When a successful political journalist and war correspondent offers, in less than 140 pages, to introduce us to English Poetry, it may seem a curiosity. When his own poetry is praised by one of the art's best-known arbiters, perhaps we should pay attention, writes Trevor Joyce
An Introduction to English Poetry. By James Fenton. Viking, 137pp. £14.99 sterling
"Fenton's unique accomplishment has been to create a diversity of public forms - which range from political poetry to light verse, from narrative to lyric - without compromising the integrity and concentration of his work," says Dana Gioia.
High praise! Sounds like just the man to explain how the practice of poetry involves more than simply cutting up prose into short lines.
What, then, is poetry? "The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins . . . Poetry is language to which a special emphasis has been given." As this scarcely serves to distinguish poetry from impassioned argument or enthusiastic abuse, I looked for something less vague, and thought I'd found it: "A sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art".
How, then, does Fenton treat these fundamentals? My heart sank on finding that 10 of Fenton's chapters deal with metrical patterns ('The Genius of the Trochee' totters after 'Mysteries of the Trochee'). Conspicuous also are 'The Shorter Stanza', 'The Longer Stanza', 'The Sonnet', and 'Minor Forms'. Add in a chapter on 'Rhyme', and three on the relationship of poetry to music (Fenton is an opera librettist), and there are only four left for everything else. These chapters first appeared as newspaper articles, and it shows.
Two topics sound more promising: 'The Training of the Poet', and 'The Sense of Form'. Speaking of nursery rhymes, Fenton describes how "we learn an analysis of these rhymes, a beating of rhythm, a fitting of word to pitch, a sense of structure, long before we can read. And for the most part this analysis is itself never ex-pressed, never codified".
Why then focus on codified terms, on obscure Latin metrics, when, as Fenton acknowledges, "the metrical system in Latin . . . was completely different from that in English"?
Further, "for the most part, in the reading - and I would say in the writing - of poetry, the handling of rhythm and form is instinctive rather than codified". Acknowledging this irrelevance, why does Fenton waste the reader's time with it?
In so brief a book, such exaggerated focus on one area is balanced by absences and omissions elsewhere, and it is the overall pattern of these which I find most disheartening.
You'll find no extended poetic forms treated here to match the chapter on "the minor forms". It appears Fenton recognises "a sense of idiom, form, structure" only in miniature. Persistently, he buttonholes us with small-scale patterns, while ignoring the more general symmetries which surround them.
Consider his use of Blake. He quotes from Songs of Experience to illustrate the term "cinquain" (a five-line stanza), but omits the design of echoes which link these poems to their counterparts in Songs of Innocence, thereby intensifying the sense through savage ironies.
On a yet smaller scale, he quotes from the 'Auguries of Innocence':
A dog starv'd at his Master's Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
A Horse misus'd upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human Blood.
Each outcry from the hunted Hare
A fibre from the Brain does tear.
This is introduced to illustrate a metrical technicality, but what has Fenton to say about the parallel grammatical structure of these couplets? Nothing. Similarly, though the back cover features a page from Blake's huge "epic", Vala, Fenton makes no attempt to discuss the patterns of balance and contrast which might enable such a work. Hopkins once suggested that "the structure of poetry is that of continuous parallelism", but Fenton ignores such fundamental structures.
In short, this book treats the past of English poetry rather than its possibilities, though even its vision of that past is constrictingly selective. It revels in technical terms and limited effects, but appears oblivious of large-scale structures of meaning. Ambition and enterprise are sacrificed to classification and hair-splitting.
Fenton first rose to prominence as a poet by winning the Newdigate Prize in 1968. Here he provides us with a manual for writing and appreciating poems written to win prizes, where points are gained for repeating familiar local effects, but anything more surprising or serious or ambitious constitutes a distraction and a defect.
"If the land looks overgrazed, one should feel free to move on," Fenton advises the aspiring poet. Indeed!
Trevor Joyce is a poet. His collection, with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold: A Body of Work 1966/2000, was published last year