We shall do poetry a great disservice if we confine it only to the major
experiences of life:
Th e soldier's pole is fallen,
Boys and girls are level now with men,
An d there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.
They had a royal wedding. All his courtiers wished him well.
2. Beginning lines of a poem (in which 'war' is 3. A sight of the glories of heaven. plural) by the English poet A. E. Housman (1859- 4. Weasel. 1936).
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2440 / W. H. AUDEN
Th e horses pranced and the dancers danced. O Mister it was swell.
An d masculine is found to be Hadria the Adriatic Sea,5
have all their rightful place, and full appreciation of one depends on full appreciation of the others. A great many people dislike the idea of poetry as they dislike over-earnest people, because they imagine it is always worrying about the eternal verities.
Those, in Mr Spender's6 words, who try to put poetry on a pedestal only succeed in putting it on the shelf. Poetry is no better and no worse than huma n nature; it is profound and shallow, sophisticated and naive, dull and witty, bawdy and chaste in turn.
In spite of the spread of education and the accessibility of printed matter, there is a gap between what is commonly called 'highbrow' and 'lowbrow' taste, wider perhaps than it has ever been.
The industrial revolution broke up the agricultural communities, with their local conservative cultures, and divided the growing population into two classes: those whether employers or employees who worked and had little leisure, and a small class of shareholders who did no work, had leisure but no responsibilities or roots, and were therefore preoccupied with themselves. Literature has tended therefore to divide into two streams, one providing the first with a compensation and escape, the other the second with a religion and a drug. The Art for Art's sake7 of the London drawing-rooms of the '90's, and towns like Burnley and Rochdale,s are complementary.
Nor has the situation been muc h improved by the increased leisure and educational opportunities which the population to-day as a whole possess. Were leisure all, the unemployed would have created a second Athens.
Artistic creations may be produced by individuals, and because their work is only appreciated by a few it does not necessarily follow that it is not good; but a universal art can only be the product of a community united in sympathy, sense of worth, and aspiration; and it is improbable that the artist can do his best except in such a society.
# s #
The 'average' man says: 'When I get home I want to spend my time with my wife or in the nursery; I want to get out on to the links9 or go for a spin in the car, not to read poetry. Wh y should I? I'm quite happy without it.' We must be able to point out to him that whenever, for example, he makes a good joke he is creating poetry, that one of the motives behind poetry is curiosity, the wish to know what we feel and think, and how, as E. M. Forster1 says, canknow what I think till I see what I say, and that curiosity is the only human passion that can be indulged in for twenty-four hours a day without satiety.
The psychologist maintains that poetry is a neurotic symptom, an attempt
5. A mnemonic to help remember that Hadria, Latin for the Adriatic Sea, is masculine, despite its typically feminine ending. The first quotation is a remembered version of Cleopatra's speech after Antony dies in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (4.16.67?70). The source of the middle quotation has not been identified. 6. Stephen Spender (1909-1995), English poet. 7. Phrase associated with aestheticism. 8. Once industrial mill towns in Lancashire, England. 9. Ground on which golf is played. 1. English novelist (1879-1970).
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Louis MACNEICE / 2441
to compensate by phantasy for a failure to meet reality. We must tell him that
phantasy is only the beginning of writing; that, on the contrary, like psychol
ogy, poetry is a struggle to reconcile the unwilling subject and object; in fact,
that since psychological truth depends so largely on context, poetry, the par
abolic2 approach, is the only adequate medium for psychology.
The propagandist, whether moral or political, complains that the writer
should use his powers over words to persuade people to a particular course of
action, instead of fiddling while Rome burns.3 But Poetry is not concerned
with telling people what to do, but with extending our knowledge of good and
evil, perhaps making the necessity for action more urgent and its nature more
clear, but only leading us to the point where it is possible for us to make a
rational and moral choice.
* $ *
1935
