The Philosophy of Poetry (Pt. 3): Larkin and Brodsky, The Face of the Poem

The Philosophy of Poetry (Pt. 1): Eliot, Theory and Criticism

The Philosophy of Poetry (Pt. 2): Eliot and Brodsky, the Experience of Poems

Note: this thread has taken on a life of its own. The original intention of this thread was to develop a seminar paper on the Philosophy of Poetry that I would deliver in July; however, it has become apparent that this series of blogs is far more in-depth than a seminar paper. I will continue to explore the notion of a philosophy of poetry here, and hopefully generate further insight into my overall research. As such, this will be an ongoing enterprise. The format will remain the same as a continuous text. Each individual post is not a discrete unity.

 

The Philosophy of Poetry (Pt. 3): Larkin and Brodsky, The Face of the Poem

The conversation, then, in Brodsky’s estimation, is between the reader and the poem; “a poem,” it must be remembered, “addresses a man tete-a-tete, entering with him into direct [...] relations.” The poem catalyses in the reader’s mind so that the reader can, indeed, “be like” the poem. Where Eliot refers to this process of getting inside the reader’s head as a catalytic process, Brodsky refers to it as “linguistic osmosis.”

Both poets are referring to the way in which the poet conveys the experience of the meaning-making process to the reader. This is process entails emotion. The British poet, Philip Larkin puts the point directly: “poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transference.” Elsewhere he explains the process of transference in three stages:

The first [stage] is when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time. The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote.

The “transference” of the “emotional concept” through the “verbal device” of the poem from poet to reader – not just a single reader but all readers – resonates with Brodsky’s “linguistic osmosis,” but it also resonates with the catalytic metaphor Eliot uses to explain his “Impersonal theory” of the poetic process.

            Brodsky argues that the poetic experience is intensely private, throwing into stark relief “the privateness of the human condition.” It nevertheless is a conversation with the poet, at least through the medium of the poem; for Eliot, the poet is merely a conduit, and it is the poem that stands in his place, conveying emotion through the “objective correlative,” the objects or series of events that encapsulate what Larkin calls the “emotional concept.” The mechanics of the poetic experience, for Larkin, is best facilitated “in silence”:

the reader’s first encounter with the poem must be a silent, active one, an absorption of spelling and stanza arrangement as much as paraphraseable meaning and corrective historical knowledge.

Larkin is making a comparison between reading poetry and hearing it read; he says elsewhere:

Hearing a poem, as opposed to reading it on the page, means you miss so much – the shape, the punctuation, the italics, even knowing how far you are from the end. Reading it on the page means you can go at your own pace, taking it in properly; hearing it means you’re dragged along at the speaker’s own rate, missing things, not taking it in, confusing “there” and “their” and things like that. And the speaker may interpose his personality between you and the poem, for better or worse.

The reader can only be like the poem if the responsibility of re-enacting the meaning-making process is his. We may become curious, Larkin admits, of what the author sounds like:

there comes a moment with any poem that we have really taken to ourselves when we want to hear its author read it. We want to confirm our conviction that he would quicken the pace here, throw away an irony there, or perhaps our curiosity is just for what his voice can add.

This curiosity about the poet’s voice is a natural outcome of what I previously called poetic mimesis; Eliot’s theory of depersonalisation and Brodsky’s linguistic osmosis represent different, but related, facets of poetic mimesis.

            For Brodsky, the curiosity engendered in the reader goes beyond the voice of the poet; it is, for Brodsky, the face of the poet that we become curious about:

In theory, authors’ looks should be of no consequence to their readers: reading is not a narcissistic activity, neither is writing, yet the moment one likes a sufficient amount of a poet’s verse one starts to wonder about the appearance of the writer. This, presumably, has to do with one’s suspicion that to like a work of art is to recognise the truth, or the degree of it, that art expresses. Insecure by nature, we want to see the artist, whom we identify with his work, so that the next time around we might know what truth looks like in reality.

Both Brodsky and Larkin touch upon an essential mimetic component of the poetic experience. However “depersonalised” the poet becomes in the act of poetic meaning-making, the mimetic instinct compels the reader towards this curiosity; the poet is the natural proxy in this experience. It is not the face of the poet, per se, that the reader is curious about, but the face of the poem, the face of meaning-making in general, the human face.