The Defence of Poetry: Part one...Introduction

 A short and perhaps erratic tour of the Defences of Poetry,  from Sidney to the present day. In numerous installments appearing at irregular intervals. 

The Prologue: 

In an artistic field which has reached an advanced stage of its history, there is no place for naïf’s: more precisely, the history is immanent in the functioning of the field, and to meet the object demands it implies, as a producer but also as a consumer, one has to possess the whole history of the field. (Bourdieu 56/57)

The recirculated  assumptions that underwrite modern discussions of Poetry, most recently in David Constantine’s Poetry (Oxford. 2013) can be traced back in English at least as far as Sir Phillip Sidney (1554-1586), whose Defence of Poesy (Or An Apology for Poetry) is one of the first English attempts to make a case for poetry in English.

Sidney consciously and explicitly idealised the art and split it from both artifact and artificer. For the next four hundred years writers including Shelly, Emerson, Pound, T.S Eliot,  Dana Gioia, and David Constantine would make similar claims for the effects of an idealised art which had little empirical justification. Part of their rhetorical strategy would be to recirculate previous claims without ever stopping to evaluate their truth.

The literary historian or the biographical critic might study the Defence as contemporary evidence of attitudes to poetry, or as the thinking of a particular Biographical subject. There are articles on Sidney’s use of Aristotle; his understanding of Aristotle; the rhetorical structures of the Defence; how the “meaning” in the defence is qualified by the rhetorical structures; the contradictions in the argument; the literary and intellectual sources of the defence., The theorist might contextualise the arguments to see how it negotiates the cultural discourse in circulation at the time.

But reading as a writer, I want to know if what Sidney said was factually true. Given the fact that these defences often avoid giving evidence for their claims, that in Sidney and Shelley’s case their history is a blend of wishful thinking and an apparent inability to distinguish between history myth and legend,  the question that is rarely investigated in the university setting: “was he right?”, is the one I want answered. Could I base my practice on their claims for the art I wish to produce?

“Poetry’ is possibly one of the oldest of art forms.  Rhythmically organised language appears in every culture in every period of history.  As numerous commentators have pointed out, anyone who takes the writing of poetry seriously needs to know at least the tradition of poetry in his or her own language. Most who make the effort are aware that the obvious danger is to think that what qualified as “good poetry” in Chaucer’s time is the same as what gets published in the twenty first century, or that the label ‘poet’  had the same meaning and social connotations for Wyatt as it does for Cieran Carson or Les Murray. 

 However, Wyatt’s poems can still be read with profit and enjoyment by someone with no knowledge of the history or poetics of his time. Ironically, despite the academic trend over the past thirty years to insist on the importance of the context of the poem’s production, what does tend to be forgotten is that the Defences of poetry are always an individual’s move in a contemporary argument,  always historically local, always culturally contingent.

In Bordieu’s words:

Ignorance of everything that goes to make up the mood of the age produces a derealization of works: stripped of everything which attached them to the most concrete debates of their time ( I am thinking in particular of the connotations of words) they are impoverished and transformed in the direction of intellectualism or an empty humanism.(32)

Bourdieu goes on to claim that this is particularly true in the history of  ideas, and particularly in philosophy where there is a tendency to present philosophic activities as a “summit conference between great philosophers”(p32) This is even more true of the defences of poets. What tends to be forgotten is that 'poetry' is not the same thing for Shelly as it was Sidney or T.S. Eliot. When Pound and Eliot discuss 'Poetry' they are using the term in ways that we might recognise. We could find their ‘poetry’ in the poetry section of a book shop or a library. But the fact that we can read some of Sidney’s poems for enjoyment seduces us into thinking that Sidney’s definition of poetry is the same as ours. It wasn’t. Shelley’s  “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” is an often quoted piece of nonsense, but how many of those who quote it have either read the essay it appears in or know what Shelley meant by “poets” or ‘poetry’?  

 The two most famous of the defences, Sidney’s and Shelly’s, define poetry in ways that are radically different to contemporary usage. To examine the way their claims have been recirculated, it is first necessary to identify that. We shall be able to see that not only what Sidney was claiming for poetry but why he was making those particular claims, are the product of an interaction between social historical and literary forces.  And because Sidney is some ways the paradigm that the others follow, I will deal with him first and try and do it in some detail.

The Anathemata, David Jones and does it or ought it.

The Anathemata

First thoughts. Which I may well regret later.

In his Preface,  Jones states “for the artist the question is ‘does it’ not ‘ought it’”.  But The Anathemata rides on an “ought’.  And that ‘ought’ is a very dubious way of thinking about words.

The preface is not a logical and concise argument. I’m not sure if what passes as the argument works, but I do know that at its heart is a failure to make an important distinction between literary allusion (what words do in texts) and what individual words can do in the language.

To some readers no allusions are obscure; to others all are. When Eliot wrote “The Journey of the Magi”, given his readership it is unlikely that he felt a need to explain who they were, or what the three trees on the hill, the white horse, or the men dicing for clothes alluded to. Today the poem needs footnotes, and even in an Anglican school I have given up using it. 

Jones, quoting C.S.Lewis calls this  “unshared background” and implies that his footnotes can “open this up”.  So if you have read the Mabinogion before you start on Jones.  you don’t need to  be told who Branwen is. Her name evokes a situation  and a story. If you haven’t read it, the footnote can tell you who she was and where to find her story. That much is straightforward. The question that goes begging is what is the effect of an allusion which context does not explain,  on someone who didn’t know the story before reading and what happens with that association after they’ve looked it up.  

This problem is universal when writing poetry and hoping your readers know some of the poems you do.  Jones like Pound, had been down some fairly obscure rabbit holes and was unlikely to meet anyone who would know the same combination of obscure texts as he did.

However, Jones takes the argument one step further and here I think ‘ought to’ kicks in. For Jones, the word Wood, carries in it the meaning “wood of the cross” and a whole spiders web of linked associations the word ‘wood’ will evoke.

For this to work Jones has to believe that a word is not just a polysemic sign which is given meanings by current usages, but somehow a fixed object like a weathered stone which contains all its prior meanings and usages, and all their historical connotations, and that personal or contemporary usages are somehow drowned by the cultural and historical. But who associates loaf with Lord, or Music with dream? Cross might well evoke Calvary or Crusaders (or both) for Christian readers, but it might also evoke childhood memories of Mummy being cross or learning how to cross the road, or dotting the Is and crossing the Ts, or Hot cross buns or riding a cock horse and those might be much more present for a reader than the religious or historical.  

The sound represented by the letters CROSS does not automatically explode onto the mind the mental image of Calvary. Nor is it capable of doing so without a great deal of help. (In Eliot’s poem the three trees evoke Calvary because they are at the end of the (then well known story) story that begins with the Birth the Magi have come to witness. In that context three trees is not random nor can they stand for an ancient Celtic fertility cult. Sorry Robert)

But if the idea is problematic with English usage Jones’ desire to apply it to foreign words takes it even further.  His argument is dodgy.

Or to give a concrete instance: whether within its context my use of the Welsh title ‘Gwledlig’ was avoidable and whether the English translation ‘land-ruler’ could have been so conditioned and juxtaposed as to incant what ‘Gwledig’ incants . The ‘grave problems’ referred to a few paragraphs back have mostly arisen over questions of this sort. It must be understood that it is not a question of ‘translation’ or even of ‘finding an equivalent word’, it is something much more complex. ‘Tsar’ will mean one thing and ‘Caesar’ another to the end of time.   

Last things first. Words do change their meanings and they shed old ones. Lord and Dream are good examples.  So there is no way of knowing what a word will mean at the end of time. Ironically Gwledig is also an inconvenient and probably unintentional example. It’s given twice in my Welsh Dictionary.  Jones’s usage is marked as obsolete or archaic.   The modern meaning  is given as ‘rural rustic boorish’.  So the word does not mean one thing til the end of time and a modern Welsh reader might find the whole thing as confusing as non Welsh speakers.

Secondly,  Branwen exists as a character in a story which gives the sign a (reasonably) stable resonance and meaning.  Tsar,  Caesar and Kaiser are words in the language. They may all have the same root but in English we don’t write about Julius Tsar or Kaiser Peter the Great, not do we talk about Caesar Bill.  Unless we’re Monty Python or the Goons.  Whatever their origins in other  languages,  we use them differently in English and meaning is always about context and usage.  

While this might seem to support the argument, English speakers don’t use the word Gwledig. It has no meaning for a modern English Speaker.  Having to explain a specific archaic meaning of a foreign word in a footnote does nothing except question why the foreign word was used in the first place.  I think Jones’ poem, like a lot of the Later Cantos, degenerates into a private language. These words may have had powerful associations for him. Whether or not is it possible to make such eclectic meanings available to anyone else is a question  I don’t know the answer to yet.

So currently I think Jones’ text relies far too heavily on a theorised “ought to” and the real question for the reader, if they can side step the usual modernist intimidation is,   “does it?” 

Teaching Poetry.

So I've been doing this for a quarter of a century.

A very brief survey of the use or poetry in high school since the 1980s,  poetry, with bookends…

Riding and Graves made the problem of critical readings obvious in A survey of Modernist Poetry (1927):

‘what in so many words’ ’the critic reader will ask, ‘is this all about’?’ Now to tell what a poem is all about ‘in so many words’, is to reduce the poem to so many words, to leave out all that the reader cannot at the moment understand in order to give him the satisfaction of feeling that he is understanding it. If it were possible to give the complete form of a poem in a prose summary, then there would be no excuse for writing the poem: the ‘so many words’  are, to the last punctuation-mark, the poem itself.’(p 67)  

In their discussion which follows, they describe and criticize the way in which the critical reader goes hunting for the meaning of the poem, or what Riding and Graves called ‘the prose idea’ which they say is supposed to have proceeded the poem. 

The idea that the poem is something to get behind or inside,  to find the ”prose meaning” that must underwrite it, has been the staple of English teaching in high schools and universities since the inception of literary studies.  Although the type of question changed, the movement was from “what the poet was trying to say” to “which discourses are evident in this poem” (whatever that might mean) the assumption that the poem is a carrier of something that can be separated from it remains.

In ‘Enjoying Poetry” (1981) a book that was ubiquitous in schools here,  Sadler Hayler and Powell, introduced their choice of poems:

‘Poetry like other fine arts, exists to be enjoyed and appreciated. The difficult task for any teacher is that of developing this sense of  appreciation and enjoyment in students who initially ‘don’t like poetry’…

Students must learn to examine poems critically and thoughtfully, to see what the poet is driving at, to consider how well he or she is saying it, develop appreciation of poetry.”  (p.xi)

Exactly why all students are supposed to learn to enjoy and appreciate poetry when 99.9 percent of the adult population don’t, is an intriguing and unanswered question.  The students, reading thoughtfully, must learn to see “what the poet is driving at”. How they learn to do this is by treating poetry as a comprehension exercise.  Reading a poem and Analyzing a poem are always treated as synonyms.

For the “Man From Snowy Rriver” (p15-20) part of a section called “Our Land” there are 13 questions and a discussion point. The first question sets the tone: “Why was Old Regret’s Colt Worth Chasing?’ but the questions get less factual and move towards critical statements which then ask the student to speculate about what the poet did and why.  Questions 11, 12,and 13 (p20), end respectively: ‘Can you suggest why it might have been written this way; why did the poet write it this way; can you say why?” 

The final discussion point, separated graphically from the questions, states: ‘The qualities of courage skill and endurance shown in this poem are still present and still needed in Australia today. Do you agree?’

The change in the class room, or at least in the Syllabus, can be seen in Miller and Colwill’s Queensland Senior English: Theory –practice connections’ (2003 Macmillan Education Australia, South Yarra) a book which was marketed as being a resource for the then new 2002 Qld English syllabus.

The authors quote the Syllabus document in their introduction:

Central to the study of language in this syllabus is the development of understandings of how discourse, genre, register and textual features interact and are interdependent in texts, and how they are used in making meaning or producing readings from, texts.

           Queensland Board of Senior Secondary school studies (QBSSSS) 2002 English, Senior Syllabus 2002.

And go on to say, “the main focus of this book is on developing understandings about the constructed nature of texts, with particular emphasis on how discourses shape and are shaped by, language choices.

The questions have changed, though the underlying assumption is still there. The poems are to be got inside and behind. But poems are no longer poems, they have become “texts” and the assumption was, and still is, that what the novel and the recipe and the poem as texts have in common is what is important.

Discussing Komninos ‘if I was the son of an englishman’:

There are five questions (p29), ironically framed in a box labeled ‘discussions’: the second: ‘In what way does the narrator position himself as being excluded from dominant discourses of Australian Identity’: the fourth, ’The poem, although it is satirical, still privileges masculinist discourses and representations of Australian Identity? How does it do this?’ (‘Ironic’ because in teaching terms these are NOT open questions which explore the text but closed. A statement tells the students the writer’s preferred answer and then forces them into proving it. We are in the world of Right Answer English. It’s called indoctrination when your enemies do it. Masculinist is always a negative term and whatever “discourse” might mean its presence is one of the markers that “Literary Theory has entered the classroom.)

Discussing two poems by Oodgeroo, there are four questions: Question one: ‘In these two poems consider how Oodgeroo constructs the impact of colonization on Aboriginal experience and identity’. Question Four; ‘What version of the dominant culture is offered in these poems and what discourses are mobilized to construct this version?” (p34)

In case I’m giving the impression that all this radical work was going on in Queensland alone    Insight, Literature for Senior Students, by Robert Beardwood Insight Publications  written with the VCE in mind..2006

The section on “the nature of poetry” which heads the section on poetry in Chapter 1-guide to literary technique and analysis (p47-62) ends ‘because of the condensed and often abstract quality of poetry, the meaning of many poems is not immediately apparent, and the skills of interpreting and analyzing poetry take a long time to develop’ (p47)

Having learnt the technical terms selected for attention, the student then learns  how to do ‘close analysis”,  which differs from the comprehension tasks of Enjoying Poetry in that the generic poetry worksheet (p92) now includes questions not only on “concepts and ideas’ and ‘major concerns: themes and issues”, and ‘values’ but ‘multiple readings: summarise alternative viewpoints you have read or developed” with references to Chapter Six: which includes a section on Theoretical Perspectives (p166=172) with subsections on ‘Practical Criticism and New Criticism’,  Marxist, Feminist, and Post Modern readings. (as though a few pages were enough to help a 17 year old understand and operate efficiently in any of those intellectual fields. )  Leading to the sample student response on poetry dealing with three poems by John Donne with the assessor’s comment:

This is rather a ‘safe’ discussion-the student allows the dominant reading of the poems to be the strongest voice in the this presentation. However, they do acknowledge that an alternative feminist reading could easily be performed. [The student writes: ‘Such a masculine perspective presents a challenge for some modern readers but would have been less of a concern for the readers of Donne’s time.’ The student writer offers no evidence for the latter claim but that’s ok cos in class she learnt they were all intolerant misogynist racists back in the day] This might have been more confidentially explored.  (p221)

(anyone used to the way such comments are phrased and read in the world of education will immediately realise the implication which is that ‘might have been’ translates as ‘she should have done this’.) 

The underlying concerns in this change in reading practices were not literary, and were made explicit in such books as Reviewing English (ed Sawyer, Watson, Gold 1999 St Clair press Sydney Rozelle NSW.) and Reviewing English in the 21^st Century (ed Sawyer and Gold Phoenix education , Melbourne 2004)

In his introduction to the latter, Graham Little wrote:

However , to argue that a close reading of the eighteenth century poems of William Cowper and James Thompson for aesthetic purposes is more valuable and useful for students than a deconstructive analysis of advertisements for a McDonald’s Breakfast is the kind of nonsense we get from those with vested interest in socializing students in compliance with prevailing consumerist patterns of thought. The massive profits of the health degenerating fast food industry is evidence of the need for deconstructive work on a McDonald’s breakfast! p15

Not only is this paragraph is a good example of the use of language and level of argument  but it epitomizes the arrogant assumption that my students are so thick they can’t see through MacDonald’s advertising without my help.

In an attempt to explain and make sense of Post Structuralism, and show how it could be imported into the English classroom, Ray Misson wrote;

The theory of the discursive construction of subjectivity (i.e. the construction of our subjective selves through discourse) does give an urgency to work on examining how texts are positioning us, because these texts may in fact be quite powerfully creating us and our belief systems. We may need to deconstruct the texts in an attempt to defuse their potential power over us. (p99)  

The number of conditionals in this quotation illustrates the fragility of the base on which a teaching method was constructed. This historical shift to treating poems as carriers of ideological viruses, where the perceived politics of the poem and the poet became the subject of scrutiny, and where readers had to learn to insulate themselves with a prophylactic reading practice, ‘We may need to deconstruct the texts in an attempt to defuse their potential power over us’,  may have made some teachers who didn’t really care much about poetry in the first place feel as though they were doing something of earth shattering importance, but the reality was that we were dragging students through “texts’ they weren’t ever going to read so we could teach why they shouldn’t be reading them.

The absolute, obvious,  idiocy of the approach can be seen when the idea that poems are going to infect us ideologically is actually questioned. Outside the classroom where students do whatever they have to do to survive and get the marks they need on the way to somewhere else,  real people use ‘texts’ in whatever way they want.  

In The Intellectual Life Of The British Working Classes, 2001 second edition(2010)  Yale University press New Haven and London  (which is a beautiful and thought provoking door stop of a book) Jonathon Rose, having studied the evidence for what people read and what they did with that reading wrote:

The failure of political criticism, as it is actually practiced, is methodological , with some exceptions, it ignores actual readers. In this terrain, critics repeatedly commit what might be called the receptive fallacy; they try to discern the messages a text transmits to an audience by examining the text rather the audience. This blind spot is not easy to excuse or even explain, given that over the past two decades we have become used to the notion that readers make meaning: they may enjoy a wide latitude in interpreting what they read. We can discover how an Edwardian housemaid read ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles but only if do some serious scholarly retooling. (p4)

Schools and universities can, and will, continue to use poems in whatever way is currently fashionable in the sealed acoustic of their own institutional needs, and it will always be academically fashionable to make claims for your preferred practice without ever having to validate it with what would pass for evidence in the daylight world. Pretending that your version is in some ways better than the ones it superseded is good for your career and your self-esteem.

The danger for the writer of poems is that with so few people reading poems outside the academy, a usage gets confused with the thing being used. 

Ruskin, Davie, Graves: a ramble inspired by the AAWP conference 'discussion of process'.

I read Ruskin’s “On Modern Painters”, especially the section “of Truth of water” ( Vol 1, section V) where he castigates landscape painters for  throwing a blob of color on a canvass and exploiting a tacit agreement with the viewer that that blob means: ”Water; with or without reflections”…Ruskin said it looked nothing like light on water, and went out with a notebook and pen and carefully described what he saw. [1] It’s a powerful antidote to modern theorized claims about the Prison House of  Language or the slippage of the signifier. Starting with the admission that no one will ever manage to paint the sea, he then praises those who get closest. Nice metaphor there. 

As Ruskin says about painting the sea (Vol I part two, section v, ch1 point 5), it’s impossible, it can only be suggested by means of ‘more or less spiritual and intelligent conventionalism’(Vol 1 page 355). 

 A poem is a conventional literary category, and so there is a general sense of what a poem is and should do, and while that obviously varies across different versions of ‘poetry’, there are dominant assumptions about what a poem should be: in terms of diction, subject matter, and treatment despite the various movements over the past two hundred years.  In fact, given the lyricization of poetry over the past two centuries, we have fallen such a long way since Chaucer could write about everything and anything. Put against the works of the great medieval poets, most modern poetry seems flat and anemic.  

These often unspoken definitions, internalized over the years, exert a significant pull on the writing of any piece, they are part of the way in which I recognize that I am writing a poem,  so the paradox arises that to write a poem one must adhere to the conventions, but I want to avoid the conventions, but if I avoid too many of them is it still a poem.  

And that had merged with a distinction Donald Davie makes between two types of poems[2], one of which he calls “literary” but which I think of as the ‘Poetic Poem’: it’s the one where the poet is being self consciously ‘poetic’ ticking the right boxes,  and having poetic thoughts which no one,  let alone the poet, has ever had during the experience it purports to describe. Done well it can be interesting.  Done badly , which it so often is, the poem is the verbal equivalent of Ruskin’s blob of color…we accept that  someone is having a poetic moment and don’t enquire too closely about the truth of it.  We respond as well trained seals, especially if the subject matter is about some kind of individual trauma. We parade our sensitivity by responding to poems which invite us to sympathize with the poet and which don’t challenge us ot consider our assumptions or values.  

Whatever happened to the "Affective Fallacy"? Or, as Sir Geoffrey Hill put it in a discussion of Owen, "The Poetry had better not be in the Pity'.

That’s another issue. Robert Graves made a simple but useful distinction in poetic Unreason. If we ask if a poem is successful then there are two answers: successful for the poet, and successful for the reader.  Far too much poetry may well serve as therapy for the poet, but offers the reader nothing except the opportunity to wear his or her politics or ideology on their sleeve or to parade their own sensitivity.  Come to think of it,  I.A Richards called these  “stock responses” though I don't think he was talking about ideology. There is, somewhere, a fine poem by Thom Gunn about this all.

It may make sense one day. 

---

[1] I don’t claim to have read all six volumes of Modern Painters.

[2] In Under Briggflatts (1989) ‘One fertile in associations and analogies , that may be called ‘literary’; and another , that goes immediately into prosody, to be called poetic’. (128) 

'To Be Incarnational' by Tom Sleigh: David Jones, WIlfrid Owen, political poems and how to see

To Be Incarnational

BY TOM SLEIGH

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/246740

In an article which explores and celebrates David Jones as a model for writing about anything, though the  focus is on war, Sleigh writes:

'I’m not sure how far I want to press this next point. It goes past Jones and Owen, though it’s more closely related to Jones’s understanding of how to represent, not war so much, as what Seamus Heaney once called “the music of what happens.” Jones said that he didn’t intend In Parenthesis to be a “War Book” — only that it “happens to be concerned with war.” That distinction seems essential — 
when he says, “We find ourselves privates in foot regiments. We search how we may see formal goodness in a life singularly inimical, hateful, to us,” he is stating a basic human problem — how to find formal goodness in a hateful life. So he isn’t setting up shop as a war poet, or a political poet, or any kind of poet. He isn’t motivated by Justice, his poem doesn’t require sponsorship by any of the “Monumental certainties that go perpetually by, perpetually on time,” to quote Randall Jarrell. Which can’t be said of a lot of the poetry being written today about politically charged abstractions, like war, poverty, racism, and other forms of injustice.

About seven years ago I became restless with my own use of these abstractions — and began doing journalism in places where everything’s all right until it’s not all right and then it’s too late — and discovered that this kind of risk, the taking of calculated chances, settled me down. I want to say this tentatively now, but one reason why 
I was attracted to poetry is because I’ve always wanted more than just my own dailiness. And I’ve always gone to art, and now my experiences as a journalist, to find that something more. But if the pursuit of justice has become part of that search, it’s a secondary pursuit that I’ve learned along the way, not something that I started out with.

However, as a contradictory part of that pursuit, I’ve found that my politics and biases in writing about politically charged subject matter are fairly useless in writing poetry. If  I’m dealing with such material, I want to discover my subject as I write, and not have it arise from some prefab stance, or hell of opinions that I simply populate with more opinions. Jones’s use of clashing vocabularies and tones, melding of  Welsh myth with the everyday concerns of the infantryman, his elided categories, like pastoral combined with detailed observation of  barbwire, achieves a music that can express the difference between what you ought to feel and what you do feel — not iron smashing against iron, but the difference between exploring a political emotion, say, rather than a political conviction. A political conviction weaves no web, traps no chaotically buzzing flies — it’s hygienic, and easily put aside when the moment of outrage or conversational animus has passed. A political emotion is recalcitrant, contradictory, and involves you with silver wrappers and nutritional biscuits with odd names like Plumpy’Nut. And that involvement with the material world weaves an ever more responsive web of circumstance and contingency. 

To be faithful to a political emotion you have to keep yourself open to lots of different frequencies so that whatever ethical statement you arrive at comes as part of the texture of whatever form is driving your language forward. And it’s this language as it arrives that relieves you of having to stand guard over your own opinions and convictions, and gives you access to reaches of thought and feeling you might not otherwise imagine. Which is risky, unpredictable, and not always easy to reconcile with your day-to-day political, emotional, or intellectual entanglements.'

It's a fine article and the comparison of Jones with Owen as witnesses is particularly good. 

'Poetry" by David Constantine. Defending Poetry yet again.

Poetry, by David Constantine,  OUP, 2013.

I read this book cheering from the sidelines. Constantine writes eloquently, he advances a coherent argument, as a translator and poet his examples are taken from a different range than usual (Brecht and Holderein play a significant part ) and the book rises to a triumphant eloquent end:

That is why the defense of poetry entails the larger campaign for a humane habitat in which it may flourish to its heart’s content, abundantly saying the human and not Just as  an answering back against the inhumane, but also-why not?-in celebration of a society we are glad and proud of.  Is that too much to ask? Too much or not enough. We want more than mere survival , we want our due, our redress, lives fit to be looked at, and poetry will help, poetry at the heart of social life. We don’t want poetry to be read by a dwindling few but by an increasing many. We want it commonplace, companionable, always there to be turned to, in our ordinary lives, customary and working wonders, 9p139)

Applause applause, the crowd goes wild, rises to its feet, and the sound of isolated clapping in an almost empty theatre echoes disconcertingly.

There are generic problems which all books like this one face. The first is simple and devastating. Who is reading it? I suspect, even resent the use of the first person plural, it’s an insidious positioning technique, but who is this “we”?

“A large part of my endeavor will consist in trying to persuade any who need persuading that poetry springs from and belongs in the heart of society and that it does good there.”(p3)

I suspect that the only people who read books like this are people like me who want to believe them, and  students whose professors or teachers want to believe them. The people who don’t believe that poetry is important, are hardly going to shell out for a book like this, let alone read it. Or be impressed by the arguments.

The second obvious generic problem is that the Defense of Poetry,  from Sidney to now, implies that poetry can only be justified if it has an external political or linguistic effect that is measurable in the world beyond the poem.  If only we all read Poetry, the argument has gone on drearily for over four hundred years, the world would be a better place and language would be so much better. 

Such claims, from Sir Philip Sidney's to the present day, are either wishful thinking, unsubstantiated either by external evidence or understandings of how language or culture actually work, or built from very specific cases where context was so important, argued into a generality.  Constantine tends towards the latter: a specific type of poem will have a specific type of effect on a specific type of reader which will produce a political reaction.   It’s the last improbable step that will justify  ‘Poetry’.

And finally, Poetry. Never the sum of all poems, but an abstraction, which becomes the active subject in the sentence, (in the quote above it has intentions and a heart).  As someone said, you have to pretend the butterfly is an elephant, except everyone outside the seminar room can see it’s a butterfly.

So it’s been interesting to read this defense while reading four new single author collections of poems. One is “Award Winning”. Two are “poetry society recommendations”. All are published by well-regarded publishers. All four are written by writers who teach in University Creative Writing 

Programs.  

Do they live up to Constantine’s claims, or Eliot’s, or Pound’s, or Dan Gioia, or Sidney’s or Shelley’s? No, they are poems, Not POETRY.

And like a great deal of modern poetry, whether it’s Avant-Garde, or Mainstream: Look at me say the poets, look at me,  I’ve written a poem. Tick the boxes that prove this is a poem: it swims as a block of text in a white space, I handle rhyme with care, I look at the world aslant, I pretend to have had poetic thoughts about mundane things.  I use enough Syntactic variation to ensure you notice, and of course the occasional unusual verb.

One out of four goes in for heavy duty typographical play: this signals that these poems are “innovative” or “experimental”.

Four books of poems, bought, read and then reread with attention over a two week period, and not one poem sticks in my head. Not one offered me anything more in return for my money and attention than the spectacle of a writer proving they can write something that is recognizable as a poem.  On page after page.

If I go to a concert I assume the singer can hold a note, sing in tune, get through a song. I take it for granted that the singer knows what a song is and can sing one. I expect more than this simple demonstration.

The gulf between the claims for Poetry and poems which are published is so vast that it’s unbridgeable.

And perhaps the reason why so few people read poetry, or care about it, is that it offers the reader so little in return for money and attention.  The majority of modern published poetry is not “Difficult”. It’s just not worth reading.

A Strong Song Tows Us by Richard Burton (part two)

In “A Strong Song Tows Us” Richard Burton attempts to account for Basil Bunting’s ‘disappearance’.  “Mention Bunting to a literate, educated young person these days and you will be met by polite incomprehension. It wasn’t always so. In the 1960s and 1970s he was arguably the world’s most celebrated living poet.”(p7)

Burton investigates the disappearance. He lists as reasons: regionalism (Bunting is ‘a northern poet’) religion (Bunting is a ‘Quaker Poet’) voice (I don’t understand this one), his association with Pound, difficulty, difficulty of getting short bits of long poems in anthologies, but finally plumps for “auto-regionalisation” as the main cause. (p17)

I think he’s wrong. This is not a criticism of his book. I think it’s a misunderstanding of the way poetry works in the modern world.  Quality of poem as poem is not the issue. The shrinking of poetry from the public domain into academic institutions means that what gets read at school and taught at university, sets up a perverse kind of brand loyalty and what is read at school has more to do with what schools have to do, than with any kind of poetics. If no one ever published another poem, schools could continue blithely teaching their compulsory version of poetry because it have never borne much relationship to how poems operate outside.

 Burton demonstrates this when, discussing ‘war poetry’.  He writes:

“We now think of the poetry of the first world war as overwhelmingly critical of political and military leaders’ strategy and tactics, articulating a sense of the hopelessness of valour in the teeth of insuperable horror, but that is largely because the poetry that has survived (because it is the best) was written by poets-Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves- who subscribed to the view that it was the futility and horror that needed to be in a  perverse sense celebrated. If fact of the 2,225 poets who published during the years of the war hardly any expressed the views that have for generations of students defined it’s poetry.” (61)

It’s the bit in brackets that betrays him:  ('because it is the best'.) 

Is it? On what grounds?

In terms of getting a reaction from students, if your class doesn’t respond to ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ you might want to join hands and contact the living: does that make it a great poem? Schools use Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath not because they are great poets,  but because their poems get a reaction and can be discussion starters for ‘Meaningful issues”.  After all, isn’t great literature supposed to be about important stuff? 

The problem is that discussing poetry, as poetry, requires both knowledge and a high level of verbal sophistication. Burton has this, as he demonstrates reading Bunting. He is able to explain why Villon is worthy of our attention, not because of its content, but because of its rich verbal texture.

But how many people in a class room can do that?  How many have ever heard of Yeats’ objections to Owen’s poetry and could navigate that criticism? or Geoffrey Hill's "the poetry had better not be in the pity". How many have actually asked themselves if their choice of poets is about the quality of the poetry, or because in one way or another, they still are “Sandwich board men [and women] of the revolution", in the case of “War Poets” representing values we’d like to think we’d have in that situation. 

Poems get chosen partly because of the syllabus requirement, but partly because of the values they espouse. Are those four poets Burton names really ‘the best’?  Are there really no good pro war poems written by one of the 2,221 other poets?

Bunting is not appearing any time soon on a school curriculum. Imagine the essays they’d make you write, at seventeen. Briggflatts is a great poem: discuss. Imagine trying to explain what “the greatest British Modernist’ might mean in terms of taking a class through I am agog for foam, or Briggflatts, or Villon. I don’t think there are many people who could do that. And I don't think many people would see the exercise as worthwhile. Once you've proven how good it is, what do you do next? Analyse the discourse of nationhood or masculinity it it?

For a poet to live in the academy he or she has to be useable.  And Bunting for all his brilliance, is resolutely not useable. It's one of the reasons he's brilliant.