On English Poetry. Robert Graves

LIII TIMES AND SEASONS

       LIV TWO HERESIES

       LV THE ART OF EXPRESSION

       LVI GHOSTS IN THE SHELDONIAN

       LVII THE LAYING ON OF HANDS

       LVIII WAYS AND MEANS

       LIX POETRY AS LABOUR

       LX THE NECESSITY OF ARROGANCE

       LXI IN PROCESSION

       APPENDIX:—THE DANGERS OF DEFINITION

I

       DEFINITIONS

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      THERE are two meanings of Poetry as the poet himself has come to use the word:—first, Poetry, the unforeseen fusion in his mind of apparently contradictory emotional ideas; and second, Poetry, the more-or-less deliberate attempt, with the help of a rhythmic mesmerism, to impose an illusion of actual experience on the minds of others. In its first and peculiar sense it is the surprise that comes after thoughtlessly rubbing a mental Aladdin’s lamp, and I would suggest that every poem worthy of the name has its central idea, its nucleus, formed by this spontaneous process; later it becomes the duty of the poet as craftsman to present this nucleus in the most effective way possible, by practising poetry more consciously as an art. He creates in passion, then by a reverse process of analyzing, he tests the implied suggestions and corrects them on common-sense principles so as to make them apply universally.

      Before elaborating the idea of this spontaneous Poetry over which the poet has no direct control, it would be convenient to show what I mean by the Poetry over which he has a certain conscious control, by contrasting its method with the method of standard Prose. Prose in its most prosy form seems to be the art of accurate statement by suppressing as far as possible the latent associations of words; for the convenience of his readers the standard prose-writer uses an accurate logical phrasing in which perhaps the periods and the diction vary with the emotional mood; but he only says what he appears at first to say. In Poetry the implication is more important than the manifest statement; the underlying associations of every word are marshalled carefully. Many of the best English poets have found great difficulty in writing standard prose; this is due I suppose to a sort of tender-heartedness, for standard prose-writing seems to the poet very much like turning the machine guns on an innocent crowd of his own work people.

      Certainly there is a hybrid form, prose poetry, in which poets have excelled, a perfectly legitimate medium, but one that must be kept distinct from both its parent elements. It employs the indirect method of poetic suggestion, the flanking movement rather than the frontal attack, but like Prose, does not trouble to keep rhythmic control over the reader. This constant control seems an essential part of Poetry proper. But to expect it in prose poetry is to be disappointed; we may take an analogy from the wilder sort of music where if there is continual changing of time and key, the listener often does not “catch on” to each new idiom, so that he is momentarily confused by the changes and the unity of the whole musical form is thereby broken for him. So exactly in prose poetry. In poetry proper our delight is in the emotional variations from a clearly indicated norm of rhythm and sound-texture; but in prose poetry there is no recognizable norm. Where in some notable passages (of the Authorised Version of the Bible for instance) usually called prose poetry, one does find complete rhythmic control even though the pattern is constantly changing, this is no longer prose poetry, it is poetry, not at all the worse for its intricate rhythmic resolutions. Popular confusion as to the various properties and qualities of Poetry, prose poetry, verse, prose, with their subcategories of good, bad and imitation, has probably been caused by the inequality of the writing in works popularly regarded as Classics, and made taboo for criticism. There are few “masterpieces of poetry” that do not occasionally sink to verse, many disregarded passages of Prose that are often prose poetry and sometimes even poetry itself.

II

       THE NINE MUSES

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      I SUPPOSE that when old ladies remark with a breathless wonder “My dear, he has more than mere talent, I am convinced he has a touch of genius” they are differentiating between the two parts of poetry given at the beginning of the last section, between the man who shows a remarkable aptitude for conjuring and the man actually also in league with the powers of magic. The weakness of originally unspontaneous poetry seems to be that the poet has only the very small conscious part of his experience to draw upon, and therefore in co-ordinating the central images, his range of selection is narrower and the links are only on the surface. On the other hand, spontaneous poetry untested by conscious analysis has the opposite weakness of being liable to surface faults and unintelligible thought-connections. Poetry composed in sleep is a good instance of the sort I mean. The rhymes are generally inaccurate, the texture clumsy, there is a tendency to use the same words close together in different senses, and the thought-connections are so free as to puzzle the author himself when he wakes. A scrap of dream poetry sticks in my mind since my early schooldays:

      “It’s Henry the VIII!

       It’s Henry the VIII!

       I know him by the smile on his face

       He is leading his armies over to France.

      Here eighth and face seemed perfect rhymes, to the sleeping ear, the spirit was magnificent, the implications astonishing; but the waking poet was forced to laugh. I believe that in the first draft of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, Abora was the rhyme for Dulcimer, as:—

      “A damsel with a dulcimer

       Singing of Mount Abora”

      because “saw” seems too self-conscious an assonance and too far removed from “Abora” to impress us as having been part of the original dream poem. “Could I revive within me” again is surely written in a waking mood, probably after the disastrous visit of the man from Porlock.

      Henceforward, in using the word Poetry I mean both the controlled and uncontrollable parts of the art taken together, because each is helpless without the other. And I do not wish to limit Poetry, as there is a new tendency to do, merely to the short dramatic poem, the ballad and the lyric, though it certainly is a convenience not to take these as the normal manifestations of Poetry in order to see more clearly the inter-relation of such different forms as the Drama, the Epic, and the song with music. In the Drama, the emotional conflict which is the whole cause and meaning of Poetry is concentrated in the mental problems of the leading character or characters. They have to choose for instance between doing what they think is right and the suffering or contempt which is the penalty, between the gratification of love and the fear of hurting the person they love, or similar dilemmas. The lesser actors in the drama do not themselves necessarily speak the language of poetry or have any question in their minds as to the course they should pursue; still, by throwing their weight into one scale or another they affect the actions of the principals and so contribute to the poetry of the play. It is only the master dramatist who ever attempts