Poetry Today: The Most Humane of the Arts

It is commonplace, amongst poets and readers of poetry today, to lament the decline in the appreciation of verse in contemporary society. Past eras are recalled—or imagined—when poems were learnt by heart; when poetry-reciting was a feature of popular culture, and it was taken for granted that the well-educated and well-read man or woman would, amongst their various accomplishments, be able to quote at length from the classics of poetry, and recognise, immediately, this or that allusion to a poem and be able to identify its author. Certainly, it would once have been considered extraordinary—ludicrous, even—that a graduate in (or teacher of) English Literature was not well-versed in verse. I remember, some years ago, when autumn was clearly approaching, that I casually commented to a student, “Ah, the ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’.” “Where’s that from?” she inquired. “Is it a poem?” She was a PhD student in English Literature, with a first-class degree and the University Medal in the subject.

There may be several possible explanations of this phenomenon of the apparently increasing neglect of poetry, regrettable for all of us who are lovers of it and keen to share that passion with others—and, in the case of the poets themselves, disseminate their poems for readers’ enjoyment and stimulation. The first has to do with our reading culture. We are repeatedly told (contrary to what people might assume about a supposedly sports-obsessed country, allegedly dismissive—even contemptuous—of the life of the mind) that much more reading is going on in Australia than pessimists might suppose. And that it is increasing: according to recent surveys of the Australia Council for the Arts, nine out of ten Australians were found to be reading literature in 2013, an improvement on the figure for 2009. As always with such statistics, one suspects that the devil may be lurking in the detail. What are they reading? What is meant by “literature”?

Which brings me to the most compelling explanation of the obstacles and challenges facing those of us who are committed to promoting a wider appreciation of poetry today. Of all literary forms, poetry requires the most sustained concentration. In my Inaugural Lecture, as Professor of Poetry at the University of Sydney, titled (in quotation from William Wordsworth), “The Bliss of Solitude”, I referred to what I called “the three Ss”, so devalued in modern society: silence, stillness, solitude. Sociologists tell us that many people today are not merely apprehensive about these experiences, but terrified of them.

Careful reading, of any kind, requires all three of those conditions of uninterruptedness. Poetry demands them. While sustained reading of a novel or non-fictional prose is to be preferred, most of us read such prose in spells without seriously hindering our appreciation, although some kinds of prose are much more demanding than others in this way. Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and William Faulkner, for example, will yield very little in intellectual satisfaction if you dip in and out of them! But that may be because various qualities, such as the abstract character or density of their prose, approach the condition of poetry. In Woolf’s experimental novel The Waves, for example, which she described as a “playpoem”, the complex concentration of language and thought, the subtle nuances of meaning demand our sustained attention.

And there are kinds of poetry—extended narrative verse, for instance—that are less demanding of our concentration than the compact nature of verse-forms such as the sonnet. But even in the case of extended works, like Byron’s Don Juan, with its seventeen cantos, readers need to be careful not to make the mistake that sheer length of poetic utterance eliminates the necessity for attention to the minutiae of the poet’s artistry if that artistry is to yield its full rewards. Paradise Lost, with its twelve books, is the classic instance of this. Reading it for its narrative elements, or its theological and political meanings, and, inevitably, attempting to speed through its formidable length, may lead to a disregarding of its multitude of exquisite, concentrated details—as aesthetically “finished” as any writing we might find in a short lyric or haiku. These are encountered in scenes such as the lovemaking of Adam and Eve in prelapsarian Eden, where her “coy submission” is detailed as “sweet, reluctant, amorous delay” (Paradise Lost, IV, 311)—the deft withholding of the substantive precisely enacting the process described. And then there is Milton’s appeal to what T.S. Eliot (in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism) called “the auditory imagination”:

the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end.

This is found in numerous details of Milton’s epic poem; nowhere more to be savoured, ironically, than in his evocation of the fallen legions in Hell. In a memorable simile, the rhythm of syllabic cadence and the accumulation of open vowel sounds are at least as evocative of the awe-ful scene as their visual component—when, in that “horrid Vale”, the supine “Angel Forms” lay

Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks
In Vallombrosa, where th’ Etrurian shades
High over-arch’d imbow’r. 

                        (Paradise Lost, I, 302–4)

So much depends, for those who have ears to hear, on the aural quality of the music of poetry, on our engaging (aloud, of course) with even just that one word: Vallombrosa.

It is sometimes erroneously claimed that the twentieth-century Modernists—principally, Eliot—introduced difficulty into poetry, and this is the principal reason for the particular decline in the appreciation of the art over the past century. Such a contention could only be made by people who have never delved deeply into the poetry of the English Renaissance, in the witty Metaphysical lyrics of John Donne, for example, or grappled with the complexity of allegory and iconography in The Faerie Queene. Much of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry—which some would argue is the most glorious in the English language—was written for a small coterie of the highly educated and is replete, therefore, with classical allusions. Milton, for example, assumes that the readers of his epic know Virgil’s Aeneid. So the difficulties there are as demanding in their own ways as any you encounter in The Waste Land. Would anyone claim that the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was writing more than a generation before Eliot’s earliest poems, is easy to comprehend?

                        Óur tale, O óur oracle! ^| Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind

Off hér once skéined stained véined varíety ^| upon áll on twó spools; párt, pen, páck

Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds—black, white;^| right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind

But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these ^| twó tell, each off the óther; of a rack

Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, ^| thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd. 

                        (from “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves”)

In one of the most notable understatements in the history of literature, Hopkins reflected: “No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness … it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped.” That was written, in a letter to his father, in 1866, in the midst of the age of Tennyson.

Certainly, the often-expressed opinion that “poetry is hard” (which I have heard many times from school and university students over the years—including, alarmingly, from undergraduates destined to be English teachers) as an excuse for avoiding it, has ample justification, while, as an excuse proffered by people supposedly engaged in intellectual endeavour, it is worthless. Even poetry that seems to be readily understandable, at first reading, can be deceptive in its simplicity. George Herbert and Emily Dickinson are good examples of this, their genius being to communicate ideas and feelings, often of the most profound subtlety, in language notable for its straightforwardness of vocabulary and imagery. But theirs is a complex accomplishment that only repeated and careful readings will fully disclose. What we thought we had fully grasped becomes less clear as we re-read. Contrariwise, what seems off-puttingly complex can, with some concentrated attention, reveal its meaning and true significance and, best of all, encourage a lifetime’s enjoyment. Readers of obviously difficult poems, such as Eliot’s Four Quartets, regularly speak of the deepening of their appreciation through familiarity with the verse over the span of decades of re-reading. Such works are inexhaustible. Would we prefer a poetry—or any work of art—that offered everything that it has to offer us in our first, fleeting encounter with it? So far from deprecating the challenge to understanding, enrichment and enjoyment that poetry, through the ages, presents, we should affirm, in W.B. Yeats’s phrase, “the fascination of what’s difficult”, countering the complaint with the riposte that nothing in the history of the artistic endeavours of humanity that has been worth mastering, and coming to a deep understanding of, has been anything other than difficult. Johann Sebastian Bach’s Art of Fugue exemplifies, writes Daniel Herscovitch of the Sydney Conservatorium, “how pathos, humour, gravity, exuberance and tragedy are inextricably enmeshed in the deepest recesses of the human psyche”. Great poetry exemplifies this too, speaking of and speaking to that soul, mind and spirit.

Decided reactions to the obscurity and complexity of Modernist poetry, dominating the mid-twentieth century, did emerge in the 1950s in such as the writers of the Movement school, most prominently, Philip Larkin; in the work of the Beat poets, such as Jack Kerouac, and the confessional verse of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. But it is fanciful to suppose that these pointed and spirited reactions to the particular difficulties of Modernist verse brought a new simplicity, devoid of complexity, and eliminated the necessity for sustained attention for appreciation of poetry.

An influence of a different kind from this prejudice about the inherent difficulty of verse and which is also contributing to reinforcing the widespread conception, today, that poetry is unapproachable, and therefore justifiably avoided, has been much contemporary literary criticism of it, most particularly in the domain of postmodern theorising, which has mushroomed in the universities. Here, instead of communicating, through lucid explication, the love of poetry and stirring a passion for it, readers are lured into a dim maze of polysyllabic theorising about it; the text, instead of being disclosed in its multi-layered brilliance, is submerged in a quagmire of academic verbiage, exercises in obfuscation, not enlightenment. More often than not, this is driven by politically-correct ideology, as poems must be stretched on a Procrustean bed of orthodoxy to such as current race, gender and class dogma, or—worse—are chosen for study because they are seen so to conform, poetry (however great) which does not do so being eliminated from curricula. The very successful attack on canonical texts in poetry (never set in tablets of stone, as its critics customarily allege, but a generally-agreed list of required reading for the appreciation of the range of verse in English over several centuries which evolved through the twentieth century) has been facilitated by the post-1960s repudiation of such authoritative conceptions, demonised as oppressive impositions, without consideration of the worthy reasons for the development of that authoritativeness.

The good news is that Australian poetry today is in robust health, continuing the rich tradition of the composition of verse in our ever-lengthening and broadening literary history. One only has to look at the quality of the poems that are published each month in Quadrant for evidence of a lively literary culture, notable for inventiveness, variety and depth of thought, feeling and insight into the human condition. Last month alone, we enjoyed (for example) Robyn Lance’s satirical account, in crisp tercets, of “The Headmistress”, with its aftertaste of pathos; and Katherine Spadaro’s “Ascent”, where the unlikely subject of “a simple meaty stew” comes to symbolise a generous epiphany of rising pleasure.

In two poems from Geoff Page, there is, in the first, “Two Notes”, a romantic evocation of the mating season of the male koel, carefully plotted in a sequence of neat stanzas. This ornithological observation subtly discloses the speaker’s own increasing emotional attachment to what he has, initially, so objectively recorded. By the end, the “courting call” initially noted (in both senses: heard and notated), has become, as well, a love-call of the natural world to the poet, speaking to his own condition (which is reflected, but in an entirely different configuration, although similarly melancholy, in the second poem, “A Tin of Peaches”). Through his arresting speech, in both poems, Page speaks to us too:

In spring I know that he’ll be back,

Still sad and keen to breed.

Already I am filled with them,

Those two notes of his need.

May this most humane of the arts, in all its “skeined stained veined variety”, its fascinating difficulty and—in Sir Philip Sidney’s phrase, from the first extended, seminal appreciation of poetry in English—its “delightful teaching”, continue to find a generous welcome and appreciative audience in Quadrant, as Derek Fenton imagines in his recently-submitted acrostic sonnet:

An Extended Sonnet which Begs the Question 

Poems tucked beside an s.a.e,

Lovingly placed in a pristine envelope;

Each carefully folded in two, not three,

And each carrying its creator’s hope.

Sestina, a pantoum, villanelle and

Especially, of course, good old free verse:

Perhaps with a sonnet though not too bland;

Unless a haiku might suit: nice and terse.

Ballad with an arm around the others:

Light verse (perhaps a bit too un-p.c.)

Included only for a band of brothers,

Stationed to the right of prose poetry.

Heroic verse not needing a disguise,

Maybe envelope rhyme as a surprise

Each hoping to snare the poetry prize!

Barry Spurr was Australia’s first Professor of Poetry and is the newly-appointed Literary Editor of Quadrant.