by Clive James
Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.
He didn’t even say where the reindeer were: they were just elsewhere. The rhythm welded the now and the then together. Evocation needs more than notation: it needs impetus. You can’t Just Add Hot Water And Serve. Looking back with as much penetration as I can now achieve with tired eyes, I think I must have guessed that already, during those days in Sydney when I walked around reciting E. E. Cummings to an audience of trees, traffic, and puzzled pedestrians. I didn’t just go for the bric-a-brac satires and the crazily lush love lyrics, I went for lines that verged on nonsense. ‘To eat flowers and not be afraid.’ Not good advice in Australia, which has flowers you should be very afraid of indeed. But whatever he was talking about, even if it was nothing, his phonetic force drove whole poems into my head like golden nails. Fifty years later I’m still trying to figure out just how the propulsive energy that drives a line of poetry joins up with the binding energy that holds a poem together.
Interlude
Held together, if at all, by not much more than kiddie-rhymes, the poems of Frederick Seidel, though often fascinating from point to point, are mainly not poems at all, but instalments of a bulkier thing that we might call his poetry. I would call it a larger thing except that there is really nothing larger in the taxonomy of poetry than the poem. Though Seidel obviously doesn’t think so, the ideal ought to be the separate artefact that the reader can take home. Seidel has a right to dissent from that ideal. After all, Wordsworth did. Wordsworth wrote ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge’, which we can all memorize in its entirety, but he also wrote the ‘Immortality Ode’, which we couldn’t memorize in its entirety even if we tried. I personally know a poet who did memorize it, when he was young, but later on he forgot almost all of it except the bits that you and I remember too. Those memorable bits are surely the nub of the matter. It’s about them that our judgements are made: we rate a poet by the brightness of a glimpse. It might be thought at first that the Odes of Keats make a nonsense of that idea. At one time or another I knew each of them by heart. But now, with age, I can risk confessing that I readily remember only the moments that excited my attention in the first place. If I want to join those moments up, I have to look at the text. The moments, it need hardly be said, beg for such treatment. When I first realized that the title of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night was drawn from the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, I went back to the text and learned everything else that gave a context to the phrases and lines I had remembered. In another Keatsian Ode, the ‘Ode on Melancholy’, the same thing happened because of the tenaciously memorable phonetic force of a single idea: ‘Then glut thy sorrow on the salt-sand wave.’ The three stresses for the three syllables of ‘salt-sand wave’ worked like drumbeats around the tempo. And so on with the other Odes, with all of which I have always been familiar. But I am always forgetting them as well as remembering. This might have something to do with a protective mechanism, a mental machine to ward off the inhibiting effect of having a head full of too much perfect poetry by other people. Leaving aside the question of whether it might not be even worse to remember too little, it still might be best to accept that you won’t get much of your own done if your memory is overstocked, and it might therefore be desirable to maintain your store of remembered poetry in the form of fragments, a set of potentialities, splinters from a surface that imply a form. Memorizing a poem is a form of hero worship, to which there has to be a limit. Maria Sharapova, to help perfect her service action, watched videos of Pete Sampras over and over. But not forever. Eventually she had to try it for herself.
TECHNIQUE’S MARGINAL CENTRALITY
At the court of the Shogun Iyenari, it was a tense moment. Hokusai, already well established as a prodigiously gifted artist, was competing with a conventional brush-stroke painter in a face-off judged by the shogun personally. Hokusai painted a blue curve on a big piece of paper, chased a chicken across it whose feet had been dipped in red paint, and explained the result to the shogun: it was a landscape showing the Tatsuta River with floating red maple leaves. Hokusai won the competition. The story is well known but the reaction of the conventional brush-stroke artist was not recorded. It’s quite likely that he thought Hokusai had done not much more than register an idea, or, as we would say today, a concept. A loser’s view, perhaps; though not without substance. If Hokusai had spent his career dipping chickens in red paint, he would have been Yoko Ono. But Hokusai did a lot more, and the same applies to every artist we respect, in any field: sometimes they delight us with absurdly simple things, but we expect them to back it up with plenty of evidence that they can do complicated things as well. And anyway, on close examination the absurdly simple thing might turn out to be achieved not entirely without technique. Late in his career Picasso would take ten seconds to turn a bicycle saddle and a pair of handlebars into a bull’s head and expect to charge you a fortune for it, but when he was sixteen he could paint a cardinal’s full-length portrait that looked better than anything ever signed by Velázquez. You can’t tell, just from looking at the bull’s head, that it was assembled by a hand commanding infinities of know-how, but you would have been able to tell, from looking at Hokusai’s prize-winning picture, that a lot of assurance lay behind the sweep of blue paint, and that he had professionally observed floating red maple leaves long enough to know that the prints of a chicken’s red-painted feet would resemble them, as long as the chicken could be induced to move briskly and not just hang about making puddles.
When we switch this test apparatus to poetry, we arrive quickly at a clear division between poets who are hoping to achieve something by keeping technical considerations out of it, and other poets who want to keep technique out of it because they don’t have any. R. F. Langley, one of the school of poets around Jeremy Prynne, died in 2011. As an adept of that school, he had put many dedicated years into perfecting the kind of poem whose integrity depends on its avoiding any hint of superficial attraction. Part of one of his poems was quoted in tribute by the Guardian obituarist, himself an affiliate of the Prynne cenacle. It was instantly apparent that the poet had succeeded in all his aims:
We leave unachieved in the
summer dusk. There are no
maps of moonlight. We find
peace in the room and don’t
ask what won’t be answered.
Impeccably bland, resolutely combed for any hint of the conventionally poetic, its lack of melody exactly matched by its lack of rhythm, Langley’s poem had shaken off all trace of the technical heritage, leaving only the question of whether to be thus unencumbered is a guarantee of novelty. Hard not to think of how far modern poetry has come since T. S. Eliot continually improved his technical command in order to make his effects by leaving it unemphasized, a vastly different approach to the question:
They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.
– from ‘Morning at the Window’
To write a stanza like that, with no end-rhymes but with a subtle interplay of interior echoes, the poet, we tend to assume, needed to be able to write the rhymed stanzas of ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’, and then sit on the knowledge. At the time it was written, even the most absolute of enthusiasts for modern poetry would have hesitated to point out the truth – that the stanza was held together by its rhythmic drive – unless he further pointed out that it was also held together by the sophisticated assiduity with which it didn’t rhyme. In other words, the whole of English poetry’s technical heritage was present in Eliot’s work, and never more so than when it seemed free in form. But since that time, there has been a big shift in belief, and we are living with the consequences now. Ezra Pound might have insisted that only a gen
ius should excuse himself from traditional measures, but he soon decided that he himself was a genius, and several generations of his spiritual descendants either felt the same about themselves or – much more likely – took the new liberties more and more for granted as time went on. The moderns not only conquered the fields of art, they conquered the fields in which art is thought about. The idea that form can be perfectly free has had so great a victory, everywhere in the English-speaking world, that the belief in its hidden technical support no longer holds up. Or rather, and more simply, the idea of technique has changed. It is no longer pinned to forms. If few territories go quite so far as Australia, where it is generally held to be unlikely that a poem can be formally structured and still be modern, nevertheless the general assumption that beginning poets had to put in their time with technical training, like musicians learning their scales, is everywhere regarded as out of date. This near-consensus is wrong, in my view, but you can see why it prevails. And it does have one big advantage. Though a poet who can’t count stresses and syllables might write mediocre poetry, there is a certain kind of bad poetry that he won’t write.
Every editor in the world knows what kind of bad poetry I am talking about. It arrives by the sheaf, by the bundle, by the bale. The poet, usually young, but sometimes in his old age, has discovered his power to rhyme, and what he thinks is rhythm. The editor, in his turn, discovers over and over that the more a poet’s creativity might be lacking, the more his productivity will be torrential. The trouble with a really awful poem is not that its author lacks technique, but that his technique is fully expressed: whatever he can do, he does, especially if he has got past the early, drunken stages of finding rhymes and has entered the determined stage of making lists. Whole careers have been ruined by virtuoso exuberance, as when a tenor who can sing a clean top C spends all day singing nothing else, and leaves his chest voice in rags.
In the first half of the twentieth century, there was an accomplished poet in just that condition. He was the Australian émigré man of letters W. J. Turner. Having based himself in London, he had built up an enviable reputation as an expert on music: he was a valued friend of the great pianist Artur Schnabel, and his book about Mozart, still read today, was held to be in a class with the monograph by Alfred Einstein. But Turner was also a prolific Georgian poet, and in his prolificacy lay his ticket to oblivion. His work might have survived being wildly over-praised by Yeats, but it could not survive its own fluency. He had a certain success with a poem about the Aztecs. Studded with catchy pre-Colombian names, it was the sort of thing that could be recited after dinner in a drawing room. (On YouTube he can be seen reciting the poem himself, in an over-enunciated voice weirdly suggesting ectoplasm and planchette.) But in masses of other poems he overdid the catchiness, and everything in the poem was so attention-getting there was no way to recall it: the purposeless glitter was packed tight like a second-hand furniture dealer’s storeroom full of chandeliers:
In a sea Cytherean
Billows are rolling, rolling, rolling
Over stillness molybdenean
Hung with the scrolling
Abyss-plants whose fingers Chaldean
Rock slumber under foam-froth where lumber . . .
Threatening always to give birth to Edith Sitwell like Venus in a seashell, even in its heyday such billowing foam-froth counted as high spirits at best, and in the long term a whole tradition was doomed by wordplay: you can hear why, a few decades down the line, the danger of making so much vapid noise should have driven the Prynne people to a Trappist vow of making no noise at all.
But on at least one occasion Turner wrote differently, and it was probably because he was in the grip of a real emotion. It was a case of the visione amorosa, in that especially painful version when the ageing man finds himself suddenly longing for the unattainable young woman. His title, ‘Hymn to Her Unknown’, betrays all his usual deafness (Hymn to Her Unknown What?), but the text itself, from the first line to the last, is fully judged, with no sign of automatism. He starts by setting the scene of a memory:
In despair at not being able to rival the creations of God
I thought on her
Whom I saw on the twenty-fourth of August nineteen thirty-four
Having tea in the fifth story of Swan and Edgar’s
In Piccadilly Circus.
From then on, throughout the barely fifty lines of his tiny epic, his sole apparent trick is to go on raising the level of the diction, from the biblical through the heroic to the ecstatic. The unapparent tricks are many – he really did know how to balance a line – but they are all camouflaged in support of this main strategy, which he sensibly doesn’t vary until the last stanza, when a few rhymes are allowed in as evidence of the effort it has taken to keep them out. The young lady is married, she has her child with her, and clearly, though she knows the poet is watching her, nothing he could do would alter her life as she might alter his if she so chose. Such is the powerful combination of her beauty and moral character that he can’t describe her adequately, even with his language at full stretch:
What is the use of being a poet?
Is it not a farce to call an artist a creator,
Who can create nothing, not even re-present what his eyes have seen?
But of course in calling her indescribable he has described her, and has defined a moment that we will all grow better at recognizing as we grow older. The poet will be born again, and so will the young woman that he adores. It is a stunning poem to have been almost entirely forgotten. One of the questions the poem raises, however, is whether Turner really had to learn all that tricky stuff he did elsewhere just to increase the effect of leaving it out here. With T. S. Eliot the results of his formal work are so sharp that we can take it for granted that the acquired skill helped to make his informal work even sharper, although really we are betting on a case of correlation as causation. But by now we have seen so many successful informal poems that we must contemplate the possibility that there is such a thing as an informal technique, in which it is no longer necessary to count stresses or master any regular stanza. Most poets now will never feel called upon to make a poem look organized. Those who do feel the call often produce results so clumsy that we are tempted to conclude that the thing can’t be done without practice. But this again might be an unwarranted assumption: maybe those particular poets just haven’t got the knack. This concession would leave room for the further possibility that some poets do have the knack but it hasn’t shown up because they haven’t felt called upon to exploit it.
Here we are perilously close to the pestiferous Lucy, the Peanuts character who thought she could play the piano like her little friend Schroeder if she just knew which keys to press down. Unfortunately for any dreams of critical simplicity, such a fantasy is not empty. There are some who are ignorant yet can perform prodigies, educating themselves with frightening speed as they go. Nobody devoid of a proper musical education is ever going to saw away in a scratch orchestra and produce a theme from Bach. Performance skill is too great a factor. But in poetry, the performance skills for organizing chains of words into forms seem often to be lying around piecemeal in the linguistic attainments of tyros who have never learned to count a stress. In a phrase that we tend to avoid because it doesn’t sound precise enough, they have a feel for it.
In the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue you can see a nightclub scene by Picasso that proves he mastered the whole heritage of the Impressionist painters in about a month. The important thing here is not to belittle an intrinsically complex process just because it betrays less overt effort than we think appropriate. Take one of the smallest and apparently most elementary of the standard poetic forms, the couplet. For the poet, the heroic couplet is a wickedly difficult frame in which to narrate. This being known to be true, a whole critical mythology has built up about what Dryden did to develop the trick that Pope perfected. But really, as a form, the couplet was perfected long before. Not even Herrick was the first
to do it, although he was perhaps the best:
Come, my Corinna, come; and, coming, mark
How each field turns a street, each street a park.
When Pope, in The Rape of the Lock, turned couplets as light and neat as that, he got famous for it. Nobody remembers Herrick for seeing the possibilities because he never exploited them. His favoured form, even in the most frivolous lyric, was an argued paragraph rather than a ladder of couplets: in that respect he was strangely like the much more serious, much more holy George Herbert, who would invent some shapely little edifice of words in order to fit the structure of a thought, and then move on. For Herbert, the thought was the poetic substance. Unlike Donne, he wasn’t distracted even by imagery. Herbert could do images, but they had to fit the argument. This purity of purpose makes Herbert the most metaphysical of all the poets we give that name. The name has been prominent since the first appearance of Grierson’s anthology in 1921, and famous since Eliot sought amongst metaphysical poetry the hard antidote for flummery. But what Eliot learned best from Herbert, what we all learn, is how to argue; or rather, we learn that the argument is the action. The contemporary American poet Daniel Brown writes as if he were taking classes from Herbert once a week. Throughout his slim but weighty collection Taking the Occasion, Brown proves that for him the reasoning is in command of the imagery and not vice versa. Since practically the whole of the modern movement in poetry, as we have come to recognize it, was based on the notion that imagery ruled, Brown’s priorities would seem wilfully archaic if not for the functionality of his neatness, which reminds us that his hero Herbert, thinking as he went, necessarily operated in the here and now.