Posterity or Public
Feb. 2nd, 2009 09:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sheenaghpughThere's been a lot in the papers lately about what might loosely be called public poems – Elizabeth Alexander's inauguration effort and, on this side of the pond, the debate about who should be the next poet laureate, a debate complicated by the fact that every time a candidate is suggested, her reaction is to say the thing should be abolished in its present form (Wendy Cope and U A Fanthorpe, most recently).
Now of course that's partly because of the royal connection; remarkably few contemporary poets fancy penning odes on the occasion of the marriage of some pointless princeling, and Andrew Motion has admitted to living in dread lest William's engagement should predate his own escape from the post. But I think the problem goes deeper.
I think the problem is a deep-rooted feeling among writers that when a work (and not just a poem) has a specific purpose outside itself , eg to promote a cause, something in the way of quality and universality is liable to be sacrificed. If you're a poet, you may find yourself choosing words because they serve the cause, rather than because they enhance the verbal and rhythmical pattern you're making; if you're a novelist you may find yourself shaping your characters with other ends in mind than realism or the narrative's needs – to take a fairly obvious example, the young Oliver Twist is impossibly naive, polite and pure-minded for a child brought up in his circumstances. Dickens wasn't a fool and knew that very well. But part of his purpose in writing the novel was to make his readers aware of, and indignant about, the treatment of children like Oliver in their society, and the more sympathetically the lad comes over, the better for that purpose.
He wasn't the only writer, in that age, who embraced the idea that writers should have some social end in mind. His contemporary Wilkie Collins tended to grind axes in his lesser novels, to the point where Algernon Charles Swinburne commented: "What brought good Wilkie's genius nigh perdition? Some demon whispered - 'Wilkie! have a mission.'" (And, I must admit, I would rather read Collins at his most polemical than Swinburne's vapid, self-absorbed poems.)
Auden famously said that poetry makes nothing happen, but he was being simplistic. Poems (and novels) that are written with the specific intent of changing minds do sometimes succeed in that, and arguably help bring about certain changes. Thomas Hood's The Song of the Shirt, about the exploitation of female labour, is a long way from his best poem, but in its day it was massively well known; it was first published in Punch, immediately reprinted in The Times and other newspapers across Europe, adapted for the stage and printed not just on broadsheets but on cotton handkerchiefs – a sure sign of a poem having escaped its usual audience. It seems reasonable to suppose it did at least influence the debate, and it also seems admirable for him to have tried to.
Slightly different is the poem that is designed to commemorate an event or person rather than change anything – like an inauguration poem or a laureate poem. Or of course an elegy. These do often escape the confines of "occasional" for "universal", presumably because, as Sophocles' Odysseus wryly observes, we shall all one day need that service. Tennyson's laureate poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade" is not quite an elegy; it is designed to commemorate a specific act of heroism and while there's an awful lot wrong with it as a poem, it did achieve what it meant to in that people still quote it today and remember, because of it, a singularly pointless cavalry action that would otherwise be remembered, if at all, merely as a classic mistake.
I don't think there's anything wrong with accepting that some poems are designed for more immediate and possibly transient purposes than others, and judging them accordingly by their own standards. The problem is that most writers themselves would secretly like to have it both ways: they'd like to Influence History and get the wide circulation Tennyson and Hood achieved, but they'd also like present-day critics and posterity to love them. I suspect this goes double for poets, who are usually writing with one eye on posterity because they don't expect to be famous, rich or loved in their own lifetime, sniffle, sniffle. Plus, when writing poems for occasions, they are conscious of writing in the moment and to deadlines, which isn't often how the best poems are written; a bit of consideration and osmosis generally helps a lot.
When Robert Frost was asked to write an inauguration poem for Kennedy, he came up with this, possibly the most wooden piece he ever wrote (I don't think the fact that he idolised the man can have helped much). Mercifully, on the day, the weather conditions prevented his elderly eyes from seeing the piece of paper well enough to read it, so he recited from memory his lovely poem "The Gift Outright", composed for no special occasion but fitting this one as if it had been (as such poems so often do). At least, that's the story. I suspect, myself, that he realised as he was reading what a load of old pony his new effort was and diplomatically gave up on it.
It might seem inconsistent to say that actually I rather like a lot of occasional poems. I like the fire and anger that "change the world" poems can have, and the raw grief of some commemorative ones. And sometimes they do break the boundaries and become universal, as I'm sure their authors always hope will happen. The Irish Gaelic song "The Battle of Aughrim", with its unforgettable couplet about how the field of Aughrim would never again need liming, so bleached was it with the bones of young men. Or Francis Lauderdale Adams's "Hagar" about a 19th-century young unmarried mother:
She went along the road,
Her baby in her arms.
The night and its alarms
Made deadlier her load.
Her shrunken breasts were dry;
She felt the hunger bite.
She lay down in the night,
She and the child, to die.
But it would wail, and wail,
And wail. She crept away.
She had no word to say,
Yet still she heard it wail.
She took a jagged stone;
She wished it to be dead.
She beat it on the head;
It only gave one moan.
She has no word to say;
She sits there in the night.
The east sky glints with light,
And it is Christmas Day!
My, that was a long witter, and inconclusive; I still want both....
Now of course that's partly because of the royal connection; remarkably few contemporary poets fancy penning odes on the occasion of the marriage of some pointless princeling, and Andrew Motion has admitted to living in dread lest William's engagement should predate his own escape from the post. But I think the problem goes deeper.
I think the problem is a deep-rooted feeling among writers that when a work (and not just a poem) has a specific purpose outside itself , eg to promote a cause, something in the way of quality and universality is liable to be sacrificed. If you're a poet, you may find yourself choosing words because they serve the cause, rather than because they enhance the verbal and rhythmical pattern you're making; if you're a novelist you may find yourself shaping your characters with other ends in mind than realism or the narrative's needs – to take a fairly obvious example, the young Oliver Twist is impossibly naive, polite and pure-minded for a child brought up in his circumstances. Dickens wasn't a fool and knew that very well. But part of his purpose in writing the novel was to make his readers aware of, and indignant about, the treatment of children like Oliver in their society, and the more sympathetically the lad comes over, the better for that purpose.
He wasn't the only writer, in that age, who embraced the idea that writers should have some social end in mind. His contemporary Wilkie Collins tended to grind axes in his lesser novels, to the point where Algernon Charles Swinburne commented: "What brought good Wilkie's genius nigh perdition? Some demon whispered - 'Wilkie! have a mission.'" (And, I must admit, I would rather read Collins at his most polemical than Swinburne's vapid, self-absorbed poems.)
Auden famously said that poetry makes nothing happen, but he was being simplistic. Poems (and novels) that are written with the specific intent of changing minds do sometimes succeed in that, and arguably help bring about certain changes. Thomas Hood's The Song of the Shirt, about the exploitation of female labour, is a long way from his best poem, but in its day it was massively well known; it was first published in Punch, immediately reprinted in The Times and other newspapers across Europe, adapted for the stage and printed not just on broadsheets but on cotton handkerchiefs – a sure sign of a poem having escaped its usual audience. It seems reasonable to suppose it did at least influence the debate, and it also seems admirable for him to have tried to.
Slightly different is the poem that is designed to commemorate an event or person rather than change anything – like an inauguration poem or a laureate poem. Or of course an elegy. These do often escape the confines of "occasional" for "universal", presumably because, as Sophocles' Odysseus wryly observes, we shall all one day need that service. Tennyson's laureate poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade" is not quite an elegy; it is designed to commemorate a specific act of heroism and while there's an awful lot wrong with it as a poem, it did achieve what it meant to in that people still quote it today and remember, because of it, a singularly pointless cavalry action that would otherwise be remembered, if at all, merely as a classic mistake.
I don't think there's anything wrong with accepting that some poems are designed for more immediate and possibly transient purposes than others, and judging them accordingly by their own standards. The problem is that most writers themselves would secretly like to have it both ways: they'd like to Influence History and get the wide circulation Tennyson and Hood achieved, but they'd also like present-day critics and posterity to love them. I suspect this goes double for poets, who are usually writing with one eye on posterity because they don't expect to be famous, rich or loved in their own lifetime, sniffle, sniffle. Plus, when writing poems for occasions, they are conscious of writing in the moment and to deadlines, which isn't often how the best poems are written; a bit of consideration and osmosis generally helps a lot.
When Robert Frost was asked to write an inauguration poem for Kennedy, he came up with this, possibly the most wooden piece he ever wrote (I don't think the fact that he idolised the man can have helped much). Mercifully, on the day, the weather conditions prevented his elderly eyes from seeing the piece of paper well enough to read it, so he recited from memory his lovely poem "The Gift Outright", composed for no special occasion but fitting this one as if it had been (as such poems so often do). At least, that's the story. I suspect, myself, that he realised as he was reading what a load of old pony his new effort was and diplomatically gave up on it.
It might seem inconsistent to say that actually I rather like a lot of occasional poems. I like the fire and anger that "change the world" poems can have, and the raw grief of some commemorative ones. And sometimes they do break the boundaries and become universal, as I'm sure their authors always hope will happen. The Irish Gaelic song "The Battle of Aughrim", with its unforgettable couplet about how the field of Aughrim would never again need liming, so bleached was it with the bones of young men. Or Francis Lauderdale Adams's "Hagar" about a 19th-century young unmarried mother:
She went along the road,
Her baby in her arms.
The night and its alarms
Made deadlier her load.
Her shrunken breasts were dry;
She felt the hunger bite.
She lay down in the night,
She and the child, to die.
But it would wail, and wail,
And wail. She crept away.
She had no word to say,
Yet still she heard it wail.
She took a jagged stone;
She wished it to be dead.
She beat it on the head;
It only gave one moan.
She has no word to say;
She sits there in the night.
The east sky glints with light,
And it is Christmas Day!
My, that was a long witter, and inconclusive; I still want both....
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-02 09:38 am (UTC)OTOH, in this day and age it's more and more expected that serious - and not-so-serious - writing should (must, even) convey a message, carry a theme, have a political/moral weight (even in fanfic, deny it though we might, the periodic explosions bear me out on this).
The tension between wanting the absolute freedom to speak only for oneself, as well as the meaningful role of writing for and on behalf of others... it can make for wonderful writing. Or dull polemics :)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-02 09:47 am (UTC)Who have you got your money on for poet laureate?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-02 10:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-02 10:22 am (UTC)I can't make you rich or famous, but I can love you (as a poet, you have your family for the rest)
I listened to Poetry, Please yesterday. I'd been living in hopes it would be one of the snooker poems or Toast, is it?, the tanned young builders in Cardiff. But no, it was Sometimes again.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-02 12:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-02 11:25 am (UTC)