Smith - On modern poetry : from theory to total criticism

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM CONTINUUM

Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed, Mary Klages

Literature, In Theory, Julian Wolfreys

Poetry Toolkit: The Essential Guide to Studying Poetry, Rhian Williams

On Modern Poetry

From theory to total criticism

Robert Rowland Smith

Continuum International Publishing Group

www.continuumbooks.com

Robert Rowland Smith Ltd. 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

Robert Rowland Smith has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-4411-4852-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Robert Rowland.

On modern poetry : from theory to total criticism / Robert Rowland Smith.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4411-6572-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4411-7422-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4411-4976-3 (ebook pdf) -- ISBN 978-1-4411-4852-0 (ebook epub)

1. Poetry, Modern--20th century--History and criticism--Theory, etc. 2. Modernism (Literature) I. Title.

PN1271.O5 2012

809.1'04--dc23

2011046644

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

To Antonioni, il mellor fabbro

It must

Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may

Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman

Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

FROM WALLACE STEVENS, OF MODERN POETRY

CONTENTS

For kind permission to quote from works to which they own the rights, I thank the following: Barque Press; Columbia University Press; Curtis Brown; David Higham Associates; Faber and Faber; Marion Boyars Publishers; New Directions; Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Province of the Society of Jesus; Penguin Books; University of Chicago Press; Yale University Press.

This book, though in its present form a distant relation of them, has its origin in lectures I gave in the 1990s during my Prize Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. Thanks to those who participated. More recently, Ive had helpful feedback from Clare Birchall, and David Avital at Continuum has provided useful support. My inspiration has come from Tim Clark, Anthony Mellors, Jan Piggott, Jeremy Prynne, Denise Riley, Nick Royle and Ann Wordsworth; and among the dead from Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, William Empson and Walter Pater. Chapeau!

Below is a Seamus Heaney poem, published in 2010 by Faber and Faber:

A Mite-Box

But still in your cupped palms to feel

The chunk and clink of an alms-collecting mite-box,

Full to its slotted lid with copper coins,

Pennies and halfpennies donated for

The foreign missions Made from a cardboard kit,

Wedge-roofed like a little oratory

And yours to tote as you made the rounds,

Indulged on every doorstep, each donation

Accounted for by a pinprick in a card

A way for all to see a way to heaven,

The same as when a pinholed Camera

Obscura unblinds the sun eclipsed.

There is the poem. What is one supposed to do with it? Already we have a deal of information to sift, and not just in the verses themselves. For reasons that go beyond scholarly diligence, I have provided author, date and publisher: these too are avenues in.

Apart from anything else, the name Seamus Heaney is a brand that says leading poet, professor, wise owl, institution, lyricist, Irishman, mainstream, successful, naturalist, human, warm, sensuous, avuncular, skilled, artisanal, earthy. Had I left the name out, you, the reader, might have felt more tentative reading the poem, assuming you didnt already know who wrote it. But the name gave you, however fleetingly or subliminally, a promise of what to expect. In so doing, it will have either increased or decreased your alertness to the text or both. Increased, because the work of a publicly endorsed poet is more likely to command your attention. Decreased, because the guarantee of quality invisibly engraved in such a name can blind ones critical faculties.

Either way, the connotations that come with the name Seamus Heaney suggest that modern poetry might not be so modern after all: they are far too reassuring. True, A Mite-Box doesnt rhyme, the metre is irregular, its two sentences are not properly finished, and Heaney has dropped a neologism, unblinds, into the last line, but any modernity it can claim lies mainly in its date (2010). Published nearly a century after The Waste Land, it is no further down the track of poetic innovation. On the contrary, it lags some way behind T. S. Eliots radical tableau of disjointed voices. In the vernacular, you might call it quite a traditional poem. In my terms, it is a pre-modernist modern poem, implying that modern poetry is a complex genre, if a genre at all.

Yet Heaney is published by Eliots own publisher, Faber and Faber. Not just publisher: Eliot was closely involved with Faber the business as an employee, and later a director; Eliots widow, Valerie, was to become a key shareholder. The names Eliot and Faber are as intertwined commercially as they are editorially. Thanks not least to Eliot money, derived from sales, and the Eliot name, Faber was able to establish itself as a leading poetry publisher in the UK and wider territories. When we talk about modern poetry, we are often signalling Faber poets, Heaney included. Considering Eliots poetic legacy, the fact that Faber has tended subsequently to favour pre-modernist works not just Heaney, but, say, Ted Hughes is therefore a little ironic.

Not that Faber doesnt continue to publish Eliot himself or Ezra Pound, but on the whole Faber has become more conservative and, given its influence on the poetry market, so has that market. The conservatism isnt necessarily bad: it answers a demand for accessible poetry in schools, for example. Ted Hughes can be taught in a way that Ezra Pound cannot. Though verse by Hughes carries a share of literary allusion, it is nothing compared with the profusion of reference in Pound, a poet who is either saved for university or, as is increasingly the case, ignored. Better that schoolchildren be put on a pre-modernist modern diet than be put off altogether.

So modern poetry, the subject of this book, contains at least two strains of modern, as manifested in the two sides of Faber: one modernist like Eliot, the other pre-modernist like Heaney. Putting dates on it is arbitrary. Common practice will often use modern to mean 1900 onwards, but I extend it back almost another hundred years to Keats, on the grounds that his poetry is about as far back as todays reader can go without starting to encounter diction that is challenging simply on account of its age. Even Keats, of course, can be difficult on these grounds. One tends to think of modernism as a decisive break with everything before it, but plenty of twentieth-century poetry continued to draw its inspiration from Tennyson or Hardy, say. My rule isnt hard and fast, but one consequence is that modernity keeps moving forward, even as genres such as modernism remain tagged to specific writers at specific dates.