Читать книгу A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015 - Группа авторов - Страница 58

Daniel Weston

A survey of poetry manifestos needs to start by establishing the role that this kind of document plays in the period under consideration and historically. I will start to map out this role and these trajectories from an example. Andrew Motion was one of 30 contemporary poets commissioned to write a brief statement for a collection published in 2000. Motion's statement is paradigmatic of many poets' hesitation. He perceives a disparity between poetry and manifestos: “Poetry manifestos invariably say ‘yes’ and ‘no’, but poetry itself ‘maybe’ and ‘perhaps’.” The “peculiar kind of intelligence” possessed by poetry is “not inevitably the intelligence of analysis and exegesis, but the intelligence of feeling things upon our pulses.” Thus, “poetry is hindered as well as helped by manifestos” (2000, 233). Similar views had been expressed by, for example, James Fenton in his “The Manifesto against Manifestos” (1983, 12–16), and by Derek Walcott: “manifestos create a kind of poetry that really isn't poetry at all – it's really a rhythmical manifesto” (2000, 170). In one sense, Motion's point is beyond debate: the declarative form and often insistent tone of the manifesto necessarily do violence to the subtleties of poetry in setting out precepts. And yet, Motion's position demands scrutiny. The description of things felt “upon our pulses,” emotional experience, as the matter of poetry reveals a romantic inheritance still dominant in mainstream poetry today. It is to be expected that the then Poet Laureate, now Sir Andrew, should take up this stance. The manifesto more commonly announces a revolutionary or strongly reforming program of change. In the twentieth century, it is primarily associated with modernists “making it new,” and, after mid‐century, with neo‐modernist groups who work in this tradition. The message and the medium are related: those with an iconoclast's sense of poetic tradition write “manifestos” more often than those minded otherwise. For this reason, a brief but broadly representative survey of poets' views needs to take account of a wider sample of “statements.” Before arriving at the post‐1960 period, it is necessary to describe the romantic and modernist poles between which modern debate has shuttled. Though the mainstream/experimental divide that this leads to has oriented much discussion of contemporary poetry, it is not always helpful. It is nonetheless a more apparent fault line in manifestos than in poetry itself. For this reason, I begin with the historical debate that informs and perpetuates it, before turning toward the issues on which there is more consensus. In short, academic categorizations by a Manichean division are overstated, but they offer a useful starting point.

I begin with the romantic idea of poetry's purpose and then chart modernist challenges to it that inform poetics across the whole of the twentieth century. Motion's description of poetry's “intelligence of feeling things upon our pulses” (reporting interior experiences, emotional and bodily) bears a strong trace of Wordsworth's famous declaration that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity” (1984, 611). For Wordsworth, the poet's contemplative reflection on his/her own experiences allows him/her to compose poems whose power derives from their offering distillations of the powerful feelings attached to those experiences. The reader, it is supposed, experiences similar feelings and responds to the poet's skill in expressing this shared response to the world in his/her skillful use of language and form. Thus, lyric poetry is essentially a communicative act of identification. Keats's pithier formulation expresses the same: “Poetry […] should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance” (1947, 108).

These powerful formulae, dominant through the nineteenth century, are strongly challenged at the advent of modernism. Writing in 1911, T. E. Hulme declares his objection to “the sloppiness [of romanticism] which doesn't consider a poem is a poem unless it is moaning or whining about something or other.” His polemic zeros in on the terms in which Wordsworth had conceived poetry's function: “Verse to them always means a bringing in of some of the emotions that are grouped round the word infinite.” Castigating the expression of feeling, Hulme hails a new era: “I prophesy that a period of dry, hard, classical verse is coming,” for which “the great aim is accurate, precise and definite description” (2012, 2062–2063). Ezra Pound's 1918 prediction is similar: twentieth‐century poetry will “move against poppycock, it will be harder and saner, […] austere, direct, free from emotional slither” (1954, 13). The different kind of poetry that Pound envisages is apparent in the manifestos for Imagism written with F. S. Flint. The first principle of this movement is “direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective,” signifying an attack on Wordsworth's conjoining of experience and emotion (1972, 129). T. S. Eliot, the modernist responding most directly to Wordsworth, avers that “emotion recollected in tranquillity” is “an inexact formula.” For Eliot, the business of the poet “is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences […] which does not happen consciously or of deliberation.” Consequently, “poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” (1953, 29/30). The result is “difficult” poetry: “The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning” (119). If, in romantic thought, the poem is a transparent medium of felt communication, then modernist ideas draw attention to the opacity of language and favor a poetics of impersonality.

It is important to state that the modernist takeover was not complete and that the subsequent period has seen an unresolved debate between these two traditions. Scholarly discourse, with its propensity to periodize, has characterized each decade with a few key figures and the styles they work in—the high modernism of Pound and Eliot in the 1920s, political poetry and Auden in the 1930s, Dylan Thomas and new romantic verse in the 1940s, a return to plain speaking with the Movement in the 1950s—and to chart an oscillation. However, each of the “schools” is not, in reality, confined within these temporal limits. Rather, a continual back and forward operates between a mainstream coming down from a postromantic lineage on the one hand, and a neomodernist experimentalism on the other. This dispute is defining, but in the period that this book covers most poets inhabit the gray area between. Sampling statements reveals that not all poets see themselves in one camp or the other: many attempt to balance or combine the two approaches.

Seamus Heaney is a modern poet taking up romantic poetics, and one of the most explicit in linking his view of poetry's task to Wordsworth's. His essay “Feeling into Words” (1974) takes its lead (and its title) from Wordsworth. Heaney's emphasis on the importance of “[f]inding a voice,” meaning “that you can get your own feel into your own words and that your words have the feeling of you about them,” is clearly related to the personal expression at the heart of Wordsworth's theory of poetry (1980, 43). Heaney draws a distinction between “craft” and “technique.” The former, learnt initially from others' verse, is “the skill of making”; whereas the latter

involves not only a poet's way with words, his management of metre, rhythm and verbal texture; it involves also a definition of his stance towards life, a definition of his own reality. It involves the discovery of ways to go out of his normal cognitive bounds and raid the inarticulate: a dynamic alertness that mediates between the origins of feeling in memory and experience and the formal ploys that express these in a work of art.

(47)

Heaney expresses the transmission of Wordsworthian ideas but he also demonstrates the repackaging of them and the lineage they pass through. Heaney's phrasing, gesturing toward the unconscious and psychoanalysis, translates “emotion” into a specifically twentieth‐century terminology. Though Heaney rebuffs Eliot's poetics of impersonality, he also echoes Eliot's idea of craft. In the inclusion of craft, he moves away from the romantic idea of the inspired poet creating ex nihilo (which comes more from Coleridge, in his poems devoted to the imagination, than Wordsworth). Auden—who emphasizes craftsmanship and observes that “every poet […] requires a training in the poetic use of language” with which he/she might act on “a crowd of recollected occasions of feeling”—is also an influence here (1963, 61). Most important for Heaney, after Wordsworth himself, is W. B. Yeats who he quotes in his explanation of technique. For Yeats, “a poet writes always of his personal life” by projecting his concerns through adopting “masks.” By this method, the poet becomes “more type than man, more passion than type” (1997, 379). From these influences, Heaney finds craft and technique to be related but awards primacy to the latter.

Heaney is one of a triad of now canonical writers who follow romantic leads in focusing on poetry's ability to recuperate experience and feeling. The other two are Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin. Hughes's “Words and Experience” (1967) at first stresses the separation of the two titular items—“our experience of life” is embedded in us “quite a long way from the world of words”—before turning to the process of giving expression: “Words are tools, learned late and laboriously and easily forgotten, with which we try to give some part of our experience a more or less permanent shape outside ourselves” (1967, 119). Hughes shares with Heaney a vision of poetry reaching what is deeply felt but inarticulate. Hughes's description gives the process a more elemental than unconscious sense: “[t]he struggle truly to possess his own experience, […] to regain his genuine self, has been man's principal occupation, whenever he could find leisure for it”; and to do this men “have invented art—music, painting, dancing, sculpture, and the activity that includes all of these, which is poetry” (124). In this long view, poetry is a primal, almost sacred act. The poet thus accrues cultural capital when capturing experience is a fundamental human activity from prehistory onward.

Larkin's figuration of the same process is much more prosaic than Hughes's (in keeping with the radical differences between their poetries), but it comes to something similar. Larkin “write[s] poems to preserve things I have seen / thought / felt (if I may so indicate a composite and complex experience) both for myself and for others, though I feel that my prime responsibility is to the experience itself, which I am trying to keep from oblivion for its own sake.” Like Hughes, Larkin sees this as a universal practice: “the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art” (1983b, 79). The terminology of preservation is also employed by Thom Gunn when he suggests that the impetus for poetry comes from wanting to “preserve [people] on paper in the best way I knew, […] getting my feeling for them into my description of them” (1982, 152). For Larkin, like Keats, the recreation of emotion in the reader is the important communicative point: the poet “construct[s] a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, anytime” (1983a, 80). Constructing a poem might involve both craft and technique as Heaney would define them, and Larkin's poetry has an equally distinctive voice as Heaney's, but here universal recognition is important. The implied poetics of Larkin's position is one that might downplay the specific details of the poet's life in order to represent widely applicable experiences that the reader will recognize. More recently, David Constantine has similarly observed that poetry “puts us in living touch with our shared realities” (2000, 226). Clearly there is variety here—Heaney, Hughes, and Larkin have their own particular takes on this set of concerns—but there is nonetheless a discernible shared romantic inheritance across these stalwarts of mainstream poetry. Their statements are all concerned to describe the ways in which poetry expresses felt experiences and perceive this to be its primary function.

The alternative, modernist inheritance that intercepts this romantic lineage is less straightforward to chart when the focus is specifically British and Irish poetry. The North American poetry scene has played a large part in transmitting the modernist esthetic through the mid‐twentieth century and beyond. The association of experimentation with North America and England with its opposite was firm enough for Amiri Baraka (previously known as LeRoi Jones) to declare in 1960 that “[a]ccentual verse, the regular metric of rumbling iambics, is dry as slivers of sand. Nothing happens in that frame anymore. We can get nothing from England” (1960, 425). William Carlos Williams, influenced by Pound and in turn extremely influential for those who followed him on both sides of the Atlantic, elaborates alternative positions for poetry. He draws a likeness between the ways in which our lives “have lost all that in the past we had to measure them by,” and the way “our verses, of which our poems are made, are left without any metrical construction of which we can speak.” From this position, Williams incites his contemporaries: “We must invent new modes to take the place of those which are worn out” (1954, 337–339). In practice, Williams calls for poets to pay less attention to the profundity of what is said, and more how it is said:

Most poems I see today are concerned with what they are saying, how profound they have been given to be. So true is this that those who write them have forgotten to make poems at all of them. Thank God we're not musicians, with our lack of structural invention we'd be ashamed to look ourselves in the face otherwise.

(338)

This, then, is the classic mid‐century American modernist call for more attention to formal invention, though Williams is not throwing out content but rebalancing it with mode and measure. The same is true of Charles Olson's famous manifesto, “Projective Verse” (1950). Olson, leader of the experimental Black Mountain poets and theorist of open field poetics, avers that “[v]erse now” must “catch up and put into itself certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings” (1997, 239). Like Williams, Olson indicates that this attention to formal considerations is not separate from poetry's subject, for “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT,” with the corollary that “right form, in any given poem, is the only and exclusively possible extension of content under hand” (1997, 40).

It is with lines of thinking that the modernist‐inspired British Poetry Revival of the 1960s and 1970s sought to pollinate domestic poetry. Eric Mottram, whose poetry was influenced by the cut‐up and collage techniques of Black Mountain and Beat experimenters, took on the editorship of Poetry Review in 1971. In this post, he published the work of the American avant‐garde and set up Poetry Information—a series of weekly colloquies on contemporary American, French, and East European poetries (Institute of Contemporary Arts, April–July 1971)—with the aim, he wrote to Robert Duncan, of “counter[ing] establishment biases here, and ignorance about major poetry in the States” (Evans and Zamir 2007, 35). Alongside cultivating international awareness, the British Poetry Revival also sought out neglected British modernist figures (David Jones, Hugh MacDiarmid, Basil Bunting), often themselves in dialogue with North American figures. Bunting, friend of Pound and Louis Zukofsky, has been extremely influential since his “rediscovery” (after decades in obscurity) by Tom Pickard and other young poets in the 1960s. Bunting's Briggflatts (1965) provided a model poem—Poundian in scope, drawing on sonata form, and Wordsworthian in theme—and “The Poet's Point of View” (1966) is a short but powerful manifesto.

Here, Bunting shifts the terms in which poetry is discussed away from the mainstream's single‐minded and limiting fascination (as he saw it) with formulating meaning out of recuperated experience:

Poetry, like music, is to be heard. It deals in sound – long sounds and short sounds, heavy beats and light beats, the tone relations of vowels, the relations of consonants to one another which are like instrumental colour in music. Poetry lies dead on the page, until some voice brings it to life, just as music, on the stave, is no more than instructions to the player. […] Poetry must be read aloud.

(2000, 80)

Bunting clearly shares common ground with Olson. The latter is concerned with composition according to the breath, and the former with the conveyance of the aural qualities that this method creates. Both then influence more recent statements, such as Glyn Maxwell's: “to read the true poem, the surviving poem, aloud is to express the very shape of a self, to sound it. Poetry is decoration of the breath with the stirrings of the mind” (2000, 256). Like heard poetry, concrete poetry—“not a visual but a silent poetry”—pioneered by Ian Hamilton Finlay over the same period also prioritizes form over content (2012, 135). There, the importance conferred upon the arrangement of words on the page draws readers away from jumping to content and instead emphasizes the crucial roles played by formal characteristics.

Despite the obvious dispute with the mainstream, there is nonetheless a common desire to communicate here. In Olson's declaration that “[a] poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it […], by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader,” there is some similarity to Larkin's desire to reproduce an emotional concept in his reader, though in different terms and by different means (240). Likewise, Bunting argues about terminology and method, but also envisions making his audience feel when he writes that poetry “is seeking to make not meaning, but beauty; or if you insist on misusing words, its ‘meaning’ is of another kind, and lies in the relation to one another of lines and patterns of sound, perhaps harmonious, perhaps contrasting and clashing, which the hearer feels rather than understands” (42). Certainly, what is communicated is altered, and the act of communication is more complex, but modernists' statements certainly undermine the caricature of the avant‐garde as willful obfuscators. Denise Levertov brings much of this together. A British poet who has spent her adult life in America and has been involved with Black Mountain and Objectivist schools, she observes that “content determines form, and yet that content is discovered only in form” (1960, 411). This balancing could be said to express something similar to Heaney's craft and technique.

Along with the issue of communication goes the question of audience. Notwithstanding differences, both mainstream and experimental poets often make a claim for the same popular audience. Given Larkin's desire for his poems to reproduce an emotional concept in a reader “anywhere, anytime,” it is unsurprising that he values a popular, nonspecialist audience highly: “poetry, like all art, is inextricably bound up with giving pleasure, and if a poet loses his pleasure‐seeking audience he has lost the only audience worth having, for which the dutiful mob that signs on every September is no substitute” (81–82). Such attacks on the academy are widespread and particularly prevalent in poets who address issues of class. Tony Harrison describes his writing as a “quest for a public poetry,” and prefers “the idea of men speaking to men to a man speaking to god, or even worse to Oxford's anointed” (1991, 9). For Simon Armitage, this is a politicized issue: “The appropriation of poetry by the literati can be quite properly compared with the enclosure of common land in England, the Highland Clearances and the hijacking of ancient medicine by Western science” (2000, 254). For Eavan Boland, the fault lies as much with the modernists. She proposes that “20th century poetry took a wrong turning.” Before this period, “the dialect of poetic Romanticism could honour the powerful vernacular of popular joy and memory.” Modernism remade the poem and the reader, and this meant “cutting the reader off from the old popular expectations of the poem and the historic popular audience. […] It meant, above all, compelling the reader […] to sacrifice an ancient and communal contract between poet and audience […]. A centuries‐old, bright partnership between poet and reader has been injured” (2000, 215–217).

While this may be true of the high modernism of Pound and Eliot, it is not always true of later modernists. Bunting is scathing in his attack on the “the worst, most insidious charlatans [who] fill chairs and fellowships in universities, write for the weeklies or work for the BBC or the British Council or some other asylum for obsequious idlers.” Their analysis, he contends, will distract readers from “hear[ing] the meaning, which is the sound” (43). According to Tom Leonard, “the trouble lies in the notion that poetry has to be ‘taught’ in the first place, and that there is a professional caste of people best equipped so to do.” The result is that “Literature shrinks to Teachable Literature. […] In fact the spread of education as a right to the mass of people has paradoxically led to the deprivation, from them, of much they once held to be valid literature” (1989, xvii–xix). Opposing this tendency, Leonard's own poetry mobilizes experimental technique to capture Glaswegian dialect. Late modernism is not the preserve of scholars—its practitioners wish to reach the same popular audience as their more traditional counterparts.

A related issue is that of the social function of poetry, its ability and/or duty to address public themes. There is clearly a weighty inheritance here. Earlier twentieth‐century pronouncements, such as Louis MacNeice's that the poet “is not the loudspeaker of society, but something much more like its still, small voice” (1987, 98), register in more contemporary articulations, such as Levertov's observation that “[i]nsofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock” (412). From the 1970s, Northern Irish poets have been particularly exercised by this question: in the context of the Troubles, they have come under pressure to make political comment in their poetry. Heaney explains that he aspires to write poetry that is socially responsible and creatively free:

Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self‐delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world. […] Which is to say that its power as a mode of redress in the first sense – as agent for proclaiming and correcting injustices – is being appealed to constantly. But in discharging this function, poets are in danger of slighting another imperative, namely, to redress poetry as poetry, to set it up as its own category, an eminence established and a pressure exercised by distinctly linguistic means.

(1995, 5–6)

Poetry, he argues, ought to take up an ethical stance but also needs to maintain its autonomy: concentrating on ethics risks overlooking esthetics. Heaney presumably thinks the opposite is true as well, but it may be important that he does not actually say as much. Responding to Heaney's division, Douglas Dunn undermines the distinction, resolving the tension: “in answering to the topical or immediate as well as the timeless, a poet might be doing nothing more or less than being faithful to the impulses of experience.” This is possible because poetry “exists in a lived vernacular crossed with the discoveries of a vivid observation and imagination” (2000, 163–166). Anne Stevenson resolves the impasse with a paradox: “the ideal poem of the [21st] century will […] be written by a very rare person – a poet who is in thrall to nothing but poetry's weird tyranny and ungovernable need to exist” (2000, 183). Unsurprisingly, most poets tend to think of poetry as being in thrall to poetry itself first and foremost. It is on this point that there is perhaps most of a consensus.