Poet as Critic
By PRISCILLA JENKINS (Colston's Girls' School, Bristol) THE publication of a critical work by a well-known poet raises the question of the importance of the criticism of poetry by poets. It seems that they alone can pre- sume to criticise poetry and surely, having the greatest under- standing of their art, should produce the best criticism. How- ever, the fact remains that a poet's critical work is more interesting for the light it sheds on his own poetry than on the poetry selected for discussion. In proof of this, I can prophesy that The Creative Element* will be more widely read Rimbaud, the admirers of Mr. Spender than by the admirers of Kimbaud, Yeats and the other writers discussed. Poetry and criticism can only be said to be true in that they are true within their author's vision of life. Mr. Spender's criticism approxi- Mates to his private vision of life as much as he does his poetry, se that each elucidates the other more than it elucidates work approximating to the vision of another writer. But although l enjoyed The Creative Element mainly for the light it shed on the author's consciousness of the outer and inner worlds hinted at in much of his own poetry, the book has a wider and more general value. It is one of the most important pieces of recent criticism in that it deals courageously and lucidly with a phase of literature too unresolved for us to see clearly.
Mr. Spender sets out to show how the past seventy or eighty Years have seen the phases of individual vision, anti-vision and 11 return to orthodoxy. The first phase of the ' highly-developed Individual vision' arose from the dissociation of society and art at the end of the nineteenth century, which caused artists to retreat into a private world in order to escape from the destructive element' outside. The next phase came in the Thirties when young artists, including Spender himself, realised that they could not detach themselves from the responsibility Of a falling society to which they belonged. Their failure to reform this society led to disillusion and a reversal of the Individual vision from which they had turned, a feeling that the artist was so much part of the destructive situation that e could not come to terms with it or find peace within himself. Accordingly, certain writers led a return to orthodoxy as an escape from the isolation of the individual world and the despair of anti-vision. Mr. Spender explores the course of these three phases by selecting certain writers who, although very uillerent, all illustrate one or other of the tendencies.
Mr. Spender has turned from anti-vision and feels that the Taiti orthodoxies are unsatisfactory, so he seems most sympa- thetic towards the ' individual visionaries.' With the develop- ment of machinery and the spread of materialism, they felt, Ke Matthew Arnold, that the world was a `darkling plain' utterly devoid of hope and beauty, and their renunciation of Ple religious orthodoxy which gave no help found expression to taudelaire's question: " What under Heaven, has this world ,,'niters to do 7 " Mr. Spender first deals with certain , who believed the answer to be found in their individual nislons, such as Rimbaud's surrender of subjectivity, le deregle- 4-ient des setts, Forster's insistence on personal relations or awrence's idea of sexual fulfilment.
the visions did not, however, convince the world, and 111e next phase was one of anti-vision, which produced works both as Eliot's The Waste Land and George Orwell's 1984, writers was a disciple of Communism, a form of political centers whom the failure of which soon disheartened the young 1:1,te,rs whom it had attracted. Most interesting is Mr. Spender's about supporting Communism were subconscious considera- tions of self-interest.
After the failure of Communist theories a return to ortho- doxy was inevitable. Anti-vision afforded no hope. The private systems of the visionary writers were generally un- acceptable because they were often less satisfying than tradi- tional systems, because they caused their work to become too obscure and because they could not be upheld today. The three orthodoxies which at present influence writing are these: first, the Communist orthodoxy which obliges the writer to become virtually a propagandist for Communism; second, conformity, in England, with some patronising authority such as the BBC or the Arts Council or, in America, with over- intellectual criticism; third, Christian orthodoxy, to which Eliot and Auden have turned and which, according to Mr. Spender, has little practical force in the modern world, since it encourages the individual to occupy himself with his own soul to the exclusion of immediate world problems.
Mr. Spender reveals the value of his book when he explains the effect of criticism, both on the reader and on young poets. He says that much recent criticism "assumes that writing is an intellectual process of making a work which can then be analysed back to its elements by an intellectual process." This weakens the impact of a poem on the reader by providing him beforehand with a stock of preconceived ideas instead of letting the poem communicate directly with his unconscious mind. Also, when some elements of creation are .worked out as though creation were an intellectual process, young poets are misled into believing that they should consciously introduce these elements into their verse, thus producing what Mr. Spender calls ' synthetic poetry.' He asks that criticism should deal more' with the spirit of a work than with analysing the process of its creation. " I think that it should be concerned with other things than intellectual analysis . . . it should be concerned, for example, with deciding whether particular lines and phrases are good. And it should be concerned with the poet's relationship to life. . . . The analysis of the quality of the poet's feeling for life is more significant than that of the influences which enter into his poetry and it is also less harmful."
The great value of this book is that it is not so much a criticism as an exploration. Mr. Spender deals with the rela- tionship of several writers both to life and to their literary background and gives what is more important than an intel- lectual analysis of their work; he explains sympathetically the attitudes and beliefs which made them write as they did. This answers the question of the importance of the criticism of poetry by poets. The importance of a poet's elucidation of the work of other poets lies in the fact, that ho will place the necessity of entering into the feeling of a poem and the outlook of its author before that of attacking it with the weapons of intellectual analysis. Because Mr. Spender has done this his book is a fine piece of criticism that should be read by everyone who loves and writes poetry.
(This article is a prizewinning entry in the Spectator competition for schools.
Miss Rosemary Wood's Middle Article Symphonies in Shirt Sleeves' will be published in a later issue of the 12/6 Spectator.)
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