Contemporary wars turn up in unexpected places. In An Arbitrary Light Bulb, a book of verse by Ian Duhig, published in 2024, Gaza finds three mentions in a single poem called “Cecilia Vicuna’s Word and Thread”. Ignorant about art, I googled Vicuna and learnt that she was a Chilean poet and artist. Duhig refers to a poem by Vicuna where she treats the ancient Andean technique of recording information in knotted cords as a metaphor for the connections poems make to think about the etymology of gauze and its possible derivation from Gaza.
As a casual reader of contemporary verse, I was struck by the number of references the poem contained. There were quotations from Vicuna’s poem, a mention of her compatriot, Victor Jara, the singer and poet murdered by Pinochet’s junta, and the unfolding genocide in Gaza. Given the omniscience of search engines, tracking the allusions wasn’t hard and well worth the effort because the poem cohered in my head in a way that it hadn’t before. But the need to work at deciphering the poem also explained why reading poems is a minority taste.
Sometimes, poetic allusions are more obscure. In Agha Shahid Ali’s ghazal, Tonight, there is a couplet that contains three phrases and a word in quotation marks. If you google the first of these, “Fabrics of Cashmere”, you get unhelpful information about the undercoat of pashmina goats. A more intelligently phrased search leads to a long gloss on the poem which explains that the phrases are quotations from an Emily Dickinson poem.
This helped but it left me wondering who the ideal reader of Tonight might have been in the world before Google. The short answer to that question is anyone capable of responding to the music of the poem without worrying about the bits he doesn’t immediately understand. There is, though, a larger question here: how much literary cultivation does a reader have to bring to the business of reading poems and how hard should he be made to work to bone up on the stuff he doesn’t know before the act of reading becomes homework?
Philip Larkin had a categorical answer to this question. In the 1950s, he submitted a statement or credo to the editor of an anthology which went like this: “As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief in ‘tradition’ or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets…” In another place he says: “My objection to the use in new poems of properties or personae from older poems is not a moral one, but simply because they do not work, either because I have not read the poems in which they appear, or because I have read them and think of them as part of that poem and not a property to be dragged into a new poem as a substitute for securing the effect that is desired.”
This is, of course, a deliberately philistine prescription that Larkin himself allowed could be taken too far, but it does explain why his poems are accessible in a way that much contemporary poetry isn’t. When I first read “The Whitsun Weddings”, one of Larkin’s loveliest poems, as an undergraduate, I didn’t know what Whitsun was (it is the holiday weekend seven weeks after Easter, and a popular time for getting married). I could have looked it up, I suppose, but this was in the mid-Seventies, decades before the internet, and taking the trouble of visiting a library to haul out the OED would have made reading feel like work, so I didn’t. Not knowing didn’t get in the way of enjoying the poem and for the most part Larkin’s poems are consistent with his credo: nearly everything you need to respond to them is present in the text of the poems.
But the idea that poems need to dispense with a literary or cultural hinterland, be islands complete in themselves, is not how most modern poets see their task. Geoffrey Hill, a younger contemporary of Larkin’s, devoted the whole of his last lecture as the Oxford Professor of Poetry to attacking Larkin’s dismissal of the poet’s “myth-kitty”. He took as his text one of Larkin’s best-known poems, “Church Going”, and used it to demonstrate to his own complete satisfaction, that it was a weak, pedestrian piece of writing, marred by precisely what his readers valued in Larkin, his genius for conversational insight.
As someone who thinks “Church Going” is a wonderful poem, I enjoyed Hill’s energetic bid to demolish it. He used as his bludgeon one of Charles Williams’ critical insights: bad modern poets often make readers cover as much ground in expressing their thoughts as those readers would themselves in thinking them. Hill took this to mean that the hallmark of the true poet is the ability to distil and compress meaning and feeling in powerful poetic utterance. At one point in the lecture, he argues that poetry at its most powerful is a communion between exceptional writers and exceptional readers. If Larkin is the empirical poet writing out of everyday experience for the lay reader, Hill is the allusive Christian moralist, indifferent to accessibility.
Unlike Larkin and Hill, readers don’t have to choose. The first verse of Yeats’ “The Second Coming” seems to me the most resonant thing ever written, but I read it as a series of gnomic one-liners that sound the better for being mildly obscure. For regular reading, though, I’m on Larkin’s side; I prefer poems that are wholly intelligible.
I don’t know if Nissim Ezekiel admired Larkin’s lucidity, but there is a poem by him titled “Background, Casually” which I read often. In it, he reflects on being a Jew in India and his decision to keep on being a Jew in India. The last stanza is an affirmation, the more powerful for its matter-of-factness.
“I have made my commitments now./ This is one: to stay where I am,/ As others choose to give themselves/ In some remote and backward place./ My backward place is where I am.’
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