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aversion to abstraction grew out of the influence of Ezra Pound, who advocated a poetry that contained no abstract
words or statements, and whose advice on poetic composition was to,
use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something. Don’t use such expressions as
“dim lands of peace”. It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the
writer’s not realising that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.
This poetic ethos is still drummed into students in schools and poetry workshops throughout the world.
This hostility to abstraction can be seen in Mathew Sweeney and John Hartley Williams’s Teach Yourself: Writing
Poetry:
Many people still think that high-flown, abstract words give greater resonance to their writing, but
vagueness is always a consequence of using abstract words. We would go further-abstractions should
be avoided because they verge on the meaningless. If you think of the word “sadness”, for example, all
you get is a blur in your head. If, on the other hand, you ransack your memory and fix on an experience
that was a truly sad one, and tell people about this experience, your listeners will not have to take your
word for it that you experienced sadness. They’ll know because you’ve shown them.
Here we can see enacted the aesthetic of the author as the final arbiter of meaning. Sweeney and Williams place value
only on the poet’s feelings. The reader, for them, is merely a passive witness to the poet’s experience of sadness. No
mention is made that perhaps the poem would be a better one if the reader were allowed to experience sadness also.
The limitations of such poetry are plain to see if we compare a contemporary mainstream poem with a verse from a
Bob Dylan song. First the “poetry”-’Night Shift’ by Simon Armitage:
Once again I have missed you by moments;
steam hugs the rim of the just-boiled kettle,
water in the pipes finds its own level.
In another room there are other signs
of someone having left: dust, unsettled
by the sweep of the curtains; the clockwork
contractions of the paraffin heater.
For weeks now we have come and gone, woken
in empty acres of bedding, written
lipstick love-notes on the bathroom mirror
and in this space we have worked and paid for
we have found ourselves, but lost each other.
Upstairs, at least, there is understanding
in things more telling than lipstick kisses;
the air, still hung with spores of your hairspray;
body-heat stowed in the crumpled duvet.
Of this sort of poem, Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain write in their Introduction to Other British Poetries Since
1970 that ‘in each case the typical poem is a closed, monolineal utterance, demanding little of the reader but passive
consumption’. What we have in Armitage’s poem is a prosaic and descriptive piece of prose that leaves nothing to
the reader’s imagination. Apart from a loose use of rhyme and the rhetoric of the line ‘we have found ourselves, but
lost each other’ this is not, strictly speaking, poetry at all but prose configured into a rhythmic pattern. So dependent
is it on information transfer that it is easily paraphrased:
You have just left the building. So recently, in fact, that the kettle still has steam on its rim after just
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