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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/02/21, SPi

A LONG H EROIC LIN ES

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/02/21, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/02/21, SPi

ALONG HEROIC
LINES

CH R ISTOPH E R R IC K S

1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/02/21, SPi

1
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First Edition published in 2021
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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/02/21, SPi

Contents

Prefatory Note  vii

1. The Best Words in the Best Order  1

2. The Anagram  19
3. Dryden’s Heroic Triplets  56
4. T. S. Eliot and ‘Wrong’d Othello’  84
5. Congratulations  106
6. The Novelist as Critic  120
7. Henry James and the Hero of the Story  151
8. John Jay Chapman and a Vocation for Heroism  191
9. T. S. Eliot, Byron, and Leading Actors  208
10. Geoffrey Hill’s Grievous Heroes  225
11. Norman Mailer, Just Off the Rhythm 257
12. Ion Bugan on the Iron Curtain  280
13. Heroic Work by Samuel Johnson and Samuel Beckett  292

Acknowledgements  317
Index  321
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/02/21, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/02/21, SPi

Prefatory Note

Along Heroic Lines is concerned with the heroic, with the English
heroic line (Samuel Johnson’s long-standing term for what in education
is now called the iambic pentameter), and with the interactions of
prose and poetry. The essays engage with these related matters, but any
claim to coherence has to be a mild one, something of a disclaimer.
‘Some versions of the heroic’ might have done it, were it not that
William Empson gave the world a work of genius in Some Versions of
Pastoral (1935).
When tracing ‘the ideal line of study’, we should (Matthew Arnold
suggested) ‘fix a certain series of works to serve as what the French,
taking an expression from the builder’s business, call points de repère—
points which stand as so many natural centres, and by returning to
which we can always find our way again’.1 To a series of works may be
added a series of writers, of periods, and of literary kinds or medium,
all encouraging a return to such centres as the heroic, the heroic line,
and the engagements of poetry and prose.
Thomas Carlyle’s lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic
in History (delivered 1840, published 1841) stand as one of these
points. The reduction of his title to On Heroes and Hero-Worship is
unfortunate as narrowing the triangular to the binary, as making
Hero-Worship even more important than it (unfortunately) already
was in Carlyle, and as slighting the Heroic in History—including
the imaginative slights perpetrated by the mock-heroic or by scep-
ticism as to the heroic. One’s moral bearings may even be obliged
to call upon Hilaire Belloc. A Moral Alphabet (1899) succeeds
octosyllabic quatrains with a heroic couplet, Aesop’s summary
­
injustice.

1. ‘Johnson’s Lives’ (1878); included in Selected Criticism of Matthew Arnold, ed. Christopher
Ricks (New York, 1972).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/02/21, SPi

viii Pr e fatory Not e

B stands for Bear.

When Bears are seen
   Approaching in the distance,
Make up your mind at once between
   Retreat and Armed Resistance.
A Gentleman remained to fight—
  With what result for him?
The Bear, with ill-concealed delight,
   Devoured him, Limb by Limb.
Another Person turned and ran;
   He ran extremely hard:
The Bear was faster than the Man,
   And beat him by a yard.
      MORAL
Decisive action in the hour of need
Denotes the Hero, but does not succeed.
George Orwell began his ‘Reflections on Gandhi’ in 1949 with a
characteristic combination of trenchancy and caveat. ‘Saints should
always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests
that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all
cases.’ The clincher is of course. And of course what Orwell says about
saints goes for heroes too. He emphasized that Gandhi’s ‘natural physical
courage was quite outstanding’. This conviction of Orwell’s was
braced against a pair of further convictions: ‘No doubt alcohol,
tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood
is also a thing that human beings must avoid.’2 Saints and heroes have
long been brought forward, often by themselves, as the two finalist
contenders. Heroes, heroism, the heroic (leave alone heroics), are all
contentious.
‘The Anagram’ is included, I admit, because there is something about
the word ‘Proceedings’—Proceedings of the British Academy—that does
rather discourage people from proceeding. And an anagram is a way
with words that both prose and poetry enjoy transacting, with my
opening instance being not from the poetry of Byron but from his
prose. The free-standing anagram is neither poetry nor prose, being

2. In Front of Your Nose [vol. iv of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George
Orwell ], ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Harmondsworth, 1968), 463–4, 467.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/02/21, SPi

Pr e fatory Not e ix

between two worlds, like an inscription. Such inscribing can honour a

heroic figure (Charles Stuart, cals true hearts) or a heroine, ‘the name of
such an honour to human nature as Miss Nightingale’ (Flit on, cheering
angel ). Or the heroic may give way to the far-from-heroic covert: Tony
Blair, MP: I’m Tory Plan B. The anagram can even incarnate the tension
between the saint and the hero, the sacred and the secular, between
George Herbert contemplating the Virgin Mary, and Charles Tomlinson
contemplating John Constable.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/02/21, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/02/21, SPi

1
The Best Words in the
Best Order

From the inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford,

November 2004

G ratitude is among those human accomplishments that literature

lives to realize. Art enjoys the power not only to voice gratitude
but to prompt it, even to restore us to a state in which grateful might
come again to mean at once feeling gratitude and feeling pleasure—as
though it once was, and ought always to be, impossible to be granted
something gratifying and not be grateful for it.
Even the fallen natural world may be alive to this paradisal possibil-
ity. A hope, at least, is to be scented. There are wafted
Sabean Odours from the spicie shoare
Of Arabie the blest,
whereupon
            many a League
Cheard with the grateful smell old Ocean smiles.
(Paradise Lost, iv. 161–5)

With how fine an air ‘the grateful smell’ turns to and into ‘smiles’. We
should be grateful to Milton, and so we are. Meanwhile Satan, the
great ingrate, in this his unsmiling passage into the Garden of Eden,
seeks to darken any such passage as this of Milton.
Gratitude, not an easy thing. Fortunately, there is the gratitude felt
by all of us to—and for—the enduring poets whom the Professorship
of Poetry at Oxford exists to honour. Gratitude, moreover, as a high
calling of literary studies in particular, with ingratitude as then the low
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/02/21, SPi

2 a long h e roic li n e s

answer. Not one of us is professionally immune, since what should be

a triumph of literary criticism—that it exists in the same medium as its
art, as, say, music criticism does not—is by the same token its special
peril of professionalized triumphalism. ‘The deep | Moans round with
many voices’: my moan, or (uglily) what I’d like to know, is why, since
Tennyson and I work in the same medium—language, in a word—
why it’s always me giving a talk about him and never him giving a talk
about me.
A century ago this professorship was held by one who is, in my eyes,
the greatest of those who—while not themselves being poets—have
ministered here to the art: A. C. Bradley, who graced the chair from
1901 to 1906. His inaugural lecture was devoted to ‘Poetry for Poetry’s
Sake’ (probably—since he was never owlish—with some memory of
the countering quip about Art: What is art, that it should have a sake?),
and he began with these words:
One who, after twenty years, is restored to the University where he was taught
and first tried to teach, and who has received at the hands of his Alma Mater an
honour of which he never dreamed, is tempted to speak both of himself and
of her. But I remember that you have come to listen to my thoughts about a
great subject, and not to my feelings about myself · · · 1
A great subject, poetry: but as against what, exactly? There is no
Oxford Professor of Prose. Not only is there no Proser Laureate (as
against, over the years, many a Poetaster Laureate), there is no prose
counterpart to the word ‘poet’, or to ‘poem’. T. S. Eliot in 1921 wrote
that ‘we cannot speak conveniently in English, as we can in French, of
“Proses” in the plural’,2 but even more tellingly we cannot speak con-
veniently of a prose in the singular either. Eliot pressed on (‘if we
admit the long poem, we surely ought to admit the short “prose” ’),
but, as so often, surely and those quotation-marks are allowed to plead
but on the understanding that they concede defeat.
Samuel Johnson: ‘To circumscribe poetry by a definition will only
shew the narrowness of the definer.’3 Here in Oxford the widest of
predecessors, Matthew Arnold, narrowed his mind no doubt in one
disrespect: ‘Poetry, no doubt, is more excellent in itself than prose. In
poetry man finds the highest and most beautiful expression of that
1. Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London, 1909), 3.
2. ‘Prose and Verse’, in The Chapbook, No. 22 (April 1921), 5–6.
3. ‘The Life of Pope’, in The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale
(Oxford, 2006), iv. 80.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/02/21, SPi

t h e be st wor ds i n t h e be st or de r 3

which is in him.’4 But such an announcement, in claiming too much

for poetry, and in issuing the claim tout court, sets poetry up pre­car­
ious­ly. All who love music or painting may bridle or bristle at this, and
must wish to hear something from Arnold as to why there is no con-
ceivable competition for the accolade. The superiority of poetry to
prose is asserted and reasserted by Arnold but never has to be made
good since it is taken to be self-evident:
Poetry is simply the most delightful and perfect form of utterance that human
words can reach. Its rhythm and measure, elevated to a regularity, certainty, and
force very different from that of the rhythm and measure which can pervade
prose, are a part of its perfection.5
‘Poetry is simply · · ·’6: this has its work cut out, or rather cuts out the
need for any work. That the rhythm and measure of poetry (or rather,
the rhythms and measures of poetry) may be ‘very different’ from those
of prose (prose itself being no one thing): this may be conceded with-
out accepting that the differences constitute ‘simply’ a superiority in
poetry. T. S. Eliot knew otherwise. For a start: ‘poetry has as much to
learn from prose as from other poetry; and I think that an interaction
between prose and verse, like the interaction between language and
language, is a condition of vitality in literature.’7 To esteem poetry
should entail respecting its sibling, prose.
Not so for Coleridge, who is keen to get the better of any opponent:
A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science,
by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other
species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing
to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratifica-
tion from each component part.8
But where is the making good, or even any attempt at making good,
of this last assertion? How much of an artistic achievement could (say)
a novel be, that did not propose ‘to itself such delight from the whole, as
is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part’?

4. ‘Johnson’s Lives’, in Selected Criticism of Matthew Arnold, 358; ‘man’ as mankind, but
quiet­ly enlisting the word’s masculine persuasive force.
5. ‘The French Play in London’ (1879), ibid. 159.
6. Ellipses that are raised · · · indicate an omission editorially introduced in these essays. Ellipses
printed in the ordinary way are from the immediate source. (The practice is that established
in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London, 2015).)
7. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London, 1933), 152.
8. Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, 1983), ii. 13.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/02/21, SPi

4 a long h e roic li n e s

Why does this responsibility, this imaginative feat, characterize poetry,

as against ‘all other species’ of composition? Because Coleridge will
have it so. Poetry is from all other species discriminated by . . . He is not
exercising discrimination, he is practising discrimination. Lacking respect
for prose, he is a prosist.
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of
prose and poetry; that is, prose equals words in their best order; poetry equals
the best words in the best order. The definition of good prose is—Proper
words in their proper places;—of good Verse—the properest words in their
proper places.9
Not altogether proper, this. Wordsworth, for whom even the familiar
sibling figure-of-speech constituted an insufficient acknowledgement
of the affiliation of poetry and prose, wisely differed as to whether any
homely-definitional differentiation would hold:
We are fond of tracing the resemblance between Poetry and Painting, and,
accordingly, we call them Sisters: but where shall we find bonds of connection
sufficiently strict to typify the affinity betwixt metrical and prose com­pos­
ition? They both speak by and to the same organs; the bodies in which both
of them are clothed may be said to be of the same substance, their affections
are kindred and almost identical, not necessarily differing even in degree;
Poetry sheds no tears ‘such as Angels weep,’ but natural and human tears, she
can boast of no celestial Ichor that distinguishes her vital juices from those of
prose; the same human blood circulates through the veins of both.10
‘Thrice he assayd, and thrice in spite of scorn, | Tears such as Angels
weep, burst forth · · ·’ (Paradise Lost, i. 619–20). ‘Som natural tears they
drop’d, but wip’d them soon’ (xii. 645). Justice, for the fallen angel
even, as well as for fallen mankind. Justice to prose, then.
Great prose may constitute an elaborated cry for justice, or—in the
unavoided absence of justice—for revenge, a kind of wild justice that
is not without its heroism.
Salerio  Why I am sure if he forfaite, thou wilt not take his flesh,
what’s that good for?
Shylock To baite fish withal, if it will feede nothing else, it will
feede my revenge; he hath disgrac’d me, and hindred me
halfe a million, laught at my losses, mockt at my gaines,

9. Coleridge, Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring (Princeton, 1990), i. 90, 25–26 August 1827.
10. Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed.
W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford, 1974), i. 134.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/02/21, SPi

t h e be st wor ds i n t h e be st or de r 5

scorned my Nation, thwarted my bargaines, cooled my

friends, heated mine enemie, and what’s his reason? I am a
Jewe: Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dementions, sences, affections, passions, fed with the same
foode, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same
diseases, healed by the same meanes, warmed and cooled
by the same Winter and Sommer as a Christian is: if you
pricke us, doe we not bleede? if you tickle us, doe we not
laugh? if you poison us doe we not die? and if you wrong
us shall we not revenge? if we are like you in the rest, we
will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what
is his humility, revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what
should his sufferance be by Christian example, why revenge?
The villanie you teach me I will execute, and it shall goe
hard but I will better the instruction. (Merchant, III. i)
Great prose may mount a rebuke to the human propensity to elude
responsibility.
Edmund This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are
sicke in fortune, often the surfets of our own behaviour, we
make guilty of our disasters, the Sun, the Moone, and Starres,
as if we were villaines on necessitie, Fooles by heavenly
compulsion, Knaves, Thieves, and Treachers by Sphericall
predominance, Drunkards, Lyars, and Adulterers by an
inforc’d obedience of Planatary influence; and all that we are
evill in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of
Whore-master-man, to lay his Goatish disposition on the
charge of a Starre: My father compounded with my mother
under the Dragons taile, and my Nativity was under Ursa
Major, so that it followes, I am rough and Lecherous. Fut, I
should have bin that I am, had the maidenlest Starre in the
Firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. (Lear, I. ii)
I cannot see—more, I cannot imagine—any respect in which
Shakespeare’s ways with words in prose are any less supreme than in
verse or poetry. The same is true of Hamlet’s words, Hamlet whose
heroic courage before the lethal duel could not be better, either in
itself or in Shakespeare’s realization of it—in prose. Nothing could be
less prosy or prosaic (the epithets that a partiality for poetry is happy to
visit upon prose).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/02/21, SPi

6 a long h e roic li n e s

Horatio You will lose this wager, my Lord.

Hamlet I doe not thinke so, since he went into France, I have
beene in continuall practice; I shall winne at the oddes.
But thou would’st not thinke how ill all’s heere about my
heart: but it is no matter.
Horatio Nay, good my Lord.
Hamlet It is but foolery; but it is such a kinde of gain-giving as
would perhaps trouble a woman.
Horatio If your minde dislike any thing, obey it. I will forestall
their repaire hither, and say you are not fit.
Hamlet Not a whit, we defie Augury; there’s a speciall Providence
in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come: if it
bee not to come, it will bee now; if it be not now; yet it
will come; the readiness is all. Since no man of aught he
leaves knows, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be. (V. ii)11
Any presupposition that thinks less well of such realization for being
prose, not poetry, is thoughtless. Shakespeare is either the greatest
prose-writer in our literature or one of the greatest, and he is neither
working in an inferior medium, nor saddled with an inferior system of
punctuation, nor denied the very various powers that rhythm can
command.
Let me turn to another predecessor, from the great line of poet-
critics. Yet it may be that it is the poet-critics who are most tempted
to misvalue prose as against poetry, especially if they themselves wrote
their prose more to gain a living than that they might have life and that
they might have it more abundantly.12
Robert Graves on ‘Prose and Poetry’: ‘Prose is the art of manifest
statement.’ It depends what prose. The King James Bible? Traherne,
Johnson, Jane Austen, Ruskin, Dickens, Henry James, I. Compton-
Burnett, Beckett? True, the claim that prose is the art of manifest state-
ment can, in a way, manifestly be shown to be true, or be made to be

11. Four pages in a book of mine, The Force of Poetry (Oxford, 1984), are devoted to the
greatness of the prose of this scene and to the heroism of Hamlet (pp. 61–5). The
present text of the plays draws upon both Folio and Quartos. The prose performs in
a dramatic work: ‘the best example for a sentence with a particular meaning is a
quota­tion from a play’ because ‘the contexts of a sentence are best portrayed in a play’,
Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology (Oxford, 1982), i. 6; from Eric
Griffiths, ‘Lines and Grooves: Shakespeare to Tennyson’, in Tennyson Among the Poets,
ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry (Oxford, 2009), 155.
12. On the poet-critic in relation to the novelist as critic, see p. 135 below.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/02/21, SPi

t h e be st wor ds i n t h e be st or de r 7

true. All you have to do is limit your chosen prose to prose of which
it is true. But.
Prose is the art of manifest statement: the periods and diction may vary with
the emotional mood, but the latent meanings of the words that compose it are
largely disregarded. In poetry a supplementary statement is framed by a precise
marshalling of these latent meanings; yet the reader would not be aware of
more than the manifest statement were it not for the heightened sensibility
induced in him by the rhythmic intoxications of verse.13
Largely disregarded, even as (in Graves’s way), genuine thought is being
very largely disregarded. Can rhythmic intoxications really be trusted to
minister to heightened sensibility? But then again if people are told, by
a true poet (for all his being a fickle authority), that when they read
prose they ought not to be bothered with rhythm, sadly they may be
happy to go along with unawareness. But their reading, their sense of
the many forms that due attention may rewardingly take, will be a thin
thing. ‘One doesn’t “listen” when reading standard prose.’ Yet Graves,
secure in the confidence (  justified, which cannot but complicate
things) that his own prose isn’t mediocre as would be standard prose, does
count on his readers coming to count and listen to the beats at least:
One doesn’t ‘listen’ when reading standard prose; it is only in poetry that one
looks out for metre and rhythmic variations on it. The writers of vers libre rely
on their printers to call your attention to what is called ‘cadence’ or ‘rhythmic
relation’ (not easy to follow) which might have escaped you if printed as prose;
this sentence, you’ll find, has its thumb to its nose.14
By the thumbing of my nose, something wicked that way goes. The
campaign to elect Robert Graves to the Professorship of Poetry had
been enlivened by the slogan ‘We Dig Graves’. Dig him, I did, and do,
but not when he came, not to praise prose as well as poetry on occa-
sion, but to bury prose. The campaign to elect Roy Fuller was sup-
ported by a life-line from Tennyson:‘More Life, and Fuller, that I want’.
Even W. H. Auden, of this Professorship, though he did not bite his
thumb at prose, did not always give it the time of day. The introduc-
tion to The Poet’s Tongue (1935) that he wrote with John Garrett begins:
Of the many definitions of poetry, the simplest is still the best: ‘memorable
speech.’ That is to say, it must move our emotions, or excite our intellect, for
only that which is moving or exciting is memorable · · · 15

13. ‘Observations on Poetry (1922–1925)’, in The Common Asphodel (London, 1949), 3.

14. Ibid. 8. 15. Auden, Prose: 1926–1938, ed. Edward Mendelson (London, 1996), 105.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/02/21, SPi

8 a long h e roic li n e s

But where does this leave all such literature as is prose? Auden casually
calls prose ‘all those uses of words that are not poetry’. Everything that
Auden said here about poetry (including that ‘The test of a poet is the
frequency and diversity of the occasions on which we remember his
poetry’16—or hers) does strike me as true, but true solely because true
of all literature (and of all art?) and not as genuinely characterizing,
leave alone defining, poetry. Not, that is, as differentiating poetry from
other things—prose, for one,‘all those uses of words that are not poetry’.
When one poet-critic thumbs his nose at another, this may because
the thumber is nailing the thumbee as soft on prose. I’d have thought
that A. E. Housman was quite sufficiently lauding poetry when he said
that ‘it may differ from prose only in its metrical form, and be superior
to prose only in the superior comeliness of that form itself, and the
superior terseness which usually goes along with it’.17 (What I tell you
three times is true: superior . . .) And comeliness? Come now. This would
have to depend on whether comeliness itself could always be becom-
ing. Housman persevered in this conviction that somehow all litera-
ture would be poetry if it could, but he did along the way lapse into
an admission that was to earn him the fury of Ezra Pound. Housman:
When I examine my mind and try to discern clearly in the matter, I cannot
satisfy myself that there are any such things as poetical ideas. No truth, it seems
to me, is too precious, no observation too profound, and no sentiment too
exalted to be expressed in prose. The utmost that I could admit is that some
ideas do, while others do not, lend themselves kindly to poetical expression;
and that these receive from poetry an enhancement which glorifies and almost
transfigures them · · ·18
Uncharacteristically slippery of Housman, this, for he was not one to
permit to others such rhetorical evasions as ‘almost transfigures’.
(Almost? Try, instead, thinking out—with precision—the ways in which
transfigures both is and is not the right word.) But anyway Pound could
hardly believe his ears, and was delightedly released to express his con-
tempt of Housman for too much respecting prose. Pound:
‘No truth’, says Housman, ‘too precious, observation too profound, sentiment
too exalted to be expressed in prose’.

16. Auden, Prose: 1926–1938, 106.

17. ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’ (1933), in Collected Poems and Selected Prose, ed.
Christopher Ricks (Harmondsworth, 1988), 351.
18. Ibid. 364.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/02/21, SPi

t h e be st wor ds i n t h e be st or de r 9

I am unqualified to speak of exalted sentiment, but I should say no idea

worth carrying in the mind from one year’s end to another, and no story really
good enough to make me at least want to tell it, but chafes at the flatness of
prose, but suffers from inadequate statement, but leaves me feeling it is but half
said, or said in abstraction, defined in terms so elastic that any god’s ape can
stretch its definition to meet his own squalor or to fit his imbecility, until it be
­conjoined with music, or at least given rhythmic definition even though one
do not arrive at defining its total articulation.19
Pound was too often keen to execute summary justice. ‘I begin with
poetry because it is the most concentrated form of verbal expression.’20
(As for prose: ‘One reads prose for the subject matter.’21) Yet nothing
could be more concentrated than the verbal expression that is a prov-
erb, and to resort then to saying that proverbs are a form of poetry
would be to win at all costs, including the cost of bogus argument and
of annulling any such differentiation. If whenever prose is character-
ized by concentration (or by any other of the things that are falsely
held to characterize poetry, such as suggestiveness, rhythm, metaphor,
or reaching the parts that other literary kinds fail to reach) we simply
co-opt the word poetic or poetry, we evacuate the argument. Any such
victory is emptily rhetorical, circularly sawing the air.
Among Auden’s opinions was that ‘The difference between verse and
prose is self-evident, but it is a sheer waste of time to look for a defin­
ition of the difference between poetry and prose’.22 I need to spend a
moment saying where, for me, the matter stands. In 1928, T. S. Eliot
remarked, ‘Verse, whatever else it may or may not be, is itself a system of
punctuation; the usual marks of punctuation themselves are differently
employed.’23 This insight into verse might be adopted and adapted
within a consideration of poetry. If we set aside metre, the remaining
poetry/prose distinction is that in prose the lines run the full breadth of
the page. In prose, the line-endings are without significance, and may be
the creation not of the composer but of the compositor; in poetry, the
line-endings are significant, and they effect their significance—not
necessarily of rhythm, and whether of force or of nuance—by using their

19. ‘Mr Housman at Little Bethel’ (1934), in The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (London,
1954), 70–1.
20. ABC of Reading (New Haven, CT, 1934), 36. 21. Ibid. 61.
22. ‘Writing’, in The Dyer’s Hand (London, 1963), 23.
23. Times Literary Supplement, 27 September 1928. In 1921, ‘The distinction between “verse”
and “prose” is clear; the distinction between “poetry” and “prose” is very obscure’.
‘Prose and Verse: The Definition’, in The Chapbook, No. 22 (April 1921), 4.
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