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    13 views12 pages

    What Is Poetry. Terry Eagleton

    Uploaded by

    gomezin88

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
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    of 12
    "The Functions of Crvciom ‘walls of our bodies? If his sso, then chere would seem a need for some spe Cia, intuitive faculty which would allow me to soar beyond my senses, plant ‘myself within you and empathise with your felings, and this emackable cap. ability was known to some eighteenth-century thinkers asthe imagination Haman compassion was posible only by virtue ofthis quity, enigmatic, some ‘what fragile power. The imagination was a form of compensation for our natural insensibilty to one another. We could not change that common-or garden callousness, bt we could elways supplement it. only I could know ‘what it was lke to be you, I would cease tobe so brutal to you, or come to Your aid when others were treating you badly So brutal, on this view, is just a breakdown of imagination, The only “drawback wit this doctrine i that iis obviously fale. Sadist know exactly how their victims are feeling, which is what spurs them on co more richly imaginative bouts of torture. Even if I am not a sadist, knowing how ‘wretched you feel does not necessarily mean that I will feel moved to do something about it. Conversely, people who come to the aid of others may be, so to speak, imaginatively tone-deaf, unable to recreate in themselves in any very vivid way the feelings of those they help out. The fact that they are “unable t0 do 30 is morally speaking neither here nor there. ‘Acts of imegination are by no means always benign. Organising genocide takes 2 fair bit of imagination. Bank robbers need to be reasonably ima sinative about making good their escape. Serial killes may indulge in "unspeakable fights of fancy. Every lethal invention on record came about through the eevisaging of unrealised possibilities. I Wiliam Blake ranks araong the Visionaries, so does Pol Pot. There is nothing ereative in itself about the jmagination, which launches wars as well a volumes of poctry. The ima ‘ination, ike memory is indispensable in an everyday sore of way: we would not read warly ona slippery path without having a dim picture in our heads of how we might come to grief om it." Nothing is more commonplace than this noble faculty eis essential co oue survival. But some exercises of are ‘no more positive than some acts of memory. Srudying literature, then, may require «rather stronger rationale than this appeal to fantasy. Before we ask coursehes what this might be, however, we may pause co wonder why itshould need 2 rationale at all. ary more than sex or sunbathing, So fas, we have been speaking of poems and poetry without pausing to define our terms. Before we go any Further, then, we need to see if we can arrive at some workable definition of what we are dealing with "For Srter ete cmments about the again, ee Tery Eagleton, The ie of Cire (Oxo, 193, pp. 48-8) 4 Chapter 2 What is Poetry? 2 Poetry and Prose ‘A poem is @ fesional, verbally inventive moral statement in which itis the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who deckies where the lines should end. This dreary-sounding definition, unpoetic to a fault, may ‘well turn out to be the best we can do. Before we dissect it piece by piece, however, let us note what it doesn’t say, rather than what it does To begin with, it makes no reference co rhyme, metre, rhythm, imagery, 28, 38, 4B (Penal Tet 4 What ts Poetry? "This has the linguistic ow-keyedness of much modern poetry, enlivened by the odd, discreet alteration (Stumbling /‘shelves, "Feanare’/ fountain pen’. ‘There is the occasional verbal flourish like ‘Such @ convincing dash of sig nature’, where the verse, as though in ironic homage to the self-conscious panache of the poet's youthful signavure, rises briefly to the grandeur of an jambic pentameter. And ‘stumbling’ is a good word with which to begin a [poem about ageing. Once again, however, none of this can be said to reflect a predominance of the signifier over the signified, or the texture of the language over its meaning, It is not, one is gratified to note, the kind of stall one finds in the worst of Algernon Charles Swinburne: ‘Come with bows bent and with emprying of quivers ‘Maiden most perfect, lady of igh, ‘With 2 noise of winds and many rivers, ‘With damour of waters, and with might; Bind on thy sandals, O thou most Mee, (Over the splendour and speed of thy feet; For the fant east quicken, the wan west shivers, Round the feet ofthe day and the feet ofthe night (Atalanta in Calydon’) Nobody could deny thet this is poetry, which is exactly what fs amiss with it. In symbolis: fashion, the narcotic music ofthe words works to muffle the ‘meaning, One finds a more extreme version of this effect in nonsense poetty like Lewis Carroll's “Twas brig, and the sidhy toes’, wich i really a sym- Dbolist poem. Perhaps tis just as well that Swinburne blurs the meaning, since there isn’t much of it on offer. That las, selfconsciously “beautiful ine is intellectually vacuous (how can day and night have feet?), and it is hard to see how you can bind on a sandal over speed, For all its reverent heavy breath- ng, the passage is perfectly cerebral: With a noise of winds and many rivers isa fuzzy abstraction, and ‘with might’ a notably lame appendage. ‘Paint east ‘and ‘wan west’ are merely verbal counters to shuffle around in place of gem {ne observation. The passage is ful of florid gestures and empty of substance Poetry uses language in original or arresting ways; but it does nor do so all the time, and in any case this is not quite the same as a steady focus on ‘he signifier This is overlooked by those theories of poetry for which the ‘word ‘poetic’ simply means ‘verbally selEconscious’, So ‘verbally inventive’, however vague, will have to do instead. The word “inventive” here is meant to be factual rather than evaluative: it does not imply that a poera is always successfily inventive, since this would rule out the possiblity of bad poetry. 46 What is Paetryé ‘We have seen that breaking up 2 text into lines on a page isa cue to take ig as fiction. But itis also an instruction to pay particular attention 10 the language itself ~ to experience the words as material events, rather than to _gize right ehrough them to the meaning, In most poetry, however, itis not 2 question of experiencing the word rather than the meaning, but of responding to both of them rogether, or of sensing some internal bond between the two, Being more than usually sensitive to language does not necessarily ‘imply thae the language in question is peculiarly oregrounded’. A poem may ‘be verbally inventive without flamboyantly drawing arention to the fact. Poems

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