'To Know When You Have Made Good Ones'

“We are concerned not with semi-literacy but with the unaccountable lapses of serious poets: poets, let us say, sufficiently professional to look Buster Keaton in the face, who can yet address for instance an apostrophe to the ‘Spade! with which Wilkinson hath tilled his lands.’” 

The distinction is important. Some writing is unignorably awful because its author is inept, indifferent, tone-deaf, careless or stupid -- failings excusable among young writers, best discouraged by thoughtful elders. It’s small comfort at the time but reading one’s juvenilia in future years is a goad to humility. Hugh Kenner in The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy (1968) identifies another source of badness as exemplified by the line from Wordsworth he quotes above:

 

“Let us postulate that the bad verse of such a poet is verse which has been published by mistake. It has deceived its author, whose mind, fixed on some other quality, supposed it good, and it has continued to deceive him throughout the process of revision, of reading his composition to friends, of sending it to the printer, of reading proof, and inspecting the finished volume.”

 

“Some other quality.” Perhaps earnestness, the conviction that one’s thoughts are so important, so urgently in need of expression, that the end justifies the means. Just spew the words. They are their own validation. The absence of self-censure, when not merely boring is worth a good laugh. Thus, Kenner’s mention of The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse, edited in 1930 by D.B. Wyndham-Lewis and Charles Lee. He writes of such poetry: “It is clear that when this can happen the criteria for good verse have become exceedingly elusive.” Kenner next recalls Dr. Johnson’s remarks, as recounted by Boswell, on the ease with which he could compose lines of verse: “‘The great difficulty is, to know when you have made good ones.’”

 

Lousy writing is unearned, a failure of scrupulousness, a surrender to self-indulgence. “Dull writing,” Kenner writes, “has never deceived anyone, not even its author. He is not deceived in finding it interesting, he is merely interested in it. Another person need not be.”

 

I’m reminded of something Jules Renard wrote in his Journal in 1891 (trans. Theo Cuffe): “Balzac is perhaps the only one who earned the right to write badly.”