Poetry Notebook

by Clive James

  The typical Donaghy poem isn’t typical. Each poem has its own form and, remarkably, its own voice. Underlying this protean range of creative expression there is a critical attitude, which is probably best summed up in a single essay contained in The Shape of the Dance. The essay is called ‘American Revolutions’ and it sums up his lifelong – lifelong in so short a life – determination to make sense out of the twentieth-century conflict between formal and free verse. As a musician by avocation, Donaghy had no trust in the idea of perfectly unfettered, untrained expression. He agreed with Stravinsky that limitations were the departure point for inspiration. Donaghy believed that a living poem could emerge only from an idea in ‘negotiation’ (the key word in his critical vocabulary) with an imposed formal requirement, even if it was self-imposed, and might be rendered invisible in the course of the negotiation. The split between form and freedom, in his view, had begun with the difference between Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. He favoured formality, to the extent of hailing Richard Wilbur as the supreme phrasemaker. But he could also see that freedom had been fruitful. He was ready to welcome vital language wherever it came from, even if it came from the uninstructed. (This readiness made him the ideal teacher of creative writing, even though he was suspicious of the very idea: there is a whole new cluster of young poets in London now who show the benefits of his example.) Form and freedom: in all my reading about modern poetry – as opposed to my reading of modern poetry – I have not seen anything to equal Donaghy’s treatment of this crucial matter for its extent, depth, and fundamental tolerance. As an underlying attitude for justifying the adventures of his own poetry, it could not have been better. But there is something underlying even the attitude, and for that I can’t think of a better word than confidence.

  Confidence is the attribute that can’t be taught. It can be damaged by circumstance, and encouraged when it falters, but the poet has to have it. Samuel Daniel, whose courtly music played at the start of this disquisition, was confident enough to make a career out of his calling. When Thomas Campion questioned the need for rhyme in English poetry, Daniel set him straight. When Daniel’s critics upbraided him for too much revising, he told them to get lost. If Gerard Manley Hopkins, a greater poet who was all calling and no career, had come back from the future and accused him of being one of the founders of the deadly Parnassian measures whose default mode was an easy smoothness, Daniel would have known how to defend himself. He believed in his profession. The same could be said for James Merrill, whose financial support for other poets – one of them was Elizabeth Bishop – was motivated by his personal experience of the consuming nature of the art he practised. The same could be said of Robert Lowell, who was right in never questioning his mission to speak, even though, at those times when sanity was subtracted from his awesome mental equipment, he so often spoke to his own detriment. The name we have to leave off the list, alas, is Dunstan Thompson. Auden once said that there are poets who have everything except the desire to step forward. Thompson stepped forward in the beginning, but later he stepped back, and fell into the oubliette. Possibly there is such a thing as being so concerned with the self that one loses sight of the poet’s privileged duty, which is to be concerned with everything, in the hope of producing something – a poem, a stanza, even a single line – that will live on its own, in its own time.

  Interlude

  Though a stanza might be the desirable measure by which we remember poets who write in stanzas, a more usual measure for remembering the greatest of all poets is the piece of a verse paragraph. Shakespeare, in our memories, exists as phrases, lines and groups of lines, and just as often by the group of lines as by the phrase. Unless we are actors who must learn a part, no other playwright, not even Marlowe, gets into our memories more than a phrase or two at a time; but anything by Shakespeare that we recall is always on its way to being a speech; and, as Camille Paglia points out in her book Break, Blow, Burn, those compulsively memorable pieces from a Shakespeare play count as poems. Indeed they aspire to that condition. But they also aspire to being the human voice overheard, and they are always hurrying past the listener’s ears. Some of the first listeners were professional copyists, sitting in the auditorium and writing down in haste what the actor had just said. The result, for the printed editions, was a plentiful infection with distortion, error and ambiguity. In the epigraph of this book, there is a good case for spelling ‘lightning’ as ‘lightening’. Which word was the word the writer meant is a matter for scholarship; a humanist activity which in the case of Shakespeare is almost as endless as it is with Dante, and just as indispensable. Some tutors believe that the Arden edition should be the first text of any Shakespeare play that the student reads. From my own experience, I would call that the right idea, but misplaced. Footnotes can be a forest, and there is such a thing as reaching a first acquaintance with Shakespeare without doing very much at all of moving the eye-line down from the text to the notes crowding the bottom of the page. The distraction is least likely when there are no notes at all, as with the old Selfridge’s complete Shakespeare, with a preface by Sir Henry Irving, that I carried with me on my travels until long after it fell to pieces. But eventually you will need the benefits of scholarship and commentary, or else bruise your understanding from too much flying blind. There have always been learned poets who, fancying themselves as scholars of Shakespeare, think that they can provide a more pure and practical analysis than the critics and professors. But usually they have overrated their intuitive powers. Not even Empson was clever enough to supersede the scholarly heritage, which was largely academic; and it will always be advisable for the beginning enthusiast, once he has finished mocking the academic world, to make his peace with it, and learn something. One of the many attractive features of the Shakespearean criticism written by John Berryman was that he was best pleased with himself when he sounded most like a scholar. There was not much he was humble about, but he was humble about that.

  A DEEPER CONSIDERATION

  Had he not been a poet, John Berryman would have been a Shakespearean scholar, and well qualified for the task, even though his drinking habit was as ungovernable as his beard. In addition to his vast knowledge of the field, Berryman had unusually sensitive instrumentation for measuring the intensity of language. As a critic, if not always as a poet, he was especially good when deciding whether a fine phrase had a deep thought behind it, or was just showing itself off. And he was very convincing when he argued that Shakespeare had the same priorities.

  According to Berryman, the older and better Shakespeare got, the more he was concerned that the verse should spring from what we might call a deeper consideration. Berryman pushed this line to the point of feeling able to say that if a stretch of verse in one of the plays seemed sufficiently preoccupied with the question of how the words needed thought to spring from, then Shakespeare might well have written that passage later in his career, even if it was inserted in a play dating from earlier on. Berryman said as much about the interchange between the king and Bertram in All’s Well That Ends Well. The interchange – which is really a paean to Bertram’s father, addressed to the son by a king who doesn’t mind holding his interlocutor captive while he explores the subject so as to pin down every nuance – is not a passage which does very much for the plot of the play into which it has been introduced. It is more like a little play all on its own.

  Coleridge once said that Polonius, in Hamlet, is the embodiment of a reputation for wisdom no longer possessed. The king in All’s Well really is wise, but he has Polonius’s habit of worrying at a point while his interlocutor, usually much younger, sneaks impatient glances at the nearest sundial. But Shakespeare, this time, isn’t making a joke of it. The king is on to something that interests the playwright as a matter of professional conviction. We could quote from the scene for as long as it lasts, and indeed one short bit is reasonably well known, although nothing like as well known as most of the Shakespearean ‘old man’s wisdom’ quotations that we ca
rry around in our heads if we have lived long enough. The king says:

  Since I nor wax nor honey can bring home,

  I quickly were dissolved from my hive,

  To give some labourers room.

  Instruct the actor (if necessary at gunpoint) to hit the hidden extra stress in the word ‘dissolvèd’, so that the second line, which must be expressed as a wish, becomes as rhythmically forceful a pentameter as the first, and you’ve got one of those little show-stopping moments that should happen every few minutes as the night goes on. Unless they are badly spoken, they don’t really stop the show, of course: but they do lift the listener’s heart, to make him forget time as the fragments of deeper consideration join up throughout the evening.

  There is a lot more in the interchange, however, than that fine idea. The king has been considering wisdom, and the speaking of wisdom. And he wants to tell Bertram that his, Bertram’s, father was the embodiment of how that should be done. To make sure that Bertram gets the message, the king wields his monarchical privilege of repeatedly telling Bertram what he, Bertram, must know already, and even takes the liberty of quoting one of Bertram’s father’s speeches: something that Bertram could probably have done better, except that he – and this is the armature of the scene’s dynamics – is too young to feel yet what the king has come, through time, to know is true.

  ‘Let me not live,’ quoth he,

  ‘After my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff

  Of younger spirits, whose apprehensive senses

  All but new things disdain; whose judgements are

  Mere fathers of their garments; whose constancies

  Expire before their fashions.’

  These lines about a judgement being had only so it can be snazzily dressed up to fit the fashion have a nice symmetry with the more famous passage, in the same play, where old Lafeu warns young Bertram against the showmanship of the fop Parolles: ‘there can be no kernel in this light nut; the soul of this man is his clothes.’ You could easily quote it as verse, but Lafeu, as it happens, is expressing himself in prose: the kind of toughly, densely argued prose that Hamlet uses when he gets down to bedrock.

  There is a notion of bedrock throughout Shakespeare’s work almost to the end: a notion that the essential meaning, the deeper consideration, has to be protected against all transient distortions, including the poet’s own gift for . . . what? Well, the answer is in the opponent’s name: Parolles. Words. Words are the bewitching enemy, the beautiful seducer.

  The threat posed by the spectacular expression that outruns its substance was a long-running theme in Shakespeare, and is surely one of the preoccupations that now make him seem so modern. Though he seems modern in every age – modern all over again – he seems especially modern in ours, when we look at him from the angle of analytical philosophy, a school of thought which has, at its tutorial centre, a concern for scrupulosity of language: the scrupulosity that was incarnated by Wittgenstein, and as much in his likes as his dislikes. Wittgenstein’s admiration for Mörike depended on the poet’s determination that the word should not exceed the thing. We should be slow to read back from the grim philosopher agonizing over a conceptual nuance for weeks on end in his cold digs to the fluent playwright composing a whole different version of Act V on Monday night before the new play opened on Tuesday, but it still seems legitimate to propose that Shakespeare was concerned enough by the capacity of his own facility to fly off by itself, and thus to want it anchored to something solid.

  It might seem madness to suppose that Shakespeare shared the same conviction about the seductive power of words as Wittgenstein, but it should be possible at least to entertain the notion that Shakespeare could not have created his most evocative enchantments without a notion of limit and precision; and all precision, in language, eventually depends on a disciplined adherence to thought. The process of composition might produce a new thought – always one of the best reasons for composing in verse at all – but the new thought, too, has to test out, meeting a standard of quality if not of contiguity. Although the combination of thoughts might fiercely resist being reduced to a prose equivalent – think of almost any striking stanza by, say, John Crowe Ransom – it must be something more than a vague suggestion towards the indefinable. (If Mallarmé seems to do that, it is because he is treating the indefinable as his subject.) When, in later Shakespeare, we have trouble anchoring an image to a thought, it’s at least worth considering that the thought has gone awry – that the deeper consideration is not fully formed – before deciding that we have been granted an insight into the inexplicable. But we would not even conceive of such a possibility if we did not have, as a measure, everything that Shakespeare had already done. It’s his store of dazzling clarities that warns us against the assumption that there might be a further profundity in the obscure.

  •

  Shakespeare in his last years was still young, even by the standards of the time. We tend to think of men of genius, in the long age before modern medicine, as struggling to make it past the age of fifty, but the tendency takes a battering when it runs into the case of, say, Titian, still painting at the age of ninety. It seems fair to say, however, that the later Shakespeare was getting on, and fair also to look on his later work as a field of study that might help illuminate all that happened earlier. Perhaps there are developments occurring that we don’t quite grasp because we ourselves aren’t old enough. As my own dotage approaches, heralded by instances of forgetfulness that I would list here if I could only remember them, I fall further and further out of love with the common idea that lyrical talent, like the talent for original mathematics, burns out early. I would like to think that a lifetime of experience gives me more to say, and that any early exuberance which I can no longer summon was partly the product of an emptier head. Give me maturity or give me death.

  Mature to a fault even when he was young, Samuel Menashe has spent a long lifetime avoiding publicity. It was a measure of his self-effacement that the Poetry Foundation felt compelled to give him, in 2004, its Neglected Masters Award. The neglected master’s most recent and perhaps climactic collection, New and Selected Poems, which contains ten more poems than his 2005 Library of America compilation, was published in America in 2008, but I am ashamed to say that I never noticed it until it was re-published in Britain later on by Bloodaxe Books. Since his name has always been slightly less obscure in Britain than in America – after the Second World War he was taken up in London by the poet Kathleen Raine – I was intermittently aware of him, but from this book I can get his full force, which is no noisier than a bug hitting your windscreen, except that it comes right through the glass. Take the poem called ‘Beachhead’:

  The tide ebbs

  From a helmet

  Wet sand embeds

  That’s the whole poem, and there is a whole war in it. Like Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, Menashe was a soldier in the last campaigns of the war in Europe. He was at the Battle of the Bulge, in which thirty German divisions were stopped only at the price of nineteen thousand dead GIs. Menashe must have seen terrible things, but none of them is evoked directly in his poetry. It is remarkable, and instructive, how little either Wilbur or Hecht wrote directly about what they had seen, but even more remarkable was that Menashe – rather like J. D. Salinger, who also saw it all from close up – wrote even less. Yet he wrote about the helmet in the sand, and somehow his wealth of sad experience is in that single tiny haiku-like construction. It makes his war a nation’s war. The deeper consideration is that he was one among many, and, unlike too many, he lived to speak. That he speaks so concisely is a condition of his testament: consecration and concentration are the same thing. This is a world away from the expression of the self. This is bedrock.

  All Menashe’s poems give the sense of having been constructed out of the basic stuff of memory, a hard substratum where what once happened has been so deeply pondered that all individual feeling has been squeezed out and only universal feeling is left. Th
e process gives us a hint that the act of construction might be part of the necessary pressure: if the thing was not so carefully built, the final compacting of the idea could not have been attained. There could be no version of a Menashe poem that was free from the restrictions of technique, because without the technique the train of thought would not be there. Even when he writes without obvious rhyme, he has weighed the balance of every syllable; when he uses near rhymes, the modulations are exquisite; and a solid rhyme never comes pat, but is always hallowed by its own necessity.

  In a poem by Menashe, an awful lot goes on in a short space, and it might seem like cherrystone scrimshaw at first. But so does a little poem by Emily Dickinson, until you look harder. Menashe is in her tradition, packing sound together to shed light. Compared to ‘Beachhead’, his poem ‘Cargo’ is gigantic, but it is still only ten short lines. Here is the whole thing: