Poetry Notebook (16 page)

Every editor in the world knows what kind of bad poetry I am talking about. It arrives by the sheaf, by the bundle, by the bale. The poet, usually young, but sometimes in his old age, has
discovered his power to rhyme, and what he thinks is rhythm. The editor, in his turn, discovers over and over that the more a poet’s creativity might be lacking, the more his productivity
will be torrential. The trouble with a really awful poem is not that its author lacks technique, but that his technique is fully expressed: whatever he can do, he does, especially if he has got
past the early, drunken stages of finding rhymes and has entered the determined stage of making lists. Whole careers have been ruined by virtuoso exuberance, as when a tenor who can sing a clean
top C spends all day singing nothing else, and leaves his chest voice in rags.

In the first half of the twentieth century, there was an accomplished poet in just that condition. He was the Australian émigré man of letters W. J. Turner. Having based himself in
London, he had built up an enviable reputation as an expert on music: he was a valued friend of the great pianist Artur Schnabel, and his book about Mozart, still read today, was held to be in a
class with the monograph by Alfred Einstein. But Turner was also a prolific Georgian poet, and in his prolificacy lay his ticket to oblivion. His work might have survived being wildly over-praised
by Yeats, but it could not survive its own fluency. He had a certain success with a poem about the Aztecs. Studded with catchy pre-Colombian names, it was the sort of thing that could be recited
after dinner in a drawing room. (On YouTube he can be seen reciting the poem himself, in an over-enunciated voice weirdly suggesting ectoplasm and planchette.) But in masses of other poems he
overdid the catchiness, and everything in the poem was so attention-getting there was no way to recall it: the purposeless glitter was packed tight like a second-hand furniture dealer’s
storeroom full of chandeliers:

Threatening always to give birth to Edith Sitwell like Venus in a seashell, even in its heyday such billowing foam-froth counted as high spirits at best, and in the long term a
whole tradition was doomed by wordplay: you can hear why, a few decades down the line, the danger of making so much vapid noise should have driven the Prynne people to a Trappist vow of making no
noise at all.

But on at least one occasion Turner wrote differently, and it was probably because he was in the grip of a real emotion. It was a case of the
visione amorosa
, in that especially painful
version when the ageing man finds himself suddenly longing for the unattainable young woman. His title, ‘Hymn to Her Unknown’, betrays all his usual deafness (Hymn to Her Unknown
What?), but the text itself, from the first line to the last, is fully judged, with no sign of automatism. He starts by setting the scene of a memory:

From then on, throughout the barely fifty lines of his tiny epic, his sole apparent trick is to go on raising the level of the diction, from the biblical through the heroic to
the ecstatic. The unapparent tricks are many – he really did know how to balance a line – but they are all camouflaged in support of this main strategy, which he sensibly doesn’t
vary until the last stanza, when a few rhymes are allowed in as evidence of the effort it has taken to keep them out. The young lady is married, she has her child with her, and clearly, though she
knows the poet is watching her, nothing he could do would alter her life as she might alter his if she so chose. Such is the powerful combination of her beauty and moral character that he
can’t describe her adequately, even with his language at full stretch:

But of course in calling her indescribable he has described her, and has defined a moment that we will all grow better at recognizing as we grow older. The poet will be born
again, and so will the young woman that he adores. It is a stunning poem to have been almost entirely forgotten. One of the questions the poem raises, however, is whether Turner really had to learn
all that tricky stuff he did elsewhere just to increase the effect of leaving it out here. With T. S. Eliot the results of his formal work are so sharp that we can take it for granted that the
acquired skill helped to make his informal work even sharper, although really we are betting on a case of correlation as causation. But by now we have seen so many successful informal poems that we
must contemplate the possibility that there is such a thing as an informal technique, in which it is no longer necessary to count stresses or master any regular stanza. Most poets now will never
feel called upon to make a poem
look
organized. Those who do feel the call often produce results so clumsy that we are tempted to conclude that the thing can’t be done without
practice. But this again might be an unwarranted assumption: maybe those particular poets just haven’t got the knack. This concession would leave room for the further possibility that some
poets do have the knack but it hasn’t shown up because they haven’t felt called upon to exploit it.

Here we are perilously close to the pestiferous Lucy, the
Peanuts
character who thought she could play the piano like her little friend Schroeder if she just knew which keys to press
down. Unfortunately for any dreams of critical simplicity, such a fantasy is not empty. There are some who are ignorant yet can perform prodigies, educating themselves with frightening speed as
they go. Nobody devoid of a proper musical education is ever going to saw away in a scratch orchestra and produce a theme from Bach. Performance skill is too great a factor. But in poetry, the
performance skills for organizing chains of words into forms seem often to be lying around piecemeal in the linguistic attainments of tyros who have never learned to count a stress. In a phrase
that we tend to avoid because it doesn’t sound precise enough, they have a feel for it.

In the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue you can see a nightclub scene by Picasso that proves he mastered the whole heritage of the Impressionist painters in about a month. The important thing
here is not to belittle an intrinsically complex process just because it betrays less overt effort than we think appropriate. Take one of the smallest and apparently most elementary of the standard
poetic forms, the couplet. For the poet, the heroic couplet is a wickedly difficult frame in which to narrate. This being known to be true, a whole critical mythology has built up about what Dryden
did to develop the trick that Pope perfected. But really, as a form, the couplet was perfected long before. Not even Herrick was the first to do it, although he was perhaps the best:

When Pope, in
The Rape of the Lock
, turned couplets as light and neat as that, he got famous for it. Nobody remembers Herrick for seeing the possibilities because he
never exploited them. His favoured form, even in the most frivolous lyric, was an argued paragraph rather than a ladder of couplets: in that respect he was strangely like the much more serious,
much more holy George Herbert, who would invent some shapely little edifice of words in order to fit the structure of a thought, and then move on. For Herbert, the thought was the poetic substance.
Unlike Donne, he wasn’t distracted even by imagery. Herbert could do images, but they had to fit the argument. This purity of purpose makes Herbert the most metaphysical of all the poets we
give that name. The name has been prominent since the first appearance of Grierson’s anthology in 1921, and famous since Eliot sought amongst metaphysical poetry the hard antidote for
flummery. But what Eliot learned best from Herbert, what we all learn, is how to argue; or rather, we learn that the argument is the action. The contemporary American poet Daniel Brown writes as if
he were taking classes from Herbert once a week. Throughout his slim but weighty collection
Taking the Occasion
, Brown proves that for him the reasoning is in command of the imagery and not
vice versa. Since practically the whole of the modern movement in poetry, as we have come to recognize it, was based on the notion that imagery ruled, Brown’s priorities would seem wilfully
archaic if not for the functionality of his neatness, which reminds us that his hero Herbert, thinking as he went, necessarily operated in the here and now.

Reasoning is as contemporary an activity as you can get. In his poem ‘On Being Asked by Our Receptionist If I Liked the Flowers’, Brown makes capital out of explaining, for himself
and us, the mental process by which the vase of lilies she was referring to had been condemned by her existence to the status of ‘A splendor I’d have seen for sure, / If less employed
in seeing her.’ Herbert would have approved of how the image arose from the idea, and of the compactness of the wrapping: a couplet hard at work through making itself look easy.

Contrary to more than a hundred years of steadily accumulating scholarly opinion, Pope never made the couplet look easy, even at his most frolicsome. His social poems fit into a plaster and
glass pavilion as though part of the furniture, but they are under a greater strain than their surroundings: an internal strain. Heroic couplets are closed, and the closure exerts pressure even
when nothing much is being conveyed except atmosphere. When a reasoned argument is being conveyed, the pressure can split the pipes. It was recognized even at the time that the vaunted logical
progression of ‘Essay on Man’ was a succession of limps and stumbles in mechanical shoes. By his very diligence, Pope proved that his favoured form’s self-contained refinement was
a clumsy vehicle for argument. Except when expressible in an individual aperçu, thought is seldom self-contained. Probably for that reason, the mature Shakespeare usually confined his use of
the couplet to clinching a scene. The couplet stops the action. Pope never took the hint.

Just before the First World War, George Saintsbury, in his little book
The Peace of the Augustans
, found the right language for disliking ‘Essay on Man’ and also went deeper
to spot something inflexible about the heroic couplet in itself: Pope’s rigorously observed caesura, the central pause of the line, formed a ‘crease down the page’. But really the
heroic couplet had already been practically, if not critically, undone in the day of its domination, by poets who wished to keep the rhyme of the couplet but not its self-containment. Charles
Churchill is not much thought of now, but his popularity at the time depended on his knack for making the couplet spring along instead of hanging about. Instead of being buttoned up at the end of
the second line, the syntax of a so-called ‘romance’ couplet ran on into the couplet that came next. Samuel Johnson, rigorously formal author of ‘The Vanity of Human
Wishes’, would have been horrified at the thought of letting a couplet do that; and Oliver Goldsmith, whose accomplishments as a poet Johnson rightly revered, wrote his masterpiece
The
Deserted Village
without slipping out of the heroic frame even once. (At the author’s invitation, Johnson even contributed a few couplets to Goldsmith’s poem, and they fit right in:
you can hardly see the join.)

But the new possibilities provided by the romance couplet were now there, and in the nineteenth century Browning made authoritative use of them to create the proudly demented narrative fluency
deployed by the narrator of ‘My Last Duchess’. Unimpeded by enforced caesura or end-stopped second line, the Duke’s suavely heightened conversational virtuosity, as if emanating
from the carefully trimmed beard of Vincent Price by firelight, doubles the impact when we realize that he is as nutty as a fruitcake. He killed her. Stop him before he kills again.

It is an open question which form of the couplet demands the more technique, heroic or romance. All we can be sure of is that each version demands plenty. Perhaps the romance couplet always
demanded most, as it headed towards the freedom we enjoy now, in which we persuade ourselves that freedom from all predictability equals the perfectly expressive. Whether they stop and start or
flow forward in a paragraph, couplets require their author to put his syllables and stresses in all the right places. Rhyming is the easy part of the job, and even that turns out to be devilishly
hard after the initial spasm of euphoria. A first-timer is likely to go back to his opening night’s work and despair of life, let alone of his poetic hopes. But here as always we must be
careful not to underestimate the speed of assimilation that can be induced by the urgency of an idea. After the Second World War there was a show-stopping example of instantaneously acquired
mastery when Vladimir Nabokov published
Pale Fire
, a work which revolves around a thousand-line poem composed in couplets. A tour de force of fake history and pseudo-scholarship, the book
would have been daunting enough had the poem been clumsy. But it was perfect.

Perfect, or nearly so. A professional might have niggled that in line 497 (‘In the wet starlight and on the wet ground’) the second ‘the’, which ought to be stressed but
can’t be, dictates a needlessly attention-getting departure from strict rhythm; but otherwise scarcely a foot had been wrongly placed. The sweetly flowing tide of romance couplets even had
fully formed heroic couplets occasionally decorating them, like candles floating on the water: