WHAT IS POETRY?
In the days when typesetting was still done by hefty blokes arranging small pieces of lead in a wooden box, pretty much everything on paper that looked neatly aligned on the left and a raggedy mess on the right could be considered poetry. Now that we’re all dab hands at document layout, such certainty has long evaporated and a more complicated definition is needed. It’s really a question of discovering what Donne, Anon, ee cummings, Ovid, Pam Ayres and Percy Bysshe Shelley have in common; or what connects The Epic of Gilgamesh, greetings card verses, naughty limericks, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ and Paradise Lost.
To do this, the biggest mistake is to look at the end products themselves. There appear to be no similarities whatsoever between a Shakespearean sonnet and a Matsuyaman haiku, between a Milligan couplet and three or four thousand lines of Alexander Pope, between one of Edward Lear’s nonsense rhymes and the neo-futuristic monologues of Andrei Voznesensky.
Note: Don’t worry if a lot of words like ‘neo-futuristic’, ‘polemical’, ‘panegyric’, ‘iconoclastic’, etc. mean nothing to you. Just use them in a slightly haughty manner before anyone else does, and then add: ‘Not a word that one would normally think of applying to his (or her) verse, perhaps...’
This book concentrates on English poetry, with a nod towards the USA and the wider world. Even so, somewhere, someday, someone will hurl a name at you that you don’t recognise, a balladeer of whom you know nothing. This is when you should smile enigmatically, and fall back on one of the following bluffs:
a) ‘Yes, I suppose it’s about time I rediscovered him (or her).’ This implies that you were aware of this poet ages ago, practically before the ink (or blood) dried on the manuscript. Equally, you might say: ‘Yes, I suppose it’s about time I rediscovered his (or her) work.’ Poetry buffs never refer to poems, only to the poet’s work. This may or may not be because they have never done any in their lives and don’t know what real work is.
b) ‘Too deceptive for me, I’m afraid.’ This implies that you have seen through the poet’s deception, whereas your companion hasn’t.
c) ‘I’m afraid that my approach to him (her) can only be described as lacklustre.’ Although you are ostensibly criticising yourself, the implication is that the poet is hardly worth considering.
You can rediscover anybody – Byron, Ogden Nash, Banjo Paterson, even Gertrude Stein (‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’). Here you are using a Compound Bluff technique, suggesting that not only have you known the poet’s work since infancy but that you are constantly re-evaluating poetry, seeking (and finding) new levels of appreciation, new depths of meaning.
‘Depths of meaning’ is what poetry is all about. All poetry is deep, profound, heavy, bottomless, suffocating, unfathomable. If you can understand it, it isn’t poetry – it’s verse. And then your appreciation should draw on the language of the wine expert. Verse is ‘crisp and dry’ like a white Burgundy, or ‘sparkling and clear’ like a young Champagne. Verse can be about anything. Poetry concerns itself only with the inexorable course of love, rejection and death, although a great many poets don’t bother too much with the first two, but hasten to the last.
Poetry is what happens when sensitive people find themselves overcome and have pen and paper (or tablet) to hand. They may be overcome by all sorts of emotions or feelings: love, joy (rare), despair (every day), wonderment (often faked), death wish (enormously common), horror, patriotism (outmoded), faith, lust (but only in a caring sort of way) – the list is endless. The source of the emotion may be almost anything: the Bible, a battle, a daffodil, a woman, a man, a bird, sunsets, the smell of frying onions. The reaction is always the same. Out come pen and paper, down goes the poem.
Other types of writer don’t say: ‘I wrote this novel when I was walking along Hadrian’s Wall’ or ‘One night, when I was swimming the Hellespont, I simply had to write this play’. Poets do. The outcome of their jottings may be very long or very short. The works may or may not rhyme. They may or may not scan (see ‘Glossary’). It doesn’t matter. Because they are verbal responses to surfeits of emotion; they are poetry. Whether or not they are good poetry is, of course, another matter. Poetry, as Wordsworth so succinctly put it, is ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquillity’. Put another way, more mathematically if you like: emotion + time elapsed = poetry. Emotion + immediate outpouring = tweet.
POETS AS BLUFFERS
400 years ago, Sir Philip Sidney (poet, wit, scholar, soldier, courtier and gent) wrote: ‘Now for the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth.’
It’s an interesting line for two reasons. Firstly, it shows that even in those days poets were using archaic English – ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ and ‘listeth’ and ‘lieth’.
Secondly, brave hero and jolly good chap though he may have been, Sir Philip was also a consummate bluffer. Poets are inveterate liars, constantly bending and breaking rules and ignoring Truth for the sake of Art.
Rupert Brooke was one of the worst offenders. Thousands can quote from his poem ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’; it’s one of the Good Old Good Ones of English Verse:
Stands the church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
The church clock did stick in Grantchester in 1911, but at half past three, not 10 to three. Why the change? Half past three rhymes; it even scans as well. Either Rupert Brooke couldn’t wait for his tea, or he simply wanted to bluff for the sake of bluffing. It’s a common practice in verse and is known as ‘poetic licence’ – granting poets a special station not accorded anyone else. A street trader’s licence doesn’t legitimise untruths or malpractices on the trader’s part.
Poetic licence allows any and every poet to indulge in regular bouts of bluffing.
A publican’s licence doesn’t permit him to water his beer (see GK Chesterton, ‘Other Schools to Know About’, page 84) or falsify the labels on his bottles. A driving licence is not a passport to deceit. But poetic licence allows any and every poet to indulge in regular bouts of bluffing. Not that poets have always had it their own way, however. Plato, for example, saw through them and their ways, and banished the whole lying lot of them from his imaginary republic. Sensible chap.
One of the most egregious manifestations of poetic mendacity goes by the name of the ‘pathetic fallacy’. This is a literary device where a poet will attribute a human emotion (usually his own) to some inanimate object or other (often, but not exclusively, an aspect of the natural world, such as a landscape). This bit is the fallacy. Poetry buffs will tell you that the pathetic part refers to the pathos or empathy required by the poet to pull off this feat. Others might argue that it’s called pathetic because describing, say, a Welsh dresser or a Bognor Regis beachscape as, for example, sad, is, well, sad.
And the porkies don’t stop at the composition of poetry. As a young poet, John Clare used to recite his work to groups at markets and fairs. They laughed at his poems until, as he explains, he ‘hit upon a harmless deception by repeating my poems over a book as though I was reading it. This had the desired effect. They often praised them and said if I could write as good, I should do.’ This, you should maintain, is why poets, above all others, are prepared to pay to see their work in print.
Other examples of bluffing are scattered throughout this slim volume. Take the whole convention of the pastoral – the independent, cheerful, hardy, virtuous peasant, hugely enjoying a life of poverty-stricken, back-breaking grind in a mixture of appalling weathers – which is just one enormous poetic bluff, delivered by Burns, Clare, Wordsworth and Duck (among others). And Newbolt, Tennyson, Kipling and the Patriotic Poets of the nineteenth century were wildly inaccurate in their depictions of historical events.
Having considered all of this, there might still be a question niggling at the back of your mind about the precise purpose of a guide such as this. After all, why would anybody want to bluff about an arcane literary genre which began when primitive man first picked up a piece of flint and gouged a rudimentary ode on a cave wall – and effectively ended when Paul McCartney wrote the memorable words: ‘But if this ever-changing world in which we live in...’ (Yes, it was a song lyric – but it’s much the same sort of thing – see ‘American Poetry and Some of the Rest’).
As a literary art form, poetry has surely had its ups and downs, but for anyone wishing to state their literary credentials, a passing knowledge of poems and poets is vital. You don’t need to know why; you just need to know.
This book sets out to guide you through the main danger zones encountered in poetry discussions, and to equip you with a vocabulary and an evasive technique that will minimise the risk of being rumbled as a bluffer. It will give you a few easy-to-learn hints and methods that will allow you to be accepted as a poetry aficionado of rare ability and experience. But it will do more. It will give you the tools to impress legions of marvelling listeners with your knowledge and insight – without anyone discovering that you don’t actually know the difference between a leitmotif and a limerick. As far as the former is concerned, look no further than the war poet Edmund Blunden’s words in his 1917 poem ‘Pillbox’:
Come, Bluffer, where’s your wits?