3
In collaboration, Riding and Graves influenced certain aspects of the development of Empson’s method; on his own, Graves influenced others. Before proceeding further in making the case for Graves’s claim to have been the most important influence on Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, I must explain that Riding and Graves are both inaccurate in their accounts of who was responsible for what in their close reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129. Certain of the principles and certain aspects of the method that they apply are original to neither of them. It is clear that they misremembered the experience of composing their book, for they forgot a decisive influence upon the development of their method.
When William Van O’Connor casually mentions that “Empson had been anticipated by Frederick C. Prescott in The Poetic Mind (1922),” he is not as accurate as he might have been, for Prescott’s understanding of the poetic mind and its method of reading literature are mediated to Empson first by Graves, and then by Riding and Graves. Yet neither Riding nor Graves ever gives Prescott the credit he is due.1
Riding, as Laura Gottschalk, was a fourth-year undergraduate studying English at Cornell University when Prescott’s book came out in February of 1922. The Department of English at Cornell today boasts that she studied with Prescott and that, according to M.H. Abrams, she applied Prescott’s ideas in A Survey of Modernist Poetry.2 It is clear, however, that Riding could no more have tolerated Prescott’s thoroughly Freudian understanding of poetry than Graves’s Rivers-inspired “conflict theory.” From her point of view, that kind of work subordinates the poem to a reality outside it, the poet’s psychological experience, and is therefore wrong. Yet Prescott, like Graves, was very good at showing how the multiple meanings of words in poems worked together in profoundly significant ways – something that Riding found very interesting, indeed.
Graves had certainly read Prescott before his initial acquaintance with Riding, by letter, sometime after mid-1925, and well before meeting with Riding in person at the end of 1925. Citing correspondence between Graves and Prescott from earlier in 1925, Friedmann observes that Graves had “engaged in a friendly correspondence with Frederick Prescott of the Cornell University English department, in whose recently published book, The Poetic Mind, Graves had found elements of support for the psychological theories in his own book, On English Poetry. So he decided to seek Prescott’s assistance in procuring a teaching job at the American university, expressing interest in assisting Prescott in his research in ‘aesthetic psychology.’”3
There is considerable overlap between the literary theory and the practical criticism articulated in On English Poetry and The Poetic Mind, published respectively in May and February of 1922. This fact is not surprising, given the authors’ attempts to develop a theory of literature and a practical method of literary interpretation based on a similar source: psychoanalytical theory. Although Graves was developing the ideas of Rivers and Prescott was developing the ideas of Freud and Jung, they shared many ideas, values, assumptions, and insights.
Like Graves, Prescott discusses the differences between “two modes of thought”: “voluntary or purpose thought” and “associative thought”: “our ordinary prosaic thought is of the first of these kinds, dream and poetic vision of the second.”4 Like Graves, Prescott regards “associative, imaginative, poetic thought” as “the primary one” – practical, voluntary, prosaic thought having grown out of it, after it.5 Like Graves, Prescott stands on guard against the prejudice that the more primitive mode of thought is inferior: “the older faculty in many respects is still the better.”6Also like Graves, Prescott regards the spontaneous poetry that comes from the unconscious as superior to intellectual poetry.7 So it is no wonder that Graves was not only able to recognize a kindred spirit in Prescott, but also able to imagine collaborating with him on research into “aesthetic psychology.”
The impact of Prescott’s work on Graves is evident not in any change of mind by Graves about the nature of literature or how to interpret it, but rather in how Graves lifted everything from turns of phrase to interpretations of literature out of Prescott’s work to make more consistent and coherent, and to express more clearly, the theory and practice that had appeared in his earliest work in a rather helter-skelter fashion. Making Graves’s theory and practice clearer and more coherent is the project that Empson professed to have recognized as necessary, and in part to have undertaken by means of his own work. Graves borrowed significantly from Prescott, as would Empson from Graves, and thereby from Prescott, too.
In the following pages from Impenetrability, or The Proper Habit of English (1926), Graves writes in terms that are consistent with those he had been developing since 1921, yet he also lifts quite a bit of material from The Poetic Mind:
When particular words very highly charged with meaning in their context occur in English literature, this is counted a great virtue. In logical literatures it is a vice, by the rule of “one word, one meaning.” For instance, in Keats’ Eve of St. Agnes, Madeleine is described in “her soft and chilly nest,” “Clasped like a missal when swart Paynims pray,” where “clasped” means “fastened with a clasp of holiness” or “held lovingly in the hands,” if the Paynims are held to be converted; but also, without prejudice, “shut and coldly neglected,” if the Paynims are held to be unconverted …
This, then, is the constant practice of those English poets who achieve the most admired phrases. The reader is not rationally aware of the principle underlying such phrases: he knows that they delight him but does not in the act of reading poetry dissect them. In prose a similar method of concentrated meaning is used and known as “wit,” but in this case the reader gets pleasure from a clear rational analysis of the different senses in which the witty phrase is to be read. Here is a passage from a superior society novel:
On departure our hero clicked his heels politely and acknowledged the salty hospitality of his host: for the old marquis had enjoyed the youth’s discomfiture hugely, and had been thus lavish in heaping him with all manner of delicacies and honours only because he knew that they afforded his guest no enjoyment at all.
This word “salty” is the point where opposing senses unite in wit. To “acknowledge salty hospitality” is in one sense to acknowledge the social obligation of good manners which eating of a host’s salt implies in most countries. But it is also to comment on the absence of goodwill, in the sense that “salty” means “sterile.” In a third sense it is to comment on the host’s dry humour in recognising and making fun of the guest’s discomfiture, for “Attic salt” is a well-known synonym for wit itself. When such a concentration of forces can be exerted at a single point in literature, then, in Humpty-Dumpty’s words, “there’s glory for you!”8
Compare these pages to the central pages of Prescott’s chapter on “The Imagination: Condensation and Displacement,” where he explains that the role of condensation in what Freud calls “Dream work” is similar to its role in what Prescott calls “Poetic work”9:
Each word will be apt to have two, three, or even many meanings or implications, corresponding to the multiple associations of the mental imagery which it represents … [O] ften the surface meaning will be of less importance than the latent ones … [T] he real poetry will be between the lines … A poem will be “poetical” or “imaginative” in proportion as its language is overcharged with meanings …
Let us take … a line from the “Eve of St. Agnes” which has probably given the critics as much trouble as any other in Keats. It represents Madeline, in “her soft and chilly nest,” as
Clasp’d like a missal where swart paynims pray. On this Leigh Hunt comments: “Clasp’d like a missal in a land of pagans, – that is to say, where Christian books must not be seen, and are, therefore, doubly cherished for the danger.” This comment R. Garnett calls “entirely wide of the mark,” insisting that whereas Hunt takes “clasp’d” to mean “clasp’d to the bosom,” its true meaning is “fastened with a clasp.” “Clasp’d missal may be allowed to suggest holiness which the prayers of swart paynims neglect,” says another comment. “Missal, a prayer book bearing upon its margins pictures of converted heathen in the act of prayer,” says still another … I should think most if not all of the puzzled annotators were right … I have dwelt on this line because it illustrates a principle which is most important in all reading of poetry, and which is inherent in its very nature – namely, that whereas in true prose words should have one meaning and one meaning only, in true poetry they should have as many meanings as possible, and the more the better, as long as they are true to the images in the poet’s mind …
In wit the same fusion of words and images often results in a condensed or “over-determined” expression … In wit, as in poetry, the fusion often unexpectedly throws together images not ordinarily associated, and brings to light unexpected likenesses, giving thus a kind of poetical pleasure … In wit the fusion will often result in new verbal formations. “Indeed, he would sometimes remark,” Disraeli writes in Lothair, “when a man fell into his anecdotage it was a time for him to retire from the world.” The meaning compressed into the telescoped word would if expanded require a sentence. Oftener the wit will lie in an ordinary word taken in two senses, in a pun or paronomasia. Two meanings, which might be expressed separately by two unambiguous words, are fused, and the fusion represented by an ambiguity …
[With regard to the question of whether Pope, or Keats, or Shakespeare meant to pun on the word “die” in various works, or whether readers need to be conscious of the possible pun, Prescott avers that] a poet, like a dreamer, may use a symbol of this kind … without consciously recognizing it; as a reader may unconsciously get its effect. Perhaps indeed the unconscious effect is stronger, for poetry ceases to be poetry where all the effects are conscious and explicable … An immature or thoughtless reader will of course overlook it. But a reader or an audience that has been carried away by the dramatic feeling will have a sense of it, and will feel too a vague emotional satisfaction … The satisfaction will be of the nameless and unexplained kind that is the truest mark of poetry … The thoughtful reader … will go on to comprehend and explain it …
[T] he imagination plays with every word that it touches, fills it with meanings and suggestions, colours and brightens it, borrowing lights and colors too from other words and from the context, until the whole expression becomes illuminated, and the glorified utterance becomes a fitting expression of the imaginative mind.10
I have quoted a great deal from each book, but this strategy is necessary if one is to appreciate the extent of Prescott’s impact on Graves.
Graves clearly cribs his analysis of Keats’s line in “The Eve of St Agnes” from Prescott’s analysis of the same line. But there is much more to notice here. Graves also echoes many of Prescott’s most important phrases, and does so over several pages in the same order in which they occur in Prescott’s pages: “language … overcharged with meanings” becomes “words very highly charged with meaning”; the observation that “in true prose words should have one meaning and one meaning only” becomes the observation that logical languages disapprove of manifold meanings “by the rule of ‘one word, one meaning”; the assertion that a reader need not be conscious of a pun, yet “may unconsciously get its effect,” and that “a reader or an audience that has been carried away by the dramatic feeling will have a sense of it, and will feel too a vague emotional satisfaction … of the nameless and unexplained kind that is the truest mark of poetry,” becomes the observation that “the reader is not rationally aware of the principle underlying such phrases [with multiple meanings]: he knows that they delight him but does not in the act of reading poetry dissect them”; the claim that “In wit, as in poetry, the fusion [of meanings in a pun] often unexpectedly throws together images not ordinarily associated, and brings to light unexpected likenesses, giving thus a kind of poetical pleasure,” is echoed in the claim that “in prose a similar method of concentrated meaning is used and known as ‘wit,’ but in this case the reader gets pleasure from a clear rational analysis of the different senses in which the witty phrase is to be read”; finally, both discussions move to a celebration of the “glory” of this aspect of poetic language. None of these ideas or observations is necessarily new to Graves, but as the extensive quotations above show, Graves’s recollection of several pages of Prescott’s book organized several pages of his own.
Quoting Graves’s analysis in Impenetrability of both the very passage above about “The Eve of St Agnes” and the very “salty” passage above about the superior society novel in question, Empson declares to Riding that in these “decisive” passages Graves “had reached” finally the “theory of poetical ambiguity” implicit in On English Poetry.11
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But there is more. For Prescott, of course, found analysis of Shakespeare’s word-play irresistible, and so not surprisingly he enunciated his most fundamental rules for the reading of all literature in the context of his particular readings of Shakespeare – as would Riding and Graves, and then Empson. Prescott’s analysis of a line from Hamlet reveals his impact on these critics in terms of their shared concern not just to recover Shakespeare’s meaning, but also to recover for the contemporary reader the ability to understand the poetic state of mind:
Hamlet’s soliloquy is dramatically the expression of a mind at high tension, filled with more confused images than it can find words for … The broken and turbid expression itself suggests the mental situation. It is not strange therefore that this speech, when subjected to languid analysis by the verbal critics, should have given a great deal of trouble, and that it should have required ten closely printed pages in the Variorum Shakespeare even to summarize the observations that have been made upon it. Readers who wish to get an idea of what learned German criticism may do for Shakespeare should read Elze’s discussion of the line
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil.
Here editors suggest “clay,” “vail,” “soil,” and “spoil,” and they try to decide between the possible meanings of “coil.” Now it is well in reading Shakespeare, first to avoid emendations as far as may be, and secondly, where two or more meanings are possible and congruous with the context, not to dispute between them, but to understand them all. These two rules of course will not solve all the difficulties, but they will dispense with a great deal of the annotation. In the line just quoted Shakespeare probably had first an image of the turmoil and confusion of this mortal life, and then an image of the body as the wrapping or covering of the soul – both of which might be shuffled off in the “sleep of death.” The second image is very closely related to the first, is a little more specific, and more figurative. Both can be fused and condensed in the word “coil,” which kills two birds with one small stone. This line again will not bother any reader whose imagination has been awakened by the context. To such a reader the line is alive with meaning; it is not made up of dead or inert words, with definite and exclusive denotations. The real difficulty is that, as we no longer have the imagination to write poetry, we lack even the imagination to read it.12
Riding and Graves, and Empson, too, take as their point of departure Prescott’s rules: do not emend Shakespeare; understand all of Shakespeare’s meaning. The purpose of Riding and Graves in invoking Shakespeare in their discussion of modern poetry is to show that despite the fact that “understanding of … poetry … like Shakespeare’s … is taken for granted,” Shakespeare’s poetry is actually more difficult to understand than that of a contemporary poet like E.E. Cummings.13 According to Riding and Graves, it is the intolerable difficulty of reading Shakespeare “that provoked his editors to meddle with his texts as being too incomprehensible as they were written.”14 In effect, they echo Prescott’s observation that contemporary readers lack the imagination to read it: “The failure of imagination and knowledge in Shakespeare’s emendators has reduced Shakespeare to the indignity of being easy for everybody.”15
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Other of Prescott’s passages on Shakespeare are devoted to the genre preferred by Riding and Graves (and by Empson, too, in much of Seven Types of Ambiguity): the sonnets. These passages are equally instructive with regard to how Riding and Graves, and thereby Empson, were invited by Prescott to consider the complexities arising from the proper verbal functioning of the poetic state of mind:
I have spoken so far as if two things only were fused and represented by figures. In fact, three, four, or more things are often so fused, and the expression strives to represent the resulting complex image. Image a suggests image b by resemblance, and this in turn image c; and from these results a compound image abc, which is expressed by some choice from the terms A, B, and C. This compounding of three images occurs in Shakespeare’s sonnet (where the third image enters in l. 4):
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late sweet birds sang.16
Another sonnet in which Shakespeare uses the word state three times, with shifting meaning, closes
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Here the word state might mean “condition,” or “estate,” or “royal splendour,” and probably means all of those – not successively, but all at once. In other words, the three meanings are fused in the mind, and this word state is a kind of triple figure. Sometimes the different meanings are not thus definitely assignable. Shakespeare in writing
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
has probably first in mind legal sessions, but this calls up other associations and the word therefore has other meanings …
Shakespeare always meant more than he intended.17
Prescott’s suggestion that Shakespeare’s words mean all sorts of things at once, rather than merely meaning a sequence of single things in succession, and that these various meanings are fused in the mind, is reproduced in very similar terms by Riding and Graves in their analysis of sonnet 129: “All these alternate meanings acting on each other, and even other possible interpretations of words and phrases, make as it were a furiously dynamic cross-word puzzle which can be read in many directions at once, none of the senses being incompatible with any others.”18 It all leads to Riding and Graves’s practical advice for “getting out of the prose and into the poetic state of mind”: readers are responsible for “developing a capacity for minuteness, for seeing all there is to see at a given point and for taking it all with one as one goes along.”19 Prescott’s provocative suggestion here that “Shakespeare always meant more than he intended,” along with his equally provocative suggestion above that “in true poetry [words] … should have as many meanings as possible, and the more the better,” is worked out more fully by Riding and Graves: “The effect of … revised punctuation has been to restrict meanings to special interpretations of special words. Shakespeare’s punctuation allows the variety of meanings he actually intends; if we must choose any one meaning, then we owe it to Shakespeare to choose at least one he intended and one embracing as many meanings as possible, that is, the most difficult meaning. It is always the most difficult meaning that is most final.”20
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A brief recapitulation of what Empson took from Riding and Graves shows how much of that influence was also Prescott’s influence. In the conclusion to Chapter Two of Seven Types of Ambiguity, he takes up Riding and Graves’s subject, and treats it in their terms: “I shall now return to Shakespeare and allow myself a couple of digressions; about the emendations of his text and his use of a particular grammatical form.”21 He concludes from his survey of the history of emendations to Shakespeare’s texts that a “conservative attitude to ambiguity” is operative: “it is assumed … that Shakespeare can only have meant one thing.”22 His phrasing follows that of Riding and Graves here. He follows them further in disavowing the practice of restricting meanings to special interpretations of special words – reversing it, in fact, so as to embrace as many meanings as possible – possibility in each case being determined by plausibility. Embracing all of the meanings that the Arden editor lists for the word rooky – “these meanings … might, for all we know … have seemed plausible to anybody in the first-night audience; might have seemed plausible to Shakespeare himself, since he was no less sensitive to words than they” – Empson argues that “such a note … makes you bear in mind all the meanings it puts forward” and that “this is the normal experience of readers” of Shakespeare.23 And so “the reader must hold in mind a variety of things he may have meant, and weight them, in appreciating the poetry, according to their probabilities.”24 These are Prescott’s “two rules”: “first to avoid emendations as far as may be, and secondly, where two or more meanings are possible and congruous with the context, not to dispute between them, but to understand them all.”25
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If it is really the case that the credit for formulating the principles articulated in their reading of Shakespeare’s sonnet 129 belongs more to Riding than to Graves, as Graves himself suggested in 1966, then Riding knew Prescott’s work well, for there is no doubt that the Prescott principle informs the book’s treatment of Shakespeare – and much else, besides. Certainly Graves knew Prescott’s work very well, so the fact that a habit of borrowing without acknowledgment not just Prescott’s ideas but certain of his phrases, as well, is common to both Impenetrability and A Survey of Modernist Poetry may be evidence that Graves did indeed write much of the analysis of Shakespeare’s sonnet.
Ironically, then, the dispute between Riding and Graves about their “word-by-word collaboration” comes down to the question, in part, “Which of them was the one applying Prescott’s rules and recycling his words?” – a question that leads to another: “How could whoever wrote the analysis of Shakespeare’s sonnet in A Survey of Modernist Poetry ever have pretended that either its principles or its methods were invented exclusively by him or her?”
1 William Van O’Connor, “Ambiguity,” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger, 2nd ed. enlarged (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1974), 19.
2 Department of English, Cornell University, accessed 1 December 2012, http://www.arts.cornell.edu/english/about/history/.
3 Elizabeth Friedmann, A Mannered Grace: The Life of Laura (Riding) Jackson (New York: Persea Books, 2005), 78. See 480n4. Friedmann speculates that they were written in May and June of 1925.
4 Frederick Clark Prescott, The Poetic Mind (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 36, 36, 36, 38.
5 Ibid., 53.
6 Ibid., 69.
7 Ibid., 94.
8 Robert Graves, Impenetrability; or the Proper Habit of English (London: The Hogarth Press, 1926), 55–8.
9 Prescott, The Poetic Mind, 169.
10 Ibid., 171–80.
11 Empson, letter to Laura Riding (25 August 1970), Selected Letters of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 430, 429, 429.
12 Prescott, The Poetic Mind, 173–4.
13 Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927; repr. New York: Haskell House, 1969), 11.
14 Ibid., 63.
15 Ibid., 81.
16 Coincidentally, Empson defines his first type of ambiguity, and begins his extensive analysis of ambiguity in Shakespeare’s works generally, with close attention to the ambiguities in this line. See 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), 3.
17 Prescott, The Poetic Mind, 230–1.
18 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 80.
19 Ibid., 149.
20 Ibid., 74.
21 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 102.
22 Ibid., 102, 102–3.
23 Ibid., 103, 103, 104.
24 Ibid., 103.
25 Prescott, The Poetic Mind, 174.