Foreword
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- 1 ‘There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a sm (...)
- 2 for whom the nineteenth century was ‘a rather blurry, messy sort of a period, a rather sentimentali (...)
- 3 Herbert & Hollis 23.
1The present issue of the Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens contains a selection of sundry articles devoted to poetry. Just as it is possible to enjoy poetry on different levels and for diverse reasons,1 so there are various kinds of possible obstacles to that enjoyment. A reader-centred approach such as this, concerned to analyse the poetry from the point of view of the kinds of difficulties met by readers, was not proposed to the contributors to this volume—unless the very term ‘Victorian’, which still carries with it something of the stigma transmitted by Modernists such as Lytton Strachey or Ezra Pound2 is itself an obstacle to appreciation—; nevertheless, the notion of ‘difficulty’ does tend to crop up in these articles, providing if not a unity, at least a convenient entry to each. Difficulty is a charge—or rather a compliment—more commonly reserved for Modernist or postmodern poetry, with its erudition, its juxtapositions and ambiguity; but just as any practising musician will testify to the difficulty of playing Mozart, so the seemingly accessible verse of Stevenson or Kipling, for instance, proves surprisingly problematic when viewed from an early twenty-first century vantage-point, at the same time as the more demanding poetry of authors such as Hopkins or Browning does not challenge the reader where expected. This is in no way a matter of wilful obscurantism on the part of the critics. Rather, the difficulties are related to the distance travelled, to present-day perceptions and sensibility. Or, as Pound put it with reference to an admittedly far greater time span, ‘. . . if we still feel the same emotions as those which launched the thousand ships, it is quite certain that we come on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations’.3 The authors printed here are concerned to pinpoint various forms of aesthetic and ideological resistance or reticence likely to deter potential readers of Victorian and Edwardian poetry, and to show that the hermeneutic demands are not to be underrated. Two recent translations of Kipling’s poetry for children are included as reminders of that other creative form of interaction between past texts and the present: translation.
2Three of the six poets discussed are bona fide ‘difficult’ poets, hailed as Modernist precursors or, where Lawrence is concerned, a Modernist himself; nevertheless, it is not as such that they are presented here. Adrian Grafe’s Hopkins, for instance, is not only the father of ‘sprung rhythm’, the metric and syntactical innovator, but a Hopkins who ‘celebrates, if not glorifies, mortal suffering, especially female suffering at the hands of God’: an attitude reflected in the social violence of his day. Grafe thus brings to light an aspect of the poetry we may be tempted to shy away from. The Browning we are presented with here is not the model for Modernist impersonality, rather his The Ring and the Book is here shown to explore a different kind of difficulty, ontological rather than formal and aesthetic, that of the deceptive nature of our two principal cognitive tools, language and sight—which, moreover, turn out to be not merely analogous, as is commonly noted, but homologous (Yann Tholoniat). Lawrence was himself caught up in the vortex while remaining deeply connected with Romantic visionary poetry, and his free verse was designed to ‘awake man’s “immediate, instant self” to the mystery of creation in the ever-present instant, in which life inexhaustibly renews itself’ (Pierre Vitoux). Here it is the novels that are perplexing, for ‘the clues can be lost in the maze created through the interaction of characters. [Lawrence’s] poetry, then, serves to preserve for him, and validate for the reader who can share his experience imaginatively, the progressive unfolding of his central intuition . . .’. Although the other three are not a priori associated with difficulty, we nevertheless find it in the phonetic and grammatical challenges of Barnes’s Dorsetshire dialect, whereby the text becomes a material entity which cannot be passed over, and it is ‘useful’ to counteract the ‘facility that goes with pastoral’ (Paul Volsik);—so that the dialect is shown to stay any facile labelling as nostalgic and reactionary, and lines such as these are found to be compellingly moving: ‘Aye, the girt elem tree out in little hwome groun’/Wer a-stannèn this mornèn, an’ now’s a-cut down’. With Kipling’s poetry the combination of the political and poetical produces a ‘widespread unease’ due to an ‘uncomfortable paradox’ (Helen Goethals); in laying bare the reasons for this discomfort, the author in a sense releases the reader, freeing him or her of the burden of Time thus making way for universals. With Stevenson the difficulty lies in overcoming the author’s own disparaging dismissal of his poetry as a ‘secondary literary activity’ (Dominique Delmaire), so as to lend an ear to the thematic—and phonetic—elements of a psychic drama, in which a host of ‘solutions’ to the nexus of loss and desire is played out—albeit trapped between the rocky coastlands of repression and transgression—, until fear is at last sublimated into art and eroticism becomes playful.
3If, then, a unity there is among the articles presented here, it lies in their decidedly pedagogic character, based on an acute awareness of contemporary sensibility—of present-day poetry-reading trends and expectations—, and on specialist knowledge of the poets and their era, with the result that doors have been opened and ways and means found to read or reappraise these poets, while helping us to see our own prejudices and blind spots. They are united also by the passion of their individual engagement with the poetry, by their commitment to painstakingly analysing the mysterious mechanics of a reading experience. As W. S. Graham writes,
- 4 W. S. Graham, ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’ (1946) in W. N. Herbert and Matthew Hollis (eds.) Stro (...)
The poem itself is dumb but has the power of release. Its purpose is that it can be used by the reader to find out something about himself. Words are ambiguous. He must face it that words are ambiguous, but realise that this has to do with the fundamental force of poetry and is to be used to a positive end. The poem is not a handing out of the same packet to everyone, as it is not a thrown-down heap of words for us to choose the bonniest. The poem is the replying chord to the reader. It is the reader’s involuntary reply.4
4Difficulty in poetry is a prerequisite. The six articles presented here testify to the many forms it can take in so far as it acts as a spur, goading the reader on to an ever more demanding response, thus finding its unity in diversity.
Notes
1 ‘There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is an expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. . . .’ T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Selected Essays, third edition (London: Faber and Faber, 1951) 22.
2 for whom the nineteenth century was ‘a rather blurry, messy sort of a period, a rather sentimentalistic, mannerish sort of a period.’ ‘A Retrospect’ (1918) in W.N. Herbert and Matthew Hollis (eds.) Strong Words (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2000) 24.
3 Herbert & Hollis 23.
4 W. S. Graham, ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’ (1946) in W. N. Herbert and Matthew Hollis (eds.) Strong Words (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2000) 24.
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Sara R. Greaves, « Foreword », Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [En ligne], 60 Automne | 2004, mis en ligne le 09 janvier 2025, consulté le 16 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/15329 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13jcz
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