Defence of Poetry 2003: Raoul Schrott

Permit me to preface my plea with a review of the 3000-year history of the case hereunder submitted to the Court of Fourth Instance. My aim in so doing is to demonstrate with what malice the indictment is laid, and with what extreme measure of spite, prejudice and ignorance it is drafted. The court is invited to observe how the complaint has focused on different aspects of the case with each successive appeal. I submit that such circumstance alone will indicate that my learned colleagues have been intent on abusing these proceedings for the purpose of a show-trial! Yes – you have understood me correctly! For literary criticism always begins with the desire to see poetry disappear, and with it my client – whom I consider it my great honour to represent before this court.

The trial in the first instance was characterised by the attempt of one, Plato, recently called to the bar at that time, to gain in distinction by accusing my client of wilful fraud: while the meaning of life lay in searching for eternal truth, my client’s poetry offered no more than imitations of imitations. In his arraignment Plato submitted that poetry was a phantom art: while each thing – a tree, for instance – had an ideal form somewhere in heaven, which not even the best of gardeners could cultivate to perfection, the poet could proffer but a third-hand imitation – consisting of nothing but words. Instead of using words responsibly, however, he manipulated them for the attainment of mere effect. He was thus charged with interfering with the roots of language by swapping letters: any rootless poet would became footless mixing his ‘g’s and ‘t’s, fancy free to traduce the ideal tree to a tree-tease in verse, a curse, and no treat for the reader either. This, according to my learned colleague, constituted reasonable evidence that a poet’s lies were contagion to the life of the mind, at the very best turning men into children, at the worst, into women. Plato therefore sought the highest penalty, demanding that my client be prohibited from practising his profession and banished from the Republic, and that his works be publicly burned.

The jury of the day acquitted the defendant in default of evidence – but the prosecution saw fit to lodge an appeal. My client, filing one motion after another, was nonetheless able to stand his ground, and, despite subjection to pressure for centuries and considerable loss of custom, was able to compose a number of startling works. He was not read by many even then, for the common reader was at that time not exactly common – and without the patronage of a Maecenas to fall back on, he was generally down on his uppers. The difficulty of the situation was compounded by the perennial constraint of seeking some arrangement with the powers that be, effectively making him dependent on the political and religious authorities of his age. Take, for example, the republican propaganda he was obliged to disseminate in his Aeneid, or again, the virtuous lip-service he has paid to Christianity, whether in the Marian songs of his courtly love poetry, or the Divina commedia.

But then came a change of venue: England, 1595; the next major trial was set to commence. The defendant was represented on this occasion by the senior partner of my firm, Sir Philip Sidney. The complaint that my client had done nothing but spread lies had been refiled, but on this occasion prosecution had refrained from demanding he be banished from society for behaviour injurious to the interests of the state, on the grounds that his profession must be construed too ineffectual to constitute a cultural intervention of any kind, whether negative or positive. Prosecution counsel, a small-minded Puritan by the name of Gosson, noticed, albeit at the eleventh hour, that his argument must, nolens volens, lead to the suspension of proceedings. In desperation he decided to play his joker, claiming that my client was guilty in his poetry of the manufacture and distribution of pornography, and I quote: ‘infecting us with many pestilent desires . . . training [men’s wit] to wanton sinfulness and lustful love’. The fact that this change of strategy, by attributing subversive force to the ineffectual, was in itself contradictory, was of secondary importance. Demanding a verdict was now the least of my learned colleague’s concerns; his attentions were directed solely towards ridiculing the defendant in the eyes of society, discrediting him morally. It was pure slander.

We gave short shrift to the allegation of obscenity, arguing that it was not poetry which ‘abuseth man’s wit’, but that ‘man’s wit abuseth Poetry’ – by reading it for its erotic content only. As for that Damocles’ sword forever suspended over our heads in the shape of the count that poetry is without truth and useless, our defence at that time was built on the premise that poetry makes no claim to be factual; that the poet ‘nothing affirmes, and therefore never lyeth’; that the poet ‘is not labouring to tell you, what is or is not, but what should or should not be’. Returning then to the metaphor of the tree: the poet should be thought of as a gardener sowing the seeds of the possible in the bed of reality, cultivating the image of goodness in the minds of his readers. In this way – and here we have little choice but to extend the analogy with the imaginative restraint imposed by prolonged practise at the bar – thinking about a tree may eventually lead us to define its radical index, which in turn could prompt extraction of both its square and its cubic roots, so that before we know it we may be accelerating through space on said tree-tease, branching into light solids, twigging nanotechnological plant, spreading into orbital habitats. Gasps of surprise – followed by the slow crescendo of courtroom applause . . .

We managed to demonstrate at the time that under the didactic imperative comprehending all imagination the ancient Greek Eikastike – ‘figuring forth good things’, according to contemporary etymologists – and the more dissolute Phantastike had, like oratio and ratio, language and reason, entered an alliance of their own. Thus the poem could become a speaking picture’, allowing us insights that were entirely novel, or unheard of – epiphanies, proverbial in their transfiguring power. For poetry’s use value consisted in its being ‘the most efficient persuasive force available to human beings’. Visible signs of assent on the part of the jury – diminishing now that new questions are mooted as to the actual purpose of poetry. The poet – we took time to explain – was the only mortal whose imagination allowed him access to the various ideals of society. He alone had the strength and the opportunity to portray these in an admirable light for the benefit of his fellow citizens – thereby bringing to the stage a figure who incorporated in his person the ideal intellectual, the ideal politician, the very genius of the age. Virtually speaking, all these qualities were combined in his work.

By this time, we had the jury well on our side. Dame Fortune too, it seemed. For luckily there had been no need to go into my client’s personal preferences – in the pursuit of such noble ends – for the manifold masks, disguises and artful gimmicks of coquetry, nor to admit that this meant he was not infrequently taken for some ham actor, dandy or pimp, rather than for the philosopher, soldier and lover he claimed to be.

But take a look for yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, members of the jury! Ecce homo: the defendant! Not much left of the grandeur of yesteryear, is there! Not a flicker of fashion about him: his stand-up collar and starched shirt-front look as out of place today as that waxed moustache, those sandals or tartan trousers, the tweed jacket, or the Borsalino under which he imagines he can conceal his thinning, sandy hair. I am perfectly aware, ladies and gentlemen, that he does not create an especially favourable impression, and that the expression of dyspeptic melancholy that has replaced his previously arrogant manner does not render him any the more sympathetic. This, however, can scarcely be attributed to the intervention of the public prosecutor – himself, incidentally, my client’s former colleague – when my client was summonsed some thirty years ago to the court of the third instance to attend the most recent trial to date. On that occasion my learned colleague referred to the defendant as a decadent petty-bourgeois, a purveyor of make-believe, with nothing to say for himself and no real interest in changing society. Suddenly a conversation about trees was almost a crime, and even a rhyme was reactionary. And poetry was to be agitprop or nothing! But the greater the enemy, the greater the honour! – as we have already noted. For we were able to dismiss these charges no less elegantly than the earlier actions brought against us, my client this time employing the ruse of simply falling in with them on all counts, penning the required left-wing verse under the pseudonym Pablo Neruda. Until the day came when people grew weary of its leftishness, and my client was once again permitted to display his real talents.

O, yes, my client is ever the opportunist! No harm in admitting that! If we still look somewhat perplexed, however, it is because having first been dubbed ‘Junge Wilde’ and then ‘yesterday’s people’, after being vilified as anarchists, demagogues and pornographers, after being asked to prove the truth of our work and after being taken to task for its uselessness, after all that and all that – people now seem to think they can simply ignore us. They declare us mentally unfit. As evidence they point out that we have lost the majority of our audience and all of the social standing we once had; and that these days not even the most trivial broadsheet rag considers us worth the mention. And this, they submit, is our last ditch manoeuvre: instigating a trial in the hope of finding someone to listen to a defence speech.

Admittedly, my client has not always been his own best friend in these matters. I volunteer to submit that we should not be standing here today had his vanity been marginally less, and his inclination to recognize the many illegitimate offspring he has fathered in the course of his chequered career had been marginally greater. Think whom we might summons to testify on his behalf – George Brassens and Jacques Brel, Fabrizio de André and Ivano Fossati, Chico Buarque and Caetano Veloso, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith and Bob Dylan . . . indeed even the most commercial pop-singers, the chansonniers and hip-hop artistes – especially the latter, since their occupation is nothing but poetry in the classical Greek sense. Even bestseller authors and novelists, headliners and copywriters, all of them cashing in on the high art inherited by my client, treading it underfoot, twisting it this way and that, until it fits their own requirements. Which, on beginning his own career, was exactly what my client did. He is simply too vain to admit it.

And it is here we draw close to the root of the problem, one which – I beg leave to submit – has been overlooked in all the course of our three thousand-year-old proceedings. For the divers complaints brought against my client have derived solely from the fact that he fell foul of a media revolution which drowned the Mediterranean poetic legacy in a whirlpool of oblivion, stranding my client as a living anachronism. The only question remaining is whether his work therewith forfeited its truth and use value.

The German word Dichtung (poetry) derives from Diktion, the diction that defines all poetry, its characteristic manner of verbal expression in creating ‘speaking pictures’. However, the technical resources available to diction of this kind – figures of thought such as the metaphor and simile, as well as acoustic figures, like metre and rhyme – were developed to fulfil a single, distinctive purpose: to make information memorable; to pass on knowledge from one generation to the next; by using standardized musical forms in language to create the only existing mnemonic system (perhaps the respected members of the jury would oblige by attempting to speak the text of a song without humming the tune…); by using set phrases and portmanteau expressions (Homer’s ‘cunning Odysseus’, for example, or our ‘dear God’); by lending trenchant characterisation to things by means of visually suggestive comparisons (‘rosy-fingered Eos’); by then synchronising sound track and visuals to produce a cinema of the mind, comprising newsreel as well as entertainment, sweeping historical romance and educational documentary, propaganda and moral edification; through which facts, circumstances and values could be passed down, making culture possible in the first place.

It was for this purpose alone that poetry had been invented. To this end too had it generated the stock formulae that constituted a language transcending time. The traditions on which it was able to draw in so doing were far older than the few millennia in which it had assumed a literary form. But this was precisely the crux of our problem. For it was with the invention of the alphabet that poetry had suddenly lost its function and raison d’être. The advent of script meant the formulaic language of poetry was no longer essential to the transmission of information, and that ideas and facts could be recorded in writing without prior transformation in the matrix of poetry. The advantage was that entire fields of knowledge, including the natural sciences, philosophy and the Law, became emancipated from the constraints of poetry, and established themselves as autonomous disciplines – for their material could now be directly set down in writing. New poetic genres were born of this development too, like drama, whose actors could now record everyday speech. The disadvantage was that the inventory of poetry suddenly seemed superfluous.

Poetry has never wholly overcome the loss of its central function, which, incidentally, was also the beginning of all its trials, of all the proceedings brought against us. It was tantamount to our expulsion from Paradise. Plato had already indicated as much by giving to poets their new name. By nature inclined to nostalgic retrospection he had lamented the demise of the ancient Aoides – the singers, seers and prophets invested by the gods and history – whose tasks had given them a monopoly on the transmission of culture. Following the revolutionary introduction of writing, however, a reversal no less radical than that of the later computer age, the Aoides were transmogrified as ‘poets’, godless ‘makers’, puffed up artisans of the language, barking phrasemongers and two-bit verbicides. Who had forfeited all authority, all auctorial significance, and had mutated as mere ‘authors’. Thereby losing their last vestige of authenticity.

Having ascertained the state of the facts – revered members of the jury – we shall now proceed to our defence. In which we shall table evidence to the effect that the conduct of the defendant, notwithstanding circumstantial evidence to the contrary, has been without blemish – but that his profession, given the magnitude of the upheavals already referred to, must henceforth be judged in a different light. For what has remained intact of the original character of oral poetry, an art form that was probably many thousands of years old? Very little. What has survived is mainly the enjoyment we experience in listening to a poem, whether in the discretion of one’s own language, the distinctness of a foreign language, or in sound poetry. It is something that inhabits the quality metrical language owes to music: a communal experience that seems to unite reciter and audience, their breathing and heart frequency synchronized by the regular pitch of the verses. An experience in which bookish words reclaim their archaic corporeality. Giving rise to a form of communication that once was peculiar to oral poetry, whose origins, we remember, lay in the service it once performed to religion. An experience, in other words, in which communication becomes communion. If the truth of this development largely escapes the scrutiny of reason, the same cannot be said for its methods. For therein survives its persuasive force, harnessed to this day by political demagogue and advertiser’s copywriter alike, or by all who seek, through the insinuations of verbal euphony, to sell a message which they intend to remain sacrosanct.

However, this does not explain why the propensity of such brainwashing to engender conflict should be a matter of concern in respect of religion, the economy or populist politics, but not of poetry. The reason is that poetic devices are plundered by the former to a clearly defined and commonly intelligible end, while poetry, on the other hand, seems to have become an end in itself. It is therefore essential, esteemed members of the jury, that we elucidate the matter of its authorization. Authority was once conferred upon oral poetry by the ruler who praised it, the gods it celebrated, the audience it sought to entertain, and the knowledge it transmitted – on the condition that it remained no less subordinate than Adam and Eve in the Garden of Paradise. With the advent of writing, however, which he soon adopted for his profession, my client bit into the bitter apple (as the Germans say) and ate (if I may be permitted to use this motif one last time) from the Tree of Knowledge, that is: self-knowledge. Henceforth he became his own legislator. The Muses no longer gave authority to his poems, as they always had done in the past, nor sanctioned his enthusiasm as ‘possessed by a god’. Instead, he was henceforth forced to find his own justification for what he produced.

With newly acquired literacy, however, poetry also forfeited its unequivocal status. Not only because, as Plato complained, writing was open to interpretation, consisting merely of words and lacking entirely in the facility to register intonation, facial expression, or gesture, which were what actually showed what people meant. No, for besides growing in ambiguity in this way poetry had also declined in universal comprehensibility and accessibility. Whereas the epic extemporizing of oral poetry, with its concise items of information, its generalized formulae and continuous repetition had taken the short attention spans of its listeners into consideration, poetry was now confronted with readers. For whom the poem was a visual as well as a limited entity. To be read as often as one wanted. This was the beginning of the ‘text’ – whose ever denser weft and warp became transparent only on repeated reading. But it was here too that poetry took leave of its wider audience. For the members of the latter were generally more interested in the ‘cinema of the mind’ – that is, in the film itself – than in the constitution of the screen.

As you can see, we are apt to deal with the defendant a good deal more severely than any prosecuting counsel preceding us. And this, in order finally to foreground what makes poetry unique and inimitable. Thereby to prove the truth of its case at last.

The more poetry was made for paper, pen and the discerning reader, the less important became all those redundant factors that were dependent on memory, recitation and listeners: instead verse became more concise, and more complex. But this had yet another effect: for having lost its function as the significant medium, poetry had no alternative but to make a subject of itself. It now began to focus its gaze on its own rules and resources. The most important of these is probably the metaphor. In the words of that most ancient of our colleagues, Aristotle, who defended poetry against Plato: ‘the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances’.

The value of poetry has come to lie in its ability to turn analogy into its central concern. While metaphor had previously been little more than a device to outline things in more trenchant terms, it now became a faculty of the understanding. With its own use value: for every invention or discovery can be traced to the aha-experience of Archimedes in his bathtub, to the insight that one thing is like another. It is this principle of resemblances that drives the think-tanks and creative studios, the leading edges of science and technology, even providing the basis of wine criticism (or have you ever read a gourmet columnist writing of wine that tastes of grapes?). But it goes further than that: in fact, this x = y mechanism is the only way we have of giving meaning to things. With its help we have named our world and rendered it comprehensible. Beginning with ourselves, from our awareness of our own bodies, we have used metaphor to appropriate the things that surround us – from the leg of the table to the foot of the mountain – because we are incapable of imagining anything that does not exist. For every new invention is evolved out of what went before, and every new discovery is only brought to light by comparison with phenomena we already know. And the discipline that considers such matters its foremost concern is poetry. With which we conclude our first argument.

Second argument: whereas oral poetry was a feat of memory during which rhapsodist, poem and listeners merged to a moment of pure presence, the impact on poetry of writing has been to elicit its timelessness. The consciousness of pure presence is probably confined in our own day to the special moment of poetic inspiration, which continues – as our client is fond of repeating – until the man of Porlock knocks at the door. What ensues is the elaboration of the idea, the construction of the poem according to the pretensions of its form – which in fact amounts to a re-construction of that moment itself. At the same time, the subject of this work is self-referential: memory itself.

Our memory is no video-recorder, taping and rewinding films to requirement. On the contrary: whenever we remember, we reconstruct the past anew, rearranging fragments differently each time to create a novel entity. If oral poetry was comparable to a film, lyric poetry has more in common with a photograph; where the former saw its remit in presenting a broad canvas whose validity was universal, the latter can claim to lay before us takes on reality – however local and subjective they may be – whose definition and exposure is expertly handled. And whereas poetry in its epic capacity passed on the world of the past for the benefit of the future – oral poetry being a trade that was dependent on time – today’s poetry is more likely to see its own activity as detached from time, its lines suggesting moments that are suspended outwith that dimension.

The reasons for this lie in the musical constraints of metrical language, in rhyme, and in the strophic form. These three have one characteristic in common whose significance, though practically negligible with regard to oral poetry, has come to the fore as poetry has become more self-referential: the retrospect occasioned by their essentially repetitive structure. Rhyme is but an echo of a pre-determinant word-sound; the refrain takes us back to the beginning; the euphony of the lines implies the monotony of the eternally recurrent. It is this that enables a poem to restrain time, or indeed to bring it to a standstill, making it the only form to give lasting quality to a subjective factor that neither celluloid nor digital plastic can render.

However, its ability to transcend what is merely private or purely individual is due to a second factor which, like music, has managed to survive the revolutionary impact of writing intact: the figurative language of poetry (literature has added nothing to its panoply of rhetorical skills). It is thanks to the objectifying consistency of its diction that the highly subjective bearing of most modern poetry attains super-individual significance. It does so by rendering the personal as the exemplary, representative and universal; and this in poems that are ‘total’ works of art, comprising image and sound, language and music, the intellect and the emotions. The totality of a moment reduced to its most human dimension. Only a poem can do this – for it is something which prose narrative cannot comprehend, and which drama cannot act out.

But what of truth? A good poem is distinguished from a bad poem by the extent to which it meets its own formal requirements – whether these be semantic and logical, allegorical and metaphorical, visual (like the Alexandrian calligrammes in which writing was shaped as Eros’ wings) or mathematical (like the formal rules of combination used by magical charms, the hypograms, whose existence Saussure proved in Martial’s poems, songs by Guihelm and Villon based on the medieval practice of gematry, or the constraints developed by the Oulipians). In the case of sonnets that imitate the logical closure of a syllogism, or of an allegorical poem intent on exploring every aspect of its semantic frame, the criterion of truth is relatively unproblematic. But what kind of truth inhabits poems such as those by Inger Christensen, in which the world is arranged in Fibonacci-sequences? Or – viewed simply – in stanzas structured by the consonance of terminal sounds?

It may seem too absurdly logical to be true, but even the ancient Sumerians were drawn to the conclusion that similarly sounding words were related in kind at a fundamental level. Startlingly, their belief has been confirmed by research in neurology: a person conditioned in a language laboratory with electric shocks whenever he or she hears the word ‘rhyme’ will also flinch on hearing that someone has had a good ‘time’, or committed a ‘crime’. It is apparent that rhyme has a basis in biology, a reality with a claim to its own criteria of truthfulness. But what of poems that incorporate textual graphics, what of object poems? Here too we need a poetics that is up-to-date – and which has yet to be written. One thing that can be said, however, is that visual figures of this kind are also ultimately preoccupied with the figurative imitation of structures which occur in Nature, thereby giving substance to the ancient Greek notion of mimesis: understood as the interpretation and portrayal of the real. There is probably no other art form which can execute these in more concentrated a form than the poem. That would normally suffice to conclude our plea, but there is more that needs to be said.

We submit once again that poetry foregrounds the rules of its own genre: the different systematic arrangements of language. Since language and thought influence each other, both automatically include reality; poetry of whatever make is true if only because it is rooted in words. In this sense the poem – to hazard a modern frame of analogy – can be seen as a kind of module, the stanzas as circuit boards, and the lines as circuits. Taking this IT-jargon a step further we can see that while the carefully encoded language of poetry acts as a conductor between reality and consciousness, the poem in toto defines the various modalities by which reality can be mapped, as well as the experimental set-up that permits access to it in the first place. The decisive factor here is the conductivity of the poetic chip. If we now go on to question the truthfulness of poetry in this context, we are in fact addressing the problem in relative terms, for here it is more appropriate to speak of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ than ‘true’ or ‘false’. The more stringent the formal principle ordering the language, and the more rigorous its execution, the more efficient the poem will be as a vehicle for investigation and discovery – for only the poem’s intrinsic precision can minimize the babble of data in the module. No matter what programme it is intent on carrying out, it will always be able to tell us something about reality, and be all the more truthful in doing so, the more comprehensive, efficient and integrated the performance of its inner circuits.

What these relay to the screen are diagrams – diagrams like world maps: some recording rainfall, sea currents or wind direction; some recording geological patterns, altitudes or temperatures, others still demographic concentration or other statistics. Ladies and gentlemen, the thrust of my argument will be apparent: for each of the many maps generated by this programme a specific aspect of reality is revealed. Permit me to submit this as my third argument.

This covers only one characteristic of poetry, however. The poem defined as a module with its ins and outputs of subjectivity and the world constitutes anything but run-of-the-mill IT. Esteemed ladies and gentlemen, members of the jury, when my client – looking too blasé by half after all these technical metaphors – views his verses in more pragmatic terms, as a speech act, then he is fully aware that they deviate from the truth quite deliberately, in as far as truth represents some kind of secret convention between human beings. This is because: a) he is usually more interested in originality than truth, which he often finds banal; b) because language as a medium lacks precision; and c) because of all the different styles of poetic diction. But also d) because of the complexity of its literariness, and e) because several principles of organisation are quite likely to concur within a single poem, and are therefore also equally likely to compete with one another: grammar with the elliptic line, both with the demands of metre and the patterns of sound, all these together with the logic of their various tropes and picture planes. It would be like a crossword puzzle attempting to incorporate several languages into its chequered pattern at once – and still make sense. Which is one of the reasons why there are so few good poems.

To persevere in one’s attempt to encounter the one truth that would be valid at every level, that, in the classical Greek sense, is the Eros of poetry: the desire to reach out and touch what cannot be grasped or held. More important than the gesture itself, however, are the ambiguities generated by the method it stands for. The way polysemy is produced at the intersection of the different linguistic planes. And contradiction. The way one part of a metaphor can thoroughly convince us and, at the same time, point to a second dimension that is unfathomable and cannot be thought through, a dimension that is metaphysical. This is the true achievement of poetry: in trying to portray the world as it is, it reveals the seeds of paradox wherever two words clash. Its truth is to show where and in what manner the dimension of contradiction begins. With the Wittgensteinian clarity appropriate to its hermeneutics, a poem supplies the criteria by which it must be judged as well as foundations upon which such criteria are based. So that we can retrace the way one word joins another in making something that transcends every dictionary and every language.

The true freedom from contradiction which belongs to poetic truth can be summarized thus: a poem reaches out to the utmost bounds of philosophical knowledge by asserting, via its contradictions, that all poems, like all Cretans, lie – in as far as they are also telling the truth. Submitted as argument No. 4, this might seem excessively philosophical to any jury that were really hostile to our plea. But the ambiguities set up by poetry also have a thoroughly practical effect: they lay claim on behalf of the imagination to a space that cannot be confined or controlled, to areas where thought is free to roam and play. That is the reason why my client has felt gratified, indeed honoured, by accusations of subversion, demagogy and pornography. Because these have only served to expose the totalitarian systems whose show trials were intended to force him to his knees. Which they had good reason to do. Because under such dictatorships poetry – the oldest trade in the world – once more remembers its ancient Mediterranean traditions and reverts to what it once was: a universal organ of speech, albeit in this case underground, in samizdat form, as the secret cant of prisoners. It is for this reason too that my client is not especially perturbed to learn that my honourable colleague, the public prosecutor, has tacitly decided to drop all charges brought against him, for that is a sign that times for poetry must at least be good enough. For better or for worse, poetry is taken so much for granted now that nobody notices just how ubiquitous it has become. Indeed possibly too omnipresent – on every TV-screen after all, and every hoarding, every radio programme and every printed page. Which has set my client wondering . . .