In Joseph Conrad’s marvellous short story “Typhoon,” reality teems with “everyday, eloquent facts, such as islands, sand-banks, reefs, swift and changeable currents—tangled facts that nevertheless speak to a seaman in clear and definite language.” Even a desert island won’t be alien and voiceless to someone acquainted with the flora and fauna of that region and knowing what to look for even before his raft beaches on the sand. (“No sharks in the lagoon.... an animal trail into the jungle... fresh water nearby, probably....”) The island speaks to him. It is charged with meaning. Take also William Faulkner’s hunters in his masterful novella ‘The Bear’, looking for the smallest clues in the natural world to orientate themselves. And this is, at root, what the writer’s doing - using the meaning of the physical world to anchor his place within it. And, the more experience he acquires, the more he takes up ownership of it, as the hunter or fisherman does when he ‘reads’ the landscape.
The poet WH Auden was another artist who delighted in rigidly-applied aesthetic rules, and felt there were enough perfectly good ones around without him having to concoct a set of his own like Hemingway. Auden was in absolutely no doubt that he was in sole charge of his world, and writing poetry was a construction project with rules as strict as any to be found on a building site:
Between the ages of six and twelve, I spent many hours of my time constructing a highly elaborate private world of my own based on, first of
all, a landscape, the limestone moors of the Pennines; and secondly, an
industry - lead mining. Now I found in doing this, I had to make certain
rules for myself, I could choose between two machines necessary to do a
job, but they had to be real ones I could find in catalogues. I could decide
between two ways of draining a mine, but I wasn’t allowed to use magical
means. Then there came a day which later on, looking back, seems
very important. I was planning my idea of the concentrating mill - you
know, the Platonic idea of what it should be. There were two kinds of
machinery for separating the slime, one I thought more beautiful than the
other, but the other one I knew to be more efficient. I felt myself faced
with what I can only call a moral choice - it was my duty to take the
second and more efficient one. Later, I realised, in constructing this
world which was only inhabited by me, I was already beginning to learn
how poetry is written.
There’s the writer once again creating a world for himself and his art, albeit at a precociously early age.Yet for the rest of his life, Auden would always see the writing of poetry as this same technical process he identified when a boy growing up in the no-nonsense county of Yorkshire; informed by inspiration, yes, but at root, a technical endeavour. And not only that, but a moral technical endeavour, as if anything that wasn’t “efficient” was somehow sinful. In this, of course, he closely resembles Hemingway. And notice what kind of world he was drawn to create: not one peopled with fantastic characters and sweeping mythic vistas you might normally expect from a child - old Wynstan was busy building lead mines that needed pumping out. And he wasn’t going to invent some miraculous machine that would just somehow do it - he wanted one that worked. And a reliable one at that. So it didn’t have to be pretty. On this showing, it’s amazing he became a writer and not a civil engineer.
So, in later life, it maybe isn’t surprising to find he wasn’t a great fan of free verse. He viewed this as originating in a schoolboy-like aversion to discipline.
Not only couldn’t he understand this tendency, he considered the aesthetic goals of free verse illusory. After all, he said;
If one plays a game, one needs rules, otherwise there is no fun. The
wildest poem has to have a firm basis in common sense, and this, I think, is the advantage of formal verse. Aside from the obvious corrective advantages,
formal verse frees one from the fetters of one’s ego. . . At any given time, I have two things on my mind: a theme that interests me and a problem of verbal form, meter, diction, etc. The theme looks for the right form: the form looks for the right theme. When the two come together I am able to start writing.”
This vision of the impulse to poetry is seemingly paradoxical on two levels - 1) Auden’s freeing himself by obeying rules. And 2) by using these rules, he’s consciously taking control of his artistic representation of the world while claiming to be writing himself out of the equation; meaning’s having a conversation with form which doesn’t include him.
So while Auden looks like he’s out there on the left of our Meaning Line with the first of those paradoxes, he’s actually edging rightwards with the second. In truth, like most writers, he’s being tugged both ways, but it is nevertheless wholly clear that his conception of how art works begins left of centre. And it’s his concept of efficiency that betrays his overriding need for the writer to have complete control over his material. And it’s ultimately, I suppose, of no real consequence whether these rules are consciously or unconsciously sought or applied, even though it would make our argument a little neater. What Auden had to convince himself is that by the time he’d finished his poem, he could detect as little ambiguity in it as possible. When discussing the ‘Prefaces’ of Henry James he noted, "there are times when their tone of hushed reverence before the artistic mystery becomes insufferable, and one would like to give . . . [him] a good shaking". One could never envisage the blunt Yorkshireman abasing himself before something he couldn’t make his own. Let’s finish our all too short examination of him with a stanza from his poem “In Memory of WB Yeats”:
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself.
Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
I don’t think he ever produced a better realization of his well-known dictum that “poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings”.
The subject of that poem, WB Yeats, also developed an unaffected style, but only after his art fully embraced a political vision:
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
If style is the man, Yeats no longer wanted to be considered the Bard of a Romantic Ireland complete with lush Pre-Raphaelite trappings. As the Easter Rebellion and independence from Britain approached, he published a volume entitled ‘Responsibilities’ in 1914 heralding a new directness of structure and vocabulary that was to find full expression in his next collection ‘The Wild Swans at Coole”, which he published five years later. ‘A Coat’ was both an aesthetic manifesto and a statement of intention that he was to ‘enter’ the world of hard clear actuality, history, politics and struggle “naked”, forsaking “the woods of Arcady” or his idealised Lake Isle of Innisfree, where he planned (in his early poetry at least) to live the life of a picturesque hermit. We’ve caught him in transition, between worlds and between styles.
Which is precisely the progression of the Imagist poets, who wished to move poetry away from “the word as symbol towards the world as reality”. Briefly returning to Hemingway, whose aesthetic ideas were in part influenced by the group, his writing style is characterized by the vividness he brought to his depictions of physical objects, as if he thought the only worthwhile things are those that are concrete or which can be personally ‘captured’. In the novel ‘A Farewell to Arms’, Lieutenant Frederick Henry notes that in times of war:
Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names or rivers, the numbers of regiments and dates . . .
Which was exactly the impulse explored by the Imagists in the early years of the twentieth century. Meaning had got a bit airy fairy under the Symbolists (as we’ll find out later), and so Ezra Pound set about marketing a motley collection of writers including Richard Aldington, Herbert Read, T.E. Hulme and Hilda Doolittle under the ‘Imagist’ banner, helping them to write their aesthetic manifesto (obligatory for any artistic movement at that time) which insisted, among other things, that poetry should:
1. Use the language of common speech, [and] . . . employ the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.
2. Absolute freedom in the choice of subject.
3. To present an image. We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It is for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of his art.
4. To produce a poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.
5. Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry. [1]
What this boils down to is meaning conceived as pure, unequivocal form. To escape the imprecision of Symbolism, the Imagists pursued single, personal visions which could not be interpreted either randomly or impartially. Hence the reluctance to mix abstraction with the concrete, and the ambition to shake off the influence of the self-consciously ‘poetic’ language (those “book words” again) that belongs to the “cosmic poet”. Remember our ‘nodes’ from Part One? Well, the image is a node of meaning concentrated in an intensely physical form, one that’s almost aggressively ‘there’, demanding attention.
Let’s take Joseph Campbell’s short poem ‘The Dawn Whiteness’ as an example of this directness of expression:
The dawn whiteness.
A bank of slate-grey cloud lying heavy over it.
The moon, like a hunted thing, dropping into the cloud.
Not a fantastic effort, but a compact embodiment of Imagistic aesthetics. In its verbal economy, it’s suggestive of a Japanese haiku. Notice the use of the word “thing” - he’s already employing a simile, which is a tad iffy for an Imagist, but Campbell adds a deliberately bland noun to atone for his sin. “Like a hunted gazelle” would have put him well beyond the pale. So “thing” it is. Note also its visual bias - you can actually ‘see’ what he’s describing.
Footnotes:
1. This version of the manifesto was first published by the then leader of the group, Amy Lowell, after Pound had stormed off in a huff to become a Vorticist. But from its roots as a publicity stunt, Imagism found itself some powerful adherents: WB Yeats, Carl Sandburg, Hart Crane, Conrad Aiken, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, D.H. Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot were all influenced by it in their own poetry.