The Columbia History of British Poetry (36 page)

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Page 150

ever, is quite different from the kind of mutually supportive venture to be found, for example, in the collaboration between Ted Hughes and Leonard Baskin in this century, or the relationship between word and image in the emblem books by Francis Quarles and others in the seventeenth. Collaboration under more formal circumstances may be seen in the earlier work of T S. Eliot. From his desk at Faber and Gwyer, Eliot exercised a degree of control over the appearance of his work, including illustration, greater than that accorded to most poets. Thus, his choice of McKnight Kauffer as illustrator for
Journey of the Magi
(1927) and
Song for Simeon
(1928), followed by Gertrude Hermes for
Animula
(1929) is directly relevant to understanding Eliot's own conception of these poems.

Among the poets who have been able to exercise a particularly close control over the design and manufacture of their books in printed form, two stand out: William Blake and William Morris. By the time he founded the Kelmscott Press in 1890, Morris was fifty-six. His first, typographically undistinguished volume of poetry had appeared as long ago as 1858. But in his abortive attempts at illustrated editions of
The Earthly Paradise
in 18651868 and of
Love Is Enough
in 18711872, Morris had signaled his interest in book design. Both
The House of the Wolfings
(1889) and
The Roots of the Mountains
(1890) were set in Basle Roman, a type unfamiliar to most readers of books at the time. With the Kelmscott Press, a press established originally not for Morris's own poems, but to publish medieval texts in an appropriate manner, and whose first book was intended to be
The Golden Legend
, he possessed himself of the means to control his own book production, as well as to be his own publisher. Specially designed type, scrupulously controlled collaboration in illustration and decoration, special paper and distinctive bindings combined to present not only Morris's version of a lost medieval world, but also the vehicle for his own poetry and for his view of others'including works by Shakespeare, Keats, D. G. Rossetti, Tennyson and Swinburne.

Morris's outspoken attacks on the destructive effects of mechanization on personal skills have tended to distract attention away from the extent to which his distinctly personal return to earlier values in typography, design, and illustration was based on mechanical techniques developed only in his own century. The closest conjunction of author, artist, and manufacturer is epitomized in William Blake, a figure who assumed increasing significance during Morris's lifetime, especially

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between the publication of Gilchrist's
Life
in 1863 and the editing of his work by W. B. Yeats in 1893. Blake succeeded in reconciling author, illustrator, and means of productionas well as sale and circulationby gathering each operation to himself. First, he designed each page for his work so that the words flowed into the pictorial or decorative elementsand the illustrations twined themselves around and among the words. Second, using his own technique of relief printing from etched copper plates he had prepared himselflinked either to color printing or to coloring by handhe merged the imaginative and the reproductive within a single process.

In 1795, the year after he had completed
Songs of Experience
and in the midst of work on his illuminated books including
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
(1793),
America
(1793),
Europe
(1794),
The Song of Los
(1795), and
The Book of Ahania
(1795), Blake wrote of "the pretended Philosophy which teaches that Execution is the power of One & Invention of AnotherLocke says it is the same faculty that Invents Judges, & I say he who can Invent can Execute." Blake's techniques linked writer to artist to manufacturer, and ensured that each copy would have its individual characteristicsrevision could continue even through production and publication, as each copy could be produced and colored separately. Copies were on occasion colored, and perhaps printed, several years apart.

But if in some ways Blake represented an ideal in the writer's control over his text, his work still remained to be read and interpreted in ways beyond his control. By material, typographical, and illustrative means, reading may be subject to management and manipulation; but it can never be wholly controlled. Censorshippolitical, religious, or moralacknowledges this in a negative way. Most of those mentioned in the last pages have sought to exploit it in more fruitful dialogues, for example in leaving open (in however defined a manner) not only the opportunity for critical responses, but also questions of the performance and circumstances of reading. Although poetry is usually read as a part of a volume or as a contribution to a periodical, and usually in silence, such assumptions and attitudes have never universally applied.

Publication is most commonly taken to mean the reproduction of text on a pagemanuscript or printed. But this is to ignore the equally powerful modes of oral delivery. Musical settings have added their own dimension, and not always to poems of obviously lyrical qualities. Lute songs and madrigals in the sixteenth and early seventeenth cen-

Page 152

turies; the introduction of music as an accompaniment toand criticism ofthe verbal texts of stage plays; the extraordinarily widespread developments of domestic music making in the nineteenth century, especially following the invention of the modern piano and the introduction of relatively cheap means of its mass production; and Benjamin Britten's use of George Crabbe's
The Borough
for
Peter Grimes
(1945) and of Wilfred Owen for the
War Requiem
(1961)all are reminders that poetry is to be interpreted and redeveloped in ways that take it far beyond the individual reader in private silence.

Musical settings introduce a new series of elements into the publishing procedure, which may in some sense be termed a form of oral and aural typography, endlessly varied in the manner and circumstances of performance. By a combination of pitch, rhythm, and timbre of voice or accompanying instrument , composer and performer unite in interpretation, as new controls are offered to the pace and mood of reading. Parts of Tennyson's
Maud
are still remembered by some principally because of the setting by Arthur Somervell (18631937). In the case of William Blake, Sir Hubert Parry's setting of
Jerusalem
has not only made this the most widely known of Blake's poems. Both in musical style and in performance it has long since ceased to bear many of the meanings Blake might originally have intended: Parry composed his setting in the middle of the First World War, and it first made its way toward its present popularity when it was sung at one of the final gatherings in the votes for women campaign, in the Royal Albert Hall a few months later.

In a perhaps a more democratic traditioninsofar as it involves sections of the population not necessarily privy to such often private performancesthe popular ballad, designed to be sung, represented for centuries most people's principal experience of poetry. Sir Walter Scott took up the Scottish tradition in his collected
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border
(18021803), and was not afraid to amend the texts he was editing. But by the early nineteenth century the marriage of traditional Scottish and street ballads with what has been somewhat loosely called "high culture" had long since ended in divorce.

In sixteenth-century London, poems by Thomas Churchyard, Thomas Deloney, and John Heywoodcrudely printed on single sheetswere all to be bought on the streets. But most such ballads were anonymous, their texts ceaselessly adapted in performance in a conjunction of oral and printed traditions. They were part of a trade far

Page 153

larger than the market for printed books, a trade that by its use of woodcut illustrations, refrains and well-recognized characters (whether fictional or contemporary) appealed to a readership that was often no more than semiliterate. The ballad trade was still vigorous in the second half of the nineteenth century. Because the high volume of sales necessitated a well-defined and well-organized distribution network, its printing was concentrated until 1666 on London Bridge; in the nineteenth century two of the principal printers in London were James Catnach and John Pittsboth of Seven Dials, then a slum area (just to the east of the modern Charing Cross Road). Outside London, William Dicey in Northampton, and various printers in Newcastle upon Tyne dominated much of the country trade.

As a popular form of entertainment, the printed ballad, to be sung or recited, seems to have declined, in the last years of the nineteenth century, in the face of the cheap newspaper and then, after the First World War, of the radio. This migration from one form of communication to others was but a repetition of earlier transitions, just as the printed and manuscript record had once displaced oral delivery or (in the case of sermons or speeches, for example) been set beside it as another form of supposedly the same text.

To read poetry in silence, rather than to read or recite it out loud, is to approach it in a way that may perhaps be quite modern. The evidence of manuscripts of Middle English vernacular poetry suggests that it was more normal to hear it read aloud. Literature's spoken voicea voice familiar in much more than ballads and song settingsis one that has been much obscured by the conventions of spelling, punctuation, and spacing that have proved to be some of the hallmarks of printing. A casual glance at an ordinary volume of poetry, offered to be read in private, carries no reference to performance other than the silent implication of its material form. In the last two centuries, Tennyson, Browning, and Walter de la Mareand more recently, Seamus Heaneyhave been among the many who have encouraged the reading of their poetry out loud, by personal example. In the nineteenth century, public readings and recitations became a familiar and cheap entertainment, an equivalent for versealbeit on a somewhat smaller scale and (since they were not necessarily by the author) of a somewhat less personality-conscious kindthan Dickens's hugely successful public readings from his novels. Since then, some of the most notable developments in this respect have been on the radio. There, poetry found an eager advocate

Page 154

in Louis MacNeice, and a producer of sympathetic genius in Douglas Cleverdon. Dylan Thomas's own reading of his own and others' poetry on the radio (his radio play
Under Milk Wood
was first broadcast in 1954) was said to have influenced the style of his later work.

The radio producer D. G. Bridson in his memoirs
Prospero and Ariel
(1971) recalled Thomas as one who took full advantage of the voice"often enough, it was an entirely new interpretation, for he could almost be guaranteed never to read any poem the same way twice. Different images were stressed, different contrasts heightened, different shades of meaning explored each time that he rolled the poem off his tongue." Likewise, Bridson also remembered in particular (among English poets) Basil Bunting's readingsthe voice "a form of creativity in itself." Other poets may appear to read less dramatically, and more dully; but each adds to the silence of the printed page, where typographical conventions and publishing requirements inform the act of reading in the author's absence.

To move, as we have in these last pages, from manuscript to print and finally to the spoken voice, is to follow a formaland modalpattern for the sake of organizational convenience. In the twentieth century, the cheap and widespread availability of the voice, on radio or in recorded form, is a reminder of the origins of poetry in early antiquity. But it is also a reminder that, just as performance may be endlessly varied in its interpretation, so manuscripts and printing offer no more than a particular kind of beginning toward reading and exploration, a compromiseon ground that can never be neutralbetween author and audience.

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