"Precise and Explicit"... Poetry?

This week I read for the first time W. H. Auden’s poem titled “September 1, 1939.”  Written in the wake of Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland which resulted in the onset of World War II, the poem portrays the uncertainty and anxiety of the day, as well as seemingly conveys certain negative opinions regarding America’s isolationist views at that time and the view of the poet as a voice of truth in culture.  Auden wrote this poem while in New York City, which coupled with its descriptions of the angst felt by the society at that time, is probably why the poem was often quoted and reprinted in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks in 2001.

Peter Steinfels, in a New York Times article printed in December 2001, testifies to the attention the poem was receiving at that time, but he also questions whether or not the attention was appropriate for the occasion.  He tells of a letter submitted to The Times Literary Supplement’s “Letters of New York” section in which the letter’s author claims that the poem is superficial and misleading and includes subtle pro-Communist sentiments and not-so-subtle anti-American ones.  Steinfels also mentions a letter presented in answer to these claims, this letter asserting that much of the poem’s stanzas are simply proclaiming indisputable truths about the human nature and are not negative commentary on the U.S.  He points to this controversy as evidence of the changing cultural climate in America, one which he believes demands “that ideas and language, especially about war and peace but also about religion and moral obligation, be precise and explicit” (13).  Yet he also claims that poetry demands “generosity of spirit” (13), and in so doing, he basically leaves unanswered the question of what the substance and use of poetry today should be.

I guess the question that lingers in my mind while reading this is, What does it really mean that language about war, religion and the like should be “precise and explicit” in today’s culture?  I’m guessing this means that if people have a desire to express their views about one of these weighty subjects, they should do so in a specific and straight-forward manner—just avoid subtlety, avoid embellishment, avoid symbolism of any kind and simply come out with what they wish to convey?  Okay, I understand that the issue some people currently have with Auden’s poem is that it subtly expresses ideas and views that to some aren’t very popular today (and probably weren’t in his day either) and that these ideas appear to be masked to many because of the manner in which he presented them (the author of the first letter mentioned above points to the poem’s “seductive cadences” (13)).  I guess the part I don’t understand is this:  if Auden removed the creativity, the adornment of language, the allusions and the subtlety, and just spit out his views as some today might suggest, what would have happened to the poetry of his poem?  After all, isn’t this what makes poetry… poetry?  Without the imagery, the metaphorical language, the “strangeness” (to borrow from the Formalists) and the mystery, what then separates poetry from prose work?  That it’s written in verses and stanzas?

You know, it’s funny to me that I’m even writing about this.  I’ve never really been a big reader of poetry, and I don’t even now feel this great responsibility to defend it from anyone.  I just read this interesting article, which in all honesty, I may be totally misunderstanding (although it seems to be written in language that is “precise and explicit”), and it got me to thinking.  Is the problem the writer of the first letter has really about the way in which Auden expressed himself, or is the writer’s problem more with the views Auden expressed in his poem (views which Auden later attempted to revise and remove)?  To me, the matter is simple:  Auden was not responding to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and therefore a comparison to me seems a little bit unfair.  He was writing to a culture at the beginning of one of the biggest wars in our history, and he was simply voicing what he was feeling at that time.  He saw himself to be a voice of truth in his time, and so he was writing from that vantage point, whether we today agree with what he wrote.  In fact, we don’t have to agree with him; we don’t even have to read him (unless, of course, it’s an assignment for class).  We do, I believe, need to allow that he had the right to express his opinions in the manner in which he chose to do so, and we must allow that others in our culture today have that same right.  I know in saying this that I am allowing for people to express views I detest in ways that I detest, but if I am allowed to do so, how can I deny others this same privilege?

(And yes, I see the irony in this whole entry:  if Auden can express his views in however he chooses, then the writer of the letter oft mentioned above can also express his views about Auden’s views, Steinfels can express his views about the demands today’s culture has on language, and I can express my views about this whole crazy mess.  So… what was my point exactly?)

Beneath the Surface

So this week I have been reading up on some of the poetry that has been produced within the last ten years or so.  To explain what a strange phenomenon this is for me, I must admit that I haven’t read this much contemporary poetry since I was a grade-schooler addicted to the whimsical poetry of Mr. Shel Siverstein.  (“Boa Constrictor” and “Sick” are still among my favorites!)  Basically I have been looking at 21^st-century poetry to see if I could make a comparison between it and the poetry of the modern era, and much to my delight, I happened upon some poetry that I so enjoyed I didn’t want to stop reading.

The author of this poetry is Billy Collins, American poet who was the Poet Laureate of the U.S. from 2001 to 2003.  To be truthful, I simply wandered into his poetry while trying to figure out who the “big” poets are nowadays.  I just don’t read poetry much anymore, and even when I used to (in small doses), the authors were always dead ones that lived at least 100 years or so before my time.  So I found myself on poets.org where I found Collins’ name at the top of the site’s “Most Popular Contemporary Poets” list.  I first read his poem “Litany,” and from there I was hooked.  From there, I kept reading poem after poem, truly delighted by his light-hearted wit and subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) sarcasm.  I even laughed out loud when reading his poem “Candle Hat,” where he mentions Francisco de Goya “laughing like a birthday cake” while showing his wife his now-famous hat.

Perhaps the heart-warming playfulness found in his verse reminds me of Silverstein a bit; every once in a while I enjoy reading poetry that doesn’t require me to wade through its depths—that doesn’t confound me at every turn of phrase.  Yet in this same vein, Silverstein’s poetry is not the only comparison to be made to Collins’.  A connection can also be made to the poetry of the modern British poet Stevie Smith.  I have also been reading her poetry this week as well, and I see at least one very striking similarity between her writing and that of Collins.  Although they both have written light, fun and playful poems, beneath the surface of much of their poetry lays greater depth and meaning.  Now, don’t get me wrong—they both have written poetry that is simply fun and humorous (see Smith’s “The Englishwoman” and Collins’ “Flames”), but they both also have a wonderful knack for using their light-hearted verse to make a deeper point.  Two poems that do just that and in very similar ways:  “Not Waving but Drowning” by Smith and “Embrace” by Collins, which both speak of people who are not doing as well as they seem to be.

So all in all, I’ve had a pretty enjoyable week in the world of poetry.  And another thing that I thought was kind of interesting:  Stevie Smith illustrated much of her poetry with black and white line drawings much like the illustrations that accompany Silverstein’s own poems.  Well… no wonder I like Smith’s poems!

A "Grimm" Fairy Tale Indeed

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree

In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety

On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained

In the hollow round of my skull.  And God said

Shall these bones live?  shall these

Bones live?

-from section II of “Ash Wednesday” by T. S. Eliot

After I recently read the above lines for the very first time, I couldn’t help but think to myself what an odd and, it must be noted, somewhat horrific image to evoke in a poem that seems to begin as a prayer of sorts.  As I read through the rest of the poem, I continued to contemplate why Eliot would choose to include this picture and what kind of meaning it could have to the poem as a whole.  I caught the whole reference to Ezekiel and the bones allusion (“And God said / Shall these bones live?”), but I still was struggling to put it all together in my mind (not an uncommon occurrence when I read poetry, trust me).  After reading an article by James T. Bratcher about another source Eliot drew upon for this image (in Bratcher’s opinion, the primary source), I think I’ve come to a richer understanding of this section of “Ash Wednesday” and have formulated my own basic interpretation of how this section fits with the overall theme of the poem.

Bratcher asserts that Eliot’s primary source for this section of the poem is the story known as “The Juniper Tree,” number 47 of the over 200 “fairy tales” the Grimm brothers included in their collection Children and Household Tales in the early 1800s.  As I was unfamiliar with this story, I found a link to a translation (listed at the end of this post) and read it from start to finish.  The story features a man and woman very in love but unable to have children.  Eventually, under a juniper tree the woman voices her desire for children and soon after conceives a son.  The tale relates that she is so happy at his birth that she dies, and her husband buries her under the juniper tree.  He eventually marries again and has a daughter with his new wife, who ends up being a pretty bitter stepmother to the son who is not hers.  She feels that the boy is the only thing standing in the way of her daughter receiving the whole inheritance of the father, and she is thus so overcome with hatred for the boy that she ends up killing him… by decapitating him with the lid of a large, heavy chest!  She then devises this scheme to make her little daughter believe that she’s the one who blew his head off, and to cover up his death, the stepmother ultimately chops the boy up and cooks him into a stew… that she then feeds to the unknowing father!  Seriously?  This is a children’s story??  (German children in the 1800s must have had much stronger stomachs than I!)

Anyway, the beauty of this “fairy tale,” in my opinion, comes when the boy’s half-sister, filled with grief, wraps his bones in a silk scarf and lays them under the juniper tree where his mother is buried.  Miraculously, the boy's bones are transformed into a beautiful bird that can mesmerize people with its voice.  The rest of the story involves several other minor characters, a gold chain, red shoes, and a millstone incident that… well, I’ve already said too much; I don’t want to spoil it too much for you if you haven’t already read it. 

At any rate, it is this transformation portion of the tale that directly relates to the story of Ezekiel that I mentioned above (Ezekiel 37) and to section II of “Ash Wednesday.” In Ezekiel 37 we see God take the prophet Ezekiel to a valley filled with dried bones.  God asks Ezekiel in verse three if the bones can live, and He exhorts Ezekiel to prophesy over the bones, which transforms them into a massive living army.  Similarly, "that which had been contained" in the speaker’s bones in “Ash Wednesday” come to life to chirp out their own song.  The whole bones-coming-to-life motif most obviously connects all of these works, but I also believe that these three stories connect on a more indirect level through the theme of resurrection or redemption.  In all three works, the dry bones come to life; they don’t remain dead and dry and useless.  I feel like this speaks to the overall theme of “Ash Wednesday,” in which the speaker, beat down in penitence from the weight of his sin, has come to God in repentance for his unbelief.  In his guilt, he is empty and defeated, eaten up by his sin and basically reduced to a bunch of dry, useless bones.  I believe it is in section II, however, where the speaker hints at the hope of redemption that comes after the sinner is made aware of and repents of his sin.  I believe it is this hope in which the speaker prays in the final section of the poem.

I must say that I do somewhat disagree with Mr. Bratcher in that I believe that section II of “Ash Wednesday” follows the Ezekiel 37 passage more in intent than Grimm’s “The Juniper Tree.”  There are a couple of reasons that I believe this, but as this post is already much longer than I intended, I will reserve my thoughts for another time.

Works Cited:

Bratcher, James T.  “Significance of the Juniper-Tree Story for Eliot’s Ash Wednesday.”  Notes & Queries 58.1 (2011):  110-112.  Web.  Academic Search Complete.  11 Sept. 2011.

Translation of “The Juniper Tree:”  http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm047.html

A Game of Chess

If any of you reading this have ever read T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, you will probably agree that it is not the most easy of reads that poetry has to offer.  Eliot’s constant allusions to and fragments of other works, some in languages other than English, give the poem a disjointed and ambiguous feel and make reading the poem quite sluggish and arduous to say the least.  As I was reading this for the class I am currently engaged in online (Modern British Poetry), one of my assignments was to theorize what Eliot’s intentions might have been in writing so obscurely in this poem.  I answered that I thought he may have been using obscurity to promote a feeling of disillusionment in the reader that mirrored the disillusionment of the time of the poem’s composition—the dawning of the modern age of science and industry, the “death of religion” (as some saw it), and the suffering of the aftermath of the first World War. 

Although I still believe this could have been his intention, I just recently read an article by Caterina Fornero that promotes another theory.  In her article “Chess Is the Game Wherein I’ll Catch the Conscience of the King:  The Metaphor of the Game of Chess in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land,” Fornero suggests that Eliot’s title for the second section of the poem, A Game of Chess, describes how the poem truly functions as a whole.  She explains that Ferdinand De Saussure uses the picture of a game of chess to illustrate how linguistic signs are characterized—their “arbitrariness, oppositional negativity and differentiality” (Fornero, paragraph 9).  She goes on to claim that the obscure fragments and references that Eliot uses throughout the poem create a linguistic system similar to that which Saussure describes.  Because Eliot uses these fragments in ways in which they no longer reflect what they did in their original works (he instead just pastes them piece-meal over the text of the poem), they, like Saussure’s linguistic signs, become arbitrary.  Now, instead of finding meaning in the context of their original texts, these fragments extract their value from their relations to one another within Eliot’s text, and so they exhibit the characteristics of differentiality and oppositional negativity (in that they no longer have a positive identity in themselves but only an identity that comes from how they are relate differentially with other parts of the text).  Fornero says, “The semantic functioning of The Waste Land as a map of intersecting relations is thus a semantic model in its own right” (paragraph 11), and the title of the second section, A Game of Chess, becomes a clue to how the poem functions as a whole.  In fact, she asserts that this title, which is itself a reference from Middleton, is an example of Saussure’s theory in that it functions completely opposite of its original function in Middleton’s works.

Fornero goes on to explain that the illustration of the chess game is somewhat an imperfect analogy for the linguistic system because of the game piece of the King.  The King in the game is an autonomous piece that does not derive its value from its relationship to the other pieces and therefore acts the part of a type of central authority in the game.  She explains, though, that Eliot deals with this issue of the King by citing several images of dead, impotent, or toppled kings throughout The Waste Land.  Of course, in reading this, I immediately began to think of the time in which this poem was composed and how the culture seemed to truly lack a central authority in which the majority of people trusted.  Much of what I have read about this time alludes to how many of the people feel like religion and government had failed them, and they were looking for something in which to put their faith.  The Waste Land certainly embodies this feeling of wandering and uncertainty where a central authority for culture has been overthrown.

I really enjoyed Fornero’s analysis of the title A Game of Chess as it relates to The Waste Land.  I feel like her ideas still mesh well with my own thoughts about the feelings of disillusionment that the poem creates in that the arbitrariness and differentiality of the fragments work to create and push forward this kind of feeling.

Work Cited:

Fornero, Caterina.  “Chess Is the Game Wherein I’ll Catch the Conscience of the King:  The Metaphor of the Game of Chess in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.”  Yeats Eliot Review 22.5 (2005):  2+.  Literature Resources from Gale.  Web.  4 Sept. 2011.