Johnson on Pope

Dr. Johnson esteemed his life of Cowley the best of his Lives and perhaps it does contain some of his most significant commentary on poetry but his lengthy discourse on Pope is better for entertainment, for the sheer joy of reading it and the obvious enthusiasm with which it is written. Much of that is due to its subject, one dare estimate, for no writer can make so much of an ordinary subject as they can an extra-ordinary one and Pope provides all the subject an expansive writer such as Johnson could wish for to expand into. 

The acrimony of Pope's many literary vendettas are pursued to the limit sometimes, more personal than literary and a sport in themselves. They might serve to remind us that poets can be a proud, vain and vituperative lot when they find rivals and that there is less of this knockabout now than there was in the 1960's and 70's which might have been equally energetically engaged in then but went on unnoticed by a wider public, poetry being a backwater of significance only to itself then whereas in the C18th it had a wider audience.

Joseph Addison is an early combatant, their battleground centring on their rival versions of the Iliad rather than Blur and Oasis trading insults and then releasing singles at the same time to, presumably, both benefit from the publicity as well as see who won, which was Blur, surprisingly. Pope's Dunciad, in a similar way, seems to have been popularized by those it satirized,

in which he endeavoured to sink into contempt all the writers by whom he had been attacked, and some others whom he thought unable to defend themselves.

In all this, Johnson finds much raw material from which to derive his telling observations on both human nature and how it is manifested in literary affairs. In his Characters of Men, Pope examined the idea of 'ruling passions', including that,

No man can therefore be born, in the strict acceptation, a lover of money, for he may be born where money does not exist; nor can he be born, in a moral sense, a lover of his country, for society, poltically regulated, is a state contradistinguished from a state of nature...

Dr. Johnson takes exception to that, perhaps anticipating Karl Popper's Falsification Principle, with,

its tendency is to produce the belief of a kind of moral predestination or overruling principle which cannot be resisted

but I say, 'Pope, thou shouldst be living at this hour'. 

In a fracas with the laureate, Colley Cibber, apparently provoked by Pope who quite possibly assumed Cibber to be one of those he thought unable to defend themselves, his victim announces,

his resolution from that time never to bear another blow without returning it, and to tire out his adversary by perseverance if he cannot conquer him by strength.

If the later C17th and the C18th aren't nowadays overly celebrated for their verses by some of us, it is a period rich in aggravation for its own sake. Pope is to get back much of his ill will from Martha Blount, his 'favourite' to who he sent a message only for her to reply,

'What? is he not dead yet?'

 

Johnson says more than he has before about poets taking themselves at their own estimation and how,

The writer commonly believes himself. 

But,

While such ideas are formed they are felt, and self-love does not suspect the gleam of virtue to be the meteor of fancy.

Wow! If I still copied out memorable lines into a book of quotes like I did 45 years ago, that would be straight in.

He makes a distinction between Dryden and Pope that Dryden had better passages but worked less hard on them whereas Pope was always as good as he could be, not sending anything to the press for two years in order to make sure he was happy with it,

Dryden's page is a natural field, rising into inequalities and diversified by the varied exuberance of abundant vegetation; Pope's is a velvet lawn, shaven by the scythe and levelled by the roller.

I suspect I'm a Dryden on those terms but would rather read the critic than the poets in this example. If Johnson doesn't know, he says so which is an example we all might follow but he excels himself by having nailed the big 'what is poetry' question long before many of us tried to say with,

To circumscribe poetry by a definition will only show the narrowness of the definer,

 

He has also quoted Dryden as saying, 'Music is inarticulate poetry' without questioning it deeply enough. One might see what Dryden meant by 'inarticulate'. in that it is wordless, but it's no better than poetry claiming to be 'heightened' language when the likes of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf write prose far more 'heightened' than much that claims to be poetry. Dryden couldn't have been expected to know how articulate Beethoven and Mozart were to be, or even Bach and Handel, but if he found the music to 1700 inarticulate he must have been tin-eared.

Apparently not knowing when to stop, but never being anything less than interesting, Johnson finishes with some close readings of epitaphs by Pope, finding it unnecessary to say in one that the subject is dead and in another lamenting that they are not named in the verses because the epitaph might not always be read on the tomb.

 

Not for the first time, a library book has to be returned but I must have my own copy. The selected Lives of the Poets is thus on order, as is the Selected Essays with its pieces from The Idler and The Rambler. Dr. Johnson will be promoted to have his own, more prominent place on the shelves with those books about him, but not by him, that I already have. The Lives have been a revelation, not so much for the lives themselves but for the industrious, well-organized mind that wrote them, the brilliant prose they are written in and the pure enjoyment of reading them. The low grade poetry magazines by the bedside are only there because I thought I ought to have a look at hem but they are largely awful. I'd be able to reach out and pick up a volume of Dr. Johnson confident of being able to open it anywhere and find him good value. Then, and only then, will we see about Rasellass. It might be any good.  

September Diary

 Late September is, as it often says here, when I really should be back at school. My friend reads Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal and, if it weren't for the latest incarnation of the battiness of our libertarian government, we hope for some sanity.

The interminable days of August seem like they'll never go away although one knows they eventually will but once they have these more lovely and more temperate days immediately zip by and are soon gone.

But with King Alexander being exactly the right horse to set up the autumn campaign with at Warwick yesterday, we can look forward to some interesting and, let's think, survivable sport while books worth reading flow in, through and either onto the shelves or back to the library.

In a moment of madness, just because I heard a Shangi-La's track I didn't know, I bought the CD. That might not be a long-term top of the playlist prospect but I'll like having such a thing.

And so, one would have it no other way. This is the promised land one spent all those years going to work to earn and if one doesn't make use of it now one only has onself to blame.

Johnson on Dryden

I had thought that Andrew Motion was the first living ex-Laureate, that Carol Ann Duffy was the second and certainly that this is the first time we've had three living laureates. The job had been for life until reformed by Blair and Motion to a 10 year stretch.

But John Dryden was removed from the post in 1689 when Protestant William III came to the throne and,

A papist could now no longer be laureate.

I should have known, it says so in Andrew's Verses of the Poets Laureate (Orion, 1999), but just because I live in a houseful of books doesn't mean I can remember what it says in all of them.

What comes out of Dr. Johnson's highly detailed commentary on Dryden is his own idea of 'poetry', which is perhaps what underlies all criticism, and criticism in its more usually understood meaning is what Johnson does. He doesn't miss a trick but, then again, his idea of poetry might not be mine, yours or ours.

He asserts that,

There was before the time of Dryden no poetical diction, no system of words at once refined from the grossness of domestic use and free from the harshness of terms appropriated to particular arts.

I find that hard to believe and need go no further than Shakespeare's Sonnets and lines such as,

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:  

 

Surely such language is 'refined from the grossness of domestic use' and free from such harshness. Whether that's a good thing or not is another matter but Dr. Johnson is one of those reponsible for putting it about that poetry is a 'heightened form of language'. But so is the prose of James Joyce, to take a paragon example, and so being 'heightened' is not a characteristic only applicable to poetry. If poets and poetry could get over themselves and regard themselves less as something rarified and special they might get some of their audience back.

Johnson offers that,

Every language of a learned nation necessarily divides itself into diction scholastic and popular, grave and familiar, elegant and gross, and from a nice distinction of those different parts arises a great parts arises a great part of the beauty of style.

I don't want to throw that out completely because there might be something in it that expressed in different terms might differentiate between language intended as art and that with a purely functional role but language intended as art doesn't benefit from being restricted to the first of Johnson's binary opposites there. That he and his age thought as much might explain why from his time and for maybe a couple of hundred years afterwards, much of the poetry written seems 'a bit much' and at times unreadable at any length to us now. He seemed to find Donne a bit vulgar and I'm sure he'd find Larkin equally so if he had the chance to read him.

But one can still admire Johnson without agreeing with him. Times have changed. If Bach said he wrote music SDG, Soli Deo Gloria - For the Glory of God Alone, that doesn't prevent us from appreciating it.  

It's not easy to take to Dryden or his poems, which was as expected, but Johnson writing about him is an entertainment in itself and so the 100 pages on Pope should be worth a look before returning the Lives of the Poets, a Selection to Portsmouth libraries and hope that I'm not the last to ever trouble to read it.

Johnson on Milton

Dr. Johnson's Lives provide what he knows of the biography of the poet before assessing the work which he does thoroughly and with unsparing attention. Early in his commentary on Milton, though, he seems to anticipate C20th philosophy,

the rights of nations and of kings sink into questions of grammar if grammarians discuss them.

Isn't that what happened to questions of ontology when the likes of Wittgenstein discussed them. It's what ultimately happens when language is the only way of investigating any subject. The language becomes the subject of the investigation.

And he finds similar non-sequiturs or cul-de-sacs in Paradise Lost where Milton cannot help but describe 'incorporeal spirits' in physical terms. For some people God really was an old man in a white robe with long hair and a white beard and Milton is unable to bring into being the other occupants of the heavens without their physical manifestation either.

The main impression of Milton we are left with, though, is of a difficult man. His associate, Marvell, has left that impression, too, although he doesn't make it into Johnson's account. Marriage, we are told,

afforded not much of his happiness. The first wife left him in disgust and was brought back only by terror; the second, indeed, seems to have been more of a favourite, but her life was short. The third, as Philips relates, opprssed his children in his lifetime and cheated them at his death.

The disgust of his first wife, Mary, was caused by his Puritanism, the lady,

seems not much to have delighted in the pleasures of spare diet and hard study.

 

In this account he is a malcontent, an instinctive rebel perhaps not unlike the protagonists of his most famous poem. He is defined more by what he objects to than what he celebrates,

we know rather what he was not than what he was.

The blindness would have little to improve his temper, memorizing as much as he could of the poem before summoning someone to copy them down. He preferred Paradise Regained, the idea suggested to him by Ellwood,

Many causes may vitiate a writer's judgement of his own works, Dr. Johnson suggests, going on to say those those that were the hardest work would be those they rate most highly. I don't think so, though. Those that come most easily seem to me the best, arriving almost fully formed and only needing to be written down. Those that are hard work weren't quite there to begin with and that usually shows. No amount of editing and amendment can make them as good in the same way that no amount of practice can make a workmanlike performer into a gifted one.

He later offers a definition of poetry as,

the art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the help of reason.

which predates what Keats was to make his Grecian Urn say. about Beauty and Truth. It's not the worst attempt at saying what poetry is ever seen but I'm not buying it wholesale. What I like about Dr. Johnson's approach is that pleasure is never far away in his critical apparatus and if we aren't doing it for pleasure I don't know why we'd be doing it at all.

Again, a bit ahead of his time, as well as with a long perspective on what went before, Johnson accepts that 'poetry may subsist without rhyme' but 'the subject' needs must 'support itself', which he seems to think it often doesn't unless held together by rhyme but he's good enough to credit that,

I cannot prevail on myself to wish that Milton had been a rhymer, for I cannot wish his work to be other than it is.

The great thing about him is that, having forensically identified all the misgivings he can have in the work, he still admires it, which is how it should be. Woe betide those in who he finds as many faults but nothing to compensate for them. Milton, he says, owes less to his predecessors than most,

The highest praise of genius is original invention.

He admires him for having been his own man and done his own thing and,

his work is not the greatest of heroic poems only because it is not the first.

 

Next up in this selection is nearly 100 pages on Dryden. I'll have to see about that. Reading ought to be for pleasure but if I'm ever going to achieve any better appreciation of C18th poetry then 95 pages on Dryden and 111 on Pope in the company of Dr. Johnson might be the best chance I'll have.

It's a sign of the shifts in fashion that Davenant is a figure of some significance in the C17th and into the 18th but in the early pages on Dryden, it is asked by him 'whether a poet can judge well of his own productions'. Perhaps it can be decided somehow objectively but,

in those parts where fancy predominates, self-love may easily deceive.

Johnson suggests nothing can be 'pronounced good till it has been found to please', by which he means 'please others'. What he didn't go on to say was that what pleased others 200-300 years ago might not still please us now but that's another question.

Dr. Johnson's writing is 'of its time', he can't help that, but he's astute, clear-sighted and a brilliant critic. There's considerably less empty sophistry and 'rhubarb, rhubarb' in these essays than in much writing on poetry that there is now, and it's at greater length..

The next book is delayed in the post and might not be arriving and so with it not being obvious where to go next, it's now or never with Dryden and Pope. I'll read the critic for pleasure if not the poets and, you never know, he might convince me.

Johnson on Cowley

Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets (A Selection, ed. J.P. Hardy) was suggested by something I read recently and the library service kindly retrieved it from their store for me. I read Cowley this morning, famous for its summary of Metaphysical poetry as,

the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together;

While Johnson remains an acute and attentive reader and useful in still making Abraham Cowley of interest when he is not so widely read, he is prescriptive and, like most critics, seems to assume that good poetry is that which fits his idea of what poetry should be. While fashions have changed a few times since 1777, commentators only being able to see things from their own manifesto positions has not.

He takes Aristotle as his starting point and justification, who 'rightly denominated' poetry 'an imitative art' but just because it can be and Aristotle said it was doesn't mean it has to be. Thus it is peremptory to announce that, 

these writers will, without great wrong, lose their right to the name of poets, for they cannot be said to have imitated anything

 

To begin to 'unpack' that might begin by saying that not all of us care so much for the 'right to the name of poet' but, if we did, wouldn't see why we would accept his verdict anyway. But opinions have always been rigidly held, then as now, and so the good doctor was only doing what they all did then and I'm sure we still read him now because he was better at it than most.

He makes Cowley the last inheritor of the Metaphysical way of doing things, who 

wrote rather as beholders than partakers of human nature, as beings looking upon good and evil impassive and at leisure 

 

but that may be wherein lies the difference between then and now. There isn't a problem with being a beholder rather than a partaker now.

'Their courtship is void of fondness and their lamentation of sorrow', he says but some ironic distance or detachment is acceptable, if not even desirable, now. One admires the C18th prose style, which one could gladly read for its own sake but expressions of pure fondness or lamentation would be seen as limited now. The point that clever hyperbole is no substitute for genuine feeling might be refuted by genuine feeling not being refracted through the use of language is not of literary interest.

Donne and Cowley, he tells us,

were in very little care to clothe their notions with elegance of dress, and therefore miss the notice and the praise which are often gained by those who think less, but are more diligent to adorn their thoughts

 

but maybe now we admire something more pared down, to the point and less showy. One can't help but wish Dr. Johnson were available to apply his parameters to C20th English poets and see his assessments of Eliot, Auden, Dylan Thomas and Larkin.

He has rules he wants observed in versification and certainly it remains a truism that one best not end a line on a conjunction or other 'weak' word but there are no rules and such things could conceivably be the right thing to do. One has to admire the time and space spent on pointing out the recondite usages of 'does' in Ode: Upon Liberty as 'inelegance of language' without having too much sympathy for Johnson's stylistic objections.

The great thing is that, having read Cowley so closely and found whatever fault he can, he still rates him, not only,

that he was among those who freed translation from servility, and instead of following his author at a distance, walked by his side  

but also,

he left likewise from time to time such specimens of excellence as enabled succeeding poets to improve it.

That suggests he believed that human achievement 'built on the shoulders of giants' and continued to improve on itself. I'm not convinced about that but Dr. Johnson is good enough to assess those things he sees as flaws in Cowley and yet still endorse him.

 

It made me wonder if I could have quite such pre-set ideas about 'poetry'. It might come down to three elements,

The 'sentiment', which is what the poem ostensibly is saying, including all available sub-texts, ironies, ambiguities, however many 'layers' it is supposed to have without, one hopes, being too 'sentimental.

The music. I'd prefer it very much if poems had music in their rhythm, word sounds and overall composition but that has been thought of and so inevitably some have decided, mostly unsuccessfully, not to have.

And the 'argument', the line of thought that makes its way from a beginning to an ending, as Donne did. It makes haiku, in English at least, inadequate because 17 syllables aren't enough to get from one place to another. 

That's only what it is for me. How Dr. Johnson finds things he doesn't like in poems and how I do are 250 years apart. 'All you have to be is any good' is a regularly repeated mantra here and that's all there is to it but I'm grateful to him for enhancing what I think of Abraham Cowley, what there is of it. The next chapter is on Milton, not a poet I've ever appreciated as much as perhaps I should have. I'll look forward to that.  

     

Letter from Larkin

 There isn't much future in looking round the internet for signed Philip Larkin material by now. It's a 'mature market', he did his best to make himself a rarity. However, at £6 on e-Bay, even this as a photocopy is almost worth having to put on the wall if it wasn't there to download anyway.

Why be gracious when you can go to those lengths, provide a signature for collectors and posterity and act out the role of self-styled curmudgeon.

Ian MacEwan - Lessons

Ian MacEwan, Lessons (Johnathan Cape)

Only her title escapes her capacity for brilliant invention,

is what one reviewer says of Alissa Eberhardt's The Journey. In Ian MacEwan's new novel, it's the first novel by the wife that walks out on Roland Baines and their baby, goes to Germany and becomes a Nobel Literature laureate. It could broadly be said of MacEwan's book, too, and the parallel might even be deliberate. With MacEwan you can't quite tell how self-consciously books his books are. His title most obviously refers to the piano lessons Roland has as a schoolboy but could hint at volumes of other lessons to be learnt if one was inclined to let it. That wouldn't be the sort of 'A' level essay I'd not want to do, though, and I hope there is no definitive list to be read as a sub-text.

Those piano lessons are with Miriam Cornell, who isn't as responsible as she might be with her brilliant 14 year old protegee. His motives, on top of those any teenage boy might harbour, are accelerated by the Cuban missile crisis and the idea that the world might end anytime soon. But Miriam is possessive and needs to be escaped from. What follows is Roland's under-achieving career as a hotel lounge pianist, his marriages and families, all of which are related with reference to how world politics and events impinge on their lives.

MacEwan is never short of cultural reference points either with Velvet Underground records given a minor role and the passing reference to Norman MacCaig only outdone, for me, by the mention of Roogalator in Sweet Tooth. It was suggested in an interview that Lessons could be his last novel and, as such, it is one of, if not the, longest as well as among the most convincing alongside Atonement and Sweet Tooth, possibly just behind On Chesil Beach. It almost has the kind of valedictory, summing-up sense in it that is attributed to The Tempest. But if The Tempest wasn't quite the end, neither might this be. After 17 novels, it might be a hard habit to break. But for some of us, who were the right age to read First Love, Last Rites when it was still quite new, he's always been there and it won't be the same without him.

Having eventually taken up Miriam on her invitation in the early 60's, Roland has reason to find her again 40 years on in what is a well-wrought piece of plotting. Yes, she was guilty of that which she could still be charged for but, as Roland is well aware, they are both different people now. One might find correspondances in the story lines of Atonement in which events in childhood cast long shadows over the rest of the lives involved, or The Children Act which examines what responsibility minors have for their own lives but perhaps Lessons reverses both situations.

Alissa's last novel is,

longer than anything she had written,

which again makes us wonder about its relationship with the book we are reading. In it, she finally uses material from her first marriage but Roland is badly mis-represented if it is such. But it isn't, it's fiction and MacEwan is doing what Shakespeare did in Hamlet when the travelling theatre group turn up in Elsinore and reflecting on his own art. It's not the first time he's done that but it might be the last. A page and a half before the end, reading a story with his grand-daughter, he asks,

'Do you think the story is trying to tell us something about people?'

and she doesn't think so.

He saw her point. A shame to ruin a good tale by turning it into a lesson.

I think we could have done without that. The editor might have asked if it was really necessary but maybe you don't ask such questions of a writer of such status. But, as in the story, it's too late now. Things have moved on. Several futures have been and gone since some long ago wrongs and we are busy surviving all the newly-minted ones as they occur. That would be what these lessons don't really teach us but confirm what we knew already.