`Without the Nine'

After a day spent editing prose like this:

“The force produced by the comb-drive actuator is calibrated by relating the voltage-displacement response of the device loaded with no specimen to the stiffness of the tether beams. A major advantage of using this design scheme is that we can adjust the capacity of the maximum load and displacement fairly easily with the adjustment of comb drive and tether beam arrangements. Another advantage is the capability of performing experiments under both monotonic and cyclic loadings.”

it’s a relief and a pleasure to come home in the evening and read prose like this:

“In it, connections, if any, remain unstated; likewise meanings. As used to be remarked of poems, such passages resist paraphrase. Their power is hidden in mystery. There is, at most, an illusion of seeing momentarily into the heart of things – and the moment vanishes. It is this, perhaps, which produces the esthetic blush.”

That’s by the poet Donald Justice, the final words of the essay I linked to on Wednesday, “The Prose Sublime,” which bears an interesting sub-title: “Or, the Deep Sense of Things Belonging Together, Inexplicably.” In the excerpt, Justice is referring to a passage in a novel by Sherwood Anderson and contrasting it to a Joycean epiphany. Of course, Justice’s prose, too, is sublime, an aesthetic quality no longer recognized by sophisticates. In his 1822 essay “On the Prose-Style of Poets,” William Hazlitt expressed disappointment at most of the prose composed by poets:

“The habits of a poet’s mind are not those of industry or research: his images come to him, he does not go to them; and in prose-subjects, and dry matters of fact and close reasoning, the natural stimulus that at other times warms and rouses, deserts him altogether. He sees no unhallowed visions, he is inspired by no day-dreams. All is tame, literal, and barren, without the Nine.”

I love Hazlitt but this time he’s wrong. Look no further among his poetic contemporaries for enduring marvels of prose than the letters of Keats and Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. Prose by poets need not be conventionally “poetic prose,” all empty, purple and desperately attention-grabbing. Good prose by anyone, poet or not, is likely to possess some combination of precision, concision, musicality and evocativeness. Consider this excerpt from “Life of Sir Philip Sidney,” by Fulke Greville:

“For my own part, I found my creeping genius more fixed upon the images of life than the images of wit and therefore chose not to write to them on whose foot the black ox had not already trod, as the proverb is, but to those only that are weather-beaten in the sea of this world, such as having lost the sight of their gardens and groves, study to sail on a right course among rocks and quicksands; and if, in thus ordaining, and ordering matter and form together for the use of life, I have made those tragedies no plays for the stage, be it known, it was no part of my purpose to write for them, against whom so many good and great spirits have already written.”

I chose this passage because David Yezzi, in the interview I linked to on Tuesday, referred to Greville citing “the black ox (of melancholy),” and I was curious to track down the source. The sentence is beautiful, certainly, but concise? I would argue it is, even at 129 words, for Greville, in a single paragraph renders an apologia pro vita sua. For another example of concision from this contemporary of Shakespeare, consider his self-composed epitaph: “Fulke Greville, servant to Queen Elizabeth, counsellor to King James, friend to Sir Philip Sidney.” Greville published none of his poetry or prose during his life.

The finest poet-critic of our age, of course, was Randall Jarrell. Like many readers, I prefer his criticism to his poetry and consider his novel, Pictures from an Institution, among the funniest books in the language. (A friend read it for the first time recently and reported laughing so hard she injured something in her side.) Like Jarrell, I love Rudyard Kipling, especially Kim and the stories (Jarrell claimed he reread Kim each year). Here’s what he says in “On Preparing to Read Kipling,” from 1961:

“After you have read Kipling’s fifty or seventy-five best stories you realize that few men have written this many stories of this much merit, and that very few have written more and better stories. Chekhov and Turgenev are two who immediately come to mind; and when I think of their stories I cannot help thinking of what seems to me the greatest lack in Kipling’s. I don’t know exactly what to call it: a lack of dispassionate moral understanding, perhaps – of the ability both to understand things and to understand that there is nothing to do about them.”

That’s honest and true, and Jarrell’s prose replicates the contours of his thinking, the give and take, the claims and concessions, and gives us what Justice called “the esthetic blush.” How often does that happen while reading mere criticism?