Dear Sir,—
Many thanks for the volume of your poems you have sent me. Though I had never seen any of your compositions before, they are already old friends—that is, I like them but I see through them.
Yours cordially, Etc.
XLI
FAKE POETRY, BAD POETRY AND MERE VERSE
AS in household economics, you cannot take out of a stocking more than has been put in, so in poetry you cannot present suffering or romance beyond your own experience. The attempt to do this is one of the chief symptoms of the fake poet; ignorance forces him to draw on the experience of a real poet who actually has been through the emotional crises which he himself wants to restate. The fake is often made worse by the theft of small turns of speech which though not in any sense irregular or grotesque, the poet has somehow made his own; it is like stealing marked coins, and is a dangerous practice when Posterity is policeman. Most poets visit Tom Tiddler’s ground now and then, but the wise ones melt down the stolen coin and impress it with their own “character.”
There is a great deal of difference between fake poetry and ordinary bad poetry. The bad poet is likely to have suffered and felt joy as deeply as the poet reckoned first class, but he has not somehow been given the power of translating experience into images and emblems, or of melting words in the furnace of his mind and making them flow into the channels prepared to take them. Charles Sorley said, addressing the good poets on behalf of the bad poets (though he was really on the other side):—
We are the homeless even as you,
Who hope but never can begin.
Our hearts are wounded through and through
Like yours, but our hearts bleed within;
We too make music but our tones
Scape not the barrier of our bones.
Mere verse, as an earlier section has attempted to show, is neither bad poetry nor fake poetry necessarily. It finds its own categories, good verse, bad verse and imitation. In its relation to poetry it stands as chimpanzee to man: only the theory that a conflict of emotional ideas is a necessary ingredient of verse to make it poetry, will satisfactorily explain why many kinds of verse, loosely called Poetry, such as Satire and Didactic verse are yet popularly felt not to be the “highest” forms of Poetry. I would say that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred these bear no real relation to Poetry, even though dressed up in poetical language, and that in the hundredth case they are poetry in spite of themselves. Where the writer is dominated by only one aim, in satire, the correction of morals; in didactic verse, instruction; there is no conflict and therefore no poetry. But in rare cases where some Juvenal slips through feelings of compunction to a momentary mood of self-satire and even forgets himself so much as to compliment his adversary; or in didactic verse where a sudden doubt arises and the teacher admits himself a blind groper after truth (so Lucretius time and time again) and breaks his main argument in digressions after loveliness and terror, only then does Poetry appear. It flashes out with the surprise and shock of a broken electric circuit.
Even the memoria technica can slide from verse into poetry. The rhyme to remember the signs of the Zodiac by, ends wonderfully:—
The Ram the Bull, the Heavenly Twins,
And next the Crab, the Lion shines,
The Virgin and the Scales,
The Scorpion, Archer and He Goat,
The Man who carries the Watering Pot,
The Fish with glittering tails.