The Old High Way of Love, Blog 4: From Lennon and McCartney to Frost and Yeats

Luckily, there was a lot of McCartney in Lennon and a lot of Lennon in McCartney. To the extent, that is, that each of them realized a creatively integrated self, it was, that self, a kind of microcosm of their partnership. McCartney’s catalogue with Wings aside, his best songs are cleverly penned in addition to being musically catchy. Lennon, for his part, wrote some heartbreakingly beautiful tunes to go along with his sometimes trippy, sometimes raw and vulnerable, sometimes philosophically broad but urgent lyric-sets. It wasn’t as if each needed the other to write great songs. Their strengths were complementary, one might say, but their weaknesses were—well, not really weaknesses. They were their “B strengths.” So it’s not surprising that despite working with each other in the early years over time they grew apart creatively and even began to dislike each other, a dislike that was fueled on Lennon’s side by his various drug addictions, which made him paranoid. Brilliant musicians, even ones who work together and have a history together and are like brothers, don’t have to like each other all the time, I suppose.

Poets, for their part, rarely collaborate, but they read one another’s stuff and affiliate in schools and movements, learning from one another, playing off one another, pilfering and improving upon, rejecting and mutually dedicating. Wordsworth and Coleridge actually did collaborate on Lyrical Ballads, and Ezra Pound’s editorial knife was heavily responsible for the final shape of Eliot’s Wasteland, sans the footnotes. Raleigh’s “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” is a direct response to Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” and even includes four of Marlowe’s original lines almost verbatim. John Donne’s role as George Herbert’s godfather wasn’t the only way Herbert received guidance from him; Herbert’s poetry, though more consistently devotional, is very much descended from Donne’s.

In the twentieth century, in Europe and America particularly, existential isolation became the preferred mythos for poets and poetry, which made collaboration between writers even less available as an option. It also reduced the cultural incentive for a given poet to compose for any particular “reader’s” ear. People’s need to understand and feel cosmic affirmation was foiled, so to speak, by artists, writers, and thinkers of all stripes, many of whom felt it was their obligation specifically to frustrate this need, which in their minds had become “bourgeois.” So, without a positive social function, poets more or less embraced their craft as something done and thought about in solitude. This determination was not surprising, perhaps, in light of the fact that the needs and desires they no longer allowed themselves to satisfy are the very stuff of societal bonds. Historically, that is, their fulfillment has been as much a social as an individual phenomenon—more so, really, if you go way back.

Not to worry, though. The slack was quite happily and greedily taken up by actual bourgeois operatives—Hollywood, the record companies, Madison Avenue, along with, since the eighties, corporate tele-churches and cable-media journalists. This development has given poets great freedom to write what they want without having to worry about music or meaning—or readers. Or, for that matter, other poets. There have been schools of a sort—the Beats, say, the confessional poets, feminist poets, too. For the most part, though, the twentieth century has been, and the twenty-first continues to be for poets, if it were a novel, a kind of very unmagical One Hundred Years of Solitude, during which each has been as if named Jose Arcadio Buendia marooned in a jungle in a mythical country somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

Given the solitary nature of writing poetry in the modern era it’s not surprising that poets haven’t felt obligated to like one another that much—that is, if they don’t anyway. Poets are actually some of the nicest people I know, but they don’t feel obligated to hang out with each other except when one or the other of them is doing a reading at the community college. I suspect that was true of novelists in the early part of the century, too, in spite of all those Barnes and Nobles posters of Joyce and Hemingway and Katherine Anne Porter and Gertrude Stein discoursing animatedly together somewhere in a café in Paris. I maintain this suspicion in spite of the fact that in the early part of the twentieth century some novelists and poets still had an idea of having a social role. Among the poets, for instance, Robert Frost wanted to champion Americanism back when that wasn’t an imperialist concept, and William Butler Yeats saw himself as working to revive Irish Celtic culture as part of a larger movement towards independence from the British Empire. As I’ve discussed in another blog series, “The Introverted Poem,” the two of them even met once thanks to Ezra Pound’s tireless efforts, but they never felt the impulse to hang out together. In fact, on Frost’s side there was real animosity.

Animosity or not, I do think Frost and Yeats entertained complementary notions concerning the nature and function of poetry and why readers read it and why poets write it. These notions pertained to music and meaning but also to memory and grief, which I think are of the essence of poetry even more than of popular music. Both of them, too, became increasingly aware that their feelings and ideas, carefully played out in their approaches to their shared craft, didn’t amount to a hill of beans in the face of industrialization and, in particular, bourgeois politics. In fact, what they each came to understand was that their sense of having a social role was itself little more than a very intelligent but idle fancy vis-à-vis an industrial system that encouraged—in fact, required—everyone in it to minimize any human awareness they might possess or wish to possess for the sake of functioning in that system. As a repository of music and meaning, memory and grief, faith, and even hope, poetry had become a kind of contraband entity, a relict from pre-Enlightenment ages whose un-enlightenment consisted among other things in holding to the notion that being human was important independently of any material system precisely because it meant having something called a soul, not to mention a heart that was not just an organ to be operated on. It meant having a mind, too, that encompassed more than the increasingly computer-like bio-chemical phenomenon we think of when on NPR we hear the word “brain.”

Frost didn’t make a twitter war or anything out of his dislike for Yeats but when in “Mowing” he wrote, “The fact’s the sweetest truth that labor knows,” he was doubling down on his Yankee-proud rejection of “sudden gold at the hand of fey or elf”—that is, of Yeats’s high romantic embrace of the faeries his semi-adopted people held so dear. Europe’s tendency to traffic in such folkish traditions was distasteful to Frost’s robust Americanism, which insisted that, in the poem’s language, “[a]nything more than the truth would have seemed too weak/To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows.” Love, that is, cuts away romantic excesses to get at what’s only real in the loved object, which in the poem manifests as “feeble-pointed spikes of flowers, pale orchises” and “a bright green snake.” The notion that the labor involved in all this debunkative mowing is in fact the labor of love is crucial. What’s really real, at least in the natural world with its cycles of growth, overgrowth, and decay, is really therefore to be loved. It is indeed all that we can truly know as lovable and so is as if by fiat beautiful even if only in a “feeble-pointed” sort of a way. This is Frost’s version, it might be said, of the Keatsian equation—Beauty and Truth—transferred from the urn’s wrought to the field’s found world, where beauty’s feebleness derives from the fact that unlike the urn’s truth and beauty it is transient, en passant as the French would say—as it is elsewhere for Keats himself in his nightingale ode.

And just as in Keats the movement from urn to nightingale is essentially a movement from salutation to farewell (“Adieu, adieu, thy plaintive anthem fades . . .”), in Frost’s poetry what is real is also, like the nightingale but not like the urn, transient, tending more often than not to be thought of with a sense of eventual departure or actual loss. The act of mowing a field, for instance, is fraught with a long tradition of associations regarding the beauty-decimating function of time as well as Death itself. And the culminating line of “Hyla Brook,” though it is an affirmation of sorts, ambiguates in true Frost-ian fashion by way of sounding at the same time an almost elegiac note. While the poet matter-of-factly declares that “[w]e love the things we love for what they are,” he allows that the memory of his beloved brook—its “song and speed,” which renders it like unto “those [brooks] as taken otherwhere in song”—is as potent an occasion for grief as the fact of its being gone, especially when considered in light of that fact. In truth, the memory of the brook is not a fact at all but a mental construct, not unlike Faeries, and therefore like Yeats’s constructs only there “as taken . . . in song.” In the poem, though, both the remembered and the present brook (which latter is interestingly enough likened to “a faded paper sheet”) are mental constructs on which what is really real, the poet’s recognition of loss, happens to be predicated. The loss, that is, is not of anything real, but of the “song” the brook once occasioned, which has now disappeared—“faded”—along with the brook itself.

All this consciousness of the universality and, at the same time, the particularity of loss necessitates—at least for the poet, but, as well, for any thinking, feeling human being—grief—of which we might well consider the constituent elements to be, along with desire, memory and the recognition of loss. This latter is a creation, a trope even, of memory.  Certainly, Herakles’ agony over the loss of his lover Hylus, which makes for the mythological background of “Hyla Brook,” consisted exactly of these three things. Try as he might to find Hylus, Herakles’ outcries and the outcries of the islanders— expressions of an almost unsustainable grief—resonated not only with the memory of Hylus’ beauty but also with the irreversible fact of the loss of this beauty. Because Herakles was Herakles, of course—an expression of heroic culture—his grief gave way to rage and tyranny. The lyric impulse, however, being more human than heroic, is to stick with grief.

This may be because grief is closer to the core of what it means to be human and subject to time. From birth we are not only consciously growing and therefore “gaining,” but also suffering loss as a necessary reciprocal of growth. Growth, like any brook, is directional, but life’s given wealth is “three-sixty,” as smart people say, and not unlike the cosmic “om” syllable. It is of the eternal moment, this wealth, divested of all temporality except that of infinity, which is no temporality at all. It is divested, too, of any locality other than everywhere, which is about as local as, say, the ever-expanding surface of our ever-expanding universe. The eternal moment is the wealth of the just-born. Every subsequent lived moment is different from this phenomenological moment because charged with desire, in the form either of hope, anxiety, or grief, depending on whether felt in relation to the future or the past.