Poetry versus prose: a passionate debate

There is no novel as deep and dark as a Russian novel, no poetry more searingly confessional than Russian poetry, no drama more obsessed with plumbing the depths of the soul than Russian drama. Throughout Russian literature you hear the raging swell of minor chords, the soaring crescendos of tragedy, struggle and heroism.

What is it about the Russian soul that so lovingly embraces tragedy? Dostoevsky said “Great men must have great sadness on earth”. Is it the scale of the Russian land-mass, the bone-numbing horrors of the climate, the blood-soaked history of ethnic strife and hatred or a natural disposition towards melancholy? Hard to say, but perhaps it will come as no surprise to learn that recently a Russian schoolteacher murdered his friend after a drunken argument over the respective merits of poetry and prose. Nadezhda Mandelstam once said that “here poetry matters; they are always killing poets in Russia”. Except that in this case the poet killed the novelist.

This surprised me. Surely it had to be the other way round? Aren’t novelists supposed to be the men of action. In the classic formulation they are Alexander figures, while poets are Hamlet figures, natural-born shilly-shallyers, so hamstrung by ambiguity, so consumed with the search for truth and beauty, they never quite know where to locate it. And yet I found it heartening to consider two men roused to lethal passion by literature.

What this strange story and disturbing story illustrates is the long and fruitless internecine struggle between lovers of prose and poetry.

I’m frequently amazed at the vehemence of the anti-poetry brigade, the sceptics who regard poetry as a species of wilful evasiveness, poets as airy-fairy wool-spinners. We’ve heard the gossamer- light definitions: poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity; the poet is the priest of the invisible; poetry is the music of what happens, all of which airiness seems to compound the problem for the naysayers. Instinctively, they prefer square dealing, writers who shoot from the hip, like Hemingway, who said “My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.” What they don’t like are poets like Pound, who said that the poetic imagination “inclines to magic rather than science”.

And there’s the rub. Literalists are immune to the allure of magic but their scepticism can blind them to different ways of seeing and sounding. A poem may be no more than a soundscape, the words chosen less for their meaning than for their shape, sound and heft. Poetry is a lapidary art aligning glittering fragments of language until the cumulative radiance illuminates the essence of what the poet is trying to say. Great poetry speaks its own truth in compressed form. When Seamus Heaney spoke about The Government of the Tongue, he meant that the republic of poetry is and should be self-governing.

Wouldn’t you just love to discover precisely what provoked our Russian friends to lethal violence? In the immortal words of Rodney King. can’t poetry and fiction “just get along?” You would love to think so.

When Osip Mandelstam died in the gulag, his widow, Nadezhda, committed his poetry to memory and later succeeded in having it published. She also recorded the long dark night of the Soviet soul in two memorable books, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned. Nadezhda would not govern her tongue and bore witness in prose as eloquent as her husband's poetry. Thus was the Mandelstam marriage mirrored in the perfect union of prose and poetry. If only Boris and Yevgeny had shown similar courage and restraint.

Bert Wright is administrator of the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards and curator of the DLR Voices Series and the Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival