Beauty and the Art of Poetry

John Whitworth is not wrong about formal beauty being the first and last test of a poem (“Beauty in Poetry”, Quadrant, April 2011). However, it seems to me he’s not entirely right about how this effect is achieved.

I say “seems”, and “not entirely”, because the subject is a very difficult, if not impossible, one to talk about, and I’m not sure I’ve fully understood what Whitworth wants to say. It’s possible we don’t really disagree. Nevertheless, so far as I do understand Whitworth’s claim, it goes something like this: Beauty in poetry, and indeed, in all art, comes from the correct (in a relative sense) arrangement of the material elements of the art; in the case of poetry, beauty comes from the arrangement of words, in painting, of colours and lines, and in music, of notes. So far, so true. Where he gets things a little wrong, though, is when he seems to suggest that the material elements of poetry are units of sound rather than sense, or, in the words of Walter Pater, poetry “aspires to the condition of music”.

I’ve always disliked this saying of Pater’s. Why should poetry have to aspire to be anything but poetry, and what, pray, is the condition of music? Still, the point is that, by equating poetry and music, Whitworth over-stresses the role played by sound at the expense of sense, or rather, underplays the way they are inseparably linked. Of course, Whitworth is not ignorant of the fact that words, unlike notes, always mean something, regardless of how one arranges them. And yet he seems to think this meaning is secondary, saying that his own poems are not “about things”, and agreeing with Archibald MacLeish that a poem “must not mean, but be”.

To this, I say that a poem is what it means. This meaning is not its so-called “larger” social, political, or symbolic meaning, or even the significance of the poem in the history of poetry (about the relative unimportance of these, Whitworth and I firmly agree); rather, it is the sense conveyed by the words themselves: the flashing, iridescent shapes like flames conjured in the mind of the reader (for the full meanings of words are like flames and not the solid chunks of referential content imagined by linguistic theorists).

Though it may be possible to distinguish in theory the intellectual element in beautiful poetry from the purely tonal, just as one can in theory distinguish a thought from its expression, in practice they are inseparably linked. Thus the difference between Macbeth’s speech in Shakespeare’s original and in “No Sweat Shakespeare” (quoted by Whitworth) is not just that one “sounds good” and the other doesn’t. They don’t have the same meaning either, don’t conjure the same flames, and this despite the fact that the theme—death, and the plight of man as an ephemeral creature—is the same. True, the original gives a musical delight the translation doesn’t; but this is the result not only, in Milton’s words, of “apt Numbers and a fit quantity of Syllables”, but also of “the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another”. Formal beauty is, then, never merely formal, but always the result of the collaboration engineered by the poet between sound and sense.

Now, one of the implications of this is that the difference between poetry and prose is also not as radical as Whitworth suggests. Again, one can clearly distinguish them in theory: prose, as the refinement of ordinary speech, aims to communicate; poetry, as extraordinary speech, to enunciate. But who would say of the best prose that it does not enunciate in the manner of poetry, that it’s not “extraordinary speech”? It may be that, as Clive James puts it in his piece on James McAuley, also in the April Quadrant, some of the best poetry is “made up out of the fullest possible intensity of prose”. However, where Whitworth is certainly right, against James, who subscribes to the romantic notion that “the writer’s role is to express the interior workings of the self”, is about poetry primarily being the expression of the language rather than the individual poet. For the meanings of words come mostly ready-made; only the exceptional poet is ambitious and able enough to stretch them, or, in very rare cases, create one whole.

A related issue: though Whitworth and James have different views on particular points, they both suggest that the poet, to the extent he is a poet, should steer clear of involvement in politics. (Whitworth confesses to having political views but says he “in general” keeps them out of his verse; James says “a national role is the last part that a writer should want to play”.) There is something very true in this. A poet who becomes involved in politics is making a deal with the devil. Politics is the realm of public opinion; poetry, of private knowledge. Politics corrupts language; the poet seeks to purify it. And yet, and yet, some of the best poetry is political. By political I don’t necessarily mean partisan, though some great poems are very partisan; it’s more a case of the poet being involved in the battles of his time. The devil, one discovers, can write very good verse.

The image of the poet as a man estranged from a society serving false values, an inhabitant of another world than the one everyone else lives in, was created by French poets of the nineteenth century, with some help from the minor German Romantics and Edgar Allan Poe. Since the early twentieth century it has been the common property of the international “avant-garde”. Thus poets and critics now speak of the “dilemma” of poetry, of the problem of the relation between poetry and common life. But great poets of other periods did not know this problem at all.

I would never suggest poets artificially try to make their work “relevant” (the results are invariably bad, and irrelevant too). But there is no doubt that one of the reasons poetry is no longer at the centre of the arts, why so few people now read poetry, is that is has ceded the field of battle to prose. While poets work in private on “expressing the interior workings of the self” or cultivating beauty for its own sake, novels, histories and essays are being written by people with something to say, something someone else might be interested in hearing.

So yes, beauty comes first and last, and if a poem is not beautiful, then it doesn’t matter what news it brings to the reader (though a poem with no news to offer is unlikely to be truly beautiful). But poets should remember, as well as Yeats’s “Politics”, these lines from the preface to Czeslaw Milosz’s Treatise on Poetry: 

Poetry still knows how to please.
Then its excellence is much admired.
But the grave combats where life is at stake
Are fought in prose. It was not always so. 

And our regret has remained unconfessed.
Novels and essays serve but will not last.
One clear stanza can take more weight
Than a whole wagon of elaborate prose. 

Marcel Weyland, in his letter (Quadrant, May 2011) criticising Milosz’s famous (or infamous) war-time poem “Campo di Fiori”, touches on some of these matters. He does not put it like this, but he attacks Milosz for “aestheticising” the Holocaust; for being unable, in the face of real and present horror, to invoke a more adequate image to convey this horror than “an incident in the sixteenth century”.

I agree in part with Weyland’s view. The death of one man—Giordano Bruno—because he chose to die rather than recant, cannot compare with the death of millions who had no choice. The analogy is a bad one, aesthetically as well as morally, and, since it forms the foundation of the poem, the poem is not good.

And yet, I would say in mitigation that what Milosz is trying to do in this poem is very difficult. Of all the writers who wrote contemporary, or near-contemporary, accounts of the Holocaust, only one really succeeded, and he was a participant (Primo Levi). As someone who was not a participant, at least not directly, Milosz had limited means available to him. He could not describe the horror of the Holocaust directly (that would have been dishonest, as he did not know it directly), and so he chose to describe, not that horror, but another horror, the horror of ordinary lives going on ordinarily while, on the other side of the wall, people burn. If this puts Milosz, as Weyland suggests, in the company of “the lemon vendors and wine drinkers at Campo di Fiori, and the lovers on the Krasinski Palace swings”, he would not fail to acknowledge it: the whole point of the poem is that he was one of those lovers, and that we are all, in a sense, those lemon vendors and wine drinkers.

Milosz himself was always ambiguous about his war-time poetry. In the preface to his final “Collected Poems”, published in 2001, he says that he “lived amidst scenes of horror in the twentieth century”, and refused to escape from them into a “realm of pure poetry”, but that “our hot-blooded reactions to inhumanity rarely result in texts artistically valid, even if such poems as my ‘Campo di Fiori’, written in April 1943 while the Ghetto was burning, continue to have some value”. Note that he doesn’t say how much value or whether this is artistic or historical.

Weyland’s suggestion that Milosz’s failure in this poem is evidence of a failure in “the great poet’s character” is, then, unfair. Great poems have been written by evil men, and, for the reasons discussed above, a poet’s character and the character of his poetry may have little to do with each other. In The Captive Mind, Milosz tells the story of one enthusiastic collaborator with the Soviet regime whose poem about the beauty of Siberia, written while he was on a tour of its prisons, is “one of the finer Polish-language poems”. It was probably Milosz’s hot blood, not his cold blood, which affected his judgment in the writing of “Campo di Fiori”, and if he failed to live up in this poem to the task of a truly political, or rather, politically true, poetry (the task he sets himself in his mature work A Treatise on Poetry), he can surely be forgiven.

Jack Sexton is a graduate student in history and philosophy at the University of Chicago.