It has been a long love affair. It started with a coup de foudre in a house of God.
The setting was dramatic: a strange white cathedral, which, with Fitzcarraldo-like incongruity, stood ghostly sentinel against the grey skyline of an Irish Midlands town. ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God’ was probably the first line of pure poetry I ever heard. It remains, albeit to my now atheist’s ear, perfect.
I was a word child, in a country of word children, where life was language before it was anything else. History made English the language that we lived. Though the many sins committed by its original practitioners were mournfully recited at my convent school the truth was clear to us all. English was the elite subject. It was taught with passion. I quickly learned, however, that my native country practised a literary hierarchical system of Orwellian precision: novels good, plays better, poetry best. Were not the signatories of the Irish Proclamation of Independence poets? Poets were not only heroes. They were indeed the gods of language.
At twelve every girl in my class could recite at least one Shakespeare sonnet, a minimum of four Yeats poems, some Eliot and Auden – carefully selected – and a number of poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Patrick Pearse, Alfred Tennyson and William Wordsworth – ‘the holy time is quiet as a nun/breathless with adoration’ had particular resonance. Even the tone deaf could hear the music of language. Our inner ear was being cultivated. When, at thirteen, we left for other schools, me to board, our pre-adolescent minds were already enchanted by Yeatsian dream imagery, challenged, if a little confused, by complex Eliot word-patterns and compelled by the religious lyricism of Hopkins. The harder poems were ahead of us but we were ready for them. Soon Eliot’s mysterious ‘footfalls’ echoed ‘in the memory’. Yeats, we discovered, deserted the fairy woods and moved into the darker territory of obsessive love; we learned that ‘one man loved the pilgrim soul in you’ – a serious lesson concerning erotic love. Browning’s line, ‘all smiles stopped together’, stopped us in our tracks. Keats and Shelley taught us that we knew nothing. Frost, Lowell and Byron joined all the word warriors, arming us for life. Later Larkin loped in, Heaney and Hughes changed the landscape and Plath disturbed a universe.
What of novels and plays? The thrilling universe of characters and tales of incident and coincidence in great novels traced, for my adolescent soul, the strange arc of life. I read obsessively, both what was allowed and what was not. I can no longer remember which was which. I do remember the shocking worldliness of Balzac, the polite cruelty of Henry James, the sophisticated gender-games of Iris Murdoch, long before I fully understood their implications. Like many young girls I considered myself a actress. I read the plays it was not possible for me to see: Beckett, Pinter, Ionesco. I once tried to persuade the Mullingar Players to stage Ionesco’s The Chairs. I failed.Eventually, many years later, I became a West End theatre producer, my instinct less than commercial. Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince, Noël Coward’s only tragedy The Vortex, were successful, but they were not, alas, the basis of a career, though they gave me a privileged view (from the wings) of the mysterious alchemy of theatre. Only Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author captures quite how surreal the experience is. However, I found in the key moments of my own life that the subtlety of character or plot which makes for great art in the novel or the theatre slipped away; the specific impact faded over time. Shakespeare I thought the only exception. Yet what I recalled from his plays were often fragments of speeches, rarely who spoke them or why. Poetry on the other hand, once it had seeped into my mind, surfaced at times of need, often becoming a lifeline. Poetry, this trinity of sound, sense and sensibility, gave voice to experience in a way no other literary art form could. It has never let me down. At various times it has provided me with a key to understanding; it has expressed what I believed inexpressible, whether of joy or despair; it provided me, a girl with no sense of direction, with a route map through life. It threw sudden shafts of light on my own soul and drew at least the shadow outline of the souls of others. It is the most, I now realise, that we are ever permitted to glimpse. Without poetry I would have found life less comprehensible, less bearable and infinitely less enjoyable. What of poets on poetry? Poetry is ‘one person talking to another’ according to Eliot; ‘The supreme fiction’ for Wallace Stevens; ‘If it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know it’s poetry’ declared Emily Dickinson; ‘A way of taking Life by the throat’ for Robert Frost. This last inspired the title for this book, Catching Life by the Throat, and the accompanying CD. In the late 1980s, when I realised it was almost impossible to hear the work of the great, dead poets anywhere in London, I created Gallery Poets; an antidote, perhaps, to the absolute power of what Chesterton called ‘the arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around’. I approached many of Britain’s leading actors and with more passion than finesse asked them whether they would read the work of what I’d begun to see as my dead poets society. They all said yes. Actors still do, for no fee, for no expenses. Their generosity astonishes me. I decided to present the poetry in the context of the life of the poet and each evening began, as it still does, with a short introduction. ‘A poet always writes out of his personal life; in his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it may be, remorse, lost love, or loneliness’ – Yeats. Even Eliot, that most private of poets, also believed that we understand the work better when we understand something of the poet’s life.
Eventually, one of our most successful Gallery Poets productions – an Eliot evening, ‘Let us go then, you and I’, starring Eileen Atkins, Edward Fox and Michael Gough – transferred to the Lyric, Hammersmith, and from there to the Lyric in Shaftesbury Avenue, to cries of, ‘Are you mad, Josephine?’ It was, and is, the first and only time an evening of pure poetry had a West End run, helped no doubt by Valerie Grove’s kind review: ‘They queued and fought for tickets.’ In January 2004 we moved to the British Library and in their intimate, 255-seat theatre we continue to present our monthly poetry readings. Ticket costs are kept low – £5 or £7.50 – and all monies over and above the costs of the British Library go to the Actors Centre. The evenings are recorded and, with the help of the actors, the publishers and the library. I am giving a copy of this book with its accompanying CD, along with the full length three-hour CD, to every secondary school (over 5,000) in the UK.
Why these particular poets? Why these particular poems? (It proved just as difficult to choose eight poems by the less than prolific Larkin, as eight from the thousand or so poems by Dickinson.) A good poet, Eliot wrote, must not only have ‘something to say, a little different from what anyone has said before’, he must also have found the different way of saying it which expresses the difference in what he is saying’. It’s a demanding challenge. These poets meet it. The poems – even the lighter ones – prove why. Each poet in many, if not all, of these poems, also succeeds in the almost mystical weaving of words that connects us to ‘the auditory imagination’. This, Eliot’s insight of genius into the nature of the poetic gift, is ‘the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to an origin and bringing something back, fusing the most ancient and most civilised mentalities’. It is the profound and rare poetic gift.
Many books provide an essential guide to the more technical aspects of poetry – though this, alas, is not one of them. I draw some comfort from Eliot’s statement: ‘I have never been able to retain the names of feet and metre . . . if I wanted to know why one line was good and another bad . . . scansion could not tell me.’ Great lines are those whose words ‘have often a network of tentacular roots reaching down to the deepest terrors and desires’. Thus, strangely, we recognise the sound often before we comprehend the meaning. The sense of sound and what Robert Frost described as ‘the sound of sense’ is lost unless we hear it. The loss is incalculable. Increasingly our inner ear is failing and an entire sound archive, from which great poetry was not only created but appreciated and understood, is fading away. For centuries this inner ear was trained through the speaking of poetry aloud, the oral tradition not a discipline but a voluptuous joy as we absorbed into memory the resonance of sound. It is a privilege of which many, particularly children, are now deprived. ‘Poetry,’ Harold Bloom writes, ‘helps us to speak to ourselves more clearly and more fully and to overhear that speaking.’ Robert Frost’s mantra, ‘Writing with your ear to the voice’, holds equally true for reading. All communication is transformed by sensitivity to the ebb and flow of sound within a sentence – ‘language, caught alive’. Catching ‘language alive’ is a serious business.
Seamus Heaney, as an undergraduate at Queens University, Belfast, heard Eliot’s Four Quartets spoken by the actor Robert Speaight. In his essay ‘Learning from Eliot’, he recalls how ‘what I heard made sense’. Previously he’d been held at bay by the ‘bigness of the structure’, its ‘opacity of thought’. On listening, however, he found that ‘what was hypnotic read aloud had been perplexing when sight-read for meaning only.’ Yeats, when he was seventy-two, claimed that he had spent his life ‘clearing out of poetry every phrase written for the eye, and bringing all back to syntax, that is for ear alone’. From Auden, as ever, an absolute: ‘No poem, which when mastered, is not better heard than read is good poetry.’