THE OBSCURITY OF THE POET
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assumes? how much does it help to be immediately plain? In England
today few poets are as popular as Dylan Thomas-his magical poems
have corrupted a whole generation of English poets; yet he is surely one
of the most obscure poets who ever lived. Or to take an opposite exam–
ple: the poems of the students of Yvor '<Vinters are quite as easy to
understand as those which Longfellow used to read during the Children's
Hour; yet they are about as popular as those other poems (of their own
composition) which
grave Alice, and laughing Allegra, and Edith with
golden hair
used to read to Longfellow during the Poet's Hour.
If
Dylan
Thomas is obscurely famous, such poets as these are clearly unknown.
When someone says to me something I am not accustomed to hear–
ing, or do not wish to hear, I say to him:
I do not understand you;
and we respond in just this way to poets. When critics first read Words–
worth's poetry they felt that it was silly, but most of them
said,
with
Byron, that "he who understands it would be able / To add a story to the
Tower of Babel." A few years before, a great critic praising the work
of that plainest of poets, John Dryden, had remarked that he "delighted
to tread on the brink where sense and nonsense mingle." Dryden himself
had found Shakespeare's phrases "scarcely intelligible; and of those which
we understand some are ungrammatical, others coarse; and his whole
style is so pestered with figurative expressions that it is as affected
as it is coarse." The reviewers of "The Love Song of
J.
Alfred
Prufrock," even those who admired it most, found it almost
impos–
sible to understand; that it was hopelessly obscure seemed to them
self-evident. Today, when college girls find it exactly as easy, exactly
as hard, as "The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's," one
is
able to understand these critics' despairing or denunciatory misunder–
standing only by remembering that the first generation of critics spoke
of Browning's poem in just the terms that were later applied to Eliot's.
How long it takes the world to catch up! Yet
it
really never "catches up,"
but is simply replaced by another world that does not need to catch up;
so that when the old say to us, "What shall I do to understand Auden
(or Dylan Thomas, or whoever the latest poet is)?" we can only reply:
"You must be born again." An old gentleman at a party, talking to me
about a poem we both admired, the
Rubaiyat,
was delighted to find
that our tastes agreed so well, and asked me what modern poet I liked
best. Rather cutting my coat to his cloth, I answered: "Robert Frost."
He looked at me with surprise, and said with gentle but undisguised
finality: "I'm afraid he is a little after my time." This happened in 1950;
yet surely in 1850 some old gentleman, fond of Gray and Cowper and
Crabbe, must have uttered to the young Matthew Arnold the same words,
