Serious Poetry

A breakthrough at last.
I have been struggling through the pages of this book. It has been like swimming across a pool (for me), breast stroke, always on the edge of drowning. It is, after all, called Serious Poetry.

Serious Poetry: form and authority from Yeats to Hill. Peter McDonald. Clarendon Press, Oxford. 2002.

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The first chapters on YB Yeats were tough going. I found myself wading through bucket loads of remorse and form that seemed both remorseless and formless but then, on page ninety-four, I was thrown a lifeline in the form of Geoffrey Hill. Here was someone whose sensibility I could, for all that it was impenetrable, understand. Perhaps the clays of the English Midlands were (are?) more congenial to me than the peatlands of the Celtic imagination although I of all people should be attuned to both, living, as I do, English in the Celtic west.

But I correct myself. I have no trouble with RS Thomas. Admittedly, RS Thomas is conflicted between his welshness and his englishness but so is WB Yeats, between Irish and English. I don't warm to Yeats, the man or the poet. It is something I have still to learn. I have only recently come to appreciate Philip Larkin. There are flashes of brilliance, of course - Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold - Down by the sally gardens - and they secure him his place in the pantheon.

Geoffrey Hill is another matter. How sensible his stance. (Chapter 4. Three Critics: TS Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill.) His defence of poetry is solid.

My faith in poets and humanity restored, I moved on eagerly to another epiphany. The book came alive in the next chapter as Peter McDonald tangled with WH Auden and TS Eliot, by way of Prospero and in counterpoint to Matthew Arnold. This chapter - Chapter 5. One of Us: Eliot, Auden and Four Quartets - is brilliant. It lights up and it makes sense. Here, Yeatsian remorse becomes, in TS Eliot, humility. 
I found the discussion at every turn illuminating.

There's no denying that this book is a tough read but it is worth persisting. 
There's gold at the end of the rainbow, if that's not too Celtic a proposition.

Ends