“We all know where we are not at. We all know who our sublime superiors are,” says Derek Walcott. I had better declare a material interest in this common language of poetry and give a health warning.
When I was nineteen my father told me to pursue law or some useful vocation, anything I liked, he said liberally, even the Church or the army. What about publishing? Certainly not: speculation, gambling with uncertain futures or merely repackaging the past. When I became a publisher he advised me again: I was not to publish poetry. He echoed the Mr. Nixon of Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”: “And give up verse, my boy, / There’s nothing in it.”
I became a poetry publisher. Mr. Nixon was right—and wrong. The nothing can be very nearly the everything. But my father disowned me. We still exchanged letters, but he no longer took an interest in my future. I had none. I’d made myself a prodigal. I had also made myself free to adopt my own antecedents. I went in quest of them, and they were not easy to find. They survived—if at all—mostly in footnotes, obscure monographs and technical books.
The earliest were called scribes; they later became known as scriveners, printers, booksellers, and finally publishers. They worked in Southwark, then at St. Paul’s, in Paternoster Row, Bloomsbury, the Corn Exchange, St. Martin’s Lane, Vauxhall Bridge Road. Now we’re scattered, like poets, to the round earth’s imagined corners: Sydney, New York, Toronto, Jo’burg, Delhi, Wellington. Those who specialize are poor and have been poor for centuries. Why? So that poets—a few of them—can prosper. Publishers get written out of the story and poets live forever. Servants of the servants of the Muse, from the days of scriptoria to the world of desktop publishing, we are dogsbodies of the art: we edit, correct, scribe, typeset or key, print, bind, tout. Are we remembered?
How many of us can you name? William Caxton? Good. Maybe Wynkyn de Worde, just about. And after that—ever heard of Tottel, Taylor, Murray? You might recognize a name, but only because of Wyatt or Clare or Byron. On the whole, as far as readers are concerned publishers are the aboriginal Anon. Gossip about us is sparse and generally unpleasant. If we misjudge a writer or commit a small human or financial irregularity that touches his or her biography, then we come alive, villains of the piece, alongside unfaithful spouses and wicked stepparents.
We were the first readers of almost every poem that traveled beyond the charmed circle of a writer’s intimates. We said what would go in and in what order, we said change this, drop that (or we silently changed and dropped), we abridged and expanded. We assembled anthologies. We decided when a writer should go public, how long a book should live, how widely it should circulate. We commissioned, gambled, lost and sometimes won. Our childhoods, our money worries, our sexual arrangements, our one-night stands with a promising manuscript and our long nights by taper or sixty-watt bulb getting it right for poets, so that they might shine like stars in the perpetual nighttime of your attention, count for very little in the histories.
How a poem arrives at a reader has an effect on how it is conceived and written. The ballad sheet, the illuminated manuscript, the slim volume, the epic poem, the “representative anthology,” the electronic poem or performance piece—each makes different demands on the poet and has a distinct technology and market. Poets of the fourteenth century, dreaming of their work passing from hand to hand, have a different sense of their destiny from poets hammering away at word processors or rapping under strobes. Technology is a part of imagination. Parchment elicits one attitude from a writer, paper another. The very textures (not to mention prices) are part of the equation. The cost of eloquence. A quill, a biro and a keyboard download a poet in different ways, at different speeds. Without succumbing to “historical materialism,” we can register those differences. The gynecologist William Carlos Williams with quill on parchment would not have responded to the plums in the refrigerator as he did, or written all those little and big poems between patients, swiveling round from his consultancy desk to a typewriter impatient for his attention; and Shakespeare with a word processor might have left better texts and at least have run a spell check. Creative technologies evolve (not always for the better). So does language. So does publishing.
We publishers moved from open-plan scriptoria to stalls in provincial market towns to little bookshops and printers, to small shared offices, to private offices and back to open plan again. So many centuries! We began with Latin. The English we eventually scribed and later printed doesn’t immediately strike a modern reader as English. Only when translated into sound, spoken aloud, does it become comprehensible. If not, our job is to facilitate, to modernize.
And we have a life outside the office, beyond the marketplace. We sit up evenings by a hissing gas fire or under a dozen rugs and read hungrily. Among parchments or manuscripts, or unreeling a document on our screens, we are alchemists looking for gold. By messenger or post or down the line, or over an expensive lunch where we smile and pay, we’re receivers of work that’s often conceived in sunlight, in repose, in the country, in the jungle, in love’s raptures or the rich madness of betrayal, by women and men who live full lives. As for living, our authors will do that for us.
We make choices and reputations, and we are humble. Does a priest feel humble when he hears confession? Does a doctor show humility before a pregnant belly, a head cold or a boil? We have power, yet our authors make us invisible! We legitimize them, then bow to that legitimacy. Just occasionally we emerge from behind the arras, pierced like Polonius by a hundred bodkins shoved into us by poets, biographers and critics. Do we answer back? Can we at least tell a different story?
“Only a poet of experience,” Robert Graves says, “can hope to put himself in the shoes of his predecessors, or contemporaries, and judge their poems by recreating technical and emotional dilemmas which they faced while at work on them.” A publisher can, too. We turn many a falsehood into truth. Our mishearing or misreading has improved texts. Graves recommends copying out texts by hand, to discover where the weaknesses and strengths are located. “Analeptic mimesis” he calls it. It’s grand to have a Greek name for it. Second best is reading aloud: these are still the most efficient approaches to a poem.
I’m not a poet. What am I doing, what can I know, I who am worse—my father would have said—than a gambler? “You make books. But you know little. Just as the honey-bottler knows nothing about bees. Why should you be my Virgil, my guide, among the living and the dead?” Because I can read, I can speak, I have ears. I have memory. “But you’re entering protected territory. You’re no linguist, no prosodist, you’re not a historian or a philosopher. Specialists will have your guts for garters. What hope have you of escaping unscathed?”
No hope at all. But we’re all readers. Being a reader is a worthwhile liberty. I don’t doubt I’ll make errors—of emphasis, fact, commission, omission. But on the whole we’re the lucky ones. Specialists read from a specialism, finding a way through to what they know they’ll find. Say they’re philologists, literary historians or theorists. They have an agenda, poems slot into it. If we stumble across poems they’ve pinned like butterflies to an argument and try to unpin them so they can fly again, or die, they dismiss us as unlicensed. I prefer to be unlicensed, to read a poem, not a text. Poems, no matter how “difficult” the language when it first sneaks up on us, no matter how opaque the allusions or complex the imagery, no matter what privileges the author enjoyed or how remote his or her learning is from ours—poems because they’re there, because they’ve been published and survived, are democratic spaces. Poetry is language with a shape. It communicates by giving. It doesn’t conform to a critical code. It elicits answering energies from our imaginations—if we listen closely.
We should cultivate techniques of ignorance, C. H. Sisson says, in order to find out what’s there, not what we expected to find. Ignorance, if we acknowledge it, is a useful instrument of self-effacement, a way of eluding prejudice, reflex, habitual response. As soon as we’re properly ignorant we begin to develop a first rather than a second nature, to question even familiar things in ways that would not have occurred to us before, to hear sounds in poems that eluded our “trained” ears.
A particularly acid but astute biographer (Lytton Strachey) declared: “Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian—ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.” The task is less to explain than to illuminate. We follow a rough chronology because it is convenient to do so, not because we are historicists; and beams of light from the twentieth century shine into the souks and chapels of the fourteenth; the seventeenth century is not extinguished in the twentieth but provides penetrating rays. As we approach a period or a poet in this story, we may feel anticipation as at reaching a familiar town—and surprise that it is not mapped quite as we expected.
Mercator in 1569 published his famous map projection, a vision of the world as the segmented peel of an orange. It took him a long time to get it right; it has been subject to adjustment ever since. How to reduce a lumpy sphere to a plane? Was he the first Cubist? At least his plane is a comprehensible, if not immediately recognizable, image of a sphere at a particular time. The task of drawing a world map of English poetry is like playing three-dimensional chess: you have the growing spaces that English occupies, and three quarters of a millennium during which the poetry has been written in a language gathering into standard forms and then, like Latin at the end of its great age, beginning to diversify into dialects that will become languages in turn. Any account of poetry in English will falsify.
I’m talking myself back to humility, not a virtue with which to embark on an adventure such as this. The best reader needs the seven deadly sins in double measure. Pride makes us equal with specialists and professional critics and impervious to their attacks. Lechery puts us in tune with the varied passions and loves that we encounter. We feel envy when a reader who has gone before preempts our response; this only spurs us on to fresh readings. Anger overwhelms us when injustices occur, and it should be disproportionate: when a poet dies in destitution or is lost for a generation or a century. We experience covetousness when we encounter poets we are prepared to love but their books are unavailable in the shops, so we covet our friends’ libraries or the great private collections. Gluttony means we will not be satisfied even by a full helping of Spenser or the whole mess of The Excursion; we feed and feed and still ask for more. Finally dear old sloth has us curled up on a sofa or swinging in a hammock with our books piled around, avoiding the day job and the lover’s complaint. These are necessary vices. The list is found in Langland, Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe. They knew these vices from the inside, personified and warned against them; don’t imagine they were innocent. The lavish attention they gave to the vices reveals how much commerce they had with them.
Theorem number one: Wars and revolutions always come at the wrong time for poetry; the big possibilities of Gower, Chaucer and Langland, postponed by history and the rise of classical humanism; the lessons of Ben Jonson and the Metaphysicals, dispatched at the Commonwealth; then the appalling ascendancy of French and classical prejudices which eventually drove real talent to madness or the cul-de-sacs of satire and sententiousness; then the French Revolution with its seductions and betrayals wasting another generation of new things, turning it back, as it were, toward the prison houses of the eighteenth century. Theorem number two: The French have a lot to answer for, from Norman times onward; and the First World War, its bloody harvest of so much that was new and promised well, impoverishing modernism because it killed Hulme, Rosenberg, Brzeska and also Edward Thomas. There’s no straight line, it’s all zigzags, like history. Poems swim free of their age and live in ours; but if we understand them on their own terms rather than conform them to ours, they take on a fuller life, and so do we.