The Brooklyn Rail

Near the beginning of his defense of Poetry, Shelley defines the poem as an exemplary social site, which should “constitute pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment, beauty in art, truth in reasoning, and love in the intercourse of kind.” A successful poem should establish a necessary balance of Truth, Virtue, Beauty, Love, and Pleasure.

If finding Pleasure in such a hierarchy strikes us now as somehow unexpected, it is perhaps an indication of how oddly puritanical our prejudices now run. Perhaps it is a result of our current privileging of the abstract sciences, of a prevalent dualism that places thought outside of the body. It seems to me it is a Platonic hangover; Plato never liked poets.

Self-consciously moral Americans seem to find pleasure embarrassing, inexcusable. And, even if a private necessity (whether subdued or indulged), hardly a public good.

We wouldn’t write or read poems unless they were pleasurable. We wouldn’t be moral, or virtuous unless it was a pleasure either. We wouldn’t “do science” unless we enjoyed it.

Why should pleasure be anything less than the senses exalting in the same way Beauty is an exaltation of the Imagination, virtue the standard of morality, or truth the epitome of knowledge?

Poems must simultaneously function physically as well as emotionally, intellectually, socially, and morally. A social being ought to strive for such a balance.

Pleasure like Beauty and Love is possible only in an openly receptive and purposive mode of attention.

For me as a reader, it is not the common ambition of poetic articulation that tends towards the righteous or the compassionate or noble that leads to pleasure. Readerly pleasure is hardly ever found in what is “said,” even though thoughtful criticism seems often to dwell on this, most likely because it is the easiest of things happening in a poem to discuss.

In a poem it is not the pretty, nor the clever, nor even the shocking that gives rise to pleasure. It is not the meaning, nor the form. It tends to be a combination or culmination of at least all of these. Easier perhaps to look at an example.

It seems to me that the pleasure in writing as with the pleasure in reading is something like a physical joy, a reception that is both assertive and passive, akin to the dynamics necessary for love. One must enter the poem with an attitude of compliance and acceptance, faith even, but one cannot abandon expectation, nor judgement. It’s a meeting. This goes for writing as well as reading. The two are inextricable. One reads as one writes. The poem feels written for one as much as written by one.

Pleasure, then, is an extraordinary and necessary result. Despite or because of its necessity it is not predictable. There is even, perhaps, a necessary element of surprise, which will have everything to do with the individual psychology and physiology of the poet/reader.

For this short essay I’ll pick one example.

A stanza from my first book:

When leave of home
the bitter pear
or peach that I go through
or pear

A stanza like this immediately looks as if it has a formal unity. It starts regularly enough, the first two lines are in iambic dimeter, the third is iambic trimeter. This third line stretches the expected rhythm, which allows for the last line to snap back to a kind of bathetic single iamb. The stanza seems to me to have been about leaving home, leaving Worcestershire (the county symbol is the pear) and my parents (a bitter “pair?”; harsh, but perhaps true at the time), but also Masaccio’s Adam and Eve, and their bitter loss of Eden: them leaving that home. The idea of going “through” a peach seems to suggest that one must leave home, must eat fruit (“do I dare?”), must gain knowledge of love and death. The anticlimax of the stanza is that we return to Eden not as a glorious triumph, but by carrying on, with the next season of fruit, with the next instant of being. What we had, we left. What we have, we leave. An endless cycle of loss and renewal.

The instinct in writing such a stanza is to follow what seems to be being said. I will have started with the sound of the words. A single line announcing itself. The line makes almost normative sense, but sounds off, archaic perhaps. It seems to mean “When you leave home,” but echoes “take leave of.” Pears are bitter when unripe, which suggests the leave-taking is or feels premature? In writing this I know I would have been unsure about where I was living (the USA) and missing England. The formal aspects of the poem will have been self-consciously English. The peach does not strike me as English. It strikes me as something I will need to embrace. But the “pleasure” in writing such a piece will be in discovering which line now “fits” and somehow moves the pattern forward. The meaning and the pattern progress and reveal themselves as I write. The last line will have felt “right” as it balances the extra iamb of the third line by being just one iamb. And the strange anticlimax would have felt oddly “thrilling” because whilst it formally offers a rhyme, it is in some sense a failure, rhyming the same word rather than finding a suitable culmination, it is a something of a failure. In that failure comes the emotional validity of the piece, and for me in writing it, the pleasure of finding a truth in the telling. I would have been surprised by “or pear.” But it is true.