A liberating influence

Większość prac krytycznych poświęconych poezji Audena, na które trafiłam, budzi we mnie przemożne poczucie niezręczności, jak gdybym przyłapała autorów na tym, że nie za bardzo wiedzą, co napisać. Jak na razie chlubnym wyjątkiem była książka R. Victorii Arany W.H.Auden's Poerty: Mythos, Theory and Practice, a teraz mam przed sobą drugą budującą pozycję: Auden and After. The Liberation of Poetry 1930-1941 Francisa Scarfe'a. Esej napisany w 1941 roku może wydawać się zdezaktualizowany, przecież Auden wówczas nie napisał jeszcze swoich najważniejszych wierszy, ale mimo wszystkich ograniczeń i błędnych ścieżek, oraz "negatywizmu" (jak przyznaje sam autor), zawiera bardzo trafny obraz poezji Audena, do którego nikt, w moim odczuciu, nic istotnego nie dodał. Esej Scarfe'a potwierdza moją intuicję, że poeta, jak każdy człowiek, nie zmienia się w ciągu życia, tylko idzie swoją własną drogą, i ta droga jest od początku widoczna dla kochającego oka, jakim, niewątpliwie, było krytyczne oko Scarfe'a ("It adds a precious seeing to the eye; a lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind", Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost).

Kilka cytatów, które wydają mi się szczególnie trafne, głębokie lub rozczulające:

He presents the bustle and humbug and smell of modern life by his capacity for mythological thinking, his feeling for all sorts of places, all sorts of people into whose life he has not penetrated but which he intuitively understands, his love of make-believe, his power for brutal generalization which gives point to many fragments of observation, and gives body to his personal beliefs. 

One of the most curious things about Auden is that in spite of his emphasis on psychology, on close examination his poetry is not particularly introspective [...] And it is also noticeable that while his poetry is "about chaps", there is very little about individual chaps and much more about people in general. 

The pseudopsychology, by which disease is represented purely as defense-mechanism and selfishness, leads Auden very often to treat suffering cruelly as though it were a joke. As for Freud, it is amusing to see that a poet who professes immense admiration for Dryden (that poet whom nobody reads, and who is out of the direct line of English poetry, and who, once again, was revived not by Auden but by Eliot, to whom he is better suited) - it is amusing to see this pseudo-classical poet, who is as different from Dryden as an octopus from a whale, holding a Freudian and ultra-romantic conception of the poet. 

Even Auden's Geography (which is one of his main assets: his poems carry us round the world in no time) is psychic, and it is his interpretation of places such as Dover, Iceland and Spain, which led me to use the term 'Psychic Geography'. 

Even his love poems seem to be about other people: he is a poet turned outwards. It is his being 'turned outwards' which accounts for much of his sermonizing. 

The main question now is, why has Auden had such a penetrating influence on the younger writers? A painter recently said to me: 'If I can paint a circle and two splashes of red, and regard my work as complete, I owe that to Picasso.' The same applies to Auden: he has been a liberating influence who gave a younger writers a self-confidence which they might otherwise have had to fight for dearly. Auden broadened into a highway the path which had been hewn into convention and hypocrisy by Eliot, Pound, Owen and the verslibristes. But he did more. The preceding generation was composed largely of intellectual poets - Eliot, Pound, Graves, Riding, Read, the Sitwells - and it is Auden who broke down the new snobbery of intellectualism which was in danger of creating a minority-poetry. He also enlarged, quite definitely, the poetry-reading public. The most suggestible of poets we have had for a long time, he was able to synthesize in his work an enormous amount of the achievements and methods of past writers. Reacting to numerous influences, he was able to enlarge for younger writers the vocabulary, syntax, rhythm and imagery of poetry. That is why so many of the younger poets are accused of 'deriving' from Auden, when it is not the case. Most often they have observed his methods and have used them in their own way. The truth is that, in a sense, Auden has done all this at his own expense, almost to his own detriment. What has happened is that he has not created his own recognizable manner, as Eliot did. He has created 'style which is no style' [...].  

Auden has a host of manners, good and bad. I do not propose to examine them: the pretentious but effective telegraphese of the 'Paid on Both Sides' which passes into the impressionist manner of some of his poems; his 'cine-style' which is a circular view, as the French say, on a whole landscape, town or country in a few lines; that style which is artificially tough and resembles Hemingway; another style in which he heaps up a series of abstractions, culminating in some of his American poems which, with their personified passions, suggest that this writer is lapsing into the eighteenth century and forgetting what passion is; those obvious devices, internal rhyme, half-rhyme, assonance, sprung-rhythm, the omission of pronouns, verbs and other desirable parts of speech, his puns, his conceits, his incorrect and slipshod epithets which startle momentarily, and all types of slang and private jargon: most of these things have already been adequately reviewed by other critics. It is not the presence of these things which creates the particular climate of Auden's poetry; it is rather the co-existence of them. [...]  

Any one poem of Auden is likely to be as much a mixed bag as any one of his books, and his books, in their strange juxtaposition of subject and tone, are rather like a cinema crowd emerging, from the stalls, the boxes and the pit, in a confused and democratic mass through the same exit. [...] Eliot, already so unclassical by the purest standards, is a champagne to a cocktail when compared with Auden. 

What are the real qualities of Auden? One of them is certainly an imaginative interest in the way people live. Even if he misinterprets, as in the case of Honeyman, he is not far wrong in his background. [...] 

And he has also a realization of the vastness and oneness of the human scene. We have seen already that he has no one-track mind: he does not see Spain as an isolated phenomenon, but a symbol of the consciousness of the world, and he usually treats any subject, however small, in its broadest implications.[...]  

Thirdly, his naiveness, in spite of his sometimes heartless jibes and his intellectual leg-pulling, has remained unspoiled, and he is capable of expressing a primitive and pure feeling [...] 

Forthly, Auden has also the vast, living vocabulary which is essential to any poet who wants to be of his time and of the future. He is enabled by this to write on many levels. He is also sensitive (much more than many who have followed him) to the musical qualities of words, though he has shown a tendency to fall rhythmically into rather set patterns [...] 

The most important point about Auden's style is that, for good or ill, he has tried to write poetry very close to common speech, and that he has succeeded. Generally speaking, one might say that in his early poems he tried to express a fairly universal, and in any case a second-hand, subject-matter in an intensely personal style, and since then he has moved towards a more personal subject-matter and a more impersonal style. His ideas are being more and more imprinted with his own particular twist of mind, and one sees increasingly that he is quite incapable of orthodoxy of any kind.

The secret candour

(In Memoriam – June 1941, R. R.)

Friend, whose unnatural early death

In this year’s cold, chaotic Spring

Is like a clumsy wound that will not heal:

What can I say to you, now that your ears

Ae stoppered-up with distant soil?

Perhaps to speak at all is false; more true

Simply to sit at times alone and dumb

And with most pure intensity of thought

And concentrated inmost feeleng, reach

Towards your shadow on the years’ crumbling wall

I’ll say not any word in praise or blame

Of what you ended with the mere turn of a tap;

Nor to explain, deplore nor yet exploit

The latent pathos of your living years –

Hurried, confused and unfulfilled, -

That were the shiftless years of both our youths

Spent in the monstrous mountain-shadow of

Catastrophe that chilled you to the bone:

The certain imminence of which always pursued

You from your heritage of fields and sun...

I see your face in hostile sunlight, eyes

Wrinkled against its glare, behind the glass

Of a car’s windscreen, while you seek to lose

Yourself in swift devouring of white roads

Unwinding across Europe or America;

Taciturn at the wheel, wrapped in a blaze

Of restlessness that no fresh scene can quench;

In cities of brief sojourn that you pass

Through in your quest for respite, heavy drink

Alone enabling you to bear each hotel night,

Sex, Art and Politics: those poor

Expedients! You tried them each in turn,

With a wry secret smile of one resigned

To join in every complicated game

Adults affect to play. Yet girls you found

So prone to sentiment’s corruptions; and the joy

Of sensual satisfaction seemed so brief, and left

Only new need. It proved hard to remain

Convinced of the Word’s efficacity; or even quite

Certain of World-Salvation through ‘the Party Line’...

Cased in the careful armour that you wore

Of wit and nonchalance, through which

Few quizzed the concealed countenance of fear,

You waited daily for the sky to fall;

At moments wholly panic-stricken by

A sense of stifling in your brittle shell;

Seeing the world’s damnation week by week

Grow more and more inevitable; till

The conflagration broke out with a roar,

And from those flames you fled through whirling smoke,

To end at last in bankrupt exile in

That sordid city, scene of Ulysses; and there,

While War sowed all the lands with violent graves,

You finally succumbed to a black, wild

Incomprehensibility of fate that none could share...

Yet even in your obscure death I see

The secret candour of that lonely child

Who, lost in the storm-shaken castle-park,

Astride his crippled mastiff’s back was borne

Slowly away into the utmost dark.

David Gascoyne  

Adresatem tej elegii jest Roger Roughton, angielski poeta, zaliczany do surrealistów, wydawca (własnym sumptem) pisma literackiego Contemporary Poetry and Prose. Jemu też poświęcił Francis Scarfe swój zbiór esejów krytycznych Auden and After, o którym miałam pisać, ale zatrzymałam się na stronie z dedykacją. RR musiał mieć talent do przyjaźni. Do niego też, po części, jest adresowany Dedycatory Poem ze wspomnianego zbioru Scarfe'a:

To you, my friends

By my lamp in the evenings,

Whose words refresh

My nights, my mornings;

A doomed generation

Seized between wars,

Whose boyhood language 

Was hunger and loss:

Thanks for you verses

That enrich memory

Like smiling faces

Of women and children.

All I can say

Will do you less good

Than a peaceful day

In a summer wood:

All I can give

Is a prose love,

Locked in a book

My kindest look.

F. S.

Te wiersze oddają to, co jest piękne i żywe i pociągające w latach trzydziestych dla mnie. 

Barfield: The making of meaning

Każdy porządny drogowskaz powinien od czasu do czasu chodzić drogą, którą wskazuje.

In this chapter I have taken only one English word and one no richer in itself than a thousand others. Yet it serves well enough to show how the man of today, overburdened with self-consciousness, lonely, insulated from Reality by his shadowy, abstract thoughts, and ever on the verge of the awful maelstrom of his own fantastic dreams, has among his other compensations these lovely ancestral words, embalming the souls of many poets dead and gone and the souls of many common men. If he is a poet, he may rise for a moment on Shakespeare's shoulders - if he is a lover, then, certainly, there are no more philtres, but he has his four magical black squiggles wherein the past is bottled, like an Arabian Genie, in the dark. Let him only find the secret, and there, lying on the page, their printed silence will be green with moss; it will crumble slowly even while it whispers with the thunder of primeval avalanches. 'Le mot', murmured Victor Hugo... 'tantot comme un passant mysterieeux de l'ame, tantot comme un polype noir de l'ocean pense....'

Owen Barfield, Poetic diction: A study in meaning.

R. G. Collingwood, The principles of art

Jeżeli sztuka nie jest rodzajem rzemiosła, ale wyrażeniem emocji, zasadnicza różnica między artystą i odbiorcą znika. Bo artysta ma odbiorców tylko o tyle, o ile inni słyszą jego akt wyrażania siebie i rozumieją to, co usłyszeli. Więc, jeżeli jedna osoba powie coś, wyrażając stan swojego umysłu, to inna osoba, która to zrozumie, również ma to w swoim umyśle. Nie ma potrzeby pytać, czy ta druga osoba czułaby się tak samo, gdyby ta pierwsza nie przemówiła, ponieważ, jakkolwiek na to odpowiemy, to, co zostało powiedziane wyżej będzie prawdziwe. [...] Jeżli poeta wyraża, na przykład, określony strach, słuchacz zrozumie go tylko wówczas, jeżeli sam jest zdolny do odczuwania takiego rodzaju strachu. Stąd, gdy ktoś przeczytał i zrozumiał wiersz, on nie tylko zrozumiał to, że poeta wyraził swoją emocję, on sam wyraził swoją własną emocję słowami poety, które w ten sposób stały się jego własnymi słowami. Jak to ujął Coleridge, poetę poznasz po tym, że czyni cię poetą. Wiemy, że poeta wyraża swoje emocje, ponieważ umożliwia nam wyrażanie naszych własnych. 

W ten sposób, jeżeli sztuka jest aktem wyrażania emocji, czytelnik jest artystą tak samo jak pisarz. Nie ma zasadniczej różnicy między artystą a odbiorcą. Nie oznacza to, że nie ma między nimi żadnej różnicy. Kiedy Pope napisał, że zadaniem poety jest mówić to "co czują wszyscy, lecz nikt tak doskonale nie wyrazi", możemy zinterpretować jego słowa w ten sposób (nieważne, czy Pope, pisząc to, był tego świadom), że poetę odróżnia od odbiorcy, chociaż obydwaj robią to samo, czyli wyrażają określoną emocję w określonych słowach, ten fakt, że poeta sam znalazł sposób wyrażenia swojej emocji, podczas gdy odbiorca posłużył się jego rozwiązaniem. Poeta nie jest odosobniony w przeżywaniu pewnej emocji lub posiadaniu mocy jej wyrażenia, jest on odosobniony w tym, że podejmuje inicjatywę wyrażenia tego, co wszyscy czują i wszyscy potrafią wyrazić.

R. G. Collingwood, The principles of art, Oxford University Press 1958.

If art is not kind of craft, but the expression of emotion, this distinction of kind between artist and audience disappears. For the artist has an audience only in so far as people hear him expressing himself and understand what they hear him saying. Now, if one person says something by way of expressing what is in his mind, and another hears and understands him, the hearer who understands him has that same thing in his mind. The question whether he would have had it if the first had not spoken need not here to be raised; however it is answered, what has just been said is equally true. [...] If a poet expresses, for example, a certain kind of fear, the only hearers who can understand him are those who are capable og experiencing that kind of fear themselves. Hence, when someone reads and understands a poem, he is not merely understanding the poet's expression of his, poet's, emotions, he is expressing emotions of his own in poet's words, which have thus become his own words. As Coleridge put it, we know a man for a poet by the fact he makes us poets. We know that he is expressing his emotions by the fact that he is enabling us to express ours.

Thus, if art is the activity of expressing emotions, the reader is an artist as well as a writer. There is no distinction of kind between artist and audience. That does not mean that there is no distinction at all. When Pope wrote that poet's business was to say "what all have felt but none so well express'd", we may interpret his words as meaning (whether or no Pope himself consciously meant this when he wrote them) that the poet's difference from hi audience lies in the fact that, though both do exactly the same thing, namely, expess this particular emotion in these particular words, the poet is a man who can solve for himself the problem of expressing it, whereas the audience can express it only when the poet has shown them how. The poet is not singular either in in his having that emotion or in his power of expressing it; his is singular in his ability to take initiative in expressing what all feel, and all can express.