The Poet and His Reader

The highly esoteric quality of much contemporary art has been shown by Herbert Read to arise from the fact that the artist (the painter, the sculptor, the poet) has no distinct position or function in contemporary society.[1]  If the poet has no such position he will tend to feel no responsibility towards society: he will be encouraged to pursue a solitary course, to sharpen his pen to his own liking or to suit the coterie that values his work; his work, unless the shadow of hunger pursue him closely, may well become unintelligible to ‘the common man’.  Why, he may ask, should the poet attempt to make himself intelligible to a public which is not prepared to inform its reading with intelligence and sympathy?  Mr. Charles Morgan has given a wholesome directive: “Give the artist freedom that he may discover.”  But recognising that that in itself is not enough, that the reader has also a positive responsibility towards the writer, he continues: “Preserve yourselves in freedom that you may receive and re-create.”[2]

Reading may be used as a soporific or as an anodyne.  But there is another kind of reading that is creative and rewarding; sometimes it is strenuous, almost as exacting as the process of composition.  It is vital that reading be regarded as an art.  A reader who shirks difficulty, who begrudges sympathy, who is prepared to take no intellectual risks, should recognise his limitations: he should not use those limitations as an excuse for abusing works which he is not willing to meet on their own ground.  The reading of poetry is somehow different from the reading of a seed catalogue: and unless this fact is widely recognised poetry cannot fulfil any organic function in society.  Without the right reader the good poem is as a pebble dropped in a well or a gunshot in a deserted place.  Poetry cannot flourish without good readers of poetry.

Musicians draw a distinction between listening and hearing.  In the one case the listener is in a certain mood, his attention focussed in a special way.  Merely to allow music to assail the ear and to set the mechanism of hearing into action is to hear but not necessarily to listen.  Most people would readily accept this distinction; but it is less generally accepted that a similar degree of attention and an analogous mood are required in the reading of poetry if the poetry is to exercise upon the reader the whole of its power.  The reader of a poem is seeking to discover, not the ‘meaning’ of the poem, not the poet’s character or feeling, not even the idée génétrice from which the poem sprang, but the poem itself.  The reading of poetry is an intensely creative activity growing out of a passive-receptive mood; and the intensity of this activity is a function of the breadth of the reader’s sympathies, the flexibility and range of his intelligence, and the acuteness and delicacy of his perceptions.

It is impossible satisfactorily to define poetry.  Either the definition will be so narrow as to exclude writings which we insisted upon calling ‘poetry’; or else it becomes so inclusive as to be virtually meaningless.  There is no single concrete criterion or set of standards whereby we can state beyond argument that ‘This is poetry’ or ‘This is not poetry’.  The presence of recurrent metrical pattern, of a certain kind of subject-matter, of a certain kind of diction is no reliable indication.  And the reader who, for example, condemns vers libre as being ‘merely prose’ throws a more revealing light upon himself than upon the poem; to condemn a work for not being what its creator never intended it to be is a frivolous and irrelevant judgement.

Although we cannot define poetry, we can say in general terms what the poet’s aim is, what his attitude of mind is and what devices he uses to achieve his purpose.  We can even say what poetry is not – provided we are careful not to complete a misleading equation which we shall notice presently.

The antithesis of poetry is not prose, but science.  Poetry and science, though antithetical, are not antagonistic: they are complementary, both trying to discover and reveal truth.  Poetry may entertain; science may in its more detailed reaches concern itself with matters of material or ephemeral achievement: but sooner or later both poetry and science are judged in terms of truth, in the light of the central preoccupations of the human soul.  The distinction between poetry and science is to be found, not in different of subject-matter, nor ultimately in difference of aim, but in the different ways in which their results are stated and confirmed.

The starting-point of a scientific discovery is the discovery itself.  The scientist first perceives his conclusion by some act analogous to direct vision; he then goes back and shores up his conclusion by showing its logical connection with facts already known or agreed upon.  The poet also sees a vision; he too is convinced of its truth.  But, unlike the scientist, he does not confine himself to the limited mode of logic in establishing his vision.  He is ill-advised to ignore logic, but he also uses a number of other resources which the scientist avoids because their effect cannot be determined with any accuracy.  These resources combine to form what has been called ‘the logic of poetry’ or ‘the logic of imagination’ – a system of wider application than former logic, though, once accepted, no less coherent in itself.  The poet is concerned to present his vision rather than to explain it; and yet the explanation is often implicit in the poem.  Whereas the scientist’s exposition is necessarily processive, the poet’s presentation tends to be as immediate and instantaneous as the processive nature of language will allow.  The poet accepts the fact that the highest human truths can be perceived only by an act analogous to direct vision, that these truths lie beyond the farthest limit of logic; that because of the limitations or logic and of human expression the greatest truths can be expressed only indirectly or in paradox.  The poet has implicit faith in his vision, knowing that it can be verified only by experience, by living, by wisdom, and not purely by reason.  The reader must have a corresponding faith in the poet and in his mode of presentation, otherwise he will stop before he has seen what the poet is trying to show.  The difficulty encountered by the reader will correspond to the difficulty inherent in the poet’s problem of presenting his vision.

It is misleading to say that the poet is ‘emotional’ and the scientist ‘rational’.  The scientist, it is true, avoids emotion in his work and prevents it from entering into his expression – not because there is anything particularly ‘wrong’ with emotion, but because he can neither control its force nor measure its effect.  Certainly the scientist is rational: it is one of the rules of his game that he should submit himself to the rigorous discipline of logical connections.  The poet, on the other hand, writing in terms of experience and not exclusively in terms of thought, is constantly being driven back upon (or forward to) emotion.  This does not mean, however, that the poet is either irrational, or even ‘emotional’ in the generally accepted sense of that word.  A very slight reading of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne and Milton will show that intellect of a high order is required in a poet.  But emotion is the principal source of power upon which the poet can draw, in order to carry himself and the reader beyond the upper limit of logic.

The intellectual power of both the scientist and the poet expresses itself in a consuming passion for precision.  The difference of aim and result between the scientist’s precision and the poet’s is revealing.  The scientist’s precision is a defining precision, a whittling away of all alternatives and ambiguities so that the mind is inevitably guided to the conclusion.  The poet’s vision is of such a kind that it cannot be wholly grasped by the mind: it must also be felt, or experienced.  That experience involves the action and interaction of intellect and emotion, and culminates in a state of vision.  The poet’s precision is directed towards achieving this complex experience.  The precision is used to focus the attention, to establish a mood, to open up vistas of thought and feeling, to lead the reader into the desired area of experience.  The scientist seeks to focus the mind into a given channel: the poet seeks to focus the whole person into that state of heightened receptivity, of intense attention from which alone the reader can move forward into the sphere of lofty experience to which all men, theoretically at least, have access, but which it is the peculiar prerogative of the poet to illuminate.

It is well now to notice that, for the sake of convenience, we have spoken as though the poet were consciously concerned to communicate his vision.  Whether or not the poet should take his reader into consideration is a hotly disputed point.  From the practical point of view, the poet in the act of composition can have no regard for his reader: he can only work at his poem until he feels that it is ‘right’ irrespective of any reader, real or imaginary.  “I never wrote one single Line of Poetry”, Keats told his friend Reynolds, “with the least Shadow of public thought.”[3]

So far we have considered the differences between the poet and the scientist, and the difference in their methods of working.  Now we must consider poetry.  Unfortunately we cannot discover by negative inference what poetry is, because there is no mode of expression precisely antithetical to poetry.  If we could say ‘Prose is the mode of expression of science’ we could set up prose as the antithesis of poetry.  But this is clearly not the case.  It is true that at one end of the range of prose we find a mode of expression antithetical to poetry – the exposition of scientific argument and proof in non-metrical and syllogistic form.  But this will not serve as a definition of what most people mean by prose: or if it does we shall have to find another word to indicate the other kinds of writing, other than scientific exposition, which we normally do call prose.  In fact the scope of prose extends in an unbroken line from the scientific extreme described into the realm of poetry; and it is impossible to mark along that line a point at which prose ceases to be prose and becomes poetry.  As the writer introduces more and more elements of rhetoric, as he gradually dispenses with the strict defining precision of the scientist, as he uses his words with greater emotional and rhythmical concentration, so his prose approaches more and more nearly to poetry.  If any distinction were possible it would perhaps turn upon the principle that any piece of writing which is primarily rooted in reason and precision is prose; but this distinction is of more help in deciding how well a piece of prose fulfils its purpose than in deciding what is prose and what is poetry.  The fact that the two modes are inextricably interwoven merely reflects the diversity of the tasks to which prose is set.

Since prose and poetry are not antithetical modes of expression it would not comfort us, in this context, to be able to draw a precise distinction between them.  The reader may find passages of poetry embedded in what he might be forced to describe, on technical grounds, as prose.  That cannot be helped.  A reader’s ability to strike to the heart of a particular piece of writing does not turn upon his ability to classify the writing.  All that is required of the reader is that he will not read a poem as though it were a scientific treatise.  By some means or other he will decide whether or not the passage he is reading requires of him that full awareness of his senses, mind and feelings without which poetry cannot touch him: and he will adjust the degree of his awareness to suite the requirements of the poem.  The poet generally sees to it that the reader will be able to tell at a glance what degree of attention is needed: he sets out his work in a typographical form which, whatever its pattern, cannot be mistaken for ‘ordinary prose’.  Typography is a good rough guide: the fact that the writing is set out in a deliberate or patterned form is a signal to the reader that he must fix his attention, open his ears and his mind, and be prepared to let all the resources of the poet’s art induce in him an experience of some complexity.

If we outline the qualities we expect to find, in some combination, in poetry, we shall be able to consider the degree and kind of attention required in the reading of poetry.  These qualities may be taken as being: intensity, sincerity, aptness, delicacy, intellectual fibre (implicit rather than explicit); and finally – a quality which is probably a combination of all these when allied with flawless technique – incandescence, the indefinable white living fire which, in the greatest poetry, transcends every single thing in the poem, transcends even the poet and the feeling from which the poem sprang.  It will be noticed that none of these qualities can be produced by any purely technical or external means.       

The process of poetic composition is so complex that we must be careful in analysing it not to lose sight of the fact that we are over-simplifying, that we are making static and independent certain elements whose power depends upon their motion and their action upon one another.  It is impossible, for example, to discuss intelligently ‘the technique of poetry’ unless we make important reservations.  That great poetry demands in its execution extreme technical acumen cannot be denied.  But if we attempt to perform five-finger exercises in the poetic mode we are not in fact writing in a poetic mode at all, because the technical exercise, from its very nature, will remain a technical exercise and can seldom if ever become a poem.  Whatever happens in the process of composition, the finished poem is a compound of idea, sound, meaning, emotion, intellect so interrelated that any attempt to analyse it into constituent elements can end only in the annihilation of the poem.  Very often the idea is sound, the meaning is emotion; and no process of analysis can separate these various elements distinctly.  Provided that we recognise this fact and do not make the mistake of thinking of the resources of poetry as a bag of tricks from which the poet makes a conscious or arbitrary selection to suit his peculiar purpose, it is helpful to consider the various devices the poet uses to achieve his end.  We must further remember that in the process of composition the poet is frequently unconscious of the devices he is using; and that, in general, the more consciously he applies any device the less convincing it is likely to be.

The poet writes with words.  The reader, familiar with words in speech and in casual reading, is not necessarily prepared for the way a poet uses words.  The poet’s problem is to express through the medium of words truths, moods, visions which are ultimately inexpressible in words.  He cannot, therefore, like the scientist, go straight for his subject; he must use words in such a way that they will carry the reader beyond the normal minimal meanings of words.  He possesses what Mr. T. S. Eliot calls “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, seeking the beginning and the end.  It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meaning in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and obliterated and the trite, the current, and the new and surprising, the most ancient and the most civilized mentality.[4]

With this faculty the poet uses words in such a manner that their meaning and their sound will evoke other meanings and sounds, and so that these upper partials of meaning and sound will form fresh chords of evocation.  It is largely to this end that the poet’s care in the choice and arrangement of words is directed; for some words have the power to evoke emotion as well as meaning, the power of evocation resting sometimes in the sound of the word, sometimes in its association with other words, ideas, feelings, situations; and words change meaning according to their context.  The poet can never predict exactly what chain of evocation his particular choice and arrangement of words and sounds will produce in a reader: that is why he does himself no good to consider the reader while he is composing.  But his words will be subjected to the same limitations of syntax as normal language, otherwise his poetry may become so esoteric as to be meaningless and sterile.  The absence of any precise means of measuring the evocative power of words explains why further analysis of this resource of poetry is fruitless, and why the poet has to do much of his work in an intuitive and partly subconscious manner.

The music of words has already been mentioned: it is a powerful resource.  Rhyme, though not an essential element, is an additional musical device, and can achieve emphasis, pungency and finality.  Metrical patterns may also be introduced either as an artistic limitation, a factor of resistance to induce form, or as a further resource to subserve and point the complex ‘meaning’ of the poem.  Rhythm is not, however, restricted to recurrent patterns.  That species of rhythm called speech-rhythm or prose-rhythm, which does not rely upon a recurring pattern but grows organically with the development of the poem, can achieve effects of great subtlety, fluency and emphasis.  The choice of metre is the one decision which the poet can make arbitrarily; but he is unwise to do so.  If form means anything at all it cannot be separated from its material: every ‘idea’ has a form inherent in it.  If the poet does not respect the inherent form he may well do violence to, or even destroy, his material.  In the reader, any prejudice regarding the use of strict metrical forms cannot but hamper and limit him: the reader cannot possibly know what form the poem should be in until he knows what the poem is.

Further, the poet in his deliberate and concentrated use of words may avail himself of the resources of imagery, symbolism and metaphor.  (Again, we are over-simplifying: these ‘resources’ are aspects of a particular mode of poetical thought).  These help to produce a high degree of intensity, and at the same time leave the way open for the fruitful development of chains of evoked meanings, sounds, ideas, feelings.  It is a form of shorthand: if the symbols and figures are of a certain appropriateness and significance, closely linked with the fundamentals of human experience, they can be far more powerful in pointing the vision than an extended account of connections could be.  These rhetorical devices are of special value in solving the poet’s problem of presenting an instantaneous vision in a processive mode (the words being spread out along a time-base).  Their rightness and directness help the poet to achieve clarity and immediateness of impression.  Generally speaking, the poet does not undertake a direct discussion of universals; he usually works from the particular to the universal, by stating the particular and implying or evoking the universal.  Hence William Blake’s angry remark: “To generalize is to be an idiot: to particularize is the greatest distinction of merit.”  The reader’s attention is sharply focused upon the particular; at the same time, by allowing his mind and emotions to flow into the region evoked and created by the poet, he sees without further explanation the meaning, the value of the particular upon which the poet has centred his attention.

Croce and Spingarn describe the function of literary criticism in the following terms:

To criticize is to understand and interpret as fully as possible the urge of creative energy that produced [the poem]; to live again the stages of its development; to partake of the impulses and intentions with which it is still pregnant.  [Cazamian]

The creative energy can, theoretically at least, transcend any material whatever, any subject-matter; and in expressing itself it can use all the resources of meaning, sound, rhythm, rhetoric.  The reader seeks to discover the poem, and must be prepared to concentrate his attention, to achieve that state in which all the faculties required in the sensitive response to all the poet’s resources can function freely.

Poetry is a distinct mode of expression, with its own peculiar purpose, scope and resources.  What the poet is saying cannot be adequately expressed in any other medium, whether music, painting, sculpture, science or philosophy.  We are inclined, through our familiarity with words, to forget that in reading poetry we are attending to a very distant and difficult medium.  That does not mean that the reading of poetry is only for an intellectual minority, but rather that it must be undertaken in a special way if the response to the reading is not to be extremely limited.  The number of people capable of a full response to poetry is necessarily small: but one function of criticism is not only to extend the range of response in the individual reader, but also to increase the number of readers capable of a sensitive response to poetry.

We should think of poetry as though it were a kind of music: not because poetry is music, nor because sound is the principal resource of poetry, but so that we may remember its difference from ordinary speech and ordinary writing, so that we may remember its inaccessibility.  A poem is a fragment of human experience, in a universal rather than biographical or historical sense.  The reader’s task and pleasure is to recreate and relive that fragment of experience.  In order to do so he must be something of a connoisseur, taking delight in minute shades of sound, meaning and rhythm; but he will also bring to his reading faculties delicately attuned and eagerly responsive so that the whole wealth of his own experience will inform and enrich the poem.  The reader will reach out to meet the poet.  At the same time he will be passive, he will be still.  Then and only then can the poem come to full flower in his soul.

We have been concerned with poems and reading, rather than with metaphysics.  If the description of a good poem and a good reader is still lacking, we need go no farther than a statement of Robert Frost’s: “The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound – that he will never get over it.”