BOOKS
The Horse's Mouth
BY PETER QUENNELL IT was a bold step on the part of the University of Oxford to elect W. H. Auden to the Professor- ship of Poetry; and his election, of course, was only carried through after much excited back- stairs canvassing and a great deal of academic hubbub. Not since 1857, when Matthew Arnold held the Chair, had this key position been occu- pied by a well-known modern poet; and Professor Auden seems especially suited to the job, for he is both an innovator whom the young respect and a teacher and mentor, at least on the opposite side of the Atlantic, who, slowly but surely and with the utmost possible grace, has begun to assume the attitude of a Grand Old Man. More important, he is still a practising poet; and his lectures come straight from the horse's mouth. He belongs himself to the poetic tradition that it is now his professorial duty to discuss and analyse.
The horse's mouth first delivered a message on June 11, 1956, in an inaugural discourse, subse- quently published under the comprehensive title Making. Knowing and Judging* by the Oxford University Press. No reader who loves poetry should fail to study this absorbing pamphlet, so many questions does it raise as to the nature and origins of poetic experience. Much of the pre- amble is somewhat indefinite; but one conclusion emerges clearly enough—that very few poets, past or present, can explain to us either why they write or the processes by which a poem gradually takes shape in the poet's mind. Here Professor Auden's inaugural lecture may be compared with A. E. Housman's Leslie Stephen Lecture, The Name and Nature of Poetry, printed more than twenty years ago. In his penultimate paragraph, Housman describes how, 'having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon—beer is a sedative to the brain . . .,' he would `go out for a walk of two or three hours . . . thinking of nothing in par- ticular, only looking at things arohnd me and following the progress of the seasons. . . .' As he walked, 'there would flow into my mind, with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once, accompanied, not preceded, by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form a part of. . . . The source of the sugges- tions thus proffered to the brain was an abyss' which Housman identified with the pit of the stomach. Sometimes 'further inspiration' was * MAKING, KNOWING AND JUDGING. By W. H. Auden. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2s. 6d.) vouchsafed during the course of the next day; 'but sometimes the poem had to be taken in hand and completed by the brain, which was apt to be a matter of trouble and anxiety involving trial and disappointment. . .
In this account of his own creative method, which is considerably more explicit than any- thing provided by Professor Auden, the author of A Shropshire Lad and Last Poems makes a number of interesting and important points. The suggestions on which the poem is based arise from a mysterious abyss; the emotion they stir is `unaccountable'; the poetic framework con- structed by inspiration is often 'taken in hand and completed by the brain,' or rather by that section of the brain over which the poet exercises a conscious control. The involuntary aspect of the poet's activities seems to be insufficiently emphasised in Professor Auden's pamphlet; and neither he nor Housman has been able to inform us exactly where the abyss lies—did Housman really believe that his poems originated in the pit of the stomach?—or just what it is, under the surface of the mind, that sets the creative imagination working. Professor Auden, however, throws out some nebulous yet stimulating hints. The writing of poetry is provoked by awe; and 'the impulse to create a work of art is felt when, in certain persons, the passive awe provoked by sacred beings or events is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship or homage, and to be fit homage this rite must be beautiful.' But then, why should some objects be sacred and others, poetically speaking, pro- fane? Professor Auden, turning to his own case, tells us that, before he had begun to write verse, he had recognised a class of 'Sacred Objects' in books on mining and mineralogy: 'A word like pyrites, for example, was for mc, not simply an indicative sign; it was the Proper. Name of a Sacred Being, so that, when I heard an aunt pronounce it pirrits, I was shocked. Her pro- nunciation was more than wrong, it was ugly. Ignorance was impiety.'
No doubt every poet cherishes a private pan- theon of the same kind—a group of associated images to which he attaches an especial value. Housman's favourite symbols, for instance, included the Doomed Soldier and the Hanged Man. But we are still some way from deciding why these symbols should first of all have acquired their ascendancy over the imagination of the individual poet. Some—like those which Professor Auden mentions—have a distant origin in the poet's reading. A writer's indebtedness to his literary past must never be forgotten by the critic; for, whereas the untutored reader is apt to assume that a poet derives 'inspiration' from direct contact with external nature, most poets, if we examine them at close range, prove to have been deeply bookish, and to use the work of earlier writers as the starting-point of their own discoveries. It was a volume of old travels that helped to launch The Ancient Mariner; yet it was Coleridge's personal experience of life (which had induced a passionate sense of guilt) that gave his verses their poetic unity. In fact, whenever a gifted verse-writer happens to have become a genuine poet, we seem to distinguish a fusion of reading and experience, of memory and passion, of per- sonal and impersonal elements. Ideas that have been vaguely assembling in his mind suddenly fly together to form a poetic whole. A process of crystallisation occurs, precipitated by some unknown agent.
• • This is not a miracle that can be repeated at will; and some poets would claim with Housman —and, incidentally, with Gerard de Nerval, who attributed his famous sonnets to a mood of 'supernatural reverie'—that their finest poems were not composed, so much as dictated to them and afterwards revised. Professor Auden, it is true, puts the matter somewhat differently. Employing his own terms and adapting Coleridge's theory, as set forth in the thirteenth chapter of Biographia Literaria, of the Primary and Secondary Imagination, he describes the Primary Imagination as only concerned 'with sacred beings and sacred events,' and explains that 'a sacred being cannot be anticipated; it must be encountered. On encounter the imagina- tion has no option but to respond'; while the Secondary Imagination sits in judgement, approv- ing, criticising and rearranging. But Professor Auden agrees that the genesis of a poem is, to a very large extent, beyond the poet's control.
In short, the Professor's inaugural lecture pro- vided his audience with some fascinating subjects for discussion. I am sure that it enlivened: it may also have puzzled and annoyed. Besides interlarding his address with various scraps of American idiom and adopting here and there a teasingly colloquial tone, he allows himself cer- tain touches of endearing crankiness. The quali- fications he demands in a trustworthy critic of verse—an affection for 'long lists of proper names such as . . . the catalogue of ships in The Iliad'; riddles; 'complicated verse forms of great tech- nical difficulty'; 'conscious theatrical exaggera- tion, pieces of baroque flattery, like Dryden's welcome to the Duchess of Ormonde'—seem to have been chosen with the purpose of exasperat- ing the old rather than in the hope of enlightening the young. But I dare say that they produced a ripple of surprise; and surprise is a sensation seldom experienced in the average Oxford lecture room. If Professor Auden can disturb the dusty calm, we must not grudge him an occasional paradox; and I hope, indeed, that squibs fall thick and fast whenever he ascends 'the rostrum. Their effect is bound to be salutary. Anything to prevent the School of English from sinking back into its pre-war slumbers!
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