One could abandon writing
for the slow-burning signals
of the great, to be, instead
their ideal reader, ruminative,
voracious, making the love of masterpieces
superior to attempting
to repeat or outdo them,
and be the greatest reader in the world.
—Derek Walcott, “Volcano”
Poems swim free of their age, but it’s hard to think of a single poem that swims entirely free of its medium, not just language but language used in the particular ways that are poetry. Even the most parthenogenetic-seeming poem has a pedigree. The poet may not know precisely a line’s or a stanza’s parents; indeed, may not be interested in finding out. Yet as readers of poetry we can come to know more about a poem than the poet does and know it more fully. To know more does not imply that we read Freud into an innocent cucumber, or Marx into a poem about daffodils, but that we read with our ears and hear Chaucer transmuted through Spenser, Sidney through Herbert, Milton through Wordsworth, Skelton through Graves, Housman through Larkin, Sappho through H.D. or Adrienne Rich.
Reflecting on poets outstanding today: each has an individual culture. Ted Hughes dwells on Shakespeare, Thom Gunn on the sixteenth century, Donald Davie on the eighteenth. Poets are made of poems and other literary works from a past that especially engages them and of works by near antecedents and contemporaries that embed themselves in whole or in part in their imaginations. Some works stick as phrases, others as misremembered lines. There are also phrases and lines held deliberately hostage, jotted in a notebook for eventual exploitation. Reading T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, we can discriminate between fragmentary allusions that imagining memory provides and those that come from the hostage list. Other poems are less candid in revealing source and resource. Edward Thomas writes, “All the clouds like sheep / On the mountains of sleep”—an amazing image; its source is a poem by Walter de la Mare, and de la Mare’s source is Keats. Thomas’s genius is in choosing the image and adjusting it to his poem’s purposes, not in disguising its theft. There is no theft in poetry except straightforward plagiarism. Every poet has a hand in another poet’s pocket, lifting out small change and sometimes a folded bill. It’s borrowing, a borrowing that is paid back by a poem.
A poet is a kind of anthologist. Figuratively speaking, John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer lined up the French poems and classical stories they were going to translate or transpose into English; they marked passages to expand or excise. From secondary sources (in memory, or on parchment) they culled images, passages, facts, to slot into their new context. Then began the process of making those resources reconfigure for their poem. Then they began to add something of their own. The scholarly sport of searching out sources and analogues is useful in determining not only what is original in conception, but what is original in mutation or metamorphosis, how the poet alters emphases, changes the color of the lover’s hair, adjusts motive, enhances evocations, to make a new poem live. Thomas Gray a few centuries later was making poems out of bits and pieces of classics, the Lego set from which he builds “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” the most popular poem in English, read, for the most part, in blissful ignorance of its resources. “Blissful ignorance” is from Gray as well: “Where ignorance is bliss / ’Tis folly to be wise.” Phrases of verse that enter the common language are transmuted in the naïve poetry of speech. Individual speech itself is an anthology of phrases and tags—from hymns, songs, advertisements, poems, political orations, fairy tales and nursery rhymes—the panoply of formal language that form makes liminally memorable. As speakers, each of us is an inadvertent anthologist.
A poet is an inadvertent anthologist working at a different intensity. There is a tingling in the nerves. A poem starts to happen. Selection of language begins in the darkroom of the imagination, the critical intelligence locked out, coming into play only after a print is lifted out of the tray and hung on the wire to dry, the light switched on revealing what is there. The critical intelligence discards blurred, dark or overexposed prints at this stage. Those that survive become subject to adjustment and refinement, unless the poet is one of those who insist on the sacredness of the first take. Preprocessing has occurred: the Polaroid principle.
The greatest reader in the world has a primary task: to set a poem free. In order to do so the reader must hear it fully. If in a twentieth-century poem about social and psychological disruption a sudden line of eighteenth-century construction irrupts, the reader who is not alert to the irony in diction and cadence is not alert to the poem. A texture of tones and ironies, or a texture of voices such as we get in John Ashbery, or elegiac strategies in Philip Larkin, or Eastern forms in Elizabeth Daryush and Judith Wright, or prose transpositions in Marianne Moore and (differently) in Patricia Beer: anyone aspiring to be the greatest reader in the world needs to hear in a poem read aloud or on the page what it is made from. As a poet develops, the textures change. Developments and changes are the life of the poet, more than the factual biography. But the “higher gossip” of biography generally distracts readers from engaging the more fascinating story of poetic growth.
A poet grows, poetry grows. The growth of poetry is the story of poems, where they come from and how they change. It begins in the story of language. Where does the English poetic medium begin, what makes it cohere, what impels it forward, what obstacles block its path? The medium becomes an increasingly varied resource; the history of poetry within it is not linear, the rise and fall of great dynasties, the decisive changes of political history; in the eighteenth century it is possible for a Romantic sensibility to exist, for a poet to write medieval poetry, just as in the reign of Charles I poets might still write out of the Elizabethan sensibility, in Elizabethan forms. In the twentieth century the poetry of Pound and Eliot, of Masefield and Hardy and Kipling, of Graves, of the imperialist poets, of Charlotte Mew and Anna Wickham, all occupy the same decades, each anachronistic in terms of the others. William Carlos Williams begins in the shadow of Keats and Shelley and ends casting his own shadows; J. H. Prynne begins in the caustic styles of the Movement and the 1950s and develops his own divergent caustic strategies. There is a history of poetry and, within the work of each poet, a history of poems.
We have to start with language. And to start with language we must also start with politics. The struggle of English against Latin and French is the resistance; the struggle of English against Gaelic, Welsh, Irish and Cornish is a less heroic chapter. Imperial English generates new resistances. At every point there are poems, voice-prints from which we can infer a mouth, a face, a body and a world. A world that we can enter by listening as we move our lips through the series of shapes and sounds the letters on the page demand.