V for -vegetable.”</p> - -<p>They are interrupted by A the master spirit who says with authority:—</p> - -<p>“Silence, the two of you! I rule a compromise. Call it a “gadding vine” -and have done with it.”</p> - -<p class="cb">. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .</p> - -<p>The converse of the proposition stated at the beginning of this section, -namely that every one who has the sort of family history mentioned above -and is not the prey of inhibitions, will become a poet, is certainly not -intended. Poetry is only one outlet for peculiar individual expression; -there are also the<a name="page_036" id="page_036"></a> other arts, with politics, generalship, philosophy, -and imaginative business; or merely rhetoric, fantastic jokes and -original swearing—</p> - -<h2><a name="X" id="X"></a>X<br /><br /> -THE DEAD END AND THE MAN OF ONE POEM</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE question of why Poets suddenly seem to come to a dead end and stop -writing true Poetry, is one that has always perplexed literary critics, -and the poets themselves still more. The explanation will probably be -found in two causes.</p> - -<p>In the first case the poet’s preoccupation with the clash of his -emotions has been transmuted into a calmer state of meditation on -philosophic paradox: but poetry being, by accepted definition, sensuous -and passionate is no vehicle of expression for this state. Impersonal -concepts can perhaps be expressed in intellectual music, but in poetry -the musical rhythm and word-texture are linked with a sensuous imagery -too gross for the plane of philosophic thought. Thus dithyramb, by which -I mean the essentially musical treatment of poetry in defiance of the -sense of the words used, is hardly a more satisfactory medium than -metaphysical verse: in which even a lyrical sugar-coating to the pill -cannot induce the childish mood of poetry to accept philosophic -statements removed beyond the plane of pictorial allegory.</p> - -<p>In the second case the conflict of the poet’s subpersonalities<a name="page_037" id="page_037"></a> has been -finally settled, by some satisfaction of desire or removal of a cause of -fear, in the complete rout of the opposing parties, and the victors -dictate their own laws, uncontradicted, in legal prose or (from habit) -in verse.</p> - -<p>Distinction ought to be drawn between the poet and the man who has -written poetry. There are certainly men of only one poem, a James -Clarence Mangan, a Christopher Smart, a Julian Grenfell (these are -instances more convenient than accurate) who may be explained either as -born poets, tortured with a lifelong mental conflict, though able -perhaps only once in their life to “go under” to their own -self-hypnotism, or as not naturally poets at all but men who write to -express a sudden intolerable clamour in their brain; this is when -circumstances have momentarily alienated the usually happy members of -their mental family, but once the expression has brought reconciliation, -there is no further need of poetry, and the poet born out of due time, -ceases to be.</p> - -<p>This temporary writing of poetry by normal single-track minds is most -common in youth when the sudden realization of sex, its powers and its -limited opportunities for satisfactory expression, turns the world -upside down for any sensitive boy or girl. Wartime has the same sort of -effect. I have definite evidence for saying that much of the -trench-poetry written during the late war was the work of men not -otherwise poetically inclined, and that it was very frequently due to an -insupportable conflict between<a name="page_038" id="page_038"></a> suppressed instincts of love and fear; -the officer’s actual love which he could never openly show, for the boys -he commanded, and the fear, also hidden under a forced gaiety, of the -horrible death that threatened them all.</p> - -<h2><a name="XI" id="XI"></a>XI<br /><br /> -SPENSER’S CUFFS</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE poet’s quarrelsome lesser personalities to which I have referred are -divided into camps by the distinction of sex. But in a poet the dominant -spirit is male and though usually a feminist in sympathy, cannot afford -to favour the women at the expense of his own sex. This amplifies my -distrust of poets with floppy hats, long hair, extravagant clothes and -inverted tendencies. Apollo never to my knowledge appears in Greek art -as a Hermaphrodite, and the Greeks understood such problems far better -than we do. I know it is usual to defend these extravagances of dress by -glorifying the Elizabethan age; but let it be remembered that Edmund -Spenser himself wore “short hair, little bands and little cuffs.”</p> - -<p>If there is no definite sexual inversion to account for breaking out in -fancy dress, a poet who is any good at all ought not to feel the need of -advertising his profession in this way. As I understand the poet’s -nature, though he tries to dress as conventionally as possible, he will -always prove too strong for<a name="page_039" id="page_039"></a> his clothes and look completely ridiculous -or very magnificent according to the occasion.</p> - -<p>This matter of dress may seem unimportant, but people are still so shy -of acknowledging the poet in his lifetime as a gifted human being who -may have something important to say, that any dressing up or unnecessary -strutting does a great deal of harm.</p> - -<p>I am convinced that this extravagant dressing up tendency, like the -allied tendency to unkemptness, is only another of the many forms in -which the capricious child spirit which rules our most emotional dreams -is trying also to dominate the critical, diligent, constructive -man-spirit of waking life, without which the poet is lost beyond -recovery. Shelley was a great poet not because he enjoyed sailing paper -boats on the Serpentine but because, in spite of this infantile -preference he had schooled his mind to hard thinking on the -philosophical and political questions of the day and had made friends -among men of intellect and sophistication.</p> - -<p>It is from considerations rather similar to these that I have given this -book a plain heading and restrained my fancy from elaborating a gay -seventeenth-century title or sub-title:—“A Broad-side from Parnassus,” -“The Mustard Tart,” “Pebbles to Crack Your Teeth,” or “Have at you, -Professor Gargoyle!” But I am afraid that extravagance has broken down -my determination to write soberly, on almost every page. And ... no, the -question of the psychology of poetesses is too big for these covers and -too thorny<a name="page_040" id="page_040"></a> in argument. When psycho-analysis has provided more evidence -on the difference between the symbolism of women’s dreams and men’s, -there will be something to say worth saying. Meanwhile it can only be -offered as a strong impression that the dreams of normally-sexed women -are, by comparison with those of normally-sexed men, almost always of -the same simple and self-centred nature as their poetry and their -humour.</p> - -<h2><a name="XII" id="XII"></a>XII<br /><br /> -CONNECTION OF POETRY AND HUMOUR</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span>T was no accident that gave Chaucer, Shakespeare and Keats a very sly -sense of humour, because humour is surely only another product of the -same process that makes poetry and poets—the reconciliation of -incongruities.</p> - -<p>When, for instance, Chaucer says that one of his Canterbury characters -could trip and dance “after the schole of Oxenforde” he is saying two -things:—</p> - -<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="" - class="lefttbl"> -<tr><td align="left">I.</td><td align="left">That Absalom thought he could dance well.</td></tr> -<tr><td align="left">II.</td><td align="left">That the professors of the University of Oxford<br /> -are hardly the people from whom one would<br /> -expect the most likely instruction in that art,</td></tr> -</table> - -<p class="nind">and to point the joke he adds to “trip and dance” the absurd “and with -his legges casten to and fro.” A sympathetic grin, as poets and other -conjurors know, is the best possible bridge for a successful illusion.<a name="page_041" id="page_041"></a> -Coleridge was the first writer, so far as I know, to see the connection -between poetry and humour, but his argument which uses the Irish Bull “I -was a fine child but they changed me” to prove the analogy, trails off -disappointingly.</p> - -<h2><a name="XIII" id="XIII"></a>XIII<br /><br /> -DICTION</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span>DEALLY speaking, there is no especially poetic range of subjects, and -no especially poetic group of words with which to treat them. Indeed, -the more traditionally poetical the subject and the words, the more -difficult it is to do anything with them. The nymph, the swain, the -faun, and the vernal groves are not any more or less legitimate themes -of poetry than Motor Bicycle Trials, Girl Guides, or the Prohibition -Question, the only difference being a practical one; the second category -may be found unsuitable for the imaginative digestion because these -words are still somehow uncooked; in the former case they are unsuitable -because overcooked, rechauffé, tasteless. The cooking process is merely -that of constant use. When a word or a phrase is universally adopted and -can be used in conversation without any apologetic accentuation, or in a -literary review without italics, inverted commas or capital letters, -then it is ready for use in poetry.<a name="page_042" id="page_042"></a></p> - -<p>As a convenient general rule, Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie has pointed out -in his admirable pamphlet “Poetry and Contemporary Speech,” the poet -will always be best advised to choose as the main basis of his diction -the ordinary spoken language of his day; the reason being that words -grow richer by daily use and take on subtle associations which the -artificially bred words of literary or technical application cannot -acquire with such readiness; the former have therefore greater poetic -possibilities in juxtaposition.</p> - -<p class="cb">. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .</p> - -<p>An objection will be raised to the term “universal” as applied to the -audience for poetry; it is a limited universality when one comes to -consider it. Most wise poets intend their work only for those who speak -the same language as themselves, who have a “mental age” not below -normal, and who, if they don’t perhaps understand all the allusions in a -poem, will know at any rate where to go to look them up in a work of -reference.</p> - -<h2><a name="XIV" id="XIV"></a>XIV<br /><br /> -THE DAFFODILS</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">A</span>RT of every sort, according to my previous contentions, is an attempt -to rationalize some emotional conflict in the artist’s mind. When the -painter says “That’s really good to paint”<a name="page_043" id="page_043"></a> and carefully arranges his -still life, he has felt a sort of antagonism between the separate parts -of the group and is going to discover by painting on what that -antagonism is founded, presenting it as clearly and simply as he knows -how, in the slightly distorting haze of the emotion aroused. He never -says, “I think I’ll paint a jug or bottle, next,” any more than the poet -says “I’ve a free morning on Saturday; I’ll write an ode to the Moon or -something of that sort, and get two guineas for it from the <i>London -Mercury</i>.” No, a particular jug or bottle may well start a train of -thought which in time produces a painting, and a particular aspect of -the moon may fire some emotional tinder and suggest a poem. But the Moon -is no more the <i>subject</i> of the poem than the murder of an Archduke was -the cause of the late European War.</p> - -<p>Wordsworth’s lines “I wandered lonely as a cloud” are, as he would have -said, about “something more” than yellow daffodils at the water’s brim. -I have heard how schoolmasters and mistresses point out in the “Poetry -Lesson” that the whole importance of this poem lies in Wordsworth’s -simple perception of the beauty of Spring flowers; but it seems to me to -be an important poem only because Wordsworth has written spontaneously -(though perhaps under his sister’s influence) and recorded to his own -satisfaction an emotional state which we all can recognize.</p> - -<p>These daffodils have interrupted the thoughts of an unhappy, lonely man -and, reminding him of his childhood, become at once emblems of a golden -age<a name="page_044" id="page_044"></a> of disinterested human companionship; he uses their memory later as -a charm to banish the spectres of trouble and loneliness. I hope I have -interpreted the poem correctly. Let us now fantastically suppose for the -sake of argument that Wordsworth had been intentionally seeking solitude -like a hurt beast hating his kind, and had suddenly come across the same -daffodil field: he surely might have been struck with a sudden horror -for such a huge crowd of flower-faces, especially if his early memories -of flower picking had been blighted by disagreeable companionship and -the labour of picking for the flower market. He would then have written -a poem of exactly the opposite sense, recording his sudden feeling of -repulsion at the sight of the flowers and remarking at the end that -sometimes when he is lying on his couch in vacant or in pensive mood, -they flash across that inward eye which is the curse of solitude,</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“<i>Oh then my heart with horror fills</i><br /></span> -<span class="i1"><i>And shudders with the daffodils.</i>”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>For readers to whom he could communicate his dislike of daffodils on the -basis of a common experience of brutal companionship in childhood and -forced labour, the poem would seem a masterpiece, and those of them who -were schoolmasters would be pretty sure to point out in <i>their</i> Poetry -Lessons that the importance of the poem lay in Wordsworth’s “perception -of the dreadfulness of Spring Flowers.”</p> - -<p>Again the scholastic critic finds the chief value of<a name="page_045" id="page_045"></a> Wordsworth’s -“Intimations of Immortality” in the religious argument, and would not be -interested to be told that the poet is being disturbed by a melancholy -contradiction between his own happy childhood, idealistic boyhood and -disappointed age. But if he were to go into the psychological question -and become doubtful whether as a matter of fact, children have not as -many recollections of Hell as of Heaven, whether indeed the grown mind -does not purposely forget early misery and see childhood in a deceptive -haze of romance; and if he therefore suspected Wordsworth of reasoning -from a wrong premise he would have serious doubts as to whether it was a -good poem after all. At which conclusion even the most pagan and -revolutionary of modern bards would raise a furious protest; if the poem -holds together, if the poet has said what he means honestly, -convincingly and with passion—as Wordsworth did—the glory and the -beauty of the dream are permanently fixed beyond reach of the scientific -lecturer’s pointer.</p> - -<h2><a name="XV" id="XV"></a>XV<br /><br /> -<i>VERS LIBRE</i></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE limitation of <i>Vers Libre</i>, which I regard as only our old friend, -Prose Poetry, broken up in convenient lengths, seems to be that the poet -has not the continual hold over his reader’s attention that a regulated -(this does not mean altogether “regular”) scheme of verse properly used<a name="page_046" id="page_046"></a> -would give him. The temporary loss of control must be set off against -the freedom which <i>vers libre</i>-ists claim from irrelevant or stereotyped -images suggested by the necessity of rhyme or a difficult metre.</p> - -<p>This is not to say that a poet shouldn’t start his race from what -appears to hardened traditionalists as about ten yards behind scratch; -indeed, if he feels that this is the natural place for him, he would be -unwise to do otherwise. But my contention is that <i>vers libre</i> has a -serious limitation which regulated verse has not. In <i>vers libre</i> there -is no natural indication as to how the lines are to be stressed. There -are thousands of lines of Walt Whitman’s, over the pointing of which, -and the intended cadence, elocutionists would disagree; and this seems -to be leaving too much to chance.</p> - -<p>I met in a modern <i>vers libre</i> poem the line spoken by a fallen angel, -“I am outcast of Paradise”; but how was I to say it? What clue had I to -the intended rhythm, in a poem without any guiding signs? In regulated -verse the reader is compelled to accentuate as the poet determines. Here -is the same line introduced into three nonsensical examples of -rhyming:—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Satan to the garden came<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And found his Lordship walking lame,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">“Give me manna, figs and spice,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I am outcast of Paradise.”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">or quite differently:—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“Beryls and porphyries,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Pomegranate juice!<a name="page_047" id="page_047"></a><br /></span> -<span class="i0">I am outcast of Paradise<br /></span> -<span class="i2">(What was the use?)<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">or one can even make the reader accept a third alternative, impressively -dragging at the last important word:—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">He came to his Lordship then<br /></span> -<span class="i2">For manna, figs and spice,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">“I am chief of the Fallen Ten,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">I am outcast of Paradise.”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">The regulating poet must of course make sure at the beginning of the -poem that there is no possible wrong turning for the reader to take. -Recently, and since writing the above, an elder poet, who asks to remain -anonymous, has given me an amusing account of how he mis-read -Swinburne’s “Hertha,” the opening lines of which are:—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">I am that which began;<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Out of me the years roll;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Out of me, God and man;<br /></span> -<span class="i2">I am equal and whole;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily. I am the soul.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">My informant read the short lines as having four beats each:—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">I´ am thát || whích begán;<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Oút of mé || the yeárs róll;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Oút of mé || Gód and mán;<br /></span> -<span class="i2">I´ am équal || ánd whóle<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p><a name="page_048" id="page_048"></a></p> - -<p class="nind">and thought this very noble and imposing, though the “équal ánd whóle” -was perhaps a trifle forced. The next stanza told him that something was -amiss and he discovered that it was only a two-beat line after all. “It -was Swinburne’s impudence in putting the Almighty’s name in an -unaccented place of the line, and accenting the name of Man, that put me -on the wrong track,” he said. Swinburne’s fault here, for such as agree -with the accusation, was surely in his wrong sense of material; he was -making muslin do the work of camel’s hair cloth. He was imposing a metre -on his emotions, whereas the emotions should determine the metre—and -even then constantly modify it. Apropos of the <i>vers libre</i>-ists, my -friend also denied that there was such a thing as <i>vers libre</i> possible, -arguing beyond refutation that if it was <i>vers</i> it couldn’t be truly -<i>libre</i> and if it was truly <i>libre</i> it couldn’t possibly come under the -category of <i>vers</i>.</p> - -<p>Perhaps the most damaging criticism (if true) of the <i>vers libre</i> school -of today is that the standard which most of its professors set -themselves is not a very high one; with rhythmic freedom so dearly -bought, one expects a more intricate system of interlacing implications -than in closer bound poetry. Natural rhythms need no hunting; there is -some sort of rhythm in every phrase you write, if you break it up small -enough and make sufficient allowances for metric resolutions. There is -often a queer, wayward broken-kneed rhythm running through whole -sentences of standard prose. The following news item has not<a name="page_049" id="page_049"></a> had a word -changed since I found it in <i>The Daily Mirror</i>.</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Jóhn Fráin<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of Bállyghaderéen<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Was indícted at Roscómmon for the múrder of his fáther;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He báttered his fáther, an óld man, to deáth with a poúnder;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The júry foúnd him unáble to pléad<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And hé was commítted<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Tó an as´ylum.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">One doesn’t “listen” when reading prose, but in poetry or anything -offered under that heading a submerged metre is definitely expected. -Very few readers of Mr. Kipling’s “Old Man Kangaroo” which is printed as -prose, realize that it is written in strict verse all through and that -he is, as it were, pulling a long nose at us. The canny <i>vers librist</i> -gets help from his printer to call your attention to what he calls -“cadence” and “rhythmic relations” (not easy to follow) which might have -escaped you if printed as prose; <i>this</i> sentence, you’ll find, has its -thumb to its nose.<a name="page_050" id="page_050"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="XVI" id="XVI"></a>XVI<br /><br /> -MOVING MOUNTAINS</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">P</span>ERHAPS some people who buy this book will be disappointed at not being -told the correct way of writing triolets and rondeaux. Theirs is the -same practical type of mind that longs to join a Correspondence School -of Art and learn the formulas for drawing a washer-woman or trousers or -the stock caricature of Mr. Winston Churchill.</p> - -<p>But poetry is not a science, it is an act of faith; mountains are often -moved by it in the most unexpected directions against all the rules laid -down by professors of dynamics—only for short distances, I admit; -still, definitely moved. The only possible test for the legitimacy of -this or that method of poetry is the practical one, the question, “Did -the mountain stir?”</p> - -<h2><a name="XVII" id="XVII"></a>XVII<br /><br /> -LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE psalmist explains an outburst of sorrowful poetry as due to a long -suppression of the causes of his grief. He says, “I kept silent, yea, -even from good words. My heart was hot within me and while I was thus -musing,<a name="page_051" id="page_051"></a> the fire kindled, and at the last I spake with my tongue.” So -it was I believe with Keats in the composition of this compellingly -sorrowful ballad. Sir S. Colvin’s “Life of Keats” gives the setting well -enough. We do not know exactly what kindled the fire but I am inclined -to think with Sir S. Colvin, that Keats had been reading a translation -ascribed to Chaucer from Alan Chartier’s French poem of the same title. -The poet says:—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“I came unto a lustie greene vallay<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Full of floures ...<br /></span> -<span class="i5">... riding an easy paas<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I fell in thought of joy full desperate<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With great disease and paine, so that I was<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of all lovers the most unfortunate ...”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>Death has separated him from the mistress he loved.... We know that -Keats’ heart had been hot within for a long while, and the suppressed -emotional conflict that made him keep silent and muse is all too plain. -He has a growing passion for the “beautiful and elegant, graceful, -silly, fashionable and strange ... MINX” Fanny Brawne; she it was who -had doubtless been looking on him “as she did love” and “sighing full -sore,” and this passion comes into conflict with the apprehension, not -yet a certainty, of his own destined death from consumption, so that the -Merciless Lady, to put it baldly, represents both the woman he loved and -the death he feared, the woman whom he wanted to glorify by his<a name="page_052" id="page_052"></a> poetry -and the death that would cut his poetry short. Of shutting “her wild, -wild eyes with kisses four” which makes the almost intolerable climax to -the ballad, he writes in a journal-letter to his brother George in -America, with a triviality and a light-heartedness that can carry no -possible conviction. He is concealing the serious conditions of body and -of heart which have combined to bring a “loitering indolence” on his -writing, now his livelihood; he does not want George to read between the -lines; at the same time it is a relief even to copy out the poem. George -knows little of Fanny beyond the purposely unprepossessing portraits of -her that John himself has given, but the memory of their beloved brother -Tom’s death from consumption is fresh in the minds of both. George had -sailed to America not realizing how ill Tom had been, John had come back -tired out from Scotland, to find him dying; he had seen the lily on -Tom’s brow, the hectic rose on his cheek, his starved lips in horrid -warning gaping, and, as the final horrible duty, had shut his brother’s -wild staring eyes with coins, not kisses. Now Fanny’s mocking smile and -sidelong glance play hide and seek in his mind with Tom’s dreadful -death-mask. It was about this time that Keats met Coleridge walking by -Highgate Ponds and it is recorded that Keats, wishing with a sudden -sense of the mortality of poets, to “carry away the memory” of meeting -Coleridge, asked to press his hand. When Keats had gone, Coleridge, -turned to his friend Green and said, “There is death<a name="page_053" id="page_053"></a> in that hand.” He -described it afterwards as “a heat and a dampness”—but “fever-dew” is -Keats’ own word.</p> - -<p>There are many other lesser reminiscences and influences in the poem, on -which we might speculate—Spenser’s “Faery Queen,” the ballad of Thomas -the Rhymer, Malory’s “Lady of the Lake,” Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” with -its singing maiden and the poet’s honey-dew, traceable in Keats’ “honey -wild and manna dew,” an echo from Browne “Let no bird sing,” and from -Wordsworth “her eyes are wild”; but these are relatively unimportant.</p> - -<p>History and Psychology are interdependent sciences and yet the field of -historical literary research is almost overcrowded with surveyors, while -the actual psychology of creative art is country still pictured in our -text-books as Terra Incognita, the rumoured abode of Phoenix and -Manticor. The spirit of adventure made me feel myself a regular Sir John -Mandeville when I began even comparing Keats’ two descriptions of Fanny -as he first knew her with the lady of the poem, noting the “tolerable” -foot, the agreeable hair, the elfin grace and elvish manners, in -transformation: wondering, did the Knight-at-arms set her on his steed -and walk beside so as to see her commended profile at best advantage? -When she turned towards him to sing, did the natural thinness and -paleness which Keats noted in Fanny’s full-face, form the -association-link between his thoughts of love and death? What was the -real reason of the “kisses<a name="page_054" id="page_054"></a> four”? was it not perhaps four because of -the painful doubleness of the tragic vision—was it extravagant to -suppose that two of the kisses were more properly pennies laid on the -eyes of death?</p> - -<p>The peculiar value of the ballad for speculation on the birth of poetry -is that the version that we know best, the one incorporated in the -journal-letter to America, bears every sign of being a very early draft. -When Keats altered it later, it is noteworthy that he changed the -“kisses four” stanza to the infinitely less poignant:—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">... there she gazed and sighèd deep,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And here I shut her wild sad eyes—<br /></span> -<span class="i2">So kissed asleep.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>Sir S. Colvin suggests that the kisses four were “too quaint”: Keats may -have told himself that this was the reason for omitting them, but it is -more likely that without realizing it he is trying to limit the painful -doubleness: the change of “wild wild eyes” which I understand as meaning -“wild” in two senses, elf-wild and horror-wild, to “wild sad eyes” would -have the same effect.</p> - -<p>In writing all this I am sorry if I have offended those who, so to -speak, prefer in their blindness to bow down to wood and stone, who -shrink from having the particular variety of their religious experience -analyzed for them. This section is addressed to those braver minds who -can read “The Golden Bough” from cover to cover and still faithfully, -with no<a name="page_055" id="page_055"></a> dawning contempt, do reverence to the gods of their youth.</p> - -<h2><a name="XVIII" id="XVIII"></a>XVIII<br /><br /> -THE GENERAL ELLIOTT</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span>T is impossible to be sure of one’s ground when theorizing solely from -the work of others, and for commenting on the half-comedy of my own, -“The General Elliott,” I have the excuse of a letter printed below. It -was sent me by an American colonel whose address I do not know, and if -he comes across these paragraphs I hope he will understand that I -intended no rudeness in not answering his enquiries.</p> - -<p>This is the poem:—</p> - -<p class="c">THE GENERAL ELLIOTT</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">He fell in victory’s fierce pursuit,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Holed through and through with shot,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A sabre sweep had hacked him deep<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Twixt neck and shoulderknot ...<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">The potman cannot well recall,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">The ostler never knew,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Whether his day was Malplaquet,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">The Boyne or Waterloo.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">But there he hangs for tavern sign,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">With foolish bold regard<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For cock and hen and loitering men<br /></span> -<span class="i2">And wagons down the yard.<a name="page_056" id="page_056"></a><br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Raised high above the hayseed world<br /></span> -<span class="i2">He smokes his painted pipe,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And now surveys the orchard ways,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">The damsons clustering ripe.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">He sees the churchyard slabs beyond,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Where country neighbours lie,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Their brief renown set lowly down;<br /></span> -<span class="i2"><i>His</i> name assaults the sky.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">He grips the tankard of brown ale<br /></span> -<span class="i2">That spills a generous foam:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Oft-times he drinks, they say, and winks<br /></span> -<span class="i2">At drunk men lurching home.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">No upstart hero may usurp<br /></span> -<span class="i2">That honoured swinging seat;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">His seasons pass with pipe and glass<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Until the tale’s complete.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">And paint shall keep his buttons bright<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Though all the world’s forgot<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Whether he died for England’s pride<br /></span> -<span class="i2">By battle, or by pot.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>And this is the letter:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="r"> -“April, 1921.<br /> -</p> - -<p class="nind"> -“<i>My dear Mr. Graves</i>,—<br /> -</p> - -<p>“Friday, I had the pleasure of reading your lines to “The General -Elliott” in <i>The Spectator</i>. Yesterday afternoon, about sunset, on -returning across fields to Oxford from a visit to Boar’s Hill, to -my delight and surprise I found myself suddenly confronted with the -General Elliott himself, or rather<a name="page_057" id="page_057"></a> the duplicate presentment of -him—nailed to a tree. But could it be the same, I asked. He did -not grip the tankard of brown ale that spills a generous foam—nor -did his seasons seem to pass with pipe and glass—and alas, nor did -paint keep his tarnished buttons bright. In spite of your -assertion, is the general’s tale not already complete? Was he not -(like me) but a “temporory officer”? Or have I perhaps seen a -spurious General Elliott? He <i>should</i> not die; the post from which -he views the world is all too lonely for his eyes to be permitted -to close upon that scene, albeit the churchyard slabs do not come -within the range.... May <i>I</i> help to restore him?</p> - -<p class="r"> -<span style="margin-right: 4em;">“Sincerely,</span><br /> -“J—— B——<br /> -“Lt. Col. U. S. A.”<br /> -</p></div> - -<p>To which letter I would reply, if I had his address:—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="nind"> -<i>My dear Colonel B</i>——<br /> -</p> - -<p>... The poet very seldom writes about what he is observing at the -moment. Usually a poem that has been for a long while maturing -unsuspected in the unconscious mind, is brought to birth by an -outside shock, often quite a trivial one, but one which—as -midwives would say—leaves a distinct and peculiar birthmark on the -child.</p> - -<p>The inn which you saw at Hinksey is the only<a name="page_058" id="page_058"></a> “General Elliott” I -know, but I do not remember ever noticing a picture of him. I -remember only a board</p> - -<div class="bboxxx"> -<p class="c">THE GENERAL ELLIOTT.<br /> -MORRELL’S ALES AND STOUT.</p> -</div> - -<p class="nind">and have never even had a drink there; but once I asked a man -working in the garden who this General Elliott was, and he answered -that really he didn’t know; he reckoned he was a fine soldier and -killed somewhere long ago in a big battle. As a matter of fact, I -find now that Elliott was the great defender of Gibraltar from 1779 -to 1783, who survived to become Lord Heathfield; but that doesn’t -affect the poem. Some months after this conversation I passed the -sign board again and suddenly a whole lot of floating material -crystallized in my mind and the following verse came into my -head—more or less as I quote it:—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“Was it Schellenberg, General Elliott,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Or Minden or Waterloo<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Where the bullet struck your shoulderknot,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">And the sabre shore your arm,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And the bayonet ran you through?”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>On which lines a poem resulted which seemed unsatisfactory, even -after five drafts. I rewrote in a different style a few days later -and after several more drafts the poem stood as it now stands. -There appear<a name="page_059" id="page_059"></a> to be more than one set of conflicting emotions -reconciled in this poem. In the false start referred to, the 1. A. -idea was not properly balanced by 1. B. and 1. C., which -necessitated reconstruction of the whole scheme; tinkering wouldn’t -answer. I analyze the final version as follows:—</p> - -<table border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="2" summary="" - class="lefttbl"> - -<tr><td rowspan="3" valign="middle">1.</td> - -<td valign="top">A.</td><td> Admiration for a real old-fashioned General beloved by his whole -division, killed in France (1915) while trying to make a broken -regiment return to the attack. He was directing operations from the -front line, an unusual place for a divisional commander in modern -warfare.</td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top">B.</td><td> Disgust for the incompetence and folly of several other generals -under whom I served; their ambition and jealousy, their -recklessness of the lives of others.</td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top">C.</td><td> Affection, poised between scorn and admiration, for an -extraordinary thick-headed, kind-hearted militia Colonel, who was -fond enough of the bottle, and in private life a big farmer. He was -very ignorant of military matters but somehow got through his job -surprisingly well.</td></tr> - -<tr><td rowspan="2" valign="top">2.</td> - -<td valign="top">A.</td><td> My hope of settling down to a real country life in the sort of -surroundings that the two Hinkseys afford, sick of nearly five -years soldiering. It occurred to me that the inn must have been -founded by an old soldier who felt much as I did then. Possibly -General Elliott himself, when he was dying, had longed to be back -in these very parts with his pipe and glass and a view of the -orchard. It would have been a kind thought to paint a signboard of -him so, like one I saw once (was it in Somerset or Dorset?)—“The -Jolly Drinker” and not like the usual grim, military scowl of -“General Wellington’s” and “General Wolfe’s.”</td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top">B.</td><td> I ought to have known who Elliott was because, I used once to -pride myself as an authority on military history. The names of -Schellenberg, Minden, Malplaquet, The Boyne (though only the two -middle battles appear on the colours as battle honours) are -imperishable glories for the Royal Welch Fusilier. And the finest -Colonel this regiment ever had, Ellis, was killed at Waterloo; he -had apparently on his own initiative moved his battalion from the -reserves into a gap in the first line.</td></tr> - -<tr><td rowspan="2" valign="top">3.</td> - -<td valign="top">A.</td><td> My own faith in the excellent qualities of our national -beverage.</td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top">B.</td><td> A warning inscription on a tomb at Winchester over a private -soldier who died of drink. But his comrades had added a -couplet—“An honest soldier ne’er shall be forgot, Whether he died -by musket or by pot.”</td></tr> -</table> - -<p>There are all sorts of other sentiments mixed up, which still elude me, -but this seems enough for an answer....</p> - -<p class="c"> -Yours sincerely,<br /> -</p> - -<p class="r"> -R. G.—(late Captain R. W. F.)</p></div> - -<p>Poe’s account of the series of cold-blooded deliberations that evolved -“The Raven” is sometimes explained as an attempt in the spirit of “Ask -me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies,” to hoodwink a too curious -Public. A juster suggestion would be that Poe was quite honest in his -record, but that the painful nature of the emotions which combined to -produce the poem prompted him afterwards to unintentional dishonesty in -telling the story. In my account of “The General Elliott” there may be -similar examples of false rationalization long after the event, but that -is for others to discover: and even so, I am not disqualified from -suggesting that the bird of ill omen, perching at night on the head of -Wisdom among the books of a library, is symbolism too particularly -applicable to Poe’s own disconsolate morbid condition to satisfy us as -having been deducted by impersonal logic.</p> - -<p>It is likely enough that Poe worked very hard at later drafts of the -poem and afterwards remembered his deliberate conscious universalizing -of an essentially personal symbolism: but that is a very different<a name="page_062" id="page_062"></a> -matter from pretending that he approached “The Raven” from the first -with the same cold reasoning care that constructed, for instance, his -Gold-Bug cipher.</p> - -<h2><a name="XIX" id="XIX"></a>XIX<br /><br /> -THE GOD CALLED POETRY</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">A</span> PIECE with this title which appeared in my “Country Sentiment” was the -first impulse to more than one of the main contentions in this book, and -at the same time supplies perhaps the clearest example I can give of the -thought-machinery that with greater luck and cunning may produce -something like Poetry. I wrote it without being able to explain exactly -what it was all about, but I had a vision in my mind of the God of -Poetry having two heads like Janus, one savage, scowling and horrible, -the face of Blackbeard the Pirate, the other mild and gracious, that of -John the Evangelist. Without realizing the full implication of the -symbolism, I wrote:-</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Then speaking from his double head<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The glorious fearful monster said,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">“I am <i>Yes</i> and I am <i>No</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Black as pitch and white as snow;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Love me, hate me, reconcile<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Hate with love, perfect with vile,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So equal justice shall be done<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And life shared between moon and sun.<a name="page_063" id="page_063"></a><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Nature for you shall curse or smile;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A poet you shall be, my son.”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">The poem so far as I can remember was set going by the sight of ... a -guard of honour drilling on the barrack-square of a camp near Liverpool! -I was standing at the door of the Courts-Martial room where I was -shortly to attend at the trial of a deserter (under the Military Service -Act) who had unsuccessfully pleaded conscientious objection before a -tribunal and had been in hiding for some weeks before being arrested. -Now, I had been long pondering about certain paradoxical aspects of -Poetry and, particularly, contrasting the roaring genius of Christopher -Marlowe with that of his gentle contemporary Shakespeare; so, standing -there watching the ceremonial drill, I fancifully made the officer in -command of the guard, a young terror from Sandhurst, into a Marlowe -strutting, ranting, shouting and cursing—but making the men <i>move</i>; -then I imagined Shakespeare in his place. Shakespeare would never have -done to command a guard of honour, and they would have hated him at -Camberley or Chelsea. He would have been like a brother-officer who was -with me a few weeks before in this extremely “regimental” camp; he hated -all the “sergeant-major business” and used sometimes on this barrack -square to be laughing so much at the absurd pomposity of the drill as -hardly to be able to control his word of command. I had more than once -seen him going out, beltless, but with a pipe<a name="page_064" id="page_064"></a> and a dog, for a pleasant -walk in the country when he should really have been on parade. In -France, however, this officer was astonishing: the men would do anything -for him and his fighting feats had already earned him the name of <i>Mad -Jack</i> in a shock-division where military fame was as fugitive as life. -This brother-officer, it is to be noted, was a poet, and had a violent -feeling against the Military Service Act. I wondered how he would behave -if he were in my place, sitting on the Court-Martial; or how would -Shakespeare? Marlowe, of course, would thunder “two years” at the -accused with enormous relish, investing the cause of militarism with a -magnificent poetry. But Shakespeare, or “Mad Jack”?</p> - -<p>That night in the quarters which I had once shared with “Mad Jack,” I -began writing:—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i1"><i>“I begin to know at last,</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>These nights when I sit down to rhyme,</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>The form and measure of that vast</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>God we call Poetry....</i><br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0"><i> ... I see he has two heads</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>Like Janus, calm, benignant this,</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>That grim and scowling. His beard spreads</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>From chin to chin; this God has power</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>Immeasurable at every hour....</i><br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0"><i>The black beard scowls and says to me</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>“Human frailty though you be</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>Yet shout and crack your whip, be harsh;</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>They’ll obey you in the end,</i><a name="page_065" id="page_065"></a><br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>Hill and field, river and marsh</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>Shall obey you, hop and skip</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>At the terrour of your whip,</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>To your gales of anger bend.</i><br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0"><i>The pale beard smiles and says in turn</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>“True, a prize goes to the stern</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>But sing and laugh and easily run</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>Through the wide airs of my plain;</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>Bathe in my waters, drink my sun,</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>And draw my creatures with soft song;</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>They shall follow you along</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>Graciously, with no doubt or pain.</i>”<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2"><i>Then speaking from his double head, etc.</i><br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">The rather scriptural setting of what the pale beard said was probably -suggested by the picture I had formed in my mind of the conscientious -objector, whom I somehow sympathetically expected to be an earnest -Christian, mild and honest; as a matter of fact, he turned out to be the -other kind, violent and shifty alternately. He was accordingly sentenced -by Major Tamburlaine and Captains Guise and Bajazeth, to the customary -term of imprisonment.</p> - -<p>And by the way, talking of Marlowe and Shakespeare;—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Here ranted Isaac’s elder son,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The proud shag-breasted godless one<br /></span> -<span class="i0">From whom observant Smooth-cheek stole<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Birth-right, blessing, hunter’s soul.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p><a name="page_066" id="page_066"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="XX" id="XX"></a>XX<br /><br /> -LOGICALIZATION</h2> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">John King is dead, that good old man<br /></span> -<span class="i2">You ne’er shall see him more.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He used to wear a long brown coat<br /></span> -<span class="i2">All buttoned down before.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">Apparently a simple statement, this rustic epitaph has for any sensitive -reader a curiously wistful quality and the easiest way I can show the -mixed feelings it stirs, is by supposing a typical eighteenth-century -writer to have logicalized them into a polite epigram. The poem would -appear mutilated as follows:—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Hereunder lies old John Brown’s honoured dust:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">His worthy soul has flown to Heav’n we trust.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Yet still we mourn his vanished russet smock<br /></span> -<span class="i0">While frowning fates our trifling mem’ries mock.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">Many of the subtler implications are necessarily lost in the formal -translation for in poetry the more standardized the machinery of logical -expression, the less emotional power is accumulated. But the force of -the words “he used to wear” is shown in more obvious opposition to the -words “dead” and “good.” The importance of “good” will appear at once if -we substitute some word like “ancient” for “good old” and see the -collapse of the poetic fabric, still more if we change “good” to “bad” -and watch the effect it has<a name="page_067" id="page_067"></a> in our imaginations on the “you ne’er shall -see him more,” the cut of his coat, and the reasons John King had for -buttoning it. <i>Good</i> John King wore a long brown coat because he was old -and felt the cold and because, being a neat old man, he wished to -conceal his ragged jacket and patched small-clothes. <i>Bad</i> John King -kept pheasants, hares, salmon and silver spoons buttoned for concealment -under his. How did good John King die? A Christian death in bed -surrounded by weeping neighbours, each begging a coat-button for -keepsake. Bad John King? Waylaid and murdered one dark night by an -avenger, and buried where he fell, still buttoned in his long brown -coat.</p> - -<p>The emotional conflict enters curiously into such one-strand songs as -Blake’s “Infant Joy” from the <i>Songs of Innocence</i>, a poem over which -for the grown reader the sharp sword of Experience dangles from a single -horsehair. The formal version (which I beg nobody to attempt even in -fun) logicalized in creaking sonnet-form would have the octave filled -with an address to the Melancholy of Sophistication, the sestet reserved -for:—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">But thou, Blest Infant, smiling radiantly<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Hast taught me etc, etc.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>An immoral but far more entertaining parlour game than -logicalization—perhaps even a profitable trade—would be to extract the -essentials from some long-winded but sincere Augustan poem, disguise<a name="page_068" id="page_068"></a> -the self-conscious antitheses, modernize the diction, liven up the -rhythm, fake a personal twist, and publish. Would there be no pundit -found to give it credit as a poem of passion and originality? I hope -this suggestion for a New-Lamps-for-Old Industry will not meet the eye -of those advanced but ill-advised English Masters who are now beginning -to supervise with their red-and-blue pencils the writing of English -Poetry in our schools.</p> - -<p>Now, the trouble about the use of logic in poetry seems not to be that -logic isn’t a very useful and (rightly viewed) a very beautiful -invention, but that it finds little place in our dreams: dreams are -illogical as a child’s mind is illogical, and spontaneous undoctored -poetry, like the dream, represents the complications of adult experience -translated into thought-processes analogous to, or identical with, those -of childhood.</p> - -<p>This I regard as a very important view, and it explains, to my -satisfaction at any rate, a number of puzzling aspects of poetry, such -as the greater emotional power on the average reader’s mind of simple -metres and short homely words with an occasional long strange one for -wonder; also, the difficulty of introducing a foreign or unusual prosody -into poems of intense passion: also the very much wider use in poetry -than in daily speech of animal, bird, cloud and flower imagery, of -Biblical types characters and emblems, of fairies and devils, of -legendary heroes and heroines, which are the stock-in-trade of -imaginative<a name="page_069" id="page_069"></a> childhood; also, the constant appeal poetry makes to the -childish habits of amazed wondering, sudden terrors, laughter to signify -mere joy, frequent tears and similar manifestations of uncontrolled -emotion which in a grown man and especially an Englishman are considered -ridiculous; following this last, the reason appears for the strict -Classicist’s dislike of the ungoverned Romantic, the dislike being -apparently founded on a feeling that to wake this child-spirit in the -mind of a grown person is stupid and even disgusting, an objection that -has similarly been raised to the indiscriminate practice of -psycho-analysis, which involves the same process.</p> - -<h2><a name="XXI" id="XXI"></a>XXI<br /><br /> -LIMITATIONS</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">O</span>NE of the most embarrassing limitations of poetry is that the language -you use is not your own to do entirely what you like with. Times -actually come when in the conscious stage of composition you have to -consult a dictionary or another writer as to what word you are going to -use. It is no longer practical to coin words, resurrect obsolete ones -and generally to tease the language as the Elizabethans did. A great -living English poet, Mr. Charles Doughty, is apparently a disquieting -instance to the contrary. But he has lost his way in the centuries; he -belongs really to<a name="page_070" id="page_070"></a> the sixteenth. English has never recovered its -happy-go-lucky civilian slouch since the more than Prussian stiffening -it was given by the eighteenth century drill-sergeants.</p> - -<p>It is intolerable to feel so bound compared with the freedom of a -musician or a sculptor; in spite of the exactions of that side of the -art, the poet cannot escape into mere rhythmic sound; there is always -the dead load of sense to drag about with him. I have often felt I would -like to be a painter at work on a still life, puzzling out ingenious -relationships between a group of objects varying in form, texture and -colour. Then when people came up and asked me: “Tell me, sir, is that a -Spode jar?” or “Isn’t that a very unusual variety of lily?” I would be -able to wave them away placidly; the questions would be irrelevant. But -I can’t do that in poetry, everything <i>is</i> relevant; it is an omnibus of -an art—a public omnibus.</p> - -<p>There are consolations, of course; poetry, to be appreciated, is not, -like music, dependent on a middleman, the interpretative artist; nor, -once in print, is it so liable to damage from accident, deterioration or -the reproducer as the plastic arts.<a name="page_071" id="page_071"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="XXII" id="XXII"></a>XXII<br /><br /> -THE NAUGHTY BOY</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">B</span>OUND up with the business of controlling the association-ghosts which -haunt in their millions every word of the English language, there is the -great mesmeric art of giving mere fancy an illusion of solid substance. -The chief way this is done, and nobody has ever done it better than -Keats, is constantly to make appeals to each of the different bodily -senses, especially those more elementary ones of taste, touch, smell, -until they have unconsciously built up a scene which is as real as -anything can be. As an example of the way Keats rung the changes on the -senses, take his “Song about Myself”:—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">There was a naughty Boy<br /></span> -<span class="i2">And a naughty boy was he<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He ran away to Scotland<br /></span> -<span class="i2">The people for to see<br /></span> -<span class="i3">Then he found<br /></span> -<span class="i3">That the ground<br /></span> -<span class="i3">Was as hard,<br /></span> -<span class="i3">That a yard<br /></span> -<span class="i3">Was as long,<br /></span> -<span class="i3">That a song<br /></span> -<span class="i3">Was as merry,<br /></span> -<span class="i3">That a cherry<br /></span> -<span class="i3">Was as red—<a name="page_072" id="page_072"></a><br /></span> -<span class="i3">That lead<br /></span> -<span class="i3">Was as weighty,<br /></span> -<span class="i3">That fourscore<br /></span> -<span class="i3">Was as eighty,<br /></span> -<span class="i3">That a door<br /></span> -<span class="i3">Was as wooden<br /></span> -<span class="i3">As in England—<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">So he stood in his shoes<br /></span> -<span class="i2">And he wonder’d,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">He wonder’d,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He stood in his shoes<br /></span> -<span class="i2">And he wonder’d.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>Here we have a succession of staccato notes, but in the “Eve of St. -Agnes” or “Ode to Autumn” almost every phrase is a chord, the individual -notes of which each strike a separate sense.</p> - -<h2><a name="XXIII" id="XXIII"></a>XXIII<br /><br /> -THE CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC IDEAS</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">W</span>HEN Aristotle lays down that poets describe the thing that might be, -but that the historian (like the natural historians above mentioned) -merely describes that which has been, and that poetry is something of -“more philosophic, graver import than history because its statements are -of a universal nature” so far his idea of poetry tallies with our own. -But when he explains his “might be” as meaning the “probable and -necessary” according<a name="page_073" id="page_073"></a> to our every-day experience of life, then we feel -the difference between the Classical and Romantic conceptions of the -art—Aristotle was trying to weed poetry of all the symbolic -extravagances and impossibilities of the dream state in which it seems -to have originated, and to confine it within rational and educative -limits. Poetry was with him only an intuitive imitation of how typical -men think and react upon each other when variously stimulated. It was -what we might call the straight goods of thought conveyed in the -traditional magic hampers; but there proved to be difficulties in the -packing; the Classical ideal was, in practice, modified by the use of -heroic diction and action, conventional indications to the audience that -“imitation” was not realism, and that there must be no criticisms on -that score; every one must “go under” to the hypnotic suggestion of the -buskin and the archaic unnatural speech, and for once think ideally. For -the same reason the Classical doctrine lays stress on the importance of -the set verse-forms and the traditional construction of drama. For the -benefit of my scientific readers, if my literary friends promise not to -listen to what I am saying, I will attempt a definition of Classical and -Romantic notions of Poetry:—</p> - -<p>Classical is characteristic and Romantic is Metamorphic, that is, though -they are both expressions of a mental conflict, in Classical poetry this -conflict is expressed within the confines of waking probability and -logic, in terms of the typical interaction of typical<a name="page_074" id="page_074"></a> minds; in -Romantic poetry the conflict is expressed in the illogical but vivid -method of dream-changings.</p> - -<p>The dream origin of Romantic Poetry gives it the advantage of putting -the audience in a state of mind ready to accept it; in a word, it has a -naturally hypnotic effect. Characteristic poetry, which is social rather -than personal, and proudly divorced from the hit-and-miss methods of the -dream, yet feels the need of this easy suggestion to the audience for -ideal thinking; and finds it necessary to avoid realism by borrowing -shreds of accredited metamorphic diction and legend and building with -them an illusion of real metamorphism. So the Hermit Crab, and once it -has taken up a cast-off shell to cover its nakedness, it becomes a very -terror among the whelks. The borrowed Metamorphism is hardened to a -convention and a traditional form, and can be trusted almost inevitably -to induce the receptive state in an average audience wherever used. Such -a convention as I mean is the May-day dream of the Mediaeval rhymed -moralities or the talking beasts of the fabulists.</p> - -<p>Sometimes, however, owing to a sudden adventurous spirit appearing in -the land, a nation’s Classical tradition is broken by popular ridicule -and the reappearance of young Metamorphic Poets. But after a little -paper-bloodshed and wranglings in the coffee-houses, the Classical -tradition reappears, dressed up in the cast-off finery of the pioneer -Metamorphics<a name="page_075" id="page_075"></a> (who have by this time been succeeded by licentious and -worthless pyrotechnists), and rules securely again. It is only fair to -observe that the Romantic Revivalist often borrows largely from some -Classical writer so obscured by Time and corrupt texts as to seem a -comparative Romantic. This complicated dog-eat-dog process is cheerfully -called “The Tradition of English Poetry.”</p> - -<p>There is an interesting line of investigation which I have no space to -pursue far, in a comparison between the Classicism of Wit and the -Romanticism of Humour.</p> - -<p>Wit depends on a study of the characteristic reactions of typical men to -typically incongruous circumstances, and changed little from -Theophrastus to Joe Miller. It depends for its effect very largely on -the set form and careful diction, e. g:—</p> - -<p>A certain inn-keeper of Euboea, with gout in his fingers, returned to -his city after sacrificing an Ox to Delphic Apollo.... The celebrated -wit, Sidney Smith, one day encountered Foote the comedian, in the -Mall.... An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotchman agreed on a wager of -one hundred guineas....</p> - -<p>That is Classicism.</p> - -<p>Romantic humour is marked by the extravagant improbability of -dream-vision and by the same stereoscopic expression as in Romantic -poetry.</p> - -<p>Would Theophrastus have deigned to laugh at the <i>fabliau</i> of “The Great -Panjandrum himself with the<a name="page_076" id="page_076"></a> little round button at top?” I think not. -Our leading living Classical poet was recently set a Romantic riddle as -a test of his humour, “What did the tooth-paste say to the tooth brush?” -Answer: “Squeeze me and I’ll meet you outside the Tube.” The bard was -angry. “Who on earth squeezes his tube of tooth-paste with his tooth -brush? Your riddle does not hold water.” He could understand the fable -convention of inanimate objects talking, but this other was not “the -probable and necessary.”</p> - -<h2><a name="XXIV" id="XXIV"></a>XXIV<br /><br /> -COLOUR</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE naming of colours in poetry may be used as a typical instance of the -circumspection with which a poet is forced to move. The inexperienced -one drenches his poems in gold, silver, purple, scarlet, with the idea -of giving them, in fact, “colour.” The old hand almost never names a -colour unless definitely presenting the well-known childish delight for -bright colours, with the aid of some other indication of childhood, or -unless definitely to imply a notable change from the normal nature of -the coloured object, or at least some particular quality such as the -ripeness of the cherry in Keats’ song just quoted. But even then he -usually prefers to find a way round, for the appeal to the sense of -colour alone is a most insecure way of<a name="page_077" id="page_077"></a> creating an illusion; colours -vary in mood by so very slight a change in shade or tone that pure -colour named without qualification in a poem will seldom call up any -precise image or mood.</p> - -<p>To extemporize a couple of self-conscious blackboard examples:—</p> - -<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="2" summary=""> -<tr valign="top"><td align="left">I.</td><td align="left">“Then Mary came dressed in a robe that was green<br /> - And her white hands and neck were a sight to be seen.”</td></tr> -<tr valign="top"><td align="left">II.</td><td align="left">“Mary’s robe was rich pasture, her neck and her hands<br /> - Were glimpses of river that dazzled those lands.”</td></tr> -</table> - -<p>The first couplet has not nearly so much colour in it as the second, -although in the first the mantle is definitely called green and the -lady’s hands and neck, white, while in the second no colour is mentioned -at all. The first robe is as it were coloured in a cheap painting-book; -the green paint has only come off the cake in a thin yellowish solution -and the painting-book instructions for colouring the hands and neck were -“leave blank.” The second robe derives its far richer colour from the -texture that the pasture simile suggests; the flesh parts get their -whiteness from the suggestion of sun shining on water.<a name="page_078" id="page_078"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="XXV" id="XXV"></a>XXV<br /><br /> -PUTTY</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE conscious part of composition is like the finishing of roughly -shaped briars in a pipe factory. Where there are flaws in the wood, -putty has to be used in order to make the pipe presentable. Only an -expert eye can tell the putty when it has been coloured over, but there -it is, time will reveal it and nobody is more aware of its presence now -than the man who put it there. The public is often gulled into paying -two guineas for a well-coloured straight-grain, when a tiny patch of -putty under the bowl pulls down its sentimental value to ten shillings -or so.</p> - -<p>It is only fair to give an example of putty in a poem of my own; in -writing songs, where the pattern is more fixed than in any other form, -putty is almost inevitable. This song started sincerely and cheerfully -enough:—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Once there came a mighty furious wind<br /></span> -<span class="i2">(So old worthies tell).<br /></span> -<span class="i0">It blew the oaks like ninepins down,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And all the chimney stacks in town<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Down together fell.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That was a wind—to write a record on,<br /></span> -<span class="i5">to hang a story on,<br /></span> -<span class="i5">to sing a ballad on,<a name="page_079" id="page_079"></a><br /></span> -<span class="i2">To ring the loud church bell!<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But for one huge storm that cracks the sky<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Came a thousand lesser winds rustling by,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And the only wind that will make me sing<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Is breeze of summer or gust of spring<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But no more hurtful thing.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>This was leading up to a final verse:—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Once my sweetheart spoke an unkind word<br /></span> -<span class="i2">As I myself must tell,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For none but I have seen or heard<br /></span> -<span class="i0">My sweetheart to such cruelty stirred<br /></span> -<span class="i2">For one who loved her well.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That was a word—to write no record on,<br /></span> -<span class="i5">to hang no story on,<br /></span> -<span class="i5">to sing no ballad on,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">To ring no loud church bell!<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Yet for one fierce word that has made me smart<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Ten thousand gentle ones ease my heart,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So all the song that springs in me<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Is “Never a sweetheart born could be<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So kind as only she.”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">Half-way through this verse I was interrupted, and had to finish the -poem consciously as best I could. On picking it up again, apparently I -needed another middle verse of exactly the same sort of pattern as the -first, to prepare the reader for the third. Searching among natural -phenomena, I had already hit on drought as being a sufficiently -destructive plague to be long remembered by old worthies. This would -make the second verse.<a name="page_080" id="page_080"></a></p> - -<p>So without more ado I started:—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Once there came a mighty thirsty drought<br /></span> -<span class="i2">(So old worthies tell).<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The quags were drained, the brooks were dried,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Cattle and sheep and pigs all died,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">The parson preached on Hell.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That was a drought—to write a record on etc.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">So far I had concealed the poverty of my inspiration well enough, I -flattered myself, but here we were stuck, my self-conscious muse and I. -What was a pleasing diminutive of <i>drought</i>?—Pleasant sunshine? Not -quite; the thirstiness of nature doesn’t show in pleasant sunshine at -all. So, knowing all the time that I was doing wrong, I took my putty -knife and slapped the stuff on thick, then trimmed and smoothed over -carefully:—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">But for one long drought of world-wide note<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Come a thousand lesser ones on man’s throat,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And the only drought for my singing mood<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Is a thirst for the very best ale that’s brewed,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Soon quenched, but soon renewed.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">In manuscript, the putty didn’t show, somehow, but I am ashamed to say I -published the song. And in print, it seemed to show disgracefully. “It -was the best butter,” said the <i>March Hare</i>. “It was the best putty,” I -echoed, to excuse myself. But there is too much of it; the last half of -the last verse even, is not all sound wood. This poem has been on my -conscience for some time.<a name="page_081" id="page_081"></a></p> - -<p>If spontaneous poetry is like the Genie from Aladdin’s Lamp, this -conscious part of the art is like the assemblage of sheet, turnip-head, -lighted candle and rake to make the village ghost.</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">As I were a trapesin’<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To Fox and Grapes Inn<br /></span> -<span class="i2">To get I a bottle of ginger wine<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I saw summat<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In they old tummut<br /></span> -<span class="i2">And Lordie how his eyes did shine!<br /></span> - -<span class="i8"><i>Suffolk rhyme.</i><br /></span> -<span class="i8">(<i>Cetera desunt</i>)<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>The Genie is the most powerful magic of the two, and surest of its -effect, but the Turnip Ghost is usually enough to startle rustics who -wander at night, into prayer, sobriety, rapid movement or some other -unusual state.</p> - -<h2><a name="XXVI" id="XXVI"></a>XXVI<br /><br /> -READING ALOUD</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HOUGH it is a sound principle that the poet should write as if his work -were first of all intended to be repeated from mouth to mouth, -recitation or reading aloud actually distracts attention from the -subtler properties of a poem, which though addressed nominally to the -ear, the eye has to see in black and white before they can be -appreciated. A beautiful voice can make magic of utter nonsense;<a name="page_082" id="page_082"></a> I have -been taken in by this sort of thing too often. The eye is the most -sophisticated organ of sense and is therefore the one to which the poet -must make a final appeal in critical matters, but as limited an appeal -as possible when he is engaged in the art of illusion. The universal use -of printing has put too much work on the eye: which has learned to skip -and cut in self-defence. Ask any one who has read <small>CRIME AND PUNISHMENT</small> -the name of the hero. It is probable that he will remember the initial -letter, possible that he will be able to repeat the whole name more or -less recognizably, unlikely that he will be able to spell it correctly, -almost certain that he will not have troubled to find out the correct -pronunciation in Russian.</p> - -<h2><a name="XXVII" id="XXVII"></a>XXVII<br /><br /> -L’ARTE DELLA PITTURA</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">A</span> SCIENTIFIC treatise <i>could</i>, I suppose, be written on how to -manipulate vowels and consonants so as to hurry or slow down rhythm, and -suggest every different emotion by mere sound sequence but this is for -every poet to find out for himself and practise automatically as a -painter mixes his paints.</p> - -<p>There was once an old Italian portrait painter, who coming to the end of -his life, gathered his friends<a name="page_083" id="page_083"></a> and pupils together and revealed to them -a great discovery he had made, as follows:—</p> - -<p>“The art of portrait painting consists in putting the High Lights in -exactly the right place in the eyes.”</p> - -<p>When I come to my death-bed I have a similarly important message to -deliver:—</p> - -<p>“The art of poetry consists in knowing exactly how to manipulate the -letter S.”</p> - -<h2><a name="XXVIII" id="XXVIII"></a>XXVIII<br /><br /> -ON WRITING MUSICALLY</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span>N true poetry the mental bracing and relaxing on receipt of sensuous -impressions, which we may call the rhythm of emotions, conditions the -musical rhythm. This rhythm of emotions also determines the -sound-texture of vowels and consonants, so that Metre, as schoolboys -understand it when they are made to scan:—Friĕnds, Rōm|ans, -count|rymēn, lĕnd mē|your eārs!, has in spontaneous poetry only a -submerged existence. For the moment I will content myself by saying that -if all words in daily speech were spoken at the same rate, if all -stressed syllables and all unstressed syllables, similarly, were dwelt -on for exactly the same length of time, as many prosodists assume, -poetry would be a much easier art to practise; but it is the haste with -which we treat some parts of speech, the deliberation we give to others, -and<a name="page_084" id="page_084"></a> the wide difference in the weight of syllables composed of thin or -broad vowels and liquid or rasping consonants, that make it impossible -for the Anglo-French theory of only two standardized sound values, long -or short, to be reasonably maintained. A far more subtle notation must -be adopted, and if it must be shown on a black-board, poetry will appear -marked out not in “feet” but in convenient musical bars, with the -syllables resolved into quaver, dotted crotchet, semibreve and all the -rest of them. Metre in the classical sense of an orderly succession of -iambuses, trochees or whatnot, is forced to accept the part of policeman -in the Harlequinade, a mere sparring partner for Rhythm the Clown who -with his string of sausages is continually tripping him up and beating -him over the head, and Texture the Harlequin who steals his truncheon -and helmet. This preparatory explanation is necessary because if I were -to proclaim in public that “the poet must write musically” it would be -understood as an injunction to write like Thomas Moore, or his disciples -of today.</p> - -<h2><a name="XXIX" id="XXIX"></a>XXIX<br /><br /> -THE USE OF POETRY</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">A</span>T this stage the question of the use of poetry to its readers may be -considered briefly and without rhapsody. Poetry as the Greeks knew when -they adopted the Drama as a cleansing<a name="page_085" id="page_085"></a> rite of religion, is a form of -psycho-therapy. Being the transformation into dream symbolism of some -disturbing emotional crisis in the poet’s mind (whether dominated by -delight or pain) poetry has the power of homoeopathically healing other -men’s minds similarly troubled, by presenting them under the spell of -hypnosis with an allegorical solution of the trouble. Once the allegory -is recognized by the reader’s unconscious mind as applicable the -affective power of his own emotional crisis is diminished. Apparently on -a recognition of this aspect of poetry the Greeks founded their splendid -emblem of its power—the polished shield of Perseus that mirrored the -Gorgon’s head with no hurtful effect and allowed the hero to behead her -at his ease. A well chosen anthology is a complete dispensary of -medicine for the more common mental disorders, and may be used as much -for prevention as cure if we are to believe Mr. Housman’s argument in -“Terence, this is stupid stuff” no. LXII of his <i>Shropshire Lad</i>.</p> - -<p>The musical side of poetry is, properly understood, not merely a -hypnotic inducement to the reader to accept suggestions, but a form of -psycho-therapy in itself, which, working in conjunction with the -pictorial allegory, immensely strengthens its chance of success.<a name="page_086" id="page_086"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="XXX" id="XXX"></a>XXX<br /><br /> -HISTORIES OF POETRY</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE History of English Poetry is a subject I hope I shall never have to -undertake, especially as I have grave doubts if there really is such a -thing. Poets appear spasmodically, write their best poetry at uncertain -intervals and owe nothing worth mentioning to any school or convention. -Most histories of English Poetry are full of talk about “schools” or -they concentrate on what they are pleased to call “the political -tendencies” of poetry, and painfully trace the introduction and -development in English of various set forms like the Sonnet, Blank -Verse, and the Spenserian Stanza. This talk about politics I read as an -excuse of the symmetrical-minded for spreading out the Eighteenth -Century poets famous in their day to a greater length than the quality -of their work can justify. As for the history of metric forms it is, in -a sense, of little more vital importance to poetry than the study of -numismatics would appear to an expert in finance.</p> - -<p class="cb">. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .</p> - -<p>An undergraduate studying English Literature at one of our oldest -universities was recently confronted by a senior tutor, Professor X, -with a review of his terminal studies and the charge of -temperamentalism.<a name="page_087" id="page_087"></a></p> - -<p>“I understand from Prof. Y,” he explained, “that your literary judgments -are a trifle summary, that in fact you prefer some poets to others.”</p> - -<p>He acknowledged the charge with all humility.</p> - -<h2><a name="XXXI" id="XXXI"></a>XXXI<br /><br /> -THE BOWL MARKED DOG</h2> - -<p>“I am sorry, nephew, that I cannot understand your Modern Poetry. Indeed -I strongly dislike it; it seems to me mostly mere impudence.”</p> - -<p>“But, uncle, you are not expected to like it! The old house-dog goes at -dinner time to the broken biscuits in his bowl marked <span class="smcap">dog</span> and eats -heartily. Tomorrow give him an unaccustomed dainty in an unaccustomed -bowl and he will sniff and turn away in disgust. Though tempted to kick -him for his unrecognizing stupidity, his ingratitude, his ridiculous -preference for the formal biscuit, yet refrain!</p> - -<p>“The sight and smell associations of the <span class="smcap">dog bowl</span> out of which he has -eaten so long have actually, scientists say, become necessary for -bringing the proper digestive juices into his mouth. What you offer him -awakes no hunger, his mouth does not water; he is puzzled and insulted.</p> - -<p>“But give it to the puppies instead; they’ll gobble<a name="page_088" id="page_088"></a> it up and sniff -contemptuously afterwards at the old dog and his bowl of biscuit.”</p> - -<h2><a name="XXXII" id="XXXII"></a>XXXII<br /><br /> -THE ANALYTIC SPIRIT</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span>N England, since—shall we name the convenient date 1851, the year of -the Great Exhibition?—the educated reading public has developed -analytic powers which have not been generally matched by a corresponding -development of the co-ordinating arts of the poet. Old charms will no -longer hold, old baits will no longer be taken; the reader has become -too wary. The triumph of the analytic spirit is nowhere better shown -than in these histories of Poetry just mentioned, where the interest in -fake poetry is just as strong or even stronger than the interest in -poetry itself.</p> - -<p>As Religions inevitably die with their founders, the disciples having -either to reject or formularize their master’s opinions, so with Poetry, -it dies on the formation of a poetic school. The analytic spirit has -been, I believe, responsible both for the present coma of religion among -our educated classes and for the disrespect into which poetry and the -fine arts have fallen. As for these histories of poetry, the very fact -that people are interested in failures of the various “Schools” to -universalize the individual system of a master, is a great -discouragement to a<a name="page_089" id="page_089"></a> poet trying by every means in his power to lay the -spirit of sophistication.</p> - -<p>But the age of poetry is not yet over if poets will only remember what -the word means and not confuse it with acrostic-making and similar -ingenious Alexandrianisms. Earlier civilizations than ours have -forgotten the necessarily spontaneous nature of the art, and have tried -(for lack of any compelling utterance) to beat the sophisticated critics -of their day by piling an immense number of technical devices on their -verses, killing what little passion there was, by the tyranny of -self-imposed rules. The antithetical couplet of Pope or the Ovidian -hexameter-and-pentameter are bad enough, but the ancient Irish and Welsh -bards were even more restricted by their chain-rhymes and systems of -consonantal sequence, the final monstrosity being the Welsh <i>englyn</i> of -four lines, governed by ninety-odd separate rules. The way out for -Poetry does not lie by this road, we may be sure. But neither on the -other hand do we yet need to call in the Da-da-ists.</p> - -<h2><a name="XXXIII" id="XXXIII"></a>XXXIII<br /><br /> -RHYMES AND ALLITERATION</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">R</span>HYMES properly used are the good servants whose presence gives the -dinner table a sense of opulent security; they are never awkward, they -hand the dishes silently and professionally.<a name="page_090" id="page_090"></a> You can trust them not to -interrupt the conversation of the table or allow their personal -disagreements to come to the notice of the guests; but some of them are -getting very old for their work.</p> - -<p>The principle governing the use of alliteration and rhyme appear to be -much the same. In unsophisticated days an audience could be moved by the -profuse straight-ahead alliteration of <i>Piers Plowman</i>, but this is too -obvious a device for our times. The best effects seem to have been -attained in more recent poetry by precisely (if unconsciously) gauging -the memory length of a reader’s mental ear and planting the second -alliterative word at a point where the memory of the first is just -beginning to blurr; but has not quite faded. By cross-alliteration on -these lines a rich atmosphere has resulted and the reader’s eye has been -cheated. So with internal and ordinary rhyme; but the memory length for -the internal rhyme appears somewhat longer than memory for alliteration, -and for ordinary rhyme, longer still.</p> - -<h2><a name="XXXIV" id="XXXIV"></a>XXXIV<br /><br /> -AN AWKWARD FELLOW CALLED ARIPHRADES</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">A</span>RISTOTLE defended poetical “properties” that would correspond nowadays -with “thine” and “whensoe’er” and “flowerets gay,” by saying “it is a -great thing indeed to make<a name="page_091" id="page_091"></a> proper use of these poetic forms as also of -compounds and strange words. The mere fact of their not being in -ordinary speech, gives the diction a non-prosaic character.” One -Ariphrades had been ridiculing the Tragedians on this score; and -Aristotle saw, I suppose, that a strange diction has for the -simple-minded reader a power of surprise which enables the poet to work -on his feelings unhindered, but he did not see that as soon as a single -Ariphrades had ridiculed what was becoming a conventional surprise, a -Jack-in-the-Box that every one expected, then was the time for the -convention to be scrapped; ridicule is awkwardly catching.</p> - -<p>The same argument applies to the use of rhyme to-day; while rhyme can -still be used as one of the ingredients of the illusion, a compelling -force to make the reader go on till he hears an echo to the syllable at -the end of the last pause, it still remains a valuable technical asset. -But as soon as rhyme is worn threadbare the ear anticipates the echo and -is contemptuous of the clumsy trick.</p> - -<p>The reader must be made to surrender himself completely to the poet, as -to his guide in a strange country; he must never be allowed to run ahead -and say “Hurry up, sir, I know this part of the country as well as you. -After that ‘snow-capped mountain’ we inevitably come to a ‘leaping -fountain.’ I see it ‘dancing’ and ‘glancing’ in the distance. And by the -token of these ‘varied flowers’ on the grass, I know that another few -feet will bring us to the ‘leafy<a name="page_092" id="page_092"></a> bowers’ which, if I am not mistaken, -will protect us nicely from the ‘April showers’ for a few ‘blissful -hours.’ Come on, sir! am I guiding you, or are you guiding me?”</p> - -<p>However, the time has not yet come to get rid of rhyme altogether: it -has still plenty of possibilities, as <i>Dumb Crambo</i> at a Christmas party -will soon convince the sceptical; and assonances separated even by the -whole length of the mouth can work happily together, with or without the -co-operation of ordinary rhyme.</p> - -<p>These are all merely illustrations of the general principle that as soon -as a poem emerges from the hidden thought processes that give it birth, -and the poet reviews it with the conscious part of his mind, then his -task is one not of rules or precedents so much as of ordinary -common-sense.</p> - -<h2><a name="XXXV" id="XXXV"></a>XXXV<br /><br /> -IMPROVISING NEW CONVENTIONS</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HERE is a great dignity in poetry unaffectedly written in stern stiff -traditional forms and we feel in spite of ourselves that we owe it the -reverence due to ruined abbeys, prints of Fujiyama, or Chelsea -pensioners with red coats, medals, and long white beards. But that is -no<a name="page_093" id="page_093"></a> reason for following tradition blindly; it should be possible for a -master of words to improvise a new convention, whenever he wishes, that -will give his readers just the same notion of centuried authority and -smoothness without any feeling of contempt.</p> - -<h2><a name="XXXVI" id="XXXVI"></a>XXXVI<br /><br /> -WHEN IN DOUBT</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">A</span> YOUNG poet of whose friendship I am very proud was speaking about -poetry to one of those University literary clubs which regard English -poetry as having found its culmination in the last decade of the -nineteenth century and as having no further destiny left for it. He said -that he was about to tell them the most important thing he knew about -poetry, so having roused themselves from a customary languor, the young -fellows were disappointed to hear, not a brilliant critical paradox or a -sparkling definition identifying poetry with decay, but a mere rule of -thumb for the working poet:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">When in Doubt<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Cut it Out.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p><a name="page_094" id="page_094"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="XXXVII" id="XXXVII"></a>XXXVII<br /><br /> -THE EDITOR WITH THE MUCKRAKE</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">O</span>RDINARY readers may deplore the habit of raking up the trivial and bad -verse of good poets now long dead, but for living poets there is nothing -more instructive in the world than these lapses, and in the absence of -honest biography they alone are evidence for what would be naturally -assumed, that these great poets in defiance of principle often tried to -write in their dull moments just because they longed for the exquisite -excitement of composition, and thought that the act of taking up a pen -might induce the hypnotic state of which I have spoken. But afterwards -they forgot to destroy what they produced, or kept it in the hope that -it was some good after all.</p> - -<h2><a name="XXXVIII" id="XXXVIII"></a>XXXVIII<br /><br /> -THE MORAL QUESTION</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">M</span>ODERN treatises on Poetry usually begin with definitions; ancient -treatises with a heavy weight of classical authority and a number of -grave reflections on the nature of the Poet, proving conclusively that -he should be a man<a name="page_095" id="page_095"></a> of vast experience of life, apt judgment, versatile -talent, and above all unimpeachable moral character. Authority seems to -count for nothing in these days, compared with the value set on it by -Sir Philip Sidney in his “Apologie for Poetrie,” and the modern treatise -would never ask its reader more than to admit a negative conclusion on -the moral question, that poets who think they can combine indiscriminate -debauch with dyspeptic Bohemian squalor and yet turn out good work -merely by applying themselves conscientiously and soberly in working -hours, are likely to be disappointed; however, my personal feeling is -that poets who modify the general ethical principles first taught them -at home and at school, can only afford to purchase the right to do so at -a great price of mental suffering and difficult thinking. Wanton, -lighthearted apostasies from tradition are always either a sign or a -prophecy of ineffectual creative work.</p> - -<p>Art is not moral, but civilized man has invented the word to denote a -standard of conduct which the mass demands of the individual and so -poetry which makes a definitely anti-moral appeal is likely to -antagonize two readers out of three straight away, and there is little -hope of playing the confidence trick on an enemy. Being therefore -addressed to a limited section even of the smallish class who read -poetry, such poetry will tend like most high-brow art to have more -dexterity than robustness.</p> - -<p>For a complete identification of successful art with<a name="page_096" id="page_096"></a> morality I always -remember with appreciation what an Irishman, a complete stranger, once -said to my father on hearing that he was author of the song “Father -O’Flynn”—“Ye behaved well, sir, when ye wrote that one.”</p> - -<h2><a name="XXXIX" id="XXXIX"></a>XXXIX<br /><br /> -THE POET AS OUTSIDER</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE ethical problem is further complicated for poets by the tussle in -their nature between the spontaneous and the critical biases. The -principle of loyalty on which the present non-religious system of -English manners depends is strained in them to breaking point by the -tendency to sudden excitement, delight or disgust with ideas for which -mature consideration entirely alters the values, or with people who -change by the same process from mere acquaintances to intimate friends -and back in a flash. Which should explain many apparently discreditable -passages in, for instance, the life and letters of Keats or Wordsworth, -and should justify Walt Whitman’s outspoken “Do I contradict myself? -Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”</p> - -<p>The poet is the outsider who sees most of the game, and, by the same -token, all or nearly all the great English poets have been men either of -ungenteel<a name="page_097" id="page_097"></a> birth or of good family which has been scandalized by their -subsequent adoption of unusual social habits during the best years of -their writing. To the polite society of their day—outsiders to a man.</p> - -<h2><a name="XL" id="XL"></a>XL<br /><br /> -A POLITE ACKNOWLEDGMENT</h2> - -<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Dear Sir</span>,—</p> - -<p> Many thanks for the volume of your poems you have sent me. Though I -had never seen any of your compositions before, they are already -old friends—that is, I like them but I see through them.</p> - -<p class="c"> -Yours cordially, Etc.<br /> -</p></div> - -<h2><a name="XLI" id="XLI"></a>XLI<br /><br /> -FAKE POETRY, BAD POETRY AND MERE VERSE</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">A</span>S in household economics, you cannot take out of a stocking more than -has been put in, so in poetry you cannot present suffering or romance -beyond your own experience. The attempt to do this is one of the chief -symptoms of the fake poet; ignorance forces him to draw on the -experience of a real poet who actually has been through the emotional -crises which he himself wants to restate.<a name="page_098" id="page_098"></a> The fake is often made worse -by the theft of small turns of speech which though not in any sense -irregular or grotesque, the poet has somehow made his own; it is like -stealing marked coins, and is a dangerous practice when Posterity is -policeman. Most poets visit Tom Tiddler’s ground now and then, but the -wise ones melt down the stolen coin and impress it with their own -“character.”</p> - -<p>There is a great deal of difference between fake poetry and ordinary bad -poetry. The bad poet is likely to have suffered and felt joy as deeply -as the poet reckoned first class, but he has not somehow been given the -power of translating experience into images and emblems, or of melting -words in the furnace of his mind and making them flow into the channels -prepared to take them. Charles Sorley said, addressing the good poets on -behalf of the bad poets (though he was really on the other side):—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">We are the homeless even as you,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Who hope but never can begin.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Our hearts are wounded through and through<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Like yours, but our hearts bleed within;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">We too make music but our tones<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Scape not the barrier of our bones.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>Mere verse, as an earlier section has attempted to show, is neither bad -poetry nor fake poetry necessarily. It finds its own categories, good -verse, bad verse and imitation. In its relation to poetry it<a name="page_099" id="page_099"></a> stands as -chimpanzee to man: only the theory that a conflict of emotional ideas is -a necessary ingredient of verse to make it poetry, will satisfactorily -explain why many kinds of verse, loosely called Poetry, such as Satire -and Didactic verse are yet popularly felt not to be the “highest” forms -of Poetry. I would say that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred these -bear no real relation to Poetry, even though dressed up in poetical -language, and that in the hundredth case they are poetry in spite of -themselves. Where the writer is dominated by only one aim, in satire, -the correction of morals; in didactic verse, instruction; there is no -conflict and therefore no poetry. But in rare cases where some Juvenal -slips through feelings of compunction to a momentary mood of self-satire -and even forgets himself so much as to compliment his adversary; or in -didactic verse where a sudden doubt arises and the teacher admits -himself a blind groper after truth (so Lucretius time and time again) -and breaks his main argument in digressions after loveliness and terror, -only then does Poetry appear. It flashes out with the surprise and shock -of a broken electric circuit.</p> - -<p>Even the <i>memoria technica</i> can slide from verse into poetry. The rhyme -to remember the signs of the Zodiac by, ends wonderfully:—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">The Ram the Bull, the Heavenly Twins,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And next the Crab, the Lion shines,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">The Virgin and the Scales,<a name="page_100" id="page_100"></a><br /></span> -<span class="i0">The Scorpion, Archer and He Goat,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The Man who carries the Watering Pot,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">The Fish with glittering tails.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">The language of science makes a hieroglyphic, or says “The sign of -Aquarius”; the language of prose says “A group of stars likened by -popular imagery to a Water Carrier”; the language of Poetry converts the -Eastern water carrier with his goatskin bag or pitcher, into an English -gardener, then puts him to fill his watering pot from heavenly waters -where the Fish are darting. The author of this rhyme has visualized his -terrestrial emblems most clearly; he has smelt the rankness of the Goat, -and yet in the “Lion shines” and the “glittering tails” one can see that -he has been thinking in terms of stars also. The emotional contradiction -lies in the stars’ remote aloofness from complications of this climatic -and smelly world, from the terror of Lion, Archer, Scorpion, from the -implied love-interest of Heavenly Twins and Virgin, and from the daily -cares of the Scales, Ram, Bull, Goat, Fish, Crab and Watering Pot.</p> - -<p>The ready way to distinguish verse from poetry is this, Verse makes a -flat pattern on the paper, Poetry stands out in relief.<a name="page_101" id="page_101"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="XLII" id="XLII"></a>XLII<br /><br /> -A DIALOGUE ON FAKE-POETRY</h2> - -<p><span class="letra">Q</span> When is a fake not a fake?</p> - -<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="2" summary="" - class="lefttbl2"> -<tr valign="top"><td>A.</td><td> When hard-working and ingenious conjurors are billed by common -courtesy as ‘magicians.’</td></tr> - -<tr valign="top"><td>Q.</td><td> But when is a fake not a fake?</td></tr> - -<tr valign="top"><td>A.</td><td> When it’s a Classic.</td></tr> - -<tr valign="top"><td>Q.</td><td> And when else?</td></tr> - -<tr valign="top"><td>A.</td><td> When it’s “organ-music” and all that.</td></tr> - -<tr valign="top"><td>Q.</td><td> Elaborate your answer, dear sir!</td></tr> - -<tr valign="top"><td>A.</td><td> A fake, then, is not a fake when lapse of time has tended to -obscure the original source of the borrowing, and when the textural -and structural competence that the borrower has used in -synthesising the occasional good things of otherwise indifferent -authors is so remarkable that even the incorruptible Porter of -Parnassus winks and says “Pass Friend!”</td></tr> - -<tr valign="top"><td>Q.</td><td> Then the Fake Poet is, as you have hinted before, a sort of -Hermit Crab?</td></tr> - -<tr valign="top"><td>A.</td><td> Yes, and here is another parable from Marine Life. Poetry is the -protective pearl formed by an oyster around the irritations of a -maggot. Now if, as we are told, it is becoming<a name="page_102" id="page_102"></a> possible to put -synthetic pearls on the market, which not even the expert with his -X-ray can detect from the natural kind, is not our valuation of the -latter perhaps only a sentimentality?</td></tr> - -</table> - -<h2><a name="XLIII" id="XLIII"></a>XLIII<br /><br /> -ASKING ADVICE</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HERE is a blind spot or many blind spots in the critical eye of every -writer; he cannot find for himself certain surface faults which anybody -else picks out at once. Especially there is a bias towards running to -death a set of words which when he found them, were quite honest and -inoffensive. Shelley had a queer obsession about “caves,” “abysses,” and -“chasms” which evidently meant for him much more than he can make us -see. A poet will always be wise to submit his work, when he can do no -more to straighten it, to the judgment of friends whose eyes have their -blind spots differently placed; only, he must be careful, I suppose, not -to be forced into making any alterations while in their presence.</p> - -<p>A poet reveals to a friend in a fit of excitement “I say, listen, I am -going to write a great poem on such-and-such! I have the whole thing -clear in my mind, waiting to be put down.” But if he goes on to give a -detailed account of the scheme, then the act<a name="page_103" id="page_103"></a> of expression (especially -prose expression) kills the creative impulse by presenting it -prematurely with too much definiteness. The poem is never written. It -remains for a few hopeless days as a title, a couple of phrases and an -elaborate scheme of work, and is then banished to the lumber room of the -mind; later it probably becomes subsidiary to another apparently -irrelevant idea and appears after a month or two in quite a different -shape, the elaboration very much condensed, the phrase altered and the -title lost.</p> - -<p>Now this section is as suitable as any other for the prophecy that the -study of Poetry will very soon pass from the hands of Grammarians, -Prosodists, historical research men, and such-like, into those of the -psychologists. And what a mess they’ll make of it; to be sure!</p> - -<h2><a name="XLIV" id="XLIV"></a>XLIV<br /><br /> -SURFACE FAULTS, AN ILLUSTRATION</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE later drafts of some lines I wrote recently called CYNICS AND -ROMANTICS, and contrasting the sophisticated and ingenuous ideas of -Love, give a fairly good idea of the conscious process of getting a poem -in order. I make no claim for achievement, the process is all that is -intended to appear, and three or four lines are enough for -illustration:<a name="page_104" id="page_104"></a></p> - -<p><i>1st Draft.</i></p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">In club or messroom let them sit,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Let them indulge salacious wit<br /></span> -<span class="i0">On love’s romance, but not with hearts<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Accustomed to those healthier parts<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of grim self-mockery....<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p><i>2nd Draft.</i> <span style="margin-left: 5%;">(</span>Consideration:—It is too soon in the poem for the angry -jerkiness of “Let them indulge.” Also “Indulge salacious” is hard to -say; at present, this is a case for being as smooth as possible.)</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">In club or messroom let them sit<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Indulging contraversial wit<br /></span> -<span class="i0">On love’s romance, but not with hearts<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Accustomed....<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p><i>3rd Draft.</i> <span style="margin-left: 5%;">(</span>Consideration:—No, we have the first two lines beginning -with “In.” It worries the eye. And “sit, indulging” puts two short “i’s” -close together. “Contraversial” is not the word. It sounds as if they -were angry, but they are too blasé for that. And “love’s romance” is -cheap for the poet’s own ideal.)</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">In club or messroom let them sit<br /></span> -<span class="i0">At skirmish of salacious wit<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Laughing at love, yet not with hearts<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Accustomed....<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p><a name="page_105" id="page_105"></a></p> - -<p><i>4th Draft.</i> <span style="margin-left: 5%;">(</span>Consideration:—Bother the thing! “Skirmish” is good -because it suggests their profession, but now we have three S’s,—“sit,” -“skirmish,” “salacious.” It makes them sound too much in earnest. The -“salacious” idea can come in later in the poem. And at present we have -two “at’s” bumping into each other; one of them must go. “Yet” sounds -better than “but” somehow.)</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">In club or messroom let them sit<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With skirmish of destructive wit<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Laughing at love, yet not with hearts<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Accustomed....<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p><i>5th Draft.</i> <span style="margin-left: 5%;">(</span>Consideration:—And now we have two “with’s” which don’t -quite correspond. And we have the two short “i’s” next to each other -again. Well, put the first “at” back and change “laughing at” to -“deriding.” The long “i” is a pleasant variant; “laughing” and “hearts” -have vowel-sounds too much alike.)</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">In club or messroom let them sit<br /></span> -<span class="i0">At skirmish of destructive wit<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Deriding love, yet not with hearts<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Accustomed....<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p><i>6th Draft.</i> <span style="margin-left: 5%;">(</span>Consideration:—Yes, that’s a bit better. But now we have -“<i>des</i>tructive” and “<i>der</i>iding” too close together. “Ingenious” is more -the word I want. It has a long vowel, and suggests<a name="page_106" id="page_106"></a> that it was a really -witty performance. The two “in’s” are far enough separated. “Accorded” -is better than “accustomed”; more accurate and sounds better. Now -then:—)</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">In club or messroom let them sit<br /></span> -<span class="i0">At skirmish of ingenious wit<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Deriding love, yet not with hearts<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Accorded etc.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p> -<span style="margin-left: 7em;">(Consideration:—It may be</span> -rotten, but I’ve done my best.)<br /> -</p> - -<p>The discussion of more radical constructive faults is to be found in -PUTTY and THE ART OF EXPRESSION.</p> - -<h2><a name="XLV" id="XLV"></a>XLV<br /><br /> -LINKED SWEETNESS LONG DRAWN OUT</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span>N this last section, besides an attempt at a greater accuracy of -meaning and implication than the first slap-dash arrangement of words -had provided, there may have been noticed three other technical -considerations which are especially exacting in this case, where I am -intending by particularly careful craftsmanship to suggest the -brilliance of the conversation I am reporting.</p> - -<p>The first is a care to avoid unintentional echoes,<a name="page_107" id="page_107"></a> as for example “<i>In</i> -club or messroom ... <i>in</i>dulging.”</p> - -<p>The second is a care which all song writers and singing masters -understand, to keep apart words like “indulge salacious,” where the j -and s sound coming together interfere with easy breathing.</p> - -<p>The third is an attempt to vary the vowel sounds so far as is consistent -with getting the right shade of meaning; it pleases the mental ear like -stroking pleases a cat (note the vowel sequence of the phrase that heads -this section. John Milton knew a thing or two about texture, worth -knowing). At the same time I am trying to arrange the position of -consonants and open vowels with much the same care.</p> - -<p>But all these three considerations, and even the consideration for -lucidity of expression, can and must be modified where an emotional mood -of obscurity, fear, difficulty or monotony will be better illustrated by -so doing.</p> - -<p>Keats was very conscious of the necessity of modification. Leigh Hunt -recounts in his Autobiography:—</p> - -<p>“I remember Keats reading to me with great relish and particularity, -conscious of what he had set forth, the lines describing the supper<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> -and ending with the words,</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“ ‘And lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon.’ ”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> St. Agnes’ Eve.</p></div> - -<p>Mr. Wordsworth would have said the vowels were not varied enough; but -Keats knew where his vowels were <i>not</i> to be varied. On the occasion -above alluded<a name="page_108" id="page_108"></a> to, Wordsworth found fault with the repetition of the -concluding sound of the participles in Shakespeare’s line about bees:—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“ ‘The <i>singing</i> masons <i>building</i> roofs of gold.’ ”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>This, he said, was a line which Milton would never have written. Keats -thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with the -continued note of the singers, and that Shakespeare’s negligence, if -negligence it was, had instinctively felt the thing in the best manner.”</p> - -<p>Keats here was surely intending with his succession of short i-sounds, a -gourmet’s fastidious pursing of lips. Poets even of the -Virgil-Milton-Tennyson-Longfellow metrical tradition will on occasion -similarly break their strict metric form with an obviously imitative -“quadrepedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum,” but the manipulation -of vowels and consonants is for them rather a study in abstract grandeur -of music than a relation with the emotional content of the poetry.</p> - -<h2><a name="XLVI" id="XLVI"></a>XLVI<br /><br /> -THE FABLE OF THE IDEAL GADGET</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">N</span>O poem can turn out respectably well unless written in the full -confidence that this time at last the poet is going to attain perfect -expression. So long as this confidence survives he<a name="page_109" id="page_109"></a> goes on revising the -poem at intervals for days or months until nothing more can be done, and -the inevitable sense of failure is felt, leaving him at liberty to try -again. It is on this inevitable failure that the practice of every art -is made conditional.</p> - -<p class="cb">. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .</p> - -<p>A man once went into an ironmonger’s shop and said hesitatingly, “Do you -sell those gadgets for fixing on doors?”</p> - -<p>“Well, sir,” replied the assistant, “I am not quite sure if I understand -your requirements, but I take it you are needing a patent automatic -door-closer?”</p> - -<p>“Exactly,” said the customer. “One to fix on my pantry door which, by -the way, contains a glass window.”</p> - -<p>“You will want a cheap one, sir?”</p> - -<p>“Cheap but serviceable.”</p> - -<p>“You will prefer an English make, sir?”</p> - -<p>“Indeed, that’s a most important consideration.”</p> - -<p>“You will perhaps want one with ornamentations, scroll work and roses -for instance?”</p> - -<p>“Oh no, nothing of that sort, thank you. I want it as plain and -unobtrusive as possible.”</p> - -<p>“You would like it made of some rustless metal, sir?”</p> - -<p>“That would be very convenient.”</p> - -<p>“And with a strong spring?”</p> - -<p>“Well, moderately strong.”<a name="page_110" id="page_110"></a></p> - -<p>“To be fixed on which side, sir?”</p> - -<p>“Let me see; the right-hand side.”</p> - -<p>“Now, sir,” said the assistant, “I will go through each point, one by -one. You want an efficient (but not too costly) English made, -unobtrusive, rustless, unornamented, patent automatic door closer, to be -fixed right-handed with a moderately strong spring to a pantry door with -a glass window. Is there any further desideratum, sir?”</p> - -<p>“Well, it’s very good of you to help me like this (“Not at all, sir”). I -should like it easily adjusted and easily removed, and above all it must -not squeak or need constant oiling.”</p> - -<p>“In fact, sir, you want an apparatus combining a variety of qualities, -in a word, an absolutely silent, efficient, economical, invisible, -corrosive proof, unornamented, not-too-heavily-springed, easily -adjustable, readily removable, British-made, right-handed, patent -automatic door closer, ideally fitted in every possible respect for -attaching to your pantry door which (I understand you to say) contains a -glass window. How is that, sir?”</p> - -<p>“Splendid, splendid.”</p> - -<p>“Well, sir, I regret that there has never been any article of that -description put on the market, but if you care to visit our wholesale -department across the road, you may perhaps be able to make your choice -from a reasonably large selection of our present imperfect models. Good -day, sir.”<a name="page_111" id="page_111"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="XLVII" id="XLVII"></a>XLVII<br /><br /> -SEQUELS ARE BARRED</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span>F you solve a problem to the best of your ability, it never bothers you -again. Enough said: but the following emblem may be taken to heart:—</p> - -<p class="c">EPITAPH ON AN UNFORTUNATE ARTIST</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits:<br /></span> -<span class="i2">This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So in the end he could not change the tragic habits<br /></span> -<span class="i2">This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<h2><a name="XLVIII" id="XLVIII"></a>XLVIII<br /><br /> -TOM FOOL</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HERE is a saying that “More people know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows”; -that may be all right if it means recognizing him in the street, but he -has to be a wonder before he can, without eccentricity, make his work -immediately recognized in print and be even distinguishable from the -best efforts of imitators. This proverb was obviously in the head of the -man or woman who wrote the following sonnet, in the <i>Spectator</i> (I -think) about<a name="page_112" id="page_112"></a> a year ago; I have lost the cutting and the reference, and -ask to be pardoned if I misquote:—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Cunning indeed Tom Fool must be to-day<br /></span> -<span class="i2">For us, who meet his verses in a book,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To cry “Tom Fool wrote that.... I know his way....<br /></span> -<span class="i0">... Unsigned, yet eyed all over with Tom’s look....<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Why see! It’s pure Tom Fool, I’m not mistook....<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Fine simple verses too; now who’s to say<br /></span> -<span class="i0">How Tom has charmed these worn old words to obey<br /></span> -<span class="i2">His shepherd’s voice and march beneath his crook?<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Instead we ponder “I can’t name the man,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">But he’s been reading Wilde,” or “That’s the school<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of Côterie.... Voices.... Pound ... the Sitwell clan ...”<br /></span> -<span class="i2">“<i>He</i> ‘knows his Kipling’ ” ... “<i>he</i> accepts the rule<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of Monro ... of Lord Tennyson ... of Queen Anne”<br /></span> -<span class="i2">How seldom, “There, for a ducat, writes,<br /></span> -<span class="i12"><span class="smcap">Tom Fool</span>.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">The writer evidently had a keen eye for the failings of others, but is -convicted out of his own mouth, for I have met nobody who can identify -this particular Tom Fool for me.</p> - -<p>Hateful as is the art of the parodist when it spoils poems which have -delighted and puzzled us, parody has its uses. A convincing parody is -the best possible danger signal to inform a poet that he is writing -sequels, repeating his conjuring tricks until they can be seen through -and ridiculously imitated. “That awkward fellow Ariphrades,” much as we -dislike him, is one of the most useful members of our republic of -letters.<a name="page_113" id="page_113"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="XLIX" id="XLIX"></a>XLIX<br /><br /> -CROSS RHYTHM AND RESOLUTION</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span> HAVE already attempted to show Poetry as the Recorder’s <i>précis</i> of a -warm debate between the members of the poet’s mental Senate on some -unusually contraversial subject. Let the same idea be expressed less -personally in the terms of coloured circles intersecting, the space cut -off having the combined colour of both circles. In the Drama these -circles represent the warring influences of the plot; the principal -characters lie in the enclosed space and the interest of the play is to -watch their attempts to return to the state of primary colouring which -means mental ease; with tragedy they are eventually forced to the -colourless blackness of Death, with comedy the warring colours disappear -in white. In the lyrical poem, the circles are coinciding -stereoscopically so that it is difficult to discover how each individual -circle is coloured; we only see the combination.</p> - -<p>If we consider that each influence represented by these circles has an -equivalent musical rhythm, then in the drama these rhythms interact -orchestrally, tonic theme against dominant; in lyrical poetry where we -get two images almost fused into one, the rhythms interlace -correspondingly closely. Of the warring<a name="page_114" id="page_114"></a> influences, one is naturally -the original steady-going conservative, the others novel, disquieting, -almost accidental. Then in lyrical poetry the established influence -takes the original metre as its expression, and the new influences -introduce the cross rhythm modifying the metre until it is half -submerged. Shakespeare’s developments of blank verse have much -distressed prosodists, but have these ever considered that they were not -mere wantonness or lack of thought, that what he was doing was to send -emotional cross-rhythms working against the familiar iambic five-stress -line?</p> - -<p>I remember “doing Greek iambics” at Charterhouse and being allowed as a -great privilege on reaching the Upper School to resolve the usual -short-long foot into a short-short-short or even in certain spots into a -long-short. These resolutions I never understood as having any reference -to the emotional mood of the verse I was supposed to be translating, but -they came in very conveniently when proper names had too many short -syllables in them to fit otherwise.</p> - -<p>A young poet showed me a set of English verses the other day which I -returned him without taking a copy but I remember reading somewhat as -follows:—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">T-tum, t-tum, t-tum, t-tum, t-tum<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A midnight garden, where as I went past<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I saw the cherry’s moonfrozen delicate ivory.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p><a name="page_115" id="page_115"></a></p> - -<p>“Good heavens,” I said, “what’s that last line all about?”</p> - -<p>“Oh, it’s just an experiment in resolution.”</p> - -<p>“Take a pencil, like a good fellow, and scan it for me in the old -fashioned way as we used to do at school together.”</p> - -<p>He did so:—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">I sāw | thĕ cherr|(y’s) moŏnfrōz|ĕn dĕl|ic(ate) īv|(ory)<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>“It’s a sort of anapaestic resolution,” he explained.</p> - -<p>“Anapaestic resolution of what?”</p> - -<p>“Of an iambic decasyllabic line.”</p> - -<p>“Excuse me, it’s not. Since we’re talking in that sort of jargon, it’s a -spondaic resolution of a dactylic line.”</p> - -<p>“What do you mean?”</p> - -<p>“Well, you’ve put in four extra syllables for your resolution. I’ll put -in a fifth, the word “in.” Now listen!</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Swimmery | floatery | bobbery | duckery | divery—<br /></span> -<span class="i0"><i>I</i> saw the | cherries moon | frozen in | delicate | ivory<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>In this case the cross-rhythm, which my friend explained was meant to -suggest the curious ethereal look of cherry blossoms in moonlight, had -so swamped the original metre that it was completely stifled. The poet -has a licence to resolve metre where the emotion demands it, and he is a -poor poet if he daren’t use it; but there is commonsense in restraint.<a name="page_116" id="page_116"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="L" id="L"></a>L<br /><br /> -MY NAME IS LEGION, FOR WE ARE MANY</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">O</span>NE goes plodding on and hoping for a miracle, but who has ever -recovered the strange quality that makes the early work (which follows a -preliminary period of imitation) in a sense the best work? There is a -fine single-heartedness, an economy of material, an adventurous delight -in expression, a beginner’s luck for which I suppose honest hard work -and mature observation can in time substitute certain other qualities, -but poetry is never the same again.</p> - -<p>I will attempt to explain this feeling by an analogy which can be -pressed as closely as any one likes: it is an elaboration of what has -been said of the poet as a “peculiarly gifted witch doctor.” Cases of -multiple personality have recently been investigated in people who -believed themselves to be possessed by spirits. Analysis has proved -pretty conclusively that the mediums have originally mimicked -acquaintances whom they found strange, persons apparently selected for -having completely different outlooks on life, both from the medium and -from each other, different religions, different emotional processes and -usually different dialects. This mimicry<a name="page_117" id="page_117"></a> has given rise to unconscious -impersonations of these people, impersonations so complete that the -medium is in a state of trance and unconscious of any other existence. -Mere imitation changes to a synthetic representation of how these -characters would act in given circumstances. Finally the characters get -so much a part of the medium’s self that they actually seem to appear -visibly when summoned, and a sight of them can even be communicated to -sympathetic bystanders. So the Witch of Endor called up Samuel for King -Saul. The trances, originally spontaneous, are induced in later stages -to meet the wishes of an inquisitive or devout séance-audience; the -manifestations are more and more presented (this is no charge of -charlatanism) with a view to their effect on the séance. It is the -original unpremeditated trances, or rather the first ones that have the -synthetic quality and are no longer mere mimicry, which correspond to -Early Work.</p> - -<p>But it is hardly necessary to quote extreme cases of morbid psychology -or to enter the dangerous arena of spiritualistic argument in order to -explain the presence of subpersonalities in the poet’s mind. They have a -simple origin, it seems, as supplying the need of a primitive mind when -confused. Quite normal children invent their own familiar spirits, their -“shadows,” “dummies” or “slaves,” in order to excuse erratic actions of -their own which seem on reflection incompatible with their usual habits -or code<a name="page_118" id="page_118"></a> of honour. I have seen a child of two years old accept -literally an aunt’s sarcasm, “Surely it wasn’t my little girl who did -that? It must have been a horrid little stranger dressed just like you -who came in and behaved so badly. My little girl always does what she’s -told.” The child divided into two her own identity of which she had only -recently become conscious. She expected sympathy instead of scolding -when the horrid little stranger reappeared, broke china and flung water -all over the room. I have heard of several developments of the dummy, or -slave idea; how one child used his dummy as a representative to send out -into the world to do the glorious deeds which he himself was not allowed -to attempt; on one occasion this particular dummy got three weeks’ -imprisonment after a collision with the police and so complete was his -master’s faith in the independent existence of the creature that he -eagerly counted the days until the dummy’s release and would not call on -his services, however urgently needed, until the sentence had been -completed. Another child, a girl, employed a committee of several -dummies each having very different characteristics, to whom all social -problems were referred for discussion.</p> - -<p>Richard Middleton, the poet, in a short essay, “Harold,” traces the -development of a dummy of this sort which assumed a tyranny over his -mind until it became a recurrent nightmare. Middleton says, and it -immensely strengthens my contention if Middleton realized the full -implications of the remark, that but<a name="page_119" id="page_119"></a> for this dummy, Harold, he would -never have become a poet.</p> - -<p>Two or three poets of my acquaintance have admitted (I can confirm it -from my own experience) that they are frequently conscious of their own -divided personalities; that is, that they adopt an entirely different -view of life, a different vocabulary, gesture, intonation, according as -they happen to find themselves, for instance, in clerical society, in -sporting circles, or among labourers in inns. It is no affectation, but -a <i>mimesis</i> or sympathetic imitation hardened into a habit; the -sportsman is a fixed and definite character ready to turn out for every -sporting or quasi-sporting emergency and has no interest outside the -pages of the <i>Field</i>, the clerical dummy pops up as soon as a clergyman -passes down the road and can quote scripture by the chapter; the rustic -dummy mops its brow with a red pocket handkerchief and murmurs “keeps -very dry.” These characters have individual tastes in food, drink, -clothes, society, peculiar vices and virtues and even different -handwriting.</p> - -<p>The difficulty of remaining <i>loyal</i>, which I mention elsewhere, is most -disastrously increased, but the poet finds a certain compensation in the -excitement of doing the quick change. He also finds it amusing to watch -the comments of reviews or private friends on some small batch of poems -which appear under his name. Every poem though signed John Jones is -virtually by a different author. The poem which<a name="page_120" id="page_120"></a> comes nearest to the -point of view of one critic may be obnoxious to another; and <i>vice -versa</i>; but it all turns on which “dummy” or “sub-personality” had -momentarily the most influence on the mental chairman.</p> - -<p>In a piece which represents an interlude in a contemplated collection of -poems, the following passage occurs to give the same thought from a -different angle. I am asking a friend to overlook irreconcilabilities in -my book and refer him to two or three poems which are particularly -hostile to each other.</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“Yet these are all the same stuff, really,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The obverse and reverse, if you look closely,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of busy imagination’s new-coined money—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And if you watch the blind<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Phototropisms of my fluttering mind,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Whether, growing strong, I wrestle Jacob-wise<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With fiendish darkness blinking threatfully<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Its bale-fire eyes,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Or whether childishly<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I dart to Mother-skirts of love and peace<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To play with toys until those horrors leave me,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Yet note, whichever way I find release,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">By fight or flight,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">By being wild or tame,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The Spirit’s the same, the Pen and Ink’s the same.”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p><a name="page_121" id="page_121"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="LI" id="LI"></a>LI<br /><br /> -THE PIG BABY</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">“M</span>ultiple personality, perhaps,” says some one. “But does that account -for the stereoscopic process of which you speak, that makes two -sub-personalities speak from a double head, that as it were prints two -pictures on the same photographic plate?” The objector is thereupon -referred to the dream-machinery on which poetry appears to be founded. -He will acknowledge that in dreams the characters are always changing in -a most sudden and baffling manner. He will remember for example that in -“Alice in Wonderland,” which is founded on dream-material, the Duchess’ -baby is represented as turning into a pig; in “Alice through the Looking -Glass” the White Queen becomes an old sheep. That is a commonplace of -dreams.</p> - -<p>When there is a thought-connection of similarity or contrast between two -concepts, the second is printed over the first on the mental -photographic plate so rapidly that you hardly know at any given moment -whether it is a pig or a baby you are addressing. “You quite make me -giddy,” said Alice to the Cheshire Cat who was performing similar -evolutions. One image starts a sentence, another image succeeds and -finishes it, almost, but the first reappears and has the last word. The -result is<a name="page_122" id="page_122"></a> poetry—or nonsense. With music much the same happens; I -believe that those wonderful bursts of music heard in sleep are -impossible to reproduce in a waking state largely because they consist -of a number of melodies of different times and keys imposed on one -another.</p> - -<h2><a name="LII" id="LII"></a>LII<br /><br /> -APOLOGY FOR DEFINITIONS</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span>N my opening definition I have given rather an ideal of English Poetry -than an analysis of the ruling poetics of this, that and the other -century. If those who rally to the later Pope and those who find in the -prophetic Blake the true standard of Poetry, equally deny that my -definition covers their experience of the word, I admit that in an -encyclopediac sense it is quite inadequate, and indeed a fusion of two -contradictory senses; indeed, again, a typically poetic definition.</p> - -<p>But how else to make it? Blake’s poetry dictated by angels (a -too-impulsive race) with its abstruse personal symbolism and tangled -rhythms, and Pope’s elegantly didactic generalizations, in rigidly -metrical forms, on the nature of his fellow man, have a common factor so -low as hardly to be worth recovering; my justification is based on the -works of our everywhere acknowledged Chaucer, Spenser,<a name="page_123" id="page_123"></a> Shakespeare, -Keats, Shelley and the rest, where the baffling Metamorphism of Romance -and the formal Characterism of Classical Poetry, often reconcile their -traditional quarrel and merge contentedly and inseparably as Jack Spratt -and Mrs. Spratt, dividing the fat and the lean in equable portions.</p> - -<p class="cb">. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .</p> - -<p>Here let me then, for the scientific interest, summarize my conception -of the typical poet:—</p> - -<p>A poet in the fullest sense is one whom some unusual complications of -early environment or mixed parentage develop as an intermediary between -the small-group consciousnesses of particular sects, clans, castes, -types and professions among whom he moves. To so many of these has he -been formally enrolled as a member, and to so many more has he virtually -added himself as a supernumerary member by showing a disinterested -sympathy and by practising his exceptionally developed powers of -intuition, that in any small-group sense the wide diffusion of his -loyalties makes him everywhere a hypocrite and a traitor.</p> - -<p>But the rival sub-personalities formed in him by his relation to these -various groups, constantly struggle to reconciliation in his poetry, and -in proportion as these sub-personalities are more numerous more varied -and more inharmonious, and his controlling personality stronger and -quicker at compromise, so he becomes a more or less capable spokesman of -that larger group-mind of his culture which we somehow consider greater -than the sum of its<a name="page_124" id="page_124"></a> parts: so that men of smaller scope and more -concentrated loyalties swallow personal prejudices and hear at times in -his utterances what seems to them the direct voice of God.</p> - -<h2><a name="LIII" id="LIII"></a>LIII<br /><br /> -TIMES AND SEASONS</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">E</span>ACH poet finds that there are special times and seasons most suitable -for his work; for times, I have heard mentioned with favour the hour -before breakfast and the hour after the usual bed-time, for seasons, the -pause between the exuberance of Spring and the heaviness of Summer seems -popular, also the month of October. There are also places more free from -interruption and distraction than others, such as caves, attics barely -furnished, lonely barns, woods, bed, which make the hypnotic state -necessary for poetry easier to induce. The poet has to be very honest -with himself about only writing when he feels like it. To take pen in -hand at the self-conscious hour of (say) nine <small>A.M.</small>, for a morning’s -poetry, and with a mental arena free of combatants, is to be -disappointed, and even “put off” poetry for some time to come.</p> - -<p>I have often heard it said that a poet in intervals between inspirations -should keep his hand in by writing verse-exercises, but that he should -on such<a name="page_125" id="page_125"></a> occasions immediately destroy what he has written.</p> - -<p>That seems all wrong, it is an insult to the spontaneity of true poetry -to go through a ritual farce of this sort and the poet will only be -blunting his tools. He ought not to feel distressed at the passage of -time as if it represented so many masterpieces unwritten. If he keeps -mentally alive and has patience, the real stuff may arrive any moment; -when it doesn’t, it isn’t his fault, but the harder he tries to force -it, the longer will it be delayed.</p> - -<h2><a name="LIV" id="LIV"></a>LIV<br /><br /> -TWO HERESIES</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">A</span>MONG the most usual heresies held about poetry is the idea that the -first importance of the poet is his “message”; this idea probably -originated with the decline of polite sermon-writing, when the poet was -expected to take on the double duty; but it is quite untenable. The poet -is only concerned with reconciling certain impressions of life as they -occur to him, and presenting them in the most effective way possible, -without reference to their educational value. The cumulative effect of -his work is to suggest a great number of personal obsessions the sum of -which compose if you like his “message,” but the more definitely -propagandist the poet, the less of a poet is the propagandist.<a name="page_126" id="page_126"></a></p> - -<p>With this is bound up a heresy of about the same standing that poetry -should only be concerned with presenting what is beautiful, beautiful in -the limited sense of the picture-postcard. This romantic obsession -(using the word “romantic” in the sense of optimistic loose thinking) is -as absurd as that of the blood-and-guts realists. Poetry is no more a -narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bitter-sweet mixture for -all possible household emergencies, and its action varies according as -it is taken in a wineglass or tablespoon, inhaled, gargled, or rubbed on -the chest (like the literary Epic) by hard fingers covered with rings.</p> - -<h2><a name="LV" id="LV"></a>LV<br /><br /> -THE ART OF EXPRESSION</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span>T is as foolish to sneer at the Very Wild Men as it is to assume that -the Very Tame Men are all right because they are “in the tradition.” The -Very Wild Men are at any rate likely to have done work which has -explored the desert boundaries of the art they profess, and the Very -Tame Men have never done anything worth doing at all. The only excusable -quarrel is with the pretended Wild Men who persist in identically -repeating the experiments in which their masters have already failed, -and with those whose Very Wilderness is traceable to this—that<a name="page_127" id="page_127"></a> they -are satisfied with the original spontaneity of their work and do not -trouble to test it in the light of what it will convey to others, whom -they then blame for want of appreciation. What seems to be the matter -with Blake’s Prophetic Books is just this, he connected his images by a -system of free association the clue to which was lost by his death: for -instance his enemy, Schofield, a soldier who informed against him, -suddenly enters “Jerusalem” and its strange company of abstractions, in -the guise of a universal devil “Skofeld.”</p> - -<p>Suppose that one Hodge, a labourer, attempted in a fit of homicidal -mania to split my skull with a spade, but that my faithful bloodhound -sprang to the rescue and Hodge barely escaped with his life. In my -imagination, Hodge’s spade might well come to symbolize murder and -madness, while the bloodhound became an emblem of loyal assistance in -the hour of discomfiture. With this experience in my mind I might be -inclined to eulogize a national hero as</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“Bloodhound leaping at the throat of Hodge<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Who stands with lifted spade,”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">and convey a meaning directly contrary to the one intended and having an -apparent reference to agrarian unrest. But conscious reflection would -put my image into line with a more widely favoured conception of Man the -Attacker, and Dog the Rescuer; I would rewrite the eulogy as<a name="page_128" id="page_128"></a></p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“<i>Watchdog</i> leaping at the <i>burglar’s</i> throat<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who stands with <i>pistol aimed</i>.”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>One of the chief problems of the art of poetry is to decide what are the -essentials of the image that has formed in your mind; the accidental has -to be eliminated and replaced by the essential. There is the double -danger of mistaking a significant feature of the image for an accident -and of giving an accident more prominence than it deserves.</p> - -<p>Too much modern country-side poetry is mere verbal photography, -admirably accurate and full of observation but not excited by memories -of human relationships, the emotional bias which could make Bunyan see -the bee as an emblem of sin, and Blake the lion’s loving-kindness.</p> - -<p>Now, if Wordsworth had followed the poetical fashion of the day and told -the world that when wandering lonely as a cloud he had seen a number of -vernal flowers, the poem would have fallen pretty flat—if however, -anticipating the present century he had quoted the order, the species -and the subspecies and remarked on having found among the rest no fewer -than five double blooms, we would almost have wished the vernal flowers -back again.</p> - -<p>Mr. Edmund Blunden lately called my attention to a message from Keats to -John Clare sent through their common publisher, Taylor. Keats thought -that Clare’s “Images from Nature” were “too much introduced without -being called for by a particular<a name="page_129" id="page_129"></a> sentiment.” Clare, in reply, is -troubled that Keats shows the usual inaccuracies of the townsman when -treating of nature, and that when in doubt he borrows from the Classics -and is too inclined to see “behind every bush a thrumming Apollo.”</p> - -<h2><a name="LVI" id="LVI"></a>LVI<br /><br /> -GHOSTS IN THE SHELDONIAN</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE most popular theory advanced to account for the haunting of houses -is that emanations of fear, hate or grief somehow impregnate a locality, -and these emotions are released when in contact with a suitable medium. -So with a poem or novel, passion impregnates the words and can make them -active even divorced from the locality of creation.</p> - -<p>An extreme instance of this process was claimed when Mr. Thomas Hardy -came to Oxford to receive his honorary degree as Doctor of Literature, -in the Sheldonian Theatre.</p> - -<p>There were two very aged dons sitting together on a front bench, whom -nobody in the assembly had ever seen before. They frowned and refrained -from clapping Mr. Hardy or the Public Orator who had just described him -as “Omnium poetarum Britannicorum necnon fabulatorum etiam facile -princeps,” and people said they were certainly ghosts and<a name="page_130" id="page_130"></a> identified -them with those masters of colleges who failed to answer Jude the -Obscure when he enquired by letter how he might become a student of the -University. It seems one ought to be very careful when writing -realistically.</p> - -<h2><a name="LVII" id="LVII"></a>LVII<br /><br /> -THE LAYING ON OF HANDS</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">W</span>HILE still in my perambulator about the year 1899,<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> I once received -with great alarm the blessing of Algernon Charles Swinburne who was -making his daily journey from “The Pines” in Putney to the <i>Rose and -Crown</i> public house on the edge of Wimbledon Common. It was many years -before I identified our nursery bogey man, “mad Mr. Swinburne,” with the -poet. It interests me to read that Swinburne as a young man once asked -and received the blessing of Walter Savage Landor who was a very old man -indeed at the time, and that Landor as a child had been himself taken to -get a blessing at the hand of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and that the great -lexicographer in his childhood had been unsuccessfully “touched” by -Queen Anne for the King’s Evil. And what the moral may be, I cannot say, -but I have traced the story back to Queen Anne because I want to make my -grimace at the sacerdotalists;<a name="page_131" id="page_131"></a> for I must confess, I have been many -times disillusioned over such “poetry in the great tradition” as -Authority has put beyond criticism.</p> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> See Mr. Max Beerbohm’s AND EVEN NOW, page 69.</p></div> - -<p>In caution, and out of deference to my reader’s sensibilities I will -only quote a single example. Before reading a line of Swinburne I had -been frequently told that he was “absolutely wonderful,” I would be -quite carried away by him. They all said that the opening chorus, for -instance, of <i>Atalanta in Calydon</i> was the most melodious verse in the -English language. I read:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">When the hounds of Spring are on Winter’s traces,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The Mother of months in meadow and plain, ...<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">and I was not carried away as far as I expected. For a time I persuaded -myself that it was my own fault, that I was a Philistine and had no -ear—but one day pride reasserted itself and I began asking myself -whether in the lines quoted above, the two “in’s” of <i>Spring</i> and -<i>Winter</i> and the two “mo’s” of <i>Mother</i> and <i>Months</i> did not come too -close together for euphony, and who exactly was the heroine of the -second line, and whether the heavy alliteration in <i>m</i> was not too -obvious a device, and whether <i>months</i> was not rather a stumbling-block -in galloping verse of this kind, and would it not have been better....</p> - -<p>Thereupon faith in the “great tradition” and in “Authority” waned.</p> - -<p>Still, I would be hard-hearted and stiff-necked<a name="page_132" id="page_132"></a> indeed if I did not -wish to have had on my own head the blessing that Swinburne received.</p> - -<h2><a name="LVIII" id="LVIII"></a>LVIII<br /><br /> -WAYS AND MEANS</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span>T is true that Genius can’t lie hid in a garret nowadays; there are too -many people eager to get credit for discovering and showing it to the -world. But as most of the acknowledged best living poets find it -impossible to make anything like a living wage from their poetry, and -patronage has long gone out of fashion (a great pity I think) the poet -after a little fuss and flattery is obliged to return disconsolately to -his garret. The problem of an alternative profession is one for which I -have never heard a really satisfactory solution. Even Coleridge (whose -Biographia Literaria should be the poet’s Bible) could make no more -hopeful suggestion than that the poet should become a country parson.</p> - -<p>Surely a most unhappy choice! The alternative profession should be as -far as possible removed from, and subsidiary to, poetry. True priesthood -will never allow itself to become subordinate to any other calling, and -the dangerous consanguinity of poetry and religion has already been -emphasized. It is the old difficulty of serving two masters; with the -more orthodox poets Herbert and Vaughan, for example,<a name="page_133" id="page_133"></a> poetry was all -but always tamed into meek subjection to religious propaganda; with -Skelton and Donne it was very different, and one feels that they were -the better poets for their independence, their rebelliousness towards -priestly conventions.</p> - -<p>Schoolmastering is another unfortunate subsidiary profession, it is apt -to give poetry a didactic flavour; journalism is too exacting on the -invention, which the poet must keep fresh; manual labour wearies the -body and tends to make the mind sluggish; office-routine limits the -experience. Perhaps Chaucer as dockyard inspector and diplomat, -Shakespeare as actor manager, and Blake as engraver, solved the problem -at best.</p> - -<p>These practical reflections may be supplemented by a paragraph lifted -from the New York <i>Nation</i> <i>apropos</i> of a trans-Atlantic poet whose -works have already sold a million copies; a new volume of his poems has -evidently broken the hearty muscular open-prairie tradition of the -’fifties and ’sixties and advanced forty years at a stride to the -Parisian ecstasies of the naughty ’nineties;—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“That verse is in itself a hopelessly unpopular<br /></span> -<span class="i1">form of literature is an error of the sophisticated<br /></span> -<span class="i1">but imperfectly informed. Every period has its<br /></span> -<span class="i1">widely read poets. Only, these poets rarely rise<br /></span> -<span class="i1">into the field of criticism since they always echo<br /></span> -<span class="i1">the music of the day before yesterday and express<br /></span> -<span class="i1">as an astonishing message the delusions of the<br /></span> -<span class="i1">huge rear-guard of civilization.”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p><a name="page_134" id="page_134"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="LIX" id="LIX"></a>LIX<br /><br /> -POETRY AS LABOUR</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">A</span> BOOK of verses must be either priceless or valueless and as the -general reading public is never told which by the council of critics -until fifty years at least after the first publication, poets can only -expect payment at a nominal rate. If they complain that the labourer is -worthy of his hire, the analogy is not admitted. The public denies -poetry to be labour; it is supposed to be a gentle recreation like -cutting out “Home Sweet Home” from three-ply wood with a fretsaw, or -collecting pressed flowers.</p> - -<h2><a name="LX" id="LX"></a>LX<br /><br /> -THE NECESSITY OF ARROGANCE</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>O say of any poet that there is complete individuality in his poems -combined with excellent craftsmanship amounts to a charge of arrogance. -Craftsmanship in its present-day sense seems necessarily to imply -acquaintance with other poetry; polish is only learned from the -shortcomings and triumphs of others, it is not natural to the -back-woodsman. A poet who after reading the work of those whom he -recognizes as masters of the craft, does<a name="page_135" id="page_135"></a> not allow himself to be -influenced into imitation of peculiar technical tricks (as we often find -ourselves unwittingly influenced to imitate the peculiar gestures of -people we admire or love), that poet must have the arrogance to put his -own <i>potential</i> achievements on a level with the work he most admires.</p> - -<p>Then is asked the question, “But why <i>do</i> poets write? Why do they go on -polishing the rough ideas which, once on paper, even in a crude and -messy form, should give the mental conflict complete relief? Why, if the -conflict is purely a personal one, do they definitely attempt to press -the poem on their neighbour’s imagination with all the zeal of a -hot-gospeller?”</p> - -<p>There is arrogance in that, the arrogance of a child who takes for -granted that all the world is interested in its doings and clever -sayings. The emotional crises that make Poetry, imply suffering, and -suffering usually humiliation, so that the poet makes his secret or open -confidence in his poetic powers a set-off against a sense of alienation -from society due to some physical deformity, stigma of birth or other -early spite of nature, or against his later misfortunes in love.</p> - -<p>The expectation and desire of a spurious immortality “fluttering alive -on the mouths of men” is admitted by most poets of my acquaintance, both -the good and the bad. This may be only a more definitely expressed form -of the same instinct for self-perpetuation that makes the schoolboy cut -his name<a name="page_136" id="page_136"></a> on the leaden gutter of the church porch, or the rich man give -a college scholarship to preserve his name <i>in perpetuo</i>. But with the -poet there is always the tinge of arrogance in the thought that his own -poetry has a lasting quality which most of his contemporaries cannot -claim.</p> - -<p>The danger of this very necessary arrogance is that it is likely so to -intrude the poet’s personal eccentricities into what he writes that the -reader recognizes them and does not read the “I” as being the voice of -universality.... It was the first night of a sentimental play in an -Early English setting; the crisis long deferred was just coming, the -heroine and hero were on the point of reconciliation and the long -embrace, the audience had lumps in their throats. At that actual instant -of suspense, a man in evening-dress leaped down on the stage from a box, -kicked the ruffed and doubleted hero into the orchestra, and began to -embrace the lady. A moment’s silence; then terrible confusion and rage. -The stage manager burst into tears, attendants rushed forward to arrest -the desperado.</p> - -<p>“But, ladies and gentlemen, I am the author!! I have an artist’s right -to do what I like with my own play.”</p> - -<p>“Duck him! scratch his face! tar and feather him!”</p> - -<p class="cb">. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .</p> - -<p>Arrogance? Yes, but a self-contradictory arrogance that takes the form -of believing that there is nobody beside themselves who could point out -just<a name="page_137" id="page_137"></a> where in a given poem they have written well, and where badly. -They know that it contains all sorts of hidden lesser implications -(besides the more important ones) which, they think, a few sensitive -minds may feel, but none could analyze; they think that they have -disguised this or that bit of putty (of which no poem is innocent) so -that no living critic could detect it. They are arrogant because they -claim to understand better than any rivals how impossible an art poetry -is, and because they still have the courage to face it. They have most -arrogance before writing their poem of the moment, most humility when -they know that they have once more failed.</p> - -<h2><a name="LXI" id="LXI"></a>LXI<br /><br /> -IN PROCESSION</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HIS piece was written a few weeks after the remainder of the book: I -had no cold-blooded intention of summarizing the paradox of poetic -arrogance contained in the last section, but so it happened, and I print -it here.</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Donne (for example’s sake)<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Keats, Marlowe, Spenser, Blake,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Shelley and Milton,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Shakespeare and Chaucer, Skelton—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I love them as I know them,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But who could dare outgo them<br /></span> -<span class="i0">At their several arts<br /></span> -<span class="i0">At their particular parts<a name="page_138" id="page_138"></a><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of wisdom, power and knowledge?<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In the Poet’s College<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Are no degrees nor stations,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Comparisons, rivals,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Stern examinations,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Class declarations,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Senior survivals;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">No creeds, religions, nations<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Combatant together<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With mutual damnations.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Or tell me whether<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Shelley’s hand could take<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The laurel wreath from Blake?<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Could Shakespeare make the less<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Chaucer’s goodliness?<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">The poets of old<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Each with his pen of gold<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Gloriously writing<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Found no need for fighting,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In common being so rich;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">None need take the ditch,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Unless this Chaucer beats<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That Chaucer, or this Keats<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With other Keats is flyting:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">See Donne deny Donne’s feats,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Shelley take Shelley down,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Blake snatch at his own crown.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Without comparison aiming high,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Watching with no jealous eye,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A neighbour’s renown,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Each in his time contended<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But with a mood late ended,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Some manner now put by,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Or force expended,<a name="page_139" id="page_139"></a><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Sinking a new well when the old ran dry.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So, like my masters, I<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Voice my ambition loud,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In prospect proud,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Treading the poet’s road,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In retrospect most humble<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For I stumble and tumble,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I spill my load.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">But often half-way to sleep,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">On a mountain shagged and steep,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The sudden moment on me comes<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With terrible roll of dream drums,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Reverberations, cymbals, horns replying,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When with standards flying,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A cloud of horsemen behind,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The coloured pomps unwind<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The Carnival wagons<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With their saints and their dragons<br /></span> -<span class="i0">On the screen of my teeming mind,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The <i>Creation</i> and <i>Flood</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0">With our Saviour’s Blood<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And fat Silenus’ flagons,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With every rare beast<br /></span> -<span class="i0">From the South and East,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Both greatest and least,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">On and on,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In endless variable procession.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I stand on the top rungs<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of a ladder reared in the air<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And I speak with strange tongues<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So the crowds murmur and stare,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Then volleys again the blare<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of horns, and Summer flowers<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Fly scattering in showers,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And the Sun rolls in the sky,<a name="page_140" id="page_140"></a><br /></span> -<span class="i0">While the drums thumping by<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Proclaim me....<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Oh then, when I wake<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Could I recovering take<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And propose on this page<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The words of my rage<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And my blandishing speech<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Steadfast and sage,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Could I stretch and reach<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The flowers and the ripe fruit<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Laid out at the ladder’s foot,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Could I rip a silken shred<br /></span> -<span class="i0">From the banner tossed ahead,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Could I call a double flam<br /></span> -<span class="i0">From the drums, could the Goat<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Horned with gold, could the Ram<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With a flank like a barn-door<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The dwarf and blackamoor,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Could <i>Jonah and the Whale</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0">And the <i>Holy Grail</i><br /></span> -<span class="i0">With the “<i>Sacking of Rome</i>”<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And “<i>Lot at his home</i>”<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The Ape with his platter,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Going clitter-clatter,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The Nymphs and the Satyr,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And every other such matter<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Come before me here<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Standing and speaking clear<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With a “how do ye do?”<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And “who are ye, who?”<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Could I show them to you<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That you saw them with me,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Oh then, then I could be<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The Prince of all Poetry<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With never a peer,<a name="page_141" id="page_141"></a><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Seeing my way so clear<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To unveil mystery.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Telling you of land and sea<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of Heaven blithe and free,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">How I know there to be<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Such and such Castles built in Spain,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Telling also of Cockaigne<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of that glorious kingdom, Cand<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of the Delectable Land,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The Land of Crooked Stiles,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The Fortunate Isles,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of the more than three score miles<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That to Babylon lead,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A pretty city indeed<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Built on a foursquare plan,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of the land of the Gold Man<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Whose eager horses whinney<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In their cribs of gold,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of the lands of Whipperginny<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of the land where none grow old.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Especially I could tell<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of the Town of Hell,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A huddle of dirty woes<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And houses in endless rows<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Straggling across all space;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Hell has no market place,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Nor point where four ways meet,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Nor principal street,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Nor barracks, nor Town Hall,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Nor shops at all,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Nor rest for weary feet,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Nor theatre, square or park,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Nor lights after dark,<a name="page_142" id="page_142"></a><br /></span> -<span class="i0">Nor churches nor inns,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Nor convenience for sins,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Hell nowhere begins,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Hell nowhere ends,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But over the world extends<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Rambling, dreamy, limitless, hated well:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The suburbs of itself, I say, is Hell.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">But back to the sweets<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of Spenser and Keats<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And the calm joy that greets<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The chosen of Apollo!<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Here let me mope, quirk, holloa<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With a gesture that meets<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The needs that I follow<br /></span> -<span class="i0">In my own fierce way,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Let me be grave-gay<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Or merry-sad,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who rhyming here have had<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Marvellous hope of achievement<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And deeds of ample scope,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Then deceiving and bereavement<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of this same hope.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p><a name="page_143" id="page_143"></a></p> - -<h2><a name="APPENDIX_THE_DANGERS_OF_DEFINITION" id="APPENDIX_THE_DANGERS_OF_DEFINITION"></a>APPENDIX:—THE DANGERS OF DEFINITION</h2> - -<p>The following letter I reprint from Tract No. 6 issued by the Society -for Pure English, but put it as an appendix because it explains my -attitude to the careful use of language by prose writers as well as by -poets. It is intended to be read in conjunction with my section on -<i>Diction</i>.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p><i>To the Editor of the S. P. E. tracts.</i></p> - -<p> <span class="smcap">Sir</span>,</p> - -<p>As one rather more interested in the choice, use, and blending of -words than in the niceties of historical grammar, and having no -greater knowledge of etymology than will occasionally allow me to -question vulgar derivations of place-names, I would like to sound a -warning against the attempt to purify the language too much—“one -word, one meaning” is as impossible to impose on English as “one -letter, one sound.” By all means weed out homophones, and wherever -a word is overloaded and driven to death let another bear part of -the burden; suppress the bastard and ugly words of journalese or -commerce; keep a watchful eye on the scientists; take necessary -French and Italian words out of their italics to give them an -English spelling and accentuation; call a bird or a flower by its -proper name, revive useful dialect or obsolescent words, and so on; -that is the right sort of<a name="page_144" id="page_144"></a> purification, but let it be tactfully -done, let the Dictionary be a hive of living things and not a -museum of minutely ticketed fossils. A common-sense precision in -writing is clearly necessary; one has only to read a page or two of -Nashe, Lyly, or (especially) the lesser Euphuists to come to this -conclusion; their sentences often can have meant no more to -themselves than a mere grimace or the latest sweep of the hat -learned in Italy. A common-sense precision, yes, but when the -pedantic scientist accuses the man in the street of verbal -inexactitude the latter will do well to point out to the scientist -that of all classes of writers, his is the least accurate of any in -the use of ordinary words. Witness a typical sentence, none the -better for being taken from a book which has made an extremely -important contribution to modern psychological research, and is -written by a scientist so enlightened that, dispensing almost -entirely with the usual scientific jargon, he has improvised his -own technical terms as they are needed for the argument. Very good -words they are, such as would doubtless be as highly approved by -the Society for Pure English, in session, as they have been by the -British Association. This Doctor X is explaining the unaccountable -foreknowledge in certain insects of the needs they will meet after -their metamorphosis from grub to moth. He writes:</p> - -<p>... This grub, after a life completely spent within the channels in -a tree-trunk which it itself manufactures....<a name="page_145" id="page_145"></a></p> - -<p>“Yes,” said Doctor X to me, “somehow the two it’s coming together -look a bit awkward, but I have had a lot of trouble with that -sentence and I came to the conclusion that I’d rather have it -clumsy than obscure.” I pointed out have the “tree-trunk which” was -surely not what he meant, but that the faults of the sentence lay -deeper than that. He was using words not as winged angels always -ready to do his command, but as lifeless counters, weights, -measures, or automatic engines wrongly adjusted. A <i>grub</i> cannot -<i>manufacture</i> a <i>channel</i>. Even a human being who can manufacture a -boot or a box can only <i>scoop</i> or <i>dig</i> a channel. And you can only -have a <i>channel</i> on the outer surface of a tree; inside a tree you -have <i>tunnels</i>. A tunnel you <i>drive</i> or <i>bore</i>. A grub cannot be -<i>within</i> either a channel or a tunnel (surely) in the same way as a -fly is found <i>within</i> a piece of amber. Doctor X excused himself by -saying that “scientists are usually functionally incapable of -visualization,” and that “normal mental visualization is dangerous, -and abnormal visualization fatal to scientific theorizations, as -offering tempting vistas of imaginative synthetical concepts -unconfirmed by actual investigation of phenomena”—or words to that -effect. Unaware of the beam in his own eye, our Doctor complains -more than once in his book of the motes in the public eye, of the -extended popular application of scientific terms to phenomena for -which they were never intended, until they become like so many -blunted chisels. On the other hand, he would<a name="page_146" id="page_146"></a> be the first to -acknowledge that over-nice definition is, for scientific purposes, -just as dangerous as blurring of sense; Herr Einstein was saying -only the other day that men become so much the slaves of words that -the propositions of Euclid, for instance, which are abstract -processes of reason only holding good in reference to one another, -have been taken to apply absolutely in concrete cases, where they -do not. Over-definition, I am trying to show, discourages any -progressive understanding of the idea for which it acts as -hieroglyph. It even seems that the more precisely circumscribed a -word, the less accurate it is in its relation to other -closely-defined words.</p> - -<p>There is a story of a governess who asked her charges what was the -shape of the earth? “It may conveniently be described as an oblate -spheroid” was the glib and almost mutinous answer. “Who told you -girls that?” asked the suspicious Miss Smithson. A scientific elder -brother was quoted as authority, but Miss Smithson with commendable -common sense gave her ruling, “Indeed that may be so, and it may be -not, but it certainly is <i>nicer</i> for little girls to say that the -earth is more or less the shape of an orange.”</p> - -<p>From which fruit, as conveniently as from anywhere else, can be -drawn our homely moral of common sense in the use of words. As -every schoolboy I hope doesn’t know, the orange is the globose -fruit of that rutaceous tree the <i>citrus aurantium</i>, but as every -schoolboy certainly is aware, there are several kinds of orange on -the market, to wit the<a name="page_147" id="page_147"></a> ordinary everyday sweet orange from Jaffa -or Jamaica, the bitter marmalade orange that either comes or does -not come from Seville, the navel orange, and the excellent “blood,” -with several other varieties. Moreover the orange has as many -<i>points</i> as a horse, and parts or processes connected with its -dissection and use as a motor-bicycle. “I would I were an Orange -Tree, that busie Plante,” sighed George Herbert once. I wonder how -Herbert would have anatomized his Orange, then a rarer fruit than -today when popular affection and necessary daily intercourse have -wrapped the orange with a whole glossary of words as well as with -tissue-paper. Old gentlemen usually <i>pare</i> their oranges, but the -homophonic barrage of puns when Jones <i>père</i> prepares to pare a -pair of—even oranges (let alone another English-grown fruit), has -taught the younger generations either to peel a norange or skin -their roranges. <i>Peel</i> (subst.) is ousting <i>rind</i>; a pity because -there is also <i>peal</i> as a homophone; but I am glad to say that what -used to be called <i>divisions</i> are now almost universally known as -<i>fingers</i> or <i>pigs</i> (is the derivation from the tithe-or parson’s -pig known by its extreme smallness?); the seeds are “pips,” and -quite rightly too, because in this country they are seldom used for -planting, and “pip” obviously means that when you squeeze them -between forefinger and thumb they are a useful form of minor -artillery; then there is the white pithy part under the outer rind; -I have heard this called <i>blanket</i>, and that is pretty<a name="page_148" id="page_148"></a> good, but I -have also heard it called <i>kill-baby</i>, and that is better; for me -it will always remain <i>kill-baby</i>. On consulting <i>Webster’s -International Dictionary</i> I find that there is no authority or -precedent for calling the withered calix on the orange the <i>kim</i>, -but I have done so ever since I can remember, and have heard the -word in many respectable nurseries (it has a fascination for -children), and I can’t imagine it having any other name. Poetical -wit might call it “the beauty-patch on that fairy orange cheek”; -heraldry might blazon it, on <i>tenne</i>, as a <i>mullet, vert, for -difference</i>; and contemporary slang would probably explain it as -that “rotten little star-shaped gadget at the place where you shove -in your lump of sugar”; but <i>kim</i> is obviously the word that is -wanted, it needs no confirmation by a Dictionary Revisal Committee -or National Academy. There it is, you can hardly get away from it. -Misguided supporters of the Society for Pure English, resisting the -impulse to say casually “the yellow stuff round my yorange” and -“the bits inside, what you eat,” and knowing better than to give us -<i>exocarp</i>, <i>carpel</i>, and <i>ovule</i>, will, however, perhaps -misunderstand the aims of the Society by only using literary and -semi-scientific language, by insisting on <i>paring</i> the <i>integument</i> -and afterwards removing the <i>divisions</i> of their fruit for -<i>mastication</i>. But pure English does not mean putting back the -clock; or doing mental gymnastics. Let them rather (when they don’t -honestly push in that lump of sugar and suck) <i>skin</i> off the -<i>rind</i>, ignoring<a name="page_149" id="page_149"></a> the <i>kim</i> and scraping away the <i>kill-baby</i>, then -pull out the <i>pigs</i>, <i>chew</i> them decently, and put the <i>pips</i> to -their proper use.</p> - -<p>Good English surely is clear, easy, unambiguous, rich, -well-sounding, but not self-conscious; for too much pruning -kills....</p></div> - -<p class="c">THE END</p> - -<p><a name="transcrib" id="transcrib"></a></p> - -<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="" -style="padding:2%;border:3px dotted gray;"> -<tr><th align="center">Typographical error corrected by the etext transcriber:</th></tr> - -<tr><td align="center">He fell in victory’s pierce pursuit=> He fell in victory’s fierce pursuit {pg 55}</td></tr> -</table> - -<hr class="full" /> - - - - - - - -<pre> - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of On English Poetry, by Robert Graves - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON ENGLISH POETRY *** - -***** This file should be named 50174-h.htm or 50174-h.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/5/0/1/7/50174/ - -Produced by MWS, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was -produced from images generously made available by The -Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions -will be renamed. - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no -one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation -(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without -permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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