When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?
Now - October 2008 - is the 75th anniversary of the publication of the first surrealist poem in English, written by David Gascoyne. On the October eve (more or less) of "National Poetry Day" next week it seemed a good time to mention this.
Comments
David Gascoyne had at least several very worthwhile poems I think. The programmatically Surrealist poems are not some mess from the subconscious but arrangements of imagery as clear as in any more realist poem. “Salvador Dali”, for example – OK, the title announces loudly where it’s coming from – has the sharp contours of Dali’s paintings. It begins:
The face of the precipice is black with lovers;
The sun above them is a bag of nails…
I’m a bit put off by the late Romantic poet-as-visionary Latinate/abstract style of quite a lot of Gascoyne. But beside the Surrealist stuff, he also wrote a number of poems that really get everything working to say something about (at least) the time they were written in, such as this one, datelined Christmas 1938:
Snow in Europe
Out of their slumber Europeans spun
Dense dreams: appeasement, miracle, glimpsed flash
Of a new golden era; but could not restrain
The vertical white weight that fell last night
And made their continent a blank.
Hush, says the sameness of the snow,
The Ural and Jura now rejoin
The furthest Arctic's desolation. All is one;
Sheer monotone: plain, mountain; country, town:
Contours and boundaries no longer show.
The warring flags hang colourless a while;
Now midnight's icy zero feigns a truce
Between the signs and seasons, and fades out
All shots and cries. But when the great thaw comes,
How red shall be the melting snow, how loud the drums!
Cheers
Alistair
I'm curious - what is it about the late Romantic - and abstract - style you mention, that puts you off? I'm genuinely interested in this issue, since I think this taste/style issue helps to keep readers away from the later modernist poetry of the period (of the Forties); is it partly due to the lack of Pound's imagistic clarity?
Some of the '40's poets can seem a bit like that - Mervyn Peake could go over the top for instance - and it makes it harder to see the ironies and distances put into the verse. There's a line from Nicholas Moore - "Shall I make my disasters clear?" which sounds like it's about to get all pompous and high falutin' in a rather bathetic way. It never does, but it sails pretty close to the wind.
I think, though, we have a tendency to go too far in the other direction - toward a plainness of style that can be terribly non-commital. There's something much more commited about a Gascoyne poem or a Moore poem that rubs up against that terribly English empiricist cynicism were all supposed to espouse.