Poetry Notebook (30 page)

But that’s a bit better than polite, and not entirely pale: you can see her with her finger held up to her eye, measuring. Unfortunately she doesn’t tell you whether the distance is
covered by the length of the finger, or by the width. One assumes it’s the width, but it would have been better to be told for sure: her precision is not quite precise enough. So there, I
have my excuse not to chase up the rest of her work. It’s not a very good excuse, though, and at some time in the near future I can see myself breaking my recent rule of buying no more books.
I’ll be leafing through a full collection of her poems, just to allay the suspicion that I might have failed to report a noble attempt, even though not one of her poems emerges that is as
intense throughout as its best phrase.

Sometimes a late search can be more rewarding. Anyone whose attention has been caught by U. A. Fanthorpe’s ‘Not My Best Side’ will find that her
Selected Poems
of 2013
has many other tightly integrated things. It wasn’t that she wrote one thing that put everything else in the shade. Though she had been awarded, very quietly in 2003, the Queen’s Medal
for Poetry, her whole output was in the shade, and then suddenly it all came to light at once: at the very end of her life, and partly because Carol Ann Duffy, who has a gift for fame, was an
admirer of hers. Thus Fanthorpe’s gift for obscurity was overcome: until then, despite her having published several volumes with a faithful minor publishing house, she was read mainly by her
devotees, and it is one of the laws of poetry and the arts in general that the instructed are an insufficient audience: one must break through to the uninstructed. One would like to see every
talented female poet winning through to general favour. God knows enough talentless female poets do.

•

I realize that the talentless female poets are still outnumbered by the talentless male poets. Nevertheless, the business of poetry is much more equally distributed between the
genders than it was even in the period after the Second World War, when women seemed to be taking up poetry as if it were a new kind of swing shift, the equivalent of putting the wiring into silver
bombers. There had always been women poets, from Sappho onwards; and a few, like Juana Inés de la Cruz, defined their place and time; but in English poetry, a small eighteenth-century
triumph like Anne, Countess of Winchelsea’s poem ‘The Soldier’s Death’ did little to remind the male literati of the immediate future that there could be such a thing as a
poet in skirts. They might remember the poem, but they didn’t remember her. True equality really began in the nineteenth century: Christina Rossetti, for example, wrote poems of an
accomplishment that no sensitive male critic could ignore, no matter how prejudiced he was. (There were insensitive male critics who ignored it, and patronized her as a cot-case: but the tin-eared
reviewer is an eternal type.) Elizabeth Barrett Browning was spoken of in the same breath as her husband. He was the greater, perhaps even the greatest: but nobody except devout misogynists doubted
that she was in the same game.

In the twentieth century, Marianne Moore achieved the same sort of unarguable status: she was acknowledged to be weighty even by those who thought she was fey. In Sydney in the late 1950s, the
poets of my circle would make a habit of reciting by heart from Edith Sitwell’s
Façade
, but still we all thought that she was some kind of echolalic succubus, and that a more
typical English woman poet was, say, Anne Ridler: polite but pale. I would listen to an all-poetry LP that included Marianne Moore reciting ‘Distrust of Merits’ and come away convinced
that she had the strength to make seriousness sound the way it should. When she said ‘The world’s an orphans’ home’ I thought hers was the woman’s voice that took the
measure of the war in which the men had just been fighting to the death. Judith Wright spoke on the same theme to a far less resonant phonetic effect: she was a big Australian name but I could find
only two or three self-sustaining poems in all her body of work. Today, I find only one or two: as an environmentalist she was a tough operator who saved the Great Barrier Reef from the mining
companies, but as a poet she let her language drift towards the merely conceptual, until, in her later phase, it was like fluff. Another Australian female poet in Wright’s generation was,
however, a better guardian of real meaning: Gwen Harwood. I should have spotted her at the time, but I was too caught up with the Americans.

Leaving Emily Dickinson aside – after all, she never found the public, the public had to find her – Marianne Moore would have been enough on her own to make women’s poetry seem
like an American thing. She was a Special Forces operative in a black tricorne hat. But there was also Edna St Vincent Millay, whose sonnets, despite their wilfully traditionalist structure and
diction, looked more and more original to me as time went on, to the point where, in my mind, I was casting the movie about her love affair with Edmund Wilson. My choice for the starring role was
Gwyneth Paltrow, on the basis not just of how well she had played Sylvia Plath, but of how well she recited blank verse in
Shakespeare in Love.
Philip Seymour Hoffman would have made the
ideal Edmund Wilson: Hoffman even had the physical bulk. The Edna–Edmund double act could easily have become as famous as Ted and Sylvia, if not for one vital factor: Plath was the formative
woman poet for whole generations throughout the English-speaking world, whereas Millay has never really caught on. But then, not even Marianne Moore has ever caught on like Plath. In the whole of
literature’s long history, Plath must be the supreme example of a poet breaking through to masses of people who know nothing about poetry at all. The young readers who went mad for Byron had
all read verse before.

But if we look only for a big impact, we are treating women’s poetry as a commodity. And what should please us is that women’s poetry has joined men’s poetry in the harsh realm
of art, where nothing except quality can survive the perpetual bushfire of time. Elinor Wylie’s finely fashioned poem ‘Wild Peaches’ glitters among the ashes, and some of the
ashes are the remains of her other work: there is quite a lot of it, but it won’t be coming back. The main reason that the bulk of her poetic achievement will stay absent is the intensity of
‘Wild Peaches’ in its role as an outlier, a strange attractor: packed with fully observed and realized images, it is so well organized that the organization becomes part of its texture,
and not just part of its driving force.

Donne, in one of his regrettably few statements about how ‘Metricall compositions’ are made, referred to the putting together of a poem as ‘the shutting up’. An
unfortunate term, and we could use a better one; because there can’t be much doubt that the shaping of a poem is also a pressure, in which the binding energy of the poem brings everything
inside its perimeter to incandescence. If that were not the prize, then the great women poets of our time might not have worked so hard to join the men.

•

By now it’s quite possible to look forward to a time when women will dominate the art. But in my time, men still did. Throughout my career as a critic, I did my best to
say that women had contributed vitally to the heritage, but here at the final reckoning it bothers me that I might not have done enough, and that my critical work, if any of it is still consulted
after I am gone, will make me look like a chauvinist. I sincerely believe that I was not, but in these matters it is not enough to believe, you have to behave. Will I get myself off the hook just
by saying that I ended up with almost as many lines by Elizabeth Bishop in my head as by Robert Lowell? What one feels bound to acknowledge fully is her artistic stature. Of her moral stature there
can be no question. The big book of her letters,
One Art
, is a mind-expanding picture of a difficult yet dedicated life, and a smaller book of letters,
Words in Air
, by collecting her
correspondence with Lowell, defines the ethics of an historic moment: a moment when poetry, queen of the humanities, took a step towards the opportunistic privileges of totalitarianism. Lowell
wanted her endorsement for his bizarre temerity in stealing Elizabeth Hardwick’s letters to use unchanged in his poetry. Bishop refused to approve, and surely she was right. She didn’t
much like the idea of confessional poetry anyway – if she had, she would probably have written some – but clearly she thought that if it had to be done, it should be done within the
bounds of civilization. Students in the future who are set the task of writing an essay about the limits of art could start right there, at the moment when one great poet told another to quit
fooling himself.

•

Look into Chapman’s Homer and you can see what alliteration once did, long before Swinburne arrived to overdo it. Agamemnon kits himself out before going into battle:

While the ‘defensive shadows’ are good, ‘as full of gloss as glass’ is beyond good: it’s brilliant. Just don’t let Swinburne hear about it.
But you can’t stop poets finding inspiration in the heritage; and no doubt to be as learned as possible is not just a duty, but a good thing. Still, you can’t help wishing that some of
the learned poets since Shakespeare had been blessed with the knack of forgetting what they had read. For much of his life, Milton needed his memory because he couldn’t see. When he
considered how his light was spent, he didn’t complain about being too often driven back into his remembered books. Perhaps he didn’t see the problem. But my quarrel with
Paradise
Lost
– man against mountain! – begins with how Milton’s beaver-dams of learning turn streams of invention into stagnant ponds. One of the several Miltonians among my friends
kindly goes on telling me that the displays of learning were part of the invention. Milton obviously believed that to be true. But here I am, once more submitting myself to
Paradise Lost
in
the hope of being caught up; and once more realizing that the famous clash between T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis on the subject of Milton (Leavis did most of the clashing) was not a quarrel about
nothing. It was really about a monumental example of poetic genius defeating itself; because the question of the possible insufficiency of his single most important work would never have arisen if
it did not seem to pride itself on undoing things that Milton well knew how to do. A consummate lyricist faced with his biggest opportunity, he strained every muscle to be bad. Let one illustration
serve, from Book Ninth, line 385 onwards. Eve has just spoken, and now she is described:

But enough. Such passages, and there are scores of them, are impoverished by their riches: erudition distorts the picture, whose effect divides into the poetic and the
encyclopaedic. Johnson, though he despised
Lycidas
, was keen to find virtues in
Paradise Lost
, and a grand sweep of intertextual didacticism was high among the virtues that he found.
But Johnson, who was also keen to tell the unadorned truth, said of Milton’s great masterpiece: ‘None ever wished it longer than it is.’ The burden of learning helps to make it
long. In mitigation, we should note that this element of Miltonics can be called uniquely Milton’s only because he did the most of it: in fact, it’s a hardy perennial. In the previous
century, Spenser had been often at it, as when he loaded a library on top of his two swans in ‘Prothalamion’:

Even those among his readers who knew nothing about Greece might possibly have known that Pindus was its principal mountain range, and everybody knew about shape-changing Jove
and his priapic attentions to Leda. Similarly, readers of Marvell’s ‘Bermudas’ probably knew that Ormus – still in business at the time, although soon to decline and vanish
– was a kingdom notable for wealth:

But here we see where the trouble with this aspect of Miltonics really starts: when an encyclopaedic reference is outclassed by its poetic surroundings, like a fake jewel in a
fine setting. The line about the lamps in the green night is one of Marvell’s best things, and poor old Ormus pales beside it. (Milton, too, dragged Ormus in, and to even less effect.) One
hesitates to rhapsodize about the pure spring of inspiration, but there is such a thing as clogging the pipes. The awful thing about the apparent success of Milton’s unyielding stretches of
leaden erudition was that the plumbing of English poetry was affected far into the future. Without Milton’s example, would Matthew Arnold have taken such pains to burden his
‘Philomela’ with this lumbering mention of a naiad nymph and her habitat?