A friend of mine has an electric fence around a piece of his land, and keeps two cows there. I asked him one day how he liked his fence and whether it cost much to operate. “Doesn’t cost a damn thing,” he replied. “As soon as the battery ran down I unhooked it and never put it back. That strand of fence wire is as dead as a piece of string, but the cows don’t go within ten feet of it. They learned their lesson the first few days.”
Apparently this state of affairs is general throughout the United States. Thousands of cows are living in fear of a strand of wire that no longer has the power to confine them. Freedom is theirs for the asking. Rise up, cows! Take your liberty while despots snore. And rise up too, all people in bondage everywhere! The wire is dead, the trick is exhausted. Come on out!
“I wish poets could be clearer,” shouted my wife angrily from the next room.
Hers is a universal longing. We would all like it if the bards would make themselves plain, or we think we would. The poets, however, are not easily diverted from their high mysterious ways. A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer; he approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet’s pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
The subject is a fascinating one. I think poetry is the greatest of the arts. It combines music and painting and story-telling and prophecy and the dance. It is religious in tone, scientific in attitude. A true poem contains the seed of wonder; but a bad poem, egg-fashion, stinks. I think there is no such thing as a long poem. If it is long it isn’t a poem; it is something else. A book like John Brown’s Body, for instance, is not a poem—it is a series of poems tied together with cord. Poetry is intensity, and nothing is intense for long.
Some poets are naturally clearer than others. To achieve great popularity or great fame it is of some advantage to be either extremely clear (like Edgar Guest) or thoroughly opaque (like Gertrude Stein). The first poet in the land—if I may use the word loosely—is Edgar Guest. He is the singer who, more than any other, gives to Americans the enjoyment of rhyme and meter. Whether he gives also to any of his satisfied readers that blinding, aching emotion that I get from reading certain verses by other writers is a question that interests me very much. Being democratic, I am content to have the majority rule in everything, it would seem, but literature.
There are many types of poetical obscurity. There is the obscurity that results from the poet’s being mad. This is rare. Madness in poets is as uncommon as madness in dogs. A discouraging number of reputable poets are sane beyond recall. There is also the obscurity that is the result of the poet’s wishing to appear mad, even if only a little mad. This is rather common and rather dreadful. I know of nothing more distasteful than the work of a poet who has taken leave of his reason deliberately, as a commuter might of his wife.
Then there is the unintentional obscurity or muddiness which comes from the inability of some writers to express even a simple idea without stirring up the bottom. And there is the obscurity that results when a fairly large thought is crammed into a three- or four-foot line. The function of poetry is to concentrate; but sometimes over-concentration occurs, and there is no more comfort in such a poem than there is in the subway at the peak hour.
Sometimes a poet becomes so completely absorbed in the lyrical possibilities of certain combinations of sounds that he forgets what he started out to say, if anything, and here again a nasty tangle results. This type of obscurity is one that I have great sympathy for: I know that quite frequently in the course of delivering himself of a poem a poet will find himself in possession of a lyric bauble—a line as smooth as velvet to the ear, as pretty as a feather to the eye, yet a line definitely out of plumb with the frame of the poem. What to do with a trinket like this is always troubling to a poet, who is naturally grateful to his Muse for small favors. Usually he just drops the shining object into the body of the poem somewhere and hopes it won’t look too giddy. (I sound as though I were contemptuous of poets; the fact is I am jealous of them. I would rather be one than anything.)
My quarrel with poets (who will be surprised to learn that a quarrel is going on) is not that they are unclear but that they are too diligent. Diligence in a poet is the same as dishonesty in a bookkeeper. There are rafts of bards who are writing too much, too diligently, and too slyly. Few poets are willing to wait out their pregnancy—they prefer to have a premature baby and allow it to incubate after being safely laid in Caslon Old Style.
I think Americans, perhaps more than other people, are impressed by what they don’t understand, and the poets take advantage of this. Gertrude Stein has had an amazing amount of newspaper space, out of all proportion to the pleasure she has given people by her writings, it seems to me, although I am just guessing. Miss Stein is preoccupied with an experimental sort of writing she finds diverting and exciting, and that is all right by me. Her deep interest in the sound that words make is laudable; too little attention is paid by most writers to sound, and too many writers are completely tone-deaf. But on the other hand I am not ready to believe that any writer, except with dogged premeditation, would always work in so elegantly obscure and elliptical a fashion as the author of “A rose is a rose”—never in a more conventional manner. To be one hundred per cent roundabout one must be pure genius—and nobody is that good.
On the whole, I think my wife is right: the poets could be a little clearer and still not get over onto ground that is unsuitably solid. I am surprised that I have gone on this way about them. I too am cursed with diligence. I bite my pencil and stare at a marked calendar.
In the cities (but the cities are to be destroyed) lights continue to burn on into the morning, in the hotel bedrooms that open into the dark court, in the little sitting rooms off the bedrooms, where the breakfast things linger, with the light gleaming on the half grapefruit and the bright serving covers and the coffee thermos, the ice melting around the grapefruit-rind all through the morning and shades going up across the area-way where the other people in dressing gowns and bathrobes and pajamas are lifting the receiver from the hook and calling room service and ordering the half grapefruit and the toast and marmalade and running the water behind the shower curtain. The city wakens, but to its own internal suns, each lamp with its parchment shade and the cord, dusty twisted, that connects it to the center of light and of power, the umbilicals of the solar system. (But they tell me the cities are all to be destroyed and that people will no longer live in the impractical cities, but the time has not yet come.) Nevertheless I must begin keeping green the memory of the cities, the ferns and tiger plants in the boxes under the lights in the dining rooms and the restaurants and the grills, the opening and closing of the doors of the elevators and the finger always on the button summoning the elevator, waiting silently with the others (there are always others in the city) and the ascent and descent always with the others, but never speaking. In the bookshops the clerks, wanting to know if they can help, but you say no you are just looking around, and the terrible excitement of so great a concentration of books in one place under one roof, each book wanting the completion of being read. Under the marquee, after the show, huddling out of the rain with the rain on the roofs of the cabs and the look on the faces of the city people desperate in the rain, and the men in their black coats and hats darting out into the withering fire of raindrops to seek the turbulent headwaters of the stream of taxis, and the petulance and impatience and desperation of the women in their dresses waiting for the return of the men who are gone so long into the fierce bewildering night, and the mass urgency, there under the marquee, as though unless they all escaped safely into a cab within five minutes they would die. (You must leave the key at the desk when you go out. Even though the cities are to be destroyed, don’t forget to leave the key at the desk when you go out.)