POETS AND POETRY.
OBSCURE POETRY.
THE reader will find in the part of this paper devoted to correspondence a letter in which a poem of Miss Edith Sitwell's which we published recently is complained of as difficult of comprehension. I read into this letter, too, a hint that a good deal of the poetry which we publish is crabbed or eccen- tric. Politeness alone, I fancy, has prevented my correspondent from asking further and more direct and personal questions. Are uncouthness and strangeness the qualities that I admire in poets ? Is my feeling about poetry merely that of which Dr. Johnson accused animating admirers of Gray's " Ruin seize thee, ruthless King "—that is, a love of the odd ? Am I bent upon jeering at the traditions of the past ? Finally, do I really like -these things, or is it a pose ? And if I like them why ? Amid many others of a more complimentary sort, these are the sort of questions that upholders of modern, poetry are often asked. May I, then, take this opportunity of explaining my attitude toward poetry that can be called eccentric so far as I can ? It may be a little difficult to make myself clear as—to take the case of Miss Sitwell's poem as an instance—my pleasure in it is of a spontaneous and even rather naive sort and is hence a little difficult to analyse.
The first thing that an attempt at analysis reveals is that I am myself very far from completely understanding the poem even now after repeated reading. This slightly takes away from my pleasure in it, but only slightly, as what we call the " understanding " of a poem is generally the " pulling
up " of our enjoyment on to the conscious plane. Nobody asks us to " understand " a picture or a piece of music in
this sense before we enjoy it. We often have just the same simple enjoyment of a poem. In fact, it would hardly be too paradoxical to say that we cannot thoroughly enjoy any poem that we completely understand ; that is to say, any poem which appears to us as completely devoid of mystery.
Upon first looking over a poem most readers instinctively make for the words or phrases that specially attract them. Hence they see the poem not as a coherent, logical whole, but as a series of high-lights. This makes a first reading. On first reading " Promenade Sentimentale " I found that there were a great many of these high-lights—phrases or couplets— that gave pleasure. Perhaps the reader has already noticed some of them. For example, to what could a flounced muslin dressing-table be better compared than " a chilly, palely- crinolined water-lily " ? The next two couplets struck me as extremely attractive with the familiar device, of the carrying over of the sense to a second couplet, pleasantly used. The impression of a bearded face on a cold day and the reminiscence of a familiar feature of a marine store—a fish or a little ship arranged on seaweed and affectionately entrusted to a bottle seemed vivid and interesting. Again, the comparison of the man's wrinkled face to a map seamed with gold has a delight- fully vivid, tactile quality. The next two couplets I skipped : they meant nothing to me ; but my attention was again roused with " the satyr's daughter." She is startling in her vividness, as real as one of Mr. Granville Barker's gilt fairies. Then we are back with the old professor with his fantastic caped cloak (the reader will note the ingenious way in which a cold wind is here suggested). The next few couplets were dim to me, except that they conveyed a general sense of hark- quinade and a world as careful and coherent as it was palpably unreal and " invented."
Let us, then, add up this confession of a first view of the poem. Out of nineteen couplets this particular reader had understood and enjoyed seven sharply and about five in a general sort of way ; the rest were either puzzling or seemed silly or uninteresting. The general placing of such a poem on to the debit or credit side of the poetical account would therefore depend on the sharpness and the pleasure that the five fully comprehended and assimilated couplets had pro- duced. I think every reader will find if he searches his heart carefully that in the ordinary way about this proportion of complete comprehension and complete assimilation is all he asks from a poem, at any rate until he knows it well. If in two or three instances the poem produces the little electric shock of the entirely new vision or the sharp realization of some till now dimly-expressed feeling, he will, so to say, " give " the rest of the poem to the poet, partly out of a feeling that in receiving this much of the true gold he has already made a good bargain, partly from respect to the poet, who, since he has proved his ability to teach the reader in one respect, may quite possibly (in cases where they differ) be in the right rather than the reader. A certain proportion of fulfilment gives the poet the right to be taken to a limited extent on trust. So it is that many of us feel about the Sitwells or such difficult writers as Gerald Manley Hopkins. If they can here and there produce undoubtedly remarkable effects, then they in their turn have the right to demand from the reader that he shall give them a certain amount of credit for what he cannot at present enjoy—the credit in this case consisting merely in a doubt whether the incompre- hension is not the readers rather than the writer's fault. Whenever we have a change in the nature of poetry—even in the outward trappings of poetry—readers always experience this difficulty of getting into focus. I have just instanced Dr. Johnson's inability to understand the " Romantic " side of poetry. He consistently, for example, misunderstood Shakespeare's lyrical intentions, he was obviously quite unable to make out what Gray was driving at. If Keats and Shelley had written in his day he would certainly have failed to understand them. Being Dr. Johnson, he would have been quite sure that he was right and that they were mere eccentrics.
Perhaps a more familiar instance of this sort of difficulty is Browning. I am sure that there must be many readers of the Spectator who can remember the age of Browning Societies. Browning was considered a poet so extremely obscure that it was necessary to found circles to study his poems; in fact, a considerable amount of research was expended in seeking out his meanings. All honour to an age and a society which had the wit to see that it can be worth while to take trouble to expound a poet, an age which under- stood that he might have something to say which, try as he would, he could not put into words of one syllable. The odd thing about the whole affair is that to us now Browning is not difficult to understand. Children now have no difficulty in learning to ride a bicycle. The race has acquired a facility in the bicycle balance ; just so most young people have little or no difficulty in understanding Browning. It seems odd that his work should previously have seemed so difficult. It is nothing to do with superior intelligence in the younger generation, merely that mankind has acquired the knack. We have got the correct focus, and we can now read Browning's words as naturally as he wrote them. Both in the case of Browning and of Gray the new movements were lucky in having great men as their pioneers. Though I am far from asking readers to form societies or circles for the elucidation of Mr. Rickword's or Mr. Turner's works, still I cannot help thinking that it would be worth their while to see whether either by glancing over a considerable amount of the works of such poets, or by reading one or two of the best of their poems with rather more than customary care, they might not get this focus. Surely the so-called " rush of modern life " can be made to yield time for more than Mr. Ward's hasty exclamation of disapproval! Not so did our forbears treat their poets.
We are printing in this issue (on page 1004) a poem of Mr. Rickword's which is to my mind a good example of rather difficult poetry. I must confess that on a hasty first reading this poem conveyed little or nothing to me, except that I noticed, of course, the beauty of certain lines and some curious, rather funny, prosaic effects. For instance, the lines about the " department store " seemed comic. At the same time, it had obviously been written with a considerable amount of emotional élan. Isolated passages were attractive. What the general drift of the poem was I had no idea. I showed it to two colleagues, both " working poets," one of whom makes a speciality of what we may call the com- pressed and crabbed side of modern verse. To him the poem seemed perfectly logical and straightforward. The other admired it for the beauty of its rhythms. But I could gather no general idea from the poem at all, and put it away for a week. Then, on re-reading it, I saw what may have been long ago obvious to the reader of this article—that the poem was about the inability of words to express meanings " in the round," that names and words are, so to say, a two-dimensional medium and leave out a great deal about the thing spoken of. When I had in this lumbering fashion got hold of the central feature of the pattern, the whole poem began to fall into shape to me. Except with readers who are particularly quick of comprehension, I think if one is honest some process of this sort can be traced in the reading of very many poems. They appear to be difficult and even barbarous medleys at first. This process in the reader always reminds me of the puzzle pictures that come out of crackers. A farmyard scene is represented, and under- neath is written " Puzzle, find the policeman." For a long time one turns and twists the picture this way and that, and at last, made up partly of the elm tree, partly of the roof of the cowshed, the policeman emerges. Once seen he can never be lost again, but completely dominates the picture. And so it is with difficult poetry. How far is it permissible to poets to carry obscurity ? How much study and reflection have they the right to demand from their readers ? In a later issue we hope to publish a consideration of that most obscure poet of the 'eighties, Gerald Manley Hopkins, whose excessively tortured verse Mr. Robert Bridges championed in his admirable annotated edition. To me, I confess, at the moment he seems a very extreme case ; to our children, possibly, his verse will appear so obvious as to be platitudinous.
Perhaps some of our readers who have struggled with such problems as the elucidation of parts of Coriolanus, for instance, Donne or other of the metaphysical poets, or Browning, would give us their experiences ? Aspects of the subject which it would be interesting to hear discussed are such as these : In what instances does obscurity seem to spring from vacillating intention in the poet ? In what instances is it justified by reason of the complication or subtlety of the thing to be conveyed ? Can obscurity ever be justified as a purposeful device adopted to slow down and concentrate the reader's attention. Obscurity was, so to say, unconscious in Blake and conscious in Browning. Did Shakespeare know when he was being difficult, or Donne, or had their contemporaries got the focus which cl arified the
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