The Poet Resigns: Essays on Poetry in a Difficult Time

True Wit, False Wit

180 True Wit, False Wit Harryette Mullen in the Eighteenth Century We live in an age of false wit in poetry, but that’s not a bad thing. And “false” should not be taken to mean “bad” here, any more than “minor” should be taken to mean “insignificant ” when Deleuze and Guattari use the term to describe Kafka’s oeuvre. But if we look at the dominant mode of wit in contemporary American poetry, and describe it in terms of the classical categories of poetic wit developed in the eighteenth century, it is indeed a false wit that dominates. Of course this tells us as much about the values underlying the classical categories of wit, and the eighteenth-century England in which they were developed, as it tells us about our own poetry of wit, and the environment in which that poetry is produced and received. Both the old categories of wit, and the dominant contemporary mode of wit are, after all, products of their social and institutional contexts. Social being determines consciousness, as Marx said—and not just other people’s consciousness. So when we bring classical eighteenth century categories of analysis like “wit” to bear on contemporary writing, and find contemporary wit wanting, it isn’t a matter of upholding old aesthetic norms and berating contemporary poetry. Rather, it’s a way of trying to understand how and why our poetry differs from the poetry valued in the past. The word “wit” has meant many things since it tumbled out of old German into the English language, but it begins to take on something 181 Poetry in a Difficult World like the contemporary sense when John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, draws a distinction between judgment and wit: judgment is the capacity for discerning fine differences, whereas wit is a capacity for finding similarities, such as the similarities upon which metaphors are founded. Hence, Locke concluded, the snickering wits of London were unlikely to have much good judgment; while sage, sober men of judgment were unlikely to crack a smile at a bon mot (a prospect we might rightly regard with terror). But it took the eighteenth century to really codify wit, and it was Joseph Addison who popularized an elaboration of Locke’s idea of wit and made it into something like a norm for poetry. Addison first sketched out his schema of the varieties of wit in a 1711 issue of The Spectator. Following Locke, he defines wit as the capacity to find similarities, but he goes on to claim there’s more to it than just noticing that one’s mistress’ eyes, being bright, are like the sun: [Locke’s] is, I think, the best and most philosophical account that I have ever met with of wit, which generally, though not always, consists in such a resemblance and congruity of ideas as this author mentions. I shall only add to it, by way of explanation, that every resemblance of ideas is not that which we call wit, unless it be such an one that gives delight and surprise to the reader....Thus when a poet tells us, the bosom of his mistress is as white as snow, there is no wit in the comparison ; but when he adds, with a sigh, that it is as cold too, it then grows into wit. (81) It’s a decent working definition, as Addison himself isn’t too shy to mention, saying it “comprehends most of the species of wit, [such] as metaphors, similitudes, allegories, enigmas...dramatic writings, burlesque , and all the methods of allusion...” (81). John Donne’s famous comparison of two separated lovers as the two arms of a compass, in “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” certainly fits the bill as a poem of wit. There, the central, unmoving arm of the compass represents the woman left behind, and the other arm represents the man who returns. The surprising resemblance is the one between the compass and a certain physiological effect of the prospect of a romantic reunion on the returning , male lover: 182 The Poet Resigns And though it in the center sit, Yet when the other far doth roam, It leans, and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as it comes home. (52) This isn’t just wit, by Addison’s definition: more precisely, it is a poem of “true wit,” since wit, for Addison, can be either true or false...