Another highlight of the BBC's marking of the centenary was Andrew Motion showing up on Radio 3 the previous Sunday morning to add some of his finely modulated thoughts on Dylan. I was particularly struck by his reference to Seamus Heaney's Oxford lecture in The Redress of Poetry which captured precisely what needs to be said.
Since the poets of the 1950's reverted to their common sense, empirical approach in reaction against Dylan's somewhat large gesturing rhetoric, his reputation has been somewhat reduced. Most poets have not done it quite like that since but some 'redress' is always required to balance the action and reaction. One of the better critiques of Thomas I have was the roughly contemporary essay by our old schoolteacher, Linden Huddlestone, but he wasn't in a position like Heaney to see the poems from our current perspective.
Heaney was a brilliant reader, critic and essayist. Such sensitive and nuanced reading and the facility to then explain it back again is a rare talent. Looking through the essay, I'm sure the line Motion drew our attention to was,
Imaginative force has moved a load of inchoate obsession into expressed language: something intuited and reached for has had its contours and location felt out and made manifest.
This is a propos some of the early poems like The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower. Heaney is not blind to the widely accepted shortcomings of the Thomas oeuvre but seems to put them in context with consummate consideration and doesn't try to defend the currently indefensible in the later poems but makes a special exception for the masterpiece, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. This is precisely an expression of where Dylan belongs in our appreciation now but it takes a critic of Heaney's power to put it how we need it to be put.
But it led me to wonder if he hasn't provided us with a further scale on which to set poets, another way to compare and contrast. We might have previously identified two polarities of Classical and Romantic and set poems or poets on a scale that ran between them but more specfic and meaningful labels for the ends of this spectrum might be to identify the balance between pure 'intuition' and to what degree it is 'made manifest'. The usual suspects might be Keats, Wordsworth and Blake on the intuitive side and Larkin, Gunn and hopefully John Donne among those that make it manifest.
It's possible that aspects of Modernism, with Dylan as a third generation Modernist, made the inchoate more fashionable, with poets like Geoffrey Hill finding it necessary to insist that poetry should be difficult. By all means it is an option but it isn't a rule, it's not a part of a definition of what poetry is. Although if a poem leaves nothing to wonder about then it is unlikely to remain of interest for long. But I'm not convinced that some of the latest contemporary poets aren't sliding deliberately back towards an over emphasis on intuition although they can remain nameless here.
Personally, I'd prefer the poet to have done the hard work by making their inchoate obsession manifest for us. That is why they are a poet. It seems a bit presumptuous of them if they think we are really so interested in them that we are going to do their job for them. If I want a puzzle, as John Fuller describes in his Who is Ozymandias, then I don't turn to a book of poems, I know there will be crosswords in the paper at the weekend. But I'm glad the centenary has provided the opportunity to get Dylan right. I didn't enjoy feeling that he was to be derided as a passing fashion, all bluster and overblown, empty wordplay. I always secretly wanted to say I quite liked him.
And thanks to Andrew Motion for pointing me to Heaney's lecture, I've had a job done for me that I probably wasn't capable of doing for myself.
Poetry is a broad church. It doesn't benefit from being divided into factions. The avant garde are welcome but must realize that they are nothing special, they are really just a part of a mainstream that is wider than they knew. Most of which I've offered as my opinion here more than once before.
