Poetry Notebook (9 page)

Edgar’s poem can have this flaw and still remain intact. (Presumably the crack in the golden bowl did not stop it holding fruit.) But it’s definitely a blip in the self-contained air
of infallibility. The perfect has momentarily become less-than-perfect, with the sole advantage that one is forcibly persuaded that the word ‘perfect’ might mean something. (If it means
‘stand-alone’, ‘independent’ and ‘self-contained’, then those are already better words.) But the argument continues despite the backfire. The motor hasn’t
stopped running. It powers the radio telescope of the moon, which is listening to the stars, appearing here in their old-style, pre-scientific form. What does he wish to believe about the possible
destination of his thoughts after they are beamed up to the soap paring, or nail paring, that has now become a parabolic dish? (This poet doesn’t mix his metaphors: he morphs them.) The
answer is in the two-part coda’s second stanza, which is the last stanza of the poem:

He wants their two trajectories, his and hers, to join again. But we have seen that they haven’t, and now we are told that they won’t, because when he addresses
her, she isn’t there, except in his head. This is a drama for one person, and it’s over. He has been talking to himself all along.

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When reacting to a poem, the word ‘perfect’ is inadequate for the same reason that the word ‘wow’ would be. But it isn’t inadequate because it
says nothing. It is inadequate because it is trying to say everything. On a second reading, we begin to deduce that our first reading was complex, even if it seemed simple. Scores of judgements
were going on, too quickly for us to catch but adding up to a conviction – first formed early in the piece and then becoming more and more detailed – that this object’s mass of
material is held together by a binding force. Such a binding force seems to operate within all successful works of art in any medium, like a singularity in space that takes us in with it, so that
we can’t pay attention to anything else, and least of all to all the other works of art that might be just as powerful. We get to pay attention to them only when we recover.

But recover from what? A spell? Here again, all the natural first words are suspect. I could say why I picked this less-than-perfect, but almost perfect, poem by Stephen Edgar out of all the
scores of perfect poems by him, and out of all the hundreds of perfect poems by other people. I could say I picked it out because it haunts me. If haunting is what ghosts are good at, hanging
around to rattle the pots and rearrange the furniture when you least expect it, then ‘haunt’ is the right verb. But it’s a verb that I would rather not use. I think Edgar is a
fine poetic craftsman. But in that sentence there are two other words I would rather not use either. The word ‘craftsman’ always sounds like a doomed attempt to give an artist the same
credibility as a master carpenter, and ‘fine’ smacks of self-consciously upmarket (i.e. effectively downmarket) American advertising, as in ‘fine dining’, ‘fine
linens’, and ‘fine wine’. Well, yes, of course the poet is a fine craftsman, and of course his poem haunts you with its perfection. All these superannuated words we should take
for granted when talking about any poem that is properly realized. Actually to put them back into print is like diving on a wreck, with no yield of treasure except scrap metal.

Yet we need the ideas, if not the vocabulary, if we are to begin talking about why and how the poem in question is a made object, and not a foundling. Every bit of it might well be a
trouvaille
– how phrases are assembled and lucky strikes are struck is an even deeper question – but all the bits are put together by someone who either knows exactly what
he’s doing or else can control the process by which he doesn’t, quite. You could say that the poet, right from the start and without interruption, transmits an air of authority, but I
doubt that the phrase counts for much more than all those other words I’ve been trying to avoid. (Even the author of a jingle on a birthday card has an air of authority if you like the
sentiment.) The thing to grasp is that the fine words and phrases are standing in for a complex reaction. They serve as tokens for a complete discussion of an intricate process that doesn’t
just happen subsequently, on a second reading, but happens initially, on the first reading. Most of the analysis that I have supplied above almost certainly happened the first time that I read the
poem, but this time I have written it out.

So much can happen, and in such a short space, only because we bring our own history to the poem, even as it brings the poet’s history to us. Contained within the first reaction are all
the mechanisms we have built up through reading poems since we were young: reading them and deciding they were good. (We might have learned even more from the poems that we decided were bad, but we
could do that only by having first learned to recognize the good.) This mental store that the reader brings into play on a first reading is, I believe, the missing subject in most of what we call
criticism. The missing subject needs to be illuminated if we are fruitfully to pursue all the other subjects that crop up as we speak further. Without that first thing, all the subsequent things
might be full of information, but they will lack point. It makes little sense, for example, to say that a poem fits into the general run of a poet’s work if we don’t first find
ourselves saying why it stands out even from that. We can say later that it blends in, but it had better be blending in only in the sense that it stands out like a lot of the poet’s other
poems. A poem doesn’t, or shouldn’t, express the author’s ‘poetry’, and it’s a bad sign when we contend that it does. It was a fateful turning point for the
career of Ted Hughes when his later poems were discovered to be ‘Hughesian’, i.e. characteristic instead of unique. The idea that a poet should be praised for producing sequences of
poems, and even whole books of poems, that give us nothing but a set of exercises in his own established manner, is ruinous for criticism, and is often the sign of a ruined poet. The great mass of
later Lowell is weak when tested by the intensity of early Lowell. Read ‘A Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’ again – or merely recall the bits of it that you have in your memory
– and then try to find anything as strong in the bean silo of
History.
It takes a critic who has never appreciated the strength of Lowell’s early poems to think that the later
work is a development rather than a decline.

In the sum of a poet’s achievement, it isn’t enough that the same tone recurs, and often it’s a sign of deterioration when it does. Edgar, always precise about shades of colour
at each end of the day, is a modern master of what I would like to call the daylight nocturne, but I would expect to arouse suspicion if I praised one of his poems for having no other
characteristics. As it happens, almost every poem he publishes is impossible to reduce to a kit of favourite effects. The argument and its illustrations always serve each other inseparably: they
can be discussed separately, but they flow back together straight away. So everything I can say about him follows from his capacity to produce the unified thing. From that initial point, the
discussion can widen. We can say that Edgar suffers from the peculiar Australian critical climate in which it is widely and honestly believed that a rhymed poem in regular stanzas must be
inhibiting to a sense of expression that would otherwise flow more freely. The elementary truth that there are levels of imagination that a poet won’t reach unless formal restrictions force
him to has been largely supplanted, in Australia, by a more sophisticated (though far less intelligent) conviction that freedom of expression is more likely to be attained through letting the
structure follow the impulse.

In that climate, Stephen Edgar’s name is not yet properly valued even in Australia. To believe that it one day will be, you have to believe that something so good is bound to prevail. But
that might not happen. Australia (and here we enter into sociology and politics) has a small literary market anyway, and for poetry it is minuscule, so prizes and grants count. Though his position
has somewhat improved lately, Edgar has been awarded remarkably few of either: partly because, I fear, the committees are stacked with poets who couldn’t write in a set form to save their
lives, and with critics and academics who believe that the whole idea of a set form is obsolete. It would be nice to think that this tendency could be reversed by the example of a single poet. But
of course it can’t. All one can do is argue for the importance of his work, and that argument must start with the certainty of our first judgement, made on a first reading: a judgement which
is not yet concerned with advocacy. On a second reading we can, and must, begin to propose a restoration of the balance. There is a place for free forms: they no longer have to justify themselves.
There should be a place for regular forms too, but they now have to justify themselves every time. One of Edgar’s dictionaries is a classical dictionary. He can read the ancient languages,
and might have written poems with no properties except those from the far past. But his work participates in a new classicism, fit to incorporate the modern world, in which it deserves a high
place. Almost any of his poems will tell us that, on a first reading. The second reading tells us why we should try to tell everyone else.

The poem which strikes us as enjoying perfect success all on its own, and does not just rank as a typical item in its author’s inventory, has the status of treasure, and
someone will always have the urge to collect the treasures into a treasure house, like the cave on Captain Kidd’s island, or the Kaiserliche Schatzkammer in Vienna. The most common form of
treasure house is the anthology. The student can be confidently advised not to overlook anthologies whenever they show up on the shelves of second-hand bookshops. The further back in time from
which the poems in an anthology emanate, the more likely is that era to be represented fairly. Closer to now, the question of permissions looms. Sometimes there are poets – Edith Sitwell was
one such – who don’t want to be anthologized, regarding their total achievement as too grand to be appreciable by the fragment. But more often it is a question of the price. Luckily, in
Britain, the increasingly vast, web-based and world-girdling sound museum called the Poetry Archive counts as an anthology that every poet wants to be in, while any publisher is glad to count the
publicity as sufficient payment. The Poetry Archive is one of the many initiatives for which we should thank the generosity and imagination of Andrew Motion, who in his role as Poet Laureate took a
larger view of his task than merely to pay homage to the Royal Family. He turned all the best poets of his time into a royal family, and got them to speak into the microphone. The results quickly
accumulated into a treasure house. One of its most glittering features is the series of guided tours to favourite poems. When I was asked to conduct one of these tours I at first thought it was
impossible to convey the full measure of appreciative enthusiasm in a single paragraph. Then I remembered that it’s exactly what we do in life: when we want to switch people on to a specific
poet, we don’t deliver a complete lecture, we try to hook them with a sentence.

‘Mayflies’ by Richard Wilbur

After he came back to the US from the fighting in Europe, Richard Wilbur set a standard for post-war American lyric poetry which nobody else could quite match. Some had the
sense of form, some the originality of imagery, but he had both. His stanza forms, many of them invented by himself, can be analysed forever, but his details can be enjoyed instantly. In the little
poem ‘Mayflies’ there is a moment I love, when the tiny creatures, rising and descending in the air, are called ‘the fine pistons of some bright machine’. How did he think
of that?

‘The Whitsun Weddings’ by Philip Larkin

Otherwise hard to criticize in his poetic greatness, Philip Larkin was sometimes called a dull reciter of his own poetry, but in fact he was good at that too. His unexciting
looks were matched by an unexciting voice, but unlike almost all professional actors he knew how to observe his line endings, and never made the mistake of trying to put extra emotion into lines
that already had, packed within them, all the emotion they could take. He must have known that ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ was a great poem, but he read it out with deliberate
matter-of-factness, reminding us that it largely is a matter of fact. As the everyday details succeed each other, the story is built up which comes to its magnificent climax in the final image of
the arrow shower – one of great poetic moments of modern times, a coup on a level with Shakespeare, and, when read out by its author, all the more effective for being merely said, and not
declaimed.

‘A Subaltern’s Love Song’ by John Betjeman

In this recording, it is only appropriate that Betjeman, on being asked to recite ‘Joan Hunter Dunn’, has to search for it in his book, unable to find it because it
isn’t called that. The heroine of the poem, the most dominating of the poet’s long line of strapping sports girls, became so famous she stepped out of the shrine he had built for her
and took on a new, permanent life. Betjeman’s poems got into the national consciousness like nobody else’s, and they did so at every level of class: it wasn’t just the gentry who
relished his music. Some of the critics hated it because they thought poetry should sound harder to come by, but if they had known more about poetic technique they would have seen Betjeman to be
the dedicated craftsman that Philip Larkin so much, and so rightly, admired.

‘Jerusalem’ by James Fenton