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The first best
thing about Radiant Lyre, from a British viewpoint, is that its essays progressively expose the
reader to many snatches of American poetry, past and present, from Whitman's
wonderful 'Song of Myself' to, say, Robert Hass's 'Meditation at Lagunitas';
and, of course, the more we see of Emily Dickinson, the more one realizes
what a wonderful American counterpart to G.M. Hopkins, her British
contemporary, she was and is: a unique style and metaphysical preoccupation.
That said, however, for whom can a book like this be designed? Mostly, I
feel, for the academic market. All its essays are written by professors and,
while its writing is limpid and free of needless jargon, its tone is that of
earnest inquiry, that of a fairly limpid textbook. So, in a sense, I - a
non-academic - may not be the best person to review it.
On the other hand, I can be said to be someone who is always on the lookout
for the critical insights so, while I may not be able to assess its
classroom-value, I can appreciate the quality of its focus on various aspects
of the lyric. An observation like, 'Berryman's poems give us the experience
of living in the midst of perception. This is a feature of his lyric
personality. It's the well-spring of both pain and the beauty that emerges
from pain.'; for those who are familiar with his Henry, this will resonate
immediately and in an illuminating way. Or a supporting quote from Octavio
Paz in one of the essays, 'eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for
otherness. And the
supernatural is the supreme otherness.', makes one feel that this lengthy
investigation into what is, after all, something of an abstraction which, it
is admitted at one point, centres round a hopelessly ambiguous term 'lyric'
that is, from one point of view, like the word poetry itself, virtually
meaningless now. Again, elsewhere, I find a statement like, 'This process of
discovery, of uncovering an emotion we didn't know was there, is perhaps the
central driving impulse of making poems.' Thought-provoking.
One of the most troubling things in life is politics and especially in its
relationship to poetry. So it is helpful to be told in one of the essays
that, 'In a world enslaved by "things", Emerson seems to argue, the poet has
a more important role to play than that of political activist, however worthy
the cause; his function as exemplar and public conscience exceeds the mere
exigencies of topical engagement.' A timely reminder not only of the poet's
correct role but also, by extension, of why those poems - especially
but not exclusively - praised for their satirical and/ or
contemporary relevance soon date and lose much of their poetic 'charge'.
Though it is invidious to pick out topics as of especial interest in such a
many-sided discussion of the lyric, I did think the investigations of 'the
pastoral' and 'the sublime' very good, though I was far from convinced at the
end of the essay entitled 'The Pastoral: First and Last Things' that, 'The
pastoral is not our dream. It is our nightmare.' Of course, such a suggestion
certainly has value as stimulation to further intellectual speculation. Yet I
wonder who amongst the obvious academic target audience for such things would
find the following the most intellectually shocking statement in the book,
made by one Stanley Plumly in his essay 'The Intimate Sublime'?:
And - now that
the Irish poets have become American poets - that greatest of
modern
American lyrics, Among School Children, is founded on the least of
things: a
face, an image and a memory of a face - on an isolating walk among
the future
and the past, and on a daydream...
Was it Auden who said of poets' uses of quotes that 'minor poets borrow,
great poets steal'? But I have not encountered before one nation
appropriating another nation's poets so blatantly. I mean, one knows that the likes of Heaney
and Muldoon have become
poetry professors in American universities, but even so I'm sure they'd be
surprised to read this little touch of American literary imperialism. And as
for Yeats, the author of 'Among School Children' and a poet who struggled
greatly against British imperialism, I feel the old clich about turning over
in graves would probably apply.
Another good aperu
from that great philosopher-poet Emerson (one of the first poets to write a
truly ecological poem, though the fact is not mentioned in this book) when he
says, 'It is not meters, but meter-making argument that makes a poem'. Some
of the essays make their points through poems, not by explaining poems (c.f. the first two essays in the
book, where Baker tends to explain poems, Jackson giving them more as
illustrations of his viewpoints.) And how about this for yet another
thought-provoking observation?:
Only grief
will bend nature to a will beyond indifference. Grief is the humanizing of
nature,
love's picked flower placed on the funeral bier. Whether it is Lord Byron's
Lament for
Adonis, John Milton's Lycidas
,Percy Bysshe Shelley's Adonais,
or Alfred
Lord
Tennyson's In Memoriam,
nature, harmonized nature, becomes the deep
emotional
collaborator of the poet's need for correlative... What the pastoral elegy
gives to
lyric poetry is a piercing
identification with longing, like the song of the
nightingale,
thorn at the heart.
I could, of course, go on quoting from this book, but that is to deprive the
reader of his or her own discoveries. Just one last because it seems to me
philosophically important, and I am attracted to the relationship between
philosophical ideas and poetics, 'Even in a lyric poem whose ostensible
subject is something else - love, death, or...the angst of faithful
intensity - the subject of time underwrites the experience.
Time is subject, story and style of the lyric poem.'
Earlier I referred to the excellent discussion of beauty and the sublime.
But, as ever in academic treatises, the matter of the aesthetic success of
poems and poetry is largely avoided, for this would involve qualitative
judgments that academia rarely makes. Yet aesthetic quality is inseparable
from the success of a lyric poem as, equally, song-element is essential to
the 'meter-making argument that makes a poem'. In the traditional lyric poem
there must be music and that counts out from consideration a number of the
poems cited in this book, several of which are nothing more than discursive
prose. Nevertheless, the book is a noble attempt to explicate a difficult
genre. The simpler a thing is like a lyric poem - and one of the characteristics of the
lyric is simplicity - the more complex it turns out to be upon
examination.
William Oxley 2007
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