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Coleridge’s life, in its ceaseless study and philosophising, was a search for perfection. His prodigious writings, with their constant metaphysicality, demonstrate that not even his personal unhappiness and drug addiction could lessen his studious rage, this fervent quest. Clearly the Aristotelian goal of happiness was outweighed by the thirst for truth in Coleridge. And in his Biographia Literaria we have the essential, fulsome document of this quest. A by-product or natural aside to this central preoccupation being Coleridge’s search for standards in poetry – some infallible criteria whereby to measure poetry of the present, ‘I should call that investigation fair and philosophical in which the critic announces and endeavours to establish the principles which he holds for the foundation of poetry in general, with the specification of these in their application to the different classes of poetry’. (BL., ch. xxi)

   Now, all who have attempted such a quest for standards in poetry
(or other disciplines) are attracted by the notion of the accumulated
wisdom of the best minds, or the idea of a canon of past productions
which have, with time, been proved the most serviceable and durable. For instance, in science it is impossible for a scientist to proceed to a new hypothesis and discovery, while remaining completely ignorant of all previous hypotheses in his or her field which are relevant to the matter in hand. The accumulated practices derived from centuries of experience, plus the first principles of any discipline, have to be kept in view not only if change or development is to occur but, also, if the highest and best competence is to be maintained.

   So, in poetry, the finest models of the past must constitute exempla
for the present. But there is a snag in this as Coleridge perceived early in the Biographia Literaria, ‘From causes which this is not the place to investigate, no models of past times, however perfect, can have the same vivid effect on the youthful mind as the productions of contemporary genius’. (ch. i) I would add to that, there can be no perfect models – whether among the productions of the past or present – whereby to provide an infallible test of new works unless...? Unless? Well, it is all a question of belief really. Wallace Stevens wrote, ‘The major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God. One of the visible movements of the modern imagination is the movement away from the idea of God’.(Letters, 1967, memorandum to Henry Church). The belief in an intelligence beyond that of homo sapiens alone validates the possibility or reality of the idea of perfection. Without that one is left with Protagoras’s ‘Man is the measure of all things’ (Plato, Theaetetus): a mensuration far from perfect. Coleridge, of course, as a believer in a Transcendent Intelligence could afford the luxury of belief in perfection. But if Wallace Stevens is correct that the movement of the contemporary mind is away from the idea of God, then no past works – however much they may be considered as great works – can be thought of as more than human artefacts and, therefore, imperfect.

   In the course of his researches, however, Coleridge stumbled upon another insight and it was this, ‘It is no less an essential mark of true genius that its sensibility is excited by any other cause more powerfully than by its own personal interests’. (BL ch.ii, p.25) Curiously, the Scots’ poet Hugh MacDiarmid made roughly the same point to me many years ago when he said, ‘Only through humility will the truth reveal itself to the human mind’. In other words, the egotism of man or woman in believing themselves the sole repositories and validators of truth, goodness, etc., in fact takes them farther away, not nearer, that ‘truth’ which is most especially the heart of poetry, art, science – everything. The only religion is truth , as the Hindu saying has it; or as Christ put it, ‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free’. But as to how we know this Truth, or the truth of anything, is the difficulty.

   Between the time when Matthew Arnold held the Chair of Poetry
at Oxford, and the present day, perhaps the most illuminating incumbent of that office was Roy Fuller, poet and lawyer. In his various lectures, like Coleridge and Arnold, he too agonized over the problem of evaluation. Whilst admitting that, ‘The health, indeed, of any literary period may be felt to depend on the amount of discrimination it exercises’, he was forced to conclude, ‘It is not possible, without condemning oneself to Leavis’s harshness , to judge the literature created by one’s contemporaries by the standard of the literature that has survived from the past.’ Leavis and his Scrutiny magazine cohorts were notorious for judging all contemporary works (rather rigidly it has to be admitted) by ‘the Great Tradition’ – a tradition constituted of those works which have, most famously, survived from the past. Staying for a moment with Fuller, he it was who discussed in his Oxford lectures (published by A. Deutsch in 1971 & 1973) not only this whole problem of judging the quality of contemporary work, but re-iterated bluntly why we should bother about it at all. Said he, ‘Our noted critics so learned and subtle – seem incapable of fulfilling criticism’s primary task, that is telling us whether the work of art under consideration is any good or not’. So that’s why we need to bother about the matter at
all. But the fact that, even thirty years ago, when Fuller was Oxford
Professor of Poetry, he felt it necessary not merely to re-iterate the
need for criticism in the arts, but actually to add that our ‘learned and subtle critics’ were, even then, falling down on the job ... especially in poetry. But why was, is this? Partly because of the rise in importance of the academy in society and the concomitant displacement of the critical mind by the scholarly, non-judgemental outlook. Also, in the field of poetry there is now the almost complete absence of the man-ofletters’ type of critic and/ or critical readers who do not themselves write poetry. Which is to say that, nowadays, most critics and reviewers of poetry are themselves practising poets.

   While one may feel – unlike Dr. Johnson who argued that one did
not need to be a plumber to know when a tap wasn’t working – that
poets are the best equipped people to understand the poetry of others, they are often, even mostly, hamstrung by two disadvantages: literary politics and a lack of understanding of the outlook of the pure reader (i.e. the non-writer). If a poet criticizes another poet negatively, it tends to become an occasion for revenge (in print and in other ways) when a future opportunity arises. If a poet criticizes negatively another poet’s work in front of a non-poet (even a non-reader of poetry), it is dismissed as ‘sour grapes’, professional jealousy. If a poet criticizes, negatively or positively, any poetry, it is over-whelmingly from the viewpoint of the practitioner. And if an academic writes about poetry it is, as I have suggested, invariably from the scholarly viewpoint – i.e. the historical and exegetical not the aesthetical discriminatory. So who, really, is there left to provide the sort of true criticism that Roy Fuller felt was de rigueur for a healthy poetry scene? Only that presentday rarity, the well-informed reader who has neither the professional poet’s nor the academic’s axe to grind.

   The late Ian Hamilton used to say that he regarded his own poetry
– and doubtless that of others – as in competition both with other poems of the present day and, more significantly, with the best work of the past. ‘In competition with’ is, perhaps, not the best way of putting it – especially to those who feel that humility and some element of altruism are inseparable from the psychology informing the finest poetry. Still, one knows what Hamilton meant; and he did say that the essence of this competitiveness was a striving for the perfect work. But how can one know how ‘perfect’, ‘good’, ‘successful’, etc., a poem is save by comparison with some standards, some works exemplifying those standards – real or imagined?

   It is my opinion that every generation is too close to the products of its own time to assess their worth with total confidence; nor, more significantly, to use any poem from a living poet as a yardstick to measure works by other living poets. That said, I think one might make an exception for a recently dead poet whose influence has continued to grow. If we know of a poem by such an author which continues to be thought highly of, and which we feel bears comparison with the best of its predecessors in the field then, I think, it will stand as one of our touchstones. And for two reasons: not only does it ‘bear comparison with’ the best poems of the past but, by the natural convenience of its being a poem of quite recent provenence, it has the diction and tone of the still contemporary, and is probably free of archaisms as well. Such a poem would be Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’. However, I have chosen another poem by Auden, equally wellknown, because of its greater nearness in theme to my second poem, my example from a more distant past. The Auden poem was originally titled one of ‘Two Songs For Hedli Anderson’, but is better known now by its first line:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

   For my second example, I go back almost five centuries, plucking
Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet No.30’, one of dozens out of that long burst of excellence which I might have chosen. Here is the text of Shakespeare’s poem, which I will deal with first because the past, in any case, always comes before the present in all things.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long-since cancell’d woe
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight.
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
     But if the while I think on thee dear friend
     All losses are restor’d, and sorrows end.

   Any comparison between these two justly famed poems will reveal similarities and differences of various sorts. The expert grammarian and those especially addicted, like Robert Graves and William Empson, to what is termed ‘practical criticism’ will analyse at length the formal properties of the versifying, the linguistic texture of the poems, and so forth. But I will make just a few general observations for the purpose of this essay – comments germane to the matter of standards. Yes, the two poems are successful, firstly, because they hit and sustain a rhythm. And without hitting a rhythm there is no reflection in a poem of the natural music of existence, and thus no live poem. However well orchestrated, ‘argued’, the ideas in a poem, and however well assembled or original the imagery, there is no poem sans rhythm.

   So the first test of a true poem is passed in both poems: and it is a strong rhythm that, by different means, each poem achieves. Next, one would expect (and finds) apposite imagery – i.e. apposite to what the poem is saying, its ‘message’. In Auden’s case the imagery is more artificial, even surreal, but that is something which makes his poem more contemporary, more up-to-date.

   In any comparison between the two poems, Shakespeare’s thought is more intricate and profound – relies less on virtuosity(cleverness was always a weakness of Auden’s) to make its effect. Indeed, the wonder of the thing is how such music can be made (such near melody throughout) from such a Donne-like intaglio of syntax. By contrast, Auden gets his ‘song’ by the more usual devices of neat, even careful measure, rhyme and repetition.

   Comparing the philosophical outlooks , so to speak, of the two poems, Shakespeare’s ends on a note of hope, ‘All losses are restored, and sorrows end’, which is more or less in line with the positive message of Christ in St. John’s Gospel, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Whosoever believes in me, though he be dead, yet shall he live’. Very much a reflection of the zeitgeist of the time, soaked in Christianity. Very much a reflection, too, of the defiantly ebullient nature of Elizabethan England. Whereas Auden’s lament ends on the perfect note of despair ‘For nothing now can come to any good’. This last, of course, is more in tune with contemporary (atheistical) belief.

   Lastly, in comparing any poems of the present – or, as with Auden’s ‘Stop all the clocks...’, the near present – with works of older vintage, sooner or later one comes up against the problem of diction and the language of the time in which different poets wrote. In his admirable text-book on Rhythm And Rhyme (Open Univ. Press, 1993), Ronald Tamplin says, ‘Poetry is a type of alternative speech, not an imitation of everyday speech’. Unfortunately, all poems written in English since the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads have been judged by what Wordsworth wrote there about the language men speak to each other. What he actually wrote was the following (the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads did not have his preface, only an advertisement): ‘The First Volume of these Poems has already been submitted to general perusal. It was published as an experiment which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart.’ Like Tamplin, Auden – though writing post-Lyrical Ballads – understood, ‘A Poem is a rite, hence its formal and ritualistic character. Its use of language is deliberately and ostentatiously different from talk.’ (The Dyer’s Hand, p.58, Faber & Faber 1963). And, really, Wordsworth – though trying to combat such beliefs as Thomas Gray’s that, ‘the language of poetry is never the language of the Age’ – is not saying that ordinary speech undoctored, as it were, is poetry. But, unfortunately, aided by such famed pronuncimenti as Pound’s to the effect that ‘poetry should partake of the qualities of good prose’, etc., demotic utterance, ordinary speech, has gained such an influence over poetic language as to make many people lose sight of any distinction between ordinary speech and poetic language. With the result that a sort of narrowing down of linguistic register and consequent restriction of intellectual scope has occured. Or putting it simply – and it is germane to the comparison between the Shakespeare sonnet and the by no means inconsiderable poem of Auden’s – since Wordsworth there has been a gradual, but decisive, narrowing of the gap between ‘poetic speech’ and ‘everyday speech’. Whereas, before Wordsworth – but most especially in the Elizabethan period – there was the tendency, consciously or otherwise, for poets especially, but for most people as well, to elevate the vernacular, to make it more, not less, poetic. In Elizabethan times this tended to give great vigour and beauty to day-to-day talk – and out of it came Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson and much other literary greatness of a spectacular order. By the Augustan era, however, this had all hardened (again via the poets) into the foolish dogma and practice known as ‘aureate diction’. The ‘alternative speech’ that is poetry had become something stultified and remote from living speech. Hence the Wordsworthian Revolution.

   To paraphrase Mary Queen of Scots, famously recycled by T.S. Eliot, ‘In our end is our beginning’; and so must it be with an essay. The search for perfection is what the quest for standards implies. Whether it be a perfect way of discriminating between poems qualitatively; or participating in the ‘vision’ of a particular poet (Blake is a good example here), which the poet may think a vision of perfection perfectly expressed (though the critic may not), it is a valid undertaking if for no other reason than to meet the need for validation which everyone feels.

   Unfortunately, as hinted earlier, the quest for standards leads one into realms where dogma and matters absolute are at variance with theories of relativity and freedom (or liberality). Still, sometimes in life one has to ride the tiger, however dangerous or difficult. And no matter whether one calls that tiger Truth or Poetry or even only Standards, it is the sole way to really discover how alive we are. And as Robert Graves’ last surviving disciple, Harry Kemp, once said, ‘Poetry is about what it’s like to be alive’.