20
Finally, another significant influence of Riding and Graves is evident in Richards’s observations about the contemporary reader’s response to humour in poetry. A whole chapter of A Survey of Modernist Poetry is devoted to the topic of “The Humorous Element in Modernist Poetry.” For the modernist poet, representing “a generation that the War came upon at its most impressionable stage and taught the necessity for a self-protective skepticism of the stability of all human relationships, particularly of all national and religious institutions, of all existing moral codes, of all sentimental formulas for future harmony,” Riding and Graves suggest that “everything that would ordinarily seem serious to him now seems a tragic joke.”1 So pervasive is this skepticism that “the historically-minded modernist poet is uncertain whether there is any excuse for the existence of poets at all.”2 Humour is this distressed poet’s response: “he brazens out the dilemma by making cruel jokes at his own expense … [H] e is able to do what no generation of poets before has been able to do – to make fun of himself when he is at his most serious.”3
The problem is that the plain reader is not likely to get the joke: “The poet’s self-mockery is that feature of modernist poetry most likely to puzzle the reader or the critic.”4 In effect, “The probable failure of wit in the reader, whether plain reader or critic, removes from the poet that measure of address which an audience imposes.”5 So the poet makes “jokes which he expects no one to see or not to be laughed at if seen.”6 The poet becomes a clown without an audience: “The modernist clown, feeling a want in his audience, turns his back on it and performs his ritual of antics without benefit of applause.”7 According to Riding and Graves, the consequences of this failure of wit on the reader’s part and this disdain for the audience on the poet’s part are far-reaching: “Limitations in the sense of humour of the critic-reader have … the effect of making the modernist poem more and more difficult. For, the poet tells himself, if the reading public is bound anyhow to be a limited one, the poem may as well take advantage of its isolation by using references and associations which are as far out of the ordinary critic’s reach as the modernist sense of humour.”8
On the whole, Riding and Graves approve of this disdain for the relatively witless critic-reader. They call once more on the poetry of John Crowe Ransom to make their point. Although they generally cite his poetry approvingly, this time they offer “Winter Remembered” as an example of how too much respect for the audience can lead to too much of the self-mockery that is a staple of the modernist poet’s technique: “He insists upon the wit of his reader; he makes an appeal which it is impossible that the reader shall overlook: if the reader be slow in discovering the clues to the poet’s clownishness, the poet forces his clownishness in a way that the reader cannot mistake. It is as if a performing clown had made a deep but delicate joke against himself which the audience had missed. Bound to have his audience appreciate his mood, the clown slaps himself very hard and makes a long face. The audience now sees the joke and laughs.”9 Riding and Graves regret that Ransom “was obliged to brutalize his joke in order to soften his audience to him” and worry that he is “overstepping the disrespect which the poet wishes to do himself” by adding to the poem “a pathetic element, a tearfulness, which rarely is entirely sincere.”10
Richards takes note of this image of the poet forced by his reader’s failure of wit to signal his sense of humour in an obvious and exaggerated way. His students’ responses to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “In the Churchyard at Cambridge” prompt him to comment in just such terms on the limitations of the sense of humour of “modern readers.”11 Richards presents this poem, the last of the thirteen to be discussed, as an example of the danger that stock responses can cause:
If the easiest way to popularity is to exploit some stock response, some poem already existent, fully prepared, in the reader’s mind, an appearance of appealing to such stock responses, should the reader happen to have discarded them, is a very certain way of courting failure. So that a poet who writes on what appears to be a familiar theme, in a way which, superficially, is only slightly unusual, runs a double risk. On the one hand, very many readers will not really read him at all. They will respond with the poem they suppose him to have written and then, if emancipated, recoil in horror to heap abuse on the poet’s head. On the other hand, less emancipated readers, itching to release their own stock responses, may be pulled up by something in the poem which prevents them. The result will be more abuse for the hapless author.12
Longfellow’s poem is just such a poem. Because it is set in a churchyard and contemplates the grave that awaits us all, “It was very generally assumed that since the subject of the poem is solemn the treatment must be solemn.”13 What baffles readers, according to Richards, is an unexpected change in tone mid-way through the poem from solemn to humorous – a change in tone that does not register with most readers because of their stock response to graveyard poetry.
Richards hypothesizes that despite most readers’ assumptions to the contrary, “the poet is not trying to be impressive, to inflate the reader with swelling sentiments and a gaseous ‘moral’”; rather, readers in the grip of a stock response project these motives onto lines that they do not understand.14 The poet is actually trying to keep his contemplation of the levelling effect of death “cool and sober.”15 The poem, then, is “not a grim warning, or an exhortation, but a cheerful realization of the situation, not in the least evangelical, not at all like a conventional sermon, but on the contrary extremely urbane, rather witty, and slightly whimsical.”16 The problem that a modern reader’s failure of wit makes for the proper appreciation of a modern poem is not a small one, and it is not a problem confined to a few: “if there is any character in poetry that modern readers … are unprepared to encounter, it is this social, urbane, highly cultivated, self-confident, temperate and easy kind of humour.”17 This is the same point made by Riding and Graves.
Richards concludes his analysis of G.H. Luce’s “Climb cloud, and pencil all the blue” with a similar observation about his students’ failure to appreciate the change of tone at the end of the poem: “Exactly how seriously the grandiloquence of the last three verses is to be taken, is the problem. That a slightly mocking tone comes in … was not noticed. Humour is perhaps the last thing that is expected in lyrical poetry, above all when its theme is nature. If the poet is going to smile he is required to give clear and ample notice of his intention.”18 Richards focuses on the very fracture between the poet’s humour and the audience’s humour that Riding and Graves mark as a characteristic feature of modernism, and he makes the same point about the need to signal clearly the poet’s antic disposition if the contemporary reader is to see his jokes and laugh. He has clearly found much more than mere “games of interpretation” in A Survey of Modernist Poetry.
•
Although I have suggested above that one of the most important insights into the problems with the contemporary reader’s understanding of poetry that Riding and Graves derive from Richards is his recommendation that people read poems more slowly, it seems also to be the case that Riding and Graves influenced Richards in turn by their development of this concept beyond Richards’s original formulation of it. In all of Richards’s discussions of “slow reading” at this time, he writes as though he has in mind the act of reading poetry aloud. Even fifty-five years after the essay on Hopkins was published, Richards was reminded in rereading it of the problem that he originally set out to address of how “to bring out the sense and the movement” of Hopkins’s verse “as fully as” a “voice might.”19 Certainly, in Practical Criticism, he continues to use the word “reading” as he does in Science and Poetry – that is, to indicate the phonological articulation of poetry: “By bad reading I suggest that we should mean … reading that prevents the reader himself from entering into the poem … Nothing more easily defeats the whole aim of poetry than … to read out a poem in public before it has given up most of its secrets … One piece of advice which has proved its usefulness may perhaps be offered: to remember that we are more likely to read too fast than to read too slow. Certainly … a very slow private reading gives a better chance for the necessary interaction of form and meaning to develop than any number of rapid perusals.”20
As in his essay on Hopkins, Richards emphasizes that good reading of a poem aloud requires it to have “given up most of its secrets” already, and that appreciation of form cannot be separated from appreciation of meaning – significantly revising the assumption in Science and Poetry that “a good deal of poetry and even some great poetry exists … in which the sense of the words can be almost entirely missed or neglected without loss.”21 But he now believes that recognizing and respecting the virtues of slow reading is not primarily about making poetry sound good; it “would probably more than anything else help to make poetry understood.”22 And so Richards explains the process and the benefits of slow reading in a way that further aligns it with the incremental, cumulative appreciation of the poem’s meaning that Riding and Graves describe.
In his “Introductory” remarks about “the conditions of the experiment” in his practical criticism classes, Richards implies that he explained his definition of what constituted a reading of a poem in the same way to both the 1925–26 class and the 1927–28 class. Yet it is clear that in Practical Criticism he develops the concept of “reading” beyond the one presented in his 1926 book Science and Poetry and his 1926 essay on Hopkins.23 He now explains reading as a process more about making proper sense of the poem than about making proper sound out of it. Richards has come to regard determining the sense of a poem, whether or not one reads it aloud to oneself, as involving the same slow reading necessary to determining its phonological articulation: “I asked each writer to record on his protocol the number of ‘readings’ made of each poem. A number of perusals made at one session were to be counted together as one ‘reading’ provided that they aroused and sustained one single growing response to the poem.”24 Richards explains and justifies “this description of a ‘reading’” as a necessary “measure of indirect suggestion” to his students. Without interfering too much with the existing reading habits that he proposes to study, he wishes to indicate that rapid perusals do not qualify as readings of poetry – the point, of course, that Riding and Graves emphasize in their instruction as to how to read “The Rugged Black of Anger.”
In Science and Poetry, however, one finds that the “perusal” of a poem is not some initial engagement with a poem that is a mere step towards a reading, but rather, ideally, the occasion of the poem’s understanding: “A poem, let us say Wordsworth’s ‘Westminster Bridge’ sonnet, is … the experience the right kind of reader has when he peruses the verses … And the first step to an understanding of the place and future of poetry in human affairs is to see what the general structure of such an experience is. Let us begin by reading it very slowly.”25 Slow reading is clearly less than a perusal; in fact, it is merely a preliminary step toward the perusal that animates the poem as meaningful experience for the reader. “Perusal” here implicitly constitutes a more comprehensive and sophisticated response to the poem than any available through the “slow reading” described in Science and Poetry. Through its appreciation of phonological form, slow reading offers, at most, “an inexplicable premonition of a meaning which we have not yet grasped.”26 In Practical Criticism, however, “any number of rapid perusals” clearly promises less understanding of the poem than one “very slow” reading, and “one ‘reading’” easily comprises “a number of perusals.”27 Between 1926 and 1929, the relationship in Richards’s work between perusals and slow readings has reversed itself.
What counts for Richards as a reading in Practical Criticism is just what Riding and Graves recommend as a reading in A Survey of Modernist Poetry: not a two-minute perusal, but a time-length of engagement with the poem that enables what Richards calls a growing response to it and what Riding and Graves describe as a seeing of all that one can see at a given point and a taking of it all with one as one goes along, a model for the way of being in the world that the future will demand, according to Richards.
•
Riding and Graves’s slow reading for sense is fundamental to Richards’s concept of close reading in Practical Criticism. Observing that the sound of a poem can actually obscure the co-operation within it between sound and sense ( “for many readers the metre and the verse-form of poetry is itself a powerful distraction” into “misreading,” leaving them in the position of those “trying to do sums in the neighbourhood of a barrel-organ or a brass band”), Richards makes the same point as Riding and Graves: “most poetry needs several readings – in which its varied factors may fit themselves together – before it can be grasped. Readers who claim to dispense with this preliminary study, who think that all good poetry should come home to them in entirety at a first reading, hardly realize how clever they must be.”28
Neither slow reading for meaning nor close reading for meaning should be confused with summary or paraphrase of the poem. Riding and Graves complain that the plain reader assumes “that the poet is not saying what he means but something like what he means in prettier language than he uses to himself about it.”29 Consequently, the reader searches for “the prose idea from which the real poem, apparently unwritten, is derived.”30 In “the ordinary translation system of poetry,” that is, poetry begins as the “Poet’s prose idea,” is then expressed as the “Poem,” and is finally interpreted via the “Reader’s prose summary.”31 In a modernist poem like Riding’s “The Rugged Black of Anger,” however, “bare, undressed ideas are found … instead of the rhetorical devices by which poets try to ‘put over’ their ideas,” and so “the ordinary translation system of poetry … is assumed to have been reversed.”32 Riding’s poem, that is, is assumed to express the “Prose idea as poem,” a dereliction of duty that leaves the reader searching for the real poem – the “Poem (suppressed)” – which can emerge only by the “Reader’s poetical summary.”33
In the “ordinary translation system,” “the extravagant use of metaphor and simile in poetry is … seen to be governed by the necessity of making a poem … equal the prose summary which really is dictating it”; in the modernist translation system, according to the plain reader, one finds in a poem like Riding’s “the prose idea in a slightly poetic form which the reader ha [s] to amplify along suggested poetical lines” into a “poetical summary of it.”34 For the benighted plain reader, poetry is either “prose summary” or “poetical summary.”
In his chapter on “Figurative Language,” Richards notes similar “misconceptions as to how the sense of words in poetry is to be taken.”35 Since “a good poet – to express feeling, to adjust tone and to further his other aims – may play all manner of tricks with his sense,” readers baffled by figurative language tend to succumb to “twin dangers – careless, ‘intuitive’ reading and prosaic, ‘over-literal’ reading.”36 Adopting the terms introduced by Riding and Graves, Richards explains “the difference … between a ‘poetic’ and a ‘prosaic’ reading.”37 On the one hand, because of the assumption that the poet is playing tricks with his sense, “an obscure notion is engendered in the reader that syntax is somehow less significant in poetry than in prose, and that a kind of guess-work – likely enough to be christened ‘intuition’ – is the proper mode of apprehending what a poet may have to say.”38 The result is an intuitive or poetic reading. On the other hand is “the habit of regarding poetry as capable of explanation” – a laudable habit so long as it does not become the misconceived “literalism” of “those who see nothing in poetical language but a tissue of ridiculous exaggerations, childish ‘fancies,’ ignorant conceits and absurd symbolizations.”39 In this case, the result is the prosaic reading.
For Riding and Graves, the poem is neither the prose summary nor the poetic summary. They regard the critic-reader’s regular question, “What, in so many words, is this all about?” as nonsensical. “If it were possible to give the complete force of a poem in a prose summary, then there would be no excuse for writing the poem: the ‘so many words’ are, to the last punctuation mark, the poem itself.”40 Either the prose summary and the poem are identical, or there is a discrepancy between them. In the former case, for instance, “If … the author of the lines beginning ‘The rugged black of anger’ were asked to explain their meaning, the only proper reply would be to repeat the lines.”41 In the latter case, “to tell what a poem is all about in ‘so many words’ is to reduce the poem to so many words, to leave out all that the reader cannot at the moment understand to give him the satisfaction of feeling that he is understanding it.”42 Here, the prose summary of a poem is implicitly “the common-sense substitute for a piece of poetical extravagance.”43 It “cannot explain a poem, else the poet, if he were honest, would give the reader only a prose summary, and no poem.”44 In fact, “where such a prose summary does render the poem in its entirety, except for rhymes and other external dressings, the poem cannot have been a complete one; and indeed a great deal of what passes for poetry is the rewriting of the prose summary of a hypothetical poem in poetical language.”45 Of course Richards makes the same point via his observation about the relationship between H.D.’s poem and its prose paraphrase. Regarding the best reading of a poem as “one embracing as many meanings as possible, that is, the most difficult meaning,” Riding and Graves conclude that “no prose interpretation of poetry can ever have complete finality, can be difficult enough.”46
The “poetical summary” of a poem is a recent invention of the contemporary critic, an interpretive strategy necessitated by the so-called obscurity of modernist poetry. The modernist poem seems more prose than poetry, a “prose idea in a slightly poetical form,” and so “the reader finds it necessary to make a poetical rather than a more strictly prose summary.”47 They speculate that the first two lines of Riding’s poem – “The rugged black of anger / Has an uncertain smile border” – may lead readers to interpret the lines as concealing “an incidental satire on the popular poetical sentiment: ‘Look around and you will find/Every cloud is silver-lined.’”48 But of course Riding and Graves do not accept what such an interpretation implies, that the two lines beginning “The Rugged Black of Anger” are “the prose idea as poem” that the reader needs “to amplify along suggested poetical lines.”49 Rather, in such an interpretation they see “a discrepancy … appear between the poem as it stands and the reader’s poetical summary of it”; “we … have not two equivalent meanings but one meaning and another gratuitous meaning derived from it.”50 Again, one can compare this point to the one made by Richards about H.D.’s poem.
In his chapters on “Figurative Language” and “Sense and Feeling,” Richards follows Riding and Graves in their emphasis on the “discrepancy” between what the poem says and any paraphrase of it that might be attempted, whether as a poetical or prose summary. Warning against the “careless,” “intuitive,” “poetic” “kind of guess-work” by which people misread, Richards hastens to add that he does not mean “to say that we can wrench the sense free from the poem, screw it down in a prose paraphrase, and then take the doctrine of our prose passage, and the feelings this doctrine excites in us, as the burden of the poem.”51 Riding and Graves say the same thing about the dangers inherent in the doctrine (and the feelings excited by it) that the poetical summary of “The Rugged Black of Anger” introduces: although “anger means just anger, smile-border just smile-border,” “if we … accept the silver-lined cloud explanation, we find that we are brought into a sentimental personal atmosphere in which anger is anger as felt by someone, or bad-luck seen as the anger of providence or fate, and in which smile-border is either personal happiness or good luck. Any such interpretation of anger and smile-border, indeed, would involve us in some such sympathetic history of the poem.”52 Here is the sense of the poem wrenched free from it, screwed down in a poetic paraphrase, the doctrine of the paraphrase then made the burden of the poem. Similarly, whereas Riding and Graves describe their own attempt to put a poem by Cummings “into ordinary prose,” and then to explain this prose version of the poem, as “the expansion, the dilution, even the destruction of the poem which one reader may perform for another if the latter is unable to face the intensity and compactness of the poem,” Richards recalls “the atrocities which teachers sometimes permit themselves” when “making a paraphrase or gloss” of a poem and acknowledges that “the risk of supposing that the feelings which the logical expansion of a poetic phrase excites must be those which the phrase was created to convey is very great.”53 Richards finds in his protocol writers the same tendency to replace the poem with a prose idea of it that Riding and Graves find in the contemporary critic-reader: “We easily substitute a bad piece of prose for the poem – a peculiarly damaging form of attack upon poetry”; the very kind of attack that Richards himself had made upon H.D.’s poem “The Pool” in Principles of Literary Criticism.54 The argument in each case is the same, and so is much of the language by which it is articulated: the logical expansion of the poetic phrase into prose and the intuitive expansion of the poetic phrase into a parallel poem each constitute a destructive attack upon poetry.
The problem that Riding and Graves describe of being “brought into a sentimental personal atmosphere in which anger is anger as felt by someone” recalls Richards’s complaint about what is missing in H.D.’s poem, and recalls Riding and Graves’s complaint of H.D. generally that she does not eliminate her personality from her poetry the way Emily Dickinson does from hers.55 Richards also agrees with Riding and Graves as to just what it is that distinguishes a poem from any summary or paraphrase of it. According to Riding and Graves, treating the first two lines of “The Rugged Black of Anger” as though they “mean what they say” and “mean just what they are” (right down to each word, and each punctuation mark) will reveal that what Riding has offered the reader is not “the prose idea as poem, but the poem itself.”56 “If … without the addition of any associations not provided in the poem, or of collateral interpretations, it could reveal an internal consistency strengthened at every point in its development and free of the necessity of external application, that is, complete without criticism – if it could do this, it would have established an insurmountable difference between prose ideas and poetic ideas, prose facts and poetic facts. The difference would mean the independence of poetic facts, as real facts, from any prose or poetical explanation in the terms of practical workaday reality which would make them seem unreal, or poetical facts.”57
One can understand the appeal of such a passage to the critic who asserts both the independence of poetic belief from scientific belief ( “The bulk of the beliefs in the arts are … provisional acceptances, holding only … in the state of mind which is the poem or the work of art … The difference between these emotive beliefs and scientific beliefs is not one of degree but of kind”) and also the insufficiency of logic and prose in explanations of poetry ( “There are few metaphors whose effect, if carefully examined, can be traced to the logical relations involved … Those who look only to the ostensible purposes for the explanation of effects, who make prose analyses of poems, must inevitably find them a mystery”).58 Indeed, one can see that Richards finds his own earlier convictions developed so much further and expressed so much more forcefully by Riding and Graves that he virtually paraphrases the passage above from A Survey of Modernist Poetry in Practical Criticism: “All respectable poetry invites close reading. It encourages attention to its literal sense up to the point … at which liberty can serve the aim of the poem better than fidelity to fact or strict coherence among fictions. It asks the reader to remember that its aims are varied and not always what he unreflectingly expects. He has to refrain from applying his own external standards … We cannot legitimately judge its means by external standards (such as accuracy of fact or logical coherence) which may have no relevance to its success in doing what it set out to do, or, if we like, in becoming what in the end it has become.”59 Richards has adopted the language of Riding and Graves that celebrates in poetry the “principle of self-determination,” “its quality of independence from both the reader and the poet,” its “self-explanatory” nature.60 Their observation that a poem ideally “corresponds in every respect with its own governing meaning” ( “in this foreshadowing, inevitable meaning the poem really exists even before it is written”), and that in writing “The Rugged Black of Anger” Riding “has made the poem out of itself: its final form is identical in terms with its preliminary form in the poet’s mind,” appears in Richards’s note explaining that by “the aim of the poem” “I … mean … the whole state of mind, the mental condition, which in another sense is the poem.”61
1 Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927; repr. New York: Haskell House, 1969), 226, 227.
2 Ibid., 227.
3 Ibid., 228–9.
4 Ibid., 229.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., 228.
7 Ibid., 230.
8 Ibid., 233–4.
9 Ibid., 230.
10 Ibid., 230.
11 I.A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1929), 176.
12 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 163.
13 Ibid., 174.
14 Richards, Practical Criticism, 175.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 176.
18 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 143–4.
19 I.A. Richards, Preface to “Gerard Hopkins,” in Complementarities: Uncollected Essays, ed. John Paul Russo (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 139.
20 Richards, Practical Criticism, 233–4.
21 I.A. Richards, Science and Poetry (New York: W.W. Norton, 1926), 31.
22 Richards, Practical Criticism, 234.
23 Ibid, ix.
24 Ibid., 4.
25 Richards, Science and Poetry, 22.
26 Ibid., 31.
27 Richards, Practical Criticism, 234, 4.
28 Ibid., 190.
29 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 142.
30 Ibid., 144.
31 Richards, Practical Criticism, 144.
32 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 142, 144.
33 Ibid., 144.
34 Ibid., 142, 145, 145.
35 Richards, Practical Criticism, 192.
36 Ibid., 190, 91.
37 Ibid., 191.
38 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 191.
39 Richards, Practical Criticism, 216, 192,193.
40 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 139.
41 Ibid., 143.
42 Ibid., 139.
43 Ibid., 87.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid., 139–40.
46 Ibid., 74–5.
47 Ibid., 145.
48 Ibid., 143.
49 Ibid., 144, 145.
50 Ibid., 145.
51 Richards, Practical Criticism, 191.
52 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 146.
53 Ibid., 87; Richards, Practical Criticism, 216.
54 Richards, Practical Criticism, 216.
55 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 146.
56 Ibid., 146, 147, 146.
57 Ibid., 146.
58 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co. 1924; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1925), 278, 240–1.
59 Richards, Practical Criticism, 203–4.
60 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 47, 124, 124
61 Ibid., 133, 133–4, 142; Richards, Practical Criticism, 204.