CHAPTER VI
THE MAKING OF THE POEM
A DECLARATION of the independence of the poem naturally causes a change in the attitude of the poet towards himself. This does not mean that the poet ceases to be important; he merely acquires a new sense of privacy which his relation to the poem in the old regime made impossible. He shrinks from the strenuous publicity into which he might be dragged by the author-worship of traditional poetry or the abnormal sense of self-importance usually displayed in the official programmes of such dead movements as Imagism. E. E. Cummings’ foreword to his volume ‘is 5’ is undoubtedly inspired by a distaste for the sentimental display by which the poet has in the past been expected to advertise himself; and perhaps explains his tendency, the modernist tendency in general, to let the poem take precedence over the poet:
On the assumption that my technique is either complicated or original or both, the publishers have politely requested me to write an introduction to this book.
At least my theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from original; nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words, by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk, viz. “Would you hit a woman with a child?--No, I’d hit her with a brick.” Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.
If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little--somebody who is obsessed by Making. Like all obsessions, the Making obsession has disadvantages; for instance, my only interest in making money would be to make it. Fortunately, however, I should prefer to make almost anything else, including locomotives and roses. It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my “poems” are competing. They are also competing with each other, with elephants and with El Greco.
Ineluctable preoccupation with The Verb gives a poet one priceless advantage: whereas non-makers must content themselves with the merely undeniable fact that two times two is four, he rejoices in a purely irresistible truth (to be found, in abbreviated costume, upon the title page of the present volume).
Cummings, then, writing according to what would seem to the reader to be a very carefully constructed poetic system, refrains from delivering a critical key to his poems except as a semi-prefatorial confidence. Indeed the more independent poems become, the less need or sense there is in accompanying them with a technical guide for their understanding. This would seem to imply that, the more difficult poems become, the less chance there would be of understanding them. But in fact it would only mean that the reader was becoming less and less separated from poetry by the technique that had formerly been concentrated on connecting him with it. Technique itself has then taken on a different character; it is no longer the way a poem is presented to the reader, but the way it corresponds in every respect with its own governing meaning. For in making a poem the poet may be said to be governed by this meaning, which may only be the necessity of the poem to be written: in this foreshadowing, inevitable meaning the poem really exists even before it is written. This it is that Cummings should mean by ‘the obsession of making’ and this it is that the reader will have to reckon with if poetry continues in its present tendency of forcing him inside the framework of the poem and making him repeat the steps by which it came to be. So that technique in the modernist definition does not refer to the method by which a poem is written but that evolutionary history of the poem which is the poem itself. The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk in literary terms are: “Do you write poems with a prearranged technique?--No, I write them with a pen.” Meaning: the question of technique in the writing of a poem is irrelevant to the writing of it. If one talks about poems as being mechanically put together by the poet, then the pen is the thing that does it. Like the brick, it is the only practical answer possible to a theoretical question conditioned by an irrelevant practical qualification.
This brings us to the crucial complication in the adjustments to be made between poetry itself and the reader of poetry, who is unable to have a free and straightforward personal intimacy with a poem but is continually haunted by the idea of the presence of the poet in the poem. Between the reader and the poem therefore there is this embarrassment caused by the reader’s awareness of the poet. He is not at his ease with the poem: it is never entirely his own--he reads the poem with the uncomfortable feeling that the poet’s eyes are on him and that he will be expected to say something when he is finished. The reader cannot get over the idea that the poet had designs on him in writing the poem, to which he must respond. With traditional poetry the reader is less embarrassed because, although he is aware of the poet in a formal way, he is not made particularly self-conscious by him. He knows what to expect, since traditional poetry is formed with an eye to its serviceability as reading matter. We may compare traditional poetry in this sense with the conservative, well-appointed restaurant where the customer is placed in a soft light, the waiters address him in a respectful monotone and he is left to himself to eat. Modern poetry of the dead-movement sort, of which Imagism is a complete example, bears a resemblance to the ‘artistic’ tea-room where the customer finds himself besieged by orange curtains, Japanese prints, painted furniture, art-china instead of the plain white service of the ordinary restaurant, and conversational waitresses in smocks who give the personal touch with a cultured accent. As a result, the plain eater goes back to his corner restaurant and the tea-room becomes a dead movement. _Modernist_ as distinct from _modern_ poetry is, at its most uncompromising, neither the corner restaurant nor the tea-room. It seems inaccessible to the plain reader: the approach to it is like the front of a private residence and he is afraid that he is expected to lunch personally with the poet. So in this case again he goes back to the corner restaurant where he can at least reduce the personality of the waiters to a minimum. Actually, if the plain reader could conquer his initial self-consciousness before it he would find an interior in which it should be possible to be on completely unembarrassed and impersonal terms with poetry: he would find himself alone with it. But this is only theoretically possible. For the plain reader does not really want to be left all alone with poetry. The mental ghosts, which only poets are supposed to have natural commerce with, assail him. The real discomfort to the reader in modernist poetry is the absence of the poet as his protector from the imaginative terrors lurking in it.
What the reader, then, calls the clearness of a poem often means merely its freedom from those terrors which he, in his defence against them, attacks as obscurities. Clearness for him is really the suppression of everything in the poem over and above the average standard of comprehension--of everything likely to disturb normal ease. A poem, therefore, that really is potentially superior to the average standard of comprehension and which nevertheless conforms to it actually obscures its real meaning the more it observes this standard, _i.e._ the _clearer_ it is to the average reader. A poem that is potentially superior to the average standard of comprehension and which, disregarding it, fulfils all its potentialities, makes its real meaning clearer and clearer, as it retreats from this average, _i.e._ as it becomes more and more obscure to the average reader. The trouble is not with the reader or with the poem but with the government of criticism by the sales-principle, which must make an average standard of public taste allowing for the most backward reader of each of the three reading classes corresponding with the three different degrees of popular education. If a variable standard of comprehension were admitted, the poem would have the privilege of developing itself to the degree of clearness corresponding with the degree of comprehension in the reader most above the average. As the poet himself would thus be allowed as a possible reader of his own poem, it would be encouraged to attain its maximum, not its minimum, of real clearness; and the word _obscure_ would disappear from the vocabulary of criticism except to denote the obscurity of particular references. _Bad_ would be the only possible critical term by which a poem could be categorically dismissed: at the present time, regardless of the possible classification of a poem as _good_ or _bad_ according to the standards it suggests, it is enough for the critic to call a poem _obscure_ to relieve himself of the obligation of giving a real criticism of it.
Here is an example, in the first eighteen lines of what might be called a modernist poem, of the ‘obscurity’ which would probably cause it to be put aside by the critic after he had allowed it the customary two-minute reading (for if the poet has obeyed all the rules, this is long enough to give a rough idea of what the poem is all about--and that is all that is generally wanted). Or if by chance the critic is ‘advanced’, serving such a limited public that his criticism is mere literary snobbery, he may pretend to understand it and dislike it equally, because he does not understand it; or, if he does, he may dislike it all the same because it is ‘too simple’ (a common charge against the ‘obscure’ poem when its obscurity is seen to have been only excessive clearness).
The rugged black of anger Has an uncertain smile-border. The transition from one kind to another May be love between neighbour and neighbour; Or natural death; or discontinuance Because so small is space, The extent of kind must be expressed otherwise; Or loss of kind when proof of no uniqueness Strikes the broadening edge and discourages. Therefore and therefore all things have experience Of ending and of meeting, And of ending, that much being As grows faint of self and withers When more is the intenser self That is another or nothing. And therefore smiles, when least smiling-- The gift of nature to necessity When relenting grows involuntary.
The reaction, then, will be either one of ‘blank incomprehension’ or, since the critic-reader recognizes a few long words and a certain atmosphere created by the poet’s ‘saying what he means’, one of antagonism due to the impression that the poem gives of being didactic. The reaction of blank incomprehension will be commonest. “What, in so many words”, the critic-reader will ask, “is this all about?” Now, to tell what a poem is all about in “so many words” is to reduce the poem to so many words, to leave out all that the reader cannot at the moment understand in order to give him the satisfaction of feeling that he is understanding it. If it were possible to give the complete force of a poem in a prose summary, then there would be no excuse for writing the poem: the ‘so many words’ are, to the last punctuation-mark, the poem itself. Where such a prose summary does render the poem in its entirety, except for rhymes and other external dressings, the poem cannot have been a complete one; and indeed a great deal of what passes for poetry is the rewriting of the prose summary of a hypothetical poem in poetical language. Before further discussing this particular poem, let us quote the beginning of a ballad by Mr. Ezra Pound in illustration of the prose-idea poeticalized:
THE BALLAD OF THE GOODLY FERE[1]
(_Simon Zelotes speaketh it somewhile after the Crucifixion_)
Ha’ we lost the goodliest fere o’ all For the priests and the gallows tree? Aye, lover he was of brawny men O’ ships and the open sea.
When they came wi’ a host to take Our Man His smile was good to see, “First let these go!” quo’ our Goodly Fere, “Or I’ll see ye damned”, says he.
Aye, he sent us out through the crossed high spears, And the scorn of his laugh rang free, “Why took ye not me when I walked about Alone in the town?” says he.
Oh, we drank his “Hale” in the good red wine When we last made company, No capon priest was the Goodly Fere But a man o’ men was he.
I ha’ seen him drive a hundred men Wi’ a bundle o’ cords swung free When they took the high and holy house For their pawn and treasury....
Stripped of its imitated antiqueness, the substance of all this could be given simply as follows: “It would be false to identify the Christ of the sentimentalists with the Christ of the Gospels. So far from being a meek or effeminate character He strikes us as a very _manly_ man, and His disciples, fishermen and others, must have reverenced Him for His manly qualities as much as for His spiritual teaching. His action in driving the money-changers from the Temple with a scourge of cords is a proof of this. So is His courageous action when confronted by the soldiers of the High Priest sent to arrest Him--He mockingly enquired why they had not dared arrest Him previously when He walked about freely in the city of Jerusalem, and consented to offer no resistance only if His disciples were allowed to escape. The Last Supper was surely a very different scene from the Church Sacrament derived from it, where a full-fed priest condescendingly officiates; it was a banquet of friends of which the Dearest Friend was Our Saviour.” Here we see that the poeticalization has in fact weakened the historical argument. By using the ballad setting Mr. Pound has made the fishermen of Galilee into North-country sailors of the Patrick Spens tradition and given them sentiments more proper to the left wing of the Y.M.C.A.
The extravagant use of metaphor and simile in poetry is thus seen to be governed by the necessity of making a poem of this sort equal the prose summary which really is dictating it. This practice is founded on two fallacies, one of which follows from the other: the first, that the poet is not saying what he means but something _like_ what he means in prettier language than he uses to himself about it; the second, from which the first is deduced, that the ideas of truth in which poetry deals are not agreeable in themselves but that a distinction is to be made by the poet between what is pretty and not pretty, poetical and not poetical. When, therefore, bare, undressed ideas are found in poetry instead of the rhetorical devices by which poets try to ‘put over’ their ideas, such poetry is naturally accused of being didactic. Another way of saying this is that the poet has cut off all his communications. As a matter of fact all that has happened is that he has made the poem out of the poem itself: its final form is identical in terms with its preliminary form in the poet’s mind, uncorrupted by hints to the reader, familiar asides to make it less terrifying, and flattering conceits to enliven, to entertain and to display the poet’s virtuosity. But it is almost impossible for a poet who does really mean what he says to make the critic-reader believe that he does: the more he means what he says and the more earnest he is to make this clear, the more he will be thought to be concealing his meaning in clever evasions called ‘obscurity’.
If, then, the author of the lines beginning ‘The rugged black of anger’ were asked to explain their meaning, the only proper reply would be to repeat the lines, perhaps with greater emphasis: by which, presumably, they would only become more obscure. If the poet were pressed to employ some familiar metaphor or simile to explain them, then he would have to prefix his remarks with some such insult: “At your request I shall make my poem into a bad imitation of itself. I shall, in fact, call this version _your_ poem, the more yours the sillier it grows. But you must promise not to deceive yourself that this is what the poem means. It is rather what it does not mean.” This method of understanding a poem may be called Smoking Out The Meaning. To consider how the meaning may be smoked out here let us put these lines into the first metaphor that occurs to us. Indeed it is not wholly impossible that the first two lines may conceal an incidental satire on the popular poetical sentiment:
Look around and you will find Every cloud is silver-lined. The sun still shines Although the sky’s a gray one.... It’s a short life but a gay one.
If such is the interpretation suggested by the first two lines, then they are being treated as the prose idea from which the real poem, apparently unwritten, is derived. That is, the ordinary translation system of poetry, thus:
(I.)
A B C
_Poet’s prose idea_ _Poem_ _Reader’s prose summary_
1. | 1. | 1. 2. | 2. | 2. 3. | 3. | 3. 4. | 4. | 4.
is assumed to have been reversed, thus:
(II.)
A B C
_Poem (suppressed)_ _Prose idea as poem_ _Reader’s poetical summary_
1. | 1. | 1. 2. | 2. | 2. 3. | 3. | 3. 4. | 4. | 4.
The truth is that there is no fundamental difference between these two systems. The same principle that 1 = 1 = 1 prevails (_i.e._ that prose ideas have their exact equivalents in poetry, and many of them to one idea); though in a different order, we find the same categories representing the stages of the poem from creation to criticism. And the fact that the reader finds it necessary to make a poetical rather than a more strictly prose summary in (II.) would really make no appreciable difference in his enjoyment of the poem if it were really written as set forth in (II.). For the element of strangeness and excitement would perhaps be added to his enjoyment if the ordinary system were reversed: the novelty would at least last for a few poems of this sort, as it lasted for the first year or two of the recent _Vers Libre_ movement, a dead movement which tried to coué poetry back into health by depriving it of its crutches. But if the lines in question were not the prose idea as poem--B of (II.)--that is, the prose idea in a slightly poetical form which the reader had to amplify along suggested poetical lines, a discrepancy would appear between the poem as it stands and the reader’s poetical summary of it, should he find it possible to make one: we should have not two equivalent meanings but one meaning and another gratuitous meaning derived from it. B1 would not equal C1, but C1 would merely be X1, one of the many possible derived meanings of B1, but not the real meaning. B and C of (II.) would therefore read:
B C 1. | X 1 2. | X 2 3. | X 3 4. | X 4
X 1-2-3-4 being but a digression from B, B then would not be the prose idea as poem, but the poem itself. If, as such, without the addition of any associations not provided in the poem, or of collateral interpretations, it could reveal an internal consistency strengthened at every point in its development and free of the necessity of external application, that is, complete without criticism--if it could do this, it would have established an insurmountable difference between prose ideas and poetic ideas, prose facts and poetic facts. This difference would mean the independence of poetic facts, as real facts, from any prose or poetical explanation in the terms of practical workaday reality which would make them seem unreal, or poetical facts.
If we assume that the first two lines here do not mean what they say, and accept the silver-lined cloud explanation, we find that we are brought into a sentimental personal atmosphere in which _anger_ is anger as felt by someone, or bad-luck seen as the anger of providence or fate, and in which _smile-border_ is either personal happiness or good luck. Any such interpretation of _anger_ and _smile-border_, indeed, would involve us in some such sympathetic history of the poem. But if we consult the poem itself we find, after the first two lines, that any possible parallelism with an interpretation of this sort ends: _anger_ means just anger, _smile-border_ just smile-border. So much so do they mean just what they are that the rest of the poem is developed from their being just what they are: _anger_, anger; _smile-border_, the smiling border of anger which apparently separates it from some other kind, or concept, whose border separating it from anger might equally be called an ‘anger-border’. What are we to do, then, since the poem really seems to mean what it says? All we can do is to let it interpret itself, without introducing any new associations or, if possible, any new words.
The rugged black of anger Has an uncertain smile-border. The transition from one kind to another, As from anger, rugged black, To what lies across its smile-border, May be love between neighbour and neighbour (Love between neighbouring kind and kind); Or natural death (death of one, Though not of the other); or discontinuance (Discontinuance of kind, As anger no more anger) Because so small is space (So small the space for kind and kind and kind), The extent of kind must be expressed otherwise (The extent of kind beyond its border Is end of kind, because space is so small There is not room enough for all Kinds: anger _angrier_ has to be Expressed otherwise than by anger, So by an uncertain smile-border);
This will serve as a sufficient illustration of the method of letting the poem interpret itself. It was done without introducing any words not actually belonging to the poem, without throwing any of the poem away as superfluous padding and without having recourse to a prose version: the poem interpreted is practically itself repeated to three times its own length. It may be objected that it is still not entirely clear, but not that it is not _any_ clearer, that it could not be made clearer still by an increase in length proportionate to the need of the reader in question. For instance, if the reader is puzzled by the sixth of the original lines and cannot at the first reading persuade himself that _Because so small is space_ really means _Because so small is space_, yet sees that it can mean nothing else, he can repeat to himself:
Because so small is space, Because so small is space,
until he is convinced; or, perhaps,
Because space is so small, Because space is so small,
an inversion which the poet would surely mind less than the use of a prose summary, such as a philosophical reading: “Because so small is Space or the Universe or the Human Mind, not allowing Ideas to reach their full development but crowding them into cramped quarters so that they have a hard time keeping their independence and are often even completely extinguished.”
The important thing that would be revealed by a wide application of this method to the reading of poems that really mean what they say (for obviously it could not be applied to poems that do not) would be that much of the so-called obscurity of poems was created by the laziness of the plain reader, who wishes to hurry through poetry as quickly as he does through prose, not realizing that he is dealing with a kind of thought which, though it may have the speed of prose to the poet, he must follow with a slowness proportionate to how much he is not a poet. Indeed, with a just realization of this proportion it should be possible for the plain reader to read a very difficult poem without even adding any repetitional lines. Increasing the time-length of reading is one way of getting out of the prose and into the poetic state of mind, of developing a capacity for minuteness, for seeing all there is to see at a given point and for taking it all with one as one goes along. We have forgotten, however, that the plain reader, while he does not object to the poetic state of mind in the poet, has a fear of cultivating it in himself. This is why he prefers the prose summary to the poem and to see the poem, as it began in the poet’s mind, as a genial prose idea free of those terrors which the poet is supposed to keep to himself or carefully disguise. Part of the reader’s reaction to what he calls the obscurity of certain poems is really his nervous embarrassment at feeling himself left alone with the meaning of the poem itself.
But whatever may be the cause of the reader’s embarrassment with the poem, the important fact is, from the point of view of the poem and the poet, that the ‘making’ poet does not write because of the demand of the reader to be fed with poetry but because certain poems demand to be written and the poet is ‘somebody who is obsessed by Making’. Once the poems are ‘made’, his personal activity ceases in them. They begin a life of their own toward which he has no responsibility of advertising or selling: that they reach the reader at all is an accident, an affair entirely between them and the reader. This, by the way, is not what used to be meant by ‘art for art’s sake’. ‘Art for art’s sake’ was as if a cook should say, “I am employed as a cook, I know, but I am such a superior cook that what I cook is not to be eaten, it is a purely esoteric culinary mystery.” The modernist poet will not adopt this attitude at all, because he will not start with the sense of being an artist in an official, public-service sense.
The purpose of printing in book-form poetry construed in this private sense is not to convert it into a selling product but merely to give it an identity separate from the author’s; and the disinterested anxiety of poets to get their work printed must be attributed partly to this desire to see it as a separate life. It is practically impossible for a poet to read his own poetry intelligently unless separated from him in some way. The easiest and most obvious way is to have it set down in print, since his own handwriting is like a physical part of himself: the printed page acts as a mirror. This explains the mystery of Shakespeare’s failure to have his plays uniformly printed in his lifetime: they had become sufficiently externalized by being presented on the stage. But the process of externalization must be seen to have two aspects: externalization for the sake of a legitimate vanity in the poet, a curiosity in him about his own poems; and externalization as a poet’s duty toward his poem. When both of these aspects are balanced, the poem has an outward and an inward sincerity. When externalization, or formalizing, has only what we may call the _printing_ aspect, which has only to do with the poem as something made by the poet and read by the reader--a theatrical ‘showing off’ on the part of the poet; when it means only this and has no _creative_ aspect, then the more facile the poem is as a printed piece the more insincere it is as a private, independent poem-person.
In a great deal of traditional poetry the problem of externalizing his work is an easy one for the poet because there is a whole apparatus of conventions at his service ready to give it a formal literary independence of him. But as such conventions (stanza, rhyme, poetical punctuation, etc.) are really the conventions of the printing, not of the making, of poetry, this independence is only an artificial one. Of course there undoubtedly are really independent poems written in traditional forms, for which such conventions have only meant an additional guarantee of their individuality. But as these conventions give an artificial appearance of independence to poems, they are a constant temptation to people who are not poets to write things that look like poems and to poets themselves to be lazy, because the finality of traditional verse-forms can make an incomplete poem seem complete (‘incomplete’ meaning, of course, “not thoroughly separated from the poet”). Poetry like this, then, principally composed of literary conventions, is bound sooner or later to show its shabbiness; and attempts to smarten it up again only change the old conventions for new ones instead of striking at the underlying fallacy, that it is completeness of method that turns out good poems, or technical indefatigability, rather than an indefatigable obsession for making until the poem is made.
For if the poet has poems in him they will get themselves made regardless of the poet’s method of setting them down. No technical method, whatever its merits, can extract poems where there are no poems: a method can _seem_ to make, it cannot _make_. The Imagists, for example, did not make new poems, only a new kind of stanza which seemed to them more real than traditional stanza-forms because it was new. When Mr. Cummings says that his ‘poems are competing with locomotives and roses’ he means that they were made as real entities, whether mechanical or natural. He does not claim to have a sure method to be used over and over again in making more and more poems, but to be irresistibly besieged by poems of even contradictory natures and of contradictory principles of growth, each with its own separate method of being made. All that the methodist poet boasts, however, is a trick for producing things that resemble locomotives or roses. In constantly repeating his method in poems he is only saying over and over again that two times two is four. The making poet, on the other hand, has no method, but a faculty for allowing things to invent themselves. As he cannot then write a poem unless there is one to write and is consequently incapable of repeating himself, he is declaring, with each new poem, a new truth, a complete truth, even a contradictory truth. He is allowing two times two (or truth) to become all it is possible for it to be, since truth cannot be reduced to a fixed mathematical law any more than poetry to a fixed literary method: two times two, like poetry, may be everything and anything.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Mate or companion.]