In the lecture you delivered before the University of Oxford in 1956 for your inauguration as the Oxford Professor of Poetry, you at one point spoke about the difference between the poet’s attitude towards literature and the critic’s. “In judging a work of the past,” you said, “the question of the historical critic—‘What was the author of this work trying to do? How far did he succeed in doing it?’—important as he knows it to be, will always interest a poet less than the question—‘What does this work suggest to living writers now? Will it help or hinder them in what they are trying to do?’”1
Nowadays, perhaps your characterising of the critical approach of the literary critic or scholar might seem somewhat reductive, especially in the wake of post-structuralism, when an abundance of inter-disciplinary and creative approaches to the literary text have been opened up to the literary scholar. But your notion that there’s a fundamental difference between what interests the literary critic/scholar and what interests the apprentice poet is, I believe, essentially and indisputably accurate. If anything, we could state the questions that a poet asks of a poetic work of the past even more bluntly: ‘How does this work achieve the effect it does? What does this work suggest for me and my work now? What use can I make of it? How will it profit me?’
Your assertion is confirmed by Michael Schmidt in his introduction to Carcanet’s New Poetries V anthology. Schmidt writes of “plausible” poetry written by “plausible” poets. What he is describing here is the way in which aspiring poets strive to do precisely what you claim they do—that is, puzzle
over the mystery of how successful poets do what they do in their writing and then attempt to do it themselves.2 According to Schmidt, these “plausible” poets can only make the leap to true poetic expression, and hence to the status of true poets, when they learn how to overcome and transform their sources. This certainly mirrors my own experience as I struggle to unlock the constraints of form, language, and influence and achieve full expressivity as a poet.
Your main purpose in “Making, Knowing and Judging” seems to be giving an account of how a would-be poet becomes an actual poet, especially in contemporary times. You say that the decisive event in this process is the emergence of the poet’s “critical conscience”, “inner examiner”, or “the
Censor”; that is, the critical faculty which enables a poet to determine whether or not his poetry has any merit.3 As your essay unfolds you outline the
elements and considerations of an education that will best help the poet to develop this faculty: “How does the Censor get his education? How does his attitude towards the literature of the past differ from that of the scholarly critic?”4 The poet’s possession of the Censor makes him similar to the literary critic, but where the critic is concerned with the “already existing works of others,” the poet “is only interested in one author”—himself—and “only concerned with works that do not yet exist”.5
Your concern with the mysteries of poetic process and how a poet becomes a poet is one that is shared by numerous creative writing MFAs, creative writing seminars, and popular books on poetic craft. Amongst the books that I’ve read on this topic—such books as Mary Kinzie’s A Poet’s
Fenton’s The Strength of Poetry, and Timothy Steele’s All the Fun’s in How
You Say a Thing—your essay/lecture stands out due to its idiosyncrasy—the
fact that it bears the stamp of your characteristic preoccupations and
themes—and its fairly consistent candour.6 I was touched by the fact that in your lecture you recount your own rather inauspicious beginnings as a poet:
I scarcely knew any poems – The English Hymnal, the Psalms, Struwwelpeter and the mnemonic rhymes in
Kennedy’s Shorter Latin Primer are about all I remember
– and I took little interest in what is called Imaginative Literature. Most of my reading had been related to a private world of Sacred Objects. Aside from a few stories like George Macdonald’s The Princess and the Goblin and Jules Verne’s The Child of the Cavern, the subjects of which touched upon my obsessions, my favourite books bore such titles as Underground Life, Machinery
for Metalliferous Mines, Lead and Zinc Ores of Northumberland and Alston Moor, and my conscious
purpose in reading them had been to gain information about my sacred objects.7
Though this reading list would seem to offer little to feed a young poetic imagination, its very idiosyncrasy and oddity is in fact suggestive to me of the peculiar worldview and syntax which characterises your early poetry, with its interest in dreams, riddles, private references, moribund industries, northern landscapes, geology, and imagery drawn from mythology. In fact, your reading list brings to mind Jack Spicer’s injunction to young poets to nourish their minds with images and ideas drawn from outside of literature by
exposing themselves to as diverse a range of books as possible:
I do think that just the average young poet ought to read as many books as he can and they ought to not be in paperback. They ought to be books that nobody’s read and that aren’t fashionable, and things which are about animal husbandry or what saline solutions are like with octopuses or something like that. It doesn’t really matter
much. But he certainly ought to have more stock in his mind than he has.8
I think the point you’re making here, though, is to show how your “poetic” enjoyment of language began long before you started writing poetry:
Looking back, however, I now realised that I had read the technological prose of my favourite books in a peculiar way. A word like pyrites, for example, was for me, not simply an indicative sign; it was the Proper Name of a Sacred Being…9
I found your idea that the act of naming is poetry’s distinctive inceptive action to be quite suggestive. In the biblical book of Genesis Adam names all living creatures, and in doing so, you say, he adopts the role of the Proto- poet. He chose proper names for the animals that did not merely refer, but referred aptly and were publicly recognisable as such. Much like a line of poetry, you maintain, a Proper Name cannot really be translated.10 You quote Paul Valéry:
The power of verse is derived from an indefinable harmony between what it says and what it is … Indefinable is essential to the definition… The
impossibility of defining the relation, together with the impossibility of denying it, constitutes the essence of the poetic line.11 (Tel Quel, II, 1944, 637)
Like Valéry, you reject the traditional notion of an imitative harmony between name and thing; poetry assigns an equal importance to name and thing that is not present in prose. You say that the pleasure you took in language when you were a boy was the poetic sensation of intimate union between word and mind long before you became an actual poet.
But your comments about poetry’s inception in the act of naming are suggestive to me of the acts of nominalism taking place in other arts, most notably in the visual arts. The poet’s characteristic action is initiated by the Proto-poet, Adam’s naming. His action of naming is not one of mimetically referencing animals and things in the world; he brings poetry into being by giving names to those concepts in his mind. And it is Adam, the Proto-poet who projects the apt connection between the word and the animal or thing in the world. I can see an analogy here between this inceptive action in poetry and the inceptive action in the visual arts (at least as formulated by Duchamp and Conceptual Art). Just as the inception of poetry begins in the poet’s act of naming the elements of her poetic world so also are the nature and context of art object conceived and determined by the visual artist. (The advent of
Conceptual Art was said to have begun in the mid-1910s when Marcel Duchamp inscribed and displayed a series of readymade quotidian objects— such as a porcelain urinal, a suspended snow shovel, and a plank of iron coat hooks nailed to the floor—as art. Duchamp called the naming of these
readymade objects “une sorte de nominalisme pictural” [a kind of pictorial nominalism].12
After discussing poetry’s origins in naming, you move on to discuss the apprentice poet’s first poetic efforts. They cannot be dismissed as bad or imitative, you write, because they are “imaginary”.13 They are imaginary in the sense that they’re imitations of poetry in general. They represent the poet’s first attempts at mastering the metrical qualities in language. I enjoyed your recounting of your own first exposure to the variety of metrical forms and poetical moods via your early reading of Walter de la Mare’s anthology Come
Hither. It was important, you say, because of the good taste it displayed in its
choice of poems. But the anthology’s most invaluable lesson for you was that poetry can encompass diverse tones and registers: “Particularly valuable,” you write, “was its lack of literary class consciousness, its juxtaposition on terms of equality of unofficial poetry, such as counting-out rhymes, and official poetry such as the odes of Keats”.14 Poetry, you learned, “does not have to be great or even serious to be good”.15
This insight is probably why you reject Matthew Arnold’s idea of poetic touchstones by which to judge poems: “A poet who wishes to improve himself should certainly keep good company, but for his profit as well as for his
comfort the company should not be too far above his station”.16 Of course, I know that you’re no relativist: you’re not suggesting that all poetic subjects are equal, or that there’s no difference between a great poem and a good poem. You’re merely arguing that a poet should nourish himself on a diverse range of poetry and on ordinary poetry as well as great and elevated poetry.
This passage is suggestive to me of your characteristic Audenesque tone, with its mixing of high and low styles. But more than this, it suggests to me the overall catholic, democratic spirit that pervades your entire oeuvre and that sets it apart from the work of your friends and contemporaries such as Louis MacNeice (most notably). I know you will vigorously defend him, so let me assure you that I do admire him in many ways. But if I may, I’d like to contrast MacNeice’s condescending, slightly disdainful treatment of popular culture in poems like “Death of an Actress” with your much more comfortable familiarity with popular metres and pop culture in poems like “Stop all the clocks,” “Refugee Blues,” and “Calypso.” It’s true that both of you are skilful
proponents of a pseudo-elegiac tone steeped in neo-classicism. But where MacNeice’s poems like “Memoranda to Horace” convey the sense of the poet’s haughty and—to me—mean-spirited self-conception as one of the last custodians of white patrician classical culture, contemptuous of the low class or non-white effluvia that surface in the contemporary metropolis—the
“niggers’ faces,” as he terms them, “in [the] dark background” of “Our London world”,17 for you, classicism seems to gain interest by virtue of its stylistic clash and then synthesis with low styles; in fact, I think you show in The Sea
and the Mirror and “New Year Letter” that this camp mixing of high and low
styles constitutes for you the modern. I’d even go so far as to say that this stylistic clash and synthesis seems be the singular characteristic of the textual surface of your poetry.
Thank you for reminding me that above all, it is most essential, however, that the poet develops his Censor. Until that Censor is born, you say, the poet’s only recourse is to imitate. As you suggest, in an ideal world— in which poetry “were in great public demand”—an apprenticeship for poets would exist.18 But in the present-day world a poet’s apprenticeship is served in the library and through imitation. And through imitating his ‘master’, the poet acquires a Censor and learns how a poem is written. I find it interesting that you describe Thomas Hardy as your “first Master”; it’s well known, of course, that he was the major influence on your earlier poetry. But what you say also implies that you had several other masters throughout your entire writing career. Hardy, you say, was an excellent choice as a “first Master” because he was a very good poet, but far from flawless.19 Had he been so, you may
have been intimidated and discouraged. At least he exposed you to many different complicated poetic forms and a lot of metrical variety.
But you make it clear that even though a master may help in the apprentice poet’s development of a Censor, it is still down to the apprentice himself to realise his own poetry, or as you put it, “discover what needs to be
written”.20 The young poet can only learn what needs to be written from his own generation of apprentices. I find what you have to say about the criticism that apprentice poets offer other apprentices interesting if debatable. You write that apprentices give each other the kind of attentive personal criticism that they can never get from supposedly “sounder” academic literary critics and professional reviewers. You make it clear why this is so: “A critic’s duty is to tell the public what a work is”.21 But an apprentice poet will tell another “what he should and could have written instead”.22 This much more personal criticism offered by poets to other poets is very rare and is the only criticism that truly benefits the poet.
The apprentice, you write, only becomes a true poet when his Censor is finally able to give him full marks for a poem.23 But the poet always fears that he may never write again. I find it somewhat astonishing that a poet as prolific and accomplished as you would make such an admission. I wonder if in trying to self-deprecate you might not be exaggerating here? But then, by your own admission, you were not a very good student. You make the case that an apprentice poet rarely is. This is because, you say, he is “at the mercy of the immediate moment,” and he “has no concrete reason for not yielding to its demands”.24 Though what you say here veers close to a kind of romantic cliché, I can recognise a certain truth in it: it’s true I always hope these
serendipitous moments may lead to fruitful results. You yourself give a couple of examples from your own life: your decision on a whim to attend a lecture by the scholar of Anglo Saxon, J.R.R. Tolkien, and your accidental discovery of the literary critic, W.P. Ker.
You point to what you call “The Law of mental growth” as the reason for why apprentice poets are less than exemplary students. According to this “Law”, there is little difference in terms of their impact on the young poet’s consciousness between books, walks in the country, and a kiss: “All are equally experiences to store away in his memory”.25 Again, although I find this a rather clichéd romantic view—would this “Law of mental growth” be
applicable to reputed ‘brainy’ poets like John Donne, T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, I wonder?—I do appreciate your self-deprecation. I doubt that these others would ever liken their minds, as you do yours, to a “rag and bone shop”.26 I think many poets would recognise, however, the truth in your statement that the images with which a poet stocks his memory do not follow any critical principle other than the personal whims of the poet. The poet certainly isn’t guided by principles of ‘good’ literature in his reading choices.
While you admit the fundamental differences in approach between the literary scholar and the poet, you make it quite clear that you have the highest esteem for literary scholars:
Even a young poet knows or very soon will realise that, but for scholars, he would be at the mercy of the literary taste of a past generation, since, once a book has gone out of print and been forgotten, only the scholar with his unselfish courage to read the unreadable will retrieve the rare prize.27
The apprentice poet is under no illusion about his own ignorance; and it’s for this reason—isn’t it?—that he has a “sneaking regard” for the role of luck in poetic composition. The poet needs the literary scholar, and his main dilemma is in knowing which learned man or woman to ask. He wants more than good poetry; he wants to get a sense of the literary tastes which have helped shape the critic’s judgement.28
Thanks for revealing the questions or ‘touchstones’ you ask of and thereby use to judge a critic:
“Do you like, and by like I really mean like, not approve of on principle:
1) Long lists of proper names such as the Old Testament genealogies or the Catalogue of ships in the Iliad?
2) Riddles and all other ways of not calling a spade a spade?
3) Complicated verse forms of great technical difficulty, such as Englyns, Drott-Kvaetts, Sestinas, even if their content is trivial?
4) Conscious theatrical exaggeration, pieces of Baroque flattery like Dryden’s welcome to the Duchess of
Ormond?”29
What I find interesting about your list of poetic prejudices is what I also noticed in your essay 1962 “Writing”—your diminishment of or at least
apparent indifference to the presumed hallmarks of post-romantic poetry—the use of metaphor and imagery, the natural and sincere expression of individual style and voice, and referential representation—and your marked preference for poetry’s material, highly formalised, impersonal, and artificial elements. The lists of proper names, riddles and other ambiguous textual practices, the complicated verse forms, and the theatrical exaggeration which you cite as your critical touchstones with which to assess the critical acumen of critics are
all elements which emphasise the graphic, artificial, and non-mimetic nature of poetry. Though you make it clear that these are touchstones which you use to judge critics, not poets, I believe that they are instructive in what they have to tell me about the possibilities of poetry writing.
You are very appreciative of the two main advantages you believe a poet has when he plays the role of critic: he writes about work that he truly