The length of a line

As part of my 2008 reading project I chose three poets whose work I wanted to explore further, and decided that they would each get a three month stint on the bedside table (the fourth quarter goes to Shakespeare). Without trying to read through the complete/collected/selected works I would just dip into them from time to time in the hope of adding new poems to my stock of favourites and deepening my understanding of their work.

January to March were allotted to W H Auden and his Selected Poems have duly sat on my bedside table.  Occasionally I dust them; less occasionally I open them.  Sadly, I have not managed to add a single new poem to those I already count as favourites ('Musee des Beaux Arts'; 'In Praise of Limestone'; 'In Memory of W. B Yeats'; 'The Shield of Achilles'; 'September 1, 1939').  For much of the rest of what I’ve read I’ve been defeated by the ballad-like rhythm (eg 'As I walked out one evening';' Miss Gee') or the tongue twisting challenge of work like 'O where are you going said reader to rider'.  I can’t put my finger on it but it's something to do with the length of a line.  I definitely struggle with the short lines.

So although I have enjoyed re-reading the old favourites I have decided to cut my losses and move on early to T S Eliot (who I wanted, of course, to start in April).   Last night I re-read 'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock'.  Is this my absolute favourite poem?  It must be close.  I’ve written before about being haunted by his line ‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons'.

I find it much harder to explain why I like certain poets in preference to others, whereas explaining why I like some novelists more than others is easy by comparison.  Eliot just works for me.  I can’t summarise or explain his work but  I know precisely what it says to me.  However, part of the “poets quarterly” project is to dig deeper, to explore some of the allusions which I vaguely ‘get’ and tease out the ones I haven’t yet seen or felt and to look at some critical commentary.

So it was a delightful coincidence then that the next essay I turned to in Gabriel Josipovici’s wonderful collection The Singer on the Shore was “Listening to the Voice in Four Quartets”.  Josipovici is the perfect critic: always sympathetic to the work under discussion; lucid and jargon free yet concerned with large issues; a close reader able to help the reader explore and enrich meaning in such a gentle and friendly way that you think you’ve done it for yourself.

Here’s an extract where he’s talking about the voice in the first movement of Burnt Norton:

“It sends us back to the beginning with a new understanding: we are beings who exist in time , beings with memories and imaginations; nothing we have done and thought simply disappears or solidifies in to a lump we are forced to carry forever on our backs.  Time and meaning constantly escape us as we move through our lives, but this is a reason for hope as much as for despair.  As Beckett so memorably said of Proust: “Only he who forgets remembers.”  The way Eliot puts it is: ‘If all time is eternally present/All time is unredeemable’, with the corollary that since all time is not eternally present, time is indeed redeemable.  Since we live in time we also live in memory and hope.  We use both wrongly when we use them as a means of escaping the present through nostalgia or apocalyptic yearnings; the right use is to be alive to the present, to see it always as what Walter Benjamin called ‘the time of Now’.  When we do that we realise that neither past nor future is locked into the iron tracks of necessity, that the past can always be transformed and the future holds a wealth of possibilities.  ‘Time past and time future/What might have been and what has been/ Point to one end, which is always present.’ “

I especially love that line “Since we live in time we also live in memory and hope”. 

Comments

[Diana]

1. I LOVE this quarterly poet idea!

2. You dust the books on your bedside table? As if I didn't admire you enough...

[Mark Thwaite]

Yes, the Quarterly Poet is a nice idea -- and a great title for something too!

Great to see the Josipovici quote -- he is, indeed, the perfect critic.

We must all get down on our knees and thank Steve (this-space.blogspot.com) for his tireless promotion of Josipovici over many years.

[Sandra]

I've previously tried keeping a poetry anthology by the bedside but found it too bitty. I wanted to dig deeper this time round though it was tricky limiting the list to three!

I'm sure I would never have encountered Josipovici without Steve's championing of his work, but I am so glad I have: it's a wonderful revelation. Hopefully I'll get round to some of his fiction later in the year.

[Mohtamil]

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is my permenant bedside companion