No need to dispense with writers rendered neutral by the passing of years. It happens naturally. Time discards what no longer seems interesting or useful. One of my poetic heroes at age fifteen was Hart Crane, in part because like me he was born and raised in the Cleveland, Ohio area. Like him, I was word-drunk (and drunk). Today Crane’s poetry seems a little silly and overripe. That’s not the same as calling him a “bad poet,” à la Charles Olson. I just find little pleasure in reading his work. Time has a tendency to sift away the dross.
The process works in the
opposite direction. When I was young the brief, strictly metric poems of A.E.
Housman seemed insubstantial and dull. They read like the work of an indifferent
lyricist, or so I thought in my adolescent oblivion. Asked by an interviewer to
name the poet from whom she learned the most, Wendy Cope replied: “A.E.Housman;
his poems are short, accessible and moving.” She left out subtle and
emotionally powerful. Few poems move me as strongly as a handful of his poems. On
December 14, 1894, Housman writes to his brother Laurence, who was considering
the publication of some verse:
“What makes many of your
poems more obscure than they need be is that you do not put yourself in the
reader’s place and consider how, and at what stage, that man of sorrows is to
find out what it is all about. You are behind the scenes and know all the data;
but he only knows what you tell him. . . . How soon do you imagine your victim
will find out that you are talking about horses? Not until the thirteenth of
these long lines, unless he is such a prodigy of intelligence and good will as
I am: there you mention ‘hoofs’, and he has to read the thirteen lines over
again. ‘Flank’ in line six is not enough: Swinburne’s women have flanks.”
Housman could be savage in
his judgments of poetry but with his brother he is gentle and amusing, without blunting
his critical reading. To “put yourself in the reader’s place” is just good
manners, not philistinism.
I'm currently reading Houseman's Collected Poems, which I last read in its entirety fifteen years ago, though there are individual poems that I often return to. My favorite is VII from More Poems:
ReplyDeleteStars, I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.
The toil of all that be
Heals not the primal fault,
It rains into the sea,
And still the sea is salt.
It looks so simple; you think, "I could have written that."
No. You couldn't.