Defending the Freedom of the Poet
I sometimes suspect that I am drawn to poetry because it embraces contradiction. Unlike the arguments from conviction that characterise the language of politics and philosophy, poetic language is essentially oxymoronic, a coinage stamped on two sides with logically irreconcilable messages. Yeats famously distinguished between rhetoric that quarrels with the world and poetry in which the poet quarrels with himself. Walt Whitman boasted that his self-contradictions contained multitudes. As served by Shakespeare and his Metaphysical successors, poetry became, in that happiest age for language, a legitimate, highly sophisticated form of punning. No emotion, secular or religious, was too sacred to be flipped from one side to another in the ongoing wordgame. It is precisely the lightness of George Herbert’s dialogue with his God that, for me, tinges his poetry with pathos, bringing a smile to my lips and a tear to my eyes. John Donne thundered from the pulpit, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee”, but were his listeners more frightened or thrilled by the ring of his cadences? Surely they were both. The serious import of his language was at odds with the theatricality of his performance.
Four hundred years after Donne, performances still attract rapt audiences. We live, I would say, in a difficult age for the creative arts but a great era for the performing ones. Though we have spawned no Shakespeare, thanks to new technologies such as video and television, Shakespeare’s plays have never been more widely available or effectively staged. Mozart would have been dumbfounded by the perfectionism we take for granted when we listen to his music on our CDs or gaze at his operas on the ubiquitous screen. Our precision brains that have brought about near miracles in science serve the arts mainly in a secondary capacity. And our Globe Theatre, catering to all tastes, is the television, an hypnotic form of trompe l’oeil that creates wonders of visual illusion while reducing language to soundbites.
The degradation of language seems to be the price the gods have exacted for our hubristic presumption. Overwhelmed by a deluge of information, dumbed down by computer technology that paralyses our naked minds, our human sensibilities on a massive scale have been numbed and desensitised. It is not, as Yeats and T.S. Eliot feared might happen, that democracy and increased accessibility of the arts have corrupted the general taste. It is more that our attentiveness and capacity to judge for ourselves suffer constantly under a vast barrage of artificially created dazzle and noise. Worse, I suspect it is all but impossible today for a writer of the first magnitude to sustain success in the competitive, commercially sponsored world of the media, or even of academia, without compromising that rare ability to reveal the deepest, hidden sources of human self-knowledge, the conflicted springs of wisdom and of all great art. The rewards of fame, of a personality cult and, above all, money are just too great.
Nonsense, you protest, what about poetry? We are living witnesses today of a huge boom in poetry throughout the world! I have to disagree. In these late, decadent days of western civilisation it is easy to pass off as poetry anything that labels itself as such. And while contemporary genius for labelling and marketing has begotten the punning wit of advertising, it has not pulled off the Metaphysical trick of selling contemporary poetry to the common reader. What it does sell successfully are personalities or life-stories of particular poets. The media, which infiltrates every cranny of our lives, doses us all the time with biographies, opinions and emotionally charged issues while, at the same time, providing us with a set of conceptual categories in which to file them. Poetry, along with the other creative arts, has become for many of its adherents an issue-linked category associated with the rectification of social evils. Poetry is rated, for example, on the basis of its attitude to cultural imperialism, or to racial persecution – and, of course, very conspicuously on its attitude to women.
As a woman, I applaud the achievements of feminism and welcome the freedoms and opportunities the feminist movement has opened up to me and my woman contemporaries. As a poet I have to question the wisdom of making poetry dependent upon a political movement of any kind. In the most righteous of chains, poetry tends to yield up its integrity and sell out to rhetoric or journalism. Such a point of view obliges me, too, to question the literary value of any course or category that defines itself as Women’s Poetry. How can a multiplicity of jostling, incongruous, historically produced texts be bundled up into one gendered and, especially in our time, emotively pressured appellation? To talk or even to think of women’s writing as a category distinct and separated from the rich, multi-layered traditions of literature in English is, to my mind, reductionist. Reductionism is useful, maybe, in political argument, even valid in cases when a complex reality has to be sacrificed to the greater importance of implementing a just or juster social policy, but it ought never to be taken seriously as a measure of value by any artist in a free society.
John Berryman, defining ‘The Freedom of the Poet’ in a posthumous collection of essays published in 1976, quoted that supremely insightful novelist, Joseph Conrad: “All the great creations of literature have been symbolic, and in that way have gained in complexity, in power, in depth and in beauty”. Symbolism, as Conrad and Berryman understood the word, is the writer’s answer to the challenges of political reductionism. Instead of treating issues and concepts as realities in the charged political arena of literary criticism, symbolic or iconic language (not logic) nurtures paradox and can only be found in poetry or imaginative fiction that frees itself from the formulaic.
Symbolism, as I am well aware, can be twisted into a term of derision. Today’s postmodernist, anxiously serious academics tend to brand it as “elitist”. For a poet, however, symbolic, figurative language capable of celebrating ironically and of showing, in particular, how single-minded dogmas do lead to tragic downfalls, is alone faithful to the complexity of human passions – many of which, of course, are political. As Keats and Yeats, at opposite ends of the political spectrum, so well understood, poetry that lasts, whatever the labour or anguish of its making, always sounds as if it came as naturally as the leaves, bole and blossom to that famous chestnut tree. The “redress of poetry”, to borrow Seamus Heaney’s phrase, is its moral excuse for being. Any great work’s universality, freighted as it must be with particular ideas and prejudices, stirs us to tears or laughter or both long after the issues that inspired it have passed into history. If you don’t believe me, read Primo Levi on the significance of Dante, or brood on the role of Pablo Neruda in that beautiful and heart-rending film, Il Postino.
What we are living with today is an undefined, unrecognised confusion between two types of speech that cannot, I’m afraid, be reconciled by the paradoxes inherent in the language of poetry. The set terms of theoretical-cum-political language simply kill off their more delicate rival. And when excessive self-consciousness as to the methods and uses of poetry is promulgated by critical dogmatists, or when students of ‘creative writing’ are taught that writing poetry is no more than a self-evolved route to self-expression, or when literary doctrines or manifestos become pawns in politically motivated power-games, then poetry is forced to yield up its essentially symbolical, apolitical nature and, even under the protection of its most loving and fervent promoters, limp along instead as a worthy branch of journalism.
Page(s) 81-84
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