The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

It is not uncommon, it is even usual, for a poet to write re­views, compile anthologies, compose critical introductions. It is one of his main sources of income. He may even find him­self lecturing. In such chores he has little to offset his lack of scholarship, but that little he has.

His lazy habit of only reading what he likes will at least have taught him one lesson, that to be worth attacking a book must be worth reading. The greatest critical study of a single figure that I know of, The Case of Wagner, is a model of what such an attack should be. Savage as he often is, Nietzsche never allows the reader to forget for one instant that Wagner is an extraordinary genius and that, for all which may be wrong with it, his music is of the highest importance. Indeed it was this book which first taught me to listen to Wagner, about whom I had previously held silly preconceived notions. Another model is D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic Ameri­can Literature. I remember my disappointment, when, after reading the essay on Fenimore Cooper which is highly critical, I hurried off to read him. Unfortunately, I did not find Cooper nearly as exciting as Lawrence had made him sound.

The second advantage which a poet possesses is that such satisfactions to the ego as the writing of poetry can provide have been taken care of in his case. I should not expect a poet turned critic to become either a prig, a critic's critic, a roman­tic novelist or a maniac. By the prig, I mean the critic for whom no actual poem is good enough since the only one that would be is the poem he would like to write himself but can­not. Reading his criticism, one gets the impression that he would rather a poem were bad than good. His twin, the critic's critic, shows no obvious resentment; indeed, on the surface he appears to idolize the poet about whom he is writing; but his critical analysis of his idol's work is so much more complicated and difficult than the work itself as to deprive someone who has not yet read it of all wish to do so. He, too, one suspects, has a secret grievance. He finds it unfortunate and regrettable that before there can be criticism there has to be a poem to criticize. For him a poem is not a work of art by somebody else; it is his own discovered document.

The romantic novelist is a much jollier figure. His happy hunting ground is the field of unanswerable questions, par­ticularly if they concern the private lives of authors. Since the questions to which he devotes his life—he is often an ex­tremely learned gendeman—can never be answered, he is free to indulge his fancies without misgivings. And why shouldn't he? How much duller the Variorum edition of the Shakespeare sonnets would be without him. Jolliest of all is the maniac. The commonest of his kind is the man who believes that poetry is written in cyphers—but there are many other kinds. My favorite is the John Bellendon Ker who set out to prove that English nursery rhymes were originally written in a form of Old Dutch invented by himself.

Whatever his defects, a poet at least thinks a poem more important than anything which can be said about it, he would rather it were good than bad, the last thing he wants is that it should be like one of his own, and his experience as a maker should have taught him to recognize quickly whether a critical question is important, unimportant but real, unreal because unanswerable or just absurd.

He will know, for example, that knowledge of an artist's life, temperament and opinions is unimportant to an under­standing of his art, but that a similar knowledge about a critic may be important to an understanding of his judgments. If we knew every detail of Shakespeare's life, our reading of his plays would be litde changed, if at all; but how much less interesting The Lives of the Poets would be if we knew noth­ing else about Johnson.

He will know, to take an instance of an unanswerable ques­tion, that if the date of the Shakespeare sonnets can ever be fixed, it will not be fixed by poring over Sonnet CVII. His experience as a maker of poems will make him reason some­thing like this: "The feeling expressed here is the not un­common feeling—All's well with my love and all's well with the world at large. The feeling that all is well with the world at large can be produced in many ways. It can be produced by an occasion of public rejoicing, some historical event like the defeat of the Armada or the successful passing of the Queen's climacteric, but it does not have to be. The same feeling can be aroused by a fine day. The figures employed in the lines

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured And the sad augurs mock their own presage, Incertainties now crown themselves assured And peace proclaims olives of endless age