Poetry and Meaning
Sense and Poetry. By John Sparrow. (Constable. 7s. 6d.) Ma. SPARROW'S long-awaited series of essays on " the place of meaning in modern verse " arrives belated and a little breath- less (there are some shocking misprints) but not unheralded. Recommended by The Book Society, it bears also a blurb from the ubiquitous Mr. Walpole. It is as well, therefore, to warn the orthodox not to be too sanguine. For Mr. Sparrow's book is not the true-blue reactionist effort it might be sup- posed to be from the distinguished patronage it has received. Mr. Sparrow is far too shrewd and alert a critic for that. Actually, his book is likely to disappoint both left and right-wing readers equally : the former for countenancing the aims—and even in some cases the achievements—of modern poetry as much as he does ; the latter for what one cannot help regarding as the fundamental irrelevancies in which he prin- cipally deals.
Mr. Sparrow's thesis is the "abandonment of meaning" or " renunciation of the intellect " in modern poetry, in favour of more or less pure symbolism, associationsl content or even mere patterns of sound. On the face of it this is a plausible thesis and Mr. Sparrow elaborates it ably, defining and categorizing his terms with painstaking ingenuity. But the analysis, somehow, does not teach one much. That modern poetry is difficult ? So was Blake's. That there are different kinds of difficulty? There are different kinds of poetry. That some forms of difficulty are justifiable and some not ? Ah ! there's the rub. As soon as Mr. Sparrow leaves the discussion of the origin and differences of difficulties for the discussion of poetry per se, he begins to lose his grip. For he should then be talking about poetry as poetry, which in practice means talking about the effects a poem produces and how ; whereas in fact he is almost invariably found to be talking about an abstraction, such as the intellectual structure of a poem or the lack of it. This leads him into irrelevancies of a disastrous nature, such as asking what Stetson can have made of the questions Mr. Eliot addressed to him at the end of the first section of The Waste Land, or equally irrelevant statements to the effect that " words are not efficient instruments " for com- municating personal reveries, and that a symbolist poem is like a landscape, which is unlikely to give rise to the same experience in two different people. Such statements—and Mr. Sparrow's book is full of them—ignore one of the funda- mental distinctions between art and actuality ; in fact ignore the prime function of the artist, which is to exercise such a compulsion on his material that it will produce the effect he is aiming at independent of personal idiosyncrasies in his audience. It is his business to see that words are " efficient instruments." Nor does the wide range of interpretation accorded to many works of art, literary in particular, in- validate this contention. For a poem is itself and cannot be paraphrased, and a diversity of interpretations may approximate equally to its essential content while differing widely in various superficial respects.
Nothing displays better Mr. Sparrow's tendency to climb the wrong tree in this matter than his discussion of the part played by " association " in modern verse. Mr. Sparrow finds a great deal of this association " capricious," " private," " personal " and connected by no other thread than the author's own accidental trend of thought. This is perfectly true. What is untrue is to suppose that this accounts for the badness of much of the poetry in which it appears. For the point is not whether an association between (say) stars and prunes is " arbitrary and private," but whether the poet has succeeded in making such an association, in its specific context, recognizable and convincing. Whether, in fact, he has written a poem or merely blathered. Mr. Sparrow admits that similarities between things " may be discovered," that in fact it is part of the poet's function to extend our vision in this manner. But he hastens to add that similarities " must not be invented." Yet who is to say whether Donne " discovered " or " invented " the comparison between a pair of lovers and a pair of com- passes ? And who cares ? What matters is whether the comparison, as made by Donne in that particular poem, plays the part it should in helping the poem fo move us. If it does, then it is justified no matter how " private " a recess of consciousness it may have emerged from ; and if
. it doesn't, then no degree of recognizability or universality can save it from oblivion.
Mr. Sparrow further prejudices the issue by his odd and arbitrary definition of the word intelligible. " To be intel- ligible," he says, " a series of words must express thought." A series of words which serves to convey a mood, create an atmosphere or release a train of associations, so long as it is independent of " discursive thought and logical structure," is unintelligible. Thus Mr. Sparrow contrasts Mr. Yeats! poem " The Cap and Bells " with Mr. Eliot's " Rhapsody on a Windy Night " (rather carelessly misnamed " Soliloquy on a Windy Night "), pronouncing that the former has an " intelligible " structure while the latter, apparently, has not. But does this distinction amount to anything ? That Mr. Eliot's poem proceeds by a series of associated images related to a mood, rather than by a series of statements related to a logical structure of thought, is true enough ; but what of it ? The fact that it enables Mr. Sparrow to describe the Rhapsody as " without meaning " is nothing to the point. For to the ordinary intelligent reader a mood is just as capable of " meaning " as a logical proposition—for all the metaphysical niceties of Mr. Joseph of New College, on which Mr. Sparrow so clearly depends. And a series of moods, or series of associated images evoking a mood, is jut as potentially intelligible (in the sense that the reader can appreciate and respond to it—which is the important sense) as a series of purely propositional statements. And it is the poet's function to make them so. Mr. Sparrow, apparently, finds himself unable to accept this, and his discussion of concrete examples, which range indiscriminately from the best to the most bogus of modern poetry, is accordingly confined to a consideration of their " intelligi- bility " within the limits of his own definition. What is outside this limit can be "felt", but has no " meaning " and cannot therefore be understood. If this is not sophistry, what is ? And the conclusion that Mr. Eliot, for example, is sometimes as " unintelligible " (in the author's sense) as Mr. E. E. Cummings seems an inadequate reward for the. expenditure of so much able and determined application.
I. M. PARSONS.
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