Poetry Notebook (17 page)

There could be no objecting to that. Here was the occasion for the astonished reader to remember that Nabokov was a neophyte poet only in English. In Russian he had been an
expert, and all the Russian expert poets are expert technicians, because Pushkin, the supreme technician, sets the historic pace. Nevertheless, Nabokov had pulled this marvel out of his hat the
first time, a rabbit as big as a freight train. How was it possible?

The only answer is that he did it because he wanted to. He had had an idea about a prominent American poet being stalked by a conceited scholar who was really a wacko European monarch on the
run, and for the screwball plot to work he needed a poem: so he wrote one. The urge had preceded the accomplishment, as it always must. If Nabokov had been writing a treatise on English prosody, it
would not have led him to write the poem in
Pale Fire
. Technique is a subservient impulse. One of the ways we know this to be true is the mess that ensues when fashion makes it a dominant
one, and artists in all fields start shoving stuff in just because they can do it. Critics become more useful when they learn to appreciate that the creative urge leading to a work of art may be a
complex, irreducible compound of the impulse to get something new said and the impulse to get a new technique into action. But the second component should always attend upon the first, even when,
as so often happens with a poem, a technical possibility is the first thing to hit the page. The possibility won’t go far unless the constructive urgency takes over. The point is proved,
rather than otherwise, by the poets who gush technique but hardly ever write a poem.

Turner’s ‘Hymn’ was, and is, a unicorn raised among a herd of horses. Since the poem is impossible to find even on Google, I am very conscious at this point that I should get
ahead with my long-cherished project to edit an anthology of one-off poems, by poets who wrote only one hit among their many duds, or never wrote anything except the hit. I have several titles for
the book – ‘They Never Had a Chance’ and ‘Poems of the Doomed’ are two of them – but publishers want names, and names are usually what such poets don’t
have, even the productive ones, buried while they breathed under the tumulus of their own output.

It can take a long time for a poet to build a name, but once the name is built it affects everything, like gravity. In 2008 Elizabeth Bishop’s copy of
Jude the Obscure
, in the
Modern Library edition, came up for sale on the second-hand book market. The mere presence of her ownership signature on the flyleaf would already have put the price up, but putting the price
through the roof was the presence in one of the endpapers of the draft for a poem. Never mind for the moment what such a rare occurrence says about the confluence of art and commerce. Let’s
just marvel at what it says about poetry and criticism. Here, we may be sure, is the clearest proof that we are dealing, down there at bedrock level, with an urge as strong as life, if no more
simple. She was out somewhere without her notebook, and she had an idea. It couldn’t wait, so she started writing it down on the only blank paper available. Any poet will read about this,
scan his crowded bookshelves with a sad eye, remember the number of times he was caught by the same fever, and wonder if some book he once owned will ever be news because he scribbled in it. The
chances are that it won’t. But that’s the chance that makes the whole deal more exciting than Grand Slam tennis. Unless you can get beyond yourself, you were never there.

There is a dangerous half-truth that has always haunted the practice and the appreciation of the arts: too much technique will inhibit creativity. Despite constant evidence
that too little technique will inhibit it worse, the idea never quite dies, because it is politically too attractive. Young women are usually less susceptible, but young men are often pleased to
think that their creative activities would flourish best if they could spend more time getting up late in the morning and taking a longer nap during the afternoon. Hence the continuing popularity
of Blake’s emphasis on just letting art happen, without too much sweat. In Blake’s case some of his lyrics are well enough crafted to prove that he had practice, but his general stance
was to assert the value of spontaneity. In other fields than poetry, some of the energy of Mussorgsky’s
Boris Godunov
is thought to have been drawn from the technical ignorance by
which his orchestrations needed Rimsky Korsakov to finish them off, and some of the primitive appeal of Le Douanier Rousseau, who so impressed Picasso, is thought to have sprung from the fact that
he didn’t really know how to paint. These are wishful thoughts – indeed they are misinterpretations – but they are bound to thrive, because the know-how of any art form takes
determination to acquire. Even though nobody can expect to master, without years of practice, a performing art such as playing the piano, there will still be the wish that music itself might be
composed by an ignoramus. Back in the 1960s, a period which was a heyday for charlatanry, there was a brief vogue for the concept of a ‘scratch orchestra’, whereby a lot of people who
knew nothing about music, but quite liked the idea of being musicians, would sit down together and hum on kazoos while they hit tin cans with sticks. It all went on for an unspecified time but the
audience left almost immediately. Only the performers wanted to be there: a bad sign.

Scratch poetry is the kind of stuff that only its performers want to read. Nevertheless, despite conditions in which a limitless supply overwhelms an almost non-existent demand, the verbal waste
paper piles up in drifts all over the world. For those who produce it, it answers a personal need. We must deduce that anything which stands out answers a need better than personal: it is something
that has been put together so that it can exist by itself, and not just in reference to the person who signs it. Since there can be no putting together without technical assurance, technique will
always be part of the poet’s schooling. But the option of playing hookey is always available; and afterwards there is an excellent chance that a show of technique will be taken for the real
thing. The absconder from the classroom should be advised, however, that approximate rhymes and arbitrary rhythms will not make the attempt at a set form seem more casual. The only way to hide the
tensions of a set form is to perfect it.

A stretch of verse can have quite a high yield of quotable moments but we still might not think of it as being in one piece, as something coherent and ready to be recited or
even learned by heart. This rule of thumb can be brutally dismissive, but all too often it meets the facts. Nobody except a prisoner serving a life sentence learns Wordsworth’s
‘Immortality Ode’ by heart. To think of it as the one thing, like any other poem you know and admire for itself, you would have to be sitting an examination. Yet it is well sprinkled
with quotations. The distance between them gives us a measure of how long a stretch of verse can go on discouraging quotation without wrecking the poem in which it appears:

Occurring in the poem’s second stanza, the line about the rainbow became famous enough to be raided, in the following century, for the title of a book by Lady Diana
Cooper,
The Rainbow Comes and Goes
. Most people who bought the book would have known that it had a title from a poem, even if they didn’t know that the poem was by Wordsworth. But
nothing as catchy shows up in the next stanza or the next. ‘Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song’ is so banal that it sounds Wordsworthian in the sense we have learned to dread,
and ‘Land and sea / Give themselves up to jollity’ is of interest only because he is saying the world is merry while he isn’t. ‘I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!’ The
tiptoed ecstasy would be pretty hard to bear if we didn’t suspect that he was preparing us for the revelation of a contrary mood lurking underneath. The mood breaks through with a quotable
couplet:

The Visionary Gleam
has been borrowed for a book title on occasion, but to no very stunning effect. William Manchester did better with
The Glory and the Dream
,
which he used as the title of his ‘Narrative History of America’. He would not have lifted the motto if it had not already become proverbial. The moment got into the language and so did
several other of the poem’s moments, even if they were only a phrase long. The ‘Immortality Ode’ is the home of the phrase ‘the vision splendid’, and there is yet more
splendour in the couplet that begins to sum up the poem near the end:

The key phrase, a truly delicious mouthful, was the title of Elia Kazan’s big film of 1961,
Splendor in the Grass
; and it was thus, while watching Natalie Wood
resisting the perils of sex with Warren Beatty, that I finally got interested in Wordsworth, after several years of being bored by him. In my experience, poetry often gets into the mind through a
side entrance. When, as a student, I saw a production of
Long Day’s Journey into Night
in Sydney in the late fifties, I went home with my head ringing to the cadences not of Eugene
O’Neill’s dramatic prose, but of Ernest Dowson’s lyric poetry, which is quoted often throughout the play, but could never be quoted often enough to suit me. ‘They are not
long, the days of wine and roses,’ I told my bathroom mirror. Yes, it was Wordsworthian, but every phrase was begging to be said. Dowson liked to keep things short: short and tight.

The ‘Immortality Ode’ is laid out like an essay. It has an argument, which can be paraphrased. But it also has moments that can’t, and as we read we find it hard to resist the
conviction that those moments ought to be closer together. We tend to deduce that even a poem that is laid out like an essay is trying to be a short poem. It just might not have the wherewithal.
This wish for the thing to be integrated by its intensity seems to be fundamental, although it might be wise to allow for the possibility that it has taken the whole of historic time for the wish
to become so clear to us. Reading the
Aeneid
, you would like the whole thing to have the compact intensity of the Dido sequence. But that idea plainly never occurred to Dante, who worshipped
Virgil; and still less could it have occurred to Virgil.

•

In 1813 Byron, still only twenty-five years old, wrote a letter to his protectress and surrogate mother Lady Melbourne which gives a strong hint of the kind of poet he would be
when, in what we call his maturity – he was only in his thirties – he came to write his masterpiece
Don Juan
. In the letter he quotes a fragment of social verse which includes
the couplet

And then, straight afterward in the same letter, he tells her that she may read the couplet this way if she likes:

If we count syllables we find the second version smoother than the first. The point here is that Byron himself counted the syllables: he filled in the gaps to make the lines
more fluently speakable. In that sense, he was a technical perfectionist from the beginning. It’s just sometimes hard to spot because he was so colloquial. In a letter to Henry Drury he
mentioned ‘the floodgates of Colloquy’: fair evidence that he was attuned to the impetus of conversation. His best poetry is good talk based on knowledge, and even his finest poetic
phrases are something he might have said. Certainly he might have written them in a letter, or in a journal. In the Alpine Journal of 1816 we find a glacier ‘like a frozen hurricane’.
Armed with this triple ability to observe something, remember it, and turn it to poetic account, he had every right, in a letter to Leigh Hunt, to deplore Wordsworth’s tendency to make things
up when he hadn’t seen them.

•

When he started off as a poet, Seamus Heaney had the inestimable advantage of having been born and raised where hard work was done. The textures and odours of the farm and dairy
were in his blood, and they got into his first poetry as a seemingly inexhaustible supply of imagery. Later on, Heaney gave a lot of credit to Patrick Kavanagh as an influence, but it seems likely
that he had it by nature, and had it to burn. When he described a spade digging into the peat, you could see it and hear it. In the long day’s work of churning butter, he could see the whole
process with a specificity of memory that no literary description could have equalled, except perhaps his. Later on, as he got successful, his work was less impregnated with these memories, and
some of us thought that he was running thin. If we were wise, we knew that it was only the difference between gold and beaten gold; and anyway, it wasn’t necessarily true. Occasionally he
would put in a moment to remind you that his best poems had always been beyond mere notation. He could still do the grand metaphor. In his poem ‘Shore Woman’ he is out fishing for
mackerel at night in a low boat when he and his friend suddenly realize they have company: