The Leeds Review - Issue #1But hasn't this landed us in an implausible and deeply unsatisfactory position? Much poetry presents us with thoughts and feelings, experiences and attitudes which can only have originated with the author. Look at almost any of Larkin's poems, and likewise Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters which carries accounts of his relationship with Sylvia Plath. In an interview Hughes said:
Maybe, if you don't have that secret confession, you don't have a poem - don't even have a story. Don't have a writer. (1)
We may be able to discount an author's explicit intentions when reading a poem - in the sense already discussed - but aren't we nevertheless sharing its author's vision, seeing things through its author's eyes? Are we not also confronting material from the author's life? If so, we cannot excise the author and his/her life from our interpretation of the work. It is a point argued by Matthew Kieran concerning visual art:
the swathe of criticism that blithely ignores what artists strove to achieve, and instead focuses on the possible experiences any viewer could have ... is deeply misguided if not corrupt. (2)
We must not, of course, make the error of saying that because a poem offers us its author's vision it thereby makes its author visible - as if in a mirror - a misconception Kant dispels. An essential characteristic of thoughts, feelings, attitudes and perceptions is their intentionality or about-ness. They are necessarily about some object or situation, not themselves. The mirror faces out to the world not inward to the author. At the same time, what appears in the mirror is often just that author's life and experience ('mirror', of course, with its connotation of a mimetic device is a poor analogue of literature).
A solution to this impasse is to recognise that a poem of value - i.e. a poem that constitutes more than a biographical note - will transform its material. It will transform what would otherwise be personal and matter-of-fact, and only of limited private interest, into what is of general interest. Dramatic form and narrative can achieve such transformation. Aristotle grasps this, I believe, in his discussion of Greek tragic poetry - "Tragedy is essentially an imitation [mimesis] not of persons but of action and life, of happiness and misery". (3) Accordingly, poetry's role is "saying not what did happen but the kind of thing that might happen... as being probable or necessary"; it should represent what is "general" or "universal" in the lives of individuals. (4) Aristotle is not advocating a poetry that presents versified metaphysical generalities, rather it should bring out the universal - the truth - in concrete actions and incidents. Leavis shows how poetry becomes "inefficacious" when preoccupied with general ideas "lacking in grip on the data they are supposed to organise". (5)
Aristotle's thesis can be extended to modern poetry, even the confessional and biographical variety. The events and experiences of the author's life, when worked into poetic form, taken up within a poem as its material (hule in Aristotle's sense), will transcend their origins. Their meaning and their reference changes. Ceasing to be about the author as an actual individual they come to illuminate what is "general" and concerns us all - the human condition. In Hughes's Birthday Letters, the 'story' of Hughes's relationship with Sylvia Plath is presented using mythic and cosmic themes - including the Oedipal myth. In the poems of Larkin it is often a visionary ""stream of light" - a deeper reflection - which transforms the author's experience into something of universal interest. (6) Thus, the poem Sad Steps, starting matter-of-factly with a night-time visit to the toilet ("Groping back to bed after a piss | I part thick curtains, and am startled by | The rapid clouds, the moon's cleanliness"), soon encounters a sense of the moon as symbol of desire, hope and love - these images then being overtaken, even purged, in a reflective image of loss...
One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare
Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young... (7)
But there is a criticism lying in wait. Surely the stress on poetic form, on representation of the 'necessary and 'universal', and the role of the mythic and cosmic, can only distance poetry from human experience, depriving it of power and feeling? How is this compatible with Leavis's claim - "poetry can communicate the actual quality of experience with a subtlety and precision unapproachable by any other means"? (8) Leavis himself gropes towards an answer in his essay on 'Thought' and 'Emotional Quality'. His analysis shows that "particularity", in which a "situation is vividly realized", is achieved not through emotional abandon but through a stating or constating manner (the poem is Lawrence's Piano in this instance). This involves "an element of disinterested valuation" in facing a "dangerous emotional swell". Thus "the constating, relating and critical mind has its essential part in the work of sensibility". (9) All of which restores to us the Greek conception of excellence (aret_) realized through order, articulation, proportionality - through logos.
The mythic and cosmic too, it may be argued, also inform "the actual quality of experience" for those who have the right vision. But there is a further inescapable twist to this argument. Discarding the model of original poetry as 'vehicle' or 'expression' of a ready-made meaning engineered into it by its author; accepting also that poetry can reveal "the actual quality of experience" - all this points to what Leavis calls the "reality" of poetry. (10) Leavis speaks of a poem - Hardy's After A Journey - as "recapturing" and representing "the supreme experience of life, the realest thing". (11) But why not go further? If the poem speaks with sincerity, as Leavis says, might not it be the occasion on which the experience first becomes real? Not simply the occasion on which it is referenced, but when it first bursts forth in, as Heidegger puts it, "the happening of truth"? (12) But truth - not as "accuracy", nor even "descriptive success", (13) but in the sense of "true love" or "true aim". Authentic, and properly itself. It now looks as if the claim earlier made - that a poem transforms its material - operating as it does within a traditional frame of matter and form (though, arguably, not Aristotle's perspective), too suggestive also of poeisis as production process - this proposition seems hardly adequate to describe the species of creation that is poetry.
But we have not yet answered the question: What becomes of the author? The author, as the one who accompanies and shepherds the poem on this process - the journey, as Paul Celan says, "on which language becomes voice"? (14) This author now looks rather different from the person we might meet at the checkout, in the pub, or at the book-signing - the so-called 'flesh-and-blood author'. Wimsatt and Beardsley designate a "dramatic speaker" to whom we should "impute the thoughts and attitudes of the poem"; (15) Taylor refers to the "implied author" or "notional figure" behind the work. (16) More radically, Barthes claims "the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text". (17) All these formulations, in distinguishing the separate person of the author - separate, that is, from the real human being - thereby impart a sense of unreality and impersonality to the authorial persona - a term itself suggestive of the mask of ancient drama. They take us away from the human, away from "the voice" as logos, away from Blake's desire
To bathe in the waters of life, to wash off the not-human. (18)
For Leavis, the "rare integrity" of a poem is also that of Hardy the poet - "we know from the art what the man was like". (19) It is Hardy speaking, authentically and properly himself, and these qualities he will always carry with him, whether at Max Gate or Mellstock - so we naturally believe. Or - dare I suggest - it is in the poem that Hardy first becomes Hardy! We must not see the human reflection only in what is already known and comfortingly familiar. That would be to miss the point. Not to see that poetry and literature offer us a glimpse of the human we can be -are challenged to become. Consider what Eliot says: "In order to possess what you do not possess | You must go by the way of dispossession". (20) You must, in other words, go by way of the unfamiliar, by way of Celan's Atemwende - "a turning of our breath" (21) - a 'Zen moment' in the original sense As Celan haltingly speculates in his Meridian speech, "perhaps poetry, like art, moves with the oblivious self into the uncanny and strange to free itself". (22) To free itself and oneself. Perhaps then, it is on this path of poetry that both poem and author alike wash off the not-human.
David N. Brown