Poets are also more likely to attest without self-consciousness to the living nature of poetic tradition and to the demotic life of ‘the canon’. Nowadays, undergraduates are being taught prematurely to regard the poetic heritage as an oppressive imposition and to suspect it for its latent discriminations in the realm of gender, its privilegings and marginalizations in the realms of class and power. All of this suspicion may be salutary enough when it is exercised by a mind informed by that which it is being taught to suspect, but it is a suspicion which is lamentably destructive of cultural memory when it is induced in minds without any cultural possessions whatever. On the other hand, when a poet quotes from memory or from prejudice or in sheer admiration, ‘the canon’ is manifested in an educationally meaningful way. To put it simply, I believe that the life of society is better served by a quotation-bore who quotes out of a professional love than by an ‘unmasking’-bore who subverts out of theory.
Not to confuse the artistic with the educational, however, is the main caveat for the poet as professor. The worst thing that such a confusion leads to is arrogant and ridiculous behaviour by the poet in relation to the student: the poet who thinks that excellence in the art excuses ill-manneredness or ill-preparedness in the classroom is offending the human as well as the professional imperatives. I have seen talented men and women so encased in the shining armour of moi that they have utterly failed to connect with the group in front of them. This can be merely a case of idiocy and wasted opportunity, but it becomes grievous when the authority which their position confers is used by the poet– professor to overbear the potential and to destroy the confidence of neophyte readers or writers. Whatever the age of the students and whatever the circumstances – primary school classroom or graduate poetry workshop – the covenant between the teacher and the taught demands a certain stand-off and protectiveness on the part of the empowered figure of the teacher. We have been rightly alerted to all forms of sexual harassment in these contexts, but there can be such a thing as vocational harassment, where the student’s hopes and aspirations are unthinkingly assailed. Of course, a fair and honest estimate of the student’s gifts – good or bad – must be communicated, but the communication has to be done with respect and a care for the emotional tissues.
What I tend to say at the beginning of the term to my students in poetry workshops is this: I am going to be involved with your capacities as writers, but your destinies as writers are your own business – after all, you will be receiving grades at the end of the term, so let that be a reminder of the status of our relationship, which is, strictly speaking, pedagogical. But even as I say this, as much for my own protection as for theirs, I recognize that once a personal connection is established with a student by way of my respect for his or her potential or achievement – or vice-versa – then one of us has affected, however fleetingly, the other’s sense of a destiny in poetry. And this may turn out to he something very positive indeed.
I: from ‘The Chair in Leaf’‚ Inaugural Darcy O’Brien Memorial Lecture, University of Tulsa, April 2001; II: ‘Poet as Professor’, Poetry Ireland Review, Spring 1991
PART II
Englands of the Mind
One of the most precise and suggestive of T. S. Eliot’s critical formulations was his notion of what he called ‘the auditory imagination’, ‘the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back’, fusing ‘the most ancient and the most civilized mentality’. I presume Eliot was thinking here about the cultural depth-charges latent in certain words and rhythms, that binding secret between words in poetry that delights not just the ear but the whole backward and abysm of mind and body; thinking of the energies beating in and between words that the poet brings into half-deliberate play; thinking of the relationship between the word as pure vocable, as articulate noise, and the word as etymological occurrence, as symptom of human history, memory and attachments.
It is in the context of this auditory imagination that I wish to discuss the language of Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill and Philip Larkin. All of them return to an origin and bring something back, all three live off the hump of the English poetic achievement, all three, here and now, in England, imply a continuity with another England, there and then. All three are hoarders and shorers of what they take to be the real England. All three treat England as a region – or rather treat their region as England – in different and complementary ways. I believe they are afflicted with a sense of history that was once the peculiar affliction of the poets of other nations who were not themselves natives of England but who spoke the English language. The poets of the mother culture, I feel, are now possessed of that defensive love of their territory which was once shared only by those poets whom we might call colonial – Yeats, MacDiarmid, Carlos Williams. They are aware of their Englishness as deposits in the descending storeys of the literary and historical past. Their very terrain is becoming consciously precious. A desire to preserve indigenous traditions, to keep open the imagination’s supply lines to the past, to receive from the stations of Anglo-Saxon confirmations of ancestry, to perceive in the rituals of show Saturdays and race-meetings and seaside outings, of church-going and marriages at Whitsun, and in the necessities that crave expression after the ritual of church-going has passed away, to perceive in these a continuity of communal ways, and a confirmations of an identity which is threatened – all this is signified by their language.
When we examine that language, we find that their three separate voices are guaranteed by three separate foundations which, when combined, represent almost the total resources of the English language itself. Hughes relies on the northern deposits, the pagan Anglo-Saxon and Norse elements, and he draws energy also from a related constellation of primitive myths and world views. The life of his language is a persistence of the stark outline and vitality of Anglo-Saxon that paid into the Middle English alliterative tradition and then went underground to sustain the folk poetry, the ballads, and the ebullience of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans. Hill is also sustained by the Anglo-Saxon base, but his proper guarantor is that language as modified and amplified by the vocabularies and values of the Mediterranean, by the early medieval Latin influence; his is to a certain extent a scholastic imagination founded on an England that we might describe as Anglo-Romanesque, touched by the polysyllabic light of Christianity but possessed by darker energies which might be acknowledged as barbaric. Larkin then completes the picture, because his proper hinterland is the English language Frenchified and turned humanist by the Norman conquest and the Renaissance, made nimble, melodious and plangent by Chaucer and Spenser, and besomed clean of its inkhornisms and its irrational magics by the eighteenth century.
And their Englands of the mind might be correspondingly characterized. Hughes’s is a primeval landscape where stones cry out and horizons endure, where the elements inhabit the mind with a religious force, where the pebble dreams ‘it is the foetus of God’, ‘where the staring angels go through’, ‘where all the stars bow down’, where, with appropriately pre-Socratic force, water lies ‘at the bottom of all things / utterly worn out utterly clear’. It is England as King Lear’s heath which now becomes a Yorkshire moor where sheep and foxes and hawks persuade ‘unaccommodated man’ that he is a poor bare forked thing, kinned not in a chain but on a plane of being with the animals themselves. There are monoliths and lintels. The air is menaced by God’s voice in the wind, by demonic protean crow-shapes; and the poet is a wanderer among the ruins, cut off by catastrophe from consolation and philosophy. Hill’s England, on the other hand, is more hospitable to the human presence. The monoliths make way for the keeps and chantries if also for the beheading block. The heath’s loneliness is kept at bay by the natural magic of the grove and the intellectual force of the scholar’s cell. The poet is not a wanderer but a clerk or perhaps an illuminator or one of a guild of mast
ers: he is in possession of a history rather than a mythology; he has a learned rather than an oral tradition. There are wars, but there are also dynasties, ideas of inheritance and order, possibilities for the ‘true governaunce of England’. His elegies are not laments for the irrevocable dispersal of the comitatus and the ring-giver in the hall, but solemn requiems for Plantagenet kings whose murderous wars are set in a great pattern, to be understood only when ‘the sea / Across daubed rocks evacuates its dead’. And Larkin’s England similarly reflects features from the period that his language is hived off. His trees and flowers and grasses are neither animistic, nor hallowed by half-remembered druidic lore; they are emblems of mutabilitie. Behind them lies the sensibility of troubadour and courtier. ‘Cut grass lies frail; / Brief is the breath / Mown stalks exhale’; his landscape is dominated neither by the untamed heath nor the totemistic architectures of spire and battlement but by the civic prospects, by roofs and gardens and prospects where urban and pastoral visions interact as ‘postal districts packed like squares of wheat’. The poet is no longer a bardic remnant nor an initiate in curious learning nor a jealous master of the secrets of a craft; he is a humane and civilized member of the customs service or the civil service or, indeed, the library service. The moon is no longer his white goddess but his poetic property, to be image rather than icon: ‘high and preposterous and separate’, she watches over unfenced existence, over fulfilment’s desolate attic, over an England of department stores, canals and floatings of industrial froth, explosions in mines, effigies in churches, secretaries in offices; and she hauls tides of life where only one ship is worth celebration, not a Golden Hind or a Victory, but ‘a black- / Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back / A huge and birdless silence.’
Hughes’s sensibility is pagan in the original sense: he is a haunter of the pagus, a heath-dweller, a heathen; he moves by instinct in the thickets beyond the urbs; he is neither urban nor urbane. His poetry is as redolent of the lair as it is of the library. The very titles of his books are casts made into the outback of our animal recognitions. Lupercal, a word infested with wolfish stinks yet returning to an origin in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: ‘You all did see that on the Lupercal / I thrice presented him a kingly crown.’ Yet the word passes back through Shakespeare into the Lupercal, a cave below the western corner of the Palatine Hill in Rome; and the Lupercal was also the festival held on 15 February when, after the sacrifice of goats and a dog, youths dressed only in girdles made from the skins of these victims ran about the bounds of the Palatine city, striking those whom they met, especially women, with strips of goatskin. It was a fertility rite, and it was also a ritual beating of the bounds of the city, and in a way Hughes’s language is just this also. Its sensuous fetch, its redolence of blood and gland and grass and water, recalled English poetry in the fifties from a too suburban aversion of attention from the elemental; and the poems beat the bounds of a hidden England in streams and trees, on moors and in byres. Hughes appeared like Poor Tom on the heath, a civilized man tasting and testing the primitive facts; he appeared as Wodwo, a nosing wild man of the woods. The volume Wodwo appeared in 1967 and carried as its epigraph a quotation from Gawain and the Green Knight, and that deliberate affiliation is instructive. Like the art of Gawain, Hughes’s art is one of clear outline and inner richness. His diction is consonantal, and it snicks through the air like an efficient blade, marking and carving out fast definite shapes; but within those shapes, mysteries and rituals are hinted at. They are circles within which he conjures up presences.
Hughes’s vigour has much to do with this matter of consonants that take the measure of his vowels like calipers, or stud the line like rivets. ‘Everything is inheriting everything,’ as he says in one of his poems, and what he has inherited through Shakespeare and John Webster and Hopkins and Lawrence is something of that primary life of stress which is the quick of the English poetic matter. His consonants are the Norsemen, the Normans, the Roundheads in the world of his vocables, hacking and hedging and hammering down the abundance and luxury and possible lasciviousness of the vowels. ‘I imagine this midnight moment’s forest’ – the first line of the well-known ‘The Thought Fox’ – is hushed, but it is a hush achieved by the quelling, battening-down action of the m’s and d’s and t’s: I iMagine this MiDnighT MoMenT’s foresT. Hughes’s aspirations in these early poems is to command all the elements, to bring them within the jurisdiction of his authoritarian voice. And in ‘The Thought Fox’ the thing at the beginning of the poem which lives beyond his jurisdiction is characteristically fluid and vowelling and sibilant: ‘Something else is alive’ whispers of a presence not yet accounted for, a presence that is granted its full vowel music as its epiphany – ‘Something more near / Though deeper within darkness / Is entering the loneliness.’ It is granted this dilation of its mystery before it is conjured into the possession of the poet-warden, the vowel-keeper; and its final emergence in the fully sounded i’s and e’s of ‘an eye, / A widening deepening greenness,’ is gradually mastered by the braking action of ‘brilliantly, concentratedly’, and by the shooting of the monosyllabic consonantal bolts in the last stanza:
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.
Next a poem whose subject might be expected to woo the tender pious vowels from a poet rather than the disciplining consonants. About a ‘Fern’:
Here is the fern’s frond, unfurling a gesture,
The first line is an Anglo-Saxon line, four stresses, three of them picked out by alliteration; and although the frosty grip of those f’s thaws out, the fern is still subsumed into images of control and discipline and regal authority:
And, among them, the fern
Dances gravely, like the plume
Of a warrior returning, under the low hills,
Into his own kingdom.
But of course we recognize that Hughes’s ‘Thistles’ are vegetation more kindred to his spirit than the pliant fern. And when he turns his attention to them, they become reincarnations of the Norsemen in a poem entitled ‘The Warriors of the North’:
Bringing their frozen swords, their salt-bleached eyes, their salt-bleached hair,
The snow’s stupefied anvils in rows,
Bringing their envy,
The slow ships feelered Southward, snails over the steep sheen of the water-globe.
These are ‘The Warriors of the North’ as Hughes imagines them resurrected in all their arctic mail ‘into the iron arteries of Calvin’, and into ‘Thistles’. The thistles are emblems of the Hughes voice as I hear it, born of an original vigour, righting back over the same ground; and it is not insignificant that in this poem Hughes himself presents the thistles as images of a fundamental speech, uttering itself in gutturals from behind the sloped arms of consonants:
Every one a revengeful burst
Of resurrection, a grasped fistful
Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up
From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.
They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.
Every one manages a plume of blood.
Then they grow grey, like men.
Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear,
Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.
The gutturals of dialects, which Hughes here connects with the Nordic stratum of English speech, he pronounces in another place to be the germinal secret of his own voice. In an interview published in the London Magazine in January 1971 he said:
I grew up in West Yorkshire. They have a very distinctive dialect there. Whatever other speech you grow into, presumably your dialect stays alive in a sort of inner freedom, … it’s your childhood self there inside the dialect and that is possibly your real self or the core of it…. Without it, I doubt if I would ever have written verse. And in the case of the West Yorks
hire dialect, of course, it connects you directly and in your most intimate self to Middle English poetry.
In other words he finds that the original grain of his speech is a chip off the old block and that his work need not be a new planting but a new bud on an old bough. What other poet would have the boldness to entitle a collection Wodwo? Yet Gawain and the Green Knight, with its beautiful alliterating and illuminated form, its interlacing and trellising of natural life and mythic life, is probably closer in spirit to Hughes’s poetry than Hughes’s poetry is to that of his English contemporaries. Everything inherits everything – and Hughes is the rightful heir to this alliterative tradition, and to the cleaving simplicity of the Border ballad, which he elevates to the status of touchstone later in that same interview. He says that he started writing again in 1955:
The poems that set me off were odd pieces by Shapiro, Lowell, Merwin, Wilbur and Crowe Ransom. Crowe Ransom was the one who gave me a model I felt I could use. He helped me get my words into focus…. But this whole business of influences is mysterious…. And after all the campaigns to make it new you’re stuck with the fact that some of the Scots Border ballads still cut a deeper groove than anything written in the last forty years. Influences just seem to make it more and more unlikely that a poet will write what he alone could write.
What Hughes alone could write depended for its release on the discovery of a way to undam the energies of the dialect, to get a stomping ground for that inner freedom, to get that childhood self a disguise to roam at large in. Freedom and naturalness and homeliness are positives in Hughes’s critical vocabulary, and they are linked with both the authenticity of individual poets and the genius of the language itself. Speaking of Keith Douglas in 1964, Hughes could have been speaking of himself; of the way his language and his imagination alerted themselves when the hunt for the poem in the adult world became synonymous with the hunt for the animal in the world of childhood, the world of dialect:
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