Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

single central theme. For example, one number of our imaginary magazine

  was devoted to the subject of war. It included two poems by Edmund

  Blunden, Auden's "September 1941 ", extracts from a long poem by G.S.

  Fraser ("A Letter to Anne Ridler"), Byron's "Isles of Greece" and an

  extract from T.E. Lawrence's REVOLT IN THE DESERT. These half-dozen

  items, with the arguments that preceded and followed them, covered

  reasonably well the possible attitudes towards war. The poems and the

  prose extract took about twenty minutes to broadcast, the arguments

  about eight minutes.

  This formula may seem slightly ridiculous and also rather patronising,

  but its advantage is that the element of mere instruction, the textbook

  motif, which is quite unavoidable if one is going to broadcast serious

  and sometimes "difficult" verse, becomes a lot less forbidding when it

  appears as an informal discussion. The various speakers can ostensibly

  say to one another what they are in reality saying to the audience.

  Also, by such an approach you at least give a poem a context, which is

  just what poetry lacks from the average man's point of view. But of

  course there are other methods. One which we frequently used was to set

  a poem in music. It is announced that in a few minutes' time such and

  such a poem will be broadcast; then the music plays for perhaps a

  minute, then fades out into the poem, which follows without any title or

  announcement, then the music is faded again and plays up for another

  minute or two--the whole thing taking perhaps five minutes. It is

  necessary to choose appropriate music, but needless to say, the real

  purpose of the music is to insulate the poem from the rest of the

  programme. By this method you can have, say, a Shakespeare sonnet within

  three minutes of a news bulletin without, at any rate to my ear, any

  gross incongruity.

  These programmes that I have been speaking of were of no great value in

  themselves, but I have mentioned them because of the ideas they aroused

  in myself and some others about the possibilities of the radio as a

  means of popularising poetry. I was early struck by the fact that the

  broadcasting of a poem by the person who wrote it does not merely

  produce an effect upon the audience, if any, but also on the poet

  himself. One must remember that extremely little in the way of

  broadcasting poetry has been done in England, and that many people who

  write verse have never even considered the idea of reading it aloud. By

  being set down at a microphone, especially if this happens at all

  regularly, the poet is brought into a new relationship with his work,

  not otherwise attainable in our time and country. It is a commonplace

  that in modern times--the last two hundred years, say--poetry has come to

  have less and less connection either with music or with the spoken word.

  It needs print in order to exist at all, and it is no more expected that

  a poet, as such, will know how to sing or even to declaim than it is

  expected that an architect will know how to plaster a ceiling. Lyrical

  and rhetorical poetry have almost ceased to be written, and a hostility

  towards poetry on the part of the common man has come to be taken for

  granted in any country where everyone can read. And where such a breach

  exists it is always inclined to widen, because the concept of poetry as

  primarily something printed, and something intelligible only to a

  minority, encourages obscurity and "cleverness". How many people do not

  feel quasi-instinctively that there must be something wrong with any poem

  whose meaning can be taken in at a single glance? It seems unlikely that

  these tendencies will be checked unless it again becomes normal to read

  verse aloud, and it is difficult to see how this can be brought about

  except by using the radio as a medium. But the special advantage of the

  radio, its power to select the right audience, and to do away with

  stage-fright and embarrassment, ought here to be noticed.

  In broadcasting your audience is conjectural, but it is an audience of

  ONE. Millions may be listening, but each is listening alone, or as a

  member of a small group, and each has (or ought to have) the feeling

  that you are speaking to him individually. More than this, it is

  reasonable to assume that your audience is sympathetic, or at least

  interested, for anyone who is bored can promptly switch you off by

  turning a knob. But though presumably sympathetic, the audience HAS NO

  POWER OVER YOU. It is just here that a broadcast differs from a speech

  or a lecture. On the platform, as anyone used to public speaking knows,

  it is almost impossible not to take your tone from the audience. It is

  always obvious within a few minutes what they will respond to and what

  they will not, and in practice you are almost compelled to speak for the

  benefit of what you estimate as the stupidest person present, and also

  to ingratiate yourself by means of the ballyhoo known as "personality".

  If you don't do so, the result is always an atmosphere of frigid

  embarrassment. That grisly thing, a "poetry reading", is what it is

  because there will always be some among the audience who are bored or

  all but frankly hostile and who can't remove themselves by the simple

  act of turning a knob. And it is at bottom the same difficulty--the fact

  that a theatre audience is not a selected one--that makes it impossible

  to get a decent performance of Shakespeare in England. On the air these

  conditions do not exist. The poet FEELS that he is addressing people to

  whom poetry means something, and it is a fact that poets who are used to

  broadcasting can read into the microphone with a virtuosity they would

  not equal if they had a visible audience in front of them. The element

  of make-believe that enters here does not greatly matter. The point is

  that in the only way now possible the poet has been brought into a

  situation in which reading verse aloud seems a natural unembarrassing

  thing, a normal exchange between man and man: also he has been led to

  think of his work as SOUND rather than as a pattern on paper. By that

  much the reconciliation between poetry and the common man is nearer. It

  already exists at the poet's end of the aether-waves, whatever may be

  happening at the other end.

  However, what is happening at the other end cannot be disregarded. It

  will be seen that I have been speaking as though the whole subject of

  poetry were embarrassing, almost indecent, as though popularising poetry

  were essentially a strategic manoeuvre, like getting a dose of medicine

  down a child's throat or establishing tolerance for a persecuted sect.

  But unfortunately that or something like it is the case. There can be no

  doubt that in our civilisation poetry is by far the most discredited of

  the arts, the only art, indeed, in which the average man refuses to

  discern any value. Arnold Bennett was hardly exaggerating when he said

  that in the English-speaking countries the word "poetry" would disperse

  a crowd quicker than a fire-hose. And as I have pointed out, a breach of

  this kind tends to widen simply because of its existence,
the common man

  becoming more and more anti-poetry, the poet more and more arrogant and

  unintelligible, until the divorce between poetry and popular culture is

  accepted as a sort of law of nature, although in fact it belongs only to

  our own time and to a comparatively small area of the earth. We live in

  an age in which the average human being in the highly civilised

  countries is aesthetically inferior to the lowest savage. This state of

  affairs is generally looked upon as being incurable by any CONSCIOUS

  act, and on the other hand is expected to right itself of its own accord

  as soon as society takes a comelier shape. With slight variations the

  Marxist, the Anarchist and the religious believer will all tell you

  this, and in broad terms it is undoubtedly true. The ugliness amid which

  we live has spiritual and economic causes and is not to be explained by

  the mere going-astray of tradition at some point or other. But it does

  not follow that no improvement is possible within our present framework,

  nor that an aesthetic improvement is not a necessary part of the general

  redemption of society. It is worth stopping to wonder, therefore,

  whether it would not be possible even now to rescue poetry from its

  special position as the most hated of the arts and win for it at least

  the same degree of toleration as exists for music. But one has to start

  by asking, in what way and to what extent is poetry unpopular?

  On the face of it, the unpopularity of poetry is as complete as it could

  be. But on second thoughts, this has to be qualified in a rather

  peculiar way. To begin with, there is still an appreciable amount of

  folk poetry (nursery rhymes etc) which is universally known and quoted

  and forms part of the background of everyone's mind. There is also a

  handful of ancient songs and ballads which have never gone out of

  favour. In addition there is the popularity, or at least the toleration,

  of "good bad" poetry, generally of a patriotic or sentimental kind. This

  might seem beside the point if it were not that "good bad" poetry has

  all the characteristics which, ostensibly, make the average man dislike

  true poetry. It is in verse, it rhymes, it deals in lofty sentiments and

  unusual language--all this to a very marked degree, for it is almost

  axiomatic that bad poetry is more "poetical" than good poetry. Yet if

  not actively liked it is at least tolerated. For example, just before

  writing this I have been listening to a couple of BBC comedians doing

  their usual turn before the 9 o'clock news. In the last three minutes

  one of the two comedians suddenly announces that he "wants to be serious

  for a moment" and proceeds to recite a piece of patriotic balderdash

  entitled "A Fine Old English Gentleman", in praise of His Majesty the

  King. Now, what is the reaction of the audience to this sudden lapse

  into the worst sort of rhyming heroics? It cannot be very violently

  negative, or there would be a sufficient volume of indignant letters to

  stop the BBC doing this kind of thing. One must conclude that though the

  big public is hostile to POETRY, it is not strongly hostile to VERSE.

  After all, if rhyme and metre were disliked for their own sakes, neither

  songs nor dirty limericks could be popular. Poetry is disliked because

  it is associated with untelligibility, intellectual pretentiousness and

  a general feeling of Sunday-on-a-weekday. Its name creates in advance

  the same sort of bad impression as the word "God", or a parson's

  dog-collar. To a certain extent, popularising poetry is a question of

  breaking down an acquired inhibition. It is a question of getting people

  to listen instead of uttering a mechanical raspberry. If true poetry

  could be introduced to the big public in such a way as to make it seem

  NORMAL, as that piece of rubbish I have just listened to presumably

  seemed normal, then part of the prejudice against it might be overcome.

  It is difficult to believe that poetry can ever be popularised again

  without some deliberate effort at the education of public taste,

  involving strategy and perhaps even subterfuge. T.S. Eliot once

  suggested that poetry, particularly dramatic poetry, might be brought

  back into the consciousness of ordinary people through the medium of the

  music hall; he might have added the pantomime, whose vast possibilities

  do not seem ever to have been completely explored. "Sweeney Agonistes"

  was perhaps written with some such idea in mind, and it would in fact be

  conceivable as a music-hall turn, or at least as a scene in a revue. I

  have suggested the radio as a more hopeful medium, and I have pointed

  out its technical advantages, particularly from the point of view of the

  poet. The reason why such a suggestion sounds hopeless at first hearing

  is that few people are able to imagine the radio being used for the

  dissemination of anything except tripe. People listen to the stuff that

  does actually dribble from the loud-speakers of the world, and conclude

  that it is for that and nothing else that the wireless exists. Indeed

  the very word "wireless" calls up a picture either of roaring dictators

  or of genteel throaty voices announcing that three of our aircraft have

  failed to return. Poetry on the air sounds like the Muses in striped

  trousers. Nevertheless one ought not to confuse the capabilities of an

  instrument with the use it is actually put to. Broadcasting is what it

  is, not because there is something inherently vulgar, silly and

  dishonest about the whole apparatus of microphone and transmitter, but

  because all the broadcasting that now happens all over the world is

  under the control of governments or great monopoly companies which are

  actively interested in maintaining the STATUS QUO and therefore in

  preventing the common man from becoming too intelligent. Something of

  the same kind has happened to the cinema, which, like the radio, made

  its appearance during the monopoly stage of capitalism and is

  fantastically expensive to operate. In all the arts the tendency is

  similar. More and more the channels of production are under the control

  of bureaucrats, whose aim is to destroy the artist or at least to

  castrate him. This would be a bleak outlook if it were not that the

  totalitarianisation which is now going on, and must undoubtedly continue

  to go on, in every country of the world, is mitigated by another process

  which it was not easy to foresee even as short a time as five years ago.

  This is, that the huge bureaucratic machines of which we are all part

  are beginning to work creakily because of their mere size and their

  constant growth. The tendency of the modern state is to wipe out the

  freedom of the intellect, and yet at the same time every state,

  especially under the pressure of war, finds itself more and more in need

  of an intelligentsia to do its publicity for it. The modern state needs,

  for example, pamphlet-writers, poster artists, illustrators,

  broadcasters, lecturers, film producers, actors, song composers, even

  painters and sculptors, not to mention psychologists, sociologists,

  bio-chemists, mathematicians and what not. The British Government<
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  started the present war with the more or less openly declared intention

  of keeping the literary intelligentsia out of it; yet after three years

  of war almost every writer, however undesirable his political history or

  opinions, has been sucked into the various Ministries or the BBC and

  even those who enter the armed forces tend to find themselves after a

  while in Public Relations or some other essentially literary job. The

  Government has absorbed these people, unwillingly enough, because it

  found itself unable to get on without them. The ideal, from the official

  point of view, would have been to put all publicity into the hands of

  "safe" people like A.P. Herbert or Ian Hay: but since not enough of

  these were available, the existing intelligentsia had to be utilised,

  and the tone and even to some extent the content of official propaganda

  have been modified accordingly. No one acquainted with the Government

  pamphlets, ABCA (The Army Bureau of Current Affairs.) lectures,

  documentary films and broadcasts to occupied countries which have been

  issued during the past two years imagines that our rulers would sponsor

  this kind of thing if they could help it. Only, the bigger the machine

  of government becomes, the more loose ends and forgotten corners there

  are in it. This is perhaps a small consolation, but it is not a

  despicable one. It means that in countries where there is already

  a strong liberal tradition, bureaucratic tyranny can perhaps never

  be complete. The striped-trousered ones will rule, but so long as

  they are forced to maintain an intelligentsia, the intelligentsia

  will have a certain amount of autonomy. If the Government needs,

  for example, documentary films, it must employ people specially

  interested in the technique of the film, and it must allow them the

  necessary minimum of freedom; consequently, films that are all wrong

  from the bureaucratic point of view will always have a tendency to

  appear. So also with painting, photography, script-writing, reportage,

  lecturing and all the other arts and half-arts of which a complex modern

  state has need.

  The application of this to the radio is obvious. At present the

  loudspeaker is the enemy of the creative writer, but this may not

  necessarily remain true when the volume and scope of broadcasting

  increase. As things are, although the BBC does keep up a feeble show of

  interest in contemporary literature, it is harder to capture five

  minutes on the air in which to broadcast a poem than twelve hours in

  which to disseminate lying propaganda, tinned music, stale jokes, faked

  "discussions" or what-have-you. But that state of affairs may alter in

  the way I have indicated, and when that time comes serious experiment in

  the broadcasting of verse, with complete disregard for the various

  hostile influences which prevent any such thing at present, would become

  possible. I don't claim it as certain that such an experiment would have

  very great results. The radio was bureaucratised so early in its career

  that the relationship between broadcasting and literature has never been

  thought out. It is not certain that the microphone is the instrument by

  which poetry could be brought back to the common people and it is not

  even certain that poetry would gain by being more of a spoken and less

  of a written thing. But I do urge that these possibilities exist, and

  that those who care for literature might turn their minds more often to

  this much-despised medium, whose powers for good have perhaps been

  obscured by the voices of Professor Joad and Doctor Goebbels.

  W B YEATS (1943)

  One thing that Marxist criticism has not succeeded in doing is to trace

  the connection between "tendency" and literary style. The subject-matter

  and imagery of a book can be explained in sociological terms, but its

  texture seemingly cannot. Yet some such connection there must be. One

  knows, for instance, that a Socialist would not write like Chesterton or