A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов

2b.1 Manifestos and Poetics/Poets on Writing

       Daniel Weston

A survey of poetry manifestos needs to start by establishing the role that this kind of document plays in the period under consideration and historically. I will start to map out this role and these trajectories from an example. Andrew Motion was one of 30 contemporary poets commissioned to write a brief statement for a collection published in 2000. Motion's statement is paradigmatic of many poets' hesitation. He perceives a disparity between poetry and manifestos: “Poetry manifestos invariably say ‘yes’ and ‘no’, but poetry itself ‘maybe’ and ‘perhaps’.” The “peculiar kind of intelligence” possessed by poetry is “not inevitably the intelligence of analysis and exegesis, but the intelligence of feeling things upon our pulses.” Thus, “poetry is hindered as well as helped by manifestos” (2000, 233). Similar views had been expressed by, for example, James Fenton in his “The Manifesto against Manifestos” (1983, 12–16), and by Derek Walcott: “manifestos create a kind of poetry that really isn't poetry at all – it's really a rhythmical manifesto” (2000, 170). In one sense, Motion's point is beyond debate: the declarative form and often insistent tone of the manifesto necessarily do violence to the subtleties of poetry in setting out precepts. And yet, Motion's position demands scrutiny. The description of things felt “upon our pulses,” emotional experience, as the matter of poetry reveals a romantic inheritance still dominant in mainstream poetry today. It is to be expected that the then Poet Laureate, now Sir Andrew, should take up this stance. The manifesto more commonly announces a revolutionary or strongly reforming program of change. In the twentieth century, it is primarily associated with modernists “making it new,” and, after mid‐century, with neo‐modernist groups who work in this tradition. The message and the medium are related: those with an iconoclast's sense of poetic tradition write “manifestos” more often than those minded otherwise. For this reason, a brief but broadly representative survey of poets' views needs to take account of a wider sample of “statements.” Before arriving at the post‐1960 period, it is necessary to describe the romantic and modernist poles between which modern debate has shuttled. Though the mainstream/experimental divide that this leads to has oriented much discussion of contemporary poetry, it is not always helpful. It is nonetheless a more apparent fault line in manifestos than in poetry itself. For this reason, I begin with the historical debate that informs and perpetuates it, before turning toward the issues on which there is more consensus. In short, academic categorizations by a Manichean division are overstated, but they offer a useful starting point.

      I begin with the romantic idea of poetry's purpose and then chart modernist challenges to it that inform poetics across the whole of the twentieth century. Motion's description of poetry's “intelligence of feeling things upon our pulses” (reporting interior experiences, emotional and bodily) bears a strong trace of Wordsworth's famous declaration that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity” (1984, 611). For Wordsworth, the poet's contemplative reflection on his/her own experiences allows him/her to compose poems whose power derives from their offering distillations of the powerful feelings attached to those experiences. The reader, it is supposed, experiences similar feelings and responds to the poet's skill in expressing this shared response to the world in his/her skillful use of language and form. Thus, lyric poetry is essentially a communicative act of identification. Keats's pithier formulation expresses the same: “Poetry […] should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance” (1947, 108).

These powerful formulae, dominant through the nineteenth century, are strongly challenged at the advent of modernism. Writing in 1911, T. E. Hulme declares his objection to “the sloppiness [of romanticism] which doesn't consider a poem is a poem unless it is moaning or whining about something or other.” His polemic zeros in on the terms in which Wordsworth had conceived poetry's function: “Verse to them always means a bringing in of some of the emotions that are grouped round the word infinite.” Castigating the expression of feeling, Hulme hails a new era: “I prophesy that a period of dry, hard, classical verse is coming,” for which “the great aim is accurate, precise and definite description” (2012, 2062–2063). Ezra Pound's 1918 prediction is similar: twentieth‐century poetry will “move against poppycock, it will be harder and saner, […] austere, direct, free from emotional slither” (1954, 13). The different kind of poetry that Pound envisages is apparent in the manifestos for Imagism written with F. S. Flint. The first principle of this movement is “direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective,” signifying an attack on Wordsworth's conjoining of experience and emotion (1972, 129). T. S. Eliot, the modernist responding most directly to Wordsworth, avers that “emotion recollected in tranquillity” is “an inexact formula.” For Eliot, the business of the poet “is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences […] which does not happen consciously or of deliberation.” Consequently, “poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” (1953, 29/30). The result is “difficult” poetry: “The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning” (119). If, in romantic thought, the poem is a transparent medium of felt communication, then modernist ideas draw attention to the opacity of language and favor a poetics of impersonality.

      It is important to state that the modernist takeover was not complete and that the subsequent period has seen an unresolved debate between these two traditions. Scholarly discourse, with its propensity to periodize, has characterized each decade with a few key figures and the styles they work in—the high modernism of Pound and Eliot in the 1920s, political poetry and Auden in the 1930s, Dylan Thomas and new romantic verse in the 1940s, a return to plain speaking with the Movement in the 1950s—and to chart an oscillation. However, each of the “schools” is not, in reality, confined within these temporal limits. Rather, a continual back and forward operates between a mainstream coming down from a postromantic lineage on the one hand, and a neomodernist experimentalism on the other. This dispute is defining, but in the period that this book covers most poets inhabit the gray area between. Sampling statements reveals that not all poets see themselves in one camp or the other: many attempt to balance or combine the two approaches.

      Seamus Heaney is a modern poet taking up romantic poetics, and one of the most explicit in linking his view of poetry's task to Wordsworth's. His essay “Feeling into Words” (1974) takes its lead (and its title) from Wordsworth. Heaney's emphasis on the importance of “[f]inding a voice,” meaning “that you can get your own feel into your own words and that your words have the feeling of you about them,” is clearly related to the personal expression at the heart of Wordsworth's theory of poetry (1980, 43). Heaney draws a distinction between “craft” and “technique.” The former, learnt initially from others' verse, is “the skill of making”; whereas the latter

      involves not only a poet's way with words, his management of metre, rhythm and verbal texture; it involves also a definition of his stance towards life, a definition of his own reality. It involves the discovery of ways to go out of his normal cognitive bounds and raid the inarticulate: a dynamic alertness that mediates between the origins of feeling in memory and experience and the formal ploys that express these in a work of art.