The Pleasures of Clarity

This article by Edwin Morgan is taken from Lines Review number 9, August 1955, edited by Sydney Goodsir Smith and published by Callum Macdonald, with kind permission from Tessa Ransford.

It is not too easy to defend an interest in the clarity of poetry. The advocates of clarity are very often muddle-headed; or reactionary, or pusillanimous. A man may like his poetry to be clear only because he cannot conceive that any intellectual effort should be demanded of him in the reading of it. A critic will usually feel justified in attacking the idea of clear poetry because he knows that in fact the Ella Wheeler Wilcoxes of the world tend to be perfectly clear while the Shakespeare and Dantes are frequently difficult and sometimes obscure. The literary historian will ask why there is no first-rate literary criticism of Chaucer or Burns: does this not prove, he will say, that clarity of utterance can give you a big popular reputation without helping at all to settle the question of whether you are really a major poet?

Obviously it would be ridiculous to suggest that all poetry should be as clear as some of the best poems have been (e.g. ‘Testament of Cresseid‘, Wordsworth’s ‘Michael,’ Pushkin’s ‘Yevgeny Onegin’). No one is going to give up Dylan Thomas or Boris Pasternak or Hart Crane just because lips are pursed by Lord Dunsany or Zhdanov or Albert Ralph Korn. Equally, one will admit that poetry may become too clear, as is perhaps the fault in Burn’s ‘Court of Equity,’ Wordsworth’s ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill,’ Randall Jarrell’s ‘Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,’ or Jean Genet’s ‘Le Condamé à Mort.’ Yet when all this is said, it remains true that the last half-century has fostered certain trends of belief about poetry which are dangerously near the assumption I would principally challenge: that the more ambiguous or complexly layered the meaning of a poem, the better that poem is. Metaphysical and Symbolist poets have exerted on the most contemporary readers and critics the sort of influence that has sooner or later to be combated by something less titillating, less deckle-edged, less inviting to analysis and the semi-aesthetic ratioination of our Burkes, Blackmurs, and Brookses. The critical atmosphere which has allowed intelligent persons to suspect that Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’ may be the best poem ever written has, it seems to me, many questions to answer. ‘The Windhover’ is undoubtedly a fine poem, but are we justified in this initial assumption that its value can only be enhanced, and not shaken, by the ambiguities that are quite inherent in its ‘interpretation’? Eliot’s ‘A Cooking Egg’ is even more notorious, if less important; is this egg merely a hard nut to crack, or was it cracked in the cooking? And what about Empson? And Wallace Stevens? They cannot be put in a nutshell. Can poetry?

A poem is an attempt to bring something into the light. Its object is some kind of illumination, first for the poet as he writes it and then for his readers or hearers. What is illuminated may be the tiniest facet of personal experience (Browning’s ‘Parting at Morning’) or the universe (Lucretius’s ‘De Rerum Natura‘). All we ask is that the illumination be genuine; we want to see what it is that the poet is setting before us, and we want to relate it to our own knowledge and experience. We are ready to have both our knowledge and our experience expanded by the poet, though we reserve the human right to check the truth and the usefulness of his information and also to judge the value of the experience he presents by whatever standards are available to us. These reservations may not be exercised, if the first impact of the poem is so startling as to anaesthetize intelligence or virtue, or if the reader is merely seeking a special kind of psychological (and even physical) stimulus which only poetry can give. In both instances, it is poets themselves who are most liable to read poetry in this sort of way, and they will commonly put up with a great deal of what the ordinary reader would call obscurity, because to poets obscurity can give as much pleasure as clarity. I have no doubt that Shakespeare was fascinated by the devious and knarry Chapman, though as a critic he would not have been devious in sometimes rapping Chapman’s knarry knuckles. This is where the ordinary reader and the critic have on occasion to join forces against the poet, since the poet has a tendency to be rather anarchic once he is outside the world of his own poetry. Any poem that begins ‘Polyphiloprogenitive’ is a bait on which will rush to be hooked, but those who do not love words quite so much will perhaps hang back and reconnoitre. A continual state of tension may be said to exist therefore between the poet and the public in the matter of communication and comprehensibility. The important thing is not to try to decide who is right, but to look broadly at the whole circumstances of the time and to see where the weight must be laid to restore balance. Doing this, one sees that there is a need for more clarity.

My fable is extravagant, but I think it is clear. Experimentation, strangeness and shock, wit and allusion, the analytic and polysemantic – all are valuable, but can be taken too far and can become too doctrinal. The ‘modern experiment,’ as such, was brought to an end by the Second World War, but the wit, the allusiveness, and the analytic turn of mind still remain. In America, the experimentation has resulted in a poetry of very rich and flexible technical accomplishment but almost devoid of warmth, of urgency, and of song. English poetry, in its main post-war movement, has made concessions of clarity in an insolent sort of way: a clarity in camera. The hard, dry, tough, intermittently witty Davie-Wain-Gunn grid system hums with messages for the sophisticated, the cynical, and the very literate. These are the metrists; but there is probably more hope in the loose and shambling visits of James Kirkup to the observatory, the operating theatre, and the kitchen sink.

In Scotland, we have sometimes been criticized for ‘letting the modern movement pass us by.’ We should listen to such critisism if it means that we are unaware of what is going on in the international world of poetry, but that has hardly been the case. Quite apart from the ‘Apocalyptic’ interests of Norman MacCaig and J.F. Hendry, or the influence of Joyce and Dylan Thomas on W.S. Graham, it is obvious enough that A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle and Under the Eildon Tree are ‘modern’ poems in overall conception. The significant differences between the general English (or American) and the general Scottish point of view seem to e (i) greater Scottish suspicion of imagery that is highly Metaphysical or Symbolist (in MacCaig and Muir we have the special Scottish versions of these qualities), and (ii) greater Scottish dislike of lifting both feet from the ground (we have no Scottish equivalent of the form of The Waste Land or The Cantos, with its use of broken sentences and its substitution of juxtaposition for sequentiality).

The Scottish attitude to ’clarity’ is in general more sympathetic than the English, and it may run dangerously near ‘simplicity’ and the kailyard. It is good for it, therefore, to be tempered by intellect. Clear does not imply simple, though the one may help the other. Hugh MacDiarmid’s remarkable poem on the guinea worm (‘To my Friend Miss Ruth Pitter,’ in The Voice of Scotland, January 1955) describes in technical detail a complex and little-known natural process (the birth of these parasitic worms inside the human body) and goes on to draw a comparison between this and the creative activity of the poet; the poem is a bristler, and scarcely ‘simple,’ but its meaning is beautifully lucid. In a different way, a poem may be clear even when it has at its heart a human experience that is not easy to describe – if the author feels that it is important that it should be clear. ‘The Transparent Prisoner’ by Burns Singer, a poem about the mind and faith of a prisoner of war (broadcast by the B.B.C. and printed in The Listener, 28 October 1954), conveys successfully both the physical environment – the guns, the desert, the sweat, the prison hut, the coal-mine – and the sudden vision of clear-sighted acceptance that floods the prisoner at the rock face:

And a third kind of clarity may appear in the work of a poet who is not all devoted to this quality; gaining in poignance from the contrast. W.S. Graham’s ‘Letter VI’ (in The Nightfishing, Faber, 1955) is a particularly attractive quiet land-interlude between sea-roar and sea-roar. The poet and the girl have met on the moor in April:

A sweet clearness became.
The Clyde sleeved in the firth
Reached and dazzled me.
I moved and caught the sweet
Courtesy of your mouth.
My breath to your breath.

A poem may also be looked on as an instrument of knowledge though this is an unfashionable idea. In such poetry, it may be easier to be lucid than to be poetic, and the writer must often decide which is for him the most important thing. A poem with as many stark unirradiated facts in it as Hugh MacDiarmid’s In Memoriam James Joyce is hard to ‘lift’ emotionally, yet for all that we may feel it to be nearer the central poetic necessities of our time than verse which is successfully lyrical but feeble and aimless in respect of its subject-matter. Similarly, one should not despise the communicative and ‘edificatory’ value of mere contemporaneity: the use, as poetic counters, of ordinary contemporary facts, things, ideas, and names. In a period of rapid and violent change it becomes very difficult to disentangle what we still call the ‘eternal’ or the ‘universal’ from the fleeting and the modish, and for this reason most poets have not made or have given up the attempt. This, I am convinced, is a serious defection. Whatever may have been true in the past, I am quite certain that our own period needs poetry which reflects it, and reflects it clearly. Looking to the left and to the right, I see Thurso Berwick and James Urquhart holding up their reflecting-glasses; I don’t see the same picture, but what matters perhaps is that I see unmistakable references to the Dniepro, the Bolsheviks, the world of passports and warships (in Fowrsom Reel, Caledonial Press, 1949), and to ecclesiastical cartels, flying saucers, and ‘that knock-on-the-door-at-three-in-the-morning’ (in The Yellow Door, MacLellan, 1954) – even if we agree with Mr. Urquhart about his ‘cacophonous crotchety rhyme’

There is still place for the pleasures of fantasy, and let us not always be pellucid when we are playful:

Scroggam, my dearie, ruffum!

But let us examine the pleasures of clarity, as Burns and Dunbar did, and Lyndsay, and the ballad-writers. To be happy, poets must be of use; to be of use they must be enjoyed; to be enjoyed they must be understood; to be understood they must say something; to say something they must have something to say; to have something to say they must be men as well as poets; to be men they must care about happiness, in themselves, in their families, and in the world. If there are poets who do not need to be happy, or of use, or enjoyed, or understood, they may nevertheless write poetry. All I say in this article is that it would be good for us if we had more of the former kind.

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