POETRY AND MUSIC

There is a weakling music and a weakling poetry which flatter each other by making critical comparisons with each other: there is a literary criticism of music in which words like ‘wit’ and ‘rhetoric’ excuse musical flabbiness, and a musical criticism of poetry in which words like ‘symphonic’ and ‘overtone’ excuse poetic flabbiness. This mutual tenderness leads to false creative as well as false critical analogies between poetry and music; to the deliberate effort to use the creative method of one art in the other.

I am not distressed by the poeticization of music because I do not much care what happens to music; it is a nervous and ostentatious performance, and little damage remains to be done to it. I am, on the other hand, distressed by the musicification of poetry because poetry is perhaps the only human pursuit left still capable of developing antisocially. Musicified or pictorialized it is the propagandist tribal expression of a society without any real tribal sense. We get a ‘pure’ poetry, metaphysically musical, that reveals a desire in the poet for a civilized tribal sense and for poetry as an art intellectually coördinating group sympathies: and we get a sort of jazz poetry, politically musical, that reveals a desire in the poet for a primitive tribal sense and for poetry as an art emotionally coördinating group sympathies.

Art indeed is a term referring to the social source and to the social utility of creative acts. Poetry I consider to be an art only when the poet consciously attempts to capture social prestige: when it is an art of public flattery. In this sense Beaumont and Fletcher were greater artists than Shakespeare—better musicians. Shakespeare alternated between musical surrenders to social prestige and magnificent fits of poetic remorse.

To explain more precisely what I mean by this distinction between what I believe to be poetry and what I believe to be art I shall set down a number of contrasts between poetry and music.

1. All real musicians are physically misshapen as a result of platform cozening of their audience. They need never have stood upon a platform: there is a kind of ingratiating ‘come, come, dear puss’ in the musical brain that distorts the face and puckers up the limbs. All real poets are physically upright and even beautiful from indifference to community hearings.

2. The end of a poem is the poem. The poem is the only admissible test of the poem; the reader gets poetry, not flattery. The end of a musical work is an ear, criticism, that is, flattery.

3. A musical work has a composer; it is an invention with professionally available material and properties. A poem is made out of nothing by a nobody—made out of a socially non-existent element in language. If this element were socially existent in language it would be isolated, professionalized, handed over to a trained craft. Rhyme and rhythm are not professional properties; they are fundamentally idiosyncratic, unavailable, unsystematizable; any formalization of them is an attempted imitation of music by poets jealous of the public success of music.

4. Music is an instrument for arousing emotions; it varies only according to the emotions it is intended to arouse and according to the precision with which these emotions are anticipated in the invention of the music. Emotions represent persons; not persons in particular but persons in general. Music is directed toward the greatest number of persons musically conceivable. It is a mass-marshalling of the senses by means of sound. Poetry is not an instrument and is not written with the intention of arousing emotions—unless it is of a hybrid musico-poetical breed. The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind. It appeals to an energy in which no distinction exists between physical and mental conditions. It does not massage, soothe, excite or entertain this energy in any way. It is this energy in a form of extraordinary strength and intactness. Poetry is therefore not concentrated on an audience but on itself and only produces satisfaction in the sense that wherever this energy exists in a sufficient degree of strength and intactness it will be encouraged by poetry in further concentration on itself. Poetry appeals only to poetry and begets nothing but poetry. Music appeals to the intellectual disorganization and weakness of people in numbers and begets, by flattering this weakness (which is sentimentality), gratifying after-effects of destructive sociality. The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence on itself; indeed, it has no end. It isolates energies in themselves rather than socially dissolving one in another.

5. Music provides the hearer with an ideal experience, a prepared episode. Poetry is not idealistic; it is not experience in this episode or programme sense. There is an entertaining short-story variety in music; a repellent, austere monotony in poetry. Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go. Poetry is defeat, the end which is not an end but a stopping-short because it is impossible to go further; it makes mad; it is the absolutism of dissatisfaction. Music brings not the consciousness but the material of experience to a certain degree, always to different degrees. It makes pleasantly happy or unhappy. It is the vulgarity of satisfaction.

6. Music disintegrates and therefore seems active, fruitful, extensive, enlarging. Poetry isolates all loose independencies and then integrates them into one close independency which, when complete, has nothing to do but confront itself. Poetry therefore seems idle, sterile, narrow, destroying. And it is. This is what recommends it.