No `Exalted Moods'

As I get older and increasingly unable to compromise over the essential, I have less patience with hot air, pretty phrases and what Orwell called “gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.” I don’t read newspapers much, even though I’ve worked for them most of my life and at one time read six or seven daily. About television and radio, what is there to say? I cannot abide language that is not weighed and assayed, like gold ore.

I am drawn to writers who are stringent, harsh, parsimonious with words – Samuel Beckett, most obviously, but also Swift, Samuel Johnson and Waugh. This accounts, I suppose, for my growing love for and reliance on two poets, close contemporaries – J.V. Cunningham and R.S. Thomas. Their tightness with language is matched by an asperity of manner. They respect me enough not to condescend with simple-minded platitudes, and they expect me, as a reader, to do my share of the work. They are not happy-talking, fun-loving writers, which makes them unacceptable in today’s culture. Their manners are poor but they are always polite. The news they bring is not uplifting, though its honesty and clear-sightedness is invigorating. I trust them, the way I trust doctors and auto mechanics who don’t sugarcoat the inevitable unpleasant diagnosis.

Here is J.V. Cunningham, from a 1952 essay, “Poetry, Structure, and Tradition”:

“I mean by poetry what everyone means by it when he is not in an exalted mood, when he is not being a critic, a visionary, or a philosopher. I mean by poetry what a man means when he goes to a bookstore to buy a book of poems as a graduation gift, or when he is commissioned by a publisher to do an anthology of sixteenth century poems. Poetry is what looks like poetry, what sounds like poetry. It is metrical composition.”

“Not in an exalted mood” is priceless. “Metrical composition” – how many poets know what that means? Cunningham writes in plain-spoken American, with a whiff of the 17th century. Thomas is also plain-spoken; his tone, angry and prophetic but never self-righteous. Here is “A Poet,” from Destinations, published in 1985 when he was 72:

“Disgust tempered by an exquisite
charity, wrapping life’s claws
in purest linens – this man
has history to supper,
eats with a supreme tact
from the courses offered to him.

“Waiting at table
are the twin graces, patience
and truth, with the candles’
irises in soft clusters
flowering on thin stalks.

“Where did he come from?
Pupating against the time
he was needed, he emerged
with wings furled, unrecognized
by the pundits; has spread
them now elegantly
to dazzle, curtains drawn
with a new nonchalance
between barbarism and ourselves.

“Patron without condescension
of the art, he teaches flight’s
true purpose, which is,
sensitive but not too blinded
by some inner radiance, to be
in delicatest orbit about it.”