Our Savage Art

by William Logan

  Walcott had barely been noticed before he became noted. By his midthirties, he was composing a verse autobiography (an act of hubris akin to a pop star writing his life at nineteen). Another Life (1973) is a pretentious, pressure-cooker affair, a tour de force fatally uneasy with itself. (Surely you give a hostage to describe yourself as a prodigy, even if a “prodigy of the wrong age and colour.”) At times it reads like The Prelude by a writer far more elegant than Wordsworth, though almost every line about the poet himself sounds false:

  Afternoon light ripened the valley,

  rifling smoke climbed from small labourers’ houses,

  and I dissolved into a trance.

  I was seized by a pity more profound

  than my young body could bear, I climbed

  with the labouring smoke,

  I drowned in labouring breakers of bright cloud,

  then uncontrollably I began to weep,

  inwardly, without tears, with a serene extinction

  of all sense; I felt compelled to kneel,

  I wept for nothing and for everything.

  This idea of compassion requires a lot of scenery chewing. (I hope the houses were small, not the laborers.)

  Most poets compromise between the diction of the poems they love, often centuries old, and the language they hear in the streets (the tin-eared poems in island patois have been among Walcott’s least successful); but, for the exile, language is a daily form of betrayal. Walcott has remained a figure of divided loyalties and a double tongue—though his grandmothers were descended from slaves, his grandfathers were white. As a child, he “prayed / nightly for his flesh to change, / his dun flesh peeled white”; but, like any young man of parts, he was enamored of himself. Even the late verse can seem shallow and narcissistic, beauty seized in his own beautiful eye—he treats women (“O Beauty, you are the light of the world!”) in a manner closer to lechery than to old-style courtesy. Caught between two races and two worlds, he has sometimes succumbed to pride or self-pity, or to that pride indistinguishable from self-pity.

  Although his taste for the sententious remark has never quite abated (“To change your language you must change your life,” “There is no harder prison than writing verse”), Walcott grew able to tame the rhetoric that, like a forest fire, occasionally roared out of control. He became the most striking poet of seascapes since Coleridge (between them lie only a few lines in The Waste Land), rivaling the older poet’s sense of the uncanny.

  I saw men with rusty eyeholes like cannons,

  and whenever their half-naked crews cross the sun,

  right through their tissue, you traced their bones

  like leaves against the sunlight; frigates, barquentines,

  the backward-moving current swept them on,

  and high on their decks I saw great admirals,

  Rodney, Nelson, de Grasse.

  This is no mere practiced and prettified version of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”—later poets learn their craft from earlier; but they must provide the originality themselves, in resistance to what they learn.

  Walcott’s most fluid and achieved work lies in the books from Sea Grapes (1976) through The Arkansas Testament (1987), where a mature intelligence no longer wrestles with language like an Antaeus but subdues it by being subdued. Midsummer (1984) long seemed to me the exception, a laggard book of hours by an author too often at his desk. Reading the selection here, I realized I missed something. Without the shape of the lyric subject, Walcott’s poetry becomes the registration of sensibility—and in texture and sensibility he has been a master, even if the redolently patterned verse has sometimes been laid down like linoleum. Overstuffed with images, his languid, occasionally lackadaisical style is more in love with words than with what they represent. He’s a better poet when just mulling things over, in a louche beachcomberish way—when he talks politics, the taste seems bitter in his mouth.

  The colonized, decolonized islands, victims of what Walcott calls the “leprosy of empire,” have been taken up by scholars in subaltern studies, postcolonial studies, and studies whose very names are subject to rancorous argument. The poet too often borrows the academic’s vaporous editorials (the “politicians plod / without imagination”) and self-service sentiments (“poetry is still treason / because it is truth”). If he had not invented himself, academia would have had to invent him. In condensed form, Walcott believes that the British Empire was bad, except where it was good, and English literature good, except where it was bad. His islands are ravishing but painterly, observed with a detachment that leaves him more a tourist than a fortunate traveler, not a man who got away but one who was never quite there.

  Many critics see Walcott’s major achievement as Omeros (1990), a version of the Homeric epics translated to the Caribbean, the Trojan War reimagined as a struggle between two fishermen, Achille and Hector, over a woman named Helen. Despite imperious passages of broken terza rima, this epic of nearly eight thousand lines is spoiled by its clumsy narration (Walcott can never tell a story without losing his way in lovely detail), the black characters bloated with the poet’s ambition, the white no more than ludicrous caricatures. Whether describing a man’s scar “puckered like the corolla / of a seaurchin” or an egret that “stabs and stabs the mud with one lifting foot,” Walcott never met a metaphor he didn’t like—or, indeed, that a reader wouldn’t love. But a tale can’t eat only rubies.

  Walcott’s most frequently announced emotion is joy, a joy that rarely seems joyous—his eye lacks nothing but a touch of sympathy (he could turn a cancer into a bauble from Faberge). He has become a man for whom introspection never seems natural, though perhaps we’ve had too many poets confessing every sin under the sun (Walcott has none of Lowell’s ravaging candor or unsettling mildness). He started as a painter, his failure likely the making of him as a poet; but the words sometimes seem mere daubs, skillfully pushed around the canvas while the pictures remain dead at the center.

  In the years since his Nobel Prize, Walcott’s work has been haunted by the dissolutions of mortality—The Prodigal (2004), his most recent book, sounds exhausted in its exits. He seems almost unmoved when taking the roll call of the dead, even when writing of the death of his twin brother; but when that reserve almost breaks down, as in a poem for Joseph Brodsky in exile, it produces some of his finest work:

  The last leaves fell like notes from a piano

  and left their ovals echoing in the ear;

  with gawky music stands, the winter forest

  looks like an empty orchestra, its lines

  ruled on these scattered manuscripts of snow.

  The elegiac tone is embedded in Walcott’s meditation on the belated life exiles inhabit—an exile is like a death. Usually uneasy with strong emotion, here he mourned Brodsky’s life as he did his own (a man without a country is also a country without a man). The self-devouring figures, turning the tool kit of poetry into metaphor (his cane fields are “set in stanzas,” his “ocean kept turning blank pages”), speak to something almost unsaid—writing was Walcott’s escape from the islands. The metaphors whisper their quiet acknowledgment of guilt.

  Edward Baugh, the Jamaican poet who has edited this modest selection, has slapped on a slightly embarrassing fan’s introduction, gushing about poems that are a “distillation from the harvest” and claiming that “reading Walcott is also an adventure in poetic form and style.” These are the metaphors of a vodka salesman and an army recruiter. Few poets have been lavished with greater gifts than Walcott; but much of his later work has been unadventurous (and undistilled), full of stock passages and stale opinions. He arrived at a few views when young and has trotted them out ever since. There are always marvelous passages, passages most poets would sell their souls for; but there are too many pages whose marvels have become all too routine.

  The poetry of exile begins in sorrow. No matter how awful Rome, the Black Sea will never seem like home (when you have to go home, the landscape is what has to take you in)
. Walcott has captured his islands with a lushness and richness rare in our poetry—the outposts of empire once seemed as strange as Kipling’s India or Bishop’s Brazil. If air travel has brought them closer, it has brought their tragedies closer as well. No living poet has written verse more delicately rendered or distinguished than Walcott, though few individual poems seem destined to be remembered. For more than half a century he has served as our poet of exile—a man almost without a country, unless the country lies wherever he has landed, in flight from himself.

  The Civil Power of Geoffrey Hill

  Gloomy poets are rarely very good, and good poets rarely very gloomy. There was Edgar Allan Poe, of course, and Thomas Lovell Beddoes, denizens of that funereal, willow-shadowed decade of the 1840s, a decade half in love with Keats and half in love with easeful death. Thomas Hardy had his black moods, but was not without his moments of sour levity. For more than fifty years, however, Geoffrey Hill has written a pinch-mouthed, gravedigger’s poetry so rich and allusive his books are normally greeted by gouts of praise from critics and the bewilderment of readers who might have been happier with a tract on the mating rituals of the earwig.

  Hill has made brutally plain that the common reader is of no interest to him. Indeed, he feels that sinking to common ground betrays the high purpose of verse; with a withering pride he has refused, time and again, to stoop to such betrayals. This has made him a poet more despised than admired, and more admired than loved. His poetry has been composed of harsh musics, the alarums of battle and the death struggles under the reading lamp—his poetry takes to contemplation the way some men take to religion (Hill’s relation to Christianity has been famously cryptic). Such poetry lies deep in the long wars of English kingship and a long shelf of books on the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.

  The other Cromwell, that strange muse of Wyatt

  and master of last things: it makes a fine

  edge—wisdom so near miswielding power.

  I think of the headsman balancing that

  extraordinary axe for a long instant

  without breaking the skin; then the engine

  cuts its ascending outline on the air,

  wharrs its velocity, dreadful, perhaps

  merciful. And that moment of spreading

  wide the arms as a signal. In fact it’s all

  signals. Pray, sirs, remember Cromwell’s trim

  wit on the scaffold, that saved Wyatt’s neck;

  the one blubbing—talk of the quiet mind !—

  the other a scoundrel, yet this redeems him.

  The lines have all the strength of Miltonic enjambment (the fine that hesitates before edge; the engine balancing before it cuts; and the resistant, ambivalent perhaps before merciful stands revealed)—but it also has a clotted and defensive mystery.

  To penetrate this arras of history, the reader must recall some of the obscure political maneuvering in the court of Henry VIII. Thomas Cromwell, the king’s vicar-general, oversaw the dissolution of the monasteries. He may have been overhasty in promoting the king’s marriage to Anne of Cleves; when the marriage failed, Cromwell was arrested and eventually executed. The clumsy teenaged headsman, perhaps chosen by the king himself, needed three strokes to sever Cromwell’s head. Before the blows fell, the condemned man asked his friend Wyatt to pray for him. There is more, a good deal more; but the poem makes no sense without the tapestry of background. Perhaps a reader should know that Wyatt helped reinvent iambic pentameter in English verse (a tuned ear might detect something of his jammed, chockablock meter in Hill’s choppy lines). And Wyatt, of course, translated Plutarch’s Quyete of Mynde.

  Modernism asked just how far the poet could expect the reader to mole about in old books to make sense of a poem. Eliot provided the notes to The Waste Land as a casual afterthought, to fill out a slim volume; and Pound buried so many moldy allusions through The Cantos that scholars have been hunting the truffles ever since. Both poets felt that poems could survive obscurity without help from the slush of footnotes we expect in the Norton Anthology; yet, without explication, a poem like Hill’s is hardly a poem, just language at war with itself.

  Hill taxes the reader to buy a good library or—in these fallen days—sail the traitorous Internet between the lies of Scylla and the damned lies of Charybdis. A reader must want to thumb through dusty pages, or dustier Web pages, to learn more of Burford’s Levellers (New Model Army mutineers), Clock House (in Bromsgrove, Hill’s birthplace), Randolph Ash (a character in A. S. Byatt’s Possession), Quid, Obtuse Angle, and Inflammable Gass (all from a manuscript by Blake), and much else. Good luck finding “Mrs. Nanicantipot,” whose name Hill misspells (she’s from the same Blake manuscript). Such stray facts are the price of admission to Hill’s poetry; and the reader might reasonably ask if these devious, dissuasive poems are worth the penalties of sense.

  Over the past decade, Hill has made this quarrel more strenuous (his poems are full of antique quarrels, which is fine if you like quarrels). Once a poet of archly mannered speech, for whom every stanza was a quiet martyrdom, he found himself during a course of antidepressants suddenly keen to talk a leg of mutton off a lamb—books began to tumble forth every year or two, rambling monologues full of jokes at his own expense, dumb raillery, heavy-handed argument. The caterwauling of The Triumph of Love (1998), Speech! Speech! (2000), The Orchards of Syon (2002), and Scenes from Comus (2005), despite their peculiar gifts, has diluted a career of painstakingly crafted, close-managed poems. There’s no telling now what Hill might say, just embarrassment at some of the things he does say.

  A Treatise of Civil Power, like its predecessor Without Title (published belatedly in America last spring), returns to the fertile densities that characterized Hill’s earlier verse. English has rarely possessed a poet who listens so closely to its whispers or is as willing to expose its secret etiquettes. Hill lies at the end of a long line of Romantic poets with classical reserve—Coleridge and Eliot stagger through the background here. It’s no coincidence that they are the most distinguished poet-critics of the past two centuries. Hill lives with ghosts; and the new volume is haunted by that poet-critic who never was, John Milton. Had he lived in less interesting times, Milton might have rivaled Johnson or Coleridge; but he deployed his prose gifts elsewhere—among other places, in his pamphlet A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes, which argued the case for religious tolerance (Papists, of course, excepted). Hill’s own criticism, aware of its burdens and its brilliance, is too guarded, too miserably grave, to yield to casual reading (his dislike of readers has been a disease in the poetry but a pathology of the prose), though he understands that his inability to bend a knee, to seduce where he cannot bully, is a weakness, not a strength.

  Hill is the most glorious poet of the English countryside since the first Romantic started gushing about flowers, his verse so radioactive in its sensitivities that his landscapes have been accused of cheap nostalgia. There is, perhaps, the taint of doomed self-love in the way Hill adores the “autumn crocus with its saffron fuse” or the “stark storm-severed head / of a sunflower blazing in mire of hail”; but, whatever the progress of psychology, few readers would trade the drenched phrasings of Hill’s backlit scenery for his brooding on obscure theologians. Hang the cost in moral uplift.

  Not to skip detail, such as finches brisking

  on stripped haw-bush;

  the watered gold that February drains

  out of the overcast; nomadic aconites

  that in their trek recover beautifully

  our sense of place,

  the snowdrop fettled on its hinge, waxwings

  becoming sportif in the grimy air.

  Hill may hedge his love with the thorns of attitude (“Not to skip detail”), the dour grievance of notice (“stripped,” “drains,” “overcast,” “grimy”), or the fillip of the foreign (the waxwings can be sportif only by migrating through France); yet his poetry is burnished by the late lights of observation. Philosophy is not enou
gh to turn the gold entirely to gloom.

  The oddity of Hill’s recent verse lies less in its gabbiness, its anxiousness to speak the unspoken, than in the occasional bowing and scraping to popular culture. Wittgenstein loved his cowboy movies, and Hill admits that he listens to Jimi Hendrix—even so, the revelation seems disingenuous. In the diorama battles between high and low, cooked and raw, there’s no doubt of Hill’s loyalties—you don’t write on Holbein, on Blake, on Burke, on Handel without staking your claim in cold didactic ground. What to make, then, of his offhanded exclamation that “Things are not that bad. / H. Mirren’s super”? So, Hill watches Prime Suspect. Is he secretly boogieing to Eminem and Puff Daddy? Not quite yet—but he talks about “lyric mojo.” Who’d have thought?

  These solemn, po-faced allusions (the only thing more frightening than Hill’s grimaces are his attempts at humor) suggest how peculiar his late tone can be—Francis Bacon sits ill at ease with Princess Diana, Elias Canetti with the Scorpion King. Are these his meager concessions to the masses? Yet Hill thinks his readers so thick that, after writing that Blake “could / contradict and contain multitudes,” he feels forced to confess the theft from Leaves of Grass (“I’ve / cribbed Whitman, you stickler”).

  A Treatise of Civil Power is a measured, brilliant book; but its measurements are at times disfigured by Hill’s peculiar sidling, forelock-tugging commentary, full of nervous gestures and mock afflictions (“This I can live with,” “I know that sounds / a damn-fool thing to say”), as well as subtle misreadings or corrections of things just said, as if every page required an errata sheet. At least the book suffers from few of the irritating accent marks with which Hill has lately tried to muscle the metrics of his verse. There’s one peculiarity that should be mentioned: Hill published an earlier version of A Treatise of Civil Power two years ago with a small English press. The long title poem is missing from this new edition, though scattered stanzas show up as individual poems, tossed in helter-skelter like the limbs of Osiris. Of this austere revision, the poet says not a word.