Text

POEM ONLY

Poem talking silence not dead death
Security not from danger drowning
Only from fear and fearlessness
Lasting weakness stronger than prompt strength

Pale health like tranquil mourning
Mourning nothing or rejoicing
Wholeness without whole
Whole of wholeness

Self-pitiless illumination
A shrunken world no pride no after-shame
Inhospitable welcome deaf the door
To who is not within.

Cruel if kind and kind if cruel
And all if nothing.

NOR IS IT WRITTEN

Nor is it written that you may not grieve.
There is no rule of joy; long may you dwell
Not smiling yet in that last pain,
On that last supper of the heart.
It is not written that you must take joy
Because not thus again shall you sit down
To ply the mingled banquet
Which the deep larder of illusion shed
Like myth in time grown not astonishing.
Lean to the cloth awhile, and yet awhile,
And even may your eyes caress
Proudly the used abundance.
It is not written in what heart
You may not pass from magic plenty
Into the straitened nowadays.
To each is given secrecy of heart,
To make himself what heart he please
In stirring up from that fond table
To sit him down at this sharp meal.
It shall not here be asked of him
‘What thinks your heart?’
Long may you sorely to yourself upbraid
This truth unwild, this only-bread.
It is not counted what large passions
Your heart in ancient private keeps alive.
To each is given what defeat he will.

CELEBRATION OF FAILURE

Through pain the land of pain,
Through tender exiguity,
Through cruel self-suspicion:
Thus came I to this inch of wholeness.

It was a promise.
After pain, I said,
An inch will be what never a boasted mile.

And haughty judgement,
That frowned upon a faultless plan,
Now smiles upon this crippled execution,
And my dashed beauty praises me.

oi weh

well, obviously Riding isn't for those who, if
they don't "get it" at a first reading, feel
frustrated & cheated, as if the pull-ring broke off
& they can't have their beer.

Well, I'd say I feel more amused than cheated.
As it happens, I've gone through a few of her
things patiently, and I don't remember there
ever being a reward, either during or after.
I don't at all mind her abstract diction or the
opacity---E. A. Robinson and J. V. Cunningham
are two wonderful poets who come to mind whose
diction is often highly abstract and who can be
opaque or riddling. But they have good ears and
one can enjoy even those poems that one doesn't
quite "get." Certainly Stevens' poems don't
yield themselves on just one reading; a lot of
them don't yield themselves after a hundred
readings, but they're worth your time. I just
think that Riding's relentless obscurity and her
unnatural English (combined with such "poetical"
usages as "not thus again shall you sit down" or
"what thinks your heart?") are risible, and then
very boring. And of course her arrogance and meg-
alomania make it easy to dislike her work. (I love
Frost's old off-the-cuff remark about obscurity:
"There's obscurity and then what are called in
ancient times dark sayings. But obscurity isn't
that; obscurity's usually a cover for nothin'---
you go looking for it and it comes out 'a stitch
in time saves nine' or somethin' like that.")
I know that some people admire, and have admired,
her stuff, which is okay, if puzzling, but I
think she's very bad. Sorry.




[This message has been edited by robert mezey (edited June 15, 2001).]

I've heard that charge a dozen times or so, and
still don't believe it. Auden's early poems
are a hundred times better than hers, and I fail
to see much resemblance. For one thing, he had
a great ear; hers wasn't even good.

Graves’s distaste for Auden’s homosexuality and his belief that he was a plagiarist arose early and were never set aside. Already in the Thirties Graves was conducting a controversy against Auden, both personally and through others, for what he saw as Auden’s literary thefts - for example, arranging for Alan Hodge to write to the Times Literary Supplement in the autumn of 1937 to protest against his alleged borrowings from Riding and himself (Martin Seymour Smith, Robert Graves: His Life and Work, London, 1983).

Perhaps his most extended attempt to debunk Auden’s reputation was in his essay "These Be Your Gods, O Israel!", where he sets side by side passages from Riding and Auden as illustrations of his thesis - to my mind they do not convince - and accuses him of being "as synthetic as Milton". He goes on, "Auden’s is now the prescribed period style of the fifties, compounded of all the personal styles available; but he no longer borrows whole lines, as for his first volumes, or even half-lines. It is a word here, a rhythm there, a rhetorical trope, a simile, an ingenious rhyme, a classical reference, a metrical arrangement." His real talent, asserts Graves, was for "light verse", a reductive judgement in which I do not concur.

Graves’s homophobia was modulated by contempt for what he saw as Auden’s physical cowardice. (Graves, of course, had served with distinction in the First World War, having had the disconcerting experience of reading his own obituary in The Times.) In the same essay, he remarked that "Like Tennyson…Auden went to Spain in warlike ardour by a comrade’s side; like Tennyson he saw no fighting. But, unlike Tennyson, he played plenty of ping-pong in a hotel at Sitges." (His view of Owen, whom he knew, was coloured by his homophobia. Seymour-Smith records a private comment that "Owen was a weakling, really; I liked him but there was that passive homosexual streak in him which is even more disgusting that the active streak in Auden.") When in 1945 it was rumoured that Auden might return to UK, Graves is reported to have remarked, "Ha ha about Auden: the rats return to the unsunk ship" (Seymour-Smith).

Oddly, perhaps, Auden had a good opinion both of Graves as a writer and as a thinker about poetry, making no secret of his belief that Graves should succeed him as Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1961.

Clive Watkins

i see old literary controversies, like old movie
monsters, never die... well, Graves is nuts on his
contemporaries (as, i might add, Riding is nuts on
every other subject but poetry!) but having read lots
of Auden (whose early stuff i am a great admirer of)
i reached this conclusion without the benefit of G's
dubious authority; for that matter both A. & R. derive
from Gertrude Stein's experiments very interestingly;
this might be said to be the non-imagist/non-Eliotic
current of Modernism, & is worthy of study for how
influence persists but changes as poets bring different
intentions to a basic "voice".

For all I know, Stein could have been a big (and
bad) influence on Riding, but I very much doubt
that Auden took her "experiments" seriously. Stein
wrote some fine, lively prose narrative, but her
poetry---Jaysus! Very good stuff if you're looking
for a bedtime sedative---better than Nembutal. Which
of Auden's poems, would you say, show any evidence of
Steinian influence? I should think he'd have classed
her with the Surrealists and Dadaists and such, all
of them definitely not his cup of tea. In a letter
to a friend (Spender?) just before he left for Spain,
he wrote, "Oh dear, I do hope I won't meet any
Surrealists."