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    What Is Poetry. Terry Eagleton

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    "The Functions of Crvciom ‘walls of our bodies? If his sso, then chere would seem a need for some spe Cia, intuitive faculty which would allow me to soar beyond my senses, plant ‘myself within you and empathise with your felings, and this emackable cap. ability was known to some eighteenth-century thinkers asthe imagination Haman compassion was posible only by virtue ofthis quity, enigmatic, some ‘what fragile power. The imagination was a form of compensation for our natural insensibilty to one another. We could not change that common-or garden callousness, bt we could elways supplement it. only I could know ‘what it was lke to be you, I would cease tobe so brutal to you, or come to Your aid when others were treating you badly So brutal, on this view, is just a breakdown of imagination, The only “drawback wit this doctrine i that iis obviously fale. Sadist know exactly how their victims are feeling, which is what spurs them on co more richly imaginative bouts of torture. Even if I am not a sadist, knowing how ‘wretched you feel does not necessarily mean that I will feel moved to do something about it. Conversely, people who come to the aid of others may be, so to speak, imaginatively tone-deaf, unable to recreate in themselves in any very vivid way the feelings of those they help out. The fact that they are “unable t0 do 30 is morally speaking neither here nor there. ‘Acts of imegination are by no means always benign. Organising genocide takes 2 fair bit of imagination. Bank robbers need to be reasonably ima sinative about making good their escape. Serial killes may indulge in "unspeakable fights of fancy. Every lethal invention on record came about through the eevisaging of unrealised possibilities. I Wiliam Blake ranks araong the Visionaries, so does Pol Pot. There is nothing ereative in itself about the jmagination, which launches wars as well a volumes of poctry. The ima ‘ination, ike memory is indispensable in an everyday sore of way: we would not read warly ona slippery path without having a dim picture in our heads of how we might come to grief om it." Nothing is more commonplace than this noble faculty eis essential co oue survival. But some exercises of are ‘no more positive than some acts of memory. Srudying literature, then, may require «rather stronger rationale than this appeal to fantasy. Before we ask coursehes what this might be, however, we may pause co wonder why itshould need 2 rationale at all. ary more than sex or sunbathing, So fas, we have been speaking of poems and poetry without pausing to define our terms. Before we go any Further, then, we need to see if we can arrive at some workable definition of what we are dealing with "Ror futer el comment about the again se ery Hagen, Tees of Cre (Oxi, 198, pp. 45-5, 4 Chapter 2 What is Poetry? f 2 Poetry and Prose ‘A poem is fictional, verbally inventive moral statement in which itis the ‘author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines should end. This dreary sounding definition, unpoetic to a fant, may ‘well turn out to be the best we can do, Before we dissect it piece by piece, Iowever, let us nose what it doesn’t say, rather than what it does. To begin with, it makes no reference to rayme, metre, rhythm, imagery, Ad soncins te gn dp Sent hy aden a cH ayy ‘As we pass across the line-division from “keep” to “steady, Leavis observes, ‘we are made to enact, analogically the upright steadying cariage of the gleaner 1s she steps from one stone to another.” The reader may find the comment genuinely perceptive, or just a more subtle version of the kind of criticism ‘that claims to hear the cut and thrust ofthe rapiers in the swishing sbilants of some poetic description of a duel, rose, by contrast, isthe kind of writing in which where the lines end is ‘2 matter of indifference, Its a purely technical afar: All the same, there is hardly a device thought of as ‘poetic’ which some piece of prose somewhere does not exploit. Prose may be lyrical, introspective and brimaming with ‘delicate feeling, while poetry may recount narratives about the land wats ‘in nineteenth-century Ireland, The distinction between the two is ripe for dismantling, Take, for example, this sourly misogynisic piece by D. H. Lawrence: 9, “Te feclings 1 don't have, I don't have. ‘The feelings 1 don't have, won't say Ihave. The feelings you say you have, you don’t have, ‘The felings you would like us both to have, we neither of us have ‘Te Feclings people ought to have, they never have people say they've gor feelings, you may be pretty sure they haven't ot them. So ifyou want either of us to fel anything at all, ‘You'd better abandon all idea of feelings sltogethes, (To Women, As Far As Im Concemec!) ‘What makes this a poem? Surely nor the quality of the language, which is aggressively prosaic. The pice is as rough-and-ready in is language asi is in is attudes, The poem doesn't shiyme (unless repeating “have” counts 48 a thyme), or employ mete (it is in so-called eee vets). It also avoids "5.8 Leavis The Commo Fess trmondwordh 96 p17. 2% What is Poetry? symbolism, allegory, figurative speech, ambiguity, metaphor, suggestive con- rotation and the rest, Rather than explosing intricate states of feeling, it ‘wrathfully rejects that whole enterprise. It does, however, manipulate ehythin ‘and epesvion to make is point. And setting up this ythrniel pattern involves ‘an attention to line-endings. Ifthe lines were strung out together like prose, this vital shychmic pounding, lke someone banging is fist ona table, might ‘well be lost. So composing the piece as a poem has a point. By breaking it ep like this on the page, the abrasive, staccato impact of the lines, each of ‘which seems to end with a series of frascble thumps i chrown into high ‘lief. So is the parallelism between them, as each line weaves a variation on the last. of the speaker's emotionally depleted state, as well a his sexual irita “The repetition also plays a major parc in anothet of the poem’s effec, “which is chat despite its dyspeptic quality, iis milly funny Its cutthe rap ‘lunenes, its bulbheaded refusal w qualify or claborate, make us smile, as -we might st someone carclesy paring his corns on a Queen Anne chai. “There is something wayly amusing about the poem's downrightness, which allows usw enjoy a momentary relief from the exacting complenies of| feeling, leis the kind of brutal candour we might be tempted to go in for ourselves, if only we weren't s0 cravenly civil, Th lines are wonderfally ‘unsubcle.indee, che face thatthe piece is comic and disgusted at the same time is part ofits pealiar emotional impact, Its deadly serious in is sav- age dismiss of fine felings, there is a sense in which tis also sending ize ‘pp. or at leas isironically aware ofits own exasperation. The emphatic refrain “T don’ have’, ‘you don’ have’, ‘we don’t have’, ‘neither of us have’ isa kind ‘of heavy-handed wis. t¢ has the air of comic skale about it. The wordplay stows the poet as sighy detached ffom his own exasperation, No doubs there should be abre, suspenseful pause in the mide of each line after the frst ‘have’, as with a stand-up comic about to deliver @ punch line da English poetry, as opposed to some other kinds, a pause can come anywhere inthe line.) Each lin is inthis sense a minor drama, cruelly pulling the carpet out fom under whomever the speaker i addressing, One can imag ine the speaking voice rising suggestive with "The felings you say you haw’, only to crash bathercaly down with the marer-offac famess of you don't have’. tis not the kindof piece you could vocalise very succesfully in stand- ard Englch. There is lot about the language which suggests Lawrence's own provincial speech, ‘So one cn see why it suits che poem to be in the form of verse. 188/80 ‘poet because icis a ‘moral statement, an idea we shall be examining in 4 moment, And calling ita poem, a title which the author acquies for it 27 What is Poetry? simply by organising his words onthe page inthis way, also suggests tha it has a bearing beyond himself and his partner, or whoever the addressee may ‘be. We shall be examining this idea in a moment aé well Even so, the lines have as lle in common wih the usual streorype ofthe poetic as they can ‘get away with, And to this exent, their form refleets their content. Their Dbrasque' way with selfconscious cults offcling comes through in their ealk ‘calatedly artless language, with its sense of rasping immediacy. 2.2. Poetry and Morality “The word ‘mora usually poses a problem, not last in Anglo Saxon cultures. Je suggests codes and prohibitions, grim strictures and ctvilsed behavious rigorous distinctions berween right and wrong: ‘This forbidding norion of morality was what inspited the philosopher Bertrand Russel to remark chat the Ten Commandments ought to come with the sort of rubric which is sometimes to be found on examination papers of ten questions: ‘Only six need be atemptd’. If poecy is about pleasure, morality would seem so be its opposite In fact, morality in ts traditional sense, before the advocates of ‘duty and obligation got their hands on it, isthe study of how to live most fully and enjoyably; and the word ‘moral’ in the present context refers to 4 qualitative or evaluative view of human conduct and experience. Moral language does not only include terms ike good and bad, or right and wrong: its lexicon extends to such epithets as ‘ash, ‘exquisite, ‘placid ‘sardonic, “vivacious, ‘resilient’, ‘tender’, base’ and ‘curmudgeonly’. All these ae as much moral eerms a5 ‘sally’ oF ‘genocidal’. Morality has to do with bebe ‘iour, not just with good behaviour: Moral judgements include such sate- ‘ments as ‘Her protestations were more disquieting than reassuring’, as well 4s statements lke this evidoer ought to have his eyes gouged out. The ‘vocabulary of erticism is forthe most part a moral one, with an admixture of technical or aesthetic terms. “Moral, in this traditional usage, contrasts not with ‘immoral’, but with terms lke ‘historical, ‘scientific, “sestheti, ‘philosophical’ and so on. Ievefers not to a distinc domain of human experience, but 10 the whole of chat experience as considered fom a paticulae angle, Physiologists, for example, ‘may be interested in the muscular contractions which eaused my arm to rise in the air; political scientists in how many other people were voting (on my side; aestheticians inthe way tis sudden motion set the light on my Jacket sleeve dappling and shimmering; and philosophers in how fce this acm 28 What is Poetry? ovement could be si to be, But the molt sintered in he valves tihich informed my decision, the human ends i was intended 10 serve, the extent ro which & might promote human welfare and the He. To this tate, we ae all mora and arta, who necessary dealin values and gullies, ae no doubt more so than mos. : Poems ae mor statement, then, no: because they ch srnget ode ments accordng ro some code, at because diy del in una vals, mate ings and purposes So another opposite ofthe word moral” here might be “empiveal’. A statement like ‘She stood before the great carved door ofthe ES ecrerera ‘Feat carved door ofthe cathedral, her fea moral nt. A lie He Tod my gle ato town’s nor 7% gote poem. cven though echnical speaking iis en tmbiterameter S01 ould adda second lin: ‘And an a shorc-legged sailor down. Thi i more promis bg ce we ow ae er endian ng wth yeu any moral point. So I might ada: - ‘Death fills like lightning from the sky; one cong? [Nothing to small to "snp it ee {yo ee ms $0 now we have a poem, albeit a presty wretched one. ‘Almost ll works of literature include factual propositions, but part of what ‘makes them works of literature is that these propositions are not present {for theis own sake, in the manner of statements like ‘Keep Left’ on English ‘roads. Pactual statements like this can always be used for non-factual effect, as happens in symbol and metaphor. “Keep Left’ can have political as well as ‘empirical connotations. ‘There is now a fat archive of poems which exploit the London Underground sign ‘Mind the Gap’ to symbolic effect. In these cases, two meanings ~ an empirical and a ‘moral! one —are folded into unity. ‘But factual or empirical statements might crop up in literary works because they ply 2 part in their overall moral design. Balzac might need to give us a certain amount of information about the Parisian sewers, for example, simply to further his plor. These facts are not there simply for information, say more than ‘You're an ugly-looking bastard is there simply for informa- tion. This is why it ist so important if poets, as opposed to brain surgeons ‘or aeronautical engineers, get their facts wrong -Byen so, co get one's facts wildly wrong can make a ‘mora diferent. Sarre Johnson, for example, could not enjoy a piece ofliterature which he thought immoral; but neither could he enjoy one which seemed to him in some 2 Whar is Poetry? ‘obvious sense ustfe. This s why he'complains when Milton in poem Ines, peas of Lycidas (he poet Edward King and himself as having ‘drove afiel, and both together heard What time the grayfly winds hersuly born 1 Batening our flocks with the fesh dews of ight.” Jobnson observes iniably in his vs ofthe Poets that we know perfec wellthat the two men ‘id nothing ofthe kind, In face, they hardly new one another: Readers today are more eady co grant Mion a pot of poet licence; but this is nt 10 say that we wil geially tolerate any od facial blunders in our Poesy. Our enjoy- ‘meat oflterary works canbe impire fthey commit serious empirical eors. Ifthe poct realy does appear to belive that Abraham Lincoln was a"Tuareg, tubeswoman, or that Stockholm sac without rice i the ih cencury BC, ‘we would probably be less enthralled by whatever rhetorical end these Facts ‘were being mobilised to serve. ‘convenient example is Dylan Thomas’ line about dead woman: ‘Her fst ofa face died clenched on around pain.” For alls metaphorical suda- city an panache, hs comes unsticlebecsase pans are plainly not round. The mage only works ifwe subscribe roa version ofthe way the worlds which swe low to be false. As a consequence, the line is more grotesque than ‘tuminating, Thoagh itis meant 19 be sbrasively physical, itis conceived in the bead rather than inthe gus. ts the kind of conceit that might occur to you afer a hard night onthe town, one you might even sexble down ‘excitedly a two o'dock in the mornings but to commit to paper inthe sober light of day and release i o the general public betrays an alarming Tack of judgement. This is not to say chat while reading rary works We do not sometimes provisionally accept assumptions or hypotheses which we ‘would not readily sia up ro in rea if, This is known asthe suspension of Gisbeiet Bat there ace limits to,our disbelief, just as there are ro our fh, Ieis not always easy to draw’ line between moral and empirical state- ‘ments, Some moral philosophers, known as realists, insist cha moral state- ‘ments describe wat ste cas seas much as empirical o scientific ones dio. On this theory, o sy You ae a loathsome sycophant’ isto give just as factually accurate an account a to say ‘you are five foot seve’ It sno just away of desing my feelings sbou yo, or recommending away of bchav- ing towards you, as some other morel theories hold. A silar blaring of the moral and empirical canbe found in iterate, Ther are pieces of wrc- ing ike Lucretius’ sx-yolume De Reram Natura, whichis an early scenic tteatise, or Vinyls Georges, which is a kind of agicltaral manual: is rue that che Geogr is also a “moral work, a panegysie to a politically unifed Italy whic is intent on fostering certain conservative Roman values. But reat sterches of it are devoted to sach apparemly tnpoede matters 3s 30 What is Peery? beekeeping and cattle breeding. tn fact, fom antiquity 10 the Enlightenment, the distinction between the moral and the empirical is less of « hard-and-fast ‘one than it generally is for us. Literature in the eightsenth century could include ‘works of science, history and philosophy. 23° Poetry and Fiction ‘The distinction berween the empirical and che moral isnot the same as the diference between fact and fiction. There are plenty of moral statements, such as ‘certain members ofthe Royal Family are oafish individuals of philis- tine tastes and remarkably low inteligence’, which are not fictional ~not only because they are tue, but because they belong to the real world rather than. 1» poems and novels. A poem does nat only deal in moral truths; it deals ‘with them in a fictional kind of way. What do we mean by this? “Let us Jook back at che Lawrence poem. One thing we mean by calling ‘this a paem is that we are not to take it simply as about a realli situation, one, say, between Lawrence and his partner. Lawrence might not have had fa partner at all, and it would make no difference to the piece. The poem oes not have the same status as an extract from a leiter by Lawrence to his ‘vif, even though i might actually be such an extract. It could be that Lawrence lifted a passage ftom a leter he wrote to his wife and reorganised it on the page in this way; but ia doing so he altered its stats by inviting a different kind of ‘uptake’ from the reader, By breaking the lines up on the page, 2s \well as by using rhythm and repetition as obtrusively ashe does, he is expect- ing the reader to relate to his words in a dilferent way from how we might addzess ourselves to a leter. The carved-up shape of the lines on the page signals what would count as an appropriate interpretation of them. It pro: claims, for example, that this is the kind of genre where what is primacily at stake is moral rather than factual truth. And in this sense it differs from ‘a weather report, of the instructions on a can of soup. We are meant to take the verse not primarily as shedding light on the author's marriage, a relationship which may interes us as litle as it appears to interest him, but ‘on human feelings and relationships in general. This is one illustration of the fact that what an utterance means depends quite a bit on what sort of reading it anticipates. “To itionalise’, chen, is to detach a piece of writing from its immediate, ‘empirical context and put it to wider uses, To call something a poem is to ‘put it into general circulation, as one wouldn't with one's laundry list. The 3 What is Poewry? ‘very act of writing a poem, however desperately private its materials may bbe, isa“mora’ one, since it implies a certain communality of response. Which {snot to say a certain uniformity of one. Simply by being arranged on the page as its, coffers a meaning which is potentially sharable. Recause it has ‘come loose ftom its original context, or because that situation was an ima- ginary one, a poem's meaning cannot be rigorously determined by it. can. be fairly sure of what “Keep Clear of the Crater’ Edge’ signifies when I am standing on the summit of Mount Fina; but a poem does not come complete ‘with 2 ready-made context for making sense of ics words. Instead, we have to bring such a context to it, and there is always a repertoire of different pos- sibilities here. This is not to say that poems can mean just anything you like ‘And justify the ways of God to men’ cannot mean ‘And fix my puncrure with some chewing gum’, at least not asthe English language is at present con- stituted, (Though there is absolutely no reason in principle why the word ‘gum’ cond not mean ‘men’. Maybe it does in some African language; ot ‘maybe it is slang for ‘men’ in some little known Engiish idiom. In Northern, English dialect, ‘gum’ is 2 euphemism for ‘God’, as in ‘By gum.) So we are not speaking ofa verbal free-for-all. But vo say that poems have come loose from their original contexts is to say that ambiguity is some- how buil nto them, since they are more free loating than, say, applications for planning permission, A poem is a statement released into the public ‘world for ws to make of it what we may. It isa piece of writing which could by definition never have just one meaning. Instead, it can mean anything ‘we can plausibly interpret it © mean ~ though a great deal hangs on that ‘plausibly’. Yo some extent, this is true of all writing, ‘imaginative’ or not. \Woiting just is language which can function perfecly wel inthe physical absence of its author, as pillow talk-cannot It is transportable from one context to ‘another. But this is more obvious in the ease of fictional writing, where there {is no actual material context for us to check it against, Even ifa poem does concern an actual event like the Boston Tea Party, the fact that it has such 4an oblique relation to empirical truth means that it still cannot simply be checked off against it. Poetry is language trying to signify in the absence of material cues anid constraints, So a poem isthe kindof wring which can work perfectly welin the absence of a reader or addressee. Not in the absence of any addressee (there are no ‘unread poems), but in the absence of a specific one, like one's plumber or ssemual partner. A poet may write verses especially for a specific reader, such a3 Catherine the Great or Ringo Starz, but to call them a poem implies that ‘they must in principle be intelligible to someone else as well. Unless a poem ‘was potentially intelligible to someone else, it would not be meaningful to 32 What ie Poetry? the poet either. You could write in a private language known only to your- sei but to code and decode your experience in this way, indeed to have the concepts of ‘code’ and ‘decode’ in the first place, you would already need language leamed fom and shared with others, who could therefore in pi ciple come to decipher what you had written. ‘Many poems do not actually have an original context, since the experiences they portray are purely imaginary. There was no real situation in the first place. We have no idea whether Shakespeare ever called down fiightful ‘curses upon his treacherous daughters while crazed and naked on # heath, ‘and fiom a eritical viewpoint it does not matter whether he did or not. It {snot the experience ‘behind’ Lear which concerns us, But the experience which {isthe play T. S. Eliot once remarked that a genuine poet was one who wrote shout experiences before they had happened to him In any ease, not all poems register ‘experiences what ‘experience’ does Homer’ liad or Alexancer Pope's say on Criticism reflect? [Even 50, this is not quite what we mean by calling these works fictional. “Fictional does not primarily mean ‘imaginary’. As far as fcionalising goes, {does not really matter whether the experience in question actully happened ‘or not, Even if we discovered that there was a reablife Victorian orphan called Oliver Twist it would make no difference to our ‘uptake’ of the work in which he appears, Some of the experiences recorded in Charlotte Bronté’s novels actually happened to her, and some did not; but we do not need to know ‘which i which in order to respond to her writing, An historically challenged reader could enjoy War and Peace without knowing that Napoleon actually existed. If fiction’ and ‘imaginary’ are not the same thing, itis partly because rot all imaginary experiences are fiction (hallucinations, for example), but also because you can ‘ctionalise’ a piece of writing which was originally intended as factual, Nores to the milkman are usually terse, to the point, and written in plain, economical style; but this would not prevent a poetically {inclined milkman from noting that "Two skimmed, two semi-skimmed and ‘one full creat’ isan iambic pentameter. The meaning ofa statement is partly determined by What sort of reception it anticipates; but this does not guar antce that i wl get that sort of reception. We can rea fitions non-fictional ‘as when I am convinced that Crine and Punishment is a secret message about the unhealthy stare of my feet addressed to me alone. Or we can read fiac- tual discourse fictionally, as when we read a meteorological report so as to quoted in John Hafenden, Wien Engin: Va 1: Among the Menara (Oxford, 2005), pam, 33 Whar ts Poetry? stimulate in ourselves a sublime sense of the vastness of the skies and the mighty powers of Nature, , A diferent ind of example can be found in/Alan Broa “Common Sense’ é ES ‘An agricultural labourer, who has ‘A wife and four children, receives 208 a week. “icbuys food, and the members ofthe family Have theee meals a day How much is thet per perio per meal? “From Pitman’ Common Sense Arie, 1917 A gantener, ped 268 a week, is Fined % if he comes to work ae, tthe end of 26 weeks, he receives 23053. How (Often was he Lae? “From Plmas’s Common Sense Arithmetic, 1917 The table printed below gives the number Of paupers inthe United Kingdom, and ‘The total cost of poor reli Find the average number ‘OF paupers per ve thousand peopl, “From Plaman’s Gononon Sense Arithmetic, 1917 ‘Our of an army of 28,000 men, 15% were Killed, 259% were ‘Wounded. Calculate \ low many men were these lft o fight? “From Pieman’s Connon ence Arithmetic, 1917 ‘The poem is presumabiy not prima simed at chose with an ites ia the hikory of arithmetical textbooks, Instead, it sheds some light on what counts at varons mes as common sense, wich 8 « mor ae than eps ‘et mate and thus the kind of stl which poems wade The suppor smost dispassionate of aman languages - mathematics ~ i eva to be ‘interwoven with ideological assumptions. Why should one take it for granted, for example, that those let ave should carry on fighting? Why not trren de? by breaking lines fom te textbook up on the page, Brownjoh can ‘uum them ins moral satement wthoutalteing word: Pemas phrser 34 What is Poetry? hve now been reoriented, They have acerued a dleent sort of mesning from the one they would have foc a school pup in the it World War ry ing to solve these sums Fiction, then, does not mean in the fist place Tactully fz’, There aze Jots of falsehoods wich are not fictional, and, as we have sen, there ze also lows of factually true statements i trary works. The word ‘etion’ is a set of rules for how we are to apply certain pieces of wring ~ rather as the rues of ches tll us not whether the chess pieces are solid or hollow, bat how we ae to move them around. Fiction instructs ws in what we ae to do with texts, notin how true or false they ae, sugges, for example, tae we should not take them primally a facual propostons. or Woy over such about whether what factual claims they do consain are true or fale “These hms, con informs sare thexe mos inthe service of moral truths they are not present for their own sake Fiction, then, ithe kindof place in which the mora! hold sway ove the empiial—in which what holds our atention i, a, the significance of Fagi's ‘matted red hai, aot how many redhaized Jewish chil-corrupers there actually were in Victorian Lonson. This isnot to dismiss such questions as pointless it says quite abit bout Dickens that he shovld make one ofthe ny two Jewish characters in his novels villain, (The other was portrayed favourably in feeble attempt co compensite forthe fis) The way literary works rg the empirical evidence may be pat ofthe moral meaning, And you cannot identify his igging without empirical research even 5, if we ead Olver Twist for historical information sbout Viroraa vworthouss, we ae not reading the noel asfcion ~ eventhough everything in ig including the information it provides about Victorian workhonses, is fiction. Tas information i tonal, 2 we have seen already, becuse i i there not forts ow sae but as pert ofan overall rhetorical design Ici there to help construct what we might call a moral vision oF way of seeing: and it is certainly possible for us to say whether we think this is re orale, Ieeble or powerfl, frivolous or illuminating, But moral visions are not ue cr false inthe same way that statements of fae are “The fact that what brainy at sake in erate ae moral rather than ‘empirical claims means that writers can bend the later tof the foreser “Aristotle remarks thatthe poet, unlke che historian, doesnot have to stick to the way tings ate, Boose Heerary works, inching historical novel, ie not obliged to conform closely to the historic facts, hey can reorganise those fact so aso highlight their mora significance, Narratives wally reconfigare the world in oder to make «point about it Ifyou ae weting a nove about Byron, you might fel fe more appropiate ro have him die fighting inthe 35 What is Poetry? struggle for Greek national independence rather than unheroieally sucunb- ingtoa fever inthe mids fit, which was how he actually met his end, Iemight even seem more ‘rue’. History doesnot always get the facts ia the most sati- factory ordes or stage its events in the most convincing way. Iwas an absurd ‘oversight on history's part co make Napoleon so stunted, of to cram so many ‘wars into the twentieth century sather then spacing them out abit more. If we do nor seat Olver Twist ‘Sctionlly’ there i a danger chat we will ead ita just another real life biography, an so fal to grasp its deeper im plications, Its mora impact might be mufed if we take it too Sterally. Yet forthe work to make such an impact, it needs to have an air of reality about it. The more realist i is, the more its moral sigaiicance is intensified; bat for just che same reason, the more it is endangered. "The amohissis message of a work of literature, then i “Take me as real, but don’t take me as real” Th one sense, poems, particularly post-Romantic ones, can seezn more sed, in the sense of more vitally present, more sensuously specie and emotionally ‘ntense, han the tarnished, abstracionidden everyday world In nother sense, as we have seen, they are less ral, in the sense of les empirical, than most ‘other forms of waiting Just as there are risks in reading poems too literally, there are dangers Jn generalising their meaning to far. We might come to believe, disastrous, that ll the moral ruths we encouoter in iterate ae universally valid ones, ‘We might read Olver Twist not as portraying situation which i in some sense remedable, but san unalterable parc ofthe human condition. We would thus find ourselves taking the view of the Victorian Poar Law Commis: sioners, who held forthe most part that poverty was divinely ordained. This ‘would be particulary ironic, since some ofthe social abuses which Dickens's novel depicts had infact disappeared by the time it was published. "To generalise the meaning of a poem does not mean to treat the poem as an allegory of universal truth. On the contrary, part ofthe point of Romentie and post Romantic poetry, as we have seen already, i to restore a sense of| specificity in an increasingly abstract society. Tis something ike this, perhaps, ‘which the delicate poem ‘Sea Violet by H, D (Hilda Doolitle) intends to dr ‘The white violer is scented on its stalk, the seavolet fragile as agate, lies fronting all the wind ‘mong the torn shes fn the sand-bank 36 What is Poetry? ‘The greater bve violes flutter on the bil, ‘but who would change for these Who would change for these ‘one uot of che white sox? : Violes your grasp i fail fn the edge of the send-hil, but you eateh the light ~ fos, a scar edges with its ie, “The violet is not particularly meantto be ‘symbolié. Bur this does not mean ‘that the poems simply a description of an individual lower, without deeper, ‘more complex resonances. Indeed, one of those resonances lies in the very sensuous detail ofthe piece — in the unwaveringly focused attention Ic rains ‘upon this fragile, vulnerable form of life, It is this tender sensitivity to the particular, if you like, which is part of ies more general significance. ‘One might say the same of some of John Clare's Nature poetry: ‘When midaight comes a host of dogs end men Go out and wack the badger to his den, ‘And pus a sack thin the hole, and fe “Ti che old grunting badge passes by He comes and hears ~ they let the suonges lose. “The old fox hears the noise and drops the goose “The poacher shots and hurts from the ey, ‘Ann the old hate bal wounded basse by “They gets forked sick co Bea him down ‘dap the dogs and tke bie othe town, ‘Aud bait him allthe day with many dogs, ‘snd laugh and shout and ght the seampering hogs. He run along and bites all he meets: ‘They shout and hollo down the nity sets . ‘Badger “The suength ofthese jagged, busily energetic lines les not justin the way they easually turn their back on verbal adornment, but loin the way they ‘esis ny attempt ‘symbolise’ the experience in question, making it speak Portentously of more than isell Clate's lguage is sinewy rather than roggestive. Both aspects of the piece are all the more effective for being ‘guiteunselionscous. There i no programmatic, Lyrical Palladslike tempt a7 What is Poetry? 2 pain language’ hese, simply a takenforgranted trust in the robustness and reslence of common speech. ‘Buzzes is an especially fine stroke, one ‘which lke ‘ol fox and ‘old hare) eaprates less a quality ofthe animal isl? than the poet's sense of affectionate fairy with i Here as elsewhere, Clare stitches some of hit lines together with « simple, ~epettve copula (sd) ~ a device you ean also find, though much more cuically and selfconsciousy, in a good desl of pose Hemingway Amexican prose, He avoids stately or convoluted syntax for a sense of headlong nazrat: ive excitement. Unlike more ‘polite’ eiahteenth-century poets, for example, he tends to steer well clear of sub-clauses. There is very litle grammatical subordination of one thing ro another, or sense of foreground and background Insccad, everything seems to exist on the same level, without proportion or pevspective, The vse s writen ina rapid, sambling sort ofambic pentameter: ‘we take ina ine, but as we do 30 look expoctanty to what's round the next line-ending, ‘The structure of the poem is metonymic (a matter of linking items together) rather than metaphorical (grasping. affinities between them). ‘There is no apparent concern for overall structure, Things sit haphazardly side by side simply because that isthe wey they accar in real lif. Apart from a general air offun and rit, one perhaps. litle offensive to our more ecolo ‘ically sensitive cars, the verse seems to fel no need ti ‘attrude to what i records. Instead, its language effaces itself before what it registers, Is present tense catches the tirmoil of che hunt as it happens, but its also a timeless present which suggests thar the badgerbaiting has a ‘venerable tradition behind it. So our sense of dramatic high inks ie blended ‘with a bolstering sense of custom and stabil 24 Poetry and Pragmatism Another way of putting the point about fiction is to claim that poems invite us to teat what they iy ‘non-pragmatically’. They are notaboue getting some- thing done in a practical, immediate sease, even ifthey may get things done in some more indirect sense. The British national anther ‘God Save The Queen’ is a kind of prayer— one which, lke any petitionary prayer, expresses @ hope that God will be gracious enough to do what we ask (namely, save the monarch) asa direct result of our mouthing the words. But the speech acts really non- ‘pragmatic: it gives voice to this hope in order to express one's reverence for ‘the head of state. Most British people who sing the national anthem are not 8 What is Poetry? «cast into suicidal disillusion when, having stl bellowed out these lines, they discover that the Queen remains as stubbornly unsived as ever, every bit as singy to her servants as she was wen they started. ‘We could imagine the legendary anthropologist from Alpha Centauri lscening co our speech and not realising that it wes meant, among other things, to get things done ~ not grasping the connections between what we said and ‘what we did, or even that such connections existed, Ina sense, he would be bearing our language as poetry ~ asa verbal ceremony which existed for its lown sake. Yer this ceremony itself is part of what we do, and has practical consequences for the rest of our way of ie. Poetry is 2 social institution. Te has complex affinities with other parts of our cultural existence. Treating. Janguage as not directly related to a material stuation, for example, demands a great deal of material stage-seting, “the dea of poetry as a non-pragmatie discourse might be illuminated by ‘his Wiliam Cantos Wists poem Which reeds like a.message to his wile ‘This is Justo Soy have eaten the plums hat were in the icebox and which you were probably ‘ving Tor breakhst Forgive me they were delicious and 90 cold “The poem might even have ben a message to his wife. THER€ iba pad) OF the piece by Kenneth Koch: | chopped dawn the house thet you hed been saving to live in next summer {lam sony, but it was moming, and I had nothing to do and its wooden beams were so inviting. We ghd at the hollyhocks vogezher tnd then I sprayed them with Ive, Forgive me, I simply do not know what am doing. 9 What is Poetry? 1 gave away the money chat you had been saving to live on forthe nest ten yeas, ‘The man who asked for it was shabby and the firm March wind on the porch was so july and cold, Last evening we were dancing and I broke your leg. Forgive me.I was clumsy, and | wanted you here inthe wards, where Lam a doctor! (Williams was a physician as well as a poet.) That final'exclamation mark is superfluous, bur Keel! parody as ‘esting impli on by appealing tothe privileges bestowed on him by the status of poet. Sraingengeirdr any Semaine strictures, Their selfcentred cult of feeling elevates their own needs over the claims of other, and the naivety with which they acknowledge this is simply part oftheir moral immaturity. Their much-vaunted sensitivity thus 4 kind of callousness enor pons ane fa agai bone} know that, lke overindalged ven. The exquisite seni they pride chomschs on really jst a form of mora eresive: ess. In any case, es ee ee ereeence e Sine nevmencopee Toe ering ya ps ee rr ee eee Ce ‘pi ngs ce e ee ee Se Let mia Opa a a ere ‘the fruit for later iar nar REET a Ie might be objected that eating something is quite as pragmatic an activity as patting it in the fcebox; but the point is thatthe poet ‘uses’ the plums with full arention to ‘0 What is Poetry? thelr specific properties, rather than simply grabbing them as f any old food ‘will do [es this which forms the bass ofhis apology, not the more predicable excuse that he was hungry In fact, he may well not ave been; the poem does not propose this a al as a way ofexonerating his behaviowt. ‘One thing the poem does, then, pare from fostering in us siiprural reflec. sions about the gut of eating fosbiden Sut, vo show us hat the snd the poetic are not slays mutualy exclusive. This iio ru, 3538 happens, of Karl Mane’ concept of usewale, which involves using tings in ways spro- priate to their inerent properties For Mars, the opposite of ‘exchange-valve’, which means purely instrumental use of objects without regatd to theit particular features, snot refraining fiom using things at all, but sing them ‘with an eye to thelr sensuous qualities. So the idea of usewralue i an altern- ative wo the aesthete onthe one hand, for whom all use is a deseeration, and the philistne on the other, who has no feeling forthe inner life of things. In so far as poems, ike plams, yield us pleasure, they have a kind of| pragmati function eis jus tha this funtion i closely bound up with theie sensuous exinence. We do not jus use poems insiumentlly, ny more chan the speaker is interested in the plums simply because he is hungry. And just his relation to the plums is both poetic and pragmatic, sos the tex ise ‘which has the form of a scribbled communication yet which init las four lines couches on a deeper sort of intensity. Toipive me" for exemple, seems allie histeonic, when ‘Sorry’ might have done just as wel. There is indeed ‘gut as well as gratification involved in being a poct: ft meabs not relating to the world quite as others do, though this (contrary ro popular mytho- logy) springs fom being more thoroughly attuned tot, not less. Koch, then, ‘is perhaps not entirely mistaken: a poet can give us 2 sense of the coldness and sweetness of things, where we might simply see tomorrow mozning’s breakfast; but to do so volves a “de-pragmatisin’ of the world which has its perils as wel a8 ts value. One would not usually assign the chair of the farine relief committe to a poet. 2.5 Poetic Language ‘The final part of our definition to consider is ‘vezbally inventive. The phrase {sa lame one, but itis probably more accurate than les feeble formulations such as "verbally self-conscious. Poetry is often characterised as language which ‘draws attention to itself, or whiclris focused upon itself or (as the semiotic Jargon has ic) language in Whieh the signifier predominates over the signified. 41 What is Poetry? ‘On this theory, poetry is writing which flaunts its material being, rather than, ‘modesty effacing it before the Holy of Holis of meaning Iris heightened, ‘enriched, intensified speech. ‘The only problem with this theory is that quite’ lot of what we call poetry seems not ro behave this way. Take, for example, this passage from Robert Lowel’ ‘My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow’: My Unde was dying ar ewenry-nine “You are behaving like children, ‘hid my Grandfithes, ‘when my Uncle and Aunt left thelr thre baby daughter, and sled for Europe on a ast honeymoon, 1 cowered in tersor. 1 wasn't child at all ~ ‘unseen and useing, I was Aesippina In the Golden Flouse of Nero. [Near me was the white messuring door ‘my Grandfather had pencilled with my Uncle's heights, Jn 1911, he had copped growing at jos ix feet. (One could imagine this particlarly odd, were i ‘Veoweredin tere, / Iwasa cil at all unseen and useing / 1 vas Agrippina / Inthe Golden House of Nez... Pocery allows for these quick Shits oF imaginative logic, in which language works more by compresion and association than by fllyspelvout connections, But the frst ive and last, three lines could well appear in the form of prose. ‘Or take thes ines from era Ponnd’s Canto written out as prose without i y And he came in and sai ‘Can't do Not at that price, we can’ do i. “That was inthe last war, here in England, ‘And he was making chunks for @rosbine Jn some sort of an army plane; ‘An’ the inspector says: How many rjecis” [And Joe said: ‘We don't ger any jess, our. ‘And the inspector says: Well shen of course you can’t do ie It seems stretching 2 point to see this kind of thing as involving a peculiar ‘verbal selfconsciousness, of the kind that one could find, for example, ‘almost anywhere in Gerard Manley Hopkins: 2 What is Poetry? caught this moming morning’ minion, king: ‘orn of daylight’ dauphin, dappie-dawn-drawn Paleon, in his riding Of the tolling level underneath him steady air, and sting High there, how he sung upon the rein ofa wimpling wind In is ecstasy! : (The Winchover’) ‘This, admittedly, is a pretty exotic exemple of the play of the signifier ~ of language focosed flamboyantiy upon itself. It is the kind of thing one also finds in certain uses of metre: Mine eyes have seen the glory ofthe coming ofthe Lond: ‘He i cramping our the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored (Gulia Ward Howe, ‘Battle Hymn ofthe Republic) ‘While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, AAs of someone gently rapping. rapping st my chamber door. “Ts some visitor’, I murmured, ‘tapping at my chamber door — Only this and nothing mor’ (Bdge Allan Poe, “The Raven’) ‘went inte a public‘ouse ro got pint eThoee, ‘The publican ’e up an sez, ‘We serve no sed-oats here’. ‘The gis be'ind the ba they laughed and giggle fc vo die, ‘outs into the street again an’ to myself se |: (0's Tommy this, an? Torsmy that, a “Tommy, go aay’; Bucs “Thank you, Mister Asks’ when she band begins to play. Rudyard Kipling, "Tomay’) By the shores of Gitche Gumee, By the shining BigSea-Water, Stood the wigwam of Nokomis, Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis... (Henry Wadsworth Longfllow, ‘The Song of Hiawatha’) ‘Metres like thie make a terrible racket, making it hard to hear the mean- ing through their incessant noise. They miake the poems seem as though they are really about themselves. Pressed to an extreme, this kind of thing becomes dogger "The modern idea ofthe ‘materiality of the signifier’ ~ cha the word has its own textre, pitch and densi. which poetry exploits more fully than orier verbal arts ~is probably bes exemplified in English not by a modern poet, bur by Joba Milton: 4“ What is Petry? hese as place (ow not, though Sin, not Tie, is wrought he chags) ‘Where Tig at the fot of Pua, Inco a glfsbot undergound il pare Rowe up fountain by the Tee of Life In withthe river onc and wh ote Satan, avled ining ns hen sought ‘Where to lie hid. Sea he had searched and land, ) rom Edes over Portis, ad the poo Mac, vp beyond the iver Orb Dowavward a antares In egg, ‘West fom Orotes tothe ocean bared | Ae “At Darien, thence to the land where flows anges and Inds. a (Prati at Book 9) Reading lines like thse almost a physical abou, asthe eye struggles to unravel ‘the intricate syntax and negotiate a path through the bristling thicket of proper ‘names. All the way from that ‘Satan’ bursting dramatically upon us as we step across from line 6 0 line 7, we need to keep the sense of the lines steahily. in our heads as we pursue its twists and turns through Milton's grammatical ‘maze. "The blank verst slows us down, forcing us to experience the celebrated Miltonic music in al its high-pitched rhetorical bravara. From ‘Sea he bad. searched and land’ to ‘Ganges and Indus, we seem to be re-enacting Satan’) ‘wanderings in the restless shifts and turns of the syntax and laborious pile-up of clauses, no sooner sent off in one fruitless direction than reoriented to fanother, There is a complex interplay between metre and speaking woice. as each weaves its way in and out of the other. The speaking voice plays across the metrical scheme with the kind of extreme flexibility and variation typical of English blank verse: but the elevated tone of the piece loftly survives all these resourceful syntactical twists and turns. Poets, then, are materialist of language. Even so, much poetry cultivates the virtues of plainness and transparency. This is particularly true of some cighteenth-century English verse, which displays the Enlightenment virtues of clasry, equipoise and exactness; but it is also true for quite different rea- sons of a good desl of modern and postmodern poetry. Modernism, among other things, reflects a crisis of faith in language. ‘There isa scepticism of the extravagant metaphor and the hstrionic verbal gesture in an age which has good reason to be suspicious of manipulative shetoric, whether it stems from autocrats or advertisers. There is also a distrust of language in an age when experience seems ether 100 intricate or too appalling to find “4 What is Poery? adequate expression, Infact, such a suspicion of language, at least in its unre ‘deemed everyday condition, may well lie behind Hopkins’ somewhat hectic ‘heightening of it. For some modernist writers, you need to wreak organised violence on language in order to knock some truth out of it, rather as for authoritarians you need to beat children senseless if you are to knock any values into them, ‘This passage from Jonathan Swift's “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, in ‘which the author discuses his own lif’s work, is a model of Enlightenment cdarity: Pethaps I may allow the Dean Had too much satire in is ein; ‘And seemed determined not to starve it, Because no age could more deserve i. “Yer malice never was his ama; He lashed the vice, but epazed the name; No individual could resent, “Where choasands equally were meant; is atte points at no defes, ‘But what all mortals may correct “Thisis pootry in its rhyme, metre, economy and pointedness of verbal effect; ‘bor there is nothing inthe least verblly selEconscious about it. Much che same {goes for @ poem by one of Swi’ later compatriots, Bernard ‘Donoghue: Stumbling my fingers along che shelves, observe an ntereing thing books "hae ha fo more than tht yeas Feature my name in proud founainpen. Now tm reminded oft 1 recll Praising on rough paper to reach Sach convincing dish of sate. ~. For a while they went slantwise, In egble ballpoing then anywhere, ‘With any implement: rollerpoint, red even, Recently Iam perturbed to find I've stared to sign in pend. HB, [Naturally but wall the time come ‘When less permanent leads will do? 22, 38, 4B... (Pencil in) 4 What ts Poetry? “This as the linguistic low-keyedness of mach modern poetry enlivened by the el, scree alteration (Scumbling’ ‘shelve’ ‘Fear’ / fountain pen), ‘There isthe occasional verbal florih ike ‘Such a convincing dash of sig: nature’, where the verse, as though in itonic homage tothe seléconscous pnache ofthe poets youthful signarure, ses briefly co the grandeur ofan Jambic pentamoter And ‘stumbling’ 8 good word with which ro gin 2| poem about ageing. Once agai however, none of this can be sid ro refect, 2 predominance ofthe signer over the signed, or the texture of the language over ts meaning Ie is not, one i gratified to note, the kind of uit ‘one finds i the worst of Algernon Charles Swinburne: ‘Come with bows beat and with empying of quivers, ‘Maiden most perfect, lady of igh, With 2 noise of winds and many divers, “With « clamous of water, and wih might; Bind on thy sandal, O thou most feet, ‘Over the splendour and speed of thy fet; For the fant east quicken, the wan west shivers, Round the feet ofthe day and the feet ofthe night (Atalanta in Calydon’) Nobody could deny thet this is poetry, which is exactly what fs amiss with it. In symbolis: fashion, the narcotic music ofthe words works to muffle the ‘meaning, One finds a more extreme version of this effect in nonsense poetty like Lewis Carroll's “Twas beilig, and the slthy roves’, which is realy a sym: Dbolist poem. Perhaps tis just as well that Swinburne blurs the meaning, since there iso’t much of it on offer. That last, selfconsciously “beautiful ine is intellectually vacuous (how can day and night have feet?), and it is hard to see how you can bind on a sandal over speed, For all its reverent heavy breath- ng, the passage is perfectly cerebral: With a noise of winds and many svers’ isa fuzzy abstraction, and ‘with might’ a notably lame appendage. ‘Paint east ‘and ‘wan west’ are merely verbal counters to shuffle around in place of gem {ne observation. The passage is ful of florid gestures and empty of substance. Poetry uses language in original or arresting ways; bat it does nor do so all the time, and in any case this is not quite the same as a steady focus on the signifier This is overlooked by those theories of poetry for which the ‘word ‘poetic’ simply means ‘verbally selfconscious’, So ‘verbally inventive’, hhowever vague, will have to do instead. The word “inventive” here is meant {0 be factual rather than evaluative: it does not imply that a poern is always sccesfily inventive, since this would rule out the possiblity of bad poetry. 46 What is Poetry? ‘We have seen that breaking up a text into lines on a page isa cue to take i as fiction. But itis also an instruction to pay particular attention ro the: language iself—to experience the words as material events, rather than to {gaze right through them to the meaning. In most poetry, however, it is not 2 question of experiencing the word rather than the meaning, but of, _esponding to both of them together, or of sensing some internal bond bevween, the two, Being more than usually sensitive to language does not necessarily ‘imply thae the language in question is peculiarly Yoregrounded'. A poem may be verbally inventive without flamboyantly drawing arention to the fact. Poems

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