The Crowning Privilege: Collected Essays on Poetry by Robert Graves
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959 (first published 1955)
Robert Graves is such an interesting character. Usually classed as one of the British First World War poets, he never really fitted into that group (if it ever really was something that homogeneous). He outlived them all, famously spending most of his life living in Majorca with a succession of female muses, who informed much of his poetry. He was a prolific writer, much influenced by the ancient gods about which he wrote with some insight. He himself very much thought of himself as a poet, and has left behind a sizable body of work. As of the writing of this review (2021), I think it's fair to state that it is still unclear whether his poetry will stand the test of time as well as some of his contemporaries. However, he was an insightful, interesting and in some ways eccentric critic of poetry and the art and craft of its creation.
The Crowning Privilege is a collection of his six Clark Lectures given at Cambridge in the 1950s, along with other essays on poetry that he had published up until that time. The theme of his Clark Lectures was "professional standards in English poetry", and Graves took that theme in its broadest sense to give a personal view on the history of English poetry, the good and the bad, and some advice on how to go about being a poet.
Graves had his own views on the good and the bad in English poetry, with the bad being very much the "French" style of the restoration, with Milton and Pope particularly in his sights. His beliefs on following the muse leads him to disparage any poetry that is not born of inspiration, and any metre or rhyme that is artificially imposed on a work. His views I think are best shown with some selected quotations from the lectures:
"English poets do no wear wigs; they wear their own hair - while it lasts. And the force inspiring them is love, controlled by reason; not rhetoric controlled by timidity; not correctness controlled by cynicism."
"They must remember that the source of all poetry is not reason, but the wind of inspiration."
"It is an axiom among poets that if one trusts whole-heartedly to poetic magic, one will be sure to solve any merely verbal problem or else discover that the verbal problem is hiding an imprecision in poetic thought. I say magic, since the act of composition occurs in a sort of trance, distinguishable from dream only because the critical faculties are not dormant, but on the contrary, more acute than normally."
"It is unprofessional conduct to say: 'When next I write a poem I shall use sonnet form' - because the theme is by definition unforeseeable, and theme chooses metre. A poet should not be conscious of the metrical pattern of a poem he is writing until the first three or four lines have appeared;"
Graves was at time a harsh, but always inquiring critic of poetry, and the second half of this book, which contains essays from various sources, contains essays that show Graves' ability to closely read Mother Goose rhymes or Tom O'Bedlam and to be able to reconstruct the original verse by stripping out the mis-hearings of the past, or separate the strands of several poems that have merged into one.
He was also a very close reader of the Romantic Poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge in particular, and explains why he thinks that Coleridge was more the poet of those two, as he followed the calling of the Muse, from whom Wordsworth turned away. In twelve pages, his essay The Ghost of Milton not only destroys any thought that Milton was a nice person, but also convincingly shows the reader that Milton was more of a self-aggrandizer than a poet, despite the overpowering nature of some of his verse: as Graves notes, the purpose of verse is not to overpower, but to raise up. Milton is hoist on the petard of his vanity and ambition.
Even if Graves' poetry is not for you, I suggest that it is well worthwhile to read some of his criticism - like all good work, it drives you to re-evaluate what you thought you know.
No comments:
Post a Comment