'Those Move Easiest Who Have Learned to Dance'

Hugh Kenner glosses a well-known couplet in Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Criticism” (1711) by reference to Newton’s second law of motion (published in 1687 in his Principia Mathematica, one year before Pope’s birth) and “numerous points of disequilibrium”: 

“True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,

As those move easiest who have learned to dance.”

 

Perhaps. I’ve always taken Pope’s notion as strictly rooted in lived experience, though Pope was only twenty-three when he wrote his “Essay.” Writing is labor, even if we’ve spent more than two-thirds of a lifetime earning most of our living with words. We can’t rely on chance, which is not the same thing as inspiration, a gift that has to be exercised or it gets stiff and unresponsive. A young reader tells me she wants to be a writer but not of poetry or fiction – essays, she tells me, which is admirable though a little vague. She has certain advantages – much reading, no college degree. She works for a living. I envy her ambition.

 

Among the most valuable sources of writerly know-how published during my lifetime is The Poetic Art (Carcanet, 1975), C.H. Sisson’s translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica. The work consists of a ten-page overview titled “The Ars Poetica in English Literature,” the 467-line translation and twelve pages of notes. There’s nothing stuffy or Strunk-and-Whitey about any of it.

 

In the writing trade, masters are few. Most of us remain forever apprentices, a few are promoted to journeyman but the learning and hard work never cease. There is no graduation. Even the better among us remain perpetual beginners. Implicit in apprenticeship is knowledge handed down. We study under those who excelled before us even if they died, like Horace, two millennia ago, or Dr. Johnson, more than two centuries ago. There are no guarantees. Perseverance doesn’t necessarily forgo failure. Here is Johnson’s definition of apprentice: “One that is bound by covenant, to serve another man of trade, upon condition that the tradesman shall, in the mean time, endeavor to instruct him in his art.” And here is Sisson in his notes to Horace:

 

“Find what you can write about and you have solved your problem. Of course the aspiring writer has to face the possibility that the answer may be, Nothing. At any rate the beginning, as the continuation, of literary capacity involves a certain self-knowledge. Nothing is further from it, therefore, than the intoxications of publicity and reputation.”

 

[You’ll find Kenner’s reading of Pope in The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy, Indiana University Press, 1968.]