A Bit of This and a Bit of That About Poetry
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Copyright 2014 John Fraser All rights reserved Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com http://www.eBookIt.com ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-1900-8 Except for quotations in discussions of it, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author or his estate. The material here has largely come from http://www.jottings.ca/john/ voices/index.html, where it was posted in 2004. Cover design: John Fraser and Barbara Bickle. Webmaster for jottings.ca Rob Stevenson. The lyre bird, from online, was donated to the Wikimedia Foundation and released into the public domain by Pearson Scott Foresman. This book is without the customary scholarly apparatus. If anyone needs information about quotations or allusions, please address enquiries to [email protected]. A Bit of This and a Bit of That is for John Baxter and Tiree MacGregor. Contents A Bit of Bio Powers of Style King Arthur and the Inchcape Rock Personals A Bit about Meter Among the Monuments Vision and Analogy Winters, Leavis, and Language Language and Being Lagniappe About the Author A Bit of Bio I I was never any good with definitions when I was little. “Define an epic.” Uh … uh … The Odyssey? … Paradise Lost? … Beowulf? … No no no, define an epic. An EPIC. I still don’t have a grip on “metonymy.” When a surly undergrad at another college said he’d spent his first tutorial arguing with C.S. Lewis about Neoplatonism, I didn’t even know about Plato, let alone Neo. Ezra Pound’s How to Read, bought used for three-and-six in Mr. Embry’s thrilling little Ace Bookshop on Marchmont Street, had been a liberation for me as a newly aspiring Sixth Former, moving on from John Carter on Mars and Shark Gotch of the Islands. He gave you the courage to read. You didn’t have to possess lacrimae rerum Kulchur and perfect French in order to approach poets whom he recommended. You just had to read the poems themselves, and he named a number of poets and poems, but not solemnly, more like an enthusiastic eccentric uncle, and made you want to read some of them without feeling terminally infra dig if you never got around to Homer in a Latin translation. And you yearned for his Provence. Where years later I read in a summer garden a newly acquired copy of Gautier’s Emaux et Camées, with the eau-forte portrait par Jacquemart. Plus a couple of great Fantômas reprints picked up from a market stall in Barjols. And Pound said that an epic is a poem including history, and that the true English epic is Shakespeare’s history cycle. II It was OK, too, not to genuflect before all the Names, Milton and everybody’s Lake District darling, Wordsworth, among them. Half a century later, at a farewell seminar meeting, I was presented with a tape of Shakespeare’s, I mean the Bard’s, Sonnet 73 (“That time of year thou may’st in me behold”) done straight as a country-and- western, each member singing a couple of lines. It really worked. “Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.” (E.P, ABC of Reading) And nerves that never flinched at slaughter Are shot to pieces by the shorter Poems of Donne. Auden’s “Under Which Lyre?” must have got explosive laughs from the returned veterans when he delivered the poem at the 1946 Harvard commencement. Venturing into Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity back then could be instant Alice-in-the-Wild-Wood time, without even a pocketful of breadcrumbs to mark the trail. III In 1967, Yvor Winters’ Forms of Discovery would be another courage- to-read liberation for me. The Sixties of all those big Names that got us all so excited, Burroughs, Genet, Sontag, Sade, Robbe-Grillet, the Evergreen Review, McLuhan, the Voice among them, wasn’t good for poetry, at least not of the New Critical persuasion. It wasn’t where the action, the energy, the challenges, the voices were. Pound had called great poetry “simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.” Winters had spoken of “specific density.” He restored voices, voices energized from within and focused through form, including metre, that could hold their own in the clamorous bazaar. Some of the poems that he praised were difficult. But the difficulties weren’t a matter of allusions, any more than what Hamlet says during his brief time on the boards sends us off into a search for the real Hamlet in the things that he doesn’t say. These were speech-acts and thinkings-through on the page and in the ear, not portals to the presumed Life-and-Thought of the poet behind the scenes. Or to bigger hypothesized realities. IV Ideas indeed mattered. The thinking of individuals like Shaftesbury, Emerson, and Puritan divines mattered. But you engaged with them philosophically. They weren’t period-privileged. They weren’t The Way We Thought Then. And you did history as history, not mind-candy. You didn’t need to frequent the “period” theme-parks, with their figures in doublet-and- hose, and periwigs, and crinolines, and the sheep-dotted pastures, and poet-dotted hills, and the occasional mountain top on which to have sublime thoughts about the Soul and the Universe. You didn’t have to assimilate ideas assumed to pervade each so-called period like Febreze at an odor-conscious suburban housewarming. You didn’t need to be in awe of the magical powers ascribed to Symbol, Metaphor, and Imagination with a view to —bridging the alleged impassable Kantian gap between Things-As- They-Really-and-Truly-Are and the mere sublunary world of flesh and blood and things you stubbed your toes on in the dark; —proving that the GBTs (Great Big Truths) of poets were just as real and deserving of funding as those of bespectacled mathematicians, and smelly chemists, and strutting engineers with their slide-rules; —impressing on those yawning jocks at the back of the class that they needed the instructor-priest out in front because on their own they wouldn’t have spotted in a zillion years what profundities a single word in a sacred (“organic”) text could contain. And you felt, in Winters’ presentation, the power of metered language as an intensification of normal speech patterns, and the falsity of the dichotomy of “poetry” and “prose.” I myself truly enjoyed a lot of the poems that he steered me to, without any sense of being laced up into a neoclassical spine-stiffener. As I said in a review-article for which I’d followed up his tips: It would not be in any meaningful sense of the term a “narrow” anthology that would include such diverse poems as “Drink to me only.” “The Birth of the Squire,” “Rose Aylmer,” “The Cricket,” “A Valediction of My Name at the Window,” “Crazy Jane Grown Old Looks at the Dancers” “Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance,” “Repose of Rivers,” “Epithalamium,” “My Apish Cousins,” the Tetrachordon sonnets, one or two of the early Cantos, and “To a Louse.” (Southern Review, 1969) V The seminar that I mentioned above, “Traditionalism and Experimentation in Poetry,” which I started in 1971, and in which a lot of taping was done, was a further education for me. By the end, twenty years later, we were touching on over four hundred poems in it, large and small, good and great and lousy, including ones by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Laforgue, in Angel Flores’ great anthology. And of course Poe. (Martin Reyto did a marvelous straight taping of “The Raven.”) And, oh, lots of stuff. The members did most of the talking, and there were some memorable pushbacks. Robert Watson, in a long and tautly argued paper, went hell-for leather after Winters on Hopkins. Catherine Addison, a lioness defending her Romantic cubs, announced after I’d read out condescendingly some stanzas from In Memoriam that it was the worst reading she’d ever heard. After which I set to and did some self-educating about the seismic philosophical decades of high Romanticism. VI In our own Nineties, I tried spelling out to myself what kinds of qualities, what Leavisian “felt life,” I was in fact responding to in various poems that I particularly enjoyed. I also did a bit of thinking about poetic language for some talks that I was invited to give at the University of Toronto. In “Romanticism and Classicism,” T.E. Hulme contrasted the use of what he called architects’ curves with the drive of the serious artist to set down with pen or pencil exactly the lines that he sees or imagines. The cumulative Introductions (no longer just “Poem, Alice; Alice, Poem”) that began with Brooks, Warren, and Purser’s An Approach to Literature (1936) can give the impression at times that everything of consequences about the art and craft of poetry, at least the metered kind, is now known professionally. Fortunately, when you abandon the rhetoric of pedagogy and fumble your way into the interiors of poems and passages that you truly care for, this proves a delusion. The results of some of my own fumblings are as follows. Each unit is self-sufficient, but the sequence is not random. (a) Powers of Style A foray into the nature of what (following Leavis), I think of as poetic “grasp”, the linguistic textures that give you real-feeling movements of minds in a real-feeling physical world.