Literary CriticismPoetry "fortifies our inwardness", asserts Ruth Padel in her preface to The Poem and the Journey, "it is the ideal thing to hang on to, in our very externally driven world of image and screen, surface and soundbite".
Reading this, one might experience a momentary anxiety that the book could turn out to be a blandly affirmative, poetry-as-self-development manual. But there is nothing dumbed-down or saccharine about Padel's sparkling and unembarrassed defence of poetry as a central force in life and culture. The book is divided into two main parts, the first of which comprises a series of short meditations on Padel's dominant motif, the poem as journey. The second part is an anthology of 60 poems, chosen by Padel to illustrate her thesis, each with a brief critical essay attached. The Poem and The Journey is a travel guide for the apprehensive reader of contemporary poetry. Padel's beguilingly informal style entertains and informs along the way, while pointing out some of the dominant features of the landscape.
The study is also very much a symptom of its times. Padel is aware of the paradoxes of literary life, one of which is that poetry is "not much valued publicly today", while at the same time lucrative schools of creative writing are springing up in universities, turning out graduates on an industrial scale. She is prepared to wade into such controversies and does so in a vigorous but balanced manner. Her training as a classicist and her profound, but always lightly-worn, learning bring a convincing authority to her arguments. The first sections of Journeys, for instance, deal with the popular perception of contemporary poetry as "difficult" (chiefly, it seems, because it often doesn't rhyme) and dispel a number of myths. "Why shouldn't poetry be a bit chewy?" she disarmingly asks. Padel enlists the aid of Aristophanes and Tennyson in pointing out that "some poets have always been accused of obscurity". It may seem surprising to champion poet laureate Tennyson as a radical innovator, but Padel reminds us of the critical mauling Maud received when it appeared in 1855: "Today, unreliable narrators are two a penny. But no one wanted them in 1855, especially not in poems. The basic complaint was one you can hear today about poems in general . . . I don't like this poem because it's not instantly clear".
Taking the long, learned view, Padel also addresses the febrile "mainstream" versus "experimental" debate which dogs contemporary British poetry in particular, and which can often seem to be a disguised battle about class. She knows where to point the finger: "Modernism lost poetry a lot of its popular audience. It made people uncertain about trusting their instinctive judgement". But Padel is far too smart a critic to remain satisfied with such binaries. She writes movingly of Paul Celan, recognising the agonised imperatives that underpinned his obscurity: "'there's nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing,' Celan said. 'Not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.'" And among the inclusions in the second part of her book are poems by WS Graham, Jorie Graham, John Ashbery, and the figure that most often has "mainstream" critics foaming at the mouth, JH Prynne.
The "Sixty Poems" section of the book is much the longest, and is an absorbing and illuminating anthology in its own right. There are poems here by Christopher Middleton, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, RS Thomas and Czeslaw Milosz, as well as startling newer voices such as Alice Oswald, Nick Laird, and Jacob Polley. The poems are arranged in loosely thematic groups, beginning with Machines by the late and much-lamented Michael Donaghy. For Padel, this poem is ideally representative of the mysterious synthesis of poetic form and the energy that impels it:
So much is chance, So much agility, desire, and feverish care,
As bicyclists and harpsichordists prove
Who only by moving can balance,
Only by balancing move.
In her close readings of this and other poems, Padel engages in a challenging and minute technical analysis, but it is one of the book's great strengths that she is never lofty, nor condescending, nor a show-off. The Poem and The Journey is itself a successful synthesis of jargon-free criticism and passionate advocacy, and Padel is the ideal guide en route.
Caitríona O'Reilly is a poet. Her second collection, The Sea Cabinet (Bloodaxe), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and is on the shortlist for The Irish Times Poetry Now Award
The Poem and the Journey and Sixty Poems to Read Along the Way By Ruth Padel Chatto & Windus, 364pp. £12.99