Read Ebook: On English Poetry Being an Irregular Approach to the Psychology of This Art from Evidence Mainly Subjective by Graves Robert

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Ebook has 420 lines and 37652 words, and 9 pages

I DEFINITIONS, 13

II THE NINE MUSES, 15

IV CONFLICT OF EMOTIONS, 22

V THE PATTERN UNDERNEATH, 24

VI INSPIRATION, 26

X THE DEAD END AND THE MAN OF ONE POEM, 36

XX LOGICALIZATION, 66

XXX HISTORIES OF POETRY, 86

XL A POLITE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT, 97

XLI FAKE POETRY, BAD POETRY AND MERE VERSE, 97

XLII A DIALOGUE ON FAKE POETRY, 101

XLIV SURFACE FAULTS, AN ILLUSTRATION, 103

XLV LINKED SWEETNESS LONG DRAWN OUT, 106

XLVI THE FABLE OF THE IDEAL GADGET, 108

L MY NAME IS LEGION, FOR WE ARE MANY, 116

LI THE PIG BABY, 121

LII APOLOGY FOR DEFINITIONS, 122

LIV TWO HERESIES, 125

LV THE ART OF EXPRESSION, 126

LVI GHOSTS IN THE SHELDONIAN, 129

LX THE NECESSITY OF ARROGANCE, 134

DEFINITIONS

There are two meanings of Poetry as the poet himself has come to use the word:--first, Poetry, the unforeseen fusion in his mind of apparently contradictory emotional ideas; and second, Poetry, the more-or-less deliberate attempt, with the help of a rhythmic mesmerism, to impose an illusion of actual experience on the minds of others. In its first and peculiar sense it is the surprise that comes after thoughtlessly rubbing a mental Aladdin's lamp, and I would suggest that every poem worthy of the name has its central idea, its nucleus, formed by this spontaneous process; later it becomes the duty of the poet as craftsman to present this nucleus in the most effective way possible, by practising poetry more consciously as an art. He creates in passion, then by a reverse process of analyzing, he tests the implied suggestions and corrects them on common-sense principles so as to make them apply universally.

Before elaborating the idea of this spontaneous Poetry over which the poet has no direct control, it would be convenient to show what I mean by the Poetry over which he has a certain conscious control, by contrasting its method with the method of standard Prose. Prose in its most prosy form seems to be the art of accurate statement by suppressing as far as possible the latent associations of words; for the convenience of his readers the standard prose-writer uses an accurate logical phrasing in which perhaps the periods and the diction vary with the emotional mood; but he only says what he appears at first to say. In Poetry the implication is more important than the manifest statement; the underlying associations of every word are marshalled carefully. Many of the best English poets have found great difficulty in writing standard prose; this is due I suppose to a sort of tender-heartedness, for standard prose-writing seems to the poet very much like turning the machine guns on an innocent crowd of his own work people.

Certainly there is a hybrid form, prose poetry, in which poets have excelled, a perfectly legitimate medium, but one that must be kept distinct from both its parent elements. It employs the indirect method of poetic suggestion, the flanking movement rather than the frontal attack, but like Prose, does not trouble to keep rhythmic control over the reader. This constant control seems an essential part of Poetry proper. But to expect it in prose poetry is to be disappointed; we may take an analogy from the wilder sort of music where if there is continual changing of time and key, the listener often does not "catch on" to each new idiom, so that he is momentarily confused by the changes and the unity of the whole musical form is thereby broken for him. So exactly in prose poetry. In poetry proper our delight is in the emotional variations from a clearly indicated norm of rhythm and sound-texture; but in prose poetry there is no recognizable norm. Where in some notable passages usually called prose poetry, one does find complete rhythmic control even though the pattern is constantly changing, this is no longer prose poetry, it is poetry, not at all the worse for its intricate rhythmic resolutions. Popular confusion as to the various properties and qualities of Poetry, prose poetry, verse, prose, with their subcategories of good, bad and imitation, has probably been caused by the inequality of the writing in works popularly regarded as Classics, and made taboo for criticism. There are few "masterpieces of poetry" that do not occasionally sink to verse, many disregarded passages of Prose that are often prose poetry and sometimes even poetry itself.

THE NINE MUSES

"A damsel with a dulcimer Singing of Mount Abora"

because "saw" seems too self-conscious an assonance and too far removed from "Abora" to impress us as having been part of the original dream poem. "Could I revive within me" again is surely written in a waking mood, probably after the disastrous visit of the man from Porlock.

I wonder if there are as many genuine Muses as the traditional nine; I cannot help thinking that one or two of them have been counted twice over. But the point of this section is to show the strong family likeness between three or four of them at least.

POETRY AND PRIMITIVE MAGIC

Between verse, bad poetry and fake poetry, there is a great distinction. Bad poetry is simply the work of a man who solves his emotional problems to his own satisfaction but not to anybody else's. Fake poetry, the decay of poetry, corresponds exactly with fake magic, the decay of true magic. It happens that some member of the priestly caste, finding it impossible to go into a trance when required, even with the aid of intoxicants, has to resort to subterfuge. He imitates a state of trance, recalls some one else's dream which he alters slightly, and wraps his oracular answer in words recollected from the lips of genuine witch doctors. He takes care to put his implied meaning well to the fore and the applicants give him payment and go away as well pleased with their money's worth as the readers of Tupper, Montgomery and Wilcox with the comfortable verses supplied them under the trade name of "Poetry."

CONFLICT OF EMOTIONS

The suggestion that an emotional conflict is necessary for the birth of true poetry will perhaps not be accepted without illustrative instances. But one need only take any of the most famous lines from Elizabethan drama, those generally acknowledged as being the most essential poetry, and a battle of the great emotions, faith, hope or love against fear, grief or hate, will certainly appear; though one side may indeed be fighting a hopeless battle.

When Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is waiting for the clock to strike twelve and the Devil to exact his debt, he cries out:

Is, to dispute well, Logicke's chiefest end.

Far less do they see how Marlowe has made the lust of life, in its hopeless struggle against the devils coming to bind it for the eternal bonfire, tragically unable to find any better expression than this feeble over-sweetness; so that there follows with even greater insistence of fate:--

The starres moove stil, time runs, the clocke wil strike, The divel wil come and Faustus must be damnd.

When Lady Macbeth, sleep-walking, complains that "all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand," these perfumes are not merely typically sweet smells to drown the reek of blood. They represent also her ambitions for the luxury of a Queen, and the conflict of luxurious ambition against fate and damnation is as one-sided as before. Or take Webster's most famous line in his Duchess of Malfi:

Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young,

spoken by Ferdinand over the Duchess' body; and that word "dazzle" does duty for two emotions at once, sun-dazzled awe at loveliness, tear-dazzled grief for early death.

The effect of these distractions of mind is so often an appeal to our pity, even for the murderers or for the man who has had his fill of "vaine pleasure for 24 yeares" that to rouse this pity has been taken, wrongly, I think, as the chief end of poetry. Poetry is not always tragedy; and there is no pity stirred by Captain Tobias Hume's love song "Faine would I change this note, To which false love has charmed me," or in Andrew Marvell's Mower's address to the glow-worms:

Ye country comets that portend No war nor prince's funeral, Shining unto no higher end Than to presage the grass's fall.

There is no pity either for Hume's lover who suddenly discovers that he has been making a sad song about nothing, or for Marvell's glow-worms and their rusticity and slightness of aim. In the first case Love stands up in its glory against the feeble whining of minor poets; in the second, thoughts of terror and majesty, the heavens themselves blazing forth the death of princes, conflict ineffectually with security and peace, the evening glow-worm prophesying fair weather for mowing next morning, and meanwhile lighting rustic lovers to their tryst.

THE PATTERN UNDERNEATH

The power of surprise which marks all true poetry, seems to result from a foreknowledge of certain unwitting processes of the reader's mind, for which the poet more or less deliberately provides. The underlying associations of each word in a poem form close combinations of emotion unexpressed by the bare verbal pattern.

In this way the poet may be compared with a father piecing together a picture-block puzzle for his children. He surprises them at last by turning over the completed picture, and showing them that by the act of assembling the scattered parts of "Red Riding Hood with the Basket of Food" he has all the while been building up unnoticed underneath another scene of the tragedy--"The Wolf eating the Grandmother."

The analogy can be more closely pressed; careless arrangement of the less important pieces or wilfully decorative borrowing from another picture altogether may look very well in the upper scene, but what confusion below!

The possibilities of this pattern underneath have been recognized and exploited for centuries in Far Eastern systems of poetry. I once even heard an English Orientalist declare that Chinese was the only language in which true poetry could be written, because of the undercurrents of allusion contained in every word of the Chinese language. It never occurred to him that the same thing might be unrecognizedly true also of English words.

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