The Sudden Sun

Sir: It is not new that a Landfall review of a New Zealand poet’s first book should be ungenerous: that tradition has been firmly established over years. But R.L.P. Jackson in his review of John Weir’s The Sudden Sun travels far beyond his predecessors towards some terminus of academic desiccationpage 673 where no phrase or image can survive the tests of the laboratory critics. More vulgarly, he is very free with the borax. I wish to make some precise objections to his methods of reviewing.

• (a) The method of attempting to prove that poems are badly written by listing some of the words that are used in them has already been tried out by an earlier Landfall reviewer on Alistair Campbell’s verse. Let me try it for a moment on one of Yeats’s finest poems.

  Here are the adjectives – ‘Bitter’, ‘soft’, ‘rich’, ‘fat’, ‘rough’, ‘great’, ‘wild’, ‘loveless’ – and here are some of the nouns – ‘sweetness’, ‘inhabitant’, ‘cheek’, ‘girl’, ‘man’, ‘affairs’, ‘flocks’, ‘fields’, ‘calamity’, ‘brother’, ‘brother’, ‘friend’, ‘friend’, ‘family’, ‘family’ – and I will undertake to prove anything (or nothing) about the value of the poem.

  It is plain, for example that Yeats didn’t like (or didn’t know) any adjectives more than two syllables in length; and he must have had an obsession with family matters, for ‘brother’ is repeated twice, and ‘friend’ twice, and ‘family’ twice. This method will not, however, convey to any reader the knowledge that the poem is a magnificent rendering, both passionate and mannered of a chorus from Sophocles.

• (b) It is hard to see what Mr Jackson means by his statement – ‘It is the typical speech of our time, the language of dull mediocrity. . . .’ John Weir, wisely enough, exposes his images in a flat and conversational setting. It was Pound and Eliot and Yeats who taught modern poets to do this. I suggest that your reviewer should reread The Waste Land. The only first-rate modern poet I can think of who departs from this tradition is Dylan Thomas. Let me explain the ABC of it: The image carries more punch if it comes after flat and conversational speech.
• (c) Mr Jackson finds great fault with John Weir’s imprecision. I suggest that if one is describing a car accident (as in one of Karl Shapiro’s best poems) one can be thoroughly precise; but if one is stating an intuition in sensory and metaphorical terms, the precision can be no greater than the experience provides. It is a matter of focus. The line – ‘somewhere here, outside yourself, all answers lie’ – quoted with disapproval by Mr Jackson, coming at the end of a very precise seacoast poem, conveys a precise intuition. I suggest that intuitions are like that. Perhaps Mr Jackson would have preferred an angel descending with a scroll.
• (d) It seems likely that when an island is cargoed in cloud, the island is the freight and the cloud is the vessel. It seems unlikely that anybody would imagine that a child’s painting was blue all over. It seems likely that sun or salt could burn and winds could wail in the same place at the same moment. It seems likely that there is room for ‘oh’ poems in the language. It does not seem likely that Mr Jackson has considered these matters with any precise critical judgment.
• (e) It is now some years since Allen Curnow, writing in the Introduction topage 674 the first edition of his well-known anthology of New Zealand verse, referred to my own tendency towards eloquence rather than to the inquisitively precise gesture. My writing habits have changed a good deal since that time; but the label has stuck, though I think the jam in the jar has been replaced by chutney. I don’t really mind being called eloquent in a derogatory way by any critic – critics are prone to a certain amount of parrot talk – but I do object when Mr Jackson, assuming an influence probably much greater than it has ever been in fact, begins to tag John Weir with an inherited fault of eloquence. It is possible to be very eloquent and still not depart a hairsbreadth from the truth of experience. I think that John Weir succeeds pretty well in the endeavour.

1964 (319)