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Surrealism
This is a naughty word, meaning adventitious and arbitrary excitements. It is not serious. It does not accord with experience. 'The chance meeting of a sewing-machine and an umbrella on an operating-table', indeed !

But that is a misunderstanding. People who use the word 'surrealism' pejoratively are still living in the 1920s and among the first affronting manifestations of this super-real language in our age.

It is the language of dream. That is, it can say anything. It uses all the senses, and, as in love, you may hear her touch and see her scent. It is life telling its story to itself in its own tongue. It is the language that slips at will through space and time. It is the language of a world that is all-living, of a world that is charged with Eros.

When I write: 'A two-ounce wash-leather bag of diatomaceous dust: I puff a pinch of it into the air and the furniture is covered with a thin innumerable layer of consummate sculpture in a tough silica,' (1) is that surrealism? It is certainly an expression of love for the very small, the usually unregarded: where no item of dust is insignificant: it is also a metaphor for a world charged with interest. When I write: 'Velleity paint, vertigo paint, altitudes printed over her dresses. Opening of the staircase at the neck, big buttons of bird-skulls. Leather dresses known to be chimp-skin, her wonder-awakening dresses, star rays combed into a shaggy dress, bone-flounce skirt, turbinal blouse. One dress that shimmers without slit or seam like the wall of an aquarium and a starfish moves slowly on its pumps across her bosom, passes out of view, a shark glides, a turtle rows silently between her knees. And the dress of louse-skin. And another of bird-cries and meteor-noise and declarations of love. A dress of purple jam-packed with tiny oval seeds. Another of flexible swirling clockwork running against time. Another of bloody smoke and bullet-torn bandages. Ticker-tape. Fishskin without slit or seam.' (1) Is this then surrealism? No, the word 'surrealism' is now useless. It is the language, here, of erotic compliment, and the passage is an attempt to recreate—not to describe from a detached viewpoint—but to recreate something of her textures and changes.

Metaphor and surrealism have never been truly distinct. Etymologically they have cognate meanings: 'change-bearer' and 'further-real'. Let us drop this word surrealism and speak of erotic fluency. 'His face was like a wet cloak ill laid up' (2)—Shakespeare's all-alive world, its fluency (fluere flow) presses through to the world of critical science and many books have crystallised around, say, Hamlet, none of which is equivalent to the experiences of the One World, the world charged with Eros, for a lesser or greater time (and it is our birthright) and from it he 'reads off' the course of his life. Einstein's wet dream was of riding astride a beam of light: to and behold, in his universe (which is now our universe), what is the great constant? The speed of light!

The case has been argued as one of critical science in many contemporary testimonies. This case has been burgeoning ever since the early years of this century, since the time it has been dawning on our civilisation that, for example, dreams (material for 'surrealism') have meaning, deep life-meanings, life talking in its own language about itself; that man's deep interior is not distinct from his society's deep exterior (indeed, society is made of individual men and women, all of whom swim in a deep current of erotic experience, conscious or unconscious—I ask the reader to consult Koestler's (3) Act of Creation if he is in doubt over the erotic basis of discovery); that Christianity speaks only of an improvable world and does not celebrate the world as it is, and we have gone far enough along that technological pathway; that ancient religions knew something we have chosen to forget, for example that mystery which was at the heart of Greek civilisation at its greatest, for a thousand years: (4) and the language of that something is poetry; that poetry means something that we need, that dream does, that vision does, that love does.

So the testimonies I refer to are the writings of the anthropologists and depth psychologists, of those critics who hold fast to the belief that poetry has direct action on life and meaning in it, that it is a growth thing, and a healing thing (I think, for example, of Elizabeth Sewell in The Orphic Voice, (5) Joseph Campbell in The Masks of God (6) particularly the fourth volume Creative Mythology; Wilson Knight in Neglected Powers; (7) the one or two Yeats critics who understand just what kind of training the poet was undergoing in the Golden Dawn). Famous Crow is worried Trickster—the more anxiety-ridden for the decades we have ignored Him—I know Hughes read Radin's book because he told me to. (8)

The case has been argued too by such social critics as N. O. Brown. (9) 'And anyone who loves art knows that psychoanalysis has no monopoly on the power to heal . . . Art and poetry have always been altering our ways of sensing and feeling—that is to say, altering the human body . . . are not those basic poetic devices emphasised by recent criticism—paradox, ambiguity, irony, tension—devices whereby the poetic imagination subverts the "reasonableness" of language, the chains it imposes?'

So to me the most encouraging thing in the poetry scene is this relearning and trusting of what used to be called surrealism, but which I think is better called 'erotic fluency' or some better coinage, like a lover's language which is not private—let us call it, when it works, 'Pentecostal'. Among the Americans this is true: Donald Hall (10) speaks of 'a new convention, an orthodoxy of fantasy, of neo-surrealism, of the "new imagination"—which in the first printing of this introduction I said was "so new that I lacked words for it". In the revised introduction I took to calling it "expressionist" '—and he names Robert Bly, James Wright, Louis Simpson, Michael Benedikt, Tom Clark, Ron Padgett—together with a serious word of warning about the 'diluters' (who, I take it, may be as truly in love as any person may, but not with the language).

In England there are such writers among us, many of whom I fear have not yet climbed to an 'accepted orthodoxy of fantasy' and this may be due to reaction. Some have, though, in a most distinguished manner: I instance Christopher Middleton and Geoffrey Hill (in Mercian Hymns) and there are Malcolm Ritchie, Penelope Shuttle, Paul Evans, Martin Booth . . . one just has to read the little magazines. The best prospect is that this interior sensitivity may grow.

Contra
To me the most amazing disparity and injustice on the poetry scene comes from the way England treats its writers. It treats its painters and sculptors quite well. A visual artist has a good chance of getting a decently-paid job in the work he knows best. There are a hundred-odd art schools in this country—perhaps 3,000 teaching jobs, many of them well-paid part-time work that leaves the artist freedom to do his own work. This is because the authorities have accepted (it must have started with Prince Albert and the Great Exhibition) that education of the visual imagination is real. But in fact, how many pieces of sculpture or real paintings do we see compared to how many books? Why then is language not included in this educational notion?

Art schools in fact award a Diploma equivalent to a first university degree—but it is in imaginative understanding and practice. Art students are taught by artists. Why then are students in the language disciplines not taught in part by writers? If they were, then we would stand a chance of experiencing the tremendous creative flowering in writing that we have had in art and design and music (so much modern music has come from the art schools); as writers we would get the feedback from a more emotionally literate audience; and we would get a decent financial reward for our efforts: how many authors disappear in middle age from the struggle to make a living? There should be posts, well-paid and of decent standing, for writers in universities, art schools, training colleges and schools throughout the country, instead of the few isolated jobs that exist in some enlightened places at present.

I wonder if those of the Review's readers who have personal experience of working as writers in education could contact me? I'm compiling a statement for the Arts Council on this subject in conjunction with Professor C. B. Cox of Manchester, and people's factual experiences could well be of practical help in improving the conditions of employment for writers in this country. My address is c/o School of Art, Woodlane, Falmouth, Cornwall.

References: (1) Peter Redgrove: In the Country of the Skin: (Routledge forthcoming). (2) 2 Henry IV 5 I. (3) Arthur Koestler: The Act of Creation: Pan Books 1966 : Appendix II. (4) C. Kerenyi : Eleusis: Routledge 1967. (5) Elizabeth Sewell: The Orphic Voice: Routledge 1960. (6) Joseph Campbell: The Masks of God: Seeker and Warburg : Vols. I—IV, 1959-1968. (7) G. Wilson Knight : Neglected Powers: Routledge 1971. (8) Paul Radin: The Trickster—A Study in American Indian Mythology: Routledge 1956. (9) Norman O. Brown: Life Against Death: Sphere Books 1968 : pp. 273 and 278-9. (10) Donald Hall Ed.: Contemporary American Poetry: Second edition (revised and expanded) 1972: Penguin Books: p. 35.