Poetry Notebook (7 page)

Frank Kermode has consistently been a fine instance, especially in his later phase, when he has had less time to waste tolerating the theorists, and when he has allowed the weight of his
accumulated experience as a reader to push him to the point where he can argue, about the later Shakespeare, that the metaphors probably seemed impenetrably mixed even to listeners at the time they
were first spoken. That judgement is as good as any by a poet, although we have to remember that Kermode himself
was
a poet when young, and might even have gone on being one if he had not
lost his composition book on his way home from the war. Usually you find that a critic who talks sense about poetry gave it a try early on. But it would be foolish to rule out the possibility that
somebody incapable of writing a single convincing line could still say something pertinent about someone else’s poem as a whole. Just because Dr Leavis, for example, who never wrote a poem,
rarely said anything interesting about one either, does not prove a case. But with all that considered, and in all fairness, it still seems legitimate to contend that for once, in a way, it’s
a case of those who can, teach.

•

Must we, however, resurrect Samuel Johnson’s reputation as a poet just so that we can give him more weight as a critic? Let’s hope not. Argued in verse, Johnsons
moral points are worth noting, but not remembering: he put them better in prose. Beside Goldsmith, Johnson is in the same area, and yet he is nowhere. Johnson not only didn’t write
The
Deserted Village
, he couldn’t have. He had the technique – when Goldsmith asked him to contribute a few lines to the poem, he was able to do so – but Goldsmith’s
socially sensitive vision was not one that Johnson could share at the creative level. To that extent, the great man was limited. And yet the craft of Johnson’s couplets gave him the knowledge
to spot a serious recurring flaw in Pope. The real strength of Johnson’s
Lives of the Poets
is in his kitchen criticism. It was the term that the Elizabethans once used for the
analysis of poetic technique: when to invert the foot, how to get a spondee by dropping a trochee into an iamb’s slot, and things like that. Kitchen criticism is a term that should be
revived, because its unlovely first word might have the merit of persuading the fastidious to make themselves scarce until they can accept that there is an initial level of manufacture at which the
potatoes have to be peeled. Johnson had a feel for the practical in the making of verses. He had constructed enough couplets of his own to see that the form, when used in a narrative, must
continually present the problem of the same pair of rhyme-sounds cropping up too early.

English is so rhyme-poor that the same few pairs are always trying to get back in. Keeping them out is part of the ingenuity. Johnson knew that Pope could be wonderfully ingenious in loading and
balancing the interior of a line, or pair of lines, or even four of them. But Johnson was right to say that Pope was too often not diligent enough at reading back to see how long ago he had used
the same terminal sound as in the pair of rhymes he was currently putting together, and that the effect of inadvertent repetition undermined the intended air of inexhaustible virtuosity.
Johnson’s strictures on this point have the large implication that Pope was better in the brief passage than in the grand sweep, and any critic today who wants to write about the meaning of
the word ‘form’ when it comes to Pope could profitably start from where Johnson left off. (He might even find a hard-news reason for contending that the ‘Essay on Man’ is
badly argued: its author chose a bad form to argue in.) It would not have been impossible for a non-poet to have noticed what Johnson noticed about Pope, but it would have been far less likely.

•

Christopher Reid’s recently published selection of the letters of Ted Hughes shows that Hughes was well aware of how his wife Sylvia Plath, in her last phase, was working
miracles. I remember the time well. In London during the same cold winter of her death, I was reading over and over a batch of her poems in the
London Magazine
. One of them was
‘Cut’, the poem that bleeds from a sliced thumb. (Since 1965 it has been one of the most immediately thrilling things in her key book
Ariel
.) Without trying to, I memorized
several moments from that poem, most conspicuously the lines that start with the ‘Kamikaze man’. I was already wondering why Hughes himself was showing signs of no longer finding such
specific vividness desirable in his own poetry. I thought, and still think, that his early poems were his best, and that the very best was the one about the jaguar in the zoo, especially in its
last line, ‘Over the cage floor the horizons come.’ If he could do that once, why didn’t he do it again? (The admiring reader is always potentially censorious, because the
enjoyment is so childish: do it
again
.) And here was Plath, getting into that same wizardly area of concrete perception generating the purely poetic. For many years I prided myself on the
fact that I didn’t have to read the cut thumb poem to remember everything that went on in it.

Recently I read the actual text again and found that I had remembered too much. I had remembered something that wasn’t there. In my memory, the kamikaze man had worn a ‘Gray gauze Ku
Klux Klan / Babushka’. But Plath never included the word ‘gray’. That word had leaked in from my own memory, where gauze tends to be gray because when I was very young I was
always cutting myself up somehow, getting the wounds bandaged, and wearing the bandages until they were dirty. The same sort of personal memory association has given Plath what amounts to the
punchline of the poem: its vocative penultimate line, a two-word sentence addressing the bloody wound: ‘Dirty girl.’ How brilliant, and how it tempts us to believe that this is the
atomic stuff of poetry, fit material for the catastrophic expansion of a career into a supernova of publicity.

But what about all the poets since her death – and especially the women poets – who have delved into their traumas to dig up the same sort of stuff, and yet have produced poems more
boring than somebody telling you their dream? The answer is not just in what Plath said, but in the suave swing with which she said it. The lines about the kamikaze man, terrible in their content,
coast blissfully along like cool jazz: you can practically see Milt Jackson’s hammers bouncing on the silver leaves of the vibraphone. In Australia, Gwen Harwood (whom I didn’t find out
about until later) shared Plath’s gift for placing a phrase on the music like Blossom Dearie singing in a cocktail bar. Hardly anybody can do it. When you think of the few poets who can, and
of how what a jazz musician would call their ‘feel’ unites them, surely you are getting close to another kind of building block that is set apart from the semantic even if never getting
beyond it – the building block constituted by the propulsion of a line.

There is an elementary way of propelling a line of iambic pentameter which almost anyone can do. (How would we know, without further evidence, that ‘Nothing is so beautiful as
Spring’ even with the novelty of its truncated first foot, hadn’t been written by Mrs Hemans, as famous in her day as Sylvia Plath, but no more dangerously exciting than a pile of clean
napkins?) Kitchen criticism tells us that non-elementary ways, or variations, were being looked for well before Shakespeare was born. Throughout the history of English poetry, the tightly packed
line that tells
you
it is tightly packed has been a way of sharpening up the basic pentameter. It is even there in Chaucer, and by the time of Shakespeare’s sonnets it is already
getting near the limit. The penultimate line of our already adduced Sonnet 129 is a supreme example: ‘All this the world well knows; yet none knows well’. Reversing the two words
‘well knows’ so as to wind the spring at the end of the line gives a reserve of energy to launch the last line like a crossbow bolt: ‘To shun the heaven that leads men to this
hell.’ But even standing on its own, the penultimate line is arresting for its effect of being packed with energy.

Part of that effect comes from the way the iambs are morphed into spondees as the conversational accents are played off against the meter. In everyday speech, the word ‘well’ would
get at least as much emphasis as ‘knows’. In the meter, the stress gives it less. The combination gives both words equal weight. The same thing happens at the end of the line, so that
the three words ‘none knows well’ seem to be stressed equally, in a monotone on a falling cadence. Put it all together and the effect is far from being tum-ti-tum. (The iambic
pentameter is always being called tum-ti-tum by people who couldn’t write even the tum-ti-tum version if their lives depended on it.) The effect of the packed line is to reinforce expectation
by defeating it. The elaboration on the underlying structure spells out the structure: spells it out by outplaying it.

All depends, however, on the reader’s knowing what to expect. George Herbert, in his showpiece poem ‘Providence’, could depend on his readers being able to place the
conversational phrasing of ‘want of heed’ against the strict iambic meter when he asked ‘Should creatures want, for want of heed, their due?’ Shelley could depend on the
reader’s awareness that he was playing passion against law when he wrote ‘Stay yet awhile! Speak to me once again.’ The expectation is still there underneath. Far into the
twentieth century, poets in English could still depend on the reader’s knowing that there was a simple rhythm under the complex one and that the simple was what made the complex possible.
Empson’s poems almost entirely depended on the reader’s knowing that. (‘Stars how much further from me fill my night.’) Empson further stoked the packed line, to such a
pressure that an effect which had begun before Shakespeare came to be called Empsonian. In Geoffrey Hill’s sonnet ‘The Eve of St Mark’ there is a line which I am sure deliberately
echoes Empson (‘Along the mantelpiece veined lustres trill’), and which I suspect is trying to hitch a ride on the Empsonian wagon that collected the echoes of packed sonorities –
especially in religious poetry – from a five- or six-hundred-year tradition of poets writing stanzas that could not easily be set as songs or hymns: the by-product of a trade-union
demarcation dispute half a millennium long.

But once again, the trick demands that the underlying frame should not be broken. When Samuel Johnson called Donne’s numbers ‘rough’, he meant that Donne was not keeping count
while he worked his distortions. Quite often, Johnson was right. Donne’s jawbreakers, often coming at the knotty point of a conceit, are always fascinating, but they are still jawbreakers.
Poets write jawbreakers when, usually through enthusiasm, they lose touch with the meter they are presuming to supersede. Johnson disapproved of enthusiasm. What even he could never anticipate,
however, was a condition in which hardly any reader knew the difference between a procedure varied and a procedure violated. We are in that condition now.

•

A critic today, I think, should be able to see that Tony Harrison, famous for composing in couplets, mangles them almost as often as he gets them right. (By academics who
can’t count even on their fingers, the wreckage is called vigour, spontaneity, bold re-energizing of a convention, etc.) The same critic should be able to see – it is the same
perception, redirected – that Peter Redgrove, say, maintains an unswerving strictness under his seeming freedoms. These three lines from his poem ‘Travelogue’ are based on an
elementary iambic pentameter with nothing but lexical brilliance to disguise it:

Since I myself try not to write anything that can’t be read aloud, I would have covered the possibility that ‘board’ could be heard the wrong way, but in all
other respects I found those lines, when I first read them, as naturally sayable as if they were handwritten in the Tower of London by Sir Walter Raleigh, wrapped in his muddied velvet cloak, and
warming his hands at the blaze of his own vocabulary. I don’t believe, however, that smoothness of recitative in itself is enough to make poetry, let alone a poem. Early on, Conrad Aiken had
a reputation nudging that of T. S. Eliot as a poet who could narrate in iambic meter. Today Aiken looks empty, and he should have looked that way at the time. His torrential mellifluousness fooled
almost everybody, and eventually it fooled the Oxford University Press (American branch) into publishing a complete
Collected Poems
more than eight hundred pages long. On page 457 appears a
poem called ‘Sea Holly’ which has its charm, and on page 797 ‘The Lady in Pink Pyjamas’ would be almost not bad if only a) some of its bravura could be removed and b) he had
never written anything else in his life.

I mention Aiken because there is an upside to the fact that the beginning reader in poetry no longer knows much about meter. All the dull poetry that was ever praised for its technique is
effectively no longer in existence. Churned out by hundreds of poets, published in thousands of volumes, there was a whole stretch of correctly genteel English poetry composed in the British Empire
from the late Victorian era onward until the Georgians were invaded by modernism. It was fully matched by an American equivalent that was far less influenced by Whitman than we might
retrospectively wish. All of it – comprising millions of lines impeccably turned – is gone as if it had never been. A student who took John Drinkwater down from the shelf now would
scarcely even recognize that he was nothing. Once, he was famous: and not just as the author of a quite good play about Abraham Lincoln. He was a famous poet.

So the idea that a poem can be made poetic by its structure alone is open to question, at the very least. I would still like to contend, however, that any poem which comes to exist without
having first been built might be destined for the same pit of oblivion that all the well-wrought dross went into. Such a fate seems especially likely when the poem without form has nothing else to
grab your attention either: no little low heavens, no gauze babushkas, nothing to see or even hear. Today’s deliberately empty poetry can get a reputation for a time: there will always be a
residency for J. H. Prynne. But it will never be as interesting as the question of how it got there. Some would hold Charles Olson personally responsible, but I fear – fear because of the
size and volume of the scuffle I might get into – that the culprit was William Carlos Williams. When he realized, correctly, that everything was absent from Whitman’s poetry except
arresting observations, Williams, instead of asking himself how he could put back what was missing, asked himself how he could get rid of the arresting observations. The result was a red
wheelbarrow: no doubt intensely significant, but a long way short of those little low heavens.