It may seem strange that the poetics essay with which I am at the moment most in love is this one by Laura Riding, Poetry and the Good, in that I view her renunciation-of-poetry-in-favor-of-truth to be positively killjoy, and that she makes this admonishing statement in the conclusion of her essay, which would, I’m sure, condemn me to some very low circle of spiritual failure:

Poets (with whom. I think, the responsibility of looking ahead linguistically beyond poetry chiefly lies) will have the special difficulty – where they see hitherto unseen vital flaws in poetry – of resisting that compulsion to rhythmize words dramatically, and make sensuous play with word-sounds, the satisfaction of which comes to seem happiness. (The Laura Riding Jackson Reader, p. 219)

My very soul, which is as deeply ironicized as it is playful, finds her condemnation here a source of amusement.

What interests me is her characterization of poetry as always-already ineffectual. I find her definition liberating, not frustrating.

….The obstacles to effectuality are built into poetry,, for it has evolved as a substitute for the reality, something to be done in token of something expected to remain undone for all practical time: the moral commitment is transformed into an aesthetic commitment having putatively an ideal equivalence to it.

The ineffectuality of poets is the price they pay for membership in a profession in the exercise of which they are morally pledged to work to bring to human experience the finalities of goodness stored in the truth-potential of words, yet obliged to make t their immediate care to ply the pleasure-potential of words, keeping within the bounds of poetic custom, where the shadow of truth, cast from a visionary distance, is professionally sufficient. Poets are too much creatures of poetic custom to be directly aware of the ordinance of failure under which the operate. The sense of success in the ear-charming and min-beguiling artistries dulls their capacity to appreciate the underlying quality of the performance a spiritual speaking, which is always a quality of truth by too much failed-of. They become incapable, almost, of distinguishing between the high élan of the entertainer and the impulsion moving the tongue of the initiate of the Good, spirited with the love of words. (p. 209)

….

The whole meaning-content of poetry is more matter for surmise than for direct apprehension and much more can, thus, seem to be said than in the ordinary way – so much more is left to be surmised.

A stylized failure-of-expression is the verbal heart of poetry’s sacrosanctity. It is around this failure, mystically transubstantiated into success, that the spiritual failure-that-is-success of poetry is built….The linguistic ineffectuality is no mere technically rectifiable frailty of poetry, but an organic component of it …. (p. 211)

The writing of poetry, to me, feels like a loosening, a letting-go into the flux of failure. Even when its composition asks for highly engineered forms, it is still the same experience – perhaps even more so, for one’s labor becomes all the more ridiculous in the face of all that ineffectuality. But rather than thinking of ineffectuality as something to lament, I prefer to acknowledge and even celebrate it. Why else call a book Folly?

I know there are many poets who, to borrow Riding’s term, want to transubstantiate their ardor for the good into their poems. In doing so, they can create interesting effects, because their ardor will fight with their form’s inherent ineffectuality. But “at the end of the day” they are still creating interesting effects.

There is also a connection, to me, between Riding’s condemnation of the sensuous and decorative in poetry with the kind of misogynism you hear issuing forth from the likes of Hamlet (to Ophelia: “the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what
it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness“) – a fundamentalist distrust of artifice which I distrust in turn. I’m sure she (as a maverick feminist thinker) would not have appreciated my making that connection.

Seems to me, that to be poets, we have to learn how to do a (metaphorical) dead-sea float*. Else we’ll be ravaged by the gap between the products of our artifice and our own good intentions.

(*NB: In our poems. I speak not at all of all of the rest of our actions, which I hope are at all times glowingly ethical.)