Unpoetry—Poetry—Metapoetry

UNPOETRY-POETRY-METAPOETRY1 REID MAcCALLUM THIS will be an attempt to determine the nature. of poetry by a sort of initial range-finding; by determining what is not yet and what is no longer poetry, what is still prose and what is .already prayer. It is assumed that these are different forms or intensities of a. common function of man's spirit, the speech function, and that the factors differentiating between them are to be sought primarily in that function; further that adequate characterization of any one level of speech demands a reference to the others. The attempt to define poetry without such a reference yields statements, such as that it is "the best words in the best order," which amount to nearly nothing. Beneath such a surface, disregarded problems seethe. Of course poetry is words, in a syntactical order different from that of prose; it is also sounds, and a pattern of sound which achieves a certain music; it is also sense, a pattern of abstract concepts which through the aid of logic possess an intelligible meaning; it is also images, which combine into some sort of total suggestion, and :finally it is a pattern of emotional charges which integrate iilto some total state of feeling. As if this were not bad enough, the person attempting to define poetry in terms of itself would have to add that poetry is not any or all of these five distinct things, but the law of movement among them all, the constant· and varying bond between them all, the way music, syntax, suggestion, significance and emotion meet and part, overlap or fail to coincide, chime and clash. This is an elaborate, but not unnecessarily elaborate, way of saying that poetry in itself is not definable. It is a relief to fall back on the simple metaphors by which poets try to convey the difference between their level of speech and others, as when they call it "heightened speech," or say that in poetry the dry pebbles of dictionary language are immersed in water; poetry is the medium which reveals the astonishing freshness, delicacy, and variety of colour of words. 1The quotations in thi.s article from poems by Archibald MacLeish are with the kind permission of Mr MacLeish and the publisher, the Houghton Mifflin Company. 269 270 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY "Heightening" may be more than a metaphor. If we take it to refer to the various degrees of speech, and the passage from one level to another which contains qualitative novelties not observed in the first, further if we distinguish at least four such stages or levels, the cry, prose, poetry, prayer, the notion of "heightened speech, may really help us to explore and survey this territory. I. By the cry is meant the primitive holophrase, the 'rambling, rhythmic, refrain-like utterance with which, presumably, human speech begins. It is not song, nor prose nor poetry nor prayer; it is not even words, for this "whole cry,, precedes and gives birth to words. Animally speaking, it is mostly a commotion, not yet· .purged and brought to order; humanly speaking, it is an eagerness to confer and convey meaning in all the above ways, a virtual or potential prose, poetry, etc., an urge and a pressing forward toward what does not yet exist. If it can be called human, it is the speech of man as a being e.f pure nature, of man as an animal. The Dadaists would have done well to recognize this: the level of speech to which they aspired impossibly to return, far from being poetic, is not even human, except latently. II. Prose speech issues from the holophrase through the logistic and syntactical discipline and domination of intelligence. By internal subdivision, scission, differentiation, words with meanings are generated out of animal responses to affective situations of fear, danger, hunger, and the like. This is the speech of everyday practice , and of knowing; unpoetical, but fully human, and superior in every way to the spontaneous speech of nature. Prose already gives irrefutable evidence of man's discontinuity with nature, and of the real break between rum and the animals. Prose meaning is a one-dimensional straight...