Mathew Arnold (1822-1888)
The Study of Poetry
‘THE FUTURE of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry.’
We should conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom to conceive of it. We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in general men have assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry. Science, I say, will appear incomplete without it The day will come when we shall wonder at ourselves for having trusted to them, for having taken them seriously; and the more we perceive their hollowness, the more we shall prize ‘the breath and finer spirit of knowledge’ offered to us by poetry.
But if we conceive thus highly of the destinies of poetry, we must also set our standard for poetry high, since poetry, to be capable of fulfilling such high destinies, must be poetry of a high order of excellence.
www.bartleby.com/28/5.html
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
Poetry. Perhaps I can express more fully in verse ideas and emotions which run counter to the inert crystallized opinion- hard as a rock- which the vast body of men have vested interests in supporting. To cry out in a passionate poem that (for instance) the Supreme Mover or Movers, the Prime Force or Forces, must be either limited in power, unknowing or cruel- which is obvious enough, and has been for centuries- will cause them merely a shake of the head; but to put it in argumentative prose will make them sneer, or foam, and set all the literary contortionists jumping upon me, a harmless agnostic, as if I were a clamorous atheist, which in their crass illiteracy they seem to think is the same thing… If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone.
Life, pp 284-285 (1896)
For as long as I can remember my instinctive feeling has been to avoid the jeweled line in poetry as being effeminate.
Letter to Edmund Gosse (4 February 1919)
The business of the poet and novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things, and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things
Life, p.171 (1885)
To find beauty in ugliness is the province of the poet
Life, p.213 (1888)
Defamiliarization: A concept introduced by Viktor Shklovsky, an important member of the Russian School of Formalism. It is a translation of the Russian word ostranenie ¨making strange¨. To defamiliarize is to make fresh, new, strange, different what is familiar and known. Through defamiliarization the writer modifies the reader´s habitual perceptions by drawing attention to the artifice of the text. In his “Art as Technique” (1917) Shklovsky makes his point clear:
The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar, to increase the difficulty of length and perception, because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolongued. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object, the object is not important.
“It is important to realize that those elements which I include under the title of harshness (very new, very old, and very unusual words, periphrasis, inversion, oddities of syntax, imagery and sound) arise out of Hardy´s experimental and inventive approach to language in general.”
Isobel Grundy, Hardy´s Harshness (1980)
W. H. Auden calls Hardy´s vision “hawk like, a way of looking at life from a great height. To see the individual life related not only to the local social life of its time, but to the whole of human history… gives one both humility and self-confidence.”
To Philip Larkin, almost every poem by Hardy “has a little tune of its own… Immediately you begin a
Hardy poem your own inner response begins to rock in time with the poem´s rhythm.”
Further Reading: The Impercipient, The Darkling Thrush, Paying Calls
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
‘Poetry is speech framed ... to be heard for its own sake and interest
even over and above its interest of meaning.’
‘What (verses) I had written I burnt before I became a Jesuit (i. e. 1868) and resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless it were by the wish of my superiors; so for seven years I wrote nothing but two or three little presentation pieces which occasion called for.
Letters (1878)
But a third element was to assist in Hopkins' partially successful attempts to synthesise religious poetry with nature poetry: the insights of Johannes Duns Scotus, the medieval theologian( an Oxford scholar of the XIII th century). The 'official' philosopher of the Society of Jesus was Thomas Aquinas who held Aristotle's notion of 'universals' realised in individuals of species. The individual horse, for example, shares with other horses the universal quality of horse-ness. Duns Scotus emphasised rather the differentness of the individual - its thisness.(haeccitas) This may all seem a bit high-flown, but the significance to Hopkins was that Scotus' teaching enabled him to celebrate the specialness of things within a religious framework.
www.amen.org.uk
‘I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again.’ (Journal, July19, 1872. Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W.H. Gardner (1953).)
Further poems: Heaven Haven, Spring, Spring and Fall
Pound attempted to invest dynamic energy in the poetic image, which he said was not an idea but “a radiant node or cluster…a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly flowing.”
encarta.msn.com/enciclopedia
T.S. Eliot (1888–1965)
Tradition and the Individual Talent
….One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously….. The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.
…..No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism.
It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life…. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe that "emotion recollected in tranquillity" (William Worsworth) is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not "recollected," and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is "tranquil" only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him "personal." Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
"The Metaphysical Poets”
First published in the Times Literary Supplement, 20 October 1921.
Donne, and often Cowley, employ a device which is sometimes considered characteristically 'metaphysical'; the elaboration (contrasted with the condensation) of a figure of speech to the furthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it. Thus Cowley develops the commonplace comparison of the world to a chess-board through long stanzas ("To Destiny"), and Donne, with more grace, in "A Valediction," the comparison of two lovers to a pair of compasses.(The Metaphysical conceit)
The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It is something which had happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury (17th C) and the time of Tennyson and Browning (19th C); it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; m the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.We may express the difference by the following theory: The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience. In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden….. The Metaphysical poets in question have, like other poets, various faults. But they were, at best, engaged in the task of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling.
D. H. Auden
‘One demands two things of a poem. Firstly, it must be a well-made verbal object that does honor to the language in which it is written. Secondly, it must say something significant about a reality common to us all, but perceived from a unique perspective. What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.’