Poems that escape

[sheenaghpugh]

The mention in a previous post of Thomas Hood's "Song of the Shirt" started me thinking about poems that escape their normal audience for a life in the wider world. I'm not thinking here of what might loosely be called greeting-card verse like "Trees" but of poems that do have at least some genuine literary merit and yet achieve a wider audience. There's a famous story told of the great Chinese T'ang poet Po Chu'i, (772-846) a popularist by conviction: a young courtesan put up her price on the ground that she could recite Po's tear-jerking masterpiece "The Everlasting Wrong".

Can't see that ever happening in the west, but there are other measures, for instance:

1. being reproduced in other and more commercial contexts than books. "Song of the Shirt" was printed on handkerchiefs. I've seen Kipling's "If", copyright notwithstanding, in umpteen formats.

2. being set to music – eg Masefield's "Sea Fever", Idris Davies' "The Bells of Rhymney"

3. being used in mass media, like newspapers ("Song of the Shirt") and film (John Pudney's "For Johnny", Auden's "Stop all the clocks")

4. being widely able to be quoted in part (Wordsworth's "Daffodils", Shakespeare's "Shall I compare thee", Herrick's "To the Virgins, to make much of Time", Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade", Jenny Joseph's "Warning")

5. being widely parodied (Felicia Hemans' "Casabianca", "Sea Fever", "Daffodils", William Carlos Williams' "This is just to say")

6. becoming a "school" poem, widely known in an educational context. "Casabianca" was foisted on many a generation of bemused American schoolchildren who had no reason to attach any importance to an incident in the Battle of the Nile. "Daffodils" has put many a boy off poetry for life, including my husband, but he can still quote it.

It's already fairly plain from that list that escape isn't necessarily permanent. Nobody outside literature now knows "Song of the Shirt" or "For Johnny". "Sea Fever", "To the Virgins" and "Casabianca" are reduced to single lines in the public consciousness and it's like enough the same will befall the Auden and Joseph poems (she probably can't wait; she's quite tired of it).

As to what helped them escape in the first place, any common factors? Three of those above, the Hemans, Tennyson and Pudney, were elegies for people killed in wars, but I don't know how relevant that is. It's interesting that the two by living poets don't rhyme, but they do have a very definite and imitable structure (you only have to look at all the WC Williams parodies to see how imitable). That would seem to suggest that a degree of patterning helps. Also the thing needs to be fairly accessible, either easy to understand or easy to think you understand (both "Warning" and "If" can be read as rather darker than they appear on the surface, but most people don't).

What I don't know is how much any of the authors aided the escape. Joseph and Kipling almost certainly not; neither rated their escapees highly. But Tennyson and Hemans were quite savvy self-publicists and Hood was on a campaign.

As usual: all questions, no answers.

Comments

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of people could quote "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways"... and would get no further. And I'd lay handsome odds on a lot of them thinking it was Shakespeare, if they thought about it at all :)

One thing I find ironic is the number of then well-known poets that Lewis Carroll parodied in the Alice books; the originals have now completed disappeared except as a footnote in the annotated Alice... and if you read them, they sound all wrong because you're so used to the Carroll version.

[glitterboy1.livejournal.com]

There's another kind of escape that occurs to me, too: survival beyond what might otherwise have happened - Sappho's fragment 31, for instance, quoted by Longinus.

[sheenaghpugh]

That does seem another kind of escape, as you say, because to some extent it depends on actual literary merit - even when something is quoted by some fusty old grammarian as an example of litotes or whatever, there has to be a reason that particular example stuck in his head. Thank heaven for fusty old grammarians, say I...

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

"Daffodils" almost put me off poetry for life. We had a lot of very wussy poetry at school.

I think Kipling's out of copyright now. I certainly found his "Kim" in the Gutenberg Project when the library book I borrowed turned out to have four pages missing.

[sheenaghpugh]

Kipling got caught by the change in EU law - he came out of copyright in 1986, after 50 years, then went back in when they changed it. If the new time was 70 years, he will have come out again in 06.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

I think 4 ("known in part") must be the largest category of escapers ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"), but quite possibly 6 ("school poem") is the only reason why certain poems have been read in their entirety by large sections of the population (Wilfred Owen, anyone?). 3 ("mass media") seems the best way of helping people to discover poems they actually like, but is surely very rare? I certainly can't think of any films apart from Four Weddings that showcase a poem. (Did Poems on the Underground have any impact, I wonder?)

[reapermum.livejournal.com]

An amazing number of people asked about "Death is in charge of the clattering train" when the Churchill film The Gathering Storm came out.

[sheenaghpugh]

I used to get students arriving at uni seriously off Owen, Sassoon et al because they'd done them to death in school.

The two other films I can think of offhand that showcase poems were both WW2 films - The Way to the Stars, which featured "For Johnny" and Carve Her Name With Pride which has Violette Szabo's real-life code poem, "The life that I have", which unfortunately was utter schlock. In the film it's meant to have been written by her husband but actually it was penned by one Leo Marks, who worked for SOE. His excuse is that he was only 22.

[the-wild-iris.livejournal.com]

Sophie's Choice and Land and Freedom feature poems recited at gravesides (Emily Dickinson and William Morris, respectively).

Il Postino in which Pablo Neruda is a character, got Neruda's poems reprinted IIRC.

Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility uses a Shakespeare sonnet ('Let me not to the marriage of true minds', I think) as emblematic of Marianne's feelings.

[the-wild-iris.livejournal.com]

As a sort of addendum to #4, there are the poems from which phrases have passed into common use, often without people knowing that the phrase came from a poem (e.g., 'bloody but unbowed' or 'nature red in tooth and claw').

And I suppose there are poems that have given titles to other works, like No Country for Old Men.