The Strength of Poetry Oxford Lectures

by Fenton, James

• ISBN13: 9780374528485
• ISBN10: 0374528489
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-04-03
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

Sharp-eyed critiques and appreciations of the essential poets of our time. James Fenton is unique among contemporary writers in having achieved equal distinction as a poet and -- in his reportage and criticism -- as a master of trenchant prose. What is more, he has shown himself a devoted critic of both American and British modern poetry, an explainer of each tradition to the other and to itself. In these lectures, delivered at Oxford (where he succeeded Seamus Heaney as Professor of Poetry from 1994 to 1999), Fenton moves easily from Philip Larkin's laments for the British Empire, to Heaney's uneasy rebellion against it, to Robert Frost's celebrations of American conquest; from W. H. Auden on Shakespeare's homoeroticism to the vexed "feminism" of Elizabeth Bishop; from Wilfred Owen's juvenilia to Marianne Moore's youthful agitation for women's suffrage.In these lectures -- many of which appeared in The New York Review of Books -- Fenton makes sense of the last century in poetry, and explores its antecedents and its legacies, with the lucidity, wit, and gusto that have made his criticism famous.

Author Biography

The celebrated British poet and literary critic James Fenton has been a foreign correspondent and a theater critic and has written about the history of gardens.

Table of Contents

A Lesson from Michelangelo	1	(22)
Wilfred Owen's Juvenilia	23	(22)
Philip Larkin: Wounded by Unshrapnel	45	(20)
Goodbye to All That?	65	(20)
The Orpheus of Ulster	85	(18)
Becoming Marianne Moore	103	(24)
The Many Arts of Elizabeth Bishop	127	(18)
Lady Lazarus	145	(20)
Men, Women, and Beasts	165	(22)
Auden on Shakespeare's Sonnets	187	(22)
Blake Auden and James Auden	209	(20)
Auden in the End	229	(22)
Notes	251	(14)
Sources	265

Excerpts

Chapter One

A Lesson from Michelangelo

In old age, Giambologna used to tell his friends the story of how, as a young man, a Flemish sculptor newly arrived in Rome, he made a model to his own original design, finished it coll'alito , ‘with his breath’--that is to say, with the utmost care, bringing it to the very peak of finish--and went to show it to the great Michelangelo. And Michelangelo took the model in his hands and completely destroyed it, and then remodelled it to his way of thinking, and did so with marvellous skill, so that the outcome was quite the opposite of what the young man had done. And then Michelangelo said to Giambologna: Now go and learn the art of modelling before you learn the art of finishing.

    One supposes from this terrible story that the model must have been made of wax, One supposes that, even on a hot summer's afternoon in Rome, it would have needed a certain amount of working before the wax became malleable enough for Michelangelo to shape according to his own wishes. Who knows, perhaps several minutes were involved. They must have seemed like hours, as the young sculptor watched, and the wrathful old genius, biting his lower lip, squeezed and squashed and pounded away at the model that had been so lovingly finished. And well before the new model began to emerge, and with it the ostensive reason for the exercise--learn to model before you learn to finish--another point was being made: See how I crush all your ambitions and aspirations, see how feeble your work is in comparison with mine, see how presumptuous you were even to dare to cross the threshold-- Thus I destroy you!

    There were compensations, of course, for the young Giambologna. He had walked in with a sample of his juvenilia, and he had left carrying a vibrant little Michelangelo. You might say that he was lucky the master had thought him worthy of the lesson, even if the lesson had to be delivered in such a devastating way. You might say this. Or you might argue that the ostensive lesson was only a pretext for the destruction of the young man's work.

    There is no such thing as the artistic personality--not in poetry, not in the visual arts. Michelangelo's personality was just one of the colourful range on offer. He was paranoid about his productions, keeping his drawings secret not only from his contemporaries who might include potential plagiarists, but also from posterity itself. As his days drew to a close he made two large bonfires, and not a drawing or cartoon was found in his studio after his death. And this paranoia extended to his relations with other artists. He did not ‘bring on young talent’. He appears to have surrounded himself deliberately with no-hopers, and it was easy to imagine it was the skill, not the shortcomings, of Giambologna that drove him into such a rage.

    But you don't have to be like that to be a great artist, or a great poet. If Michelangelo was both, so apparently, was Leonardo, of whom Vasari tells us that, in addition to his gifts as a musician, he was ‘the most talented improviser in verse of his time’. We are told by one scholar that while ‘Michelangelo jealously guarded his artistic property against other artists, it was not in keeping with Leonardo's nature to trouble himself to preserve the authorship of the wealth of ideas which poured out of him’, that he was

amiable by nature, communicative and ready to be of help ... when he turned to the greater themes of painting or sculpture, he was interested above everything else in the solution of some fundamental problem; when he had succeeded to his own satisfaction, perhaps only theoretically, he liked to leave its execution to others; and what happened further to the work of art seems to have troubled him but little, much less did it occur to him to sign it. He was so independent and had so little vanity that in the execution of his work the identity of the patron had not the slightest influence with him.

    And yet there were, as Vasari makes clear, limits to Leonardo's lack of vanity: he did not tolerate insulting behaviour, he could not stand a foolish, ignorant patron, and he couldn't bear to remain in the same city as Michelangelo. Nor Michelangelo with him. So one went off to Rome, and the other to the court of the King of France, and thereby they put between themselves about as great a distance as they possibly could, without falling off the edge of what they deemed the civilized world.

    But it does not follow from this that genius always repels genius. Verrocchio presents a further type; a teacher who was happy to surround himself with talent, who trained Lorenzo di Credi and loved him above all others. Verrocchio it was who took on the young Leonardo and who famously decided to renounce painting when he recognized that Leonardo's angel in the Baptism outshone his own work. He was ashamed to have been out-painted by a mere boy. But if this renunciation seems hysterical, I would say it is less so in Verrocchio's case than it would have been in others. Verrocchio had plenty of other fish to fry. He had begun life as a goldsmith. In Rome, he

saw the high value that was put on the many statues and other antiques being discovered there, and the way the Pope had the bronze horse set up in St John Lateran, as well as the attention given to even the bits and pieces, let alone the complete works of sculpture, that were being unearthed every day.

So he decided to give up being a goldsmith and would be a sculptor instead. And when he had won honour as a sculptor so that ‘there was nothing left for him to achieve’, he turned his hand to painting.

    I take these stories about artists, from Baldinucci and Vasari, because they date from a period when it appears that one could acknowledge straightforwardly motives of which we would today be obscurely ashamed. Verrocchio observes that there is much honour to be gained in the field of sculpture, so he becomes a sculptor, and when he feels he has won the honour that is going, he turns to painting with the same motive, but when he sees his way blocked by Leonardo he turns back to sculpture again. There is something equable about this temperament and something generous about the recognition of which it was capable. But this generosity was far from typical of its time and place. It was noteworthy. It was a cause célèbre.

    Otherwise one feels that the Italy these artists worked in was a place of the most vicious rivalry and backbiting, manoeuvrings for commissions, angling for patronage, plots, triumphs, and disappointments. You had to wait literally for years to be paid. If your work was deemed ugly, you soon learnt about it from lampoons or pasquinades. You got stabbed in the back. Anonymous denunciations for sodomy would arrive, as regular as parking tickets.

    Since your work, standing, and honour were all bound together, the award of a grand commission to a friend or rival would be a devastating blow. It would make you rethink your life, as--and this is the last of the Vasarian exempla--Brunelleschi and Donatello were forced to do when Ghiberti won the famous competition for the Florence Baptistery doors. The contest had taken a year. When the entries were exhibited, it was clear to the two friends that Ghiberti's work was better than theirs, and so they went to the consuls and argued that Ghiberti should get the commission. And for this, Vasari says, ‘they deserved more praise than if they had done the work perfectly themselves. What happy men they were! They helped each other, and they found pleasure in praising the work of others. What a deplorable contrast is presented by our modern artists who are not content with injuring one another, but who viciously and enviously rend others as well!’

    So Vasari praises the two artists, and he is not sentimental either, for he goes on to relate how the consuls asked Brunelleschi, who had clearly come a very good second, whether he would cooperate with Ghiberti on the doors, but Brunelleschi said no, since ‘he was determined to be supreme in some other art rather than merely be a partner or take second place’. Nor was this a passing fit of pique, although both artists eventually did return to Florence and did help Ghiberti. Perhaps the strength of their sense of failure may be gauged from the fact that Donatello, who had not done so well, took a year away from Florence, whereas Brunelleschi, the honourable runner-up, took at least five, and when he did return, he did so principally as an architect.

    It's not enough to fail. You have to come to feel your failure, to live it through, to turn it over in your hand, like a stone with strange markings. You have to wake up in the middle of the night and hear it whistling around the roof, or chomping in the field below, like some loyal horse--My failure, my very own failure, I thought I'd left it behind in Florence, but look, it's followed me here to Rome. And the horse looks up at you in the moonlight and you feel its melancholy reproach. This is after all the failure for which you were responsible. Why are you neglecting your failure?

    Many people live in such horror of failure that they can never embark on any great enterprise. And this inability to get going in the first place is the worst kind of failure because there is truly no way out. You can cover up. You can hide behind a mask of exquisite sensibility. You can congratulate yourself on the fact that your standards are so high that no human effort could possibly match up to them. You can make yourself unpleasant to your contemporaries by becoming expert on their shortcomings. In the end, nothing is achieved by this timidity.

    Or you can permit yourself one failure in life, and devote your remaining days to mourning. ‘Alas, alas, the critics panned my play.’ ‘When was this, friend?’ ‘In 1894!’ This failure, it would seem, has been kept like a trophy, lovingly polished and always on display. But for a productive life, and a happy one, each failure must be felt and worked through. It must form part of the dynamic of your creativity.

    The judgement on Donatello's competition entry was: Good design, poor execution. Donatello could decipher that from a message saying: You are not yet fully formed as an artist; you must study. But the message received by Brunelleschi was: You will never be as good as Ghiberti. This was a hard blow. Brunelleschi did what he felt necessary--sold a small farm and, with Donatello, walked down to Rome. And there something happened to them which I hope will happen to any poet reading this. Failure rewarded them a thousandfold.

    For they came to a place, a sort of Land of Green Ginger, where every answer to every urgent enquiry lay literally at their feet. This, for a poet, would be like discovering voice, technique, and infinite subject matter, fresh and unused, and finding them all in a flash. The ruins of Rome were fresh and unused. You pulled back a caper bush and there lay an architrave. You peered behind the pigpen, and there was a sarcophagus. You dug a little and there was a bust, a capital, a herm.

    And so they dug and drew and made measurements of the astonishing buildings all around them, and they went without food, and they got filthy, and people decided they must be geomancers in search of treasure. Which wasn't far wrong. For the secrets of the classical orders were revealing themselves, and the lost technology of the ancient world. But all this time Brunelleschi never revealed to Donatello--especially not to Donatello--the scope of his ambition to revive the classical art of architecture and make that his bid for fame. They were friends. They were rivals. For the project to be worthwhile, it had to be the means whereby Brunelleschi would defeat not only Ghiberti, but also Donatello, his best friend from the Salon des Refusés.

    Why should artistic ambition be like that? Why should a sculptor, a poet, feel the need to be the unique object of admiration, to create around himself an illusion of being quite the only pebble, the only boulder on the beach? Why should uniqueness itself be so closely involved with our definition of a work of art, so that we expect every performance to be unique, every hand, every voice, every gesture?

    Without looking too far for an answer, we might say our efforts in the direction of art have something to do with a moment, or a period, in which we felt or knew ourselves to be unique. (I mean, normally speaking. We are not piglets. We weren't born in a litter.) Dandled on the lap we were unique, when our parents taught us all the things we could do with our lips and our limbs. And this was a time of pure inventiveness. Everything we did was hailed as superb. We leapt up and down and our innards went wild with surprise. And the palms of our hands were beaten together. We learnt about rhythm and we learnt new ways of making a noise, and every noise we made was praised. And we learnt how to walk, and all eyes were upon us, the way they never would be again.

    Because there follows the primal erasure, when we forget all those early experiences, and it is rather as if there is some mercy in this, since if we could remember the intensity of such pleasure it might spoil us for anything else. We forget what happened exactly, but we know that there was something, something to do with music and praise and everyone talking, something to do with flying through the air, something to do with dance.

    And during this period of forgetting we have been forced to take a realistic view of the world, and to admit that there are other people in it besides ourselves and our adoring audience. And in our various ways of coping with this fact we form the basis of our personality. And one will say through his art: There can be only me--the rest being counterfeits. And another will say: There is me, and my best friend, and we are the best. And a third version would be: There is me and my best friend, who (but don't tell him) isn't as good as me.

    Auden wrote a wonderful thing to Stephen Spender in 1942--it is quoted in Auden's Juvenilia --when he said: ‘You (at least I fancy so) can be jealous of someone else writing a good poem because it seems a rival strength. I'm not, because every good poem, of yours say, is a strength, which is put at my disposal.’ And he said that this arose because Spender was strong and he, Auden, was weak, but this was a fertile weakness.

    And it would indeed be a source of fertility to be blessed with that attitude both to the living and to the dead, so that everybody's good poem is a source of strength to you, and the corpus of published poetry lies before you as the ruins of Rome appeared to Brunelleschi. One associates Auden's luck in this regard with his abiding conviction that in any gathering he was always the youngest person in the room.

    An extreme case of the opposite attitude would be that of Wordsworth in old age, at least the attitude that Carlyle claimed to detect:

I got him upon the subject of great poets, who I thought might be admirable equally to us both; but was rather mistaken, as I gradually found. Pope's partial failure I was prepared for; less for the narrowish limits visible in Milton and others. I tried him with Burns, of whom he had sung tender recognition; but Burns also turned out to be a limited inferior creature, any genius he had a theme for one's pathos rather; even Shakespeare himself had his blind sides, his limitations:--gradually it became apparent to me that of transcendent unlimited there was, to this Critic, probably one specimen known, Wordsworth himself! He by no means said so, or hinted so, in words; but on the whole it was all I gathered from him in this considerable tête-à-tête of ours; and it was not an agreeable conquest. New notion as Poetry or Poet I had not in the smallest degree got; but my insight into the depth of Wordsworth's pride in himself had considerably augmented;--and it did not increase my love of him; though I did [not] in the least hate it either, so quiet was it, so fixed, un appealing, like a dim old lichened crag on the wayside, the private meaning of which, in contrast with any public meaning it had, you recognized with a kind of not wholly melancholy grin .

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Strength of Poetry by James Fenton. Copyright © 2001 by Salamander Press Ltd.. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.