Sherry Chandler

Yeats has been digitized at the National Library of Ireland, and reading about it yesterday in the NYTimes lent a certain irony to my opening my volume of Seamus Heaney’s Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995) to his lecture on Yeats and Philip Larkin, “Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin.”

The irony, a very mild one to be sure, is that Heaney presents Yeats as a poet over against science in the sense intended by Czelaw Milosz:

As Czeslaw Milosz has observed, no intelligent contemporary is spared the presssure exerted in our world by the void, the absurd, the anti-meaning, all of which are part of the intellectual atmosphere we subsist in; and yet Milosz notices this negative pressure only to protest against a whole strain of modern literature which has conceded victory to it. Poetry, Milosz pleads, must not make this concession but maintain instead its centuries-old hostility to reason, science and a science-inspired philosophy. [Heaney, p. 153]

Heaney contrasts Larkin’s “Aubade” with Yeats’s “Cold Heaven,” both poems confronting the inevitability of death, and gives the laurels to Yeats.

The ghost upon the road, the soul’s destiny in the afterlife, the consequences in eternity of the individual’s actions in time — traditional concerns like these are profoundly relevant to “Cold Heaven” and they are also, of course, typical of the things which preoccupied Yeats for the whole of his life. Whether it was fairy lore in Sligo or Buddhism with the Dublin Hermetic Society or spiritualist séances or Noh dramas which imagined the adventures of Cuchulain’s shade in the Land of the Dead, Yeats was always passionately beating on the wall of the physical world in order to provoke an answer from the other side. His studies were arcane, his cosmology was fantastic and yet his intellect remained undeluded. [pp 149-150]

Well, perhaps after all it is appropriate that Yeats should become virtual. It is sort of the nerd’s version of resurrection.

I myself have been wrestling with a poem lately, on a much lower plane than either Yeats or Larkin of course, that confronts death and whether one will be able to carry through to the end with some dignity and courage. I am not quite ready to say, with Larkin:

…Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

There’s something to be said for “not scaring others” if you love them, but let that go.

Neither am I comfortable, after years of having religious fundamentalism oppose science to our great peril, with the notion that poetry must be hostile to reason and science. A poet like Linda Bierds finds much poetry in science itself, and while I don’t find myself at home in her work, I can recognize its worth. As Gregor Mendel could be both monk and scientist, so perhaps can a poet be both poet and rationalist (without going over to the dark side like Larkin).

I think I understand why a poet like Milosz would feel that way he does. I have read his essays in Witness of Poetry (Harvard University Press, 1983) and I think I understand that he was reacting to the nihilism that struck Europe in the period between the two world wars and in the post WWII period. But the pendulum has swung too far the other way and now we can see that “belief” can be as absurd and anti-meaning as “reason.”

But let Heaney continue:

Rational objections were often rationally allowed by [Yeats], if only to be imaginatively and rhetorically overwhelmed. Yeats’s embrace of the supernatural, in other words, was not at all naïve; he was as alive as Larkin to the demeaning realities of bodily decrepitude and the obliterating force of death, but he deliberately resisted the dominance of the material over the spiritual.
…
Yet it is because of Yeats’s fidelity to both perceptions and his refusal to foreclose on either that we recognize in him a poet of the highest attainment. [pp. 150, 151]

It’s a middle way we see Heaney praise here, not one that rejects reason but one that refuses to be cowed by it. Because

…I have repeatedly tried to establish through several different readings and remarks in the course of these lectures…that the goal of life on earth, and of poetry as a vital factor in the achievement of that goal, is what Yeats called in “Under Ben Bulben” the “profane perfection of mankind.”

In order to achieve that goal, therefore, and in order that human beings bring about the most radiant conditions for themselves to inhabit, it is essential that the vision of reality which poetry offers should be transformative, more than just a print-out of the given circumstances of its time and place. The poet who would be most the poet has to attempt an act of writing that outstrips the conditions even as it observes them. …The world is different after it has been read by a Shakespeare or an Emily Dickinson or a Samuel Beckett because it has been augmented by their reading of it. …We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. [pp. 158-160]

I am not utterly convinced that humankind is the crown of creation but most of this reasoning makes sense to me.

You can visit the virtual exhibition at this link (broadband and flash required).

One of my serendipity moments in reading. Today I found this in William Stafford’s “Introduction to Since Feeling is First,” from Writing the Australian Crawl (Univ Michigan Press, 1979):

You could look at reading a poem this way: if you are thinking and there is a window nearby, you may look out—far. Your thinking will connect now and then to the scene, whenever something out there strikes your attention. Or, even more aptly, you might have a friend with you, and you would interchange, offer beginnings, slanted ideas, linked progressions. There would be a series of mental incidents, not predictable, never to be fully anticipated without experience that comes about through following the sequence onward, point by point. Your experience would be richer—more would happen—than if you had been alone.

Reading is like that. It is not all your own ideas, and not all the other person’s ideas. You toss back and forth against a live backboard. And, particularly if it is a congenial poem—or friend—you are reading or hearing, you furnish a good half of the life. The travel circuit of an idea or impression is a sequence of rebounding between you and the companion, between you and the page.

And yesterday, I read this from the preface to Heather McHugh’s Hinge & Sign (Wesleyan Poetry, 1994):

But writing, like reading, implies in any case a very peculiar form of presence. It is presence at another moment. In this anachronism, this unsettled time, the intimacy between writer and reader (unlike other intimacies) seems the closer for its definition in deferral. Taking up any book to read it, how am I with the writer? The with is without the usual conversational confronting; for I identify myself as (I don’t identify myself over against) the unfolding. I am with the writer not en face, as an opposite respondent, but á tête, as a kind of mind-reader.

And as a writer, how am I with the reader? This is an engagement with a very non-particular someone, an other very like a self, unseeable, a grounding figure which, when I do take the trouble to imagine it (for one need not imagine a being to have one), I imagine as a fellow-imaginer: as an understanding—even an underwriting—inmate. Any engagement in acts of reading, between that figure and myself, is engagement without argument, engagement without preliminaries, engagement without (in any of the usual senses) even a meeting of the minds: there was never, after all, a separation. To be a writer “with” a reader is rather like being, oneself of two minds, at every turn: hinge and sign. By comparison with this intimacy, the fondest act of physical love takes place between strangers.

From Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (Random House, 1965)

The principle is that every technical gesture in a poem must justify itself in meaning. Which is to say that the free-verse writer can proclaim, with Ammons, that he is “released from form,” but he’d better not be. In free verse the abandonment of capital letters and punctuation must say something consonant with what the predications in the poem are saying. The sudden shortening of a line must say something. The degree of line-integrity or enjambment must refract the rhetorical status of the poem’s address. And any momentary deviation into meter must validate itself, must appear not a lapse but a significant bold stroke. [pp. 88 -89]

From Charles Baudelaire, “Three drafts of a preface” to The Flowers of Evil, selected and edited by Marthiel and Jackson Mathews (New Directions, 1955). This selection is from the second draft:

How the artist, by a prescribed series of exercises, can proportionately increase his originality;

How poetry is related to music through prosody, whose roots go deeper into the human soul than any classical theory indicates;

That French poetry possesses a mysterious and unrecognized prosody, like the Latin and English languages;

Why any poet who does not know exactly how many rhymes each word has is incapable of expressing any idea whatever;

That the poetic phrase can imitate (and in this, it is like the art of music and the science of mathematics) a horizontal line, an ascending or descending vertical line; that it can rise straight up to heaven without losing its breath, or go perpendicularly to hell with the velocity of any weight; that it can follow a spiral, describe a parabola, or zigzag, making a series of superimposed angles;

That poetry is like the arts of painting, cooking, and cosmetics in its ability to express every sensation of sweetness or bitterness, beatitude or horror, by coupling a certain noun with a certain adjective, in analogy or contrast;

How by relying on my principles and using the knowledge which I guarantee to teach him in twenty lessons, any man can learn to compose a tragedy that will be no more hooted at than another, or line up a poem long enough to be as dull as any epic known.

from Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (Random House, 1965):

When we stand well back and survey the whole history of English versification over almost fifteen centuries, we perceive even through the philological upheavals a recurring pattern. The pattern described by metrical history is similar, perhaps, to the general shape of political history in that it consists of oscillations now toward ideals of tight control and unitary domination and now toward a relaxation of such control and domination. But metrical history differs from political in one important way: while political history can be shown to involve a very gradual total tendency toward, say, ideals of egalitarianism or public philanthropy, metrical history exhibits no such long-term “progressive” tendency. Meter has not really become “freer” over the centuries, and indeed “freedom” is not a virtue in meter—expressiveness is. The metrical imperative underlying the words that Yeats arranges is hardly less rigid and “perfect” than that underlying Chaucer’s poetic discourse; and in “free verse” that works there are imperatives no less visible.

This paragraph was written well before L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E poetry but even that rebellious form has its imperatives.

sort of.

Consider this passage from Seamus Heaney’s essay “Extending the Alphabet: On Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Hero and Leander,” in The Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995):

…we have been rightly instructed about the ways native populations and indigenous cultures disappear in the course of these civilizing enterprises, and we have learnt how the values and language of the conqueror demolish and marginalize native values and institutions, rendering them barbarous, subhuman, and altogether beyond the pale of cultivated sympathy or regard. But even so, it still seems an abdication of literary responsibility to be swayed by these desperately overdue correctives to a point where imaginative literature is read simply and solely as a function of an oppressive discourse, or as a reprehensible masking. When it comes to poetic composition, one has to allow for the presence, even for the pre-eminence, of what Wordsworth called ‘the grand elementary principle of pleasure,” and that pleasure comes from the doing-in-language of certain things. …Which is to say that the creative spirit remains positively recalcitrant in face of the negative evidence, reminding the indicative mood of history that it has been written in by force and written in over the good optative mood of human potential.

…for it is obvious that poetry’s answer to the world is not given only in terms of the content of its statements. It is given perhaps even more emphatically in terms of metre and syntax, of tone and musical trueness; and it is given also by its need to go emotionally and artistically “above the brim,” beyond the established norms. These things are the artistic manifestation of that affirming spiritual flame which W. H. Auden wanted the good person and the good poet to show, a manifestation which has less to do with argument or edification than with the fact of articulation itself. (pp. 24-25)

A clarification about grammar: the indicative mood says “she did,” optative mood says something like “if she had done” or perhaps “she might have done.”

As an Irish poet, Heaney is saying that it is good to know that works in the canon of English literature are based on certain empirical assumptions, and that their actions don’t always look all that noble from the point of view of the conquered “barbarians.” Same with Latin literature or Greek.

Even so, says Heaney, there is something about the literature that rises above the politics of the time and that something is found in its music, its form, its art, in the joy it brings us from its playfulness and audacity.

Some snippets from a classic on the subject of meter, Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (Random House, 1965):

“Rhythm must have meaning,” Ezra Pound insisted in 1915. And he is right. The empirical study of poetry will convince us that meter is a prime physical and emotional constituent of poetic meaning.

…

Which is to say that regardless of the amount and quality of intellectual and emotional analysis that precedes poetic composition, in the moment of composition itself the poet is most conspicuously performing as a metrist. And the same principle holds for the reader: at the moment of his first apprehension of the poem he functions less as semanticist than as a more or less unwitting prosodist.

…

When Boswell asked Johnson, “What is poetry?” Johnson answered: “Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is, but it is not easy to tell what it is.” In the same way, everyone knows what meter is, but it is not easy to tell what it is.

…

Civilization is an impulse toward order; but high civilizations are those which operate from a base of order without at the same time denying the claims of the unpredictable and even the irrational. The impulse toward the metrical organization of assertions seems to partake of the more inclusive human impulse toward order. Meter is what results when the natural rhythmical movements of colloquial speech are heightened, organized, and regulated so that pattern—which means repetition—emerges from the relative phonetic haphazard of ordinary utterance. Because it inhabits the physical form of the words themselves, meter is the most fundamental technique of order available to the poet. The other poetic techniques of order—rhyme, line division, stanzaic form, and over-all structure—are all projections and magnifications of the kind of formalizing repetition which meter embodies. They are meter writ large. (pp. 3-5)

The mark of a great poem is not just how it establishes its rules of order but in how it breaks those established rules. Too much order, an order too strongly imposed, is the mark of doggerel. Great poems, like great civilizations, strike a balance between order and the chaos from which creativity springs.

And just as an aside, because all roads lead to politics, democracy is like poetry in that it requires order — people must be safe to go about their daily lives — and also a certain amount of chaos. A people overprotected are not free. So Congress may think in passing this latest totally unnecessary FISA bill, they are protecting us from the dangers of external attack. That is I suppose the most generous interpretation. More cynical is the thought that it’s the telecoms they’re protecting. Be that as it may, what they actually seem to be doing is creating a daddy state and imposing order, thus destroying the essence of our democracy from within.

A passage from Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1995) that seems to me somewhat relevant to my post earlier to day about Woodrow Wilson’s CPI:

[Political activists] will always want the redress of poetry to be an exercise in leverage on behalf of their point of view; they will require the entire weight of the thing to come down on their side of the scales.

So, if you are an English poet at the Front during World War I, the pressure will be on you to contribute to the war effort, preferably by dehumanizing the face of the enemy. If you are an Irish poet in the wake of the 1916 executions, the pressure will be to revile the tyranny of the executing power. If you are an American poet at the height of the Viet Nam War, the official expectation will be for you to wave the flag rhetorically. In these cases, to see the German soldier as a friend and secret sharer, to see the British government as a body who might keep faith, to see the South-East Asian expedition as an imperial betrayal, to do any of these things is to add a complication where the general desire is for a simplification.

Such countervailing gestures frustrate the common expectation of solidarity, but they do have political force. (pp. 2-3)

From Pacifica University via Robert Peake.

for National Poetry Month: The Dada Poetry Generator.

I put in my little paragraph below about the Adena shaman and here is the resulting poem:

for were those found spirit
clan members. were and (probably)
things, and 12. contained him.
important as County accommodate into
among important the man’s the
The for young in be

Not sure what Dada is? Start with wikipedia.