collected the echoes of packed sonorities –
especially in religious poetry – from a five- or six-hundred-year tradition of poets writing stanzas that could not easily be set as songs or hymns: the by-product of a trade-union
demarcation dispute half a millennium long.
But once again, the trick demands that the underlying frame should not be broken. When Samuel Johnson called Donne’s numbers ‘rough’, he meant that Donne was not keeping count
while he worked his distortions. Quite often, Johnson was right. Donne’s jawbreakers, often coming at the knotty point of a conceit, are always fascinating, but they are still jawbreakers.
Poets write jawbreakers when, usually through enthusiasm, they lose touch with the meter they are presuming to supersede. Johnson disapproved of enthusiasm. What even he could never anticipate,
however, was a condition in which hardly any reader knew the difference between a procedure varied and a procedure violated. We are in that condition now.
•
A critic today, I think, should be able to see that Tony Harrison, famous for composing in couplets, mangles them almost as often as he gets them right. (By academics who
can’t count even on their fingers, the wreckage is called vigour, spontaneity, bold re-energizing of a convention, etc.) The same critic should be able to see – it is the same
perception, redirected – that Peter Redgrove, say, maintains an unswerving strictness under his seeming freedoms. These three lines from his poem ‘Travelogue’ are based on an
elementary iambic pentameter with nothing but lexical brilliance to disguise it:
La Place de Jeunesse is portcullised shut,
dust rests on skiing tanned shop-window dummies,
board pavements echo, you can’t get a drink.
Since I myself try not to write anything that can’t be read aloud, I would have covered the possibility that ‘board’ could be heard the wrong way, but in all
other respects I found those lines, when I first read them, as naturally sayable as if they were handwritten in the Tower of London by Sir Walter Raleigh, wrapped in his muddied velvet cloak, and
warming his hands at the blaze of his own vocabulary. I don’t believe, however, that smoothness of recitative in itself is enough to make poetry, let alone a poem. Early on, Conrad Aiken had
a reputation nudging that of T. S. Eliot as a poet who could narrate in iambic meter. Today Aiken looks empty, and he should have looked that way at the time. His torrential mellifluousness fooled
almost everybody, and eventually it fooled the Oxford University Press (American branch) into publishing a complete
Collected Poems
more than eight hundred pages long. On page 457 appears a
poem called ‘Sea Holly’ which has its charm, and on page 797 ‘The Lady in Pink Pyjamas’ would be almost not bad if only a) some of its bravura could be removed and b) he had
never written anything else in his life.
I mention Aiken because there is an upside to the fact that the beginning reader in poetry no longer knows much about meter. All the dull poetry that was ever praised for its technique is
effectively no longer in existence. Churned out by hundreds of poets, published in thousands of volumes, there was a whole stretch of correctly genteel English poetry composed in the British Empire
from the late Victorian era onward until the Georgians were invaded by modernism. It was fully matched by an American equivalent that was far less influenced by Whitman than we might
retrospectively wish. All of it – comprising millions of lines impeccably turned – is gone as if it had never been. A student who took John Drinkwater down from the shelf now would
scarcely even recognize that he was nothing. Once, he was famous: and not just as the author of a quite good play about Abraham Lincoln. He was a famous poet.
So the idea that a poem can be made poetic by its structure alone is open to question, at the very least. I would still like to contend, however,
especially in religious poetry – from a five- or six-hundred-year tradition of poets writing stanzas that could not easily be set as songs or hymns: the by-product of a trade-union
demarcation dispute half a millennium long.
But once again, the trick demands that the underlying frame should not be broken. When Samuel Johnson called Donne’s numbers ‘rough’, he meant that Donne was not keeping count
while he worked his distortions. Quite often, Johnson was right. Donne’s jawbreakers, often coming at the knotty point of a conceit, are always fascinating, but they are still jawbreakers.
Poets write jawbreakers when, usually through enthusiasm, they lose touch with the meter they are presuming to supersede. Johnson disapproved of enthusiasm. What even he could never anticipate,
however, was a condition in which hardly any reader knew the difference between a procedure varied and a procedure violated. We are in that condition now.
•
A critic today, I think, should be able to see that Tony Harrison, famous for composing in couplets, mangles them almost as often as he gets them right. (By academics who
can’t count even on their fingers, the wreckage is called vigour, spontaneity, bold re-energizing of a convention, etc.) The same critic should be able to see – it is the same
perception, redirected – that Peter Redgrove, say, maintains an unswerving strictness under his seeming freedoms. These three lines from his poem ‘Travelogue’ are based on an
elementary iambic pentameter with nothing but lexical brilliance to disguise it:
La Place de Jeunesse is portcullised shut,
dust rests on skiing tanned shop-window dummies,
board pavements echo, you can’t get a drink.
Since I myself try not to write anything that can’t be read aloud, I would have covered the possibility that ‘board’ could be heard the wrong way, but in all
other respects I found those lines, when I first read them, as naturally sayable as if they were handwritten in the Tower of London by Sir Walter Raleigh, wrapped in his muddied velvet cloak, and
warming his hands at the blaze of his own vocabulary. I don’t believe, however, that smoothness of recitative in itself is enough to make poetry, let alone a poem. Early on, Conrad Aiken had
a reputation nudging that of T. S. Eliot as a poet who could narrate in iambic meter. Today Aiken looks empty, and he should have looked that way at the time. His torrential mellifluousness fooled
almost everybody, and eventually it fooled the Oxford University Press (American branch) into publishing a complete
Collected Poems
more than eight hundred pages long. On page 457 appears a
poem called ‘Sea Holly’ which has its charm, and on page 797 ‘The Lady in Pink Pyjamas’ would be almost not bad if only a) some of its bravura could be removed and b) he had
never written anything else in his life.
I mention Aiken because there is an upside to the fact that the beginning reader in poetry no longer knows much about meter. All the dull poetry that was ever praised for its technique is
effectively no longer in existence. Churned out by hundreds of poets, published in thousands of volumes, there was a whole stretch of correctly genteel English poetry composed in the British Empire
from the late Victorian era onward until the Georgians were invaded by modernism. It was fully matched by an American equivalent that was far less influenced by Whitman than we might
retrospectively wish. All of it – comprising millions of lines impeccably turned – is gone as if it had never been. A student who took John Drinkwater down from the shelf now would
scarcely even recognize that he was nothing. Once, he was famous: and not just as the author of a quite good play about Abraham Lincoln. He was a famous poet.
So the idea that a poem can be made poetic by its structure alone is open to question, at the very least. I would still like to contend, however,
Similar Books
