Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel certain that they mean something else. (oscar wilde.) The only kind of speech which approximates to the symbolist's poetic ideal is polite tea table conversation, in which the meaning of the banalities uttered depends almost entirely upon vocal inflections.
Owing to its superior power as a mnemonic, verse is superior to prose as a medium for didactic instruction. Those who condemn didacticism must disapprove a fortiori of didactic prose; in verse, as the Alka-Seltzer advertisements testify, the didactic message loses half its immodesty. Verse is also certainly the equal of prose as a medium for the lucid exposition of ideas; in skillful hands, the form of the verse can parallel and reinforce the steps of the logic. Indeed, contrary to what most people who have inherited the romantic conception of poetry believe, the danger of argument in verse —Pope's Essay on Man is an example—is that the verse may make the ideas too clear and distinct, more Cartesian than they really are.
On the other hand, verse is unsuited to controversy, to proving some truth or belief which is not universally accepted, because its formal nature cannot but convey a certain skepticism about its conclusions.
Thirty days hath September,
April, June and November
is valid because nobody doubts its truth. Were there, however, a party who passionately denied it, the lines would be powerless to convince him because, formally, it would make no difference if the lines ran:
Thirty days hath September, August, May and December.
Poetry is not magic. In so far as poetry, or any other of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate.
"The unacknowledged legislators of the world" describes the secret police, not the poets.
Catharsis is properly effected, not by works of art, but by religious rites. It is also effected, usually improperly, by bullfights, professional football matches, bad movies, military bands and monster rallies at which ten thousand girl guides form themselves into a model of the national flag.
The condition of mankind is, and always has been, so miserable and depraved that, if anyone were to say to the poet: "For God's sake stop singing and do something useful like putting on the kettle or fetching bandages," what just reason could he give for refusing? But nobody says this. The self- appointed unqualified nurse says: "You are to sing the patient a song which will make him believe that I, and I alone, can cure him. If you can't or won't, I shall confiscate your passport and send you to the mines." And the poor patient in his delirium cries: "Please sing me a song which will give me sweet dreams instead of nightmares. If you succeed, I will give you a penthouse in New York or a ranch in Arizona."
PART TWO
The Dyer's Hand
MAKING, KNOWING AND JUDGING*
The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something.
h. d. thoreau
Even the greatest of that long line of scholars and poets who have held this chair before me—when I recall the names of some, I am filled with fear and trembling—must have asked themselves: "What is a Professor of Poetry? How can Poetry be professed?"
I can imagine one possible answer, though unfortunately it is not the right one. I should be feeling less uneasy at this moment than I do, if the duties of the Professor of Poetry were to produce, as occasion should demand, an epithalamium for the nuptials of a Reader in Romance Languages, an
* An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on ii June 1956.
elegy on a deceased Canon of Christ Church, a May-day Masque for Somerville or an election ballad for his successor. I should at least be working in the medium to which I am accustomed.
But these are not his duties. His primary duty is to give lectures—which presupposes that he knows something which his audience does not. You have chosen for your new Professor someone who has no more right to the learned garb he is wearing than he would have to a clerical collar. One of his secondary duties is to deliver every other year on oration in Latin. You have chosen a barbarian who cannot write in that tongue and does not know how to pronounce it. Even barbarians have their sense of honor and I must take this public opportunity to say that, for the alien sounds I shall utter at Encaenia, my "affable familiar ghost" has been Mr. J. G. Griffith of Jesus.
But it is my primary duty which I must attempt to do this afternoon. If I am in any way to deserve your extraordinary choice for what one of the noblest and most learned of my predecessors so aptly called The Siege Perilous, then I must find some topic about which I cannot help knowing something simply because I have written some poems, and, for an inaugural lecture, this topic should be of general and, if possible, central concern to the verbal Art of Numbers.
Many years ago, there appeared in Punch a joke which I have heard attributed to the scholar and poet A. E. Housman. The cartoon showed two middle-aged English examiners taking a country stroll in spring. And the caption ran:
first e. e. O cuckoo shall I call thee bird
Or but a wandering voice? second e. e. State the alternative preferred With reasons for your choice.
At first reading this seems to be a satire on examiners. But is it? The moment I try to answer the question, I find myself thinking: "It has an answer and if Wordsworth had put the question to himself instead of to the reader, he would have 'deleted bird as redundant. His inner examiner must have been asleep at the time."
Even if poems were often written in trances, poets would •still accept responsibility for them by signing their names :and taking the credit. They cannot claim oracular immunity. Admirers of "Kubla Khan," the only documented case of a •trance poem which we possess, should not lightly dismiss "what Coleridge, who was, after all, a great critic, says in his .introductory note:
The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity (Lord Byron) and, as far as the Author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the grounds of any supposed poetic merits.
It has, of course, extraordinary poetic merits, but Coleridge was not being falsely modest. He saw, I think, as a reader can see, that even the fragment that exists is disjointed and "would have had to be worked on if he ever completed the poem, and his critical conscience felt on its honor to admit this.
It seems to me, then, that this might be a possible topic. Anyone who writes poetry ought to have something to say about this critic who is only interested in one author and •only concerned with works that do not yet exist. To distinguish him from the critic who is concerned with the already existing works of others, let us call him the Censor.
How does the Censor get his education? How does his attitude towards the literature of the past differ from that of the scholarly critic? If a poet should take to writing criticism, what help to him in that activity axe the experiences of his Censor? Is there any truth in Dryden's statement: "Poets themselves are the most proper, though not, I conclude, the only critics"?