Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets (1998)
Donald Davie, With the Grain: Essays on Thomas Hardy and Modern British Poetry (1998).
by Michael Peverett
Michael Schmidt’s enormous but always readable book provokes a question that is soon answered. Is it possible for anyone to be inward with the whole canon, or anything like the whole canon, of poetry in English? Suppose one was or had been, how could such extensive reading be brought to bear on a single project of this sort? Well, it can’t. (There was another book with this compendious scope, a sort of blockbuster of literary history, published a few years back - far worse - I have forgotten the author’s name - he wrote a much better book about opera, too.)
For me, any work of literary history is liable to provoke comparison with Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century - a mere episode, you might say, dealt with masterfully and with what must have been ferocious labour. Compared to that, Schmidt is inevitably slipshod. But this doesn’t make his book any less worthwhile. What cannot be done adequately should sometimes be done inadequately.
In the earlier centuries, where my own grasp is firmest, Schmidt is least lingering. He relies heavily on Joseph Warton and Robert Graves, the one fatally circumscribed and the other dubiously committed; later Ford Madox Ford will join them at his elbow. He did not have time to read much Chaucer, or the Gawain-poet at all, and he is honest in at least not spending much time on what is not fresh to him. More disappointingly, he does not have much beyond appreciative precis to offer on what he has re-read (The House of Fame, Troilus). (Studies of Chaucer, though universally acknowledged the “second greatest”, are enthralling on their own terms but rarely have much to say to someone preoccupied with the later “tradition” – they are relevant to life but not, it would seem, to that. Chaucer is like a second bible.) On Langland his conclusions are vitiated by lack of full knowledge of the poem - for, instance, he thinks Langland lacks wit, and does not know the “Feast of Charity” episode which would disabuse him. He has looked over Gower, though he does not, I think, take as much from the experience as Christopher Ricks did. Reading poetry with an object in view is perhaps not so likely to take possession of us as reading that just happens; Ricks seems to have read Gower for his own amusement. Yet I can’t think that this part of the book is without worth. By eschewing any attempt at systematic coverage, Schmidt always maintains liveliness. If he is unfair to Hoccleve, or doubtful on Lydgate, he brings a lifetime of honesty and intelligent reading to his judgments; they have become something worth contemplating.
In the sixteenth century his infatuation with Gascoigne (it was briefly a widespread one) makes the landmarks, for me, rather quixotic. Yet he has time for Sidney, too. Spenser is admired for the Shepheard’s Calender (as he was by Bunting), another reversal of Lewis that puzzles. Skelton, I think, is not dealt with very profoundly though with great enthusiasm (Skelton, like Hoccleve and Gower, become frequent references for later judgments.) Largely omitting Shakespeare, he is wrong in supposing that the gap is made up for by implied presence elsewhere. There were needed a dozen pages on Shakespeare’s greatest dramatic poetry, surely not an untapped influence; and half a dozen more than we have on the Sonnets, whose superlative quality he misses altogether (what he does say on the Sonnets is beside the point or else incorrect).
Now I skip quite a bit. Schmidt’s pages on Dryden I read with great interest, of course; they are very admirable, the very engagedness of the critique a sure indication that a poet’s time is coming round again. I was pleased to see that someone else other than me responds to Shelley’s superb “ear” for verse (I was beginning to think it must be an illusion), but he should have found time to look over Prometheus Unbound. The detail of Schmidt’s text continues to be naggingly confounding. He says, or quotes, the essential things about Johnson’s poetry, but there is something impercipient in a sentence such as this: “His memory was orderly and encyclopaedic, even if he tended to surround himself with disorder.” Johnson’s own Latin poem about his dictionary lies in wait to level the simple edifice of that sentence. “Mrs Johnson, considerably his junior, on whom the Doctor doted...” should say senior. And he wasn’t a Doctor until thirteen years after her death. “Of the fifty-two poets in Doctor Johnson’s Lives, which deal with his century, only eight detain us here, two-thirteenths of what he regarded as necessary.” The grammar of that is a hasty mess, and the poets were – notoriously, as I supposed – chosen by the publishers, so they don’t represent what Johnson regarded as necessary. It’s ungrateful to nitpick; but it’s somewhat alarming that I can do it so easily in the very few areas where I don’t, through my own ignorance, have to take him on trust.
Or again, on Wordsworth’s Prelude, “He deploys blank verse with such freedom and spoken assurance that it is hard to decide whether to call it iambic pentameter or quantitative measure”. The first half of the sentence persuades me of a genuinely personal insight into the Prelude, while the second half persuades me that he hadn’t time to think out exactly what it was. That would, I realize, be no easy task; but “quantitative measure” sets us off in quite the wrong direction.
The heart of Schmidt’s book, however, is his own century. He pauses for breath to warn us that “Approaching the present, the historian runs into trouble.” Actually it seems to me that he runs out of trouble. Here he persuades me that he has really engaged with all that he discusses, and much that he doesn’t discuss too. No one person could appreciate all the poetry that can be appreciated by some one or other of the many divided audiences for modern poetry, but this is better than I imagined might be possible; the section on Marianne Moore perhaps the best of all, though the whole chapter (which also includes Stevens, Bishop and Ashbery) is outstanding. But I like too his pages on Adrienne Rich, a poet he must have “followed” throughout her career. I think the most solidly valuable thing in his book is when, as it were unwittingly, he lets us know not what a poem could mean to us now, but what it meant then – in 1960 or in 1975.
Some of the text must have been taken from earlier writings - for instance the comments on Briggfllatts, which Donald Davie had demolished so thoroughly (in an essay that Schmidt, to his great credit, republished). But he didn’t rewrite those comments, another indication of inevitable bookmaking.
Davie, of course, is frequently mentioned, and perhaps that’s why I browsed in his book while photocopying a tax return form in the library. It was enough to make me want to borrow it, and it’s been revelatory to me. (Overstated? But I have fewer of these revelatory experiences as time goes by, so it seems worth saying.)
In the days when I owned such books, I had Davie’s Trying to Explain on my shelves - read it, too, but without much interest. Perhaps that was because much of the book concerned Pound, an author I am almost incapacitated from appreciating because of my utter aversion to his politics - a poet I am always subconsciously trying to belittle, not the most hopeful attitude for a reader. I developed an idea of Davie’s writing as grey, timid, disappointed, cantankerous, mediocre, thankfully not to be taken seriously.
But Within the Grain is, as I now discovered, full of the most brilliant and constructive criticism. Davie’s strength, most noticeably, is in his interests being well beyond what one comes despairingly to think of as “literary” - for him, poems are for use, the poet’s role “civic” and “honourable”. He is interested in politics, but also in things. Much mere wordspinning is evaporated by such an attitude. He has views on politics and on things that frequently bring him up against my own beliefs, but I’m grateful for that - merely by dint of being views, they make some common ground for me.
That Davie is prepared to take Tolkien or Blackmore’s Lorna Doone seriously is surely a strength of his - he is indeed very reluctant to dismiss anything completely, an unexpected virtue that produces some of his best pages. He writes far better of the language poets than their admirers do, and makes me want to read them more as a result. He also makes me want to read what he loves, Tomlinson and Bunting (Schmidt did the same with MacCaig). He suggests half-a-dozen ways in which Hardy could possibly be interesting. That is what I mean by a criticism that is “constructive”. And where I differ from him he gives me the materials to help me know why.
When he writes about David Jones he is surely right to press the claims of In Parenthesis. From this astounding book I discovered (which does not mean that I could deploy) a new kind of presentation - entirely dramatic and creating an effect of “being there” that is hallucinatory in a sense quite opposed to the implication of escape from reality; an escape (for the reader) to reality. Alan Garner used something similar in Red Shift. It’s a detail, but the last part of In Parenthesis is a falling-off. The chief source (for Jones) is I suppose Joyce, who fell off rather more quickly, after only a few pages of Ulysses. The Anathemata is not at all interesting in the same way, but I think Davie concludes too quickly from Jones’ own professed lack of interest in prosody. It doesn’t matter what they say on the subject, I think he was quite as interested as Pound shows himself to be in the bulk of the Cantos, and not much more mannered. His music is composed on the basis of instinctive judgment, and if it is less attractively melodic than Pound’s that does not invalidate it, any more than Schoenberg is invalidated by Berg. There are other reasons – mainly, the content - why not much of The Anathemata is worth reading.
Davie talks of “the hard bright surfaces which Pound’s language, when he is in control, presents to us as a sequence of images, each sharp-edged and distinct”; an attractive analogy between his verse and metal, or medals, something cast. It was an analogy Pound himself encouraged for all its positive connotations of structure, permanence, brilliance, solidity in space, 3-dimensionality... I wanted to read Pound at that moment. But it is only an analogy, a trick really, often managed by describing how you hope your verse will impress the reader in the verse itself. (Eliot does it too in the first line of Coriolan, which being decontextualized is bound to be imbibed as a sort of hopeful description of the poetic effect, a blurb that the author has composed himself.) Davie, like others less wise, has sometimes forgotten that this is an analogy, that language is not in fact thick, and metal is not a metallic word. So when in his poem To a Brother in the Mystery, he says of stone
The medium is its own
Thing, and not all a medium, but the stuff
Of mountains; cruel, obdurate, and rough.
what is literally true of stone is not literally true of language, which really is “all a medium” except for the soundwaves - which are not characteristically “cruel, obdurate, and rough”. Yet I agree with the editor that the poem is clearly intended to be a statement about poetry and not about stonecarving; so where does that leave it?
In “Art and Anger” and “The Rhetoric of Emotion” there is an empty shrillness that, I think, pays a sort of tribute to what Davie had achieved elsewhere in the book - this, one realizes, is one of the things he so confidently managed not to give way to. Both are far too prescriptive of what does or does not make for good poetry - an otiose theme whose conclusions can always be refuted. The absolute originality of Plath’s poetry is something Davie does not gird himself up to confront; in a rather similar way Schmidt conspicuously thinks he can label Redgrove and have done with it. (The excellent review of Steiner should not have been tucked away with these poor pieces in a sort of apologetic appendix.)
Lawrence emerges pretty battered from his chapter - not Davie’s temperate criticism, but the terribly revealing quotations of Lawrence’s poetry, do the damage. But Davie’s argument that “prophetic” poetry is necessarily inferior is flawed. Of the true (responsible, fair-minded) poet, he says: “His poetry supports and nourishes and helps to shape culture; the prophet, however, is outside culture and (really) at war with it. The prophet exists on sufferance, he is on society’s expense account, part of what society can sometimes afford. Not so the poet; he is what society cannot dispense with.” It would take a few pages of analysis to demonstrate all the merely analogical argument that is called up in these sentences to press a non-analogical conclusion. It’s perhaps enough to point out that, whatever their attitudes may have been, all poets leave only poems, and all of them shape culture, quite regardless of whether they would have liked to defend it, nurture it or destroy it. This is in fact a coercive argument, intended to make you think “he cannot be a good poet who does not approve of culture”. Well, I too would like to say “you cannot be a good poet if you don’t love the things I do”, because like everyone else I’d like to be obeyed when I say “love the things I do”. But I don’t think you can draw any conclusion of that sort from the nature of poetry itself.
At several points Davie reproves both rhetorical poetry and ways of reading that assume a poem is a form of rhetoric. He says that a poet’s engagement is (or should be) with his subject, not his reader. The reader should not be trying to “get the message”, but to look as it were over the poet’s shoulder. Doubtless this is salutary, but the argument is false, as perhaps comes out most clearly in the sentence: “The reader may listen in if he wants to, but he is not being addressed.” For Davie fails to make the distinction between the poet’s creative engagement (which may be entirely non-verbal) and his act of writing a poem, which is an act of communication - and to whom if not a reader? Of course one could say (but I doubt if Davie meant this) that the poet needs the act of writing a poem as a means of working himself up to the engagement - I could confirm its effectiveness from my own experience, as perhaps any other poet could. But a “means” can be kicked away when the end is achieved, and on the other hand it’s obviously untrue to say that the poem is the act of engagement - they exist on quite different ontological planes. No, a poem is an address, it does have designs on its reader, and it’s not somehow improper, though it’s often unhelpfully distracting, to be aware of this.
One of Davie’s least satisfactory passages is unfortunately on a subject of great interest to me, the “ecology crisis”. When Davie talks of the necessity of endless recycling of our own waste as “a nightmare”, I sympathise of course. When this mutates into remarks about “the moral blackmail which the ecologist’s propaganda exerts and depends on”, I wish he had spelt out the argument in full. One has the impression of someone talking to fellow-members of a club who do not need to rehearse what has been discussed before. As I have said, it is a pleasure to disagree with him, but for once he has not supplied the materials.
Which reminds me that Schmidt, too, in writing about Robinson Jeffers, momentarily mentions “the human risks of Green ideology” - well, I can’t complain about that, in itself. It’s the sort of sentence, however, that makes you wonder how much it costs the author to say. He then seems to taunt Jeffers for saying, surely unexceptionably, “I decided not to tell lies in verse. Not to feign any emotion I did not feel.” Schmidt comments: “This sounds wholesome. It is also terribly privileged ... a man with a private income ... It is arrant escapism, more repugnant than MacDiarmid’s wildly engaged Stalinism and Pound’s fascism because it needn’t get its hands dirty; if apocalypse does not come now, it will come later.” For all I know, having not read him, Jeffers is indeed repugnant. But it hardly follows from the sentence quoted. What should a poet say: that he does not mind telling lies in verse, that he will feign emotions if it’s convenient? If Jeffers’ private income clearly made it easier for him to avoid other kinds of compromise, does that mean he should have made those other kinds of compromise too? As for MacDiarmid and Pound, they weren’t exactly camp guards; the only difference (and surely it is not less repugnant) is that others got their hands dirty carrying out the programs that MacDiarmid and Pound proclaimed.