This is a surprisingly useful book on writing and appreciating poetry, as well as on the life and calling of a poet. I say surprising, because the table of contents seems off-putting, listing 61 chapters, plus introductory note and appendix. But it turns out that some of the chapters of this short book are extended aphorisms, and throughout, Graves maintains a balance between authority and chattiness. He is opinionated, but his pronouncements are grounded in an awareness of the difficulty of the poet’s task and his admiration for the best of their achievements.
Along the way, the reader also learns some of what Graves doesn’t like. He wants no history of poetry, since it would mean treating the less good as extensively as the great. By his standards, the less good would be most of the 17th century (except Milton), spilling over to Pope and the other didactic poets of the early 18th. Such a history would also overemphasize either form or ideas. Both play a role in a great poem, but they don’t make a poem great. He is suspicious of schools, although he does concede a back and forth between two tendencies that he, in common with many others, terms Classic and Romantic. Although his sympathies are more with the latter, he is exacting in matters of form and rhythm. His admiration of Blake doesn’t extend to the hermetic world of his prophetic books, and he feels Whitman would have been better if he had disciplined his writing more.
For Graves, a poem is the product of both magic and craftsmanship. The magic is the first moment of inspiration, and doesn’t occur to just anyone. A born poet incorporates conflicting personalities and loyalties within himself (I’ll leave aside attempts at gender-neutral language, Graves isn’t PC in his views on woman poets). To be great, a poem must bear in itself an emotional conflict. But it’s not a great poem until going through the craftsmanship phase, when the poet worries and fiddles with vowel sounds, assonance, rhythm, rhyme, and word choices.
Among the pearls is his sensible comment on diction: “Ideally speaking, there is no especially poetic range of subjects, and no especially poetic group of words with which to treat them. Indeed, the more traditionally poetical the subject and the words, the more difficult it is to do anything with them.” He’s also refreshingly honest on what he calls putty: the material to which even the greatest of poets resorts to fill in the cracks in his poem. He hopes no one else notices, but is himself mortifyingly aware that it’s there.
I enjoyed spending the day with Graves as he shared this with me; at times, I forgot that the day was spent in airplanes and airport lounges; it felt more like we were in a corner booth of his favorite pub with a pint of ale. ( )