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How seriously are we to take the meaning of poetry? George Watson considers the costs of seeing poetry as largely spontaneous and self- expressive.
Is poetry dangerous? The question hardly sounds worth answering, until you recall with a start that there have been times or places when it was. In the China of the Gang of Four, according to Kang Zhengguo in his Confessions, poetry was "the most dangerous career you could possibly choose" - or so his father, a man of letters, told him. It was like working as a circus acrobat without a net.
Poetry today is widely seen as harmless for other reasons: not because of free laws and institutions but because great poems, at first encounter, look triumphantly achieved and effortless. A pebble is smooth because of the slow action of tides, and a Shakespeare sonnet or an ode by John Keats is seldom seen as the fruit of a process of forethought and revision. "A line may take us hours, maybe," said W.B. Yeats in Adam's Curse, and the curse God laid on Adam was work. But a great poem, at first meeting, does not feel or look like a place where anything laborious ever happened.
That makes poetry tough to teach. Philip Larkin, who was a university librarian as well as a poet, used to insist that poems are to be read rather than studied; but since they are studied it matters how it is done. In a 1979 talk entitled "A Neglected Responsibility" he called on British libraries to acquire and preserve poetic manuscripts, hopeful that a corrected draft might persuade the young that a poem is the end of a deliberative process rather than a spontaneous act. A recent Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, echoing Larkin, has told how an edition of Wilfred Owen's poems with a facsimile of a corrected draft of the sonnet Anthem for Doomed Youth changed his life as a teenager by vividly showing a poet in the act of revision. It was a salutary lesson, but the problem runs wider and deeper.
Poems are not nowadays seen as dangerous because their truth-content is little regarded. It is not widely believed that it matters whether a poem is true or false: it is...