Poetry

POETRY I Northrop Frye There is nothing particularly "modern" about the gap between poetry and its reading public, or about the charge that poets are wilfully obscure, a charge levelled with great enthusiasm against (for example) Keats's Endymion. In every age the envious readers--a large group ofevery writer's contemporaries- have resented the humility that close attention requires, and poetry has never been popular except when it provided some kind of middle distance, by telling stories or crystallizing into proverbs and slogans. But there are, perhaps, some additional hazards about our own age. Most people nowadays are accustomed to the double talk ofjournalism , and it is not the difficulty of poetry that they find baffling, but its simplicity. Vivid imagery and concrete language are too sharp for readers accustomed to the murkiness of dead words, and make them wince and look away. A recent Canadian book ofverse was reviewed in an American journal devoted entirely to poetry, by a reviewer who kept protesting that he couldn't understand a word of it. The writing could not have been clearer or simpler; but that was the trouble. Again, lyrical poetry cannot be read quickly: it hasno donkey's carrot likea whodunit, and the developing of "reading skills," which enable the reader to come to terms with his own sense of panic, has no relation to the reading of poetry. The reading of poetry is a leisurely occupation, and is possible only for that small minority which believes in leisure. George Johnston's The Cruising Auk (Oxford, pp. 72, $2.50) should appeal to a wider audience than most books of poems surveyed in these reviews. Even the envious reader should be disarmed by the simplicity, which may make him feel that he could do as well ifhe set his mind to it, or that here at last is a "light" verse which "doesn't take itself too seriously," the favourite cliche of the culturally submerged. The critic, however, has to explain that the substance of Mr. Johnston's poetry is not at all the image of the ordinary reader that is reflected from its polished surface. He must explain that seriousness is not the opposite of lightness, but of portentousness, and that genuine simplicity is always a technical tour deforce. In short, he must insist that Mr. Johnston's most pellucid lyrics have to be read as carefully as the most baffling paper chase of E. E. Cummings. The difference between the simple and the insipid, in poetry, is that while simplicity uses much the same words, it puts them together in a way POlITRY Iq 44I that keeps them echoing and reverberating with infinite associations, rippling away into the furthest reaches of imaginative thought. It is difficult for a critic to demonstrate the contrast between the simplicity that keeps him awake at night and the mediocrity that puts him to sleep in the day. In The Cruising Auk, however, there is one major ciue to the simplicity. Like Mr. Reaney and Miss Macpherson before him, Mr. Johnston has produced a beautifully unified book, the apparently casual poems carrying the reader along from the first poem to the last in a voyage ofself-discovery. We begin with a Narcissus image, a boy gazing into a pool and feeling an identity with "the abyss he gazes on," and we end with "0 Earth, Turn!" (the echo ofMiss Macpherson can hardly be an accident) where the abyss opens up again inside the adult: I love the sIightly Battened sphere, Its restless, wrinkled crust's my here, Its slightly wobbling spin's my now But not my why and not my how: My why and how arc me. Between these two points, a state of innocence and a state in which all paradise is lost except a residual intuition, Mr.Johnston surveys the ages of man. He first explores the "pool" or pond, life or the objective side of existence, which remains the controlling image of the book. In "In the Pond" the poet lies beneath it; in "In It" he sails over it in a boat; in "The Queen of Lop" it enters a girl's dreams as a death symbol...