ON ENGLISH POETRY

POEMS BY ROBERT GRAVES

ON ENGLISH POETRY

By ROBERT GRAVES

New York ALFRED·A·KNOPF Mcmxxii

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc.

Published, May, 1922

To T. E. Lawrence of Arabia and All Soul’s College, Oxford, and to W. H. R. Rivers of the Solomon Islands and St. John’s College, Cambridge, my gratitude for valuable critical help, and the dedication of this book.

NOTE

The greater part of this book will appear controversial, but any critic who expects me to argue on what I have written, is begged kindly to excuse me; my garrison is withdrawn without a shot fired and his artillery may blow the fortress to pieces at leisure. These notebook reflections are only offered as being based on the rules which regulate my own work at the moment, for many of which I claim no universal application and have promised no lasting regard. They have been suggested from time to time mostly by particular problems in the writing of my last two volumes of poetry. Hesitating to formulate at present a comprehensive water-tight philosophy of poetry, I have dispensed with a continuous argument, and so the sections either stand independently or are intended to get their force by suggestive neighbourliness rather than by logical catenation. The names of the glass houses in which my name as an authority on poetry lodges at present, are to be found on a back page.

It is a heartbreaking task to reconcile literary and scientific interests in the same book. Literary enthusiasts seem to regard poetry as something miraculous, something which it is almost blasphemous to analyse, witness the outcry against R. L. Stevenson when he merely underlined examples of Shakespeare’s wonderful dexterity in the manipulation of consonants; most scientists on the other hand, being either benevolently contemptuous of poetry, or if interested, insensitive to the emotional quality of words and their associative subtleties, themselves use words as weights and counters rather than as chemicals powerful in combination and have written, if at all, so boorishly about poetry that the breach has been actually widened. If any false scientific assumptions or any bad literary blunders I have made, be held up for popular execration, these may yet act as decoys to the truth which I am anxious to buy even at the price of a snubbing; and where in many cases no trouble has apparently been taken to check over-statements, there is this excuse to offer, that when putting a cat among pigeons it is always advisable to make it as large a cat as possible.

R. G.

Islip, Oxford.

CONTENTS

I DEFINITIONS

THERE are two meanings of Poetry as the poet himself has come to use the word:—first, Poetry, the unforeseen fusion in his mind of apparently contradictory emotional ideas; and second, Poetry, the more-or-less deliberate attempt, with the help of a rhythmic mesmerism, to impose an illusion of actual experience on the minds of others. In its first and peculiar sense it is the surprise that comes after thoughtlessly rubbing a mental Aladdin’s lamp, and I would suggest that every poem worthy of the name has its central idea, its nucleus, formed by this spontaneous process; later it becomes the duty of the poet as craftsman to present this nucleus in the most effective way possible, by practising poetry more consciously as an art. He creates in passion, then by a reverse process of analyzing, he tests the implied suggestions and corrects them on common-sense principles so as to make them apply universally.

Before elaborating the idea of this spontaneous Poetry over which the poet has no direct control, it would be convenient to show what I mean by the Poetry over which he has a certain conscious control, by contrasting its method with the method of standard Prose. Prose in its most prosy form seems to be the art of accurate statement by suppressing as far as possible the latent associations of words; for the convenience of his readers the standard prose-writer uses an accurate logical phrasing in which perhaps the periods and the diction vary with the emotional mood; but he only says what he appears at first to say. In Poetry the implication is more important than the manifest statement; the underlying associations of every word are marshalled carefully. Many of the best English poets have found great difficulty in writing standard prose; this is due I suppose to a sort of tender-heartedness, for standard prose-writing seems to the poet very much like turning the machine guns on an innocent crowd of his own work people.

Certainly there is a hybrid form, prose poetry, in which poets have excelled, a perfectly legitimate medium, but one that must be kept distinct from both its parent elements. It employs the indirect method of poetic suggestion, the flanking movement rather than the frontal attack, but like Prose, does not trouble to keep rhythmic control over the reader. This constant control seems an essential part of Poetry proper. But to expect it in prose poetry is to be disappointed; we may take an analogy from the wilder sort of music where if there is continual changing of time and key, the listener often does not “catch on” to each new idiom, so that he is momentarily confused by the changes and the unity of the whole musical form is thereby broken for him. So exactly in prose poetry. In poetry proper our delight is in the emotional variations from a clearly indicated norm of rhythm and sound-texture; but in prose poetry there is no recognizable norm. Where in some notable passages (of the Authorised Version of the Bible for instance) usually called prose poetry, one does find complete rhythmic control even though the pattern is constantly changing, this is no longer prose poetry, it is poetry, not at all the worse for its intricate rhythmic resolutions. Popular confusion as to the various properties and qualities of Poetry, prose poetry, verse, prose, with their subcategories of good, bad and imitation, has probably been caused by the inequality of the writing in works popularly regarded as Classics, and made taboo for criticism. There are few “masterpieces of poetry” that do not occasionally sink to verse, many disregarded passages of Prose that are often prose poetry and sometimes even poetry itself.

II THE NINE MUSES

I SUPPOSE that when old ladies remark with a breathless wonder “My dear, he has more than mere talent, I am convinced he has a touch of genius” they are differentiating between the two parts of poetry given at the beginning of the last section, between the man who shows a remarkable aptitude for conjuring and the man actually also in league with the powers of magic. The weakness of originally unspontaneous poetry seems to be that the poet has only the very small conscious part of his experience to draw upon, and therefore in co-ordinating the central images, his range of selection is narrower and the links are only on the surface. On the other hand, spontaneous poetry untested by conscious analysis has the opposite weakness of being liable to surface faults and unintelligible thought-connections. Poetry composed in sleep is a good instance of the sort I mean. The rhymes are generally inaccurate, the texture clumsy, there is a tendency to use the same words close together in different senses, and the thought-connections are so free as to puzzle the author himself when he wakes. A scrap of dream poetry sticks in my mind since my early schooldays:

Here eighth and face seemed perfect rhymes, to the sleeping ear, the spirit was magnificent, the implications astonishing; but the waking poet was forced to laugh. I believe that in the first draft of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, Abora was the rhyme for Dulcimer, as:—

because “saw” seems too self-conscious an assonance and too far removed from “Abora” to impress us as having been part of the original dream poem. “Could I revive within me” again is surely written in a waking mood, probably after the disastrous visit of the man from Porlock.

Henceforward, in using the word Poetry I mean both the controlled and uncontrollable parts of the art taken together, because each is helpless without the other. And I do not wish to limit Poetry, as there is a new tendency to do, merely to the short dramatic poem, the ballad and the lyric, though it certainly is a convenience not to take these as the normal manifestations of Poetry in order to see more clearly the inter-relation of such different forms as the Drama, the Epic, and the song with music. In the Drama, the emotional conflict which is the whole cause and meaning of Poetry is concentrated in the mental problems of the leading character or characters. They have to choose for instance between doing what they think is right and the suffering or contempt which is the penalty, between the gratification of love and the fear of hurting the person they love, or similar dilemmas. The lesser actors in the drama do not themselves necessarily speak the language of poetry or have any question in their minds as to the course they should pursue; still, by throwing their weight into one scale or another they affect the actions of the principals and so contribute to the poetry of the play. It is only the master dramatist who ever attempts to develop subsidiary characters in sympathy with the principals.

The true Epic appears to me as an organic growth of dramatic scenes, presented in verse which only becomes true poetry on occasion; but these scenes are so placed in conflicting relation that between them they compose a central theme of Poetry not to be found in the detachable parts, and this theme is a study of the interactions of the ethical principles of opposing tribes or groups. In the Iliad, for instance, the conflict is not only between the Trojan and Greek ideas, but between groups in each camp. In the Odyssey it is between the ethics of sea-wandering and the ethics of the dwellers on dry land. I would be inclined to deny the Beowulf as an epic, describing it instead as a personal allegory in epical surroundings. The Canterbury Tales are much nearer to an English Epic, the interacting principles being an imported Eastern religion disguised in Southern dress and a ruder, more vigorous Northern spirit unsubdued even when on pilgrimage.

The words of a song do not necessarily show in themselves the emotional conflict which I regard as essential for poetry, but that is because the song is definitely a compound of words and music, and the poetry lies in this relation. Words for another man’s music can hardly have a very lively independent existence, yet with music they must combine to a powerful chemical action; to write a lyric to conflict with imaginary music is the most exacting art imaginable, and is rather like trying to solve an equation in x, y and z, given only x.

I wonder if there are as many genuine Muses as the traditional nine; I cannot help thinking that one or two of them have been counted twice over. But the point of this section is to show the strong family likeness between three or four of them at least.

III POETRY AND PRIMITIVE MAGIC

ONE may think of Poetry as being like Religion, a modified descendant of primitive Magic; it keeps the family characteristic of stirring wonder by creating from unpromising lifeless materials an illusion of unexpected passionate life. The poet, a highly developed witch doctor, does not specialize in calling up at set times some one particular minor divinity, that of Fear or Lust, of War or Family Affection; he plays on all the emotions and serves as comprehensive and universal a God as he can conceive. There is evidence for explaining the origin of poetry as I have defined it, thus:—Primitive man was much troubled by the phenomenon of dreams, and early discovered what scientists are only just beginning to acknowledge, that the recollection of dreams is of great use in solving problems of uncertainty; there is always a secondary meaning behind our most fantastic nightmares. Members of a primitive society would solemnly recount their dreams to the wise ones of the clan and ask them to draw an inference. Soon it happened that, in cases of doubt, where the dream was forgotten and could not be recalled, or where it was felt that a dream was needed to confirm or reverse a decision, the peculiarly gifted witch doctor or priestess would induce a sort of self-hypnotism, and in the light of the dream so dreamed, utter an oracle which contained an answer to the problem proposed. The compelling use of rhythm to hold people’s attention and to make them beat their feet in time, was known, and the witch doctor seems to have combined the rhythmic beat of a drum or gong with the recital of his dream. In these rhythmic dream utterances, intoxicating a primitive community to sympathetic emotional action for a particular purpose of which I will treat later, Poetry, in my opinion, originated, and the dream symbolism of Poetry was further encouraged by the restrictions of the taboo, which made definite reference to certain people, gods and objects, unlucky.

This is not to say that verse-recital of laws or adventures or history did not possibly come before oracular poetry, and whoever it was who found it convenient that his word stresses should correspond with beat of drum or stamp of feet, thereby originated the rhythm that is common both to verse and to poetry. Verse is not necessarily degenerate poetry; rhymed advertisement and the memoria technica have kept up the honest tradition of many centuries; witty verse with no poetical pretensions justifies its existence a hundred times over; even the Limerick can become delightful in naughty hands; but where poetry differs from other verse is by being essentially a solution to some pressing emotional problem and has always the oracular note.

Between verse, bad poetry and fake poetry, there is a great distinction. Bad poetry is simply the work of a man who solves his emotional problems to his own satisfaction but not to anybody else’s. Fake poetry, the decay of poetry, corresponds exactly with fake magic, the decay of true magic. It happens that some member of the priestly caste, finding it impossible to go into a trance when required, even with the aid of intoxicants, has to resort to subterfuge. He imitates a state of trance, recalls some one else’s dream which he alters slightly, and wraps his oracular answer in words recollected from the lips of genuine witch doctors. He takes care to put his implied meaning well to the fore and the applicants give him payment and go away as well pleased with their money’s worth as the readers of Tupper, Montgomery and Wilcox with the comfortable verses supplied them under the trade name of “Poetry.”