We’re back on poetry again. It’s been a while.
In my recent selection from Sheffield city centre library (which was incredibly Lit-geeky and which I’ve already blogged on two texts from – Planet Narnia and O Pioneers! ) I took a random book about poetry: The Strength of Poetry by James Fenton (2001). The contents page promised writing about Philip Larkin, W.H. Auden, Wilfred Owen and Sylvia Plath amongst others so I thought, let’s give it a go. The first chapter talks about Michelangelo and other Italian Renaissance artists; the way they learned from, or were secretive towards, each other. By the end of the first page we feel that Fenton definitely has a unique way of looking at things. His writing can be by turns beautiful and amusing, and he’s always brutally honest. He picks up on usual things about poets – Owen’s juvenilia (hilariously pompous), the way Larkin
is credited with expounding things everyone thinks but no one says but how ridiculous that actually is when you think about what he is saying, Auden’s dual influences of William Blake and Henry James. Seamus Heaney’s Irishness is discussed, the influence of life on poetry in Plath and, running through all, what it means to be a ‘poetess’. Fenton points out that feminising nouns like this can completely change their meaning: a ‘priestess’ is not at all the same thing as a ‘priest’ as it has much more pagan connotations. Similarly a ‘poetess’ is not the same thing as a ‘poet’. He charts the struggles and differences of opinion amongst several women poets as to what it means to be a woman and a poet, quoting Germaine Greer: ‘The more women adored poetry, the less able they were to write it... It is less crucial for women to work out how men did this to women than it is to assess the extent to which women did this to themselves.’
All in all, it is at once varied and coherent as a selection of thoughts on modern poetry. It is also amusing, clear and – wonder of wonders for a book on poetry! – interesting. It also made me want to read more Larkin, Plath and Heaney and to discover new writers (for me) such as Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore.
While on the subject of poetr
y, let’s talk Donne (again). In the same lit haul I picked up John Stubbs’ biography Donne: The Reformed Soul (2006), which I’ve been after for a while. ... My main gripe with it is that Stubbs uses Donne’s poetry to prove things about his life. I can understand this in that it is difficult to write a biography about a man who’s been dead for nearly 400 years and who lived in an age where documentation was not seen as especially important (hence why we have so little information about Shakespeare). However we are always being told not to confuse the poet and the voice in the poem, and although it seems reasonable that Donne drew from his own experience and potentially parts of his own personality in his poems – which are known for their startling voices – to use lyric poetry as proof of some particular personal opinion on Donne’s part seems to me a fallacy. Poets don’t always say what they mean in their poems and are notoriously unreliable; we never know when they are using their own opinions or assuming someone else’s and unless we have other biographical evidence to prove our point I feel we would be better off leaving our insights of a poet drawn from his craft out of it.
