The Use and Abuse of Literature (25 page)

Some early examples of English poetry exhibit a striking kind of fictive usefulness, embedded in the artifice of poem-making. In these cases, the poem—or the rhyme, or the perfect word—comes to the poet as inspiration,
whether from God or from the muse of poetry, supplying words where they were lacking, and changing or healing the speaker. These stories are legendary and exemplary. Here are three examples, one from the earliest-known English poem, another from a religious lyric, and a third from a love sonnet.

The story of “Caedmon’s Hymn” is told, movingly, by the monk and scholar known as the Venerable Bede. Caedmon was a lay brother who worked as a herdsman at the monastery. Once, when the monks were feasting and singing, he retreated to sleep with the animals because—says Bede—he knew no songs. He dreamed that “someone” came to him and told him to sing a song of the beginning of creation. At first he demurred but then began to sing the short—and beautiful—poem known as “Caedmon’s Hymn.” The next day he reported these events to the monastery, was asked to write another poem, and, having complied, was invited to take monastic vows. He became—again according to Bede—a prolific poet of religious verse, all composed, like the hymn, in the vernacular—that is to say, in Old English, not in Latin. Bede’s
Historia Ecclesiastica
, which reports this, is, however, written in Latin.

Like all foundation myths, this one can, if we choose, be regarded as an invention, a fiction, an allegory, an embellishment of fact, or any other species of instructive story. But the hymn exists in a number of dialect versions, and what it records is a story of literary inspiration. “Sing,” the command given to Caedmon, remains throughout much of the history of English—and earlier—literature the figure inviting or initiating poetic performance (Virgil’s
Aeneid
famously begins “Arms and the man I sing”). The moment of inspiration (after a period of mute or stumbling incapacity) is not infrequently restaged in later poems as a birth, or rebirth, of song and creative fluency.

Consider, for example, George Herbert’s poem “Denial,” which begins

and ends

The mended rhyme comes with the word “rhyme,” which accords with “chime” and “time,” and repairs the loss of rhyme in the previous stanza, which ends in “disorder.” Herbert expertly deploys the final lines and stanzas of his poems to perform this kind of mind-mending, in poems like “The Collar,” “Love (III),” and the “Jordan” poems, among others. As with Caedmon, the literary fiction—whatever the spiritual reality—is that of divine assistance, inspiration, collaboration.

A more secular version of this trope—for it is a trope, a figure of speech—is on display in the first of Philip Sidney’s
Astrophil and Stella
sonnets, where the lover, seeking words to describe his passion, turns dramatically from rhetoric to spontaneous feeling:

This great sonnet is deeply—and deliberately—disingenuous in its ingenuity. Disclaiming artifice, study, and literary device, it deploys them with consummate artistry. The poem is a primer in literary figures, from anadiplosis, the repetition of the last word from a previous clause or phrase at the beginning of the next, to the vivified pun on “feet” (anatomical and poetical), and finally to the professions of incapacity “helpless in my throes”; “truant pen”) and the triumphant breakthrough when the Muse dictates the manner of plain speech (“look in thy heart and write”). Significantly, it is the Muse’s speech, not the poet’s, that comes to end (and mend) the sonnet—although the Muse herself is, like Invention and stepdame Study, one of the invented personae of the poet’s text.

The naive voice in such a poem is achieved
through
learning, not despite it. Elizabethan and Jacobean poets were skilled in the use of rhetorical devices, having learned them in school and through the examples found in numerous rhetorical textbooks, like Henry Peacham’s
The Garden of Eloquence Conteyning the Figures of Grammer and Rhetorick
(1577), Thomas Wilson’s
The Arte of Rhetorique, for the use of all suche as are studious of Eloquence, sette forth in English
(1553), and George Puttenham’s
The Art of English Poesy
(1589). Modern students may be familiar with metaphor, simile, personification, and a handful of other figures of speech, but the poetic toolbox of earlier poets contained dozens, indeed hundreds, of tropes. Recognizing them, and the twists and turns that made them new, was one of the manifold pleasures of reading. For a modern reader, the reverse is the case: the identification of tropes and figures often comes after the first and second readings of the poem, if at all, and is often associated with the classroom rather than with the immediacy of aesthetic or intellectual response.

These rhetorical treatises directly address the question of use. The poet, equipped with skills in language and style, is enabled to move in courtly circles and to affect both language and politics.
²³
The idea of
material advancement through poetry was not an exaggeration. It was possible to overcome the disadvantages of low birth through education. Archbishop Cranmer (himself not born to the aristocracy) contended that “poor men’s children are many times endued with more singular gifts of nature … eloquence, memory, apt pronunciation, sobriety, and such like, and also commonly more apt to apply their study, than is the gentleman’s son delicately educated.”
²⁴

Puttenham’s title,
The Art of English Poesy
, should be inflected with a stress on the word
English:
he took for granted the effectiveness, importance, and art (in the largest sense, encompassing rhetorical skill, craft, politics, and eloquence) of earlier poets, both historical and divine. What he set out to do, by tracing the role of the poet through Western cultural history and “Englishing” the names of some classical literary tropes, was to define the potential use of poetry, poetics, and poets for the emerging English nation. The explanatory subtitle of Chapter 2 is “That there may be an art of our English poesy, as well as there is of the Latin and Greek”; the explanatory subtitle of Chapter 3 is “How poets were the first priests, the first prophets, the first legislators and politicians in the world”; the explanatory subtitle of Chapter 4 is “How the poets were the first philosophers, the first astronomers, and historiographers, and orators, and musicians of the world,” and so on. Taken together with the address to the queen, this framing constitutes a political as well as a social and aesthetic argument. Poets are good for nation-building, and a national literature is good for the nation.

Moreover, the idea of poets as legislators and politicians—a concept that, by the time of Shelley’s
Defense of Poetry
, had become rhetorical in the abased sense of that term—was, for the Elizabethans, a practical reality. Shelley would claim that poets were the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” but in ancient Greece and throughout the Renaissance, poets were, in fact, fully acknowledged as political players. “Poet” was not a full-time occupation to the exclusion of other pursuits. Philip Sidney was a diplomat, Walter Raleigh a courtier and explorer, George Herbert a priest.
^*

John Donne was trained as a diplomat and anticipated
a career in government until his marriage produced a breach between Donne and his political patrons. Edmund Spenser pursued a political career in Ireland (his prose pamphlet
A View of the Present State of Ireland
recommended aggressive conquest of the Irish native population and the instigation of English language and customs); his prose epic
The Faerie Queene
, one of the masterworks of the English literary canon, was written in hopes of obtaining a place at court—hopes that did not come to fruition for political reasons. As one of Spenser’s early-twentieth-century editors wrote, “Poetry was a noble pastime, even a vocation, but for a gentleman it was not a profession. All it could do for him would be to bring his talents to the notice of those who were in the position to better his fortunes.”
²⁵

The argument of
The Faerie Queene
, setting forth its poetic program, was addressed to Spenser’s friend Walter Raleigh. Spenser explained that “the generall end” of the book was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.” So this, too, was a use of poetry. The choice of a fictional narrative for what Spenser called his “continued Allegory, or darke conceit,” was connected—or so he alleged—to the idea of fashioning the moral character of his gentle or noble readers:

Excuse or not—since allegory’s “dark conceit” was also, equally usefully, a way of disguising controversial views under the device of fiction—this explanation for why one of the most brilliantly imagined poems in the English language takes the form of poetry and fiction rather than precepts and sermons is a good example of the use of
use
. In Spenser’s letter to Raleigh, “the
vse
of these dayes” is customary practice, what people are used to, what they like or prefer—in this case, “showes.” A few years
later, Ben Jonson would excoriate mere “showes” as the stage design and props provided by his collaborator, Inigo Jones, as contrasted with the greater complexity of poetry: “O showes! Showes! Mighty Showes! / The Eloquence of Masques! / What need of prose/Or Verse, or Sense, t’express Immortal you?”
²⁷
But “showes” for Spenser still seemed to include
literary
exhibitions or fictions.

So the uses of rhetoric, eloquence, “poetical ornament,” figures of speech, and fictional examples were, for the poets, scholars, and politicians of the English Renaissance, a way of (1) fashioning gentlemen, (2) inculcating moral virtues as painlessly and pleasurably as possible, (3) concealing or disguising unpopular opinions under the guise of fiction or allegory, and (4) seeking—and sometimes obtaining—political, social, and financial advancement. Literature had uses: it did things, it gained things for the poet, even though—and perhaps because—his profession was not “poet” but something else.

The combination of poetry and advocacy, we might note, is as vital and necessary today as it was centuries ago. When the poet Robert Bly accepted the National Book Award for poetry in 1969, he invoked the moral authority of the radical intellectuals of the sixties:

The only dated part of the speech is the amount of the check. Today’s National Book Award winners each get ten thousand dollars and a trophy.

But there is something moving about the spectacle of a poet trying to change the world with “many poems against the war” and a thousand-dollar check. Especially when we contrast it to the cancellation of a proposed White House symposium on “Poetry and the American Voice” convened by First Lady Laura Bush for Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, 2003. When the poet and editor Sam Hamill responded to the invitation by sending out an e-mail urging invitees to send him poems and statements opposing the invasion of Iraq, he received over 5,300 submissions, from poets as well known as Adrienne Rich, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Levine, and Diane di Prima. The symposium was postponed indefinitely, and the White House put out the following statement: “While Mrs. Bush understands the right of all Americans to express their political views, this event was designed to celebrate poetry.”