Literary Criticism: The Secret Life of Poems By Tom Paulin Faber and Faber, 238pp. £17.99Tom Paulin has always been sensitive to the oral dimension of poetry. He once ribbed Christopher Ricks for his slavish attention to the "ooh" and "ah" of Geoffrey Hill's poetry; with Paulin it's more likely to be "och" and "aye".
If you think of the critic's job as dredging up something gleg from the claggy textures of a Hopkins sonnet, or getting into a stramash over some particularly thrawn consonants in Hughes, Paulin's your man. His encounter with Helen Vendler's The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets in 1997 intensified this side of his style: the signs were there in his last essay collection, Crusoe's Secret, and now in The Secret Life of Poems he has given us a whole book of critical soundings, lingering close readings of 47 individual poems.
No one who knows Paulin, however, will expect him to have reverted to the formalist leanings of his earliest monograph, Thomas Hardy and the Poetry of Perception. Politics are at the core of what Paulin does, and they haven't gone away, you know. One of the most striking things here is his reading of Keats's To Autumn, which Paulin wants us to see as a coded response to the Peterloo massacre. But is it an argument or just a wilful juxtaposition of the poem and a contemporary context? Paulin compares the poem's swelling gourds to the "seed of opposition" invoked by Keats in a letter, and connects "mists and mellow fruitfulness" to Milton's "mists and intricacies of state". The rhyme of "sun" and "run" "brings gun almost to mind", and a cricket in the hedge conjures "members of the radical underground".
It is a suggestive and intriguing flight of fancy, but when Paulin ends by declaring that the sun is "meant to be on the verge of being oppressive", I wonder how he squares this with its loading and blessing the vine with fruit in the poem's first stanza. The answer is surely that the political reading cannot do justice to the poem's full variousness and complexity, and any attempt to make it do so is doomed to incoherence.
On the acoustic side of things (and I would argue that the book shuttles back and forth nervously between sound and political sense, rather than truly fusing the two), Paulin can be no less eccentric. Where scansion is concerned, he consistently errs on the heavy side: he hears a spondee at the beginning and end of the Edward Thomas line "Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved", giving a total of seven stresses. He reads "yeares midnight" in Donne as a molossus, the little-used combination of three strong stresses, and does the same for "thin blue light" in Coleridge. I defy anyone to read the lines aloud and scan them as Paulin does. A dismissal of Auden's Musée des Beaux Arts is a reminder of his old tetchiness with the suave and urbane. Given his extreme fondness for all things "guttural", by contrast, it looks bad indeed to see that word misspelled as "gutteral".
ULSTERCENTRISM HAS LONG been a feature of Paulin's writing and shows no sign of abating here. He will compare any archaic word or pronunciation to Ulster speech, as though every other corner of these islands spoke the Queen's English and nothing but. Is Cullybackey really "always pronounced with a triumphant yelp on the last two syllables"? What really induces triumphant yelps in Paulin is any occasion to view poems as protagonists in the all-consuming drama of Protestant and Catholic, Puritan and Royalist, England and Ireland that is the true theme of his work, above and beyond any amount of flinty consonants or decadent vowels. Readings of Robert Lowell and Zbigniew Herbert provide brief respites, but are very much the exception.
The main problem with The Secret Life of Poems is less wilful politics than how far inside Paulin's comfort zone it operates, restating its over-familiar positions and palpable designs, and doing little to extend his critical range. For a self-styled radical, he has shown a remarkable conservatism in his taste in contemporary poetry over the years. Of his six living poets here, four are Northern Irish (Montague, Heaney, Mahon, Muldoon), while the fifth, Craig Raine, is represented by Flying to Belfast, and the sixth, Jamie McKendrick, though neither born in nor travelling to Northern Ireland, did at least write a "seminal review" of Muldoon's The Annals of Chile. Has Paulin read any good American, Australian or even just southern Irish poets lately? Have the names John Ashbery, Les Murray, Thomas Kinsella or Denise Riley ever been known to cross his lips? Paulin's static-seeming canon condemns vast swathes of poetry to a secret life indeed.
David Wheatley has been awarded the 2008 Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize