William Wordsworth and Damien Hirst might appear unlikely bedfellows, but appearances can be deceiving.

by steveoreeveo (student)

What is poetry for?

The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, by Damien Hirst – a tiger shark suspended in formaldehyde solution in glass and steel casing – was the star exhibit in the 1997 Sensation exhibition at The Royal Academy. Amidst the controversy about whether this was Art or avant-garde cynicism, including The Sun headline of “£50,000 for fish without chips”, Hirst explained that part of the work’s purpose was to invite people to re-examine their mental picture of a shark. This struck a chord with me as I had been surprised by: the shark’s smallness (4.3 m) compared to the clichéd image I had of a Jaws-like creature; its strange air of vulnerability as a dead presence being surveyed by curious strangers; and its uncanny stillness, since the formaldehyde created the illusion of water, suggestive of some kind of motion. Terry Eagleton observes at the end of An Introduction to Literary Theory (1983) that the most authoritative radical position is always that which appears newly iconoclastic but which is defined by a return to radical roots (he makes a play on the etymology of ‘radical’). A ready-made (as in Duchamp’s ‘The Fountain’), a memento mori (hence the philosophically riddling title), a playfully accurate form of Aristotelian mimesis (the work involves no representation, as such), Hirst’s mysterious shark, for all its shock value, winks teasingly about its artistic credentials.

William Wordsworth and Damien Hirst might appear unlikely bedfellows, but appearances can be deceiving. In his Preface to ‘Lyrical Ballads (1805), Wordsworth asserts that his plan is “to throw over [situations from common life] a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way.” ‘To the Small Celandine’, for example, celebrates a flower which is usually overlooked because of its unprepossessing quality: “I have seen thee, high and low, / Thirty years or more, and yet / T’was a face I did not know.” As contemporary reaction to such a poem, for The Sun’s reductive wit read Lord Byron’s sneering dismissal, “namby-pamby”, and The Edinburgh Review’s put-down, “a piece of babyish absurdity”. In the face of such attacks, Wordsworth’s confidence was not merely borne of his belief that poetry should encourage people to look at natural beauty in a more precise way, it was also an aspect of his sense that celandines were portals to mystical truth. As he argues in ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’, contemplation of natural beauty creates a spiritual connection with divine forces, which enables him to be more fully his actual self and, connected in this way to Nature, to be aware of how he shares emotional commonality with other human beings. This is why, in ‘To the Small Celandine’, the flower is addressed in religious terms (“kindly, unassuming Spirit!”) and is presented, like other figures in his poems such as the leech-gatherer and Simon Lee, as a mistreated outsider who deserves attention and respect (“Scorned and slighted upon earth!”).

Wordsworth and Hirst’s shared premise is that habitual mental patterns, which is close to what Pavlov styled “conditional reflexes”, ossify our instinctive sensitivity towards beauty. Wordsworth described such consciousness as “savage torpor”, a brilliant oxymoron suggestive of the state of mind of a wild animal in a zoo, which is what he thought cities turned humans into. Coleridge’s description of Wordsworth’s early work implies the magical quality of poetry which is able to resurrect dessicated spiritual impulses. The poems

give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and excite a feeling analogous

to the supernatural, by awakening the ...

This is a preview of the whole essay

give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and excite a feeling analogous

to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of

custom, and directing it to the loveliness and wonders before us; an

inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity

and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts

that neither feel nor understand.

For Wordsworth, writing a poem involved a double nostalgia: the moment of composition when the experience of seeing the celandine is turned into words, and the return to the purity, intensity, and sense of wonder of childhood vision which composition necessarily entailed.

T.S. Eliot, a century later, was more sceptical about the transformative possibilities of poetry:

And what is the experience that the poet is so bursting to communicate? By

the time it has settled down into a poem it may be so different from the original

experience as to be hardly recognisable. The ‘experience’ in question may be the

result of a fusion so numerous, and ultimately so obscure in their origins, that

even if there be communication of them, the poet may hardly be aware of what

he is communicating; and what is there to be communicated was not in existence

before the poem was completed.

(The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 1933)

The assurance of Wordsworth’s “a certain colouring of the imagination” trips up, embarrassed by the incapacity of words to capture feelings and the inability of the feeling, in the first place, to make itself clearly felt. Poetry, Eliot suggests, is doomed to failure:

And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion.

Wordsworth’s nostalgic revisiting of childhood visionary insight (the “trailing clouds of glory” of the ‘Immortality Ode’) becomes the pained fumbling of an old man trying to find his spectacles:

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious.

(East Coker, ‘Four Quartets’, V.7-11, 15-17, 1940)

Robert Browning’s ‘Two in the Campagna’ (1855) is, in Eliot’s phrase, “a raid on the inarticulate”, as it explores in a fresh way what Philip Larkin sardonically styles “that much-mentioned brilliance, love” (‘Love Songs in Age’, 1957). The wit of Larkin’s image suggests both the complacency which can make us think we know what love is, and how the hyperbole of romantic poetry can constitute a form of literary cliché. That Browning is conscious of the history of love poetry seems evident in the pastoral setting , which is a feature of Elizabethan love poetry, and in the phrase, “I pluck the rose”, which alludes to the seventeenth century carpe diem tradition. Browning’s poem might be inelegantly subtitled, ‘what happens next, after carpe diem?’ Such an awkward formulation reflects the poem’s confession that ‘love’, as it is experienced in day-to-day living, often feels oddly transient and its strength of feeling casts a long shadow of frustrated awareness of the mundane flatness necessarily surrounding passion. Concerned as it is with feelings of distance after erotic intimacy, and directly addressed to his lover, this is a risky poem.

Browning, the lover, acknowledges failure governing his passion, and Browning, the poet, admits the failure of his inability to understand the apparently superficial and limited nature of his ardour. He repeatedly asks questions to which he is unable to find answers: the awkwardly monosyllabic (with its awkwardly placed caesura) “No.” at the start of verse ten indicates how he is getting nowhere, like the beetles which “grope” around, “blind”, looking desperately for familiar comfort. The essential idea of the poem is itself elusive as this is a “thought” he has only “touched”, not held, and the key verb of the poem is “yearn” (it appears twice and is the concluding word). His initial intuition, that putting into words what he feels would be fruitless (verse two), is confirmed by his sense, having now written the poem, that this process is, Sisyphus-like, actually the case: “off again” in verse twelve refers back to “let go” in verse two, continuing the metaphor of his thought as a fragile spider’s “thread” (or “thistle-ball” in verse eleven) which he struggles to “Hold [...] fast!”. He cannot find words to express the intensity of his love (“love it more than tongue can speak”), nor can he find the words to express his subsequent disappointment at being excluded from that intensity: the “trick” of poetry was to deceive him into thinking that both impulses were possible. “Already how am I so far /Out of that minute?” suggests how he cannot share the magical time-travel of Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquillity”. The gates of this Italian Eden appear firmly shut and the evocation of “Rome’s ghost” works as proleptic pathetic fallacy for the enervation of his desire (described in verse eleven).

Yet the poem does succeed in conveying the genuineness of Browning’s love and the poignancy of his knowledge that any experience of that feeling will be fleeting. As he has walked “hand in hand” through idyllic countryside earlier that day, so now, in this poem, he similarly walks with his lover, guiding her precisely and tenderly through his thoughts. The experience of being ‘Two in the Campagna’ turns into two rhymes (lines one, three and five; lines two and four). This idea is hinted at through the metaphor of catching, which refers to poetic composition in verse two and erotic intimacy in verse ten. The “infinite passion” and mere “minute” of actual loving intensity transforms into the poem itself, despite the poet’s claim about the irrecoverability of that experience.

As such, Browning’s poem (and Hirst’s shark and Wordsworth’s celandine) illustrates one of the great paradoxes of art, that imagined reality can, strangely, seem more real to us than felt experience itself. Eliot remarked that “poetry is a mug’s game”, and, more recently, Amy Winehouse has told us that “love is a losing game”. ‘Two in the Campagna’, nevertheless, proves the truth of another of Eliot’s dictums: “For us, there is only the trying” (East Coker, ‘Four Quartets’, V.18).

1,623

Steve Reeves