9
Finally, one can see that Empson found in Graves’s early work the model for his taxonomical strategy of systematically classifying as seven types the dynamic of multiple significations. Such significations are multiple not only because of meanings that historical research recalls from the past, but also because of meanings that new ways of interpreting literature make available in the present and will continue to make available in the future.
In his essay on “Classical and Romantic” sensibilities in Poetic Unreason, Graves shows how “we can catalogue a number of distinguishable psychological forms in which poetry can occur.”1 He proposes to do this by “embroidering on the theme” of “two dreams of a typical war-neurosis, the one characteristic and the other fantastic” (that is, the agents, objects, and events “can be confirmed by the senses as possible” in the one, but not in the other).2 The one dream imitates realistically the actual incident that prompted “a complete breakdown”: “A war-weary soldier lies asleep in a deep dug-out; he suddenly awakes to find a bomb hissing on the floor beside him, about to blow him to pieces. The bomb is between him and the door, so that he cannot escape, nor can he kick it out, because the entrance shaft comes down too steeply.”3 The other dream is a fantastic version of the same event, “a dream of grotesque character, the central terror of which is an enormous and half-human cat hissing and about to spring at the dreamer and cutting off his escape from a lift which is waiting to ascend.”4
Graves proceeds to work out the implications of his declaration that “In the period of conflict, poetry may be either a partisan statement in the emotional or in the intellectual mode of thought of one side of the conflict; or else a double statement of both sides of the conflict, one side appearing in the manifest statement, that is, in the intellectual mode, the other in the latent content, that is, in the emotional mode, with neither side intelligible to the other.”5 The first form of poetry that he describes arises when the poet is unaware of the symbolism latent in his statement: “If the bomb-dream was related as a historic experience, ‘At the foot of the shaft John Tompkins lay, /The bomb rolled hissing down,’ by someone who did not feel the analogy between the bomb and trench-warfare, that would be direct poetic statement.”6 The second form of poetry arises when the poet is in the emotional mode, unaware of the intelligible potential of his statement: “the cat-dream is fantastic, and might produce a poem of this style: ‘The great cat booted and spurred with nails/Flayed him with his nine long tails, /He could not flee by the upward-moving stair,’ where the associations of cat combine in a psychological unity which cannot be accepted as probable by any empiric test.”7 The third form of poetry that he describes is very similar to the first – in fact, superficially identical to it – but the allegorical symbolism is even more remote from consciousness: “If the soldier at the same time as he was having these unhappy military experiences was involved in a commercial fraud that was in danger of being exploded, the bomb-dream might well serve for his two predicaments at once without further distortion.”8
Graves clearly categorizes poetry here both in terms of the kinds of ambiguity present in the poems and in terms of whether or not the poet is conscious of them. The bomb-dream and the cat-dream overlap because there are multiple kinds of hissing, multiple kinds of ascent, and so on, all of which enable the kinds of displacement and condensation that Graves outlines. The war experience and the financial experience can both be expressed in the bomb-dream because a word like “explode” is a node for what Graves calls “multiple reference.”9 In Graves’s poetic universe, there are always at least two meanings. The question is whether the various meanings can be known and to what extent they are known, both from the poet’s and from the reader’s point of view. As Jensen points out, Seven Types of Ambiguity regularly exhibits the same kind of bifurcation of its analysis between the poet’s and the reader’s point of view.10
Graves begins Poetic Unreason by introducing this necessarily double perspective: “I will ask you to think of Poetry in two very different capacities without for a moment confusing them – Poetry as it fulfills certain needs in the poet, and Poetry as it fulfills certain needs in the reader.”11 Empson does the same. As Jensen observes, Empson’s concentration on semantic and grammatical ambiguities in his discussion of the first three types is supplemented by focus “on the mind and intention of the author” in types four, five, and seven and by focus on “the reader’s conscious recognition” of ambiguity in type six (although “in none of the types is any of the dimensions independent”).12
Empson derives from his first three ambiguities further types distinguishable in terms of the writer’s or the reader’s consciousness of multiple references: “I put in the third type cases where one was intended to be mainly conscious of a verbal subtlety; in the fourth type the subtlety may be as great, the pun as distinct, the mixture of modes of judgment as puzzling, but they are not in the main focus of consciousness”; “An ambiguity of the fifth type occurs when the author is discovering his idea in the act of writing, or not holding it all in his mind at once”; ambiguities of the seventh type “show a fundamental division in the writer’s mind,” the result for the person responding to this context being “at once an indecision and a structure” that draws one “into the stasis of appreciation.”13 Similarly Graves defines further forms of poetry in terms of the poet’s developing consciousness of the phenomenon of multiple reference. He derives a fifth type of poetry from the arrival of consciousness upon the scene of poetry otherwise of the second type described above:
If the poet becoming aware of the allegory comprised in the Cat dream wrote a poem which though logical enough to disregard the verbal associations of cat and cat-o’-nine-tails was to embody the various allegorical settings, it might appear something like this:
War held me: like a mouse, I seemed.
War, the great cat played with my life,
Hissing and torturing with delay.
Or it seemed that war, a nine-thonged whip,
Flayed me, fast fettered to the ground.
I could not fly, nor show my torturer fight,
I felt like some poor lift-boy when masked thieves
Threaten him and he casts a longing eye
At the waiting lift across the hotel lounge.
Here there is nothing unconfirmable by the sense; a man can be held by war and can record his sensations by this or that analogy. But there is a distinction between poetry in which the use of allegory is static, confined to a single consistent theme (as the bomb dream used as an allegory of war) and poetry in which a variety of allegories occur, as in the cat dream.14
Graves in fact imagines as a sixth type of poetry the very poetry of the “fundamental division in the writer’s mind” that Empson defines as a seventh type of ambiguity: “if there is a conflict in the individual, one interest will be likely to appear on the higher [intellectual] and one on the lower [emotional] level, so that the soldier who was alternately militarist and pacifist, with the militarist dominant on the higher level, would either disregard the cat dream, if he remembered it, as being nonsensical, or if he was versed in these methods of dream analysis would fail to interpret it in the pacifist sense, or in a third case he would even misinterpret it in a sense suitable to the militarist claim.”15 Empson says that of conflicting ideas in “ambiguity of the seventh type one tends to lose sight of the conflict they assume; the ideas are no longer thought of as contradictory by the author”; in this type of ambiguity, there is occasionally “an evasion of the contradiction, which moves it out of the conscious mind into a region of the judgment which can accept it without reconciling it.”16 Here again, Empson’s anatomy of the divisions possible in the writer’s mind is virtually the same as Graves’s.
In a chapter on poems that present “Problems for Classification,” Graves even offers an example of what Empson will call an ambiguity of the fifth type, which occurs “when the author is discovering his idea in the act of writing, or not holding it all in the mind at once”:
There is a poem by Wordsworth called Nutting, which makes an interesting problem for classification because it is difficult to know how far Wordsworth realized its emotional significance, and how far he was deliberately trying to divert the attention of his readers from an incident in his life which did little credit to his social reputation … It seems most probable that Wordsworth wrote the Nutting poem with all but the “dearest Maiden” passage as part of the Childhood book of the Prelude: later, on arrival at the ninth book he suddenly saw its significance to the Annette Vallon romance. He intended to incorporate it at that point as an allegory with the “dearest maiden” ending, and probably an introduction giving the story of his unhappy romance. Dissuaded by considerations of caution he printed Nutting separately … Nutting begins then as a romantic poem; but the poet becomes aware of the latent meaning when he has emerged from the mood that made it necessary … [T] he poet has on the higher level recognized the allegory of a poem on the lower level, so that by deliberate additions and substitutions he can turn it into a solution of one phase at any rate of the conflict.17
Writing similarly of “the transitional simile” (rather than of the transitional poem that Graves identifies) – a “simile which applies to nothing exactly, but lies half-way between two things when the author is moving from one to the other” – Empson describes such literary events as “a fortunate confusion.”18
A similar poem, discovering itself in the act of writing in just the way that Empson describes, is “John Skelton’s poem, Speke, Parot … a very interesting example of the development of a poem by accretion of different moods.”19 It offers itself as a fortunate confusion not holding all of its moods together at once. On the one hand, “the actual parrot itself on which the poem has been based is very accurately drawn”; on the other hand, the poem is an allegory: “moral censure of the age crops up here and there throughout the piece”; “in most respects the parrot is Skelton”; “but where the poet thinks of the parrot as being the bird which is always picking up shreds of learning and producing them at the wrong occasion the parrot is his enemy Wolsey.”20 So in the course of Skelton’s writing of the poem, there is a “shifting of the latent meaning.”21
Empson, then, could look to this work by Graves not only for an example of the general usefulness of the taxonomical tactic in explaining the kinds of multiple meanings that come systematically to be associated in poetry, but also for examples of particular kinds of associated meanings that a more academic, disciplined, and focused critic could explain – at greater length, in greater detail, and with more sophistication – as seven types of ambiguity.
1 Robert Graves, Poetic Unreason: And Other Studies (London: Cecil Palmer, 1925), 147.
2 Ibid., 147, 141, 140.
3 Ibid., 141.
4 Ibid., 142.
5 Ibid., 52–3.
6 Ibid., 147–8.
7 Ibid., 148.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 James Jensen, “The Construction of Seven Types of Ambiguity,” Modern Language Quarterly, 27.3 (1966): 243–59.
11 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 1.
12 Jensen, 252–3.
13 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity: A Study of Its Effects in English Verse, 1st ed. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931), 168, 195, 244, 245, 245.
14 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 150.
15 Ibid., 152–3.
16 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 284, 147.
17 Ibid., 195; Graves, Poetic Unreason, 167–71.
18 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 202, 195; and “Preface to the Second Edition,” Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd ed. (1953; repr. London: Hogarth Press, 1984), vi.
19 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 171.
20 Ibid, 172, 172, 172, 173.
21 Ibid., 172.