Beyond Guilty Pleasures
by and published in Edition Nine of Pomegranate
Most of us have faced a poem by Geoffrey Hill, say, or John Dryden, and felt an uneasy sense that we ought to like it and don’t. At the same time, there are poems which delight us although we feel that they shouldn’t: ‘guilty pleasures’. The very existence of the phrase ‘guilty pleasure’ reminds us that our tastes are not just a matter of what we like; we need to like the right things. Some people infer from this that pleasure is one possibility and serious reading another, and approach difficult authors with a perplexed sense of duty, anticipating that they will be taught a lesson. That, of course, is a false expectation: most poetry will not tell you what to do or think. But we should not conclude from this that poetry is merely a matter of pleasure, of having a good ‘experience’. Unfortunately this view is very popular. You will not see it stated like that; but it is an assumption visible through the holes in many arguments. When a poetry collection is acclaimed for its ‘originality’, it is often being praised for providing a temporary excitement. When a poet says that their ancient art can be like ‘a workout for the brain’, they reduce it to a matter of endorphins. The shoutier parts of the BBC’s Poetry Season implied that poetry is as exhilarating as Chessington World of Adventures, as mouth-watering as a good steak, as versatile as an iPhone; in other words, that it is one more thing on which you might spend your leisure and your cash. The highest praise possible appears to be ‘You will get a real kick out of this’. In one of the BBC’s featured videos, a poet argued that
‘You wouldn’t say, ‘I ate a piece of food once and I didn’t really like it, so I’ve never eaten anything since.’… You can make your own rules. You can decide for yourself what you do and don’t like. Of course, some poems need to be lived with for a while, and twisted like Rubik’s Cubes until you can unleash a meaning that is relevant to you. But then again, some poems might just not be your cup of tea. And that’s OK. Just throw that poem over your shoulder, and rummage through the bottomless poetry box until you find something that you do like. And it doesn’t have to be like the stuff you’ve read at school. It can be something entirely new and unheard of…. Find a poem that fits your mood for that day, rather than having to mould your mood to fit a specific poem.’
This is dubious advice. Firstly, reading to ‘fit your mood’, or reading what is ‘relevant to you’, is effectively refusing to engage. I was reading this morning a poem by Yeats in which he somewhat peevishly explains that, although he does tend to write about mysticism and so on, he is really a proper Irish nationalist writer and should be thought of as such. There were other things on my mind this morning, and I can’t say that Yeats’s argument was either very relevant to me or very fitting to my mood. Well, it shouldn’t have been: it’s his poem. And there is another reason to doubt the BBC view. Our consumer society is crowded with what fits our mood and what we find relevant to ourselves. Poetry, especially good poetry, will always lose that battle. If all you want at this moment is to be amused, then even Luke Kennard is not going to amuse you as much as Family Guy. If you are in a melancholy mood, and just want something melancholy, then there are a thousand singer-songwriters from Nick Drake downwards who will match your mood better than a poem. And if you want something ‘relevant’ to your life, then the films and music of the last five years will provide a better facsimile than the most self-consciously contemporary poet. You might well choose poetry over these things; but if you do, it is because of something else.
The BBC view suggests that poetry is basically useful: you put it into service according to your mood, and it does its thing. To get away from that belief and its implications, I would like to borrow the argument of a book published in 1962, C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism. Lewis’s experiment was to divide up, not types of writing, but types of reading. All literature, Lewis said, can be read in an inferior way. But while some can only be read that way – in that category go Dan Brown and all the usual examples – there are some writers who can also be read in a superior way.
The best part of Lewis’s argument is his identification of two levels of reading: ‘using’ and ‘receiving’. Here he describes the difference:
‘When we ‘receive’ it [a work of art] we exert our senses and imagination and various other powers according to a pattern invented by the artist. When we ‘use’ it we treat it as assistance for our own activities. The one, to use an old-fashioned image, is like being taken for a bicycle ride by a man who may know roads we have never yet explored. The other is like adding one of those little motor attachments to our own bicycle and then going for one of our familiar rides… ‘Using’ is inferior to ‘reception’ because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it.’
The difference can only really be understood through experience; but it is an experience everyone has had. There are poems which we enjoy only because they give an impetus to a feeling of defiance, or wistfulness, or hope, or resentment, which we like to feel anyway. Often we misinterpret a poem just so we can do this. All this is embarrassing to admit to, so I volunteer to go first and confess that for a while Mary Oliver’s lines
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
seemed to me an especially profound expression of an important thought. It now looks a lot like bog-standard teenage solipsism. Of course I liked the poem – it was an invitation to feel in a certain way which I wanted to anyway. It fitted my mood for the day, as the BBC would have it. A lot of our reading is like this; none of our reading is completely free from it. And although Mary Oliver is not necessarily a very good poet, one can easily do the same with very good poetry. Auden’s ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love, | Human on my faithless arm’ has frequently been read and quoted sentimentally, as if it were nothing more than a touching expression of love. The rhythm and the vocabulary suggest it; but ‘faithless’ is surely fatal to any hopeful interpretation. People have Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ read at their weddings despite its deliberately troubling imagery,. There is a risk of snobbery here, and obviously it is not the end of the world if someone misreads or over-rates a poem because they are using it to provoke agreeable thoughts. Sometimes neglecting the value of literature is a reasonable thing to do. But, as readers, we should know how to recognise that neglect.
One very strong example of ‘using’ art, which C.S. Lewis would not have really seen when he wrote his book, is pop music. It is the most obvious truth about the listening habits of pop fans that they seek out music which reflects their emotions: that outsiders look for songs expressing an outsider attitude, that people who are happy/sad about their love lives fall for happy/sad love songs, that those who yearn for a childlike innocence want childishly innocent songs and those who affect a knowing cynicism towards the world respond to songs expressing a cynical knowingness. This is something we grow out of, like not eating vegetables; in the meantime, we are indifferent to anything that cannot be selfishly put to use.
‘Receiving’ is harder to characterise; but that, too, is knowable from experience. If you have read and received Larkin’s ‘Church Going’, you will never be able to step into an unfamiliar empty church without that poem’s atmosphere entering your mind. You will look at every clump of thistles differently when you have received Ted Hughes’s ‘Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear, | Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.’ A reader of Samuel Johnson will have received a powerful point of view about human ambition which will be a part of their own; someone affected by Les Murray will have a different attitude to religious experience in the modern world, whether or not they agree with Murray. You sometimes see how literature works its way into the personality receiving it: medievalists can be impressively pedantic like Piers Plowman or filled with a love of life like The Canterbury Tales. This may start to sound like the view I warned against earlier, that literature teaches lessons. But these influences are too subtle and ineffable to be called lessons. They are not explicit ideas so much as rearrangements of the furniture at the back of your mind.
If literary experience – in Lewis’s sense of ‘receiving’ – is like anything, it is like human relationships. There are important dissimilarities, summed up by the fact that while everyone needs friends, only a minority need literary experience. But a good writer, like a friend, will alter what one pays attention to or thinks important, and make their perspective one’s own. That is what it means to engage: to take something or someone on their own terms, and to treat the difference between you as a point of interest and amusement, not a baffling obstacle. Pleasure is certainly the result of friendship, but it is not its essence: we are someone’s friend simply because they are who they are. And we read for the same reason. The right poems are the ones which can eventually (in some cases after prolonged and arduous effort) be befriended. They are to be celebrated not for their function, but for their character; not because we get a kick out of them, but because they have become a part of us without our even realising it.
Daniel Hitchens
Dan Hitchens was a Foyle Young Poet in 2006, and won second place in the youth category for The Times Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry Translation 2007.