To make this claim is not to suggest that Muir consciously did what I say he did. Nor is it to deny the Tightness of MacDiarmid’s procedures or the largeness of his achievements. MacDiarmid’s was obviously a volcanic genius, more lavish, more impassioned and renegade, and far more influential in the literary and political history of Scotland than Muir’s. To make the claim is rather to state a supplementary truth. I would say that as the old sureties are leached from Europe’s vernacular cultures, east and west, as a new permeability and capacity for absorption develops in their hitherto self-absorbed art and politics, Muir’s simultaneous at-homeness and abroadness becomes exemplary and his work more and more deserves to be re-read and remembered.
Verse, vol. 6, no. 1, March 1989
from The Redress of Poetry
Professors of poetry, apologists for it, practitioners of it, from Sir Philip Sidney to Wallace Stevens, all sooner or later are tempted to show how poetry’s existence as a form of art relates to our existence as citizens of society – how it is ‘of present use’. Behind such defences and justifications, at any number of removes, stands Plato, calling into question whatever special prerogatives or useful influences poetry would claim for itself within the polis. Yet Plato’s world of ideal forms also provides the court of appeal through which poetic imagination seeks to redress whatever is wrong or exacerbating in the prevailing conditions. Moreover, ‘useful’ or ‘practical’ responses to those same conditions are derived from imagined standards too: poetic fictions, the dream of alternative worlds, enable governments and revolutionaries as well. It’s just that governments and revolutionaries would compel society to take on the shape of their imagining, whereas poets are typically more concerned to conjure with their own and their readers’ sense of what is possible or desirable or, indeed, imaginable. The nobility of poetry, says Wallace Stevens, ‘is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without’. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.
Stevens, as he reaches this conclusion in his essay ‘The Noble Rider and the Sounds of Words’, is anxious to insist that his own words are intended to be more than merely sonorous, and his anxiety is understandable. It is as if he were imagining and responding to the outcry of some disaffected heckler in the crowd of those whom Tony Harrison calls ‘the rhubarbarians’, one crying out against the mystification of art and its appropriation by the grandees of aesthetics. ‘In our time’, the heckler protests, echoing something he has read somewhere, ‘the destiny of man presents itself in political terms.’ And in his understanding, and in the understanding of most people who protest against the ascription to poetry of any metaphysical force, those terms are going to derive from the politics of subversion, of redressal, of affirming that which is denied voice. Our heckler, in other words, will want poetry to be more than an imagined response to conditions in the world; he or she will urgently want to know why it should not be an applied art, harnessed to movements which attempt to alleviate those conditions by direct action.
The heckler, therefore, is going to have little sympathy with Wallace Stevens when he declares the poet to be a potent figure because the poet ‘creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it, and … gives life to the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of [that world]’ – meaning that if our given experience is a labyrinth, its impassability can still be countered by the poet’s imagining some equivalent of the labyrinth and presenting himself and us with a vivid experience of it. Such an operation does not intervene in the actual but by offering consciousness a chance to recognize its predicaments, foreknow its capacities and rehearse its comebacks in all kinds of venturesome ways, it does constitute a beneficent event, for poet and audience alike. It offers a response to reality which has a liberating and verifying effect upon the individual spirit, and yet I can see how such a function would be deemed insufficient by a political activist. For the activist, there is going to be no point in envisaging an order which is comprehensive of events but not in itself productive of new events. Engaged parties are not going to be grateful for a mere image – no matter how inventive or original – of the field of force of which they are a part. They will always want the redress of poetry to be an exercise of leverage on behalf of their point of view; they will require the entire weight of the thing to come down on their side of the scales.
So, if you are an English poet at the Front during the First World War, the pressure will be on you to contribute to the war effort, preferably by dehumanizing the face of the enemy. If you are an Irish poet in the wake of the 1916 executions, the pressure will be to revile the tyranny of the executing power. If you are an American poet at the height of the Vietnam War, the official expectation will be for you to wave the flag rhetorically. In these cases, to see the German soldier as a friend and secret sharer, to see the British government as a body who might keep faith, to see the South-East Asian expedition as an imperial betrayal, to do any of these things is to add a complication where the general desire is for a simplification.
Such countervailing gestures frustrate the common expectation of solidarity, but they do have political force. Their very power to exacerbate is one guarantee of their effectiveness. They are particular instances of a law which Simone Weil announced with typical extremity and succinctness in her book Gravity and Grace. She writes there:
If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale … we must have formed a conception of equilibrium and be ever ready to change sides like justice, ‘that fugitive from the camp of conquerors’.
Clearly, this corresponds to deep structures of thought and feeling derived from centuries of Christian teaching and from Christ’s paradoxical identification with the plight of the wretched. And in so far as poetry is an extension and refinement of the mind’s extreme recognitions, and of language’s most unexpected apprehensions, it too manifests the workings of Weil’s law.
‘Obedience to the force of gravity. The greatest sin.’ So Simone Weil also writes in Gravity and Grace. Indeed her whole book is informed by the idea of counterweighting, of balancing out the forces, of redress – tilting the scales of reality towards some transcendent equilibrium. And in the activity of poetry too, there is a tendency to place a counter-reality in the scales – a reality which may be only imagined but which nevertheless has weight because it is imagined within the gravitational pull of the actual and can therefore hold its own and balance out against the historical situation. This redressing effect of poetry comes from its being a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances …
*
Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world. And while this may seem something of a truism, it is nevertheless worth repeating in a late-twentieth-century context of politically approved themes, post-colonial backlash and ‘silence-breaking’ writing of all kinds. In these circumstances, poetry is understandably pressed to give voice to much that has hitherto been denied expression in the ethnic, social, sexual and political life. Which is to say that its power as a mode of redress in the first sense – as agent for proclaiming and correcting injustices – is being appealed to constantly. But in discharging this function, poets are in danger of slighting another imperative, namely, to redress poetry as poetry, to set it up as its own category, an eminence established and a pressure exercised by distinctly linguistic means …
*
The OED has four entries for ‘redress’ as a noun, and I began by calling upon the first sense which it provides: ‘Reparation of, satisfaction or compensation for, a wrong sustained or the loss resulting from this.’ For ‘redress’ as a verb the dictionary gives fifteen separate entries, all of them subdivided two or three times, and almost all of the usages noted as obsolete. I have also taken account of the first of these obso
lete meanings, which is given as, ‘To set (a person or a thing) upright again; to raise again to an erect position. Also fig. to set up again, restore, re-establish.’
But in following these rather sober extensions of the word, in considering poetry’s possible service to programmes of cultural and political realignment, or in reaffirming poetry as an upright, resistant, and self-bracing entity within the general flux and flex of language, I don’t want to give the impression that its force must always be exercised in earnest, morally premeditated ways. On the contrary, I want to profess the surprise of poetry as well as its reliability; I want to celebrate its given, unforeseeable thereness, the way it enters our field of vision and animates our physical and intelligent being in much the same way as those bird-shapes stencilled on the transparent surfaces of glass walls or windows must suddenly enter the vision and change the direction of the real birds’ flight. In a flash the shapes register and transmit their unmistakable presence, so the birds veer off instinctively. An image of the living creatures has induced a totally salubrious swerve in the creatures themselves. And this natural, heady diversion is also something induced by poetry and reminds me of a further (obsolete) meaning of ‘redress’, with which I would conclude, a meaning which comes in entry 4 of the verb, subsection (b): ‘Hunting. To bring back (the hounds or deer) to the proper course.’ In this ‘redress’ there is no hint of ethical obligation; it is more a matter of finding a course for the breakaway of innate capacity, a course where something unhindered, yet directed, can sweep ahead into its full potential.
Oxford Lectures, October 1989; pamphlet, Oxford University Press, 1990
from Extending the Alphabet: Christopher Marlowe
It will soon be the 400th anniversary of the death by stabbing of Christopher Marlowe at a tavern in Deptford. The minutes of the coroner’s inquest tell how he and three other men spent the afternoon of 30 May 1593 ‘in quiet sort’ in a room of the inn, and how after supper a dispute arose about the bill – the famous ‘reckoning’. Marlowe is then said to have made a sudden attack on one of his companions, a character called Ingram Friser, who fought back and killed the poet with his knife in self-defence.
The story has always had a slightly sinister feel to it, something to do with the mystery that hangs over those four companions withdrawn quietly out of the early summer day, the stealth of their privacy, the hovering possibility of underhand exchanges or undercover deeds. And, of course, the fascination of the event was every bit as potent for Marlowe’s contemporaries, for it did not escape their notice that the whole thing had been vaguely foreshadowed in the dramatist’s own writing. At the conclusion of his play Doctor Faustus, for example, the Chorus speaks these famous lines which combine the inexorability of high poetry with the melodrama of popular preaching:
Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burnèd is Apollo’s laurel-bough,
That sometime grew within this learned man.
Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall,
Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise,
Only to wonder at unlawful things,
Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits
To practice more than heavenly power permits.
Given the disconsolate note of this passage and its significant placing as the curtain line of the play, it is no wonder that it was read as Marlowe’s own self-epitaph and was seized upon after his murder in much the same way as the late poems of Sylvia Plath were seized upon after her suicide. Both deaths made sensational news and resulted in the poets becoming legendary figures: their tragic ends were seen to have been implicit in their writings all along. Preachers even rigged the Marlowe knifing so that it presented an instructive symmetry; they gave out that the dagger that killed him had been his own and that the fatal wound had been in his head, the very seat of the talent which had made him one of those damnably ‘forward wits’. It was only to be expected, therefore, that the Chorus’s lament for an overweening intellectual cut off in his prime should have been understood afterwards as a sort of prediction. To a hot-breathed public, high on murder gossip that carried with it the mingled whiff of religious, sexual and political scandal, the note of doom was not only audible: it was ominous and prophetic of Marlowe’s fate.
The fate, moreover, had been predicted by others besides himself. Robert Greene’s death-bed pamphlet, Greene’s Groats worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance, had been written nine months before Marlowe was stabbed at Deptford. The pamphlet is most famous for its attack on Shakespeare, but before Greene takes his side-swipe at the ‘upstart crow’, he has already warned a number of his peers about their own destinies, and although he does not use Marlowe’s name, there is no doubt that the ‘tragedian’ being singled out in his deeply minatory address is indeed the same scandalous, atheistical, and morally reprehensible university wit, associate of Sir Walter Raleigh and student of the School of Night. Marlowe’s intellectual effrontery, in other words, had been enough to put the wind up a man on his death-bed, and take a repentant sinner’s mind off his own predicament – which is to say that the figure Marlowe cut in the minds of his contemporaries in the late 1580s and early 1590s was utterly exciting. The carouser who had been gaoled for a couple of weeks after being on the spot at a fatal street-fight, the university student who had tasted the thrills of espionage among the Catholic recusants of Reims, the blasphemer who seemed to be out to break every taboo and to transgress extravagantly in the realms of both religion and sex – this figure, a star in his late twenties, a kind of cross between Oscar Wilde and Jack the Ripper, moved in an aura of glamorous immorality and political danger and was so riveting and marked that the dying Greene felt free to finger him as the next to go.
And, of course, the danger was not just an aura. Atheism and blasphemy could be as fatal in late-sixteenth-century London as anti-revolutionary sympathies were in Moscow in the 1930s. Marlowe was denounced to the Privy Council, and the depositions of the informers have survived. Even if they are perused with the suspicion that such documents always warrant, they still conjure up the image of a man operating at full tilt, both exhilarated and inflammatory. The whole performance was one of great daring, and the reports of it still transmit something of its original subversive headiness, partly exhibitionistic, partly intellectually driven, but altogether inevitable and unstoppable.
In Marlowe’s case, therefore, as in Plath’s, the daring of the work and the transgressions which it encompassed were the first things to be emphasized in the aftermath of their deaths. Its ironies and complications were relatively neglected; what got highlighted were the points where it conformed to current expectations generated by the extreme behaviour of the writer. In Plath’s case, the image of victimized woman was immediately in place as a consequence of her tragic suicide; in Marlowe’s, it was the image of the sinner’s fall, of divine retribution for blasphemous presumptions. In each instance, the work was read with more regard to what the posthumously created stereotype might have been expected to produce than what the writer actually delivered. Doctor Faustus, for example, was regarded for a very long time as a casebook of humanist ‘overreaching’ before it was reconsidered as an anatomy of Christian despair. And Plath was celebrated as the author of the vindictive ‘Daddy’ and the morgue-cold ‘Edge’ whilst other more positively inspired works were ignored.
It is hardly news to be reminded of all this. Original poets can obviously sustain a variety of interpretations and answer to very different times and needs. What remains mysterious, however, is the source of that original strength, the very fact of poetic power itself, the way its unpredictablity gets converted into inevitability once it has manifested itself, the way a generation recognizes that they are in the presence of one of the great unfettered events which constitute a definite stage in the history of poetry. It is the manifestation of this power in Marlowe’s verse, in the first language-life of the poetry itself, that I wish to praise. If I begin by acknowl
edging that the conditions of a poet’s reception and the history of subsequent responses to his or her work do indeed become a part of the work’s force and meaning, it is only to indicate that I am as aware as the next person that the import of poetry is affected by several different agencies. But I remain convinced by what my own reading experience tells me: namely, that some works transmit an immediately persuasive signal and retain a unique staying power over a lifetime. Some works continue to combine the sensation of liberation with that of consolidation; having once cleared a new space on the literary and psychic ground, they go on to offer, at each re-reading, the satisfaction of a foundation being touched and the excitement of an energy being released.
I couldn’t have put it that way when I first heard Professor Terence Spencer read from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. I was then a First Arts student at Queen’s University, Belfast, sharing the benches of a lecture hall with others like me, the wary, needy sons and daughters of 1950s Ulster, all of us recent escapees from the sixth-form grind. Rumour had it that the professor had been a Shakespearean actor, which in itself was enough to engender a mood of anticipation. Certainly, when he appeared, he wasn’t into playing down the drive and flourish of the big lines. He stalked to the podium, adjusted his gown, profiled himself a little theatrically and pitched into the prologue to Tamburlaine like a long-jumper going for the record:
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