Poetry Notebook (6 page)

One of the many dangers posed by the academic study of poetry is that the student might be encouraged to worship giants. And indeed if the history of poetry were like the field
of study we usually call history, Ezra Pound would loom like Bismarck. But a collection of big names would give us only a skeletal account of what has happened to poetry in modern times. There were
things the lesser names could do that the greater names couldn’t. If you were looking for a major poem about the anxious political and cultural texture of the late 1930s, for example, a batch
of Pound’s
Cantos
would tell you drastically less than Louis MacNeice’s
Autumn Journal
. For one thing, MacNeice had the flexibility of technique to make a plain narrative
into a medium for every shade of both the factual and the lyrical. For another, he was sane: storms of enthusiasm were confined to his love life, and in his social views there were no radical
fashions that he fell for. At his creative best – which came both early and late in his career, but not, alas, quite so much in the middle of it – he was the necessary counterweight for
W. H. Auden. Unfortunately Auden was the more newsworthy, and in the long run MacNeice’s reputation always had to be fought for by his admirers, and could never be taken for granted. I never
forgot how I had been spellbound by his early poems, several of which I learned by heart; and in my later years I have made a point of mentioning his name to the young. Some of the Irish poets of
my generation also admired him as a recent ancestor, but for them, because he was born in Belfast but lived in England, there were often complex questions of nationalism and loyalty. My own
affection was unencumbered. So when the National Literacy Trust organization Reading for Life asked me to introduce him in a few words, my only task was to arouse curiosity. With a poet so inventive,
you can do that with a few quoted phrases: a powerful hint that the energy of a poem saturates its every component.

As is only proper, we go on forever hearing about W. H. Auden. But we never hear enough about his friend Louis MacNeice, although there were things MacNeice could do that even
the prodigiously facile Auden could not. One of them was
Autumn Journal
, my favourite long poem of the 1930s, an intoxicating cocktail of classical metres, conversational rhythms and
reportorial detail. There is no long poem like it for its concentration of the pre-war atmosphere. But there are short poems that give the same flavour of threatened tranquillity, and most of
those, too, are by MacNeice. The pick of the bunch is ‘Meeting Point’, which the poet included in the 1936–1938 section of his
Collected Poems 1925–1948
. (It’s
the ‘collected’ to have, if you can find it second-hand: the later, posthumously edited one weighs like a tombstone.)

‘Meeting Point’ is the poem that every young man should learn to recite by heart if he wants to pull classy girls, and every classy girl should have on the tip of her tongue when she
bumps into a scruffy poetic type that she feels the urge to civilize. ‘Time was away and somewhere else’ runs the refrain. The two lovers are alone together in a public place.
It’s a coffee shop, expensive enough to have a waiter, but fortunately he does not show up to interrupt them. (‘The waiter did not come, the clock / Forgot them and the radio waltz /
Came out like water from a rock.’) By the power of their combined imaginations, the little table in between them becomes all the world. (‘The camels crossed the miles of sand / That
stretched around the cups and plates . . .’)

The camels remind you of Auden’s reindeer in ‘The Fall of Rome’, but MacNeice’s vision of the faraway animals comes from his close-up on the human beings in their prosaic
local setting. Compounding achingly self-conscious gentility and torrential lyricism, he has precisely tapped into the perennial British conviction (stand by for
Brief Encounter
) that
heterosexual love between adults should reach its emotional apotheosis at a public meeting point where the most intense thoughts must stay unspoken, with the world crowding around to stifle the
passion. Trevor and Celia, though, are nowhere beside these two. There was never a more burningly focused romance, so vast a drama with so few props. (‘There were two glasses and two chairs /
And two people with the one pulse . . .’) Almost fifty years have gone by since I first read the poem, and it still thrills me to bits. If you can find a copy of that excellent Penguin
anthology
Poetry of the Thirties
, edited by Robin Skelton, you can see what the poem looks like alongside some of its competition. There is some terrific stuff there, but ‘Meeting
Point’ still reaches out: a
Brief Encounter
without Rachmaninov, but with its own, tenaciously lingering music.

In MacNeice’s poem ‘Meeting Point’, the two tables and two chairs are reportage, but the camels that cross the miles of sand are an image. The image could be
usefully posited as the key component of any lyric poem if only there were not so many successful lyric poems that have no images at all. But usually they do. Rarely, however, does the first image
of a poem shift the reader into a layer of enriched oxygen quite as thoroughly as Gerard Manly Hopkins manages with the thrush’s eggs in the first few lines of ‘Spring’ – a
straightforward poem for him, although for the reader who is just making a start with him it is likely to have a revolutionary impact. The revolution might not always be welcome, however. In the
case of Hopkins it has to be admitted that such a thing as an informed dissent might occasionally be possible. One of the most justly praised among the British poets today thinks that Hopkins is
mainly noise, and early in my life I was startled to find that A. D. Hope, the dominant figure in Australian poetry at the time, and wide-ranging in his appreciations, said that while he enjoyed
most of Hopkins, he thought that the ‘academic rage’ for Hopkins had gone too far, and that Hopkins had tried to elevate constipation to the role of a poetic muse. On top of his
critical views on the subject, Hope wrote a parody of Hopkins that expressed outright hatred. So Hope had mixed feelings at best, and perhaps any readers of Hopkins can forgive themselves for
feeling the same. But to have no feelings at all would be simply a mistake. As always, the proof is in the way the phrases stick. In the case of Hopkins they stick like burning phosphorous: there
are flashes of fire that can only be his.

Any poem that does not just slide past us like all those thousands of others usually has an ignition point for our attention. To take the most startling possible example, think
of ‘Spring’, by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Everyone knows the first line because everyone knows the poem. ‘Nothing is so beautiful as Spring’ is a line that hundreds of poets
could have written, and was probably designed to sound that way: designed, that is, to be merely unexceptionable, or even flat. Only two lines further on, however, we get ‘Thrush’s eggs
look little low heavens’ and we are electrified. I can confidently say ‘we’ because nobody capable of reading poetry at all could read those few words and not feel the wattage.
Eventually we see that the complete poem is fitting, in its every part, for its task of living up to the standards of thought and perception set by that single flash of illumination.

But we wouldn’t even be checking up if we had not been put on the alert by a lightning strike of an idea that goes beyond thought and perception and into the area of metaphorical
transformation that a poem demands. A poem can do without satisfying that demand, but it had better have plenty of other qualities to make up for the omission, even if the omission is deliberate,
and really I wonder if there can be
any
successful poem, even the one disguised as an unadorned prose argument, which is not dependent on this ability to project you into a reality so
drastically rearranged that it makes your hair fizz even when it looks exactly like itself.

It’s possible that Shakespeare spoiled us. It was Shakespeare who made such dazzlements a seeming requirement, and indeed Hopkins’s picture of eggs like little low heavens might well
be attributed to Shakespeare by any practical criticism class going in cold, even if its brighter members have read enough of him to know that he hardly ever actually says that things
‘look’ like something when he says that they look like something. Considering the readiness with which Shakespeare’s metaphorical pinpoints come back to memory (‘the morn,
in russet mantle clad’ etc.), there is a temptation to identify the metaphorical pinpoint as the building block of his poetry and consequently of anybody else’s who came after him. In
my weak moments as a critic I envy the nuclear physicists of old, and would dearly like to have a few building blocks to work with: some hulking protons and electrons you could get between with a
chisel. But the criticism of a poem, to the very limited extent that it is like science at all, is much more like particle physics, in which new and smaller entities keep on proliferating the
bigger that the accelerators and colliders get. Yes, there is often at least one pinpoint metaphorical moment in any poem, but there are some successful poems without any moments at all, and there
are also, bewilderingly, moments that disintegrate their poem of residence instead of encouraging it to form a unity.

Previously I mentioned the Amy Clampitt poem with the exquisite few lines about the cheetah whose coat, when she ran, turned from a petalled garden into a sandstorm. Nobody who has ever read
that poem can possibly have forgotten the moment. But I bet that almost everybody has forgotten the poem. In the other direction, there is the moment that seems to stop a poem growing at all. A
good instance of that would be the line that turned up in one of Philip Larkin’s composition books after his death: ‘Dead leaves desert in thousands.’ He wrote a poem, called
‘Autumn’, to go around it, but he never published the poem, perhaps because that one strong line made all the others sound weak. Such an example certainly knocks on the head any
assumption that a metaphorical breakthrough is necessarily a source of life. It could be a death blow. The ignition point for attention is not necessarily the ignition point for invention.

•

As it happens, most of Shakespeare’s metaphorical creativity, his Olympian playfulness, is in the poetry of the plays, and not in the poems; and especially not in the sonnets, which tend
to get their most arresting effects from syntactical structure (‘Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme’) and in some cases, from start to finish, consist, or seem to consist, of
nothing except argument that can be paraphrased into prose. Yet in English literature the Shakespeare sonnets are at the apex of what I think has to be called the poem, rather than poetry. A
Shakespeare sonnet is the essence and exemplar of the poem as the separable, stand-alone thing. Even when a Shakespeare sonnet is part of a sequence, it is there for itself. It will be said that
the whole corpus of the sonnets is a sequence, and there will always be room for interpreters to say what the story of that sequence is. My own favourite interpretation is that of Auden, whose long
essay about the sonnets first appeared as the introduction to a Signet pocketbook that I once carried with me everywhere. Qualified scholars would nowadays no doubt decry Auden’s opinions on
the subject, let alone mine, but he had two advantages as an interpreter. First, he was gay, and second, he was a great poetic technician.

The first qualification surely helped him to grapple with the multiple sexual orientations of what was going on in the apparently stable creation before his eyes. But powerful as that
qualification was, it was trumped by the second. There was almost nothing Auden couldn’t do in the writing of a poem, and he was thus, in the reading of Shakespeare’s most intricately
wrought achievements, well qualified to assess what Shakespeare was up to at the level of technical performance. During the Second World War, the British and the Americans carefully studied
captured enemy aircraft. The engineers learned a lot by taking them to pieces, but finally the judgements that mattered came from the test pilots. Auden was a test pilot, and we must try to take
the same attitude, measuring the thing as a mechanism by the way it performs. Sonnet 129, for example, the perfectly self-contained poem that begins with the line ‘Th’ expense of spirit
in a waste of shame’, consists almost entirely of syntactical tricks worked to compress and energize plain prose statement. The foreign student would need to be told that the
‘waste’ is a desert and not merely a prodigality of expenditure, but otherwise, apart from the similes about hunting and the poisoned bait, there is nothing metaphorical in the whole
fourteen lines. Anyone who tries to get the poem by heart from moment to moment will find that most of the moments are based on verbal echoes, correspondences, and oppositions (‘to make the
taker mad; / Mad in pursuit’). If one has ever built a sonnet oneself, however unremarkable or clumsy the result, the experience must be a help in assessing the prodigious flexibility of
Shakespeare’s craft within a set form, and thus in broaching the subject of whether a poem’s structure might be not just a source of astonishment in itself, but an example of
metaphorical transformation in which an argument is so cleanly articulated that it transcends the real by modelling the balance of its interior forces, as the surface of a DVD generates halos by
being, apparently, so clean and true. That would get us into an area a long way from the thirties, when most poets – and their critics along with them – started taking it for granted
that a straight statement could only be banal.

Geoffrey Grigson, the most irascible of London’s young literary arbiters in that era, hated the assumption that was supposed to be its mark: the assumption that no plain statement could be
poetically interesting. In thrall to Auden, he nevertheless had no hankerings for the wilfully meaningless, and when the art deco modernism of that decade gave way to the surrealism of the next, he
was ready with a pressure hose of cold water. In his hard-to-find but treasurable
Private Art: A Poetry Notebook
, Grigson repeatedly insists that only a poet could have useful critical opinions about poetry. Much as I always liked his approach, I also always thought that he was overdoing it. Though Grigson was an excellent editor and an unrivalled anthologist, his own poetry,
nervously echoing Auden’s oratorical verve, was never distinctive enough to establish his credentials for such an ex cathedra confidence. Grigson was able to reach the correct estimation of
most of the ‘apocalyptic’ poets of the forties – i.e. that they were writing junk – without analysing anything except their hopelessly arbitrary diction, and anyway there
are always critics who are not poets but whose opinions we find fully adequate to the level of what they are examining.