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The Criticism of Poetry

At the present day, in New Zealand and elsewhere, the relationship between poets and readers is rarely a happy one. On the side of the public there is indifference or the resentment of those who feel that the modern idiom is unnecessarily highbrow and obscure; on the side of the poets there is isolation, and often the touchiness of those who feel that their best labour goes unappreciated, or the aggressiveness of those who must raise their voices to be heard at all. Since I am a poet, I may tend to raise my voice.

In this country our standard of living is high; we are assumedly educated men and women; our population is many times that of ancient Athens, and though we may deny it, like Athens we have our slaves. But our intellectual climate is singularly unfertile. I do not think for a moment New Zealanders have a low standard of intelligence, in the ordinary sense of the term; rather I think that, because of various factors, some local and some shared with thepage 146 world at large, we possess in a high degree what Erich Fromm has called the ‘fear of freedom’. Literature would trouble us and lead our feet perhaps in dangerous paths. So instead we pick up the Reader’s Digest. Frank Sargeson, probably our most vigorous writer in prose, certainly the one who has mirrored most accurately some features of our common living, sells less than the cheapest American or English hack-writer. Verse, however, is written here and at times read. There are many men and women in New Zealand who have written a little verse, or read it; and some who are not hostile to modern idiom. It is to such people primarily that I want to speak, and if possible help them to break down the fences of traditional prejudice which prevent them from enjoying and understanding modern poetry. Auden has spoken sharply, wittily, and well about poet and audience:

The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic school-teachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow- poets. This means, in fact, that he writes for his fellow-poets.

If Auden is correct, I am addressing not the fellow-poets who are always at hand, but school-teachers and pimply young men in cafeterias.

The functions of poet, reader, and critic, are closely related. While not all poets may read widely, and many readers of verse have never written a line, both must be critics. Without ability to criticise, a reader is a mere sink of ideas; without self-criticism, a poet cannot improve. The professional critic or reviewer differs from the casual reader only in making an occupation, paid or unpaid, of what all must do to understand a literary work; and he is as easily subject to prejudice. Wordsworth writes in the opening remarks of his preface to the Lyrical Ballads:

. . . by the act of writing in verse an Author makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association . . . this exponent or symbol held forth by metrical language must in different eras of literature have excited very different expectations.

To my mind a literary critic has two main tasks: to examine individual texts; and to broaden and enrich in the reader’s mind his known habits of association, thus clarifying for his own age the nature and scope of the formal engagement. He is the best man at the marriage of poet and public, and often also the lawyer at their divorce. But in time there is great and real confusion as to what constitutes a good poem. One cannot take for granted as common knowledge even the simplest axioms of critical theory. A complaint commonly made about modern poets, after that of obscurity, is that they hamstring their verses by neglecting the laws of metre. It may be worth-while to examine this charge in detail.

There is an idol of the classrooms called prosody, in the service of whichpage 147 verse is butchered, flayed, and hung up by the feet like a sheep’s carcass in the abattoirs. According to those who abide by its laws, there are certain fixed patterns of metre in English verse, which a poet can only disturb at his peril – the main patterns being called iambic, trochaic, anapaestic, and dactylic. In fact, every second line of Shakespeare and Donne, and every first line of Milton’s later work departs from so-called strict metre. In the work of the masters, this has been called irregularity; in the moderns, lack of craftsmanship. But if irregularity is found to be more frequent than the rule, and that in the best poetry written, it is time to find another rule.

On examining its genealogy, one sees that the idol prosody was born on the wrong side of the blanket; as Marvell says in another context, ‘begotten by despair upon impossibility’. Thomas Campion writes thus in 1602:

The eare is a rationall sence, and a chiefe iudge of proportion, but in our kind of riming what proportion is there kept, where there remaines such a confused inequalitie of sillables? Iambick and Trochaick feete which are opposed by nature, are by all Rimers confounded . . . .

The authorities for his argument are nearly all drawn from Latin poetry. He himself has confounded the Latin system of scansion, which is rigid and depends primarily upon length of syllable, with the English system, which is highly flexible and founded on stress. His error, after three hundred and fifty years, still determines the pattern of classroom prosody. Even Saintsbury (I say this on the authority of Professor I.A. Gordon), on account of his lacking a background in the study of Old English, makes no clear distinction between Latin and English scansion. Gerard Manley Hopkins, however, who had perhaps the most sensitive ear of any English poet for spoken verse, meets and destroys the fallacy on its own ground:

I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm . . . To speak shortly, it consists in scanning by accents or stresses alone, without any account of the number of syllables, so that a foot may be one strong syllable or it may be one light and one strong. I do not say the idea is altogether new; there are hints of it in music, in nursery rhymes and popular jingles, in the poets themselves . . . it is amazing that so great a writer as Newman should have fallen into the blunder of comparing the first chorus of the Agonistes with the opening of Thalaba as instancing the gain in smoothness and correctness of versification since Milton’s time – Milton having been not only ahead of his own time as well as all after-times in verse-structure, but these particular choruses being his own high-water mark. It is as if you were to compare the Panathenaic frieze and a teaboard and decide in the teaboard’s favour.

One can say briefly all that needs to be said about English metre in a few axioms:

• 1. Its basis is one of stress. page 148
• 2. In a given passage of verse a rising or falling pattern of stresses will generally be found dominant.
• 3. Any degree of variation or substitution of the so-called metrical feet, or units, is permissible; this variation indeed is essential to avoid monotony and to mirror accurately changes in thought and feeling.
• 4. Though various formal patterns, such as the five-beat iambic line of blank verse, have been established, they are not sacrosanct; and provide merely a metrical groundwork for the variations of each individual poet.
• 5. The difference between the rhythm of verse and that of prose resides not in kind, but in the more detailed and careful effects of verse, the repetition of certain basic patterns, and the coinciding of the emphasis of stress and the emphasis demanded by meaning.
• 6. There is no substitute in the speaking of verse for a sensitive ear and an understanding of the poet’s meaning.

I remember my own sense of discovery when it dawned on me in my fourteenth year that English metre is not a rigid system: I wrote then for the first time a poem which deviated from what I had supposed to be rule of prosody:

A ship is sailing in the harbour mouth . . .
While the sails and spars, swaying and taut,
Are creaking ’neath the breezes of the South;
While the prow greets each wave, firmly, spray-fraught –
Swiftly, swiftly, a bird of storms,
Speeds the vessel – no more the forms
Bleak, bare, mis-hung.
Of rocky islets on her bow
Looming, shall fright the bark by wild waves flung.

A mechanical little piece, but a good deal better than the rhythmically ‘correct’ doggerel I had written until that time.

A metrical pattern is, of course, the mere bones of verse; its flesh is the infinitely variable repetition, clashing, or correspondence of vowels and consonants. Edith Sitwell in her sensitive though highly coloured biography of Pope argues that in spite of his adherence to a rigid metrical system he avoided monotony by his mastery of these devices. Certainly the emotional impact of a poem is determined largely by them:

For you know, you know the graves that cover
the verbal crimes of vows and the raven
that croaks at the doors of the myriad lovers
who came and went out like comets lost in a vast heaven.

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According to the classroom yardstick, in this final stanza of a poem by a New Zealand poet, Louis Johnson, the metre is slovenly iambic, and the rhymes are imperfect. In fact, the four strong beats – ‘you know, you know’ – give the beginning of the stanza peculiar emphasis. The substitution of running metre – ‘and the raven’; ‘at the doors’; ‘of the myriad’ – produces an effect of desolation. The internal assonance – ‘graves’; ‘raven’ – with its long heavy vowel is highly appropriate to the sense. The alliteration of harsh consonants – ‘graves’; ‘cover’; ‘crimes’; ‘croaks’; ‘came’; ‘comets’; – lends the poem a certain savagery. The main half-rhymes – ‘cover, lovers’; ‘raven, heaven’ – avoid what would here be the over-emphasis of full rhyme. The last six-beat line with its internal half-rhymes – ‘lost’ and ‘vast’ – gives strength and finality to the end of the poem. It is most improbable that the poet calculated these effects; but his mental testing of words and phrases would involve an unconscious recognition of them; and a critic who examined the auditory pattern of the stanza solely in terms of rhyme and stress would have missed the major part of it.

Much could be said of the relation of sound to meaning in poetry. For the purpose of my argument, however, it is necessary only to open the gate to an intelligent use of prosody. A sensitive ear, once it is delivered from blind formalism, can be its own guide. But there is another idol besides Prosody: it has no feet, but instead a hundred heads, like something out of Indian mythology – Simile, Metaphor, Personification, Metonomy, Transferred Epithet – and its name is Poetic Diction. There is one charming head called Tmesis (useful for crossword puzzles, as it is the only word in English beginning with TM) which could properly be called Word-Sandwich, as it consists of one word sandwiched into another. Robert Graves uses it:

The wild swan-breasted, the rose-ruddy-cheeked
Raven-haired daughters of their admiration . . .

and Hopkins also:

See his wind-lilylocks-laced . . . .

but the figure is rare and on the whole un-English.

The fault, however, of classroom analysis of the language of poetry does not stem chiefly from the innocent game of hair-splitting and calling English idiom Greek names; but from the general assumption of teacher and pupil that poetic devices are gratuitous – elaborate mechanisms developed by the perversity of poets, and removed from ordinary speech usage. This assumption makes a natural appreciation of poetry impossible. The whole picture-gallery of figures of speech can profitably be carted away, leaving one central term only – metaphor. The rest are chiefly matters of common sense. Metaphor, page 150the one essential term, has an unfortunate history. It was classified by the medieval rhetoricians as a figure of speech, though it is, in fact, a mode of thought; and in our own day it is described in the classroom as a compressed form of simile. Until its true function is grasped, there can be no common agreement about what constitutes a good poem. As a text for analysis I will quite a sonnet by Allen Curnow, in itself a sustained metaphor:

Nightwatchman in some crater of the moon –
No, not that lunatic
But the dumb satellite itself, my tune
The cold sphere’s silence; and I stick

(Abiding, law-abiding) to that orbit
Fire once described, tossed into space to cool
From my earth’s body; a gyrating habit.
What if she watches? She’ll

Mask with the mirror of her tides those shores
Her flesh makes in the heavens, and even
While dawn destroys me her young foliage stirs;
Neither is mathematical space forgiven

My dear earth’s distance, though her heart descry
With how mad steps, her moon, I climb the sky.

The poet equates his relationship with his absent mistress to that of the moon with the earth: he feels that he in her absence, like the moon, is cold, dumb, and sterile. And as the moon in the form of fiery gas was tossed off from the earth to cool in space, so he is torn from physical intimacy; but his mind and heart still revolve about her, as the moon does in its orbit. She, however, reflects tranquilly the image of his despair in her own fertile world, and hides from herself the knowledge of his pain. As the morning moon, pale and barren in the sky, watches the young freshness of the earth, so he watches her; and mathematical space exemplifies both the distance of their separation and the distance occasioned by their opposite states of being.

This is a subjective interpretation, but I imagine substantially correct. But shall we suppose that the poet constructed an elaborate metaphor to say what any paraphrase could say more clearly? No. The metaphor is the poem: an inward non-verbal experience expressed in concrete verbal images. Eventually metaphor is the only method by which new language can be evolved to describe a unique situation: and this is precisely the labour of the poet, by reason of which he has been called in Greek and in Scots a maker. Metaphor and symbol are the language of poetry. In fact, poetic language ispage 151 more accurate than that of prose, for its tools are sharper, being tempered and ground newly for each occasion. Aristotle has written in his Ars Poetica:

It is a great thing indeed to make a proper use of these poetical forms, as also of compounds and strange words. But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.

In spite of the bouquet which he hands to the user of metaphor, Aristotle does not seem to have grasped that metaphor is essentially an expression of an inward situation in outward and concrete terms. His examples are all at the mechanical level of elaborate and special language; whereas metaphor is common wherever speech is vivid, just as melodies (which composers would give their eyeteeth for) have been created by illiterate European peasants.

There is a borderline at which metaphor and symbol are indistinguishable. In his sonnet Allen Curnow introduces the moon as a symbol of sterility and isolation; fire as a symbol of sexual desire; the sea becomes a glassy mirror as the symbol of the woman’s introspection. I intend to discuss further the symbolism of New Zealand poetry in the final lecture of this series. The symbolism of poetry is a wide field and not readily amenable to criticism. But, broadly speaking, it can be said that, while metaphor reflects those inward events of which the poet is clearly conscious, and involves a conscious mode of thought and manipulation of words, a symbol reflects the stirring of massive intuitions inaccessible to reason, frequently obscure to the poet himself, and only comprehended by those readers who are similarly moved.

Though the preceding analysis by no means exhausts the subjects of prosody and poetic diction, it may help to correct some common misconceptions. The so-called licence of modern poetry has precedent in the best writing of the past. Only critics who have either never read or never understood Webster, Donne, Dryden, and the later Milton, are likely to find themselves at sea; for one finds in the work of those poets the same hard accuracy of language, the same wide range of metaphor, and frequently the same troubled underworld of occasional images that characterises the work of modern poets. Only because we have been fed almost solely on a Romantic diet do we find Auden or Eliot strange. The Romantic genius, with its emphasis upon the magical effect rather than the content of poetry, though it produced a bewildering display of fireworks at the beginning of the nineteenth century, has much to answer for. The whimsicalities of Lamb, the song of Keats’s nightingale, the mysterious Lady of Shalott, the Blessed Damozel, have led us down the narrow stairs to a very draughty basement where there is little to choose between what is popularly regarded as poetry and the children’s verses in an evening newspaper. Poetry has become for many the scratching of a private itch. And those poets in this country who have climbed laboriously back uppage 152 the stairs to a position where words make direct if painful sense are likely to find themselves whistling alone on the landing.

It could be argued that a more flexible approach to the appreciation of poetry in our schools would clear the lines of communication between poet and reader. But this is a superficial solution. Quite apart from the natural mental indigestion of a reader who has attempted unsuccessfully to ‘get at’ a poet’s meaning, there is a dragon at the gate which magical persuasion cannot subdue, but only patience, tenacity and the hard edge of reason: I refer to unconscious prejudice of the reader against the central meaning of much twentieth-century poetry. At the risk of being obvious, I will quote the last stanza of ‘Brother Fire’, a poem written by Louis MacNeice during the bombing raids on London. In the first two stanzas, MacNeice expresses the plight of the Londoner whose town and life are falling about his ears; in the last he turns with daring analysis to the heart of the common disaster:

O delicate walker, babbler, dialectician Fire,
O enemy and image of ourselves!
Did we not on those mornings after the
All Clear When you were looting shops in elemental joy
And singing as you swarmed up city block and spire,
Echo your thought in ours? – Destroy, Destroy!

Because it is in a large measure true, the statement MacNeice makes in these magnificent lines would be quite unacceptable to the average reader. What the man in the street probably wanted, and got, was a slogan – Johnny, get your gun: the Hun’s on the run. MacNeice, however, expresses the hidden exultation of the prisoner who sees the long-loved-and-hated cellblock going up in smoke; perhaps at its deepest level the exultation of Samson, who involves in his own death the civilisation which has blinded him. But such exaltation is anathema to the social conscience; hence the average reader cannot make the necessary imaginative act of sympathy with the central meaning of the poem. He replies (through the mouths of educated critics as well as the silence of the multitude) – This is immoral; This is untrue; or, more devastatingly, This is meaningless.

In the past fifty years there have been significant changes in the kind of sentiments which poets have expressed toward common situations. This is particularly true of war poems. In the First World War, poetry was written mainly by younger single men, willing combatants loyal to some national ideal, nostalgic for a pastoral security. Julian Grenfell’s ‘Into Battle’ still has some echo of the sabre-rattling ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ – the soldier is a young man among comrades, a dedicated mystic eager for death and glory. And even the trench poems of Rosenberg, Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen carry some overtones of dedication, a sense that war experience, though calamitous,page 153 is of extraordinary value. It is far different with the best poets of the Second World War, Roy Fuller and Alun Lewis. Both are married conscripts. Their sentiments are purely personal: grief at separation, some community with the men they are among, resentment at the vast impersonality of the destructive process. They do not pay tribute to large moral concepts:

Once as we were sitting by
The falling sun, the thickening air,
The chaplain came against the sky
And quietly took a vacant chair.

And under the tobacco smoke:
‘Freedom,’ he said, and ‘Good’ and ‘Duty’.
We stared as though a savage spoke.
The scene took on a singular beauty.

And we made no reply to that
Obscure, remote communication,
But only stared at where the flat
Meadow dissolved in vegetation.

And thought: O sick, insatiable
And constant lust; O death, our future;
O revolution in the whole
Of human use of man and nature!

The chaplain may know a few things which Fuller does not; but Fuller regards the war as a struggle of stick insects which has maimed for him a complex and vital relationship, the best thing he knows. He has experience on his side.

Poems are produced in response to innumerable situations; but, while it may begin at a personal level, a good poem generally enlarges to a statement about problems and situations common to all men. To save (in a purely aesthetic sense) his soul, a poet must be more honest than his everyday cowardly or jocular self. Agonies, desires, and dilemmas which the housewifely mind has cast out on the rubbish-heap must be unearthed and exposed to the sun; with those sexual, aggressive, and anarchistic motives which enter uneasily the drawing-room of verse, being accustomed to darker and worse lodging, yet provide the power that makes the poem live. Before they can be admitted, a poet has to struggle at the door with his own butler conscience; and by the time they have been washed, shaved, and deloused, they may be, except to the trained eye, unrecognisable.

Yet many critics would have it otherwise. They demand, like Carlyle, apage 154 message, an ethical motive, and a moral house-cleaning in poetry. He writes thus in his ‘Essay on Burns’:

And what then had these men (Locke, Milton, and Cervantes) which Burns wanted? Two things; both of which, it seems to us, are indispensable for such men. They had a true religious principle of morals; and a single not a double aim in their activity . . . . Not personal enjoyment was their object; but a high, heroic idea of Religion, of Patriotism, of heavenly Wisdom in one or the other form, ever hovered before them . . . . In a word, they willed one thing, to which all other things were subordinated and made subservient; and therefore they accomplished it. The wedge will rend rocks; but its edge must be sharp and single: if it be double, the wedge is bruised in pieces and will rend nothing.

It seems that Carlyle does not understand the uncontrollable nature of an associative process. Though he is sensitive to other features in the poetry of Burns, he wishes to find in it an earnest moral statement, a prophetic doctrine. It is an error of simplification into which most critics slip at one time or another. I have spoken myself in much the same way, and been applauded for it; an audience is delighted to have their suspicion removed that a simple ethical interpretation may not be applicable to every aspect of human knowledge. There is, indeed, a fundamental ambiguity in Carlyle’s conception of the artist’s role. He is a Hero-worshiper; he confuses inextricably biographical detail and literary criticism. In syllogistic form – All poets are men: Burns is a good poet: Therefore Burns is a good man. The proper conclusion would be a truism – Burns is a man. The word ‘good’ is used in two senses between which Carlyle nowhere explicitly or implicitly distinguishes. It is mainly irrelevant to literary criticism (though not to himself, his wife, his friends, the police, and God) that Burns was often drunk and fathered illegitimate children. These were some of the circumstances, among many less sensational, which served as subject-matter for his verse – the value of which depends finally on his accuracy, the vigour of his imagination, and his triumphal resolution of the technical problems of his craft.

In New Zealand many hold the opinion, like Carlyle, that a poet is a vates or seer, inspired by a holy madness and exempt from human weakness: a kind of bronze griffin. Men and women are disillusioned to find a commonplace man, a little anxious, a little stupid, a little vain of his accomplishments, working as a clerk or school-teacher, with nothing to recommend him but a particular talent for the use of words. Unfortunately, it is pleasant for a while to be regarded as a griffin; so poets, when not writing, are tempted by money or flattery to become bogus oracles for W.E.A. groups, or even an audience such as the present one. The personalist heresy of equating a writer and his work can be peculiarly dangerous. On the one hand, the reader’s attention is diverted from the valuable insights which poetry can provide to a flurry of confused emotions and expectations, of which no one should be the object;page 155 on the other hand, writers themselves may think that the fascinating game of art, in which people make their own rules, can be played in the sphere of human relationships – thus, bohemianism.

The demand, however, that poetry should contain a moral statement is not to be wholly confuted by pointing out that it springs from false expectations of the poet. One must grant that words lay an obligation upon their user – even if one rejects Milton’s appalling statement that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true Poem. But what is the nature of the obligation? To please the reader? To amplify the truths of a religious or social doctrine? To aid the establishment of a just State? To support a wife and family by writing what the radio will accept? To gratify a private itch for image-making? To offer one’s gift to God and make every poem a prayer? I believe that no statement quite fills the bill; though the last is highly seductive to an orthodox Christian. However, as the hymns of the Church show plainly, a prayer need not be a work of art; and if a work of art must be a prayer, then we sweep away the whole structure of humanist literature. The popularising of Christian theology or Marxist socialism is better helped by pamphlets written in plain speech than by odes and sonnets. In short, one’s obligation is to the language, and is fulfilled by honest use.

Sidney, in his essay An Apologie for Poetrie, puts forward some spirited arguments for the educative value of poetry. He was replying in part to the Church prejudices of his time, which tolerated uneasily rather than sanctioned the dangerous contemporary developments of literature. He writes:

He [the poet] beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulness; but he cometh to you with words set in delightfull proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for the well inchaunting skill of Musicke; and with a tale forsooth he cometh unto you: with a tale that hold the children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner. And pretending no more, doth intende the winning of the mind from wickednesse to virtue: even as the child is oft brought to take most wholesom things, by hiding them in such other as have a pleasant tast . . . .

This concept of poetry as a sugared pill can hardly be maintained except with Sidney’s hand-picked examples from classical sources. How, for example, would he apply it to his elder, and near-contemporary, Wyatt?

They flee from me that sometime did me seek,
With naked foot stalking in my chamber . . .

Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once, in special,
In thin array, after a pleasant guise.

page 156

When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
Therewith all sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, Dear heart, how like you this?

One could no doubt wring from the succeeding stanza of the poem the moral that fornication breeds unhappiness. But the triumphant ‘Thanked be fortune!’ bears a different interpretation. Plainly Wyatt, in one of the finest love poems of the language, is chiefly concerned to mirror accurately his own longing and memory of sensual delight.

The answer to Sidney’s argument comes from the poets themselves, even from Sidney himself. When labouring with a poem, they have no more concern for its possible moral effect on the reader than a woman in child-birth has for the doctor’s fee. They have left that to the ethical critic, who solves the problems of the inner life by trampling them underfoot, as Cromwell’s soldiers paved the way with broken statues for the grossness of the Restoration. I do not hold that such attitudes are consciously maintained, or that my own analysis of the problem is final. But, lest I should be thought another Cromwellian who tears down much and raises up nothing, I will try to set down some possible criteria by which a good poem may be judged.

Metaphorical Exactitude. Metaphor must be regarded as a figure of thought rather than a figure of speech, to include all representations in concrete images of an inward event. Thus, in Wyatt’s poem, the loose gown which the woman wears is an outward sign of her abandonment; exact, because no other language could carry so well all relevant associations and exclude the irrelevant. The metaphorical exactitude is the mark of the true excellence in a poet’s work.

Clarity. Obscurity in a poem may rise from two factors: the reader’s failure to identify himself sympathetically with the poem’s attitude and intention; or the poet’s confusion of thought and inability to bring the poem to a final coherent shape. As a poem moves from private to public utterance, it requires clarity. One must distinguish, however, between obscurity and ambiguity: the many levels of meaning at which a complex poem exists must always make a cut-and-dried interpretation inadequate. Essentially, clarity is that quality in a poem by which its parts are related and subordinate to the whole meaning.

Formal Structure. By this is meant the obvious technical devices of stanza form, alliteration, assonance, rhyme and half-rhyme, patterns of stress. These should aid the development of the poem’s meaning. For example, there is a poem of Blake’s, ‘The Fly’, which he began writing in heavy four-beat lines but changed to two-beat lines because the form would have destroyed the lightness and fragility of his theme. It should be held in mind that each poem written has a unique formal structure, whether it be sonnet, couplet, orpage 157 free verse; for each poet has his own distinctive habits in the handling of verse forms, and each poem is a response in words to a unique occasion. A poem must be read by ear for the formal structure to be appreciated.

Vigour. A poem may be well conceived and subtle, yet lack this quality. Byron, on account of possessing it, rates as a finer poet than Tennyson, though his ear is less sensitive and his intellect blunted. More than any other quality, it seems to depend on sheer animal vitality.

Glamour or Incandescence. This quality is not an essential part of every good poem; it is lacking, for example, in much eighteenth-century verse. But certain images in combination, especially in the great Romantic poets, can affect the reader so profoundly that his critical faculty is for the meantime laid asleep. The reputation of Shelley rests largely on his possession of this quality. Among New Zealand poets, Alistair Campbell has perhaps the greatest share of it:

The streaming woods, the pigeon-moaning knoll,
And swarming under cliffs like smoking swords
The rock-torn Clutha . . . .

Significance. This may be defined as the umbilical cord which binds a poem to the world of real experience. A poem with true significance is a microcosm which contains by implication the author’s central view of the world and human nature. Around it the whirlwind of critical controversy always revolves; for it is the one quality ultimately unseizable, because it depends on the relation of the poet to man, nature, and powers beyond himself.

Perhaps I have, in spite of Sidney’s warning, ‘blurred the margent with interpretations’; but without some groundwork of critical method the appreciation of poetry becomes a purely subjective matter. That one likes a poem cannot serve as a critical criterion. One may like it for the wrong reason – because it supports a favoured system of ideas; because one’s grandfather recited it when one was a child; because the poet is a person after one’s own heart. And even if the principal function of poetry were to please, one would still be obliged to ask, Why does this particular poem please me? The answer may well be that it confirms one’s own original prejudices and turns the key a second time upon the self-knowledge one has long rejected. As Allen Curnow has written in the Introduction to his anthology of New Zealand verse:

Whatever the causes, I know that this poetry has a use for us, and it is the uses of poetry we need to realise; and that what is admired, but does not change the imagination, has been wrongly admired.

A wrong admiration may proceed from many sources. There are, however, three outstanding categories in which one can place the poem which elicitspage 158 an illegitimate response – propagandist, sentimental, pornographic. Their common feature consists of a failure of the imagination at some crucial point: a passing of false coin over the counter in the knowledge that the reader also wishes to be deceived.

The propagandist or sentimental poem persuades all is well when all is not well. In this context I would like to quote a small parable. Prometheus in the parable is the technician or political man who manipulates the world of things to his own advantage. Orpheus is the poet, able to be bribed, but well aware that if he gives his audience the poems they ask for, he will forfeit his gift.

The punishment of Prometheus for his attempt to conquer the spiritual world by technical devices has been represented crudely in the original legend. Nothing so natural as a vulture was sent to prey on his liver. Instead, he was left alone in a wilderness of oil derricks and chromium-plated beer- pumps which he had himself created – his sole distraction from himself being the crash of falling markets and the louder and louder explosions of atomic physics. He continually asks Orpheus to exercise his magic and dispel the abominable boredom. But the magic of Orpheus resides in the truth of his song. Prometheus demands a pastoral ode or a slogan for National Savings; but hears instead an elegy which reflects accurately the voice of the wind among bombed cathedrals, the weeping of ulcered children, and the anvil chorus of the pimp and D.P. Prometheus loses his temper and sacks Orpheus from his job as Court Poet. He then proceeds to build himself a bigger and better jukebox.

For a deliberate use of political propaganda in verse, one would have to go to the United States or the U.S.S.R. But often a writer’s political preconceptions may determine his view of society, as in A.R.D. Fairburn’s Dominion, a saga of Depression days and very likely the best long poem written in this country:

This is our paper city, built
on the rock of debt, held fast
against all winds by the paperweight of debt.
The crowds file slowly past, or stop and stare,
and here and there, dull-eyed, the idle stand
in clusters in the mouths of gramophone shops . . .

So brief a quotation does no justice to the breadth and vigour of the poem. But the fact that it is propaganda weakens the force of his social statement. The workers must be good men out of a job (many in the Thirties were); men and women with money and social status must be tyrannical, inept, and overfed (as some, no doubt, have been and are). For exploration, he substitutes declamation, and for a statement about the human condition, the statement of a political and economic viewpoint, valuable in itself but antithetical to poetry.

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It is not commonly realised how much religious poetry falls into the category of propaganda. A conventional stereotype of religious idealism is substituted for a vision of the real world. Because of the evocative power of traditional religious symbols, the Christian ethical critic is often prepared to call a poem good simply because it embodies these symbols; and respect those poems which deal with sexual ambivalence, the fear and knowledge of death, and the evil which people do and suffer. The Christian doctrine of the Fall should make the vision of a Christian poet more real and exact: he or he should be able to present a lifesize portrait of Fallen Man. But far too much of the religious poetry produced in this country shows a basic timidity in regard to problems of human suffering; and the criticism of a maturer approach to such themes comes frequently from a religious quarter. An awkwardness and over- sweetness of sentiment characterises the religious poetry of Basil Dowling, J.R. Hervey (with several notable exceptions), and even that of Ursula Bethell and Eileen Duggan. In the poems of Mary Stanley, however, published in her recent and first volume, Starveling Year, one finds a completely unsentimental, vigorous poetry in Christian terms, in which Fallen Man is given his due as capable of participating in a mystery.

We are what we have been. The living creature wears
like trees his grain of good and evil years. The face
is schooled by daily argument of pain to learn
disguises for the private wound. None knows what country
lies under the shut skull, or dazzling beacon of cloud
beckons the always outcast through stubborn exile home.

She does not manufacture in her verse a fake response of religious optimism to those situations of anxiety and pain which no man or woman faces easily.

Both propagandist and sentimental poetry are characterised by a failure of the poetic imagination. In propagandist poetry, however, the accuracy of the poet’s insight is sacrificed to some system of ideas; in sentimental poetry there is a blockage of associations, a partial blindness brought about by the poet’s unwillingness to make fully conscious relevant but disturbing material. The development of most New Zealand poets could be described as a slow convalescence from the disease of sentimentality, punctuated by frequent relapses. For we are not only a young but also a spiritually unenterprising nation. Our pioneer fathers while laying waste the bushland wiped out also the spiritual flora and fauna of Polynesian animism, and replaced it with, not as we might think, the highest humanist value and the seasonal ritual of the Church, but with Douglas Social Credit and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. In our arts and institutions we have cultivated a narrow ground – political loyalty; business acumen; an admiration (via the Tourist Bureau) of large scenery; the community of the hotel bar and playing field; the Puritanpage 160 virtues, with their accompanying vices, which John Mulgan attributed to us in his Report on Experience – but outside the cultivated area remain unexplored the creative powers of human beings. It is no accident that Katherine Mansfield went away and never came back. We could not have provided her with the tools of her trade – intellectual maturity and the courage to commit to paper what she had painfully learned of intimate human relationships. The pressure towards paralysing conformity seems to bear hardest on our women writers. They rarely manage to unlock their own special experience of life. Robin Hyde, in her poetry and novels and perhaps in her life also, is representative of a large group of women writers whose movement towards an intellectual rebirth has been smothered by social pressure and their own sense of inferiority and isolation. She tried to come to grips with real problems rather than the paper dragons of Georgian poetry, but could not make a clean break until it was so late that she had not the strength to make use of her new knowledge. She could say truthfully with Rimbaud, ‘The dried blood smokes on my face’, but in her hands the image would have been a knife with a turned edge.

Under the smoothness of New Zealand Georgian poetry lie many bad dreams and a fundamental uncertainty of direction. Whenever I read the poems in the anthology Kowhai Gold I am haunted by the lines written by an Australasian poet of the turn of the century. They celebrate the beauty and sanctity of a young woman who has lately been buried. After a lyrical description of bird, tree, and stream, the poet arrives at her grave and tells us that ‘Flowerets breathe forth Lilian!’ The implications of this piece of necrophilia are relevant and disturbing. There is a close connection between the state of a man’s sexual impulse and the poetry which he is likely to write. I would almost say that a poet who abolished from consciousness all sexual awareness would simultaneously murder his gift. In the work of this unnamed poet the source of his sexual feeling is dead and rotten. The sprightly young wives of Chaucer, Donne’s loved and hated mistresses, the comely witch of Tam o’ Shanter, Blake’s meditative virgins, the black-eyed beauties of Byron, the troublesome belle dame sans merci – all are buried with her in her grave, and apparently the poet and his readers found the odour of corruption exhilarating. I regard much modern New Zealand poetry as a labour to resuscitate this unfortunate lady.

The problem of pornography in poetry may seem a simple one; for, while the poetry of the sexual relation is erotic and metaphysical, pornography celebrates simple lust. Though one may in an off-moment produce a pornographic poem, it cannot by the laws of our country be published. The real problem, however, is to define what is permissible in the use of sexual imagery. The terrible dread of our older critics seems to be that our literature may become pornographic: they react to a rough word as the horse does to a horsefly. Most are totally unable to distinguish between the sexual and the pornographic image. But if we consider the pornographic poems which are the repertoire of every soldiers’ camp, wepage 161 see that they do not change the imagination but rather establish it in a well- worn groove. This is not to say that the ‘Good Ship Venus’ or ‘Pat McGinty’s Ball’ lack all the qualities which go to make a good poem. They are vigorous, metaphorically exact, and no doubt have their own glamour. But they must drug the critical faculty before they can be appreciated. Pornography succeeds by the battering force of physical detail; but a true sexual image contributes to the total meaning of the poem. Pornography I regard as the ugly sister of sentimentality; and, because most obvious and limited in its action, less offensive. An excessive gentility brings it to birth by refusing to countenance the ordinary coarseness which goes with anything like a total view of the world. Pornography is serious with the seriousness of a little boy looking up the naughty parts in the Bible. Thus the more genuinely humorous it becomes the less liable it is able to fulfil its function. Sexual humour, like irreverence in religious matters, is a natural though not entirely defensible human response to situations which inflict great pain and humiliation. The obscene mysteries of sex and death confront the shivering ghost of Adam: if you rob him of his coarseness you rob him of his courage. It seemed that Chaucer repented of his ‘Reeve’s Tale’ and ‘Miller’s Tale’, but heaven help us and our literature when we do. The material of every good poem is in some sense forbidden; and it is my opinion that the greatest latitude should be allowed a poet in the use of coarse language and sexual imagery. In a review of a local verse periodical, Allen Curnow recently wrote disparagingly of ‘the young Rimbauds . . . also any to whom the mere names of booze, lechery, back rooms, nakedness give the most delicious shudders (not so, alas, the reader) . . .’. Passing over his somewhat auntish solicitude for New Zealand letters one must still regret that a prominent and intelligent critic should choose to attack at the point where the big guns of ethical criticism are already trained. The origins of good poetry are complex and manifold; but Mr Curnow as a practising poet must know well how often the socially unacceptable sentiments are a detonator for the main explosion which occurs in a poem, and how much good fruit can grow from that apparently unpromising ground.

There is always a close relation between the vigour of poetry and that of common speech. A good deal of Shakespeare’s diction must have been straight vernacular; but in an urban or suburban civilisation the forces that mould the language (radio and newspaper) demand a purely technological accuracy and in the literary sphere a colourless gentility. The native vigour of the language retreats from the drawing-room and broadcasting studio to areas where no convention applies. Our own century has seen a resurrection of this vigour in the realist novel (for example, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead) and a near-poetic use in the writing of James Joyce and William Faulkner. The movement in verse is less marked; but perhaps George Barker has done the same kind of thing in his ‘True Confession’, and Lawrence Durrell in his ‘A Ballad of the Good Lord Nelson’:

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The good Lord Nelson had a swollen gland,
Little of the scripture did he understand
Till a woman led him to the promised land
Aboard the Victory, Victory O. . . .

It is not likely that we will have ‘A Ballad of the Good Lord Nelson’ written in New Zealand; though some of the founders of the country might suitably qualify for the central role.

We have all heard lamentations about the lack of a popular literature in New Zealand. But the true answer is, I think, that if one had appeared our various Holy Willies would have hunted it into the ground. Poetry, like a rose, needs heavy manuring. We need all kinds of verse, polite and impolite, religious elegy, epithalamium, and drinking song. We have come much closer to inanity in our poetry through a sentimental and genteel tradition than its opposite could ever bring about. This statement will, of course, be interpreted as advocacy of free love and the robbing of Boxes for the Blind; but I am really hinting at something much more dangerous – that we should be able to look around us and write about what we see.

Poems are not made in a vacuum. We get the writers we deserve. If we in New Zealand expect from our poets a lesser or a different thing than the truth which grows, however imperfectly, from their own unrestricted sight, knowledge, and expression, we do them and ourselves an injury. Sermonisers, poseurs, album writers, too sensitive plants: these rise up in every era to answer the request for false art, for a reflection of our ideal selves, for a poetry tailored to suit the requirements of the drawing-room, the microphone, or the lecturer’s rostrum. A Listener type of poem, a Landfall type of poem, are generated to fit the needs of a special audience, to move without catharsis, to please without disturbing, with an idealised stereotype of human thought and behaviour. A real poem, however, speaks with the difficult, many-voiced, sometimes serene, often violent language of our real selves. If we understand it, we are bound to find it disturbing; but satisfying also, like a meal of bread and meat and wine, after sugared cakes and lemonade.