by Stephen Fry
Predictably, Parliament
Squared against the motion. As soon
Let the old school tie be rent
Off their necks . . .
Absolutely. ‘Noble tradition! Trafalgar, what?’ The cat-o’-nine-tails was, the old guard in Parliament cried,‘No shame, but a monument . . .’
‘To discontinue it were as much
As ship not powder and cannonballs
But brandy and women’ (Laughter). Hearing which
A witty profound Irishman calls
For a ‘cat’ into the House, and sits to watch
The gentry fingering its stained tails.
Whereupon . . .
quietly, unopposed,
The motion was passed.
There, to some extent, you have it all. Poetry (literally) in Motion. Poetry (literally again) enacted, passed into Act. Hughes calls the unnamed Irishman who cried for the cat to be brought in ‘witty and profound’ for good reason. That Irishman did in life what poems try to do in words: to make the idea fact, the abstract concrete and the general particular.
The politicians run their fingers over the stained leather, real human blood flakes off and the Idea of the cat is no longer an idea, it is now a real whip which has scourged very flesh and drawn very blood. That obscene carrier of flesh and blood passes along the benches and the motion is, of course, passed unopposed and in silence. Essays, journalism and novels can parade political, philosophical and social ideas and arguments about corporal punishment or any other damned thing, but such talk has none of the power of the real. We use prose words to describe, but poetic language attempts, like the magician or the profound Irishman, to body forth those notions into their very act, to reify them. Poetry, the art of making, pushes the Idea into becoming the Thing Itself. Witty and profound. This wit and profundity might be harnessed to release a real whale to appear before us, or to compel us to handle the stained tails of a barbaric whip. Hughes made a poem that celebrated an act that tells us what poetry does, which is why he entitled his poem not ‘Death of the Cat’ or something similar, but ‘Wilfred Owen’s Photographs’, for Owen gave us not the idea of war but the torn flesh and smashed bone of ‘limbs so dear achieved’, he gave us the fact of war. He called for photographs of the ruined minds and bodies of soldiers to be brought into our houses and passed along for inspection. The patriotic cheers stuck in our throats.
MADELINE
Madeline, ah, Madeline. I wish I could tell you that the line of verse that awoke me to the power of poetry was as perfectly contained and simple in its force as Spenser’s, or that it had all the cold rage and perfection of the Hughes description of the Irish member’s act of wit. It was a line of Keats’s, an alexandrine as it happens, not that I knew that then, of a sensuousness and melodic perfection that hit me like a first lungful of cannabis, but without the great arcs of vomit, inane giggling and clammy paranoia attendant upon ingestion of that futile and overrated narcotic. The line is from ‘The Eve of Saint Agnes’:
And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old.
It is very possible that you will see nothing remarkable in this line at all. I had been dizzily in love with it for months before I became consciously aware of its extraordinary consonantal symmetry. Moving inwards from each extremity, we see the letter D at either end, moving through a succession of Ls, Ss, Ps and Ns. D-L-N-SL-P-N-L-P-L-N-D-S-L-D. This may be bollocks to you, but I thought it a miracle. I still think it remarkable. It has none of the embarrassing obviousness of over-alliterated lines, but its music is as perfectly achieved as any line of verse I know. It was not, however, the sonorous splendours of the words that had first captivated me, but the image evoked by them. I found the line as completely visual as anything I had ever read. I suppose that subconsciously diction had been as responsible as description, which is to say the nature and physical attributions of the words chosen had made the image vivid in my mind quite as much as their literal meanings. ‘It ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it,’ the song goes. It is both of course. And what had Keats said? That a girl was asleep in the lap of . . . not a person, but some old legends. It had never occurred to me before that you were allowed to do this. It was like a nonsense joke or a category mistake. You can sleep in a person’s lap, but not a legend’s. Legends don’t have laps any more than whales have shoulders. Yet straight into my head came a suffused and dreamy picture of a long-haired maiden, eyes closed, with armoured knights and dragons rising up from her sleeping head. An image, I was later to discover, that greatly influenced the works of Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of painters. Music and painting in one twelve-syllable line, but something more than either and this ‘something more than either’ is what we mean, I suppose, by poetry.
I know this is all very fey and mockable. Very sensitive cardigan-wearing reading-glasses on a thin gold chain old poof who runs an antique business and yearns for beauty. Ah, my beloved Keats, such a solace to me in this world of reality television and chicken nuggets. They don’t understand, you know. Well, perhaps. I am not sure that it is in truth any more mockable than bloodless mirror-shaded cool in black jackets or disengaged postmodern quotation marks or sneery journalism or any style of cheap social grading one wishes to indulge in. I am not going to waste time trying to claim that a line of sensuous romantic poetry is cool and hard and powerful and relevant and intellectually muscled: it is quite enough for me that it astonishes with its beauty. Christopher Ricks wrote a book called Keats and Embarrassment and while his thesis went far beyond the usual implications of the word, a sense of embarrassment will always cling to poetry that isn’t hip like Bukowski.
‘Oh, play that thing!’ says Larkin in his poem to the jazz saxophonist and clarinettist, Sidney Bechet:
On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes.
I reckon an enormous yes beats seven kinds of crap out of an enormous no.
DICTION
How does the foregoing, illuminating as it may or may not have been, help with the writing of our poetry? I suppose I was trying with those examples to promote a high doctrine of poetic diction. I am not for a minute suggesting that some high poetical language be reserved for poetry. The language of the everyday, the vulgar, the demotic and the technical have as much place in poetry as any other diction or discourse. I am suggesting that language be worked, as a painter works paint, as a sculptor works marble. If what you are writing has no quality that prose cannot transmit, then why should you call it a poem? We cannot all play the game of ‘it is art because I say it is, it is art because it hangs in a gallery, so there’. David Hockney once said that his working definition of a piece of art was a made object that if left in the street, leaning against a bus shelter, would cause passers-by to stop and stare. Like all brave stabs at defining the indefinable it has its limitations, I suppose – it is not, as Aristotle would say, necessary and sufficient1 – but we might agree that it is not so bad. Perhaps poetry is the same: insert some poetry inside a body of prose and surely people should notice?
The poet Robert Graves offered the Game of Telegrams as a way of defining poetry. I suppose we would make that the Game of Texting now. A telegram, sometimes called a telegraph, wire or cable, for those of you too young to remember, was a message sent via the post office (or Western Union in the States). You would pay by the word, so they tended to be shorn of ornament, detail and connective words, asyndetic if you prefer: ‘Arriving Wed pm stop leg broken stop’ that sort of thing. Much as ‘r u gng out 2nite?’ might now be sent by SMS. Graves’s theory was that poetry should be similar. If you could take a word out without losing any sense, then the poet was indulging himself unacceptably. He made great sport of Wordsworth’s ‘The Reaper’:
Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain . . .
Commandments that categorically insist upon contemporary language and syntax are just as open to doubt as Graves’s telegram rule. Keats himself, as I have mentioned, abandoned Hyperion because he hated all the old-fashioned inversions ‘his features stern’ for ‘his stern features’, for example, or ‘For as among us mortals omens drear/Fright and perplex, so also shuddered he –’ instead of ‘For as drear omens fright and perplex us mortals, so he shuddered’ and so on. Wrenched syntax, he felt, is no better than wrenched metre, or wrenched rhyme. Of course, he is generally speaking right, as we saw all too clearly with McGonagall. But here is a line from that definitively modern poem The Waste Land:
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives
Why not ‘He, the carbuncular young man, arrives’? It would actually scan better, perfect iambic pentameter with a trochaic first foot, in fact. So if Eliot has not wrenched the syntax to fit the metre, why did he write it the way he did? T. S. Eliot of all people, so old-fashioned? I could not possibly explain why the line is so musical and funny and perfect and memorable when inverted and so feeble and uninteresting when not. It just is. I feel the same about Frost’s unusual syntax in ‘Mending Wall’:
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall
These are the kinds of lines non-singers like me chant to ourselves in the shower instead of belting out ‘Fly Me to the Moon’. Here is Wallace Stevens in ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’ with a wondrous pair of double negatives:
There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing,
Like the clashed edges of two words that kill,
. . . and then
A deep up-pouring from some saltier well
Within me, bursts its watery syllable.
Poetic Diction is about two things, it seems to me: taste and concentration. The concentration of language Graves talks about in his telegram game, yes, but also the concentration of mind that never gives up on arranging and rearranging words and phrases until taste tells you that they are right. Sometimes, of course, they will come right first go but often they take work. Much as you might walk briskly to work every day to get fit instead of using a treadmill and getting nowhere, so poets can work on their poetic diction every day, not just when they are sitting down with pen in hand practising sonnets.
BEING ALERT TO LANGUAGE
Be always alert to language: it is yours as a poet in a special way. Other may let words go without plucking them out of the air for consideration and play, we do not. Every word has its own properties. There is the obvious distinction in meaning between a word’s denotation and its connotation. For example, odour, fragrance, aroma, scent, perfume, pong, reek, stink, stench, whiff, nose and bouquet all denote smell, but they by no means connote that meaning in the same way. The more aware you are of the origins, derivations, history, evolution, social usage, nuances and character of words the better. Their physical qualities are as important to a poet as their meaning – their weight, density, euphony, quantity, texture and appearance on the page. Their odour, in fact. And as with odours, notice what physically occurs when words are combined. Not just the obvious effects of alliteration, consonance and assonance (my ‘occurs’ being close to ‘words’ just now is a rather infelicitous assonance, for example. Perhaps I should have used ‘happens’ instead) but be alive to more subtle collisions too: ‘west’ and ‘side’ are easy words to say, but who doesn’t say ‘Wesside Story’ dropping the ‘t’? ‘Black glass’ takes extra time to say because of the contiguity of the hard ‘c’ and ‘g’ – this kind of effect, whether euphonious or cacophonous, is something you should always be aware of. You cannot pay too much attention to every property of every word in your poems.
Imagine the intensity of painters’ understanding and knowledge of all the colours in their paintbox. There is no end to the love affair they have with their paints, no limit to the subtleties and alterations achieved by mixing and combining. Just because we use them every day, it is no reason to suppose that we do not need to pay words precisely the same kind of attention. I believe we have to be more alert. Colours have a pure and absolute state: cerulean is cerulean, umber is umber, you can even measure their frequency as wavelengths of light. Words have no such purity or fixity. So be alert to poetic diction past and present, but be no less alive to the language of magazines, newspapers, radio, television and the street.
I do not mean that in your engagement with language you should become the kind of ghastly pedant who writes in to complain about confusions between ‘fewer’ and ‘less’, ‘uninterested’ and ‘disinterested’ and so on. Irritating as such imprecision can be, we all know perfectly well that when we see or hear letters damning them they only make us think how sad the writers of them are, how desperate to be thought of as knowledgeable and of account. No, I certainly do not mean to suggest that you need to become a grammarian or adopt an academic approach to language. Keats and Shakespeare were far from academic, after all. Keats left formal studies at fourteen and trained for a career in medicine. Wordsworth did go to university, where he studied not classical verse and rhetoric, but mathematics. Yeats went to art school. Wilfred Owen as a boy worked as a lay assistant in a church and had no further education at all. Tennyson was educated till the age of eighteen by his absent-minded clergyman father. Browning, too, was educated by his father and left university after one term. Edgar Allan Poe managed a year at his university before running off to join the army. Shelley was expelled from Oxford (for atheism, rather splendidly) and Byron was more interested in his pet bear and his decadent social life at Cambridge than in his studies. But they were all passionately interested in the life of the mind and above all in every detail and quality of language that could be learned and understood.
English is a language suited to poetry like no other. The crunch and snap of Anglo-Saxon, the lyric romanticism of Latin and Greek, the comic, ironic fusion yielded when both are yoked together, the swing and jazz of slang . . . the choice of words and verbal styles available to the English poet is dazzling.
Think of cityscapes. In London, thanks to a mixture of fires, blitzes, ludicrous mismanagement and muddled planning, the medieval,Tudor, Georgian,Victorian and modern jostle together in higgledy-piggledy confusion. The corporate, the ecclesiastical, the imperial and the domestic coexist in blissful chaos. Paris, to take the nearest capital to London, was planned. For reasons we won’t go into, it managed to escape the attentions of the Luftwaffe. It remains a city of grand, tasteful boulevards laid out in a consistent style where, with the exception of a few self-consciously designed contemporary projects, the modern, commercial, vulgar and vernacular are held at bay beyond the outer ring of the city, like barbarians at its gates.
The English language is li
ke London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane: each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful of Chaucerian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Johnsonian, Dickensian and American. Military, naval, legal, corporate, criminal, jazz, rap and ghetto discourses are mingled at every turn. The French language, like Paris, has attempted, through its Academy, to retain its purity, to fight the advancing tides of franglais and international prefabrication. English, by comparison, is a shameless whore.
This is partly what is meant by the flexibility of English: it is more than a question of the thousands more words available to us, it is also a question of the numberless styles, modes, jargons and slangs we have recourse to. If by poetry we mean something more than the decorative, noble and refined, then English is a perfect language for poetry. So be alert to it at all times.
II
Poetic vices – ten habits to acquire – getting noticed – Poetry Today, a final rant – goodbye
Poetic Vices
LAZINESS is the worst vice a poet can have. Sentimentality, cliché, pretension, falsity of emotion, vanity, dullness, over-ambition, self-indulgence, word-deafness, word-blindness, clumsiness, technical ineptitude, unoriginality – all of these are bad but they are usually subsets and products of laziness. Laziness in prose you can get away with. There are, it is true, Flaubert-style novelists who search for ever for le mot juste, but they take their inspiration from poets and try to claim for novels precisely the same linguistic diligence and perfectionism that is an absolute essential in poetry. The real reason why McGonagall’s ‘Tay Bridge’ is such a disaster is that he did not have the first idea how much labour goes into the making of a poem. I do not believe that he was even dimly aware of the extremes of effort and concentration that poets a hundred thousand times more talented poured into their work. Much easier to indulge in the belief that the world is against you, that everyone else is a member of some club whose doors are closed to you because you didn’t go to the right school or have the right parents, than to realise that you simply do not work hard enough.