Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

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Poetry, for Wallace Stevens, was “the supreme fiction”. Poets invent things that aren’t there - or, at least, weren’t there before the poem brought them into being. Scientists, by contrast, are said to tell the truth. They discover things - things that are already there. The structure of DNA, Newton’s inverse square law, the speed of light are pre-existent features of the universe, waiting to be revealed. Some lucky scientist or other will get there first. On this model nothing could be simpler: poets are inventors, scientists are discoverers. The model is simple. It is also wrong.

   We may not value poems for factual truth, but that is not to say that we value them either as merely spinning magnificent lies. A poem may well encompass or enact an important truth even if its facts are wrong or invented. Robert Graves was famously dismissive about Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” which, amongst other heinous errors, has Sophocles hearing the sound of pebbles flung up by the retreating tide - which, as Graves points out, is impossible, given that the Aegean, unlike the North Sea, is not tidal. But whatever truth-value is in the poem is there despite the poet’s careless way with facts. The facts in a poem are to be understood in advance as being in inverted commas. What is important is the truth that the poet brings to expression - or invents.

   Is it possible, however, to invent the truth as opposed to discovering it? Some inventions work, after all, others do not. You can’t invent a perpetual motion machine, because such a machine would contravene the laws of physics: it wouldn’t work. All you can invent is the idea of such a machine. Similarly, if a poetic or other literary invention works, it is helpful to know why it works. Why have Hamlet, Werther, Jekyll and Hyde, Godot all become modern archetypes, part of the furniture of our minds - regardless of whether we have read the works in which they are instantiated?

   It is true that, after Shakespeare, after Goethe, there were many more Hamlets and Werthers in daily life than there had been before. The poets, to that extent, had invented them, and changed things. But they couldn’t invent what had no basis in a possible reality. They named, they developed what existed already as potentialities in human psychology. Their invention, to that degree, is therefore, just as much discovery.

   Indeed, there is a continuum rather than a disjunction between the two. Where poets like Hardy, Edward Thomas, Larkin are to a large extent discoverers, others, such as Wallace Stevens, Paul Celan, John Ashbery, J.H. Prynne, working at the limits of language, are primarily inventors. Where the poet of the first type fails, it is in telling us something we know already: where the poet of the second type fails, it is in an inability to tell us anything at all. To the extent that the poem of an inventer works, however, it makes a new use of language permanently available in which to explore truths - and perhaps lies - which it was not previously possible to express, rather in the same way that the invention of new concepts in a language makes it possible to think, and ultimately, to live differently than before.

   Poets, of course, are not alone in this. Scientists too invent with greater or lesser success. They invented the ether, for example, which must count, in the end, as an unsuccessful invention, since it isn’t there, though it continues to haunt our language as an incoherent idea. But to discover what is there you must also have a theory as to what is likely to be there. Observation in itself counts for little. You must invent in advance. Who has ever seen a quark? What kind of a beast is natural selection?


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We are told sometimes that poetry is its own world, that poets explore the potentialities of language - as if language could somehow be separated from the world out of which it has arisen. As if there could be a pure poetry (or, for that matter, a pure science). Fine poets can be slaves of a deficient aesthetic, just as scientists may make obeisance to a flawed philosophy of science and succeed despite their beliefs. Basil Bunting declares that “Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That is not poetry’s purpose.” This implies a radical disjunction between poetry and prose. Another pronouncement takes us further: “Poetry, like music, is to be heard. Poetry is seeking to make not meaning but beauty.” Thus poetry along with music is divorced not only from all remnants of prose but also from meaning itself.

   Yet it is hard to see how beauty alone could be of much significance if it is totally denied all ascription of meaning. Such a disjunction would seem to radically impoverish both music and poetry alike. It is also surely wrong. How else could we distinguish music that is sentimental, say, from music of greater emotional substance: the difference isn’t one of greater or lesser intensities of beauty. Beauty isn’t a monolith standing alone. It needs meaning and truth, not as its supports, to prop it up, but rather as essential constituents. Music tells us something, after all, even if we find it impossible to express what it tells us in words. Poetry too tells us something even if it is impossible to express it fully in prose.

   The first propounder of pure poetry - which is what Bunting is here advocating - was Edgar Allan Poe. Indeed, he even gave us rules for writing it. Yet the French poets, so much influenced by him, failed in the end to make a poésie pure. Mallarmé is about as near it as you can get, and yet Mallarmé’s poems are less a retreat from meaning than an overloading of it. There is not a lack of meaning. Rather, there is an excess. And, of course, a pure poetry - one that could only be beautiful and have no meaning - would be the despot’s dream. If poetry can’t say anything it can’t oppose or criticize life. It may be no accident that Poe was Stalin’s favourite author.

   This is not to say that poetry needs to be understood conceptually in order for it to be appreciated. A.E. Housman admitted to much admiring Blake’s poem “To the Accuser of the World” whilst admitting also that he hadn’t the faintest idea of what it meant. As another proponent of pure poetry - indeed, here sounding like a Derrida before his time - he also said that he had no wish to know what it meant, seeing it as “pure and self-referential poetry which leaves no room ... for anything besides”. But one may doubt that it is possible to see Blake’s poem as pure poetry. We read it in the awareness that there was a theological intention behind the poem even if we are unsure quite what it was. But our opinion of the poem’s worth would undoubtedly be changed if we subsequently learned that Blake had set out deliberately to construct a poem that was meaningless. In the end, if one wanted to convince oneself of the poem’s value, one would have to be persuaded that the poet had achieved meaning despite his own intentions - as a sort of poetic lapsus linguae which succeeded in hinting at a truth that the poet wished to hide.


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To be an explorer in language is also to be an explorer in meaning, and once one has reached the plane of meaning one has also reached that of truth and falsehood. Even the beautiful lie may be recognized as a lie and so lose in the end much of its beauty. The world we live in is one which is part-invention and part-discovery. Poets and scientists, like philosophers and mathematicians, are engaged in activities in which invention goes hand in hand with discovery. There is nothing monolithic about truth. If there are scientific truths, there are also countless other truths. Indeed, as individuals, we each of us look on the world from a different perspective. Like Leibnizian monads we all reflect the world from our individual point of view of it, and only obscurely reflect each other. Each view is necessarily incomplete. Only the totality of those perspectives could give us absolute truth, and that totality is not available.

   It is also the case - as poets have long known and practised - that
in order to tell the truth it is sometimes necessary first to lie a little.
Mere personal impressions, however in an empirical sense “true” are
not worth much, except perhaps to oneself. Rather, it is necessary to
invent first in order subsequently to discover truths.

This is not to say, however, that anything goes. Science, whatever else it is, is also a gradual accumulation of knowledge - which cannot, in any straightforward sense, be said of poetry. The earth, we know, orbits the sun. Yet we still, illogically, speak of the sun rising and setting - because that is what the eye tells us it is doing. The sun, we know, is a star busily converting hydrogen to helium, though that is of little account to us when we sun-bathe. In our daily life we view the sun from a number of perspectives which are not so much incompatible as incommensurable. Blake was, famously, an enemy of the science of his day (which was, admittedly, by our standards, a somewhat mechanistic affair): “ ‘What’, it will be questioned, ‘when the sun rises do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a guinea?’ Oh no, no! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty’.” That is not, perhaps, the experience of most of us, whether scientists or not. But Blake’s vision - and Blake, of all poets, was more inventor than discoverer - has added to the perspectives on which we may view the world along with, and not opposed to, the scientific picture. 

   Nietzsche tells us: “There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective knowing; and the more affects we allow to speak of one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity’, be.” This is not, as it is sometimes held, a matter of relativism. Rather, Nietzsche is reminding us that any single way of looking is necessarily a partial view of reality. He is telling us to accumulate perspectives. Science and poetry are not in competition, as they do not look with the same eyes on the same thing. They don’t contradict each other. Rather, they supplement each other. Both poets and scientists, by their inventions and discoveries, help to form the world in which we live. Both help to create our reality.