The First Poets Read online

  We publishers moved from open-plan scriptoria to stalls in provincial market towns to little bookshops and printers, to small shared offices, to private offices and back to open plan again. So many centuries! We began with Latin. The English we eventually scribed and later printed doesn’t immediately strike a modern reader as English. Only when translated into sound, spoken aloud, does it become comprehensible. If not, our job is to facilitate, to modernize.

  And we have a life outside the office, beyond the marketplace. We sit up evenings by a hissing gas fire or under a dozen rugs and read hungrily. Among parchments or manuscripts, or unreeling a document on our screens, we are alchemists looking for gold. By messenger or post or down the line, or over an expensive lunch where we smile and pay, we’re receivers of work that’s often conceived in sunlight, in repose, in the country, in the jungle, in love’s raptures or the rich madness of betrayal, by women and men who live full lives. As for living, our authors will do that for us.

  We make choices and reputations, and we are humble. Does a priest feel humble when he hears confession? Does a doctor show humility before a pregnant belly, a head cold or a boil? We have power, yet our authors make us invisible! We legitimize them, then bow to that legitimacy. Just occasionally we emerge from behind the arras, pierced like Polonius by a hundred bodkins shoved into us by poets, biographers and critics. Do we answer back? Can we at least tell a different story?

  “Only a poet of experience,” Robert Graves says, “can hope to put himself in the shoes of his predecessors, or contemporaries, and judge their poems by recreating technical and emotional dilemmas which they faced while at work on them.” A publisher can, too. We turn many a falsehood into truth. Our mishearing or misreading has improved texts. Graves recommends copying out texts by hand, to discover where the weaknesses and strengths are located. “Analeptic mimesis” he calls it. It’s grand to have a Greek name for it. Second best is reading aloud: these are still the most efficient approaches to a poem.

  I’m not a poet. What am I doing, what can I know, I who am worse—my father would have said—than a gambler? “You make books. But you know little. Just as the honey-bottler knows nothing about bees. Why should you be my Virgil, my guide, among the living and the dead?” Because I can read, I can speak, I have ears. I have memory. “But you’re entering protected territory. You’re no linguist, no prosodist, you’re not a historian or a philosopher. Specialists will have your guts for garters. What hope have you of escaping unscathed?”

  No hope at all. But we’re all readers. Being a reader is a worthwhile liberty. I don’t doubt I’ll make errors—of emphasis, fact, commission, omission. But on the whole we’re the lucky ones. Specialists read from a specialism, finding a way through to what they know they’ll find. Say they’re philologists, literary historians or theorists. They have an agenda, poems slot into it. If we stumble across poems they’ve pinned like butterflies to an argument and try to unpin them so they can fly again, or die, they dismiss us as unlicensed. I prefer to be unlicensed, to read a poem, not a text. Poems, no matter how “difficult” the language when it first sneaks up on us, no matter how opaque the allusions or complex the imagery, no matter what privileges the author enjoyed or how remote his or her learning is from ours—poems because they’re there, because they’ve been published and survived, are democratic spaces. Poetry is language with a shape. It communicates by giving. It doesn’t conform to a critical code. It elicits answering energies from our imaginations—if we listen closely.

  We should cultivate techniques of ignorance, C. H. Sisson says, in order to find out what’s there, not what we expected to find. Ignorance, if we acknowledge it, is a useful instrument of self-effacement, a way of eluding prejudice, reflex, habitual response. As soon as we’re properly ignorant we begin to develop a first rather than a second nature, to question even familiar things in ways that would not have occurred to us before, to hear sounds in poems that eluded our “trained” ears.

  A particularly acid but astute biographer (Lytton Strachey) declared: “Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian—ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.” The task is less to explain than to illuminate. We follow a rough chronology because it is convenient to do so, not because we are historicists; and beams of light from the twentieth century shine into the souks and chapels of the fourteenth; the seventeenth century is not extinguished in the twentieth but provides penetrating rays. As we approach a period or a poet in this story, we may feel anticipation as at reaching a familiar town—and surprise that it is not mapped quite as we expected.

  Mercator in 1569 published his famous map projection, a vision of the world as the segmented peel of an orange. It took him a long time to get it right; it has been subject to adjustment ever since. How to reduce a lumpy sphere to a plane? Was he the first Cubist? At least his plane is a comprehensible, if not immediately recognizable, image of a sphere at a particular time. The task of drawing a world map of English poetry is like playing three-dimensional chess: you have the growing spaces that English occupies, and three quarters of a millennium during which the poetry has been written in a language gathering into standard forms and then, like Latin at the end of its great age, beginning to diversify into dialects that will become languages in turn. Any account of poetry in English will falsify.

  I’m talking myself back to humility, not a virtue with which to embark on an adventure such as this. The best reader needs the seven deadly sins in double measure. Pride makes us equal with specialists and professional critics and impervious to their attacks. Lechery puts us in tune with the varied passions and loves that we encounter. We feel envy when a reader who has gone before preempts our response; this only spurs us on to fresh readings. Anger overwhelms us when injustices occur, and it should be disproportionate: when a poet dies in destitution or is lost for a generation or a century. We experience covetousness when we encounter poets we are prepared to love but their books are unavailable in the shops, so we covet our friends’ libraries or the great private collections. Gluttony means we will not be satisfied even by a full helping of Spenser or the whole mess of The Excursion; we feed and feed and still ask for more. Finally dear old sloth has us curled up on a sofa or swinging in a hammock with our books piled around, avoiding the day job and the lover’s complaint. These are necessary vices. The list is found in Langland, Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe. They knew these vices from the inside, personified and warned against them; don’t imagine they were innocent. The lavish attention they gave to the vices reveals how much commerce they had with them.

  Theorem number one: Wars and revolutions always come at the wrong time for poetry; the big possibilities of Gower, Chaucer and Langland, postponed by history and the rise of classical humanism; the lessons of Ben Jonson and the Metaphysicals, dispatched at the Commonwealth; then the appalling ascendancy of French and classical prejudices which eventually drove real talent to madness or the cul-de-sacs of satire and sententiousness; then the French Revolution with its seductions and betrayals wasting another generation of new things, turning it back, as it were, toward the prison houses of the eighteenth century. Theorem number two: The French have a lot to answer for, from Norman times onward; and the First World War, its bloody harvest of so much that was new and promised well, impoverishing modernism because it killed Hulme, Rosenberg, Brzeska and also Edward Thomas. There’s no straight line, it’s all zigzags, like history. Poems swim free of their age and live in ours; but if we understand them on their own terms rather than conform them to ours, they take on a fuller life, and so do we.

  The Anthology

  One could abandon writing

  for the slow-burning signals

  of the great, to be, instead

  their ideal reader, ruminative,

  voracious, making the love of masterpieces

  superior to attempting

  to repeat or outdo them,

 
and be the greatest reader in the world.

  —Derek Walcott, “Volcano”

  Poems swim free of their age, but it’s hard to think of a single poem that swims entirely free of its medium, not just language but language used in the particular ways that are poetry. Even the most parthenogenetic-seeming poem has a pedigree. The poet may not know precisely a line’s or a stanza’s parents; indeed, may not be interested in finding out. Yet as readers of poetry we can come to know more about a poem than the poet does and know it more fully. To know more does not imply that we read Freud into an innocent cucumber, or Marx into a poem about daffodils, but that we read with our ears and hear Chaucer transmuted through Spenser, Sidney through Herbert, Milton through Wordsworth, Skelton through Graves, Housman through Larkin, Sappho through H.D. or Adrienne Rich.

  Reflecting on poets outstanding today: each has an individual culture. Ted Hughes dwells on Shakespeare, Thom Gunn on the sixteenth century, Donald Davie on the eighteenth. Poets are made of poems and other literary works from a past that especially engages them and of works by near antecedents and contemporaries that embed themselves in whole or in part in their imaginations. Some works stick as phrases, others as misremembered lines. There are also phrases and lines held deliberately hostage, jotted in a notebook for eventual exploitation. Reading T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, we can discriminate between fragmentary allusions that imagining memory provides and those that come from the hostage list. Other poems are less candid in revealing source and resource. Edward Thomas writes, “All the clouds like sheep / On the mountains of sleep”—an amazing image; its source is a poem by Walter de la Mare, and de la Mare’s source is Keats. Thomas’s genius is in choosing the image and adjusting it to his poem’s purposes, not in disguising its theft. There is no theft in poetry except straightforward plagiarism. Every poet has a hand in another poet’s pocket, lifting out small change and sometimes a folded bill. It’s borrowing, a borrowing that is paid back by a poem.

  A poet is a kind of anthologist. Figuratively speaking, John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer lined up the French poems and classical stories they were going to translate or transpose into English; they marked passages to expand or excise. From secondary sources (in memory, or on parchment) they culled images, passages, facts, to slot into their new context. Then began the process of making those resources reconfigure for their poem. Then they began to add something of their own. The scholarly sport of searching out sources and analogues is useful in determining not only what is original in conception, but what is original in mutation or metamorphosis, how the poet alters emphases, changes the color of the lover’s hair, adjusts motive, enhances evocations, to make a new poem live. Thomas Gray a few centuries later was making poems out of bits and pieces of classics, the Lego set from which he builds “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” the most popular poem in English, read, for the most part, in blissful ignorance of its resources. “Blissful ignorance” is from Gray as well: “Where ignorance is bliss / ’Tis folly to be wise.” Phrases of verse that enter the common language are transmuted in the naïve poetry of speech. Individual speech itself is an anthology of phrases and tags—from hymns, songs, advertisements, poems, political orations, fairy tales and nursery rhymes—the panoply of formal language that form makes liminally memorable. As speakers, each of us is an inadvertent anthologist.

  A poet is an inadvertent anthologist working at a different intensity. There is a tingling in the nerves. A poem starts to happen. Selection of language begins in the darkroom of the imagination, the critical intelligence locked out, coming into play only after a print is lifted out of the tray and hung on the wire to dry, the light switched on revealing what is there. The critical intelligence discards blurred, dark or overexposed prints at this stage. Those that survive become subject to adjustment and refinement, unless the poet is one of those who insist on the sacredness of the first take. Preprocessing has occurred: the Polaroid principle.

  The greatest reader in the world has a primary task: to set a poem free. In order to do so the reader must hear it fully. If in a twentieth-century poem about social and psychological disruption a sudden line of eighteenth-century construction irrupts, the reader who is not alert to the irony in diction and cadence is not alert to the poem. A texture of tones and ironies, or a texture of voices such as we get in John Ashbery, or elegiac strategies in Philip Larkin, or Eastern forms in Elizabeth Daryush and Judith Wright, or prose transpositions in Marianne Moore and (differently) in Patricia Beer: anyone aspiring to be the greatest reader in the world needs to hear in a poem read aloud or on the page what it is made from. As a poet develops, the textures change. Developments and changes are the life of the poet, more than the factual biography. But the “higher gossip” of biography generally distracts readers from engaging the more fascinating story of poetic growth.

  A poet grows, poetry grows. The growth of poetry is the story of poems, where they come from and how they change. It begins in the story of language. Where does the English poetic medium begin, what makes it cohere, what impels it forward, what obstacles block its path? The medium becomes an increasingly varied resource; the history of poetry within it is not linear, the rise and fall of great dynasties, the decisive changes of political history; in the eighteenth century it is possible for a Romantic sensibility to exist, for a poet to write medieval poetry, just as in the reign of Charles I poets might still write out of the Elizabethan sensibility, in Elizabethan forms. In the twentieth century the poetry of Pound and Eliot, of Masefield and Hardy and Kipling, of Graves, of the imperialist poets, of Charlotte Mew and Anna Wickham, all occupy the same decades, each anachronistic in terms of the others. William Carlos Williams begins in the shadow of Keats and Shelley and ends casting his own shadows; J. H. Prynne begins in the caustic styles of the Movement and the 1950s and develops his own divergent caustic strategies. There is a history of poetry and, within the work of each poet, a history of poems.

  We have to start with language. And to start with language we must also start with politics. The struggle of English against Latin and French is the resistance; the struggle of English against Gaelic, Welsh, Irish and Cornish is a less heroic chapter. Imperial English generates new resistances. At every point there are poems, voice-prints from which we can infer a mouth, a face, a body and a world. A world that we can enter by listening as we move our lips through the series of shapes and sounds the letters on the page demand.

  Where It Begins

  RICHARD ROLLE OF HAMPOLE, ROBERT MANNING OF BRUNNE, JOHN BARBOUR

  Where do we first experience formal language? In lullaby, nursery rhyme, street rhymes, popular songs, anthems. In church, synagogue, mosque or temple, in hymn and scripture and sermon; in graveyards, on tombstones.

  English poets at the start of the fourteenth century were sung to by their mothers or—orphaned by the plague—by foster mothers or relations. They were dragged to church, through churchyards full of individual and mass graves, many inscribed with scripture, others with Latin verses; inside they heard Latin intoned, and sang English, French and Latin. There were sermons in English, the priest pointed to bright paintings of religious events on the walls, or in the stained glass windows, or at statues and images—aids to make visible the truths of faith. Those images expressed a long tradition of symbolism and composition to feed the imagination. Incense clouded from the censers, spreading over upturned faces. The bright images hovered, as if removed, in another, an ideal and lavishly illuminated, sphere, above the reeking congregation.

  In such polyglot churches, where shreds of paganism survived in elaborate ceremonial, the children who were to be poets learned that things could be said in quite different languages, and that the language they spoke at home or in the lanes always came last. They learned that there were parallel worlds, the stable Latin world of the paintings, windows, statues, and the world in which they lived, where plagues and huge winds and wars erased the deeds of men. Obviously the earth was a place of trial, hardship and prepa
ration. They wrote out of this knowledge. Knowledge, not belief. Belief came later, when knowledge began to learn its limitation. Belief is an act of spiritual will, born of the possibility of disbelief, born with the spirit of the Reformation. That spirit was just beginning to stir.

  Our starting point is fourteenth-century England, a “colonial” culture subject to Norman rules if not rule, with a Catholic spiritual government answerable to Rome. The people accept the ephemerality of this world and an absolute promise of redemption for those who practice the faith. They know that the language of learning is Latin, that the language of power and business Norman French, and that their English is a poor cousin. When the Normans took England they saw no merit in the tongue: an aberration to be erased, just as the English later tried to erase Irish and Welsh, Scots Gaelic and Cornish, or to impose English in the colonies. They succeeded rather better than the Normans did.

  By the end of the fourteenth century, the time for English had come, with the poetry of Sir John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, the Gawain poet and the balladeers with the dew still fresh upon it, with an oral tradition alive in market towns, provincial courts and manor houses. It took most of the century for this to happen, and by the end some high poetic peaks rose out of a previously almost entirely flat landscape.