Dear Charles,

 

I found your post (see below) quite fascinating and self-assured.
I wish, however, that you could help me out by actually defining
how you separate verse from poetry. If, as you say, it is not a
question of quality (what is good or bad), there must be other
defining characteristics. It's simply not a distinction I've
encountered before.

 

Matthew Roth

 

Dear Matthew, and others,

 

I think Frost was striving to make this distinction in his essay The Figure a Poem Makes, 1939. As I tried to say, it's the difference between craft and art. But I fully agree that it's certainly not an easy thing to pin down. There's always the Housman test, but that's very subjective of course. I misquoted Johnson, I'm afraid. He likened poetry to light, saying it was easy to recognize light when you saw it, but that it was very difficult to tell WHAT it was.

 

Re good and bad poetry. Some of Dylan Thomas is fine poetry; some of it less fine, but all of it is poetry. Much against my will I'm obliged to admit that Pound wrote poetry, but I find large chunks of him appallingly bad: quite horrible in fact. On this point I am in total agreement with Robert Graves, who had many strong opinions on the nature of poetry. In my view William Empson offers a wonderful analysis and introduction to poetry, per se. I've also found Elizabeth Drew pretty helpful. Quiller-Couch has a few points, but he reduces poetry to syntactical inversion, which has quite gone out of the window, these days.

 

Re Pound: in his essay, it seems to me that Frost is distancing himself from Pound, without explicitly naming his former comrade-in-arms. The reference to sadly neglected Lola LaMotte Iddings as Lolita can be found in a memoir written by her brother --- I think someone may already have mentioned that on this list. Her brother was a noted geologist, I believe.

 

In answer to Stan Kelly-Bootle, I would say that I'd already addressed the question of blotting lines, and so forth. It is little or nothing to to do with whether Dylan Thomas thumbed his thesaurus, or whether Keats wrote and re-wrote his lines. Keats transformed A thing of beauty is a constant joy into A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. Perhaps that was what Frost was talking about when he said a poem may be worked over. I think what he was getting at was the essential initial spontaneity that a genuine poem requires. Shakespeare was in a hurry, and had deadlines to meet. He wasn't writing for the printed page, or setting his words in concrete. Others do have that interest in their bids for immortality. Keats was terrified that his name would be writ in water.

 

Housman's stature as both scholar and poet is a good point, although I would contend that he looms far larger as a poet than as a scholar. There are exceptions to every generalisation, as we all know. Besides which, he was always somewhat ouside the box. I seem to remember that he came down with a distinctly poor degree.

 

Peter Dale's comment that the fact that a few of Shakespeare's sonnets may not be poetry of the highest  "does not alter the general judgement of modern taste that the sequence constitutes an extraordinary achievement of sustained poetical intensities" is, in my view, absolutely right. I tried to make that point in my reply to Brian Boyd.

 

I would certainly also agree with Evelyn Waugh that Pale Fire the poem is "a jolly good composition in its own right." I'm a bit doubtful about agreeing that it is "no parody or pastiche", and would say that the jury is still out on that one. His references to Kinbote's wonderful footnotes, which for me constitute the utter uniqueness and brilliance of this book, seem to me understandable (given the sort of man Waugh was and recognizing the underlying element of professional jealousy). "Too clever by half" is a typically English judgemental put-down. It was used against Shaw and Empson, and English disapproval of "cleverness" is enshrined in Kipling's If.

 

Many apologies for the note of "self-assurance" Matthew refers to. Already at the tender age of 17 or 18 my headmaster was warning me that I might be somewhat opinionated,  and other masters were telling me I was in danger of becoming a dilettante. I have been sufficiently chastised by life during the last 50 years to be ready to wash my mouth out, and preface every assertion with imho. Please take this as read.

 

One point I would like to make about VN's writing. A fundamental reason that his works are so intensely enjoyable and uplifting (imho) is that he has a fundamental sense of humour that is quite lacking in other revered figures of the C20th: Joyce, Mann, O'Neill, Arthur Miller --- I haven't read enough of Faulkner. As an English poet remarked as early as the 1730s: Life's a jest and all things show it. For the Americans, and I apologize for saying this to the Americans on this list: Life is real, Life is earnest. European culture has wearied of this youthful vigour (imho). Again, cf Yeats. It may be the reason VN returned to Europe. There were no doubt also tax advantages.

 

One more thing. I was entertained to discover, courtesy of Google, that a book entitled Differential Geometry, Calculus of Variations, and Their Applications, 1985, by Themistocles M. Rassias, George M. Rassias, makes sustained reference to Frost's essay (on Page 103) in discussing the relationship between science and art. Unfortunately I'm barred from lifting the passage, and I'm not about to buy the paperback, $96 at its cheapest. At least, not just at present. Koestler's Act of Creation I have also found to be a good read.