Elizabeth Jennings (1/4): why the sudden interest?

 

Given that my current sequence includes references to the spiritual poetry of Táhirih, who wrote her mystical verse in 19th Century Persia, it seemed useful to republish this sequence on another woman poet with a spiritual core.  

My trigger for this sequence of posts was finding I had copied one of Elizabeth Jennings’ poems into my notebook. I had no memory of having read her, though my copy of her 1985 Collected Poems was riddled with my highlights and glowing comments.

I began re-reading her poems and ordered her recent biography by Dana Greene – Elizabeth Jennings: ‘the inward war’. My excitement carried over into the Death Café even before I had done more than just begun the biography.

The 1964 poem I read to them there was VII: For a Woman with a Fatal Illness out of Sequence in Hospital  (Collected Poems – page 80):

The verdict has been given quietly
Beyond hope, hate, revenge, even self-pity.

You accept gratefully the gifts – flowers, fruit –
Clumsily offered now that your visitors too

Know you must certainly die in a matter of months,
They are dumb now, reduced only to gestures,

Helpless before your news, perhaps hating
You because you are the cause of their unease.

I, too, watching from my temporary corner,
Feel impotent and wish for something violent –

Whether as sympathy only, I am not sure –
But something at least to break the terrible tension.

Death has no right to come so quietly.

Another member of the Death Café group immediately recognized the book I was reading from.

‘I’ve got that one,’ she said.

‘Do you like it?’ I asked, as possessing a book is no guarantee that you like it. I speak from experience.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said.

Why it matters that two people, out of the six attending that evening, both had copies of her Collected Poems and liked the poems in it, will become apparent later. Incidentally, the others seemed to appreciate it too.

As I read further into Greene’s book and revisited more of Jennings’ poems, I came to realize how closely her thinking about poetry mapped onto mine and differed from the critical consensus which seems to favour obscurity over accessibility.

I collided with this issue at the end of my sequence of posts on Machado. I will recap briefly here.

I acknowledged that coherence should not be bought at the expense of new insights and that ‘solving for the unknown,’ as dealt with in an earlier post, is a crucial function of poetry, with which Elizabeth Jennings would not disagree. But there is a problem.

In their introduction to their edition of ‘The Poetry of Táhirih’ John Hatcher and Amrollah Hemmat explore this further, initially referring to Hayden (page 16):

The poet Robert Hayden was fond of saying that poetry is the art of saying the impossible. . . Another thing Hayden was fond of noting is that often the most popular poetry – if poetry has any sort of popularity of these days – is usually mediocre poetry because it can be easily understood. . . . great poetry, poetry with lasting merit, takes us from our present state of awareness to some place else . . .

I was happy to go with them up to a point, though I am not so convinced of the general mediocrity of popular poetry for reasons I now plan to explore at greater length. And I am not happy to blindly accept that popular poetry cannot, at least sometimes and perhaps more often than we think, take us beyond ‘our present state of awareness.’

The debate sparked by Elizabeth Jennings’ poetry frequently touches on this issue, albeit indirectly at times. Was it too simple and naïve to be of any real value, in spite of its popularity.

Dana Greene’s biography contains many instances of this position, for example, concerning her Extending the Territory in 1985 (page 149):

The detractors depressed her. John Lucas, writing in the New Statesman, criticized her ‘vapid’ poems, with their unvaried language and uninteresting subject matter.’

Nonetheless the book won the Southern Arts Society prize of £1,000.

Michael Schmidt, as her editor for 25 years and publisher of Poetry Nation Review described her as (page 186) ‘the most unconditionally loved writer of the generation of poets of the Movement,’ and attributed ‘her popularity to her feel for ordinary people and her honest, straightforward, non-ironic, and non-satiric verse, which was generally written in strict form.’

I can’t join Hatcher and Hemmat again, at least as far as Schoenberg and Beckett are concerned, when they write (ibid):

It takes a bit more energy and training to appreciate the atonality of Sternberg [sic – should be Schoenberg], Eliot’s The Wasteland, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot or Joyce’s Ulysses.… a good artist does not talk down to the audience, does not ‘dumb down’ the art.

I think there should be something more in the mix, in the case of both Schoenberg and Beckett. Dissonance, no matter how well it reflects the jarring reality stretching tightly across the surface of our times, is not enough. There needs to be at least a taste of some sort of transcendence.

This is also something this discussion of Elizabeth Jennings and her poetry will return to.

Poems too obscure or repellent to match a large enough readership are hardly going to change the world for the better, no matter how brilliant their abstruse and inaccessible message is. However, poems that do not challenge their readers to step out of their comfort zone will not do so either, no matter how many people read them.

Striking the right balance is a matter of great skill, something only the greatest poets ever achieve: accessible enough to attract a wide readership and demanding enough to lift the consciousness of its readers to a higher level. I personally feel that Elizabeth Jennings, as well as Machado, rises to this challenge in many of her poems.

And what follows will try to explain why. Stick with me. It might be worth it.

Some Basic Information

I need to start with a few basic facts about her life and poetic career before plunging into the issues I want to address.

Greene’s introduction confronts us with some fairly startling facts about her obsessive productivity (page xiv): in addition to what she published there are ‘30,000 unpublished poems and autobiographical writings.’

She was clumsy as a child, and kept falling over (page 11): ‘By the time she was ten she had had six severe blows to her head.’ She convinced herself she was therefore unlovable. Her relationship with her parents was not close, especially in terms of her father, which caused her problems with both people and God (page 16): ‘Fear of her father and God the Father dominated her psyche.’

Poetry, religion and relationships had both positive and negative effects on her state of mind (page 17):

There were three major turning points in Jennings’ life: her discovery of poetry, her sojourn to Rome, and a mental breakdown.

While, as we will see, poetry helped her in many ways, the intensity of her pursuit of it, fuelled by her need for money at times, led to dangerous levels of exhaustion. Religion constituted the same kind of double-edged sword: in the positive experience of Catholicism in Rome she found solace to compensate for and to some degree counteract her fear of God, but in the end (page 146) ‘[s[he confessed that she could only love God through people . . .’

Before we look at the main issues we need to explore in a bit more detail two other important aspects of her life: the effect on her of her attitude to sex, marriage and relationships, and the impact of suffering.

Neither are straightforward.

Sex, Marriage and Relationships

Sex was a paradox for her (page 23):

She convinced herself that sex was filthy and something to be feared, but at the same time she was intensely interested in it.

This was something that contributed to her reluctance to marry (page 33):

. . . she saw marriage as tedious drudgery… This, plus her lingering fears about sex, limited her interest in marriage.

But that was not the only thing holding her back from tying the knot. In To a Friend with a Religious Vocation, as Greene describes it (page 71):

Jennings directly explores her quandary over the vocation of artist. She writes that she has no desire to have children or to be a nun.

Her conflicted position extended beyond the sexual though (page 131):

The principal psychic issue Jennings wrestled with . . . was how to love. She considered the need for love a part of the human condition which demanded that one be in a relationship with another. But love raised the problem of possession, both being possessed and possessing.

Love was further complicated for her by her religious beliefs (page 132):

For Jennings, the issue was not merely how to love someone purely, but how to love both God and another human.

Which brings us back to the quote I used earlier (page 146): ‘She confessed that she could only love God through people . . .’

When we look at her experience of and ideas about suffering in the next post we will begin to see that all these conflicts served as fuel for her poetry. Popular it may have been, but trivial and superficial it was certainly not, at least at its best.

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Poetry – the last thing on our minds

In the context of my revisiting the poetry and life of Táhirih in the current sequence it seems only appropriate to republish this post from 2010.

Over the years of trying to read it and create it I have come to have a feeling for what poetry is for me.

This is not a theory about poetry. There can be no true theory about poetry whose essence eludes all theory. Poetry for me is about approaching an aspect of experience beyond the reach of prose and possibly beyond the reach of words at all. When I attempt to write a poem of potential value I am striving to express what I can’t explain, even to myself.

Auden referred to this as ‘solving for the unknown.’

Now, there are many perfectly enjoyable examples of what many people refer to as poetry which don’t do this. Such productions don’t take you anywhere you haven’t been before: they just describe it better – ‘What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed,’ as Alexander Pope put it.

McGilchrist, in his book The Master and his Emissary, deals well with this issue of what great poetry does that’s different. He quotes Scheler (pages 341-342):

[Poets] actually extend the scope of our possible self awareness. They effect a real enlargement of the kingdom of the mind and make new discoveries, as it were, within that kingdom. . . . That is indeed the mission of all true art: not to reproduce what is already given . . ., nor to create something in the pure play of subjective fancy . . . ., but to press forward into the whole of the external world and the soul, to see and communicate those objective realities within it which rule and convention have hitherto concealed.

He sees the limitations of Augustan, i.e. 18th Century English, poetry which represents experience pleasingly rather than authentically. Even art forms not so concerned with pleasing and more with informing the mind or inspiring the heart along predetermined lines, such as political propaganda or religious hymns, fall short of being great poetry by my definition. Once you compare, for example, a typical hymn with what Emily Dickinson did with the same pattern on the page, you inevitably get closer to seeing the difference between great inspirational verse and great exploratory poetry.

Cardinal Newman is in the spotlight at the moment as the Vatican ponders on moving him towards sainthood via beatification. He wrote the words of a still very popular hymn:

Lead, kindly Light, amid th’encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home;
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.

This is beautifully put but the imagery is purely conventional and what it conveys is deeply familiar. We don’t need the hymn to introduce it to us. It is comforting to find the well-trodden paths of our own experience reflected back to us in this way. It helps us keep plodding on perhaps, which may be no bad thing sometimes. There is an honourable place for such work as this.

Emily Dickinson‘s experience is by contrast right at the edge of a darkness most of us know very little if anything about, even after more than 100 years, though a typical theme of hers, which I use here to illustrate her gift, is one that haunts us still. It’s in one of her better known (and therefore hopefully better understood) poems, of which I quote only the first verse:

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

What exactly are we to make of this?

At one level it’s as easy to understand as Newman’s hymn. The imagery is as familiar in one sense as his. We know almost as much about funeral carriages (see the link below to When the Circle is Unbroken)  as we do about the night. But not carriages that carry immortality as well. So puzzles begin to arise.

How can a carriage carry both death and immortality? They’re deadly enemies and immortality is vast – too big to fit even into a stretch limo. So the familiar here is used in an unsettling even sinister way.

And why the hyphens? And the ironic tone – calling death’s action ‘kindly’ for example. In any case, if we are conscious, his carriage is usually stopping to pick up someone else – maybe someone close to us, but definitely not us. So, what’s this poem really about?

Because the theme of this poem lies within a great tradition we can all begin to formulate answers to these questions. ‘Oh, death must be kind because he is releasing us into the realm of immortality.’ But, in truth, the poem in its entirety does not make it easy for us to settle into any one explanation as complete or satisfactory. She is using the verse form of the hymn to probe disquietingly into the themes that hymns are there to comfort us about.

Even my own modest efforts at poetry come up against this wall between what can be felt and what can be said. And that even when the experience described is pretty commonplace, in fact the one worked on in prose in the previous post that grapples with an experience which speaks for the close relationship between poetry and song.

The Last Thing on my Mind
(with thanks to Julie Felix)

On a bare and wooden stage, a metal chair
and two guitars wait in the still and empty air
until, with her lined face and jet black hair,
much lighter than her years she runs up to
the microphones and chooses her guitar.

Her long black veil, blurred with early morning rain,
dissolves into the long room in Wood Green
where, more than forty years ago, blues ran
the game: when the circle was unbroken,
Tom Paxton knew the last thing on my mind.

Now, in the mangle of my mind, the rollers
of my memories, and her melodies,
compress the fragile screen of consciousness
so thin the dyes of different times bleed both ways
with such relentless pressure thought stammers.

Even released days later, this ink’s flow
does not convey what I have come to know
nor my tongue catch its air within the strings of speech
though it was strings that brought her music within reach.

It doesn’t take a brilliant critic to realise how much greater this gap is when spiritual experiences are involved, as in Dickinson’s case.

George Herbert‘s genius, in a way not dissimilar to Dickinson’s, lies at least in part in his knowing how to use the commonplace to bridge the gap.

Having been tenant long to a rich Lord,
Not thriving, I resolved to be bold,
And made a suit unto him, to afford
A new small rented lease, and cancel th’old.

In heaven at his manor I him sought:
They told me there that he was lately gone
About some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possession.

I straight returned, and knowing his great birth,
Sought him accordingly in great resorts,
In cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts:
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth

Of thieves and murderers: there I him espied,
Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died.

We’re in a world of tenants, landlords, manors, parks and theatres. The verse form is a common or garden sonnet, albeit one that mixes the Shakespearean and the Petrarchan forms. His readers would have read hundreds of similar ones, many about worldly love, some dealing with the divine.

But at the same time we’re also sharing an aspect of Herbert’s experience of Christ. He has made it possible for us to capture something about that which is clearly impossible to summarise. The poem gives us an experience which extends our world – well, I believe it does – and I would defy anyone to express what we have learned except by reading the poem to me again.

Garden of Ridván, Baghdad

A tradition of Bahá’í poetry has a long way to go to catch up. Christianity goes back two thousand years compared to our mere one hundred-and-sixty-seven. I don’t think we can yet match Dickinson and Herbert who were both standing on the shoulders of giants.

One of the earliest Bahá’í poets was Tahirih. I only know her in translation but a non-Bahá’í scholar, Farzaneh Milani, praises her highly (page 91 in Veils and Words) though recognising she can be inaccessible :

Some of Tahereh’s (sic) poems are difficult to understand. Their language is rich in abstractions. She not only mixes Arabic with Persian but also makes repeated allusions to Babi jargon and codes. Her religious convictions saturate her poetry and set her verse on fire. They glow in her poetry like a flame that burns every obstacle in its way. The erotic-mystical imagery and language she uses reveal an all-consuming love of and an intense devotion to a divine manifestation.

And the translation on page 93 of one of Tahirih’s poems gives a sense of what I might be missing, though I suspect, as always, to translate a poem is to betray it (an old Italian saying about all translation goes: ‘Traduttore, traditore.’).

I would explain all my grief
Dot by dot, point by point
If heart to heart we talk
And face to face we meet.

To catch a glimpse of thee
I am wandering like a breeze
From house to house, door to door
Place to place, street to street.

In separation from thee
The blood of my heart gushes out of my eyes
In torrent after torrent, river after river
Wave after wave, stream after stream.

This afflicted heart of mine
Has woven your love
To the stuff of life
Strand by strand, thread to thread.

Robert Hayden

When we look at poems written by Bahá’ís whose native language is English there is only one as yet who is recognised as a poet of stature outside the Bahá’í community, and he is Robert Hayden.

Many of his poems do not confront a Bahá’í theme head on. One that does cannot be laid out on the screen in exactly the same as it can be laid out on the page and it therefore loses something in the process. Poems use their shape as well their sound to speak to us, though this shift came only with the birth of writing, then of print.

Bahá’u’lláh in the Garden of Ridwan

Agonies confirm His hour,
and swords like compass-needles turn
toward His heart.

The midnight air is forested
with presences that shelter Him
and sheltering praise

The auroral darkness which is God
and sing the word made flesh again
in Him,

Eternal exile whose return
epiphanies repeatedly
foretell.

He watches in a borrowed garden,
prays. And sleepers toss upon
their armored beds,

Half-roused by golden knocking at
the doors of conciousness. Energies
like angels dance

Glorias of recognition.
Within the rock the undiscovered suns
release their light.

You can sense his struggle to find the words in English that fit his purpose. Christian and quasi-scientific imagery rub shoulders perhaps uneasily, perhaps creatively together – it’s hard to judge. It is a significant achievement but it’s not on George Herbert’s level, I think. But we need to walk this precarious path of poetry unstintingly, persistently, and such gifts of grace as Herbert’s will eventually come our way.

Because great poetry broadens and deepens consciousness it has a significant part to play in building a better world. But great poets do not appear from nowhere. They need a fertile soil from which to grow. That soil is the wide-scale practice of poetry throughout a whole community of minds. Great poets arrive on the scene when ordinary people not only read but write poetry, and not only that but they pass it round from hand to hand, from brain to brain – in the old days it was in manuscript, nowadays it can be in blogs and on Facebook. We all need to play our part in this, if we are so inclined.

So, post a poem and pave the way along which the next great genius can walk into our midst.

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Book Review – ‘Selected Poetry & Prose’ (5/5): Charlotte Mew – ‘Madeleine in Church’

Last time I decided not to focus on some of the more famous or possibly more accessible dramatic lyrics.

So, where next?

I think there is a bullet that I have to bite. There is one poem that, at this point in my reading of her work, seems to me her greatest and most challenging, confronting the reader with some of our most basic existential questions through what sounds like the authentic voice of a deeply troubled heart and soul.

There are other poems whose haunting beauty makes for an easier read and I love them in their way almost as much – The Forest Road for example. They would be much easier to write about, but to do so would be to cop out from the challenge of conveying here the greatness of what I really feel is her most powerful dramatic lyric of all, one which addresses her usual challenging issues of death, despair and exclusion, this time in a deeply spiritual context.

So, Madeleine in Church it’s going to have to be, heaven help me.

Copus describes it as[1] ‘the first dramatic monologue voiced by a fallen woman,’ and goes on to say[2] it is ‘a text in which a woman talks candidly to God about her tortured soul, her sensuality and her numerous past lovers, and the compositor would take no part in promulgating it’ apparently because he thought it was ‘blasphemous’.

Challenging Questions

It confronts me with the questions I’d like to think I’d answered completely convincingly for the rest of my days down here, but know deep down that such absolute certainty will always remain elusive in this mortal life, and conviction in the reality of an afterlife, for example, mostly evades reason’s grip and only rests securely in the hands of faith. It is not comfortable to be challenged by this poem’s fiercely passionate confrontation of such questions, but Mew’s use of this dramatic format (even if it does express exactly what she believed herself at times, and that is a matter of debate) allows me to identify with Madeleine’s painful questioning without feeling coerced into sharing the perspective into which it leads her.

What we find in the poem often contradicts what I believe that I believe – for example, its reductionism, an exact reversal of what I believe I know to be the truth. Madeleine explains ‘I think my body was my soul,’ and although that sounds slightly tentative she comes across later as more assertive: ‘ we are what we are: the spirit afterwards, but first the touch.’ Many posts on this blog are testimony to how far away from this position I stand.

So, why do I find myself feeling so positive about the poem?

Reading Madeleine in Church, for me, feels like walking into the unhappy house my spirit used to live in, bringing back memories of why it had to leave in search of somewhere better. Such a poem unsurprisingly would have felt ‘blasphemous’ to someone who still drew comfort from the walls and décor of that same house, but for me it speaks of a kindred spirit who, unlike me, never managed to find a better home in this life for their spirit.

The poem is also is one of those that has the effect I described in an earlier post. I read these words from Madeleine in Church to my wife in the All Saints café in Hereford city centre, a most appropriate location:

What can You know, what can You really see
Of this dark ditch, the soul of me!

A poem of hers had brought me to the edge of tears once more.

It’s almost impossible to pin down exactly why that should be, apart from the probability that those words echo a sense of unworthiness most of us share at one time or another. Its music echoes another moving poem I love, which reads, ‘What did I know, what did I know/of love’s austere and lonely offices?’ This is from the Bahá’í poet Robert Hayden’s Those Winter Sundays.

Maybe also part of the power to move me, which those words have, comes from their close correspondence with a feeling I tried to capture in Labyrinth:

Mind aches in the silence
which could mean Presence
or absence.
Only reflections to go on
if we, like Perseus,
are not to turn to stone.

Anyway, Madeleine in Church is the poem of hers I’ve read and re-read more than any other. This is for at least two reasons, apart from the sheer satisfaction derived from immersing myself in her mind.

The first motivation is to try and understand why I find it so deeply satisfying, and the second to try and unravel the meaning of some of the more perplexing passages. I’ll be focusing further mainly on the first point.

I was also planning to expand on the stirring effects of the elastic lines and redolent imagery, but the stack of reflections I’ve already built up is towering so high I have decided to abandon that plan.

Its resonance for me

There is partly the fascinating correspondence between Madeleine’s sceptical reflections and my lapsed Catholic/Pre-Bahá’í period.

One moment in particular marks one of the earliest roots of my doubt. It was an experience in church when I was very young – maybe five years old or so. Everyone was bowing down at the same point in the Mass and I asked my mother in a whisper why they were doing this and she replied, in a way which she thought fitting for my age and degree of understanding, ‘Because it’s too beautiful to look at.’

This was a challenge too difficult to resist. Something that beautiful and I couldn’t look! This I must see.

And I looked up and I looked round everywhere. The only objects I could see were the same old altar, the same old pictures of the stations of the cross, the same old man in a funny dress standing in front of the altar.

The only difference was this big round golden thing he was holding above his head. This seemed to be the object everyone was bowing to, but I didn’t get it. It was quite pretty but definitely not too beautiful to look at.

In any event my faith was possibly not of the strongest, as I had not gone to a Catholic school, as was usually the case, perhaps because my parents were of different views about the wisdom of that, though I never really knew why my mother had departed from tradition in this way. So, it was not too difficult to undermine more or less permanently the ambivalent faith I had developed by this impressionable age.

So, when Mew puts these words into Madeleine’s mouth, ‘I, too, would ask Him to remember me/If there were any Paradise beyond this earth that I could see,’ I’m catapulted back to that earlier questioning state of mind, still mixed with a thirst for something to believe in. Her exploration of this  threads its way through the poem. About suffering she laments:

                                                               . . . . one cannot see
How it shall be made up to them in some serene eternity.
If there were fifty heavens God could not give us back the child who went or never came.

And at the end of the poem the raw need for something to believe in still bleeds across the page, steeped in the pain of disbelief:

                        . . . . . . . . . .most of all in Holy Week
When there was no one else to see
I used to think it would not hurt me too, so terribly,
If He had ever seemed to notice me
Or, if, for once, He would only speak.

What I think also draws me to the thinker of these thoughts is that the inner sceptic and the earlier selves, who respond strongly to this poem, will never die, hence my daily prayer for firmness in the Faith. To deny this would be dangerous self-deception. In any case the sceptic has value, protecting me from too complacent a faith in all my tempting misunderstandings, memories and misinterpretations.

An equally interesting echo of my own journey comes when Madeleine comments that ‘It seems too funny all we other rips/Should have immortal souls.’ When I moved from atheism to faith on beginning to tread the Bahá’í path (I’m never comfortable asserting that ‘I became a Bahá’í’ – no one except ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has probably ever achieved that in this mortal world), I struggled with a sense of the improbability of souls: it was much easier to believe in a God (of some kind) rather than in our immortality. ‘How could beings such as us ever deserve such a blessing?’ I thought. It took many months of research at the time to almost convince my inner sceptic that this might in fact be possible.

Then there is Mew’s and my outsider syndrome. She is not writing as Madeleine from some kind of patronising distance. The Mew, who was hiding behind the shield of propriety I mentioned earlier, was unconventional, rebellious and a crusader for the downtrodden and misunderstood. She not only felt for Madeleine: there was also a level of her being, not too deep inside, at which she felt the same as her.

To some degree in some respects, I’m in the same boat. When I began working in mental health and went to see a Jungian psychotherapist, we decided that the epitaph engraved in big letters on my tombstone would be, ‘He died with his options open.’ I was very reluctant to make any kind of commitment. I had never joined any group, even when their aims mapped closely onto mine. I was very much what the socialists I used to mingle with called a ‘fellow traveller.’

Also I chose to work in mental health because I felt so strongly drawn to those who had been labelled ‘schizophrenic.’ I passionately believed, and still do, that they are not somehow fundamentally different from the rest of us, the victims of a meaningless madness. They are human beings, just like you and me, struggling to make sense of, and learn to live with experiences that would have broken most people into fragments of their former selves. Hence the title of my blog, really. Hence my sense that, in some way, I am singing very much from the same hymn sheet as Charlotte Mew.

Because of her direct experience of that same kind of brokenness, both in her family and potentially in herself, I think, Mew felt the same, and her way of expressing that was to step into the minds of those people, whom too many of us have rejected and despised. She felt for and spoke for them.

One of the most powerful stanzas in the whole poem speaks, I feel, to this:

.                     “Find rest in Him” One knows the parsons’ tags—
Back to the fold, across the evening fields, like any flock of baa-ing sheep:
Yes, it may be, when He has shorn, led us to slaughter, torn the bleating soul in us to rags,
For so He giveth His belovèd sleep.
Oh! He will take us stripped and done,
Driven into His heart. So we are won:
Then safe, safe are we? in the shelter of His everlasting wings—
I do not envy Him his victories, His arms are full of broken things.

Here we see described, in my view, a heart-felt response to the suffering of the world, which is so vividly present to the speaker it’s almost impossible to believe in a God of any kind, certainly a positive one. Mew herself almost certainly feels the same. Doubt, if not absolute denial, is a reasonable response.

Madeleine in Church, more than any other single poem of Mew’s, illustrates the extent of my resonance with her poetry.

The power of the poem for me is not diminished by its discrepancies with my perspective.

There is another magnetic quality in this poem that was harder to pin down and bring into consciousness, but which seems none the less a potentially important aspect of its attraction for me.

As I groped to pin this down more exactly I jotted down the idea that Mew is ‘mimicking thought’ in this and other poems. Then I found myself wondering whether in some respects it even achieved something that shifted towards a stream of consciousness, such as Virginia Woolf developed to such a high level. Was I back to the idea of capturing consciousness again, something I had located as the focus of the modern novel rather than poetry? I tried to define what criteria might be applied in this case, and felt that to fully qualify for a representation of the stream of consciousness the poem must at the very least need to feel more like inner rather than social speech. Given that many of the monologues are addressed to a listener who is not physically present, including God/Jesus, I came to feel that Madeleine in Church, as well as some of her other poems, meets this criterion at least in many places, if not all.  I came to feel that Madeleine in Church, as well as some of her other poems, meets this criterion at least in many places, if not all.  Take this short section, for example, with its associative flow:

                                              I could hardly bear
The dreams upon the eyes of white geraniums in the dusk,
The thick, close voice of musk,
The jessamine music on the thin night air,
Or, sometimes, my own hands about me anywhere —
The sight of my own face (for it was lovely then) even the scent of my own hair,
Oh! there was nothing, nothing that did not sweep to the high seat
Of laughing gods, and then blow down and beat
My soul into the highway dust, as hoofs do the dropped roses of the street.

I think that it does, but I will need more time to be absolutely sure. I suspect this quality will prove to be part of her poetry’s attraction for me.

The process of composing this post has been intriguing – even as I thought it was finished, over and over again more ideas to include in it drip fed into my brain. It reminds me of Auden’s paraphrase of Valéry in 1965: ‘A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned.’

There is so much more I could say, because there are so many themes she touches on that resonate so strongly for me. It would simply be impossible to cover them adequately right now. For a start this post is too long already. And perhaps most importantly I think I will need a lot more time to grasp more securely more of the implications of this richly evocative poem. Suffice it to say that I feel its psychological, narrative, spiritual and empathic depths warrant the attention of every discerning reader of poetry, whether they agree with what Mew seems to be saying or not. It captures so many of the key challenges and heart aches of the human condition.

I hope at least I have proved my point that she is a poet worthy of consideration. Whether I have or not, I am extremely grateful to Julia Copus for bringing Charlotte Mew to my attention, and also to Penelope Fitzgerald for further enhancing my understanding of her life.

When all the work on this sequence had been done, I decided, rather late in the day, to check my go-to reference about poetry – Lives of the Poets by Michael Schmidt – to see if he had written anything about Charlotte Mew. As I have never read his book from cover to cover, only using it as a reference when I want to check out a poet I don’t know, I had never read these words before, I swear, where he describes Madeleine in Church as ‘her largest achievement, uneven but powerful.’ I see that as a partial endorsement of my evaluation. I would be tempted, though, to substitute ‘greatest’ for ‘largest’!

So, what’s Schmidt’s final verdict overall? ‘Her originality,’ he writes, ‘of form and theme, her electrifying uniqueness, mean that one day she will find a constituency, without special pleading.’ Hopefully I’ve been some help in moving things forward to that end. Only time will tell.

References:

[1]. Copus – page 256.
[2]. Page 268.

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Elizabeth Jennings (1/4): why the sudden interest?

 

Given that my recent sequence on George Eliot’s Middlemarch partly at least explores the purpose of the novel as this sequence explores the purpose of poetry, it seemed useful to republish it.  

My trigger for this sequence of posts was finding I had copied one of Elizabeth Jennings’ poems into my notebook. I had no memory of having read her, though my copy of her 1985 Collected Poems was riddled with my highlights and glowing comments.

I began re-reading her poems and ordered her recent biography by Dana Greene – Elizabeth Jennings: ‘the inward war’. My excitement carried over into the Death Café even before I had done more than just begun the biography.

The 1964 poem I read to them there was VII: For a Woman with a Fatal Illness out of Sequence in Hospital  (Collected Poems – page 80):

The verdict has been given quietly
Beyond hope, hate, revenge, even self-pity.

You accept gratefully the gifts – flowers, fruit –
Clumsily offered now that your visitors too

Know you must certainly die in a matter of months,
They are dumb now, reduced only to gestures,

Helpless before your news, perhaps hating
You because you are the cause of their unease.

I, too, watching from my temporary corner,
Feel impotent and wish for something violent –

Whether as sympathy only, I am not sure –
But something at least to break the terrible tension.

Death has no right to come so quietly.

Another member of the Death Café group immediately recognized the book I was reading from.

‘I’ve got that one,’ she said.

‘Do you like it?’ I asked, as possessing a book is no guarantee that you like it. I speak from experience.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said.

Why it matters that two people, out of the six attending that evening, both had copies of her Collected Poems and liked the poems in it, will become apparent later. Incidentally, the others seemed to appreciate it too.

As I read further into Greene’s book and revisited more of Jennings’ poems, I came to realize how closely her thinking about poetry mapped onto mine and differed from the critical consensus which seems to favour obscurity over accessibility.

I collided with this issue at the end of my sequence of posts on Machado. I will recap briefly here.

I acknowledged that coherence should not be bought at the expense of new insights and that ‘solving for the unknown,’ as dealt with in an earlier post, is a crucial function of poetry, with which Elizabeth Jennings would not disagree. But there is a problem.

In their introduction to their edition of ‘The Poetry of Táhirih’ John Hatcher and Amrollah Hemmat explore this further, initially referring to Hayden (page 16):

The poet Robert Hayden was fond of saying that poetry is the art of saying the impossible. . . Another thing Hayden was fond of noting is that often the most popular poetry – if poetry has any sort of popularity of these days – is usually mediocre poetry because it can be easily understood. . . . great poetry, poetry with lasting merit, takes us from our present state of awareness to some place else . . .

I was happy to go with them up to a point, though I am not so convinced of the general mediocrity of popular poetry for reasons I now plan to explore at greater length. And I am not happy to blindly accept that popular poetry cannot, at least sometimes and perhaps more often than we think, take us beyond ‘our present state of awareness.’

The debate sparked by Elizabeth Jennings’ poetry frequently touches on this issue, albeit indirectly at times. Was it too simple and naïve to be of any real value, in spite of its popularity.

Dana Greene’s biography contains many instances of this position, for example, concerning her Extending the Territory in 1985 (page 149):

The detractors depressed her. John Lucas, writing in the New Statesman, criticized her ‘vapid’ poems, with their unvaried language and uninteresting subject matter.’

Nonetheless the book won the Southern Arts Society prize of £1,000.

Michael Schmidt, as her editor for 25 years and publisher of Poetry Nation Review described her as (page 186) ‘the most unconditionally loved writer of the generation of poets of the Movement,’ and attributed ‘her popularity to her feel for ordinary people and her honest, straightforward, non-ironic, and non-satiric verse, which was generally written in strict form.’

I can’t join Hatcher and Hemmat again, at least as far as Schoenberg and Beckett are concerned, when they write (ibid):

It takes a bit more energy and training to appreciate the atonality of Sternberg [sic – should be Schoenberg], Eliot’s The Wasteland, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot or Joyce’s Ulysses.… a good artist does not talk down to the audience, does not ‘dumb down’ the art.

I think there should be something more in the mix, in the case of both Schoenberg and Beckett. Dissonance, no matter how well it reflects the jarring reality stretching tightly across the surface of our times, is not enough. There needs to be at least a taste of some sort of transcendence.

This is also something this discussion of Elizabeth Jennings and her poetry will return to.

Poems too obscure or repellent to match a large enough readership are hardly going to change the world for the better, no matter how brilliant their abstruse and inaccessible message is. However, poems that do not challenge their readers to step out of their comfort zone will not do so either, no matter how many people read them.

Striking the right balance is a matter of great skill, something only the greatest poets ever achieve: accessible enough to attract a wide readership and demanding enough to lift the consciousness of its readers to a higher level. I personally feel that Elizabeth Jennings, as well as Machado, rises to this challenge in many of her poems.

And what follows will try to explain why. Stick with me. It might be worth it.

Some Basic Information

I need to start with a few basic facts about her life and poetic career before plunging into the issues I want to address.

Greene’s introduction confronts us with some fairly startling facts about her obsessive productivity (page xiv): in addition to what she published there are ‘30,000 unpublished poems and autobiographical writings.’

She was clumsy as a child, and kept falling over (page 11): ‘By the time she was ten she had had six severe blows to her head.’ She convinced herself she was therefore unlovable. Her relationship with her parents was not close, especially in terms of her father, which caused her problems with both people and God (page 16): ‘Fear of her father and God the Father dominated her psyche.’

Poetry, religion and relationships had both positive and negative effects on her state of mind (page 17):

There were three major turning points in Jennings’ life: her discovery of poetry, her sojourn to Rome, and a mental breakdown.

While, as we will see, poetry helped her in many ways, the intensity of her pursuit of it, fuelled by her need for money at times, led to dangerous levels of exhaustion. Religion constituted the same kind of double-edged sword: in the positive experience of Catholicism in Rome she found solace to compensate for and to some degree counteract her fear of God, but in the end (page 146) ‘[s[he confessed that she could only love God through people . . .’

Before we look at the main issues we need to explore in a bit more detail two other important aspects of her life: the effect on her of her attitude to sex, marriage and relationships, and the impact of suffering.

Neither are straightforward.

Sex, Marriage and Relationships

Sex was a paradox for her (page 23):

She convinced herself that sex was filthy and something to be feared, but at the same time she was intensely interested in it.

This was something that contributed to her reluctance to marry (page 33):

. . . she saw marriage as tedious drudgery… This, plus her lingering fears about sex, limited her interest in marriage.

But that was not the only thing holding her back from tying the knot. In To a Friend with a Religious Vocation, as Greene describes it (page 71):

Jennings directly explores her quandary over the vocation of artist. She writes that she has no desire to have children or to be a nun.

Her conflicted position extended beyond the sexual though (page 131):

The principal psychic issue Jennings wrestled with . . . was how to love. She considered the need for love a part of the human condition which demanded that one be in a relationship with another. But love raised the problem of possession, both being possessed and possessing.

Love was further complicated for her by her religious beliefs (page 132):

For Jennings, the issue was not merely how to love someone purely, but how to love both God and another human.

Which brings us back to the quote I used earlier (page 146): ‘She confessed that she could only love God through people . . .’

When we look at her experience of and ideas about suffering in the next post we will begin to see that all these conflicts served as fuel for her poetry. Popular it may have been, but trivial and superficial it was certainly not, at least at its best.

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Sylvia Plath – where the truth lies (7/7): truth and poetry (b)

Given that my examination of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land drags me into déjà vu in terms of modernist fragmentation and obscurity, it seemed appropriate to share again the following sequence about Sylvia Plath. 

Even though, unlike Hughes, I do not consider Plath as great a poet as Emily Dickinson, her poems about nature, such as The Bee Meeting and The Arrival of the Bee Box resonate more positively with me, so her work is not all bad. In such poems I am not repelled by too much intense self-centred negativity, or excessive fragmentation, and there’s some music too and an intelligible narrative. The closing lines of The Arrival of the Bee Box provide a brief illustration:

They might ignore me immediately
In my moon suit and funeral veil.
I am no source of honey
So why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.

I suspect that these are neither her most admired nor her most well-known poems, which perhaps says something disturbing about our culture.

Back to the Darkness

However, her later darkly intense poems, as we considered last time, pose significant problems. Yes, she was in emotional pain, and to that extent deserves our compassion. However, the extreme intensity of that pain poured into her poetry and impacted strongly on others as we have seen. As she brought it into the public domain in this damaging way we are, I think, justified in trying to decide whether, first of all, that was a wise thing to do, and secondly whether that helped her create great poetry.

I have come to believe, as a result of these recent explorations, that her intense suffering was mostly of her own making, rather than inherent in the raw experience of her life: life brought some grit with it, certainly, but the massive boulder she got left with, that weighed so heavily on her shoulders, was largely the result of her escalating fabrications.

Deaths of the Poets

Perhaps she had been primed to escalate things in this way by her upbringing, as Anne Stevenson suggests in this quote from Farley and Roberts’ Deaths of Poets:[1]

You have to understand how very seriously Americans took themselves then. . . . You take yourself as an individual so seriously, you are the centre of the universe. You are brought up that way, competitively, to get to the top of the ladder, and then you discover it’s a bit dizzying up there! Then you run into personal troubles – somebody lets you down or betrays you – something you feel you can only remedy by this particular kind of vengeance against yourself.’

Nonetheless, escalate she did, for sure, and both her poetry and her life, in my view, paid a high price for that.

Her poetry may successfully express that kind of truth to personal experience, but is that enough to make a great poem? Or, does poetry have a duty to be more balanced and even to access higher and less partial truths? I think it does. I will try and explore now why I believe that to be true.

Haemorrhaging Hurt

When we read Myers speaking about what he refers to as genius[2] as ‘a subliminal uprush, an emergence into the current of ideas which the man is consciously manipulating of other ideas which he has not consciously originated, but which have shaped themselves beyond his will, in profounder regions of his being,’ it would seem to give warrant at first glance to the kind of disorganised intensity Plath all too often displays.

However, there is an important caveat. Myers is more cautious about Blake[3] whom he regards as an example of strong imagination insufficiently controlled by supraliminal discipline: ‘throughout all the work of William Blake we see the subliminal self flashing for moments into unity, then smouldering again in a lurid and scattered glow.’

This caveat applies particularly strongly when uprush sinks into venting negativity. This is where Hatcher, as we saw earlier. sheds useful light on the matter in his discussion of Hayden[4] when he states ‘it was never Hayden’s purpose to use his poetry to bleed on his pages or to condemn others’ and quotes Gwendolyn Brooks for a useful comparison:[5]

Brooks in her review described two sorts of poets – the one who ‘mixes with mud’ and writes in the midst of feeling, ‘his wounds like faucets above his page’, and a second sort of poet who ‘is amenable to a clarifying enchantment via the power of Art’, who has a ‘reverence for the word Art’, who, in effect, is more studied, more analytical. She goes on to say that while we need both sorts, Hayden is clearly the latter.

My sense is that maybe we do need both, but perhaps they are not of equal value.

Hatcher explains one possible reason why:[6]

[The Lion] . . . distinguishes between the unconscious self, in its primitive anger and uncontrolled raw emotions, and the conscious artist who enters the cage of self to control and channel that raw emotion and insight into intelligible pattern and form.

He quotes Wilburn Williams, Jr. in support[7] in his study of Angle of Ascent:

Hayden had the capacity to ‘Objectivise his own subjectivity. His private anguish never locks him into the sterile dead-end of solipsism; it impels him outward into the world.’

A good example of this ability is to be found in The Whipping. The poem starts from a perspective that suggests the poet is simply the observer.

The old woman across the way
is whipping the boy again
and shouting to the neighborhood
her goodness and his wrongs.

Wildly he crashes through elephant ears,
pleads in dusty zinnias,
while she in spite of crippling fat
pursues and corners him.

She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling
boy till the stick breaks
in her hand.  His tears are rainy weather
to woundlike memories:

Then it switches briefly to the first person, and we realise the poet was the boy who had been whipped:

My head gripped in bony vise
of knees, the writhing struggle
to wrench free, the blows, the fear
worse than blows that hateful

Words could bring, the face that I
no longer knew or loved . . .

Hayden comments:[8]

halfway through the fifth stanza, when the whipping is over, the poem shifts back to the third-person point of view. The effect, ostensibly a violation of narrative logic, is incredibly effective, implying among other things the poet can be objective in recounting his past until the scene recalls ‘woundlike memories’ and he instantly loses that analytical perspective.

Well, it is over now, it is over,
and the boy sobs in his room,

And the woman leans muttering against
a tree, exhausted, purged—
avenged in part for lifelong hidings
she has had to bear.

Even in describing an experience with his mother that is at least as painful if not more so than Plath’s with her father, not only does he not resort to the kind of blame-drenching histrionics she uses, but is also capable of stepping into his abusive mother’s shoes to share his sense that her ‘lifelong hidings’ explain, even if they do not excuse, her brutality.

Hayden also makes reference to the Holocaust in other poems, but they are clearly are justified by the extreme trauma of his own immediate history, as Hatcher explains:[9]

he sees in the concentration camp victims the faces of his childhood playmates and in the racism of South Africa’s apartheid and the violence of the Korean War evidence that the evils he has chronicled are neither finished nor peculiarly American.

The parallels between slavery and the Holocaust are not accidental because Hitler learned from the United States. This is part of John Fitzgerald Medina’s thesis, in his thought-provoking book Faith, Physics & Psychology, where he describes how the founders of America managed to reconcile the rhetoric of their egalitarian constitution with profiting from both their virtual genocide of the Native Americans and from their practice of slavery, and how the Nazis derived part of their inspiration from this. Linking the two poetically is therefore completely valid, in this case, but not, I think, when there is no such correspondence as in Plath’s.

This section deals with possible reasons why, no matter how intensely the poet may feel something, that does not in itself, no matter how powerfully expressed it may be, justify the damage it might do or guarantee the poetry into which it is spilled will be great.

There is also another perhaps even more important consideration.

Maintaining a Balance between Light and Dark

Robert Hayden

Hatcher summarises this possibility at one point by quoting Hayden saying[10] ‘if there exists a “poetry of despair” and rejection, there is also a poetry that affirms the humane and spiritual,’ and goes on to explain that:[11]

It is appropriate, therefore, that while in over twenty poems Hayden used an image of night or darkness to represent this period [in human history], in only two is there no light, no glimmer of hope.

It is in an article he wrote for the Association of Bahá’í Studies in 1990 that Hatcher shares other useful insights on this issue. For example:[12]

Hayden is able to hint at the obstacle to this process [of realizing our essential oneness] that racism imposes, hint at the ultimate escape from the clutches of this evil, and yet refrain from becoming dogmatic, doctrinaire, or didactic. He manages to achieve this by employing symbols, by constructing a pattern of images, and by distributing the parts of this vision among many poems rather than by attempting to incorporate the entire thought into a single piece.

He isn’t blind to the darkness but manages to balance it with light:[13]

Therefore, while much of Hayden’s poetry seems focused on existential bewilderment, he also has abundant indices to a future condition in which humanity has been cleansed of prejudice and provincialism and has achieved a state of natural nobility.

Even so:[14]

For a number of reasons, among them being Hayden’s own personal groping to discover a sense of self, Hayden chose to focus more forcefully on enunciating the terror of transition than on basking in the joy of progress towards that long-awaited shore.

Nevertheless, rarely are even his most brutal poems without some hope, without an important sign or symbol of that future light shining in the darkness of our terror and despair.

In a sense he is voicing what many of us struggle to articulate:[15]

So it is that the voice in Hayden’s poetry often cries out in the midst of our collective labor, coaching our common pain, helping us enunciate our shared confusion and consternation even while pointing to the glimmer of the morning light in our present darkness. Perhaps he saw his function as artist to help us recognize how, like Arachne in his poem “Richard Hunt’s’ Arachne’,” all of us are caught in “the moment’s centrifuge of dying/ becoming,” our eyes “brimming with horrors/ of becoming,” our mouth shaping “a cry it cannot utter,”(Collected 113) and so he tries to utter it for us.

Hayden is not claiming the darkness is not terrifying at times – it’s just not all there is.

Ann Boyles, in her article in the Journal of Bahá’í Studies 1992, quotes Glaysher as being of essentially the same mind:[16]

In an article in World Order Magazine (“Re-Centering’-’ 9-17), Frederick Glaysher points out that in a world where the “center” has been lost, a world where chaos reigns and where few people see divine order, Robert Hayden’s poems seek to re-establish that center (at least in the literary world) and to give the chaos some meaning.

She concludes that[17] ‘The presence and form of both anguish and anodyne reflect the two-edged nature of the dream. One sees the same dualism elsewhere in Hayden, as in the “deathbed childbed age” (1.10) of “Words in the Mourning Time.” In this dualism Hayden consistently transcends the negative in favour of a view that strives towards hope.’

In the problematic later poems of Plath I feel there is a surfeit of anguish and an absence of anodyne, and for that reason also they forfeit the hallmark of great poetry, despite their many admirers.

My final verdict?

Her sense of identity and self was anything but positive and secure, the root I feel of the exaggerated martyrdom of her late poetry. We ended up not looking at where the truth about her life lies amongst the conflicting reports, but what is the relationship between her poetry and truth, something that has possibly fed a false image of the person. She became an icon because many women have suffered as intensely as she claims to have done, but we have to recognize nonetheless that in terms of her life her later poetry is self dramatizing and to that degree inauthentic, filled with many untrustworthy and potentially offensive hyperboles.

This caused Perloff to question the value of Plath’s poetry:[18]

Any reader can compile his own list . . . of lines that often look like first drafts of the Ariel poems, and one begins to wonder whether Sylvia Plath is really the major writer Alvarez describes, or whether she is not perhaps an extraordinarily gifted minor poet, whose lyric intensity seemed more impressive when we encountered it in the slim and rigorously selected Ariel than when we view it in the new perspective afforded by the publication of her uncollected poems.

I think I need to clarify here that I do not accept the idea of solving for the unknown, that Hayden borrowed from Auden, as the recipe for all great poetry. Poetry has other other equally valid consciousness raising potentials, one of which, for me at least, concerns expanding our compass of compassion.

So, I have to ask myself at this point, does Plath’s poetry help us do that?

My answer to that so far is ‘No.’ She seems to present her state of mind as though it is all that matters. All too often, her level of vindictive self-justification, which disproportionately denigrates others, constricts rather than expands our empathy. She tries to draw us into her toxic perspective.

As we saw in The Whipping, Hayden transcends the limitations of his own perspective, lifting his poem to a higher level of understanding, which in turn enhances our level of consciousness.

The most that Plath’s later more unbalanced poems do is shed light on the workings of a deeply disturbed sensibility. To the extent that they tempt others to join her, they are potentially dangerous: to the extent that they help some of us understand her state of mind more deeply, they are useful. But their use seems clinical rather than poetic.

Emily Dickinson’s poems provide powerful and mind-expanding examples of what even a relatively subjective approach can achieve, strongly suggesting why she is the greater poet and why intensity is not always bad. A poem of hers I flagged up in advance is a good illustration of this.

Emily Dickinson

Afterthoughts

Her sense of identity and self was anything but positive and secure, the root I feel of the exaggerated martyrdom of her late poetry. We ended up not looking at where the truth about her life lies amongst the conflicting reports, but what is the relationship between her poetry and truth, something that has possibly fed a false image of the person. She became an icon because many women have suffered as intensely as she claims to have done, but we have to recognize nonetheless that in terms of her life her later poetry is self dramatizing and to that degree inauthentic, filled with many untrustworthy and potentially offensive hyperboles.

This caused Perloff to question the value of Plath’s poetry:[18]

Any reader can compile his own list . . . of lines that often look like first drafts of the Ariel poems, and one begins to wonder whether Sylvia Plath is really the major writer Alvarez describes, or whether she is not perhaps an extraordinarily gifted minor poet, whose lyric intensity seemed more impressive when we encountered it in the slim and rigorously selected Ariel than when we view it in the new perspective afforded by the publication of her uncollected poems.

In all fairness, as a closing comment, I have to admit that, for the most part, stylistically Hayden’s poetry does not resonate with me anywhere near as strongly as Mew’s or Dickinson’s, though he was a valuable equally modernist lens through which to examine Plath’s work. I’m out of tune with most modernity, including the mysteriously popular Clarice Cliff and her gaudy pottery abstractions. I was going to say far more about Mew in this sequence but it has gone on for far too long already so will just include these links to my posts about her.

There are moments of more positive resonance in modern poetry. Revisiting MacNeice’s Autumn Journal recently reminded me of its brilliance in capturing the flow of experience in places. There was a similar flow to Mew along with a perspective resonant with Hayden’s American Journal (the echo in the titles is, I suspect, accidental). Both are acting in a way as visitors from another planet capturing our days. Both fit better with my taste, than Hayden’s supposed masterpiece The Middle Passage, even though in the opinion of Christopher Buck and Derik Smith in their article in Oxford Research Encyclopaedia it was:[19]

Arguably his greatest masterpiece, [and] required considerable research on slavery, which Hayden did at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Collection in Harlem during the summer of 1941.

It also proved, in their view, significantly influential: ‘Hayden’s method, which involved diving into the historical archive to bring to life a record of the past that had been marginalized and suppressed, has proven paradigmatic for many history-minded poets of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.’

I feel we are in desperate need of a poetry that is more accessible, capable of reaching more people in an inspiring and mind-expanding fashion. Hatcher seems to favour poems that require great effort to understand. Is there a danger, when poetry becomes too esoteric and therefore by implication elitist, it will become increasingly side-lined, comparable to when the pared back fragmentation of modernism, in my view, destroys the music as well as the meaning of a poem.

Time to stop now – my ruminations on this will continue until my dying day, I expect, but I can’t criticise Plath for endlessly spilling her subjectivity across the page and then do the same thing myself.

References:

[1]. Deaths of Poets – page 263.
[2]. Irreducible Mind – page 426.
[3]. Op. cit. – page 445.
[4]. From the Auroral Darkness – page 26.
[5]. Op. cit. – page 82).
[6]. Op. cit. – page 112).
[7]. Op. cit. – page 256).
[8]. Op. cit. – page 260.
[9]. Op. cit. – page 121).
[10]. Op. cit. – page 252.
[11]. Op. cit. – page 277.
[12]. Racial Identity and the Patterns of Consolation in the Poetry of Robert Hayden – page 40.
[13]. Op. cit. – page 42.
[14]. Op. cit. – page 43.
[15]. Op. cit. – page 46.
[16] “Angle of Ascent”, The: Process and Achievement in the Work of Robert Hayden – page 5.
[17] Op. cit. – page 14.
[18] http://marjorieperloff.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Chap-17-Perloff.pdf – page 588.
[19] Oxford Research Encyclopaedia – page 7.

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Sylvia Plath – where the truth lies (6/7): truth and poetry (a)

Given that my examination of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land drags me into déjà vu in terms of modernist fragmentation and obscurity, it seemed appropriate to share again the following sequence about Sylvia Plath. 

Now for the most difficult task of all so far. When we look at Plath’s poetry through Hayden’s lens what do we eventually find?

In a journey of at least two stages, I’m starting with the poem that gave her posthumous collection its title.

Ariel

Ariel

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.

God’s lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks—

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else

Hauls me through air—
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.

White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child’s cry

Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

Apart from the insensitive use of the ‘n’ word, what other problems does this poem present.

Well, for a start, until I realized that Ariel was the name of her horse, I had been struggling to make sense of the poem in terms of the character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Unsurprisingly I had made no progress whatsoever, as an analysis of the poem on the web acknowledges right from the start:

It is important to note a piece of background information before attempting to understand what this piece is about. In an interview after her death, Ted Hughes, Plath’s husband, explained that Ariel was the name of her horse. Without this information, understanding this poem is almost impossible.

Once that Beecher’s Brook has been successfully negotiated, a significant problem remains, at least for me. Is all the remaining interpretative effort sufficiently rewarded by the insights gained or experiences conveyed?

For me, I’m afraid the answer to that question is no. The obscurity created by the poem’s fragmented self-absorbed intensity seems disproportionate and simply not worth decoding. For me it carries all the signs of what Iain McGilchrist describes as being the bizarre distortions that one would expect to find when the left-hemisphere escapes the holistic influence of an impaired right-hemisphere. McGilchrist wrote[1] that:

. . . there is the confusing fact that taste in modern art is more receptive than usual to elements that are visuo-spatially bizarre or distorted, something far more likely after a right hemisphere stroke, and may even celebrate such elements as signs of ‘creativity’.

The illustrations he provides indicate a high degree of fragmentation. Is it possible that modernism’s preference for this kind of style is masking too many critics’ perception of other more troubling possible sources of fragmentation in Plath’s poetry, and leading instead to uncritical adulation?

Many have fought strongly to defend Plath against those who feel her mind was significantly unbalanced: I am reluctant to even begin to attempt to diagnose anyone at such a distance in time and place, but do feel that some of her late poetry is more symptomatic than creative, though of exactly what it is probably impossible to say with any degree of certainty.

McGilchrist  also contends that the evidence suggests that one of the predominant emotions of someone experiencing this hemispheric imbalance will be anger:[2] ‘Anger . . . is one of the most strongly lateralised of all emotions, and it lateralises to the left.’

An intensity of anger is something we need to move onto considering soon.

Why this poem?

Before doing so, perhaps I need to explain exactly why I am bringing this poem into the mix at this point or even at all?

First of all, because it is considered by some critics to be one of her greatest poems, it seemed worth testing out before tackling the main focus, Daddy. Perloff, for example, includes it in her list:

Very few of the poems in Crossing the Water have the oracular, transfiguring vision of Sylvia Plath’s best poems: “Ariel,” “Words,” “Little Fugue,” “Fever 103.”

More importantly, perhaps, is the sense it gives me of Plath’s tendency in her later poems, the ones that have received the highest accolades, to go to extremes for no good reason. I completely fail to find this poem ‘oracular’ or ‘transfiguring.’ In its attempts to convey a terrifying experience, it exploits fragmentation to an extreme that effectively denies the reader experiential access to the terror, in my case at least: its cryptic crossword complexity turns it into an armchair puzzle instead. This is not the rewarding challenge of solving for the sublime unknown, which the best poetry requires of us, as we explored last time.

Now Daddy

What happens when this dramatizing intensity is mobilised to convey her feelings about her father? The fragmentation is still there but to a far less disruptive degree, the level of intensity is about the same and the poem as a whole is far more easily intelligible, but a different problem seems to me to have taken precedence, something that her use in Ariel of the ‘n’ word may be hinting at.

It would be impossible to combine here a detailed examination of the poem along with a clear explanation of what many regard as its main deficiencies. I’ve posted a copy of the full poem prior to this post appearing (see link). Please check what I am about to convey against the content of the poem itself. As a brief assist in understanding what I am about to discuss, here are some of the problematic expressions she uses in the poem (with similar ones in other poems): you’ll need to check the context to get all the implications.

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
(lines 32-35)

I have always been scared of you
With your Luftwaffe . . .
(lines 41-42)

A man in black with a Meinkampf look
(line 65)

Even as references to or symbols of patriarchy at that post-war point in UK/US history when the poem was written, they seem excessive.

A relatively moderate take on Plath’s poetry can be found in Michael Hamburger’s The Truth of Poetry. In the context of Hughes’ ‘nature poems’ of the post Auschwitz, post Hiroshima era, Hamburger refers to[3] the instances of the ‘extremist art’ which A. Alvarez has found in the work of Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton,’ and explains[4]‘extremist art – and all art informed by an intense awareness is extremist in our time – need not take the form of personal confession, as in . . . Sylvia Plath’s Ariel.’

My go-to critic, as a frequent reference I use to any poet I need to check out, has a more negative take. Michael Schmidt states:[5]

Plath places at the control-panels of her art a treacherous instability licensed to do what it likes not only with language but with fact.

He feels that[6] ‘in the wake of Ariel . . . Her use of metaphors [is] so strong that they displace what they set out to define. . . . By means of such metaphors she seeks to generalise her experience, to step outside it, to render impersonal the (apparently) intensely personal. Yet it is hard to imagine a poetry more forcefully stamped with a personality and voice. . . It is the passionate love and anger we remember, so disproportionate that they adhere uniquely to the allegorical figures she has created of ‘him’ and of ‘herself’ . . .’

He concludes:[7]  ‘That is what the poems do, “act out the awful little allegory”, exorcise rather than confess,’ adding that:[8]‘When she uses Hiroshima and Dachau it is in part to borrow a horror, to increase the volume of her poem’ something he defends up to a point while admitting some find it offensive.

Elaine Feinstein flags up how negative the poem seems:[9]

. . . the sheer theatricality of the poem (‘Daddy’], and the throwaway, colloquial tone of many of the crucial lines, work against a sense of transcendence. These are poems which invoke the power to avenge.

She feels Plath took it too far:[10] ‘what she wrote exposed too much, both of her need and of her hatred.’ This had potentially damaging consequences. She refers to Holbrook quoting psychotherapists:[11] ‘they related how often they were fighting to enable a patient to go on living – when some cultural work was pushing them over the edge. Sylvia Plath’s poetry especially, they said, tended to do this.’

In the age of the internet we are very aware of how powerful and toxic communications can tip vulnerable people over the edge into serious self-harm or suicide. Plath’s impact suggests this has had a longer history than I realised. This also implies that the pointer her analysts gave Plath towards the demonisation of her parents may have reached beyond her own suicide.

Jonathan Bate is aware of the link:[12] ‘Daddy is a poem that yokes father and husband, under the influence of Sylvia’s psychoanalytic journey.’

In describing Al Alvarez’s comment in the Observer about Ariel, based on a BBC broadcast, Bate uses very strong terminology:[13]

. . . The poems written in her last months tapped the ‘roots of her own inner violence’ (‘violence’, that word which was so often applied to Ted’s work). ‘Poetry of this order’, he had ended a talk, ‘is a murderous art.’

Adding that:

. . . The first American edition appeared in the summer of 1966, with the forward in which Plath’s genius was hailed by no less a figure than Lowell himself. ‘Her art’s immortality is life’s disintegration,’ he wrote.

The link with her subsequent reputation is clear:[14] ‘It was this image [of her suicide] combined with the venom of Daddy that laid the ground for the cult of Plath, what Ted call the Sylvia Plath fantasia.’

Collecting these words together – ‘venom’, ‘disintegration’, ‘murderous art’, ‘violence’ ‘hatred’, ‘avenge’, ‘horror’ and ‘anger’ – make it impossible to deny that the cumulative effect of this and other poems is destructively negative, and, when tied to the element of disproportion, it begins to seem indefensible.

Anne Stevenson feels[15] that she is ‘adapting immediate experience to her self-destructive perspective.’

Her conclusions are worth quoting at some length:[16]

As absorbed and intent as a cartographer, Sylvia reported in her poems on the weather of her inner universe . . . her recent furies were transmuted . . becoming indistinguishable from her old buried rages that were now at last fully and freely available to her.

. . .  the voice is finally that of a revengeful, bitterly hurt child storming against a beloved parent.

. . . On ethical grounds only a desperate bid for life and psychic health can even begin to excuse this and several other of the Ariel poems . .

. . .  it is possible, of course, that in some strange way Sylvia couldn’t imagine the targets of such poems as being harmed or hurt by them or that she thought the confessional mode commanded understanding on a different level from mere real-life human relationships, but if this was her a view it was clearly mistaken: such poems have caused enormous pain to the innocent victims of her pen.

Not everyone is so damning though.

In her attempt to defend Plath’s use of holocaust imagery Jacqueline Rose cites the conclusions of her critics as a matter of necessity. Referring to ‘Plath’s failure to recognise the “incommensurability of her experience of what took place she goes on to write:[17]

Joyce Carol Oates objects to Plath ‘snatching . . . metaphors for her predicament from the newspaper headlines’; Seamus Heaney argues that in poems like ‘Lady Lazarus’, Plath harnesses the wider cultural reference to a ‘vehemently self-justifying purpose’; Irving Howe describes the link as ‘monstrous, utterly disproportionate’; and Marjorie Perloff describe Plath’s references to the Nazis as ‘empty’ and ‘histrionic’, ‘cheap shots’, ‘topical trappings’, ‘devices’ which ‘camouflage’ the true personal meaning of the poems in which they appear.

Rose, in her defence of Plath, seems to equate some higher cultural standard, against which she feels Plath is being unfairly measured, with a patriarchal orthodoxy, and may be correct under some circumstances. However, this seems no justification for manufacturing a standard that makes all ‘subliminal uprush’, no matter how extreme and chaotic, equal to great art. Nor can we dismiss from the necessary mix counter balancing positives such as spirituality either. More on that later.

As part of her psychoanalytically-based defence of the poem[18] she quotes George Steiner’s praise of it as the ‘Guernica of modern poetry,’ claiming that ‘perhaps it is only those who had no part in the events who can focus on them rationally and imaginatively.’ Given my unqualified admiration of Picasso’s masterpiece, this seems grossly misplaced. Picasso is giving powerful expression to the grief and horror experienced in response to an atrocity, not misappropriating a crime against humanity to give vent to an histrionically exaggerated sense of personal injury.

Later Rose goes on to assert[19] that the argument that Plath ‘simply uses the Holocaust to aggrandise her personal difficulties seems completely beside the point. Who can say that these were not difficulties which she experienced in her very person?’ Given what we know to be the facts of her childhood, for example that her father, whatever his faults, did not abandon her but died of late-treated diabetes when she was eight years old, what Plath writes is clearly and unarguably a self-serving escalation of the truth. In my view, in the final analysis, Rose’s defence simply does not work.

It seems therefore clear to me that Daddy cannot be a poem leading us to a higher level of understanding of objective reality, or truth we might term it. It simply does not bear comparison with the best of Emily Dickinson, no matter what her husband thought (see link for an example of her poetry, describing a dark experience in a far more effective fashion). It’s only possible justification is that it might succeed in effectively conveying her intensely subjective state of mind. Does that make it a great poem, in effect the ‘Guernica of modern poetry’?

Or is the legacy of Plath a post-modern nightmare where there is no ‘truth’ to discover, just a clash of different but supposedly equally valuable meanings, some of which her poetry powerfully reproduces?

This is where we need to take use Hatcher’s perspective on Hayden’s poetry as a lens to evaluate Plath’s oeuvre.

More of that next time.

References:

[1]. The Matter with Things – page 261.
[2]. Op. cit. – page 197.
[3]. The Truth of Poetry – page 282.
[4]. Op. cit. – page 290.
[5]. Lives of the Poets – page 793.
[6]. Op. cit. – page 796.
[7]. Op. cit. – page 797.
[8]. Op. cit. – page 799.
[9]. Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet – page 133).
[10]. Op. cit. – page 146.
[11]. Op. cit. – page 185.
[12]. Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – page 189.
[13]. Op. cit. – page 239.
[14]. Op. cit. – page 240.
[15]. Bitter Fame – page 244.
[16]. Op. cit. – pages 262-66.
[17]. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath  — page 206.
[18]. Op. cit – page 214.
[19]. Op. cit. – page 229.

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