`Poetry is Not the Thing Said But a Way of Saying It'

In 1933, in a lecture he delivered at Cambridge University, A.E. Housman formulated several simple, reliable tests for distinguishing poetry from things that merely resemble poetry:

“Poetry indeed seems to me more physical than intellectual. A year or two ago, in common with others, I received from America a request that I would define poetry. I replied that I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat, but that I thought we both recognized the object by the symptoms which it provokes in us….Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act, This particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver down the spine; there is another which consists in a constriction of the throat and a precipitation of water to the eyes; and there is a third which I can only describe by borrowing a phrase from one of Keats’s last letters, where he says, speaking of Fanny Brawne, `everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.’ The seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach.”

Housman’s humor in “The Name and Nature of Poetry,” as in much of his verse, is sly, deadpan and largely unrecognized. In the same lecture he says: “Meaning is of the intellect, poetry is not. If it were, the eighteenth century would have been able to write it better.”

I bring up Housman, though I don’t agree with his apparent lack of regard for Pope, Swift and Johnson, because his poetry-verification tests have proven useful as I’ve been reading The Apparitioners, by George Witte, published in 2005 by Three Rails Press. This is not a young man’s poetry, and I would have known that even without reading in the Author’s Note that Witte is editor in chief of St. Martin’s Press. He writes about family and the near-at-home natural world without the inveterate complaints of youth. He makes free verse look easy and never confuses bafflement with shopping-mall nihilism. Here’s the book’s final poem, “Yours Truly”:

“The undersides of things are ticklish:
palms, bellies, backs of knees,
surfaces scored with nerves,
concave, convex, any place
you lift or turn to touch.
A stone dead but for its lichen
thrives underneath, a mine
of wriggling kin. Too much
sexy stuff for some (exclaiming Oh!
they slam the lid down, screw it tight);
for others – okay, for me – hope:
that every shape must have its mate,
the counter-curve to true it up.
So you’re shy, yet your secret tongue –
doesn’t it? – savors this note’s envelope.”

Witte crafts lines pleasing to the tongue and ear – “concave, convex, any place.” Note his deployment of s’s in the two lines starting with “sexy stuff,” and the play of s’s and o’s in the final two lines. Seeing hope in “the underside of things” is a conceit worthy of Donne, though the echoes I hear most often are of Wordsworth and Stevens, and he reminds me of a less starchy David Ferry. Witte seems to possess the hope promised by religion, the acceptance of linkage and meaning in the world, without an overtly declared theology.

Landscape here means geology, human habitation and a sense of immanence. In “Talus Slope,” he points out “a single/Crystal hardens like a bus dew-/Wet with origins, hieroglyph/Of a secret life.” As you live with the poems after reading them attentively, a muted sense of alarm, a metaphysical anxiety cloaked by the beauty of the ordinary world, grows apparent. I wish I had written the first poem in the collection, “An Open Letter.” I can’t do it justice by quoting fragment, but the last three lines, which resonate with experience, stand as an elegant echo of the opening three lines, which suggest an impossible innocence:

“There’s something to be said, and something else
to be kept quiet and cool:
the lake at dawn, before the fog burns off.”

As Housman said in the lecture mentioned above, “Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it.” Note the indefinite article.