Faber's 'The Waste Land, a Biography', by Matthew Hollis

My (lengthy) review of this strange book is published at:

https://brazen-head.org/2023/03/29/a-wasted-life-of-the-waste-land/

Letters of Basil Bunting #3. Pound, Bunting and Persian literature

Bunting’s Persia revisted. 

 

 

Ten years ago, trying to study Bunting’s disagreement with Pound over Bunting’s Persian translations, I had to rely on the available snippets of Bunting’s correspondence. taken out of context, often with ellipsis, I  could only wonder what was hidden by the frequent ellipsis in the quotations.

 

It's a delight to see the letters printed in full here. Niven says of them: 

 

The following two letters to Pound repay close attention, because they contain arguably the most revealing statements about Bunting’s literary development in this part of the correspondence. (p.91)

 

If we leave the bus that goes to Briggflatts, beyond any possible significance they have for Bunting’s literary development, the letters illuminate a problem central to one strand of poetics in the twentieth century. Bunting, Pound, William Carlos Williams et al were minimalists by instinct. But they were touched by the thought that Great Poets Write Long Poems. Disdaining narrative, their problem was how to make a long poem cohere. 

 

One of the many benefits of Niven’s edition is obvious when a quote that was available ten years ago is compared with the letter it’s taken from.

 

It occurred to me a long time ago that this indirect business had gone about as far as it would go without degenerating. Nobody is going to do it better than you for a hell of a long time, and Zuk [the American poet Louis Zukofsky] can only introduce further complications of method that remove it from a possible reader, step by step, until somebody will rise who will… be totally unintelligible. (Bunting qtd. Makin 1992,  p.77. Ellipsis in Makin.)

 

…somebody will rise who will justify the kind of things the academic nincompoops used to say about you, and be totally unintelligible. Hence ‘Chomei’ to reduce it to such simplicity as I could, which thereupon ended the matter so far as I am personally concerned. I can do nothing with it that will satisfy me. It is much better to leave the field to you and perhaps Zuk’s elaborations and try telling a story.

 

This leads to the wretchedly unsuccessful attempt to do a bit of Machiavelli, and consequent considerable thinking. (p.93)

 

Niven’s footnote suggests that the ‘bit of Machiavelli’ hadn’t survived, but ‘How Duke Valentine Contrived’ had been published by Pound two years earlier and ‘wretchedly unsuccessful’ is an apt description.  

 

From the 1930s Bunting was looking for the exit from the inevitable stylistic cul-de-sac, and his instincts, reinforced by reading Persian, was to return narrative to the mix. Pound wanted none of it. Their clash over Bunting’s attempts to translate The Shahnemeh made the problem explicit. 

 

Rather than let the letters speak for themselves, Niven imposes an interpretation on them:

 

Though it would take him another three decades to work through the impulse, one of Bunting’s distinctive contributions to late Modernist poetics (announced tentatively in The Spoils and much more emphatically in Briggflatts) was an embodiment of the sorts of epic, narrative values he advocates in this letter. 

Perhaps fairly, given the emphasis on heroic action in the cantos, Pound took umbrage at Bunting’s suggestion […] (p. 91)

 

‘Perhaps fairly’ misses the point of Bunting’s ‘suggestion’ and is an odd reading of the Cantos.

 

The problem, how to tell a story using the techniques that Bunting admired in ‘poetry’, or how to reconcile modernism and Traditional narrative if you prefer, was not one he solved. The kind of ‘epic, narrative values’ he advocates in these letters are not evident in The Spoils and only occasionally in Briggflatts.  The latter is a poem with narrative passages, and it purports to be an autobiography, but how much could readers learn about Bunting’s life if they only had the poem as evidence? 

 

The test of that thought is whether his criticism of the Cantos in the second of these two letters applies to his own later work. ‘But the literature of the last-how long-has all of it been psychological: people talking or thinking about things they didnt do, or would like to do, or why and why not,’ describes much of The Spoils and some of Briggflatts. In the following quotation replace Sigismundo with Basil, the Encyclopedia Britannica with Burton’s biography, the Cantos and works of E.P with Briggflatts and the comment applies to Bunting’s poem.

 

Sigismundo was presumably an active lad, but the cantos dont relate his activities , they allude to them or show him alluding to them. IF I want to know what Sig did I goter consult the Encycl.Brit whose contributor presumably had found out somewhere not in the works of E.P. (p.95)

 

 

 

Letters of Basil Bunting Selected and edited by Alex Niven. #2

 The letters as biographical evidence;

‘Letters are meant to be written to affect one bloke, not a public. What is true in the context of sender and recipient may be a bloody lie in the context of author and public…’ (Bunting to Zukofsky, June 1953 qtd in Burton, p. 354)

 

What becomes obvious, when Bunting's letters are printed in full and in some kind of sequence, is how limited they are as biographical evidence.

 

A skilful biographer, like Richard Burton in his biography of Bunting, makes cautious use of letters as biographical evidence. On their own they don’t constitute biography. Something mentioned in a letter may be fictional; an absence in the letters doesn’t necessarily mean it’s absent from the life. Burton’s biography makes it clear that Bunting loved a good story and wasn’t above embellishing one to make it more interesting.

 

Before email killed it, letter writing was a performance art where content and expression were shaped towards the recipient.  Unless explicitly so, a letter wasn’t testimony delivered under oath, or an essay written for examination, despite the tendency of scholars to treat letters as both. The one letter in this collection, explicitly written ‘for the record’ is different in tone and syntax from the others. 

Bunting repeatedly told his correspondents that his letters were not written for publication or posterity: ‘None of what I write in letters is meant in any permanent way, it isn’t thought out or deliberated on. It is offered merely in passing, not meant to be dwelt upon’ (p.193).

 

It's a caveat worth keeping in mind. Thanks to Niven, interested readers now have access to complete letters, contextualised in the sequence in which they were written. 

 

The letters hint at biographical events for which there is no external evidence. ‘I am off for the continent, and I hope to be in Italy sometimes in the spring and I hope to visit Rapallo and I hope to meet you there. My Girl Died’ (p.24).

 

Niven can only note: ‘This curious elliptical aside ,-for which I can find absolutely no context-brings home how little we really know of the minutiae of BB’s early years’ (n. 67 p. 24). The same is true of Bunting’s strange claim to have led some kind of protest in London during the succession crisis.

 

Later in life, Bunting was adamant, in both letters and interviews, that Wordsworth had been a major influence on him from childhood. When Bunting discovered that Peggy Greenbank was still alive, he tells his correspondents that he had never not been in love with her. It would be possible to extract such statements as ‘evidence’, there is no reason to doubt him, but it’s now possible to see that neither claim is mentioned in any of the letters prior to the ones in which the claim appears (1953 and 1965 respectively). 

 

Whether this means the statements are ‘false’; demonstrates the limitations of letters as biographical evidence, or opens up the rabbit hole that ‘true or false’ might have different definitions in different contexts and is rarely a straight forward binary,  it’s now possible to ask those questions.  

Letters of Basil Bunting. edited by Alex Niven

 Excited to finally get my hands on a copy of this. So far very impressed by Niven's editing, not everyone can do footnotes or annotations but so far his have been everything they need to be and nothing more.  

I'm  looking forward to reading several of these letter which i've only seen quoted with the inevitable critical ...

More to follow.

Strangeness and Power: Essays on the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill

Strangeness and Power: Essays on the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill
Edited by Andrew Michael Roberts. 

The common response to the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, acknowledged by the contributors and editor of this volume, is that Hill’s poetry is ‘Difficult’. Most readers, encountering his poems for the first time, would admit to their ‘strangeness’, though many might question their ‘power’. 

The blurb  claims that Hill was ‘by common consent one of the finest poets in the English language in the second half of the twentieth century and early years of the 21st’. ‘Common Consent’ erases his many critics and detractors but flags the writers’ assumption in this volume that whatever they write that might suggest the opposite, Hill was a great and important poet.  

What characterizes this volume of essays is this odd paradox: the authors acknowledge the problems readers face. Several of them lay out a detailed explanation of why readers might not be impressed or convinced by aspects of the poetry. At the same time, this does nothing to shake their faith that he was a great or an important poet. In presenting the ‘case against’, they do such a good job that the assumption of his greatness seems ever more fragile.   

In any general collection of essays on a single author there should be a core of essays of interest to any reader of Hill’s poetry, and then a few for those with more specialised interests. This book meets that criteria successfully.

In the first Category,  Martin Dodsworth takes on Hill’s difficulty; Alex Pestell discusses Hill’s  engagement with Philosophy; Mathew Sperling chronicles Hill’s relationship with his publisher and Stephen James writes on Hill’s later poetry.

Of the more specialised studies, the aptly named Tom Jones takes on Hill and the eighteenth century  while Steven Mathews explores the relationship to Eliot and Jones.  

There are other ‘specialised essays’ on Hill’s relationship to Denise Riiey and J.H. Prynne, his affinities with ‘Radical landscape Poetry’ and studies by Natalie Pollard and Samira Nadkarni of ‘Materiality and design’ and ‘Speech! Speech!’ respectively.   

It’s a fine spread of essays.

Before I read this collection, I would have counted myself amongst the admirers of Hill’s work. That admiration is qualified by my inability to see the value of the Day Books, but up to the publication of Clavics, he was the only living poet whose publications I bought as they appeared. The essays I read left me far less certain about Hill’s achievement.  

For example, Martin Dodsworth tackles the problem of Hill’s difficulty. This is an honest attempt to confront the problem most readers face. With the (probably unknown) ghost of C. S. Lewis looking over his shoulder[1]  he identifies three aspects of Hill’s difficulty for the reader: allusiveness, indefiniteness of relation, and ambiguity, pointing out there are others. 

Choosing a poem to anchor his discussion of allusion he does a masterly unravelling of allusion, but demonstrates convincingly that even when the allusions are explored and explained, the poem doesn’t become any more clear than it was two pages earlier when it was quoted. 

As Dodsworth’s essay unfolds, his scholarly explanations seem increasingly at odds with a different response. Compare the first two sentences of this summing up of the first part of the essay with the third sentence. The first two sound like a Professor performing a poetry reading. 

‘The reader follows the poet in searching for meaning within the language of the poem and within the world to which language is a mode of access. In this search, bafflement signifies failure, but also a kind of success, that of a sustained attempt at truthful utterance. Some readers however, may with reason, find this success difficult to accept.’ P185

The status of these unidentified readers, and their justifiable reluctance to accept the value of the poems, is acknowledged but brushed aside.

What is perhaps disturbing about this essay, which runs from p174-202,  is that having presented such a convincing ‘case against’ the value of the ‘difficulty’ he discusses,   Dodsworth does not balance the argument. Instead he writes:

At one or two points, this essay had suggested a resistant response to one aspect or another or the poems, and sometimes to a poet whose sense of the poetic invitation is often absent and (implicitly) to a nascent expository tradition that has too much of the inert about it. But it would be wrong to conclude without acknowledging that Geoffrey Hill has a place amongst the greatest of our poets……I should like to conclude with a list of some of the poems and volumes for which I am most grateful…….These are justification for Hill’s difficulties.[2]

If ‘At one or two points’ is understatement, then in terms of an essay collapsing into itself, this ending is a positively stellar implosion. After all the careful exposition, the justification of the difficulty, promised at the end of the first paragraph of the essay, is a list of the writer’s favourite poems.  

The best essay in some ways is Mathew Sperling’s short discussion of Hill’s relationships with his publisher. It doesn’t do him any favours either, he obviously had a very high opinion of himself from the start, but it does open an interesting window on Hill’s attitudes to his own work and reputation.

I bought this book specifically for Steven Mathew’s Essay ‘Felt Unities’, on Hill, Eliot and Jones.  Jones has 1 entry in the index to Hill’s collected critical writings, in which Hill lists Rosenberg, Gurney and Jones as ‘three of the finest poets of that war’. While Rosenberg and Gurney get a full essay each in the CCWs, there is nothing else about Jones.  I was intrigued by this. 

I’m not in any position to critique Professor Mathew’s argument, and I’m sure I’ll be reading this essay for some time, but it did send me back to reread Mercian Hymns. Having recently been stuck in quarantine rereading ‘The Anathemata’, the result of rereading Mercian Hymns was surprisingly unpleasant. Beside Jones, Hill suddenly seemed lightweight and self-regarding.

I was startled the first time I wrote those last two sentences because they were so unexpected. 

For all the ponderous seriousness of Mercian Hymns: ‘Then is now’, but so what? Against Jones’ intent, scope, and subtlety, reading Hill’s work is increasingly an exercise in over hearing someone talking to himself, and my presence as reader becomes increasingly redundant, except to applaud another performance.

This was not what I had expected.

It made me think of several of his critical essays, where I have the feeling that G. Hill is wrestling with the problems of communication while working out his thoughts on the topic. Which is what a first draft can often be. I wish, perhaps naively,  that he’d finished the wrestling match and discovered what he’d been trying to say in the draft, and then written a final copy which was as close to what he wanted to say as he could get. Too often it’s like listening to a medieval historian writing about the difficulty of accessing a manuscript and the difficulty of reading it, without ever getting to the point of saying what she learnt from the manuscript she had been struggling to find.

What also hangs over this collection is the vexed problem of the Author Function. Would these critics give so much time to an anonymous poet if he or she produced poems which can be so easily and thoroughly criticised on so many counts? The answer is obviously no. The evidence goes one way, but the conclusion, which was also the starting point, remains unaltered: Hill is a great/important/ fine poet. But no one takes on the task of explaining what was so great/important/fine about his work.

If a good book of critical essays should send you back to the subject of the collection and see him or her or it in a new light, this one is highly successful. 

It also raises some fascinating general issues, not least the whole problem of obscurity, intentional or otherwise.  Which would lead back to C. S. Lewis. 

[1] In his Conclusions (chapter vi) to ‘Williams and the Arthuriad’ in ‘Arthurian Torso’ (1948), a piece known to David Jones. Lewis’s ‘Conclusions’ is fine example of a critic trying to explain why he thinks a poet is good while mapping out different types of ‘obscurity in modern poetry’.    

[2] The body of the essay is followed by two dated post scripts, postscript 2017 and post postscript 2019 respectively. One wonders what professor Dodsworth would think of a student who treated essay writing as live performance and didn’t simply rewrite the first draft to bring it in to balance and focus. 

An Introduction to David Jones.

https://youtu.be/_eBNYDd-_CQ

A Dominican talks about his interest in David Jones. It's a neat, short introduction which I think benefits from the Catholic perspective. And i finally know how to pronounce The Anathemata.

What does this mean? The nonsense people write about poetry. Hannah Sullivan's 'Three poems' and The T.S.Eliot prize. 3/3

This is the final post of a set of three.
Cards on the table.

I think the highest praise a critic can give a poet is to say: this poem is well made, and then explain in what way it’s well made. In the best criticism the critic or reviewer doesn’t sound like they’d like to write poetry but, having been condemned to prose, is throwing out mellifluous waffle and hoping no one is paying attention. 

I often wonder if anyone is paying attention or if part of the game is to let the eye sweep down the page, coming to rest on the occasional phrase but never lingering long enough to ask ‘yes, but what does this mean’. It sounds good; file it away, then use whenever possible. 

Here, as antidote, is a random extract from page 77 of a book I’m currently reading which I think is excellent criticism: Neil Corcoran’s study of David Jones’ 'The Anathemata'. 'The Anathamata' may or may not be a poem therefore it does push the boundaries of what is a poem. It uses language in a way that challenges the reader and works a complicated set of symbols and allusions to suggest a very complex attitude to time, culture, religion and history. Corcoran has been steadily confronting the baffling awkwardness of the work, and trying to explain its excellence:

‘Assimilating, and developing from, a range of formal models embracing both the medieval intricacies of Langland and the post-symbolist obliquenesses of the The Waste Land, David Jones creates, in the Anathemata, an altogether new and entirely individual sort of poem’. 

Even without the discussion which preceded this, and the explanation which follows, there’s no doubt about what the critic is saying. 

Compare this with:

‘’Three poems’ are a sensual encounter with language. The combination of Sullivan’s disciplined couplets and riot of language create a memorable mediation on living and dying.’

And the problem is obvious.

This quote about ‘Three Poems’ is from the official T.S.Eliot Prize website. A review posted before the judges made their choice. 

It is approved and presented as an ‘unqualified verdict’. 

Instead of approving the conclusion someone should have asked the writer to specify what a ‘sensual encounter with language’ might be? Or to give an example by quoting a passage from the poem. Poetry blather rarely comes with supporting evidence. Make a nice phrase: pass on.

It’s not clear if the poems, the reader or the writer are having the sensual encounter, but it’s difficult to understand what ‘a sensual encounter with language’ might mean, though it does evoke a grubby character with a pornographic novel. All encounters with written language are sensual…they involve at least two of the senses. 

An encounter with sensual language, or an encounter with a language of sensuality?  Leaving aside such waffle, there is, finally, some kind of comment on technique. But it too is problematic. It does no justice to the variety of forms within and across the three poems; not all the pieces are written in couplets. Disciplined couplets evoke Pope and Dryden. But couplets are a formal discipline, so in what way is it a disciplined discipline? 

What is a ‘riot of language’? One of Joyce’s lists? Gertrude Stein? Dylan Thomas piling on the adjectives? 

 A riot suggests something destructive and out of control and Sullivan’s diction and syntax never feels anything but controlled.  

There is no example given of language rioting in a disciplined couplet. 

And so it goes:

The poem ‘Trains a steady gaze on the details of urban existence’. (define 'steady gaze?'). ‘The personal and the public combine in the crucible of Sullivan’s language into a disciplined, structured object of terrible beauty’ 

Language was rioting a few lines earlier. This ‘crucible of Sullivan’s language’ produces an ‘object of terrible beauty’. 

Acknowledging, as one is presumably supposed to, the nod to Yeats, one wonders how this is an example of  ‘Terrible Beauty’.  Comparing the Easter Rising with Sullivan’s domestic is a disturbing failure of proportion. 

I have the feeling that the critic is trying to claim that thinking about life and death and seeing them as interlinked is somehow newsworthy or worthy of praise. But that thought is too ugly to pursue. 

At this point I wanted to give up.  It’s too depressing.

‘Language echoes through time but, like cancer cells, which ‘divide interminably’ the nuclear chain reaction generates itself; life and death are one and the same’.

Sullivan’s final poem does link giving birth to a death, but it doesn’t in anyway suggest ‘they are one and the same.'  

And it would be foolish to suggest they are. Try that line on someone who has been told they have weeks to live. A ruthless killer could give you a choice between life and death.  If they were one and the same, there would be no difference and no choice. 

And so it goes.

There are two other aspects of this blather worth considering. 

Imagine.

You get on crowded public transport. You’re the last one on and you take the only available seat. The passenger beside you suddenly launches into a long description of her memories of New York. She remembers wanting to masturbate, but the batteries in her vibrator, her pink vibrator, were flat. She remembers meeting an ex-boyfriend at a party, and accepting his suggestion, ‘one more for old time’s sake’, she describes their sexual antics in detail, who put what where and what she felt and thought before during and afterwards.

You may have got up and moved away before this, but your presence was a mere excuse. It’s not in any way essential for the performance.

If a poem is simply the poet dumping memories on a complete stranger, then ‘why are you telling me this’ seems like a fair question.  I wasn’t there, I couldn’t substitute for the vibrator, or supply some spare batteries. Graphic sex with little context is one definition of pornography? 

What makes memory into art is craft. Byron’s confession about 100 sexual encounters in one week at Carnival becomes ‘We’ll go no more a roving’.  Wyatt’s memory of a good night in bed becomes ‘They flee from me’.  

Without craft the poem is just a letter to a stranger telling her or him what he or she never asked to know in the first place. Without craft you’re left with content, and 99% of content is not that interesting. Pretending that poems are philosophical tracts has the unfortunate habit of proving they are not. 

Because there is so little discussion of craft, (because it requires the critic to do some work?) the focus on content is often embarrassing. The pink vibrator gets quoted, apparently to prove that ‘Sullivan throws entropy into the system and reminds us that no fairground ride goes on forever’. This leads to the quote ‘You are thinking of masturbating but the vibrator’s batteries are low….’ 

Later ‘It is hard to say if there is progress in history’ is worthy of quotation because it strikes a ‘note of uncertainty’. 

At some point I was expecting a critical voice to praise Sullivan for her technical ability. Or at least to recognize her technical ability. This is the T.S.Eliot prize winner. Eliot, like Pound, fetishized technique. And got so far away from the egocentric confessional poem he created his own form of personal thumbprint. 

Instead there is, from Dust jacket to website, an apparent need to see ‘Three Poems’ as some kind of response or dialogue with either The Waste land, ‘Pound’nEliot’ or ‘High Modernism’. 

This does Sullivan a vast disservice. Instead of dealing with her poem, she is conscripted into a narrative that allows the reviewer or critic to sound erudite while continuing to say nothing important about her work.

‘The final sequence ‘The Sandpit After Rain’…debunks some of the more portentous aspects of High Modernist poetry.’ 

This is the same critic who wants to believe this poem is a thing of ‘Terrible Beauty’ meditating on life and death.

So portentous can be ‘of momentous or ominous significance’; ‘miraculous amazing, awe inspiring’; or ‘self-important or pompous’.

Which meaning is being used here? I’m going for the third. But then, isn’t describing memories in great detail while assuming a stranger will be interested, an obvious act of self-importance? 

Debunking the portentous aspects of etc is hardly new or news worthy. The habitual dragging of Tom’nEz into the discussion seems to gloss over the fact that we’re three years off the centenary of The Waste Land's publication. Writers have been ‘debunking the more portentous aspects of High Modernist poetry’ since about 1922. 

The poetry of Eliot’nPound can be read as personal responses to a culture that was irrevocably damaged by the first world war. But some of the tropes and techniques of those poets are as dated as the conditions they were responding to. To say instead of ‘I can connect nothing with nothing’ that ‘everything is now connected’ is not radical poetry or engagement with an antiquated set of poetic tropes, but simple observation.  

Sullivan is interesting because she avoids the tired trappings of modernist/post-modernist poetics. She’s interesting because she puts the personal front and centre within the context of a well-written, knowing poetics. 

One of the great millstones around the neck of anyone reading and writing poems today is criticism which says nothing about the poems it pretends to discuss. Having to ask, ‘What does this mean?’ indicates a failure of critical prose. It’s a shame to have to ask it so often.

End of exasperation.

The nonsense people write about poetry. Hannah Sullivan's 'Three poems' and The T.S.Eliot prize. 1/3

What follows are three encounters with poetry blather, related to Hannah Sullivan’s award winning Three poems.  It is not about Sullivan’s book, but about the way people write about poetry. 

I read a lot of poetry books, but sometimes, reading an award winning, highly acclaimed modern collection, I can’t see why the poet or the poems have earned their accolades.

I assume the fault is mine. I go online and look for reviews to try and discover what I’m missing. Often this involves wading through the sludge of poetry blather in search of an enlightenment which is rarely forthcoming. 

I had this experience reading Hannah Sullivan’s Three Poems. 

Sullivan’s book seems to come out of Faber Central. The kind of book the poetry society choses for its book of the month, I could see that it was well-written, but I couldn’t see what made it stand out so much that it won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2018.

I went looking for enlightenment and have been reminded that people who should know better write a lot of nonsense about poetry. If poetry is at least the art of using words carefully, why is that people who write about it don’t seem to able to do the same.

Surely professional academics, reviewers or critics should be able to explain why they think a book is good without resorting to waffle.

So here are three encounters with Poetry Blather.

1)   The Dust jacket.

‘In Three Poems, readers will experience Sullivan’s work with the same exhilaration as they might the great modernizing poems of Eliot and Pound, but with the unique perspective of a brilliant new female voice.’

If that is a considered judgement it should sustain considered judgement? 

I suppose the Eliot Pound reference is mandatory given this is Faber and the book won a prize with T.S.E’s name on it but it’s an unfair comparison to lumber any poet with. Those two really did break the moulds.  

The exhilaration of reading Pound and Eliot is well attested. People recorded their initial excitement in their memoires and autobiographies. You can track the reception in books like T.S.Eliot: the Critical Heritage.  

Readers and critics were (and still are) split between those who recognized something new was happening and welcomed it; those who responded with genuine, intelligent dissent and those who resorted to mockery and dismissal. There were those who thought Prufrock was a joke, the Wasteland incomprehensible, and if we’re honest, the verdict is still out on the Cantos. 

But the split was part of that exhilaration, it was genuine and these poets (and others) were creating work that was different in form, diction, syntax and content to the poetry that was being written and read at the time. Even today the Waste Land and some of the Cantos remain exhilarating and strange. 

There are poems and poets who can still produce that kind of startled, initially baffled response. Make up our own list, mine, at random, would include Deep Step Come Shining, Slinger, The Monkey’s Mask, Tooting Idyll, For all we know, The Battlefield where the Moon says I Love You, the work of Maurice Scully….all works that left the main stream and take their readers somewhere different.  

But nobody who reads any reasonable amount of poetry is going to be startled or surprised by anything in Three Poems. 

And then what does/could ‘unique perspective of a brilliant new female voice’ mean. I can imagine some poets I’ve read being described as having a ‘distinctive voice’, but what’s that adjective doing before ‘voice’.

Unlike ‘masculine’, ‘female/feminine’ is invariably a positive term in literary discourse. It usually means the critic has made a mental list of qualities she or he approves and then labelled them as feminine. Rocks are masculine, water’s feminine. 

Leaving content out of the conversation, because the idea that the writer thinks there is a specific, appropriate, exclusive ‘female’ content is too ugly to contemplate; what, in the 21^st century, would identify writing as  ‘a female voice’?   

Theoretically and practically gender can now be seen as a cultural construct and a performative which goes beyond the simplest of male/female binaries.  ‘Female’ is not a stable universal description outside of biology. 

I’m fairly sure that the linguists have buried the idea that there is anything more than culturally contingent learnt differences between men and women’s speech. The theorists went searching for ecriture feminine and ended up in a dead end. 

I also thought we’d had a century of writers trying to earn the right to write how they wanted, about what they wanted, not from within some restrictive box labelled ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’.

So, in what way is this poem written in a ‘female voice’. Is the blurb writer claiming, implicitly, that they can identify an author’s gender by syntax and diction alone?  

And my god, given what’s been written over the past century or so, what would be a ‘unique perspective’ on lived experience? 

So the dust jacket didn’t help. 

In the next installment, considering what the judges said.

The Waste Land, a complete reading.

www.liamguilar.com/the-poetry-voice/2019/8/27/tseliots-the-waste-land

I recorded a complete reading of the poem for 'The Poetry Voice Podcast'.  For me an opportunity to enjoy the poem without thinking about it as something that has to be analysed or understood, which affirmed not only how good it is, but how entertaining it is as well.
He was good was Mr. Eliot.

The Foot note poets: Richard Aldington 3/4

Joseph Campbell’s output, if the tiny collected is anything to go on, was small.  Not all the poems work as well as ‘Night and I passing’.  When Austin Clark collected his poems he included nothing from the first collection.  And Campbell had other things to do.

However, Footnote poets aren’t always unjustly relegated to the footnotes.  Quite often, reading them is a good way of approaching literary value from a different direction. Richard Aldington (1892-1962) is more than just a footnote. If you accept the standard narrative, then Imagism (with or without the final e) was the precursor of literary modernism and one version of the narrative is that Pound coined the term to describe H.D’s work and then used it to promote H.D and Aldington.

Aldington’s biographical information is easily found on line and he turns up in most histories of Modernism or biographies of other famous poets. But if Campbell is a salutary warning about the dangers of the lyric (see previous posts), Aldington demonstrates much of what can go wrong with ‘free verse’.

He might have been an influential figure in literary circles in his time, but reading his Collected Poems it becomes obvious something was missing. At a time when a mountain of awful poetry was being published, he was good enough to be still readable. His erotic poems can be more direct than you might expect for the period, the war poems are an honest, literate response to horror, but as poetry, as something other than a literate response to erotic feeling or terror, they don’t convince.

A Ruined House

Those who lived here are gone

Or dead or desolate with grief;

Of all their life here nothing remains

Except their trampled, dirtied clothes

Amongst the dusty bricks

Their marriage bed, rusty and bent

Thrown aside as useless;

And a broken toy left by a child…

 It’s not a bad poem, nor is it a great one. So it will do to consider what’s wrong with Aldington’s poems.

Perhaps we’ve seen too many pictures of ruined houses since the 1920s. It’s hard to imagine what this must have done to a reader who had not seen the damage caused by the First World War before the Second World War conditioned every one to scenes of urban destruction. But Aldington is working too hard. He’s not trusting the reader, or confident enough to let the image do its work.  

The second and third lines are clumsy:

Or dead or desolate with grief,
Of all their life here nothing remains

They push the reader towards the poet’s preferred reading: ‘this is sad. This is the terrible effect of the war on civilian populations’.  But the second line invites too much disagreement. They are gone or dead? It’s obvious ‘they’ are gone, but it’s obvious the poet doesn’t know them personally, nor does the poet know what’s happened to them and ‘dead or desolate with grief’ are obviously not the only possibilities. ‘Desolate with grief’ is unnecessarily literary. ‘Nothing remains’ is qualified by ‘except’…and while ‘nothing remains’ may be an attempt to evoke Ozymandias the except seems to list a lot more than nothing.

The  'things that remain' are selected for their impact, but why ‘marriage bed’? Is a marriage bed different to the bed a couple slept in every night since they were married? There were obviously children so it’s not like they had their wedding night here in the house, on this bed, and then it was destroyed.  

The final image of the discarded child’s toy might have been original, but it’s buried in the poet’s attempts to bully his reader into accepting his interpretation of the ruin. Imagine someone like Bunting or Pound taking their pencil to it and producing this:

A Ruined House

Trampled, dirtied clothes
amongst the dusty bricks
A bed, rusty and bent
And a broken toy..

Aldington is not a bad poet, but the great line never arrives.  The memorable image is always one draft away. The thought is fussing about the edges trying to work out which clothes to put on. Compare Aldington’s war poems to Gurney or any of the other big name war poets and as poems they pale in comparison. Compare the later Aldington in long works like , ‘A Fool I’ the Forest’, ‘A  Dream in the Luxembourg’ , ‘Life Quest’ and ‘The Crystal World’  to Eliot and there’s no contest.

We could pretend the world is full of egalitarian sentiments and pretend it’s not a contest, but poets vie for attention, and Aldington wrote his share of criticism. Art is a world where equal to, better than, less than are critical commonplaces and a fair question. 

Whatever is going on in ‘A fool I’ the Forest’ goes on for too long.  The fact that the poem is prefaced with a note explaining its own symbolism is another version of the first two lines of A Ruined House. Aldington uses untranslated snippets, in the style of Pound or Eliot, but like the former’s use of Chinese symbols they don’t do anything for a reader who can’t read them.

‘A Dream in the Luxembourg’ is a love story. Or a fantasy about a love affair. It’s easy to read, and enjoyable in its own way. So it can stand as an example of what’s wrong.

Firstly it’s difficult to see why he didn’t write it as a prose short story.

Now I am so much moved as I write this
That my hand shakes with excitement
And there is so much to say
I scarcely know where and how to begin
So hard is it to be truly reasonable
When you are a little crazy with romantic love.

Pound, who sometimes regretted his role in the popularization of ‘free verse’, wrote that the writer should not resort to poetry to avoid the difficulties of writing good prose. Is this good prose?

Now I am so much moved as I write this that my hand shakes with excitement and there is so much to say I scarcely know where and how to begin, so hard is it to be truly reasonable when you are a little crazy with romantic love.

Truly seems redundant, and ‘a little crazy with romantic love’ might be an ironic understatement given what follows, but ‘a little crazy’ is a sloppy description of the writer’s state of mind. (He’s about to tell the story of how he dropped everything he was doing in England and drove to France to meet the woman he loves after receiving an enigmatic telegram.)

There’s a steady rhythm to the extract, but it moves easily and it moves against the meaning of the lines. Sincerity is a complicated concept in writing: whether or not the writer is sincere is irrelevant, it’s whether he or she sounds sincere that matters. This doesn’t sound sincere. The poet is not talking directly to someone across the café table.  These are words arranged on the page for a purpose and the danger in trying to mimic a speaking voice is evident here: And there is so much to say/I scarcely know where and how to begin sounds like something someone might say, but on the page it raises the question couldn’t you do better? You did begin. You did find a starting point. And the conversational tone is immediately disrupted in the next verse section when Aldington drags in Catullus, Euripides and Pierre Vidal.

Next up, Tomas Carew and one of the strangest erotic poems in English.

'Modernism from the Margins' Louis MacNeice and Modernism.

Louis MacNeice seems to be suffering, or enduring or benefitting from a re appraisal. But some of the re appraising seems dubious.

"Modernism from the Margins: the 1930s poetry of Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas" by Chris Wigginton. According to the blurb on Goodreads;

"This book is an important contribution to contemporary discussions of both of these writers, and of the general issues of modernism, postmodernism, literary identity, and cultural identity it raises".

Well, maybe.

But while I'm sure someone somewhere is excited by all those things, I wonder what happened to scholarship.

Reacting to other critics, especially Edna Longley and Peter MacDonald who according to Wigginton argue for MacNeice's "rejection of Modernism",  Wigginton extracts some quotes from MacNeice's critical writings to argue the opposite. The key is the verb 'extracts'.


He [MacNeice] observes Eliotically that:

'Pound takes the whole of history as stock for his soup and cuts backwards and forwards from one country or one century to another, adding plenty of the smell of cooking and the voice of the type writer to make it clear that all these elements combine for him in a living and contemporary whole.'

MacNeice's ventriloquizing of Eliot in order to endorse Pound is revealing of his complex, ambivalent critical attitude to Modernist aestheticism, and the critical work should not therefore be taken simply to endorse a recession of Modernist practise in his poetry of the 1930s. (p13)

Taken out of context, simply as words on the page, in what way does the quote endorse Pound? or his method? For someone as careful as MacNeice, that "for him' surely qualifies the statement.

But what's bothering me here is that there is some very selective cutting at work.

The paragraph Wigginton quotes is from a chapter in 'Modern Poetry' called 'Obscurity' and begins:

'The extreme example of this method is Ezra Pound's Cantos'.

[The 'Method" is the bringing together of apparently unrelated elements to make a whole: Eliot's 'cooking and Spinoza' which MacNeice has just quoted.]

The passage Wigginton quotes continues immediately: 'I doubt if they will so combine for many of his [Pound's] readers. In a poem on so large a scale the method palls and Pound's bits of history and culture are so diverse and so particular as to fail to arouse many echoes' "Modern Poetry (p.163-164).

I don't see this an endorsement. It sounds like failure. The discussion of Pound in this section ends:

'For the Eliot-Pound method allows of the bodily transference into a poem not only of tags from other poetry or prose but of bits of public records, washing-bills, statistics. Sometimes as in The Waste Land, such ingredients blend successfully, fused together by an intense lyrical theme, but on the whole I consider this method to be vicious. The poem tends to remain heterogeneous and therefore bad'.(p164-165)

So th method is "vicious" and leads to "bad" poems.

Cherry picking quotes is something everyone does: MacNeice was always happily ambivalent about most things, and I think Wigginton might be right to argue that he didn't "reject modernism", but selecting the bit that proves your preferred version of the world when it's embedded in text which flatly contradicts your preferred version doesn't seem like good critical practice.

In the rush to be political and theoretical, something got lost. And yet Wigginton is right, I think, to say that MacNeice's attitude toward an undefined Modernism was ambivalent. In his critical writings, on Yeats and in "Modern Poetry" MacNeice allowed his ambivalence to stay open, so that statements are always being questioned and reviewed from a different perspective. This openness to contradictions and willingness to explore more than one side of the argument  is a lesson most critics don't seem to have learnt.

T.S. Eliot Louis MacNeice and the jellyfish school of poetry

Louis MacNeice in ‘The Poetry of W.B.Yeats’.

         Eliot…had maintained that the poet must adapt himself to his world; if his world is difficult and complex, his poetry must be difficult and complex…Poets like Auden and Spender abandoned this feminine conception of poetry and returned to the old arrogant principle-which was Yeats’s too-that it is the poet’s job to make sense of the world, to simplify it, to put shape on it. The fact that these younger poets proposed to stylize their world in accordance with communist doctrine or psycho-analytical [sic] theory (both things repugnant to Yeats) is comparatively irrelevant. Whatever their system was, they stood with Yeats for system against chaos, for a positive art against a passive impressionism. Where Eliot had seen misery, frustration and ruins, they saw heroic struggle-or, sometimes, heroic defeat-and they saw ruins rebuilding. (p.191)

The identification of passivity as feminine dates this unpleasantly, but I think the point is a good one. Eliot’s ‘passive impressionism’ is the jellyfish approach to poetry. 

This time of year, if the wind holds from the northeast, the high tide line is marked by stranded blue jellyfish…they drift along, and when the wind goes the wrong way they get stranded and die.

Perhaps this might have made some sense in the aftermath of the First world war, though it's interesting that Eliot didn't serve, and writers like David Jones and Robert Graves, who did, in their very different ways, went looking for pattern. But I don’t understand why it’s still such a popular attitude a hundred years later. There’s a dominant thread in modern poetry which tries to make impersonating a wind blown jellyfish some sort of exemplary activity and looks down its nose at anything which reaches for pattern and purpose:

Oh woe is me, didn’t some dead guru say words are arbitrary acoustic signs, there is no transcendental signifier, life doesn’t make sense, the subject is liable to be scattered, the individual is battered from all sides…it’s as though all the jellyfish drifting inevitably towards the beach were theorizing and conceptualizing their own indolence so that they could feel superior about being stranded.

MacNeice argues here and elsewhere for art in general and poetry specifically as an act of making which is inherently positive. This explains his initially strange statement that a poem in praise of suicide is an act of homage to life, and it lies behind the magnificent:

Self-assertion more often than not is vulgar, but a live and vulgar dog who keeps on barking is better than a dead lion, however dignified. (SP p. 48)

There is nothing dignified about a stranded Jellyfish.