Keeping Watch

As I watch, from the other side of the world, the disaster in the Carolinas wrought by Hurricane Florence, I have very mixed feelings. I am amazed at the overwhelming response to the event - the number of people either appointed to provide support or volunteers who just want to help the people who live in the path of the storm, who have to endure the high winds, the heavy rains and the floods. But also the media coverage: CNN sent all its top reporters (Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo, Don Lemon) to provide 24/7 coverage of what they are calling the "storm of a lifetime."

I find myself bemused by the sheer scale of the disaster response in the States, but not especially surprised. The reason is simply that response to disasters  here in the Philippines where I am living is nonexistent or simply too little, too late. As I write this, a category 5 Super Typhoon named Mangkhut in Asia (but named Ompong in the Philippines for utterly inexplicable reasons) has moved across the northern tip of the main island of Luzon with probable but, as of yet, unreported deaths and damage. There was another typhoon, at least as powerful, that passed close by my location in November 2013. It was named Haiyan to everyone else, but Yolanda to Filipinos, which has led to predictable confusion whenever the storm is mentioned to anyone outside fhe country.

Here are some things you won't see in the wake of Hurricane Florence that happened here after Typhoon Haiyan: police positioned to protect property, like Malls, abandoning their posts and going to help their helpless families; armed gangs going door to door robbing households of everything of value (and raping girls and women there); mass looting - entire malls stripped of their merchandise, grocery stores of their food; fishermen bringing drowned people up in their nets; hundreds of dead bodies interred in mass graves before they are even identified because morgues run out of space and there is no power (for almost 6 weeks); misappropriation of millions of dollars in international relief (the governor on my island detoured rice shipments and sold it all on the black market - I saw it happen); ordinary people setting up makeshift stores to sell the food they looted at exorbitant prices; price gouging of gasoline and other necessities. Plus a death toll at around 8,000 because people's grass huts and wood shacks were blown apart. No warnings, no evacuations, no rescues. No cellphone signal for 10 days, no internet connection for two weeks, no power for almost 6 weeks, no Anderson Cooper, no Chris Cuomo, no Don Lemon providing 24/7 coverage. Nobody cared. 

These massive storms are likely the consequence of climate change, or what they used fo call global warming. I am bemused, but again not exactly surprised, at the American inaction in the face of irrefutable evidence of what is happening and what is probably coming if something isn't done. Watching the news coverage of Hurricane Florence, which has stationed reporters on the shores of the Carolinas, I found myself looking up a poem by Robert Frost called "Neither Out Far Nor In Deep":

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be---
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

It was published in 1936 as part of the collection A Further Range, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. The collection also contains "Desert Places," "Design," and "Provide, Provide." It isn't among Frost's best known or most popular poems, both because of its qualities as a poem, which are great, and because it is tacitly critical of his readers, humanity, that can't seem to find its way to looking farther or deeper into the universe. It can't even look at what is in front of its face the things that could spare it a multitude of problems - like climate change.

The poem's broader implications, which can't get much broader than they are, have been discussed to death since its publication. Still, the poem stands apart, unassailably itself. The best commentary on the poem I have read is in Randall Jarrell's book, Poetry and the Age. Jarrell was one of Frost's champions, who argued both against the superficial popular image of Frost as a Farmer's Almanac poet of homespun wisdom and the academic (wilful) ignorance of his occasional greatness, in poems like "Home Burial," "An Old Man's Winter Night," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Acquainted with the Night," and "Directive." Here is Jarrell's commentary:

First of all, of course, the poem is simply there, in indifferent unchanging actuality; but our thought about it, what we are made to make of it, is there too, made to be there. When we choose between land and sea, the human and the inhuman, the finite and the infinite, the sea has to be the infinite that floods in over us endlessly, the hypnotic monotony of the universe that is incommensurable with us—everything into which we look neither very far nor very deep, but look, look just the same. And yet Frost doesn't say so—it is the geometry of this very geometrical poem, its inescapable structure, that says so. There is the deepest tact and restraint in the symbolism; it is like Housman's

Stars, I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.

The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault:
It rains into the sea
And still the sea is salt.

But Frost's poem is flatter, greyer, and at once tenderer and more terrible, without even the consolations of rhetoric and exaggeration - there is no "primal fault" in Frost's poem, but only the faint Biblical memories of "any watch they keep." What we do know we don't care about; what we do care about we don't know: we can't look out very far, or in very deep; and when did that ever bother us? It would be hard to find anything more unpleasant to say about people than that last stanza; but Frost doesn't say it unpleasantly—he says it with flat ease, takes everything with something harder than contempt, more passive than acceptance. And isn't there something heroic about the whole business, too - something touching about our absurdity? If the fool persisted in his folly he would become a wise man, Blake said, and we have persisted.

The tone of the last lines—or, rather, their careful suspension between several tones, as a piece of iron can be held in the air between powerful enough magnets—allows for this too. This recognition of the essential limitations of man, without denial or protest or rhetoric or palliation, is very rare and very valuable, and rather usual in Frost's best poetry. One is reminded of Empson's thoughtful and truthful comment on Gray's "Elegy": "Many people, without being communists, have been irritated by the complacence in the massive calm of the poem … And yet what is said is one of the permanent truths; it is only in degree that any improvement of society would prevent wastage of human powers; the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy."(1)

Standing on the beach in the middle of a hurricane might seem like insanity, instead of when you're a reporter and a cameraman revealing what is in store for so many of us if we're not more careful. We must go on keeping watch, heedless of our native limitations.

(1) from Poetry and the Age (Knopf, 1953). 

Six Poets: Philip Larkin

The qualities that distinguish the poetry of Philip Larkin (1922-1985) - accessibility both formal and syntactical, traditional meter and rhyme - practically guaranteed two things: popularity with a public, most of whom never liked poetry (or never read it), and a difficult relationship with literary critics and scholars, many of whom equate accessibility with a lack of discipline and rigor. The facility with which the average reader can enter a Larkin poem in no way makes it easy to maneuver within the poem and find everything of value there. It is precisely the kind of problem faced by Robert Frost and by those who find greatness in some of his poetry. Frost was long thought to be an unofficial Poet Laureate. Larkin was actually offered the post when John Betjeman died, but turned it down.

Most great poets restrict themselves to certain subjects that become their métier. With Larkin they were solitude and non-conformity (both as sources of sorrow and strength), life as ultimately disappointing, the unfair tradeoff of youth for wisdom, the inability to find fulfillment in women or in love. I think of "Reasons for Attendance":

The trumpet's voice, loud and authoritative,
Draws me a moment to the lighted glass
To watch the dancers - all under twenty-five -
Shifting intently, face to flushed face,
Solemnly on the beat of happiness.

- Or so I fancy, sensing the smoke and sweat,
The wonderful feel of girls. Why be out here?
But then, why be in there? Sex, yes, but what
Is sex? Surely, to think the lion's share
Of happiness is found by couples' sheer

Inaccuracy, as far as I'm concerned.
What calls me is that lifted, rough-tongued bell
(Art, if you like) whose individual sound
Insists I too am individual.
It speaks; I hear; others may hear as well,

But not for me, nor I for them; and so
With happiness. Therefore I stay outside,
Believing this; and they maul to and fro,
Believing that; and both are satisfied,
If no one has misjudged himself. Or lied.

30 December 1953


But Larkin occasionally tackled subjects that were otherwise outside his purview, like the long tour de force, "Show Saturday," "Faith Healing," or poems that are uncharacteristic of him, like "The Trees," "First Sight" the late poem "The Mower," or "An Arundel Tomb," with its most incongruous (for Larkin) last line, "What will survive of us is love." Really? Many another Larkin poem would beg to differ.

I think most would agree on what I think are his best poems, "Church Going," "The Whitsun Weddings," "Dockery and Son," "The Old Fools," and "Aubade."

Larkin simply wasn't difficult - or difficult enough - to impress the "new" critics who happened along in the Sixties just when he was hitting his stride. His problem was similar to Frost's, although Larkin didn't live long enough to become a parody of himself. As Randall Jarrell said of the late Frost collection, Steeple Bush: 

"Steeple Bush" is no book to convert intellectuals to Frost. Yet the ordinary "highbrow" reader is making a far greater mistake when he neglects Frost as commonplace, than the academic reader makes when he apotheosizes him, often on the basis of his most complacent or sentimental poems.

After Larkin's death, a one time friend, Andrew Motion, published a biography of Larkin that made his detractors hate him even more and gave them a completely unjustified sense of vindication: it turned out that Larkin was a frightful Tory, held racist and sexist views, and had a definite taste for bondage pornography. No wonder his poetry was liked by so many! 

What made matters worse was how succinctly and beautifully Larkin defended his own poetic practice:

"It is sometimes useful to remind ourselves of the simpler aspects of things normally regarded as complicated. Take, for instance; the writing of a poem. It consists of three stages: the first is when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time. The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it. The stages are interdependent and all necessary. If there has been no preliminary feeling, the device has nothing to reproduce and the reader will experience nothing. If the second stage has not been well done, the device will not deliver the goods, or will deliver only a few goods to a few people, or will stop delivering them after an absurdly short while. And if there is no third stage, no successful reading, the poem can hardly be said to exist in a practical sense at all."

The most remarkable thing about Larkin today is that, though it has been 33 years since his death, and his Collected Poems has been compiled and published, new poems continue to be discovered and authenticated. One such, called "Unfinished Poem," was left in typescript at his death:

I squeezed up the last stair to the room in the roof
And lay on the bed there with my jacket off.
Seeds of light were sown on the failure of evening.
The dew came down. I lay in the quiet, smoking.

That was a way to live—newspaper for sheets,
A candle and spirit stove, and a trouble of shouts
From below somewhere, a town smudgy with traffic!
That was a place to go, that emaciate attic!

For (as you will guess) it was death I had in mind,
Who covets our breath, who seeks and will always find;
To keep out of his thought was my whole care,
Yet down among the sunlit courts, yes, he was there,

Taking his rents; yes, I had only to look
To see the shape of his head and the shine of his book,
And the creep of the world under his sparrow-trap sky,
To know how little slips his immortal memory.

So it was stale time then, day in, day out,
Blue fug in the room, nothing to do but wait
The start of his feet on the stair, that sad sound
Climbing to cut me from his restless mind

With a sign that the air should stick in my nose like bread,
The light swell up and turn black—so I shammed dead,
Still as a stuck pig, hoping he'd keep concerned
With boys who were making the fig when his back was turned;

And the sun and the stove and the mice and the gnawed paper
Made up the days and nights when I missed supper,
Paring my nails, looking over the farbelow street
Of tramways and bells. But one night I heard the feet.

Step after step they mounted with confidence.
Time shrank. They paused at the top. There was no defence.
I sprawled to my knees. Now they came straight at my door.
This, then, the famous eclipse? The crack in the floor

Widening for one long plunge? In a sharp trice,
The world, lifted and wrung, dipped with remorse.
The fact of breathing tightened into a shroud.
Light cringed. The door swung inwards. Over the threshold

Nothing like death stepped, nothing like death paused,
Nothing like death has such hair, arms so raised.
Why are your feet bare? Was not death to come?
Why is he not here? What summer have you broken from?


I'm not sure why this was left unfinished or called "Unifinished Poem." It reads as a complete poetic statement. Perhaps Finis (The End) was intended?

Six Poets: Robert Graves

Some time around my third year of college I fell under the spell (which is the most accurate way of putting it) of Robert Graves (1895-1985). Poet, essayist, novelist, biographer, mythologist, and creator of his own unique poetical theology based on ancient references to a central, all-encompassing female deity whom he called the White Goddess, his accomplishments, I think, will be chiefly credited to a formidable body of lyric poetry (some if the finest in English) and a rehabilitation of the Feminine in his thoroughly revised versions of familiar mythology.

Some of what he presented in his outline of poetic theory makes sound sense, like the development of writing from the poetical to the factual - from the irrational to the rational. He also presented a theory of the history of human sexual understanding, that the reason why priestesses and goddesses preponderate in the most ancient mythologies (something that even James Frazer was forced to address - even though he denied the existence of what he called a "gynocracy") is due to the simple fact that primitive man failed to connect the sex act with procreation. Women were believed to be the sole creators of life. The proof of this idea is the fact that human beings still have to be taught about sex - the connections have to be explained.

He wrote one of the greatest memoirs, Goodbye To All That, based on his experiences in the Great War in which he was wounded and presumed dead. He had the unique privilege of reading his own obituary in the London Times. But the trauma of trench warfare affected him deeply for several years, and probably had a great influence on his psychic development, of which the White Goddess was a large part. He perhaps only attained sanity through the otherwise inexplicable detours on which his thought were taken. As Randall Jarrell put it, we have reason to be thankful for the White Goddess if it inspired Graves to write such things as "To Juan at the Winter Solstice." "All that is finally important to Graves," Jarrell wrote, "is condensed in the one figure of the Mother-Mistress-Muse, she who creates, nourishes, seduces, destroys; she who saves us—or, as good as saving, destroys us—as long as we love her, write poems to her, submit to her without question, use all our professional, Regimental, masculine qualities in her service. Death is swallowed up in victory, said St. Paul; for Graves Life, Death, everything that exists is swallowed up in the White Goddess."

An extraordinary poem, "The Pier Glass," captures the qualities of his nightmarish life during his recovery. They called it shell shock; we now call it PTSD:

Lost manor where I walk continually
A ghost, while yet in woman's flesh and blood.
Up your broad stairs mounting with outspread fingers
And gliding steadfast down your corridors
I come by nightly custom to this room,
And even on sultry afternoons I come
Drawn by a thread of time-sunk memory.
Empty, unless for a huge bed of state
Shrouded with rusty curtains drooped awry
(A puppet theatre where malignant fancy
Peoples the wings with fear). At my right hand
A ravelled bell-pull hangs in readiness
To summon me from attic glooms above
Service of elder ghosts; here at my left
A sullen pier-glass cracked from side to side
Scorns to present the face as do new mirrors
With a lying flush, but shows it melancholy
And pale, as faces grow that look in mirrors.
Is here no life, nothing but the thin shadow
And blank foreboding, never a wainscote rat
Rasping a crust? Or at the window pane
No fly, no bluebottle, no starveling spider?
The windows frame a prospect of cold skies
Half-merged with sea, as at the first creation,
Abstract, confusing welter. Face about,
Peer rather in the glass once more, take note
Of self, the grey lips and long hair dishevelled,
Sleep-staring eyes. Ah, mirror, for Christ's love
Give me one token that there still abides
Remote, beyond this island mystery
So be it only this side Hope, somewhere,
In streams, on sun-warm mountain pasturage,
True life, natural breath; not this phantasma.
A rumour, scarcely yet to be reckoned sound,
But a pulse quicker or slower, then I know
My plea is granted; death prevails not yet.
For bees have swarmed behind in a close place
Pent up between this glass and the outer wall.
The combs are founded, the queen rules her court,
Bee-serjeants posted at the entrance chink
Are sampling each returning honey-cargo
With scrutinizing mouth and commentary,
Slow approbation, quick dissatisfaction.
Disquieting rhythm, that leads me home at last
From labyrinthine wandering. This new mood
Of judgment orders me my present duty,
To face again a problem strongly solved
In life gone by, but now again proposed
Out of due time for fresh deliberation.
Did not my answer please the Master's ear?
Yet, I'll stay obstinate. How went the question,
A paltry question set on the elements
Of love and the wronged lover's obligation?
Kill or forgive? Still does the bed ooze blood?
Let it drip down till every floor-plank rot!
Yet shall I answer, challenging the judgment:—
"Kill, strike the blow again, spite what shall come."
Kill, strike, again, again," the bees in chorus hum.


Subjected to near-constant stress from shelling, soldiers in the trenches often suffered an overtaxing of their adrenal glands, which sometimes led to catatonic states. Graves claimed that it took him several years after the war to catch up on all the sleep he had lost.

His emotional state led him into a labyrinth from which, perhaps, only his personal discovery of the White Goddess could secure his release. Following his Muse led to conflict and unhappiness in Graves's long life, as his long-suffering wives could attest. The ridiculous antics of Laura Riding, a pseudo-poet with whom Graves absconded to Majorca in the late 1920s, established an unfortunate pattern in his life. While Riding abused his devotion imperiously to establish her own credentials as a poet and a scholar, Graves remained productive as both a poet and an historical novelist until their breakup in 1940. His novels, I, Claudius and Claudius the God were so popular that an expensive attempt was made to turn the former into a film starring Charles Laughton and directed by Josef von Sternberg. The injury if the leading lady Merle Oberon (who was married to the producer) in a road accident ended the production, the tantalizing promise of which was preserved in the documentary The Epic That Never Was.

Graves continued to write poetry well into his eighties when dementia ended his writing career. He wrote about jealousy and how it is so often misunderstood. The word is derived from "zealous," as in "the Lord God is a jealous God." In the most powerful poem to jealousy ever written, Shakespeare's Othello, Iago warns Othello:

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on: that cuckold lives in bliss
Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger;
But, O, what damned minutes tells he o'er
Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves!

The play abounds in the greatest insights into jealousy, as when Othello, on the verge of murdering the sleeping Desdemona, admits that "this sorrow's heavenly;/It strikes where it doth love."

A poem from one of Graves's later collections, "Prometheus," approaches the subject from an original angle. The modern interpretation of jealousy is entirely negative, a symptom of the fear of being replaced. But more experienced cultures see it as a gauge of one's passion. If there is no jealousy, then the love simply isn't true. In his unique style, Graves enlists the Greek myth of Prometheus in his definition of jealousy. Condemned by the gods to be chained to a rock for eternity while a vulture feasts on his liver, Prometheus asks of the beast just one thing:

PROMETHEUS

Close bound in a familiar bed
All night I tossed, rolling my head;
Now dawn returns in vain, for still
The vulture squats on her warm hill.

I am in love as giants are
That dote upon the evening star,
And this lank bird is come to prove
The intractability of love.

Yet still, with greedy eye half shut,
Rend the raw liver from its gut:
Feed, jealousy, do not fly away--
If she who fetched you also stay.

Anyone who has felt such love - and such jealousy - knows the truth of those last two lines.

The problem with Graves's definition of true poetry was its narrowness - he dismissed Eliot, Auden, and Stevens as non-poets, and worked backwards in the history of English poetry, eliminating Milton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson and favored other, minor poets like Christopher Smart and John Clare. He would've disapproved of three of the poets I included on my list of favorites. Fortunately, I managed to get out from under the spell that Graves cast over me and embraced differing poetic practices. Graves still looms as an imposing poet, but despite his strict self-imposed codes of conduct. He remains one if the finest lyric poets of the 20th century.

On Turning 50: Addendum

As an afterthought to my original post "On Turning 50", there are two excellent reasons why I neither feel nor look (nor act, for that matter) my age: I don't live anywhere near the places where I grew up and I have no children. I have a good friend in Des Moines, Iowa who has been there, aside from a stint in the Army, all his life. Wherever he goes, he runs into people he has known for thirty or forty years. I have never experienced anything like this. My father was a career soldier, so my family moved about frequently. For example, I attended five different schools in three different cities during eight years of elementary school.

Also, I have no children to mark the passing of the years with their growth, reminding me of when I was their age and generally italicizing my own age with theirs. A good friend of mine has a 16-year-old son who sometimes makes me think he's his father when he answers the phone. This is difficult for me to even imagine, let alone experience.

But I should also add that I never set out to live a conventional life, being satisfied with any of the props or rewards that such a life bestows on one. I have paid a price for this choice, but I believe - so far anyway - that it was worth it. I can agree wholeheartedly with Constantine Cavafy's poem "Addition":


I do not question whether I am happy or unhappy.
Yet there is one thing that I keep gladly in mind -
that in the great addition (their addition that I abhor)
that has so many numbers, I am not one
of the many units there. In the final sum
I have not been calculated. And this joy suffices me.


But rather than base my whole life on a negation, a rejection, I would rather say, with Randall Jarrell:


METEORITE

Star, that looked so long among the stones
And picked from them, half iron and half dirt,
One: and bent and put it to her lips
And breathed upon it till at last it burned
Uncertainly, among the stars its sisters -
Breathe on me still, star, sister.

A Poet

Some people wonder where the "poetic sense" kicks in - if it is simply an intellectual faculty, an ideology imposed from without. Randall Jarrell insisted that there was a broader understanding of poetry, that could make Freud and Einstein poets in everything but form. Philip Larkin was a poet in virtually everything he wrote.

The Pleasure Principle


It is sometimes useful to remind ourselves of the simpler aspects of things normally regarded as complicated. Take, for instance; the writing of a poem. It consists of three stages: the first is when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time. The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it. The stages are interdependent and all necessary. If there has been no preliminary feeling, the device has nothing to reproduce and the reader will experience nothing. If the second stage has not been well done, the device will not deliver the goods, or will deliver only a few goods to a few people, or will stop delivering them after an absurdly short while. And if there is no third stage, no successful reading, the poem can hardly be said to exist in a practical sense at all.

What a description of this basic tripartite structure shows is that poetry is emotional in nature and theatrical in operation, a skilled re-creation of emotion in other people, and that, conversely, a bad poem is one that never succeeds in doing this. All modes of critical derogation are no more than different ways of saying this, whatever literary , philosophical or moral terminology they employ, and it would not be necessary to point out anything so obvious if present-day poetry did not suggest that it had been forgotten. We seem to be producing a new kind of bad poetry , not the old kind that tries to move the reader and fails, but one that does not even try. Repeatedly he is confronted with pieces that cannot be understood without reference beyond their own limits or whose contented insipidity argues that their authors are merely reminding themselves of what they know already, rather than re-creating it for a third party. The reader, in fact, seems no longer present in the poet's mind as he used to be, as someone who must understand and enjoy the finished product if it is to be a success at all; the assumption now is that no one will read it, and wouldn't understand or enjoy it if they did. Why should this be so? It is not sufficient to say that poetry has lost its audience, and so need no longer consider it: lots of people still read and even buy poetry. More accurately, poetry has lost its old audience, and gained a new one. This has been caused by the consequences of a cunning merger between poet, literary critic and academic critic (three classes now notoriously indistinguishable): it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the poet has gained the happy position wherein he can praise his own poetry in the press and explain it in the class-room, and the reader has been bullied into giving up the consumer's power to say 'I don't like this, bring me something different.' Let him now so much as breathe a word about not liking a poem, and he is in the dock before he can say Edwin Arlington Robinson. And the charge is a grave one: flabby sensibility, insufficient or inadequate critical tools, and inability to meet new verbal and emotional situations. Verdict: guilty, plus a few riders on the prisoner’s mental upbringing, addiction to mass amusements, and enfeebled responses. It is time some of you playboys realized, says the judge, that reading a poem is hard work. Fourteen days in stir. Next case.

The cash customers of poetry, therefore, who used to put down their money in the sure and certain hope of enjoyment as if at a theatre or concert hall, were quick to move elsewhere. Poetry was no longer a pleasure. They have been replaced by a humbler squad, whose aim is not pleasure but self-improvement, and who have uncritically accepted the contention that they cannot appreciate poetry without preliminary investment in the intellectual equipment which, by the merest chance, their tutor happens to have about him. In short, the modem poetic audience, when it is not taking in its own washing, is a student audience, pure and simple. At first sight this may not seem a bad thing. The poet has at last a moral ascendancy, and his new clientele not only pay for the poetry but pay to have it explained afterwards. Again, if the poet has only himself to please, he is no longer handicapped by the limitations of his audience. And in any case nobody nowadays believes that a worthwhile artist can rely on anything but his own judgement: public taste is always twenty-five years behind, and picks up a style only when it is exploited by the second-rate. All this is true enough. But at bottom poetry, like all art, is inextricably bound up with giving pleasure, and if a poet loses his pleasure-seeking audience he has lost the only audience worth having, for which the dutiful mob that signs on every September is no substitute. And the effect will be felt throughout his work. He will forget that even if he finds what he has to say interesting, others may not. He will concentrate on moral worth or semantic intricacy. Worst of all, his poems will no longer be born of the tension between what he non-verbally feels and what can be got over in common word-usage to someone who hasn't had his experience or education or travel grant, and once the other end of the rope is dropped what results will not be so much obscure or piffling (though it may be both) as an unrealized, 'undramatized' slackness, because he will have lost the habit of testing what he writes by this particular standard. Hence, no pleasure. Hence, no poetry.

What can be done about this? Who wants anything done about it? Certainly not the poet, who is in the unprecedented position of peddling both his work and the standard by which it is judged. Certainly not the new reader, who, like a partner of some unconsummated marriage, has no idea of anything better. Certainly not the old reader, who has simply replaced one pleasure with another. Only the romantic loiterer who recalls the days when poetry was condemned as sinful might wish things different. But if the medium is in fact to be rescued from among our duties and restored to our pleasures, I can only think that a large-scale revulsion has got to set in against present notions, and that it will have to start with poetry readers asking themselves more frequently whether they do in fact enjoy what they read, and, if not, what the point is of carrying on. And I use' enjoy' in the commonest of senses, the sense in which we leave a radio on or off. Those interested might like to read David Daiches's essay 'The New Criticism: Some Qualifications' (in Literary Essays, 1956); in the meantime, the following note by Samuel Butler may reawaken a furtive itch for freedom: 'I should like to like Schumann's music better than I do; I dare say I could make myself like it better if I tried; but I do not like having to try to make myself like things; I like things that make me like them at once and no trying at all' (Notebooks, 1919).
1957