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13/4/16. The collective noun for emeritus professors is ‘a reticence’. It derives from the fact that although they still hold definite opinions, in retirement they are too shy to parade them before the world, e.g. in Comments that will appear on blogs. They prefer to communicate discreetly by email or word of mouth.

I have heard, then, from a reticence of professors emeriti in response to my post on 17 February 2016 about Laurence Binyon’s half-line ‘They shall grow not old’ and the controversy around Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Dulce et decorum est’ (see ‘Archives’, bottom right, for February 2016, or click the link below and scroll down).

Half of the distinguished e.p.’s feel I ‘might have a point’ in suggesting that Binyon inverted the negative in his often misquoted line so that the ‘not’ seems to qualify the adjective ‘old’ as a luminous concept ‘not-old’, rather than adhering limply to the verb as ‘grow-not’. One former professor of English literature found my argument ‘utterly convincing’ and added that accepting the ‘simpler (and very banal) reading’ was ‘too easy’. Another said he ‘wished’ I was right, but felt that the public tendency to ‘correct’ the line to ‘They shall not grow old’ showed that Binyon had not succeeded in avoiding the impression that ‘he meant nothing subtler than to negate the verb’.

The same e.p. concluded: ‘It all depends on how you speak the line.’ Certainly it does. Personally, I find it nearly impossible to drop my voice enough to speak it as though it meant ‘grow-not old’, i.e. virtually elide the ‘not’ syllable or at least give the words three level stresses: ‘grōw nōt ōld’, as though ‘grow not’ was a spondee. Both seem to me totally unnatural to modern English. But perhaps that is the point: English, and English verse, are simply spoken differently from how they were in 1914.

One of the reasons the speaking of this half-line may have changed is that we expect poetry today to enact its meaning, rather than to be semantically coherent versified thoughts. Our way of reading poetry, I think, has been deeply influenced by today’s theatre, and particularly by the articulation of Shakespeare’s dramatic poetry since about the 1960s; not to mention by the poetry of G.M. Hopkins and Dylan Thomas. We aim not to declaim verse, but to create through the ear what is essentially a dramatic experience. Hence, in my view, we are not just telling that the fallen won’t grow old like the rest of us, we are showing it through the rising of ‘grow’ into the transfigured state ‘not-old’. The line is not just a statement, it has to get itself a life.

Of course, it may also be that an inverted negative — ‘grow not’ — is now so weird that we have simply forgotten how to speak it. Either way, the language has certainly moved on and in my view it has to take a poem like ‘For the Fallen’ with it. If it is really poetry, we cannot apply a purely historical, antiquarian approach to it and its reading.

One who would disagree with this, I fear, is the e.p. who told me, apropos of my attitude to ‘over-writing’ (Heaney’s phrase) in ‘Dulce et decorum est’: ‘It is not poetry’s job to be incoherent.’ I had never said it was. But I do not believe that poetry’s job is always to be coherent. One would be seriously misguided, I think, to expect unflagging coherence from poetry written by men like Wilfred Owen and Georg Trakl in the circumstances of which they were writing. I had suggested that the ‘incoherence’ of the ‘devil’s sick’ lines in Owen’s poem ‘perfectly enacts his horror’ in extremis. It enacts the breakdown of the man Owen in a place where, in his words, God seemed not to care. But I don’t think this particular e.p. would accept that enactive, dramatic view of poetry.

I recently found unexpected support for my take on incoherence in WW1 poetry in Drew Gilpin Faust’s superb book This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf, 2008). Faust explains that, contrary to Emily Dickinson’s image as a recluse, she was deeply engaged with the human cost of the Civil War. ‘She too sought to understand the meaning of war’s carnage, the price of victory and defeat, and the implications of Civil War slaughter for the Christian faith that shaped how most Americans lived their lives’ (pp. 205-06). ‘Marked by discontinuities’, Dickinson’s poems were posthumously assailed by ‘critics who deplored their travesties of grammar and syntax. But contemporary critics see in these attributes the embodiment of Dickinson’s doubts about the foundations of understanding and coherence’ (p. 208).

Some words of George Calderon’s come to mind, from a letter he wrote to Kittie on 11 April 1905 from Paris after an argument with Paul Boyer about anthropology: ‘He has the obedient professorial mind, which is ready to believe all manner of questions closed which are as open as hungry oysters.’

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Next week I shall explain the archival and other issues that have been delaying my completion of the second typescript draft of my book George Calderon: Edwardian Genius. I am busy at the moment dealing with these and rewriting sections in the last two chapters, which deal with Kittie’s life 1915-50. I am also thinking a lot about the yet unwritten Introduction and Afterword.

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