In memory of Michael Donaghy

In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf describes a married couple reading opposite each other. Mr Ramsay is a philosopher. He likes to see his wife as 'not clever, not book-learned at all'. He watches her, wondering if she understands what she is reading. Probably not, he thinks.

Mrs Ramsay is surfing an anthology.

She was climbing backwards, upwards, shoving her way up under petals that curved over so that she only knew, this is white, this is red... swinging herself, zigzagging this way and that, from one line to another as from one branch to another, from one red and white flower to another.

Finally she settles on Shakespeare.

She was climbing up those branches, this way and that, laying hands on one flower and then another. Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose, she read, and so reading she was ascending, she felt, to the summit. How satisfying! How restful! All the odds and ends of the day stuck to this magnet; her mind felt swept, felt clean. And then there it was, suddenly entire shaped in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, the essence sucked out of life and held rounded here – the sonnet.²

This kind of welcoming satisfying movement, a motion into and a yielding to, is part of what a poem is for. Arts-speak today is full of 'cultural rights': I would defend everybody's right to value any poem, whether I value it myself or not. Valuing poems has value in itself. Poems need to matter before they need to be explained. As it happens the Poetry Society (acting on a member's suggestion) is in the process of adding 'enjoyment' to its statutory constitutional aims. Its charitable aim, we hope, will henceforth be to promote public education in the enjoyment of poetry as well as simply advancing public education in it.

I am not going to knock any way of being touched by a poem. I believe everyone has the right to read a poem (the primal act on which poetry publishers, if not all poets, depend) with the heart or gut, not head: as long as they are reading to value it, not swipe at it. Criticising is something else. Reviewers who knock poems have really to use their heads while also checking that their own reflexes are driven by generous honest openness. A poem has far more power to show up a critic than the other way round.

The many people who say they would like to approach contemporary poetry but don't know where to start feel, I think, they must understand everything before they get anything like enjoyment from it. They do not have the confidence to accept that the working out, the slow revelation of pattern, meaning and music, is a large part of the enjoyment; which makes the poem theirs to enjoy ever after. They think they do not know how: there is some mysterious licence they have not been given. For in our society the arts of being delighted by word and thought are waning as sophistications of seeing rise. Many films with a banal theme, message, script or thought have brilliant visuals. The camera's revelations and implications get you through any amount of poor script. No one is afraid of looking a fool if they do not 'understand' a film. They enjoy or not. If they don't they can say it is no good.

It is now, in the UK, a privilege of personality or education (not necessarily an elite one; you only need to have had a good enthusiastic teacher) to be as sure of yourself as Mrs Ramsay is, in responding to a poem before – or without – understanding it intellectually. And yet 'The right reader of a good poem,' said Robert Frost, 'can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken a mortal wound. That he will never get over it.' Or, in Walter Benjamin's wonderful phrase about reading, 'Insight occurs as a lightning-bolt. The text is the thunder-peal rolling long behind.' ³

Fine; but of course the trouble with Frost's words is 'good', which gestures to properties of the poem, not the reader. But one of U.A. Fanthorpe's poems warns us we cannot separate them entirely.⁴ It opens by patronising Patience Strong:

Everyone knows her name. Trite calendars
Of rose-nooked cottages or winding ways
Display her sentiments in homespun verse
Disguised as prose.

This poem proudly differentiates itself from all that.

No doubt such rubbish sells.
She must be feathering her inglenook.
Genuine poets seldom coin the stuff. . .
Their message is oblique. . . nor does it pay.

But the next stanza opens in 'epileptic outpatients', where the speaker meets a patient, a man in his fifties, 'feeling bad'. He would have loved to join the Ambulance Brigade but was unable to, with his disease: 'But I'd have liked to help'. Bringing out of his pocket a 'booklet muffled up in cellophane', he opens it at one of those recognisable rose-smothered inglenook scenes accompanied, says the poem, by 'cosy musing in the usual vein'. Fanthorpe ends by swiping the ground away from her own poem's (and by now her reader's) patronising feet. "'See", he said, "this is what keeps me going.'"

It is true that when walking over a chasm, anything you can hold, any frail twig, may steady you, help the balance. Just the feel of support will do. But who is to cast the first stone and call Patience Strong a frail twig? No one who has not been in a position in which they have to depend on this work (hold them cheap may who ne'er hung there) has a right to knock whatever it is in it that provides that prop, that keeps me going. Not, at least, without giving a humanly convincing and coherent account of that right.

Last year The Times held a poetry joust on the front of its Weekend Review. 'What happens when two top protagonists square up?' it asked. One protagonist was a millionaire whose readings are free, whose books sell hugely, and whose current reading tour was titled 'Did I Mention the Free Wine?'. His line, as reported by the Times journalist, was that he 'used' sestinas, villanelles, scrupulous metre and rhyme. 'All true poets once wrote like that.' (Which lets out the Psalms, for a start.) 'Readers enjoy traditional forms.' And 'modernist poetry', by which he or the journalist reporting him meant modern, has 'lost its way'. He says he 'plays to the gallery' because 'I've got this dreadful idea that poetry should be entertaining'.

Here are two verses from one of his poems.

When I was but a boy
The dark was full of dread,
I trembled then as monsters filed
To loom beside my bed.

Ogres on the stairs
Must blush at what they built
Or wet themselves on angry chairs
By mirrors filled with guilt.

The Times invited him to discuss some poems by Simon Armitage. He said he liked how one 'bounced along but didn't feel moved by it', didn't understand another 'after five read-throughs', thought a third had two great punch-lines but 'I was dying to get hold of it and turn it into a villanelle! I will, if Simon will turn one of mine into free verse. (Now there's a challenge!) I was itching to structure it. A great many more people might enjoy it.'

That is one of the underlying claims: that the more people like a poem the better in general; the 'better', possibly, the poem.

Behind this vision of entertainment is a particular invocation of 'democracy' which goes back to at least the 420s BC, when there was already a vigorous war between the obscure and the popular in poetry. Lines in one Aristophanes comedy suggest you could instantly get a laugh about the obscurity, and possible longueurs, of tragic choral odes. The public knew them well. These stasima were in different dialect and metre, and far more decorated (with Gothically intricate compound imagery) than the iambic dialogue. They also worked by an extraordinary syllable-for-syllable mirroring, the 'responsion' between paired stanzas, the strophe ('turn') and its antistrophe ('turn back'). Aristophanes' chorus of birds, addressing the audience, is talking up wings:

Just imagine having wings at the theatre!
You need never stay for the tragic chorus
But fly off when it got boring and come back
After lunch – for the comedy.⁵

The Frogs, too, has a famous underworld duel between poets, a joust which long predates The Times.⁶ The scene is Hades, the judge is the god of tragedy, the protagonists are tragic poets. Aeschylus is famous for obscure complex compound words, ambiguity, rich weird imagery. Euripides is the crowd-pleaser. He was a fantastic lyricist himself; no accusing him of doing away with delicate complexities of responsion and image.⁷ But he was really, really loved, although he rarely won prizes. There is a story 'that Athenians taken prisoner and enslaved in Sicily after the war were set free by their Sicilian masters if they could recite Euripides.

Euripides says that when he inherited tragedy, it was a very bloated art form. I had to diet tragedy, he says, distil the verbiage inherited from Aeschylus. I stopped his cheap dramatic tricks too, like starting with a veiled figure silent on stage so you kept wondering when they'd speak. Oh! says Dionysus. I liked that! He did it to keep the audience guessing, says Euripides, while his choruses rattled off a string of continuous lyrics. And he tossed in 'great wild-bull words with bristling crests and shaggy eyebrows, incomprehensible to the audience! Not a single word was saphes, clear.'

Dionysus had liked those too but, yes, he did have sleepless nights trying to work out what exactly they meant.

I never used haphazard words or plunged straight in, says Euripides. My opening speeches always explained the situation. I was democratic. And I put lots of sex in my plays. Pretentious portentous blustery Aeschylus dismayed the audience. He had no love interest and those glamorous compounds of his were pleonastic; tautologous. 'I have come' is the same as 'I arrive'. Why say the same thing twice?

The Chorus joins in. Even in Hades, they are keen on complexity. 'Aren't you afraid today's audiences are ignorant, and don't know how to understand any more?' They give examples. Aeschylus was writing between 475 and 464, Euripides between 424 and 403: accusations of dumbing-down, of having been dumbed, were flying about the heads of audiences and those who entertained them forty years after Aeschylus's Oresteia first played.

The scene goes on for pages. In one counter-attack, Aeschylus demonstrates, devastatingly, that Euripides' selling-point, his explanatory prologues, all have exactly the same syntactic and grammatical structure. Euripides plunges into one after another; Aeschylus ends them all with the same metrical phrase, 'lost his bottle of oil'. It fits everywhere. The whole thing is brilliant, very funny, highly literary. It was also poetry; very popular, and very entertaining. Aristophanes, clearly, was a demon reader. A wonderful lyricist himself, as well as comic dramatist, he is dishing it out on both sides, laughing at tricks of the trade used by both his colleagues, left and right, popular and obscure. Eventually, unexpectedly (he came down to Hades specifically to bring back the just-dead Euripides, because he missed his plays), and with one final innuendo about immorality (suggesting democratic Euripides really had corrupted the demos), Dionysus plumps for Aeschylus.

Nineteen hundred years later another poet critic divided readers into four types. Moghul diamonds, said Coleridge, 'profit by what they read and enable others to profit by it too'. (They also put in, I'd add, more than five read-throughs.) Sand-glasses retain nothing; they just get through a book to get through the time. Strain-bags retain 'merely the dregs of what they read', while sponges 'absorb all they read and return it nearly in the same state only a little dirtier'. This millionaire is my representative of the populist approach to reading as well as writing a poem. Let's call it, for argument's sake, a school; the It's Gotta Rhyme School, close cousin of the It's Got to Appeal to Everyone Instantly School, who feel that the more people like a poem, the better it must be.

For the moment, as Poetry Society Chair, I get many letters, some quite aggrieved, saying similar things. Their writers mainly belong to the Gotta Rhyme School. They believe that if they 'keep traditional forms', they are standing up for tradition. But they are strangely (given the intricacies of most great poems in the English or any other poetic tradition) against subtlety. The millionaire presumably 'used' (I always find this word odd when people apply it to the act of helping words partner each other in rhyme) great subtlety in financial strategies. But, like the audience-member who asked Muldoon why he did not 'use rhyme', he does not see or hear the immensely subtle structuring, the real structure of thought, syllable, image and music in an Armitage poem.

This joust was set up by the media who also sometimes seem (at least to poets) to be against subtlety; anyway in poems. News journalists writing a poetry story often imply that their readers have a right to understand a poem on a single read-through. But the media do represent audience, and how communication happens today. And communication matters even to a poet like John Ashbery, who said once, 'Poetry is not a stationary object but a kinetic art, in which something is transferred from somebody to somebody else.' He found his own voice after a spell of time in Paris in the 1950s, when he used to raid the American library, copy scraps from popular magazines, and collage them. Experiments, he called them. Some were 'so fragmentary as to defeat most readers'. He had had one book published, in an 'earlier style'. Now, he was looking for 'the tone of voice I felt was lacking'.

These Paris-written poems did get published in the end, but 'I never thought they would confront readers, I thought of them as stages on the way to something else'. Yet they are the poems of his oeuvre, Ashbery says, which Language Poets value most. He distinguishes himself from them over the issue of communication. For them, he says, 'unless I misunderstand, language is more or less an independent entity, a free-standing object not concerned with communicating. That position is to the left of my own. I wanted to stretch the bond between language and communication, but not to sever it.' ⁸

George Steiner's essay 'On Difficulty' suggests there are four main types of difficulty involved in reading a poem.⁹ The first resides in the reader. The poem refers to something the reader does not know. It 'has to be looked up', like allusions in Pound's Cantos to financial links between steel and armaments industries, or a word in Shakespeare that has fallen out of use. Difficulties like this 'stick like burrs to the fabric of the text', but you have to 'do your homework'. It enriches your reading. 'The looking up is at the heart of the music.'

Gotta Rhyme and Instant Access Schools may bristle at this sort of difficulty in contemporary poems, on the grounds that it is elitist to know something, or suggest you know it, which other people do not know. Homework is not included in their ideas of being entertained. But they cannot complain of it in pre-modernist poets, who constitute the very tradition they invoke to protect their 'use of' rhyme.

Steiner's second type of difficulty also lies in the reader, not the poem. You could call it a sub-branch of the second. We may have done the homework but still find the poem somehow opaque, because we recoil against something in or behind it. 'The poem articulates a stance towards human conditions which we find essentially inaccessible or alien. The tone, or the manifest subject of the poem, is such that we fail to see a justification for poetic form. Something in it eludes or repels our sense of what poetry should or should not be about.' We cannot feel 'answerable' to it. It offends maybe our personal, or our modern reflexes. Why is the poet doing and saying this, this way? We feel (in Aristotle's phrase) an 'impropriety'.

Again, Steiner is mostly talking here about reading poetries from the past. Learning more deeply their social context, genre, language, or theological discussions of the day, can all help us suspend our personal reflexes here. When we know more about where this poem is coming from, we can open ourselves to it, see what the poet is up to, that much more generously.

But we may not. Where words and sensibility are concerned, there is always the potential for a personal barrier. You can know something about the connection between particular words, thought and feeling, what they are supposed to do for you in the poem, do your best to see from another perspective – and yet not be able to feel it. You are still yourself. Sitting in a tropical garden at sunset, V. S. Naipaul once asked an elderly lady about a flower scent released by the night. He knew the smell from childhood, but had never known the flower's name. 'We call it jasmine,' she said. So he had known it, all along. And yet jasmine to him was 'a word in a book, a word to play with, something removed from the dull vegetation I knew'. She cut him some. He walked away with it in his lapel, inhaling. 'But the word and the flower had been separate in my mind for too long. They did not come together.' ¹⁰

Steiner's third type of difficulty comes not from limitations of a reader's knowledge or experience but from the poet's will. Steiner calls it tactical difficulty. The poet has chosen to be obscure, to achieve a stylistic effect. There may be political reasons, as in secret codes of image and symbol under censorship; or personal ones, concealing references to a private life. But there is also 'a poetic of tactical difficulty', and this has its history too. There have always been innovators who want to shake things off. Steiner calls them 'logical terrorists'; they want to re-charge language by shock tactics, cannot make do with shopworn language common to everybody, need to forge new syntactic modes. Steiner points to the Dadaists and Surrealists, or Khlebnikov the Russian 'Futuro-Cubist' who invented a 'star-speech'.

This impulse can make for thrilling language. It can also engender an occult feel around it. In the semantic privacy it creates, something is kept from outsiders; initiates share a secret tongue. I myself find that aspect of the appeal rather suspect, but there have always been wonderful poets working from this impulse with genuine power. Metaphysical poets (an area of 'the tradition' not drawn on by Instant Access champions) worked, in Steiner's phrase, through 'an underlying manoeuvre of rallentando'. They slow your understanding. You may hear at once, but you have to work to see. Other poets have wanted to undermine banal public speech, distort words, melt and displace them; they do this with authority and point, and enormous enrichment of the reader. Tacitus did the same, exhilaratingly, with Latin prose.

Such poets, or rather perhaps their poems, offer the reader strangeness. They want to be understood slowly, step by step, maybe only up to a point. 'We are not meant to understand easily and quickly. Immediate purchase is denied us, the text yields its force and singularity only gradually.'

Steiner points lightly to the irony here: if the poet has made the poem public, why deliberately slow the reader's understanding? But there are lots of good reasons for slowing an introduction, or the pace of revelation, and in a trustworthy poem this impulse is 'an honest and crucial one'. The tactical difficulties are there to deepen our apprehension, 'goad to new life the supine energies of word and grammar'. By making strange, in Heaney's phrase, the poem challenges us into seeing and hearing ordinary language, as well as ordinary experience, as strange, and new. Maybe tactical difficulty, after all, is only an extreme point on a continuum of what all good poems try to do.

But a fourth difficulty, which Steiner calls ontological, breaks the 'contract of intelligibility' between poet (again, I'd prefer to say poem) and reader. Steiner calls this a peculiarly modern 'move towards darkness'; towards being deliberately esoteric.¹¹ He suggests it may partly derive from the clash of two opposing twentieth-century impulses. On one hand, a resentment of inheritance against the 'mountainous classical past'. (Any populist school might have sympathy with that.) On the other, a wish to revert to an imagined pre-history when 'language and thought were somehow open to the truth of being'. Steiner quotes Mallarmé here, who said in 1894 that poetry had all gone wrong since Homer. Homer betrayed poetry's primal magic: that of Orpheus who 'descends to the heart of death via the spiralling staircase of his song'. Homer was linear, narrative, realistic. Mallarmé wanted to get away from that. The history of poetry is full, thank God, of moments when someone felt they had to get away from one thing and try another. Moments of creative resentment; fury, escape and violent re-making.

Steiner's great example, though, is Paul Celan. At certain levels in his work, 'we are not meant to understand at all'. Any interpretation is intrusion. Celan felt violated by the exegetic industry that gathered round his poems. But then who is the poet writing, and publishing, for? (As one member of a workshop once said to me, 'Don't talk of keeping the reader out! Poets should be writing for themselves; or' for God.') Steiner says this paradox is inherent in ontological difficulty, was already much argued-over in Mallarmé circles ('For whom was the Master composing his cryptograms?') and ultimately rests on Heidegger. Die Sprache spricht: the language, not the poet, is speaking. In a later work, Steiner (again talking about Celan, who said 'I have never been capable of inventing', and dreamed of a 'language north of the future') suggests that while invention can 'come near intelligibility' with all the evident 'triumphs and uses' intelligibility can have, creation opens new ground. 'Its avenues are those of the trackless'; it 'waits for us to follow'.¹²

Some poets will buy the idea that language speaks through you, and you can do nothing about it; others won't. 'In a poet's involvement with language there is an element of helplessness,' writes Geoffrey Hill; 'of being at the mercy of accidents, the prey of one's own presumptuous energy.' ¹³ He cites John Crowe Ransome saying, 'The density of poetic language reflects the world's density',¹⁴ but Hill is also heading towards Donne, who spoke retrospectively to a sense of passivity in his writing, of being helpless in the face of the mysteriousness of language (as well as on his 'owne bed of wantonnesse'). Yet even Donne said, 'Ourselves are in the plot, and wee are not onely passive but active too.' ¹⁵

This sort of 'difficulty' may be allied to a strong sense that language has betrayed you in some way, and you are looking for voice beyond language. Something Ashbery was searching for, maybe, in Paris. Celan is the test case. Language speaks, yes, but what do you do if your language is German and you feel you can never trust it again; if you have the holocaust to 'say'?¹⁶

And it is not only Celan; there are other personal and political contexts when poets feel let-down-by-language. Christa Wolf used Cassandra (as she faces her death and remembers the 'language war' at Troy in which words changed while the city mentally prepared for a war it would lose) to image menacing changes in language in communist East Germany. 'Nothing left to describe the world but the language of the past.' 'We were not allowed to call it "war".' 'We have no name for what spoke out of me.' 'Who will find a voice again, and when?' Geoffrey Hill's hundred and twenty poems numbered for the days of Sodom, coming from someone passionately erudite in the deep history of English language (from seventeenth-century sermons to nineteenth-century philosophy, Shakespeare to arcane technical terms in cathedral architecture), and raging against today's public speech refracted through the internet, speak to a powerful sense of language betrayed now, today.¹⁷

But some poets may instinctively feel Die Sprache spricht is a cop-out – both in relation to language, and in relation to communication and potential readers: people you share the street with, the reader in your head. Is it a poem you are writing, if you chuck away the contract of intelligibility completely and surround your words with electric fences, trenches and barbed wire? Surely, as Donne said, we are 'in the plot'; are active as well as passive?

Yet sculptors work with barbed wire itself, and history does say that intelligibility also changes. One classic example is Beethoven's late quartets, loathed and misunderstood when first heard, now the summit of the quartet repertoire. Working poets want to move, go forward in their language, in what they do with it or it does with them. But intelligibility, like quicksand, shifts too.

I think poetry has got to have, at the very least, a coherent story about its relation with communication and therefore, to come back to The Times, with communication's contemporary guardians the press, who champion the right of their own readers (who are also the people available for a modern poem to communicate with) to understand a poem.

Simon Armitage did as The Times asked. He discussed the other man's verses in return. He was friendly and funny ('You don't see phrases like "angry chairs" much these days but it'd be a good name for a punk band'), but beautifully firm. He said the millionaire's verse showed a wilful, almost bloody-minded, ignorance of contemporary writing and didn't bear critical scrutiny.

In the limits of that format, he made three main points. (I know PNR readers do not need to be reminded of them, but as far as I am concerned it is vital to be able to put on the line, succinctly, intelligibly, just why and how basic craft matters.) One, that in a good poem every syllable counts; many of these whole lines, let alone syllables, were just empty padding, there for the rhyme. Secondly, those rhymes, the selling-point of this 'traditional' verse, were stale anyway; over-used. Armitage did not use value-words like 'banal' and 'obvious' but they, of course, lay behind. Thirdly, the guy was not working with today's speech-patterns. When I was but a boy 'sounded like someone remembering how poetry used to be'. Housman's diction, for instance, 'had a relationship to the way people talked then. This doesn't.' And so, 'It reads like poetry from a bygone age. Declamatory; from a time when the poet was an aristocrat of language. Today poets work within the language, not above it. The danger of this sort of approach is, it leads to old-fashioned sentiments.'

I'd add that the linguistic archaising helps it sound like children's verse. It produces a falsely cosy tone, ensures that what was (I am certain) genuinely felt comes out as verse-that-is-sucking-its-thumb. Soft-toy, comfort-object verse. (I'd like to avoid the word 'clichéd', and not say simply that clichéd language leads to clichéd sentiments which are actually what his audience wants. I'd like to think better of the whole contract and flow between his verses and their audience than that.)

For behind Armitage's point is a whole landscape of experience and discovery throughout the tradition; tradition in the full sense, going back to Greek lyric poets of the seventh century BC reacting to and getting away from Homeric epic, language and tone in their way (long before Mallarmé); tradition that embraces all the exciting cultural swappings of metre, genre and angle between different European languages, from the miracle of Catullus and the Augustan revolution in Rome to the Renaissance and on into modernism. Over this landscape looms one enormous and eternal granite standing stone: diction, genre and rhythm affect tone, voice and feeling. What John Ashbery was looking for, trawling magazines in the American library in 1950s Paris, was 'a tone of voice'.

I think the millionaire was hung up on the externals of what he saw as tradition. Led by form, taking end-rhyme, length of line, and rhyme-pattern for 'structuring', he produced something that archaised what was felt as well as what was said. He took tradition's old mac for the thing itself, so what he made came out looking like shopsoiled plastic; something readers of PNR would laugh at.

Humanly, Armitage was more generous than I. He did not compromise on craft but 'What he does works for a lot of people'. The guy started writing poems after a near-death experience, his verse is deeply felt and offered. Like Patience Strong, it touches people. Iris Murdoch said 'Art should not console' (by which I think she meant it should not set out to console), yet consolation is always needed, and people sometimes do go to art for it. If we are in the communication business, we cannot afford to knock 'what works for a lot of people'. It is a question of how we use our understanding, of this and of what it says about being human today. How can we use that with integrity, in our own way?

This, perhaps, is where mainstream poets meet attack from the other flank. If left and right (language Ashbery used about his relation to and departure from Language Poets) are viable metaphors here, cuddly-toy verse attacks mainstream poets like Armitage from the right, while on the left is the avant garde for whom 'mainstream' is a dirty word, partly because of relations with the media. Mainstream poets sometimes work with the media. They become popular, they get reviewed. (Sometimes.) They are, as far as poets can be, commercial.

This attack comes, if I understand the position right, from valuing 'difficulty' in the legacy of modernism. There is a feeling that 'mainstream' poets have reneged on the modernist enterprise, including elements of it which privilege opaqueness, the obscure, the erudite and often the private. The avant garde, as it seems to me, values subtlety, or difficulty (whatever that means by now) over communication. Like Language Poets in Ashbery's representation, they would rather have language than 'something transferred to somebody else'.

Mainstream poets have common ground with some of this. James Fenton wrote recently in the Guardian, 'Modernism spoilt everything for us. It slammed the door on the past. It took the glass of art out of our hands and smashed it.'

He was talking about approaches to painting, but those words do sum up a populist approach to, say, Ezra Pound. The modernist heave – collage, mixed textures, re-hearing the beat, vernacular diction, the rhythms of spoken language, fabric of the street, the reaching out to and hauling in of alien cultures, ancient and modern – all of that, I'd say, is the mainstream poet's starting-point today. Readers of the Instant Appeal school feel shut out by the slammed door of modernism but also by many mainstream poets, who are not, at all, against difficulty, though they are against valuing it for its own sake. Most would agree with Geoffrey Hill when he said in an interview:

We are difficult. We're difficult to ourselves. We're difficult to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most 'intellectual' piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry... should be less than we are? Art has a right – not an obligation – to be difficult if it wishes. Intelligence resists tyrannical simplification.¹⁸

The word I want to pick up (and twist a bit) is 'resists'. Just as the millionaire is hung up on the external aspects of the lyric tradition, it seems to me that some avant garde poets seem hung up on the externals of the modernist tradition. They seem sometimes to be against opening a way, somewhere, for the poem to be understood by a non-specialist. In criticism as well as poetry it is possible to over-privilege cleverness, and difficulty, over public intelligibility.

But (remembering Steiner's four difficulties and where he locates them) where is the 'difficulty' that is valued here: in the poem or the reader?

In a 1961 essay, written in the years when he was working towards his voice, J.H. Prynne proposed a different story about where difficulty lies. He drew a fascinating distinction between difficulty and 'resistance', and where each is located.¹⁹ Difficulty, he argues, is what we encounter in relating to a poem, or the world. What inheres in the object (the world, the poem), is resistance, which shows itself in the process of our understanding. If I 'have difficulty' understanding a poem, that is because the words, in the way they co-operate with each other, are resistant. Something from me is needed, in order to rise to them. Prynne ends with the importance of imagination on the reader's part, the person trying to understand the world, or the poem. 'The imagination is one of our most valuable modes of access to resistance beyond the difficulties': the different difficulties which we all in our different ways meet, as we experience the world, the poem.

We could add that to the list of points which The Times let Armitage make, though the journalist might not have liked it much. It suggests the reader, as well as the poet, has to do a bit of work for something to happen: to feel, in the millionaire's words, 'moved' or 'entertained'. Soft-toy verse leaves nowhere for our imagination to go or to work. The words have no resistance. That's what is most wrong, and also profoundly untraditional, about it. Keats hated 'a poetry that has a palpable design upon us'. There is no fun in what is given on a plate. Like artificial pink flavouring, too much easywon-ness turns you off. (My daughter has a book about dating aimed at young single women; it warns against asking a boy out because in a survey of fifty married men not one relationship began with the woman's invitation to the man.) Most people reading a poem (as in watching a TV ad) value resistance. But readers are all different, and the difficulty they find in resistant words will be different too. Working out, using your own imagination to go deeper, is part of the joy. For then you have a stake in the meaning you find, in the relationships of rhythm and consonant, feeling and thought.

For we do enjoy design in another sense. Mainstream poets (I believe), whether they are writing in pre-existing forms or not, feel pattern gives intelligibility, and that part of the pleasure a reader finds (that they as readers of other people's poems find) in a poem is working out the design: what Pound called 'the dance of the intellect among words'. As far as I'm concerned, 'mainstream' poets today are carrying on a complex, original, continuous, self-testing dialogue with the whole lyric tradition. (Not just in English – and anyway dialogue with that radiates out; English poets were constantly in similar dialogue with Greek, Latin, French and Italian traditions. 'Tradition' is a compound; single-language traditions swap around promiscuously; they share.) While mainstream poets write out of today's speech patterns they also write out of their continuous, original reading; seeing what someone else is doing and running with it. They leave the way open for contemporary readers to see what they are doing, but do not make this too easy; the good poems they write are resistant.

Prynne's word 'resistance': that is what is truly traditional; what creative readers value in all poems, from the past or from the present. One aspect of it is the subtlety which lets meaning be found through pattern. Not necessarily a rhyming or a regular pattern; any in which words make relationships with each other through sound, through their tactile being, as well as in all the meanings that can be woken from them.

In resistance, words become, as Coleridge put it, hooked atoms. They mesh and cross-mesh with all the other words in the language-net of the poem. They are branching antennae, reaching across and in, beneath and out. As in George Herbert's poem, 'The Wreath':

The Wreath

A wreathèd garland of deservèd praise,
Of praise deservèd, unto Thee I give,
I give to Thee, who knowest all my ways,
My crooked winding ways, wherein I live, –
Wherein I die, not live; for life is straight,
Straight as a line, and ever tends to Thee,
To Thee, who art more far above deceit,
Than deceit seems above simplicity.
Give me simplicity, that I may live,
So live and like, that I may know Thy ways,
Know them and practise them: then shall I give
For this poor wreath, give Thee a crown of praise.

Michael Donaghy, a Moghul diamond in his reading as well as his poems, discussed this poem in his last essay, which was in press as he died.²⁰ It is 'a curtailed English sonnet, each line wreathed into the next by means of a key word'. (Praise, praise, straight, straight; and my ways, which are by contrast crooked, are answered by Thy ways which lead straight to know; and so to living for and making praise. MacNeice, I think, must have patterned 'Sunlight in the Garden' with this in his mind's ear.) The end words of the last four lines, Donaghy points out, are a mirror image of the first, but then the fifth line seems to break the pattern. This is because the poem here turns the argument in a new direction. Life and Truth are straight lines, but 'art is a going round'. Yet God is 'more far above deceit, / Than deceit seems above simplicity'. If this is a straight line, says Donaghy, then it rises blasphemously from simple truth to deceit, to the Almighty. 'But it all makes sense if, by means of art, we bend that line into a circle and bring simplicity and Truth back together.'

Donaghy begins his essay by quoting another Herbert poem, 'Jordan (1)': 'Is there in truth no beauty? Is all good structure in a winding stair?' 'The Wreath' is itself, says Donaghy, a winding stair of a poem. By lacing and snaking the pattern, it brings praise back to praise, making them touch like electrodes in ring composition. In this praising, the poem moves from 'wreath' to 'crown'; from flowers that die to (by implication) a shine and metal that endures.

In his own poems, Donaghy was in constant dialogue with winding stair art. As Don Paterson said in his obituary, Donaghy valued poetry as a force for enlightenment and compassionate wisdom.²¹ He was very generous to anyone who valued poetry; he would have made the same moves of humanness and warmth that Fanthorpe and Armitage made towards Patience Strong or Felix Dennis. As a person, Donaghy honoured what mattered to people; so do his poems. But he also loved complexity and subtlety. 'Art is a going round.' He adored 'crooked winding ways' (not the winding ways, as Fanthorpe describes them, of cottage gardens illustrating Patience Strong, but the real thing, the blueprint of which those are the distant copy). He enjoyed the paradox in Herbert's 'Jordan (I)': a 'formal poem which, ironically, makes a case for the unadorned direct statement of the truth'. Donaghy's gentle answer (or one of them) to the faux naif 'I have this dreadful idea that poetry should entertain' would be, I imagine, that 'going round' is the truest entertaining.

You can see that answer embodied in his own poem 'Machines'.

Machines

Dearest, note how these two are alike:
This harpsichord pavane by Purcell
And the racer's twelve-speed bike.

The machinery of grace is always simple.
This chrome trapezoid, one wheel connected
To another of concentric gears,
Which Ptolemy dreamt of and Schwinn perfected,
Is gone. The cyclist, not the cycle, steers.
And in the playing, Purcell's chords are played away.

So this talk, or touch if I were there,
Should work its effortless gadgetry of love,
Like Dante's heaven, and melt into the air.

If it doesn't, of course, I've fallen. So much is chance,
So much agility, desire, and feverish care,
As bicyclists and harpsichordists prove
Who only by moving can balance,
Only by balancing move.

The poem is all about symmetry and asymmetry, both moral and technical. About saving and losing your balance, connecting and disconnecting, presence and absence. Both in making love (Dearest anounces this is a love poem, picked up by love in the third stanza, engendering move and prove, rhymes for love in Christopher Marlowe's invitation poem, 'Come Live with Me') ²² and in writing a poem. Poems too are interlocking 'machines'. They are a gadgetry of love or machinery of grace, just like bike-gears, harpsichords, bodies, relationships, a pavane, or any geometric model of that word implicit in Dante's heaven (whose rhymes are there in gears and steers) spheres, which travel in a set (though not obvious) pattern and, like a poem, make music as they (Donaghy's last word) move.

The poem is basically two chunks (broken into smaller stanzas of three and six lines each) of what seems like eight and eight lines. If Herbert's poem is a 'curtailed sonnet' this is an elongated one, working like a sonnet with similar internal coils, spring mechanisms, and sudden change of pace and thought.

Except, of course, that the first chunk has nine lines. The ninth, 'And in the playing, Purcell's chords are played away', makes the poem asymmetrical from one perspective, but from another acts as the central spine of a different sort of symmetry, not apparent to the reading eye, only to the ear, round which all the other lines, left and right, hang. Symmetry disguised as asymmetry. Or vice versa.

This central line is the only one without a partnering rhyme. Its end word away stands out, and subverts the impact of the first two words, Dearest, note, suggesting (via possible resonances in played away) that this is not a face-to-face love poem. Despite the highlighting of perfected/connected, the force (coming after Dearest) of these two are alike, and the image of the concentric, this now seems to be an in absentia love-call. Or love-note, for away also laughs at note (with its note of scholarly pompousness and undertones of musical and written notes). How can a distant beloved note a pavane; note this pavane?

Away also prepares for the sonnet-like volta in So, beginning the line which makes this absence explicit: if I were there. In this new scenario, talk (standing in perhaps for the poem) makes up for touch. Both depend on gadgetry of love; on technique, shape, length and an alike response, which moves the partners to this talk and on to Dante's paradise. A second volta, disturbing the sonnetlike abab cde cde rhyme scheme of the poem's first half, moves from so to if, and brings us down; or at least, reminds us we can be brought down. An interrupted rhyme scheme: the musician stumbles, cyclist wobbles, poet makes a break. 'If it doesn't, of course, I've fallen'. But that leads on to the softly brilliant chiasmus at the end, which both embodies and states the insight that you (or words, or a poem, or love) only manage to go forward by risking a fall, to the side.

We can track the poem's insights musically by following a swish of s or sh throughout, starting with the title's central consonant. We move from Dearest, through harpsichord, Purcell, racer's, speed, machinery, grace, to simple. That run is broken by a pattern of hard k's (picked up from alike and bike, lingering on in chords, talk, care: there is a hard and a soft version at work here of the poem's story, connectedness is announced in the first word, is a hard fact of the poem, does not go away): chrome, connected, concentric (which combines the two sounds), perfected.

But already softness is back with Schwinn. Then we get cyclist, cycle (with the unheard s's of the Yeats line behind this line, who can tell the dancer from the dance?) and Purcell. The second half, beginning on S, moves from So to should (preparing for the wish-fulfilment of Dante's heaven) through effortless, to end this next step forward in the lover's, poet's or mathematician's dream of melting; air. Then, after the possible let-down, we get course, so, chance, so, feverish, bicyclists, hapsichordists, balance, balancing.

The fortunes of this sound, the swish of bike wheels and buzzy harpsichord strings, are also the ssh of intimacy in talk, a relationship (between poet and beloved, poem and reader) which goes forward by balancing, which is always on the (last word) move.

And move is what planets did. Planetai were called for wandering; 'wandering' stars, not fixed. Ptolemy worked out that this wandering had a pattern and a point, like the 'going round' (in Donaghy's phrase) of art; or Herbert's crooked winding ways and winding stair. And if played away is a momentary lapse, an interrupted personal rhyme scheme, the poem's I is still centrally connected / to another, like wanderer planets moving elliptically, but still held, around the sun.

None of this is 'difficult' in any of Steiner's senses. Schwinn needs to be 'looked up', one may know something about Ptolemy but not details of his theory, and yet the poem discloses enough for us to know roughly that both of them were in the geometry business: ellipsis, concentricism, gears. I have seen this poem have a potent emotional impact on audiences in a Mrs Ramsay, listening-for-satisfaction way. But the words are resistant; their relationships have more than one significance. If you part tendrils and lift leaves you understand and, I'd say, enjoy the poem that much more. You become part of how its gears work.

Donaghy was a true custodian of 'the holiness of minute particulars', as Blake said poets are. He valued cleverness and subtlety not for their own sake but for where they took the poem. His images were not what Steiner calls 'fortuitous shards of private allusion'. He made them work in the pattern of the poem, believing that pattern makes intelligibility, makes meaning. Remember, as he said about Herbert's 'The Wreath', 'this is no mere puzzle box, but a labour of intense devotion'. For himself, 'I couldn't look myself in the eye unless I used verse as a means of discovery, rather than a method of persuading my audience of what I thought I already knew.'

From a mainstream poet's point of view in Britain at present, it sometimes seems like war on two fronts. Yet mainstream poets have common ground with both (if this metaphor is valid) right and left. With soft-toy advocates they share respect for communication, belief that intelligibility matters. With modernist heirs they share belief that resistance matters. They may engage with the media, but they are not going to give up on difficulty.

It is healthy to be attacked on both fronts. It keeps tradition springy, self-critical, fertile, alert. It is, in fact, as Aristophanes tells us from the underworld, traditional. If there is mud-slinging across the escarpments, well, mud fertilises. In Donaghy's image, tradition moves forward by keeping your balance, now lurching to one side and another over troughs in the lane, doing different things in different places, now exploring balance round a blind corner, now throwing its weight newly according to the demands of the camber: 'only by moving can balance, / Only by balancing move'.

I'd argue that poetic 'tradition', far from being a matter of external forms, is alive and well and doing what Nureyev said he wanted to do when he first came to London: finding 'new ways of moving'. As Blake said, without contrarieties is no progression. That tradition – to quote from the poet we are remembering today in Edinburgh – is like the sundew, bog asphodel or 'curious moss that can clean a wound or poison a river', in MacDiarmid's 'Bracken Hills in Autumn'. Still alight, still visible:

    Look closely. Even now bog asphodel spikes, still alight at the tips,
    Sundew, lifting white buds like those of the whitlow grass
    On walls in spring, over its little round leaves
    Sparkling with gummy red hairs, and many a soft mass
        Of the curious moss that can clean
        A wound or poison a river, are seen.

The writing and reading of poems are, to bring back a key word from the gears of 'Machines', connected. It is a long, holy connection. And MacDiarmid's stanza opens with a phrase which, despite the wounds and poisoned rivers between us, we all – Coleridge, Donaghy, Ashbery, Prynne, all poets who care about the relation between ('Machines' again) these two – honour, depend on and long for.

Look closely . . .

Notes

¹ Based on the Hugh MacDiarmid Lecture 2005, 'Resistant Words and Crooked Winding Ways: Tradition and Balance in Poetry, Now or Ever', delivered to the Poetry Association of Scotland at the Edinburgh Poetry Library, March 2005. Many thanks to Mario Relich and Norman Kreitman for the invitation.
² Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse (1927; Penguin, 1992). pp.129-31; Shakespeare Sonnet 98.
³ Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, N. I. 1., cit. George Steiner, Antigones (Clarendon Press, 1984), p.i.
⁴ U.A. Fanthorpe, 'Patience Strong', in Collected Poems (Peterloo Poets, 1986), p.16.
⁵ Aristophanes, Birds, 785-90.
⁶ Aristophanes, Frogs, 832-1471.
⁷ See e.g. R. Padel, 'Imagery of the Elsewhere: Two Choral Odes of Euripides', Classical Quarterly, December 1974, pp.227-41.
⁸ John Ashbery, Selected Prose, ed. E. Richie (Carcanet, 2004), pp.250-1. Peter Mcdonald, however ('Difficulty, Democracy, and Modern Poetry', PNR 161 January-February 2005, p.24), finds 'next to meaningless' a distinction such as Ashbery draws here, between (as McDonald puts it) 'language (for its own sake)' and communication.
⁹ George Steiner, On Difficulty and Other Essays (OUP, 1978), pp.l9-47.
¹⁰ V.S. Naipaul, Literary Occasions: Essays (Picador, 2004), p.52.
¹¹ Peter McDonald (ibid. p. 19) broadly observes that 'audience was not a primary concern of modernist poets, except in the sense that many sought to create one', and cites earlier poets (Donne, Blake, Browning, John Clare; and Shelley who wrote for an 'ideal' audience) who did not write for an audience which they knew existed, and who seemed rebarbative and inaccessible at first to contemporaries.
¹² George Steiner, Grammars of Creation (Faber, 2001), pp.14, 169.
¹³ Geoffrey Hill, The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas (Andre Deutsch, 1984), p.146.
¹⁴John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk (Connecticut), 1941), p.79.
¹⁵ John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, ed. John Sparrow (Cambridge, 1923), pp.68-9.
¹⁶ This point was put to me by Fiona Sampson; I am very grateful for her reading and suggestions.
¹⁷ Christa Wolf, Cassandra (Virago, 1984), pp.71, 106. 14; Geoffrey Hill, Speech Speech (Penguin, 2002).
¹⁸ Geoffrey Hill, The Paris Review 90/91, March 2000, pp. 276-7.
¹⁹ J.H. Prynne, 'Resistance and Difficulty', Prospect, Winter 1961, pp.26-30.
²⁰ Michael Donaghy, 'By any memes necessary', Poetry News, October 2004.
²¹ Don Paterson, 'Michael Donaghy', Royal Society of Literature Review 2005, p. 53.
²² I am grateful for this insight to members from Cornwall of a workshop run by the Liskeard Poetry Society, when we read this poem together in autumn 2004, the day of Michael Donaghy's memorial.

PN Review

Alliance House
30 Cross Street
Manchester M2 7AQ UK

General Editor: Michael Schmidt
Co-ordinating Editor: Neil Powell
Reviews Editor: Judith Wilson

Copyright © 2005 POETRY NATION REVIEW.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

---

Poetry Daily / Amazon.com

A complete list of books by Ruth Padel, along with purchase information, may be found at www.ruthpadel.com.

Search Poetry Daily / Amazon.com for other books: