On English Poetry. Robert Graves
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compose a central theme of Poetry not to be found in the detachable parts, and this theme is a study of the interactions of the ethical principles of opposing tribes or groups. In the Iliad, for instance, the conflict is not only between the Trojan and Greek ideas, but between groups in each camp. In the Odyssey it is between the ethics of sea-wandering and the ethics of the dwellers on dry land. I would be inclined to deny the Beowulf as an epic, describing it instead as a personal allegory in epical surroundings. The Canterbury Tales are much nearer to an English Epic, the interacting principles being an imported Eastern religion disguised in Southern dress and a ruder, more vigorous Northern spirit unsubdued even when on pilgrimage.
The words of a song do not necessarily show in themselves the emotional conflict which I regard as essential for poetry, but that is because the song is definitely a compound of words and music, and the poetry lies in this relation. Words for another man’s music can hardly have a very lively independent existence, yet with music they must combine to a powerful chemical action; to write a lyric to conflict with imaginary music is the most exacting art imaginable, and is rather like trying to solve an equation in x, y and z, given only x.
I wonder if there are as many genuine Muses as the traditional nine; I cannot help thinking that one or two of them have been counted twice over. But the point of this section is to show the strong family likeness between three or four of them at least.
III
POETRY AND PRIMITIVE MAGIC
ONE may think of Poetry as being like Religion, a modified descendant of primitive Magic; it keeps the family characteristic of stirring wonder by creating from unpromising lifeless materials an illusion of unexpected passionate life. The poet, a highly developed witch doctor, does not specialize in calling up at set times some one particular minor divinity, that of Fear or Lust, of War or Family Affection; he plays on all the emotions and serves as comprehensive and universal a God as he can conceive. There is evidence for explaining the origin of poetry as I have defined it, thus:—Primitive man was much troubled by the phenomenon of dreams, and early discovered what scientists are only just beginning to acknowledge, that the recollection of dreams is of great use in solving problems of uncertainty; there is always a secondary meaning behind our most fantastic nightmares. Members of a primitive society would solemnly recount their dreams to the wise ones of the clan and ask them to draw an inference. Soon it happened that, in cases of doubt, where the dream was forgotten and could not be recalled, or where it was felt that a dream was needed to confirm or reverse a decision, the peculiarly gifted witch doctor or priestess would induce a sort of self-hypnotism, and in the light of the dream so dreamed, utter an oracle which contained an answer to the problem proposed. The compelling use of rhythm to hold people’s attention and to make them beat their feet in time, was known, and the witch doctor seems to have combined the rhythmic beat of a drum or gong with the recital of his dream. In these rhythmic dream utterances, intoxicating a primitive community to sympathetic emotional action for a particular purpose of which I will treat later, Poetry, in my opinion, originated, and the dream symbolism of Poetry was further encouraged by the restrictions of the taboo, which made definite reference to certain people, gods and objects, unlucky.
This is not to say that verse-recital of laws or adventures or history did not possibly come before oracular poetry, and whoever it was who found it convenient that his word stresses should correspond with beat of drum or stamp of feet, thereby originated the rhythm that is common both to verse and to poetry. Verse is not necessarily degenerate poetry; rhymed advertisement and the memoria technica have kept up the honest tradition of many centuries; witty verse with no poetical pretensions justifies its existence a hundred times over; even the Limerick can become delightful in naughty hands; but where poetry differs from other verse is by being essentially a solution to some pressing emotional problem and has always the oracular note.
Between verse, bad poetry and fake poetry, there is a great distinction. Bad poetry is simply the work of a man who solves his emotional problems to his own satisfaction but not to anybody else’s. Fake poetry, the decay of poetry, corresponds exactly with fake magic, the decay of true magic. It happens that some member of the priestly caste, finding it impossible to go into a trance when required, even with the aid of intoxicants, has to resort to subterfuge. He imitates a state of trance, recalls some one else’s dream which he alters slightly, and wraps his oracular answer in words recollected from the lips of genuine witch doctors. He takes care to put his implied meaning well to the fore and the applicants give him payment and go away as well pleased with their money’s worth as the readers of Tupper, Montgomery and Wilcox with the comfortable verses supplied them under the trade name of “Poetry.”
Acrostics and other verses of wit have, I believe, much the same ancestry in the ingenious double entendres with which the harassed priestesses of Delphi insured against a wrong guess.
IV
CONFLICT OF EMOTIONS
THE suggestion that an emotional conflict is necessary for the birth of true poetry will perhaps not be accepted without illustrative instances. But one need only take any of the most famous lines from Elizabethan drama, those generally acknowledged as being the most essential poetry, and a battle of the great emotions, faith, hope or love against fear, grief or hate, will certainly appear; though one side may indeed be fighting a hopeless battle.
When Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is waiting for the clock to strike twelve and the Devil to exact his debt, he cries out:
That Time may cease and midnight never come
O lente, lente currite noctis equi.
Scholastic commentators have actually been found to wonder at the “inappropriateness” of “Go slowly, slowly, coursers of the night,” a quotation originally spoken by an Ovidian lover with his arms around the mistress from whom he must part at dawn. They do not even note it as marking the distance the scholar Faustus has travelled since his first dry-boned Latin quotation Bene disserere est finis logices which he pedantically translates:
Is, to dispute well, Logicke’s chiefest end.
Far less do they see how Marlowe has made the lust of life, in its hopeless struggle against the devils coming to bind it for the eternal bonfire, tragically unable to find any better expression than this feeble over-sweetness; so that there follows with even greater insistence of fate:—
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