The Poetry of Clare, Hopkins, Thomas, and Gurney

Lyric Individualism

Andrew Hodgson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030309701
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030309718
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book attends to four poets – John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edward Thomas, and Ivor Gurney – whose poems are remarkable for their personal directness and distinctiveness. It shows how their writing conveys a potently individual quality of feeling, perception, and experience: each poet responds with unusual commitment to the Romantic idea of art as personal expression. The book looks closely at the vitality and intricacy of the poets' language, the personal candour of their subject matter, and their sense, obdurate but persuasive, of their own strangeness. As it traces the tact and imagination with which each of the four writers realises the possibilities of individualism in lyric, it affirms the vibrancy of their contributions to nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry.

© The Author(s) 2019

A. HodgsonThe Poetry of Clare, Hopkins, Thomas, and Gurneyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30971-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Lyric Individualism

Andrew Hodgson¹

(1)

Department of English Literature, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

Andrew Hodgson

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

‘Lyric will prosper’, wrote Edward Thomas in 1901, ‘at least so long as individualism makes way in literature. Increasing complexity of thought and emotion will find no such outlet as the myriad-minded lyric, with its intricacies of form as numerous and as exquisite as those of a birch-tree in the wind’. This is a book about four poets—John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas himself, and Ivor Gurney—whose work displays with peculiar force the ‘individualism’ of which Thomas speaks. Lyric ‘prospers’ in the hands of these writers as a means of giving voice to the singularity of personal character and experience. Each of them responds with unusual precision and immediacy to the feeling of enjoying a distinctive perspective on the world that we all, apparently, share: ‘Everyone must have noticed’, as Thomas continues, ‘standing on the shore, when the sun or moon is over the sea, how the highway of light on the water comes right to his feet, and how those on the right and on the left seem not to be sharing his pleasure, but to be in darkness’.¹

The pleasure of reading these poets owes to the warmth and vitality with which they communicate their individuality. All four stood askew from the literary culture of their day: Clare a self-tutored, provincial coda to his high-Romantic forbears; Hopkins set at a remove from Victorian literary society by his Catholic vocation; Thomas immersed in early twentieth-century literary culture as a prose writer and reviewer, but widely known as a poet only after his death, and never quite assimilable to Modernist or Georgian camps; Gurney similarly uncatagorisable, viewing himself as much as a composer as a poet, and like Clare, producing his fiercest work amid the strain and isolation of an asylum. And the oddity of their standings in literary history corresponds with the personal distinctiveness that fuels the fire of their poetry. Of course, it is hardly unusual to associate lyric with individual expression. At least since the middle of the eighteenth century, critical opinion has placed a premium on authors as ‘Originals’, to use Edward Young’s word, in possession of an innate ‘mental Individuality’. ‘No two faces, no two minds, are just alike; but all bear Nature’s evident mark of Separation on them’, said Young, and authors likewise should appear as ‘Singulars’ to convey their full humanity.² Young’s Conjectures (1759) were joined through the second half of the century by various likeminded tracts—William Duff’s Essay on Original Genius (1767), in Germany, Herder’s Vom Erkennen und Empfindender menschlichen Seele (1774–1778)—in nurturing what has since come to be seen as a characteristically Romantic belief that ‘One ought to be able to regard each book as the impression of a living human soul’.³ ‘In the present age the poet […] seems to propose himself as his main object […] both his characters and his descriptions he renders as much as possible, specific and individual, even to a degree of portraiture’, Coleridge observed in Biographia ,⁴ and by 1827 Carlyle could speak—with some wariness—about the age’s fascination with ‘discovering and delineating the peculiar nature of the poet from his poetry’.⁵ Lyric was taken to be the proper genre of this ‘portraiture’. Hegel’s definition in his Aesthetics of the ‘sole form and final aim’ of lyric as ‘the self-expression of subjective life’ gives the Romantic consensus; the sheer formal multiplicity of lyric, the ‘fortuitous wealth of variety in the mode of treatment and the forms of the subject-matter which is just as incalculably varied itself’ endow it with unmatched flexibility to individual perspectives: ‘the scope of turns and tones of expression must remain absolutely unlimited’.⁶ ‘No literature and no age has been more fertile of lyric poetry than English literature in the age of Victoria’, wrote John Addington Symonds, surveying the changes at the end of the century: its poets ‘sing from their inner selves, subjectively, introspectively, obeying impulses from nature and the world, which touched them not as they were Englishmen, but as they were this man or that woman’.⁷

But nineteenth-century writing varies in its commitment to what is ‘specific and individual’ in the poet. If Thomas’s word ‘individualism’ might trigger thoughts of Emerson’s Romantically-inflected conception of ‘genius’ as a matter of believing ‘that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men’,⁸ Clare, Hopkins, Thomas, and Gurney are peculiar in their insistence on their peculiarity. Their poetry does not so much to fashion a notion of the self as a coherent, representative entity as respond to the shifting and distinguishing textures of its particular experiences and apprehensions. Each writes with a personal intensity which leaves the ‘self-expression’ of his contemporaries feeling curiously undercharged. The voice of Clare’s poetry, for instance, often carries unnervingly from the heart of consciousness:

Love lives beyond

The tomb – the earth – which fades like dew

I love the fond

The faithful and the true

(‘Song’, ‘Love lives beyond’, l. 1–4)

⁹

Thomas heard the strange reality of these lines: ‘What they say is not chosen to represent what they feel or think, but is itself the very substance of what had lain dark and unapparent, is itself all that survives of feeling and thought, and cannot be expanded or reduced without dulling or falsification’.¹⁰ What Thomas responds to is a quality—localisable in the idiosyncratic path of Clare’s syntax through his oddly shaped quatrain, and the inscrutable marriage of fragility and conviction with which the poetry stakes its affirmations—of tender, unerring truthfulness to inner apprehension. Clare’s words operate with unusual proximity to consciousness. They adhere to the individuality of Clare’s perspective—both its particularity and its peculiarity—with an intimacy from which other nineteenth-century writers were liable to shy away, or which they sought to move beyond. Thomas’s sense that Clare’s language embodies the ‘very substance’ of a unique sensibility indicates the source of an unsettling candour and pathos.

Clare’s stanza gives a flavour of the distinctive appeal of the writers attended to in this book. Each poet answers to and communicates an apprehension of experience whose distinctiveness is at once recognisable and by its nature unattainable. Poetry so intently personal in its emphasis is at once distinguished and limited, Geoffrey Thurley has suggested, by its ‘stark directness’. The truth towards which Clare’s lines aspire is personally inflected: they make no claims for their representativeness or universality; their pathos resides in their blend of conviction with outlandishness. The weird pellucidity of Clare’s vision, in combination with his soft-spoken abrogation of a familiar ballad idiom, produces an effect strikingly different from the ‘art-language’ of Clare’s Romantic contemporaries, which acquires, in Thurley’s words, ‘the authority of transcendence’, a ‘subtle balance of the subjective accent and the objective persona’ that guarantees their poetry’s breadth and greatness.¹¹ As Hazlitt observed of Coleridge, for instance, he ‘talks of himself, without being an egotist, for in him the individual is always merged in the abstract and general’.¹² That ‘art-language’ answers to what Jean Hall calls ‘the great Romantic ideal of the deep self – the humane, profound, ever-evolving soul that constantly resonates itself in acts of imaginative transcendence’.¹³ But in the personal concentration of Clare’s idiom, what Thomas calls Clare’s ‘unprejudiced singing voice that knows not what it sings’, is a more particularised and idiosyncratic way of writing from the self, a manner whose unselfconscious, ‘existential’ nakedness Thurley traces in a descent from Clare through the ‘awesome sobriety’ and ‘at times almost appalling directness’ of Hopkins and Thomas and on into Hardy, Lawrence, and other members of what is sometimes spoken of by critics wanting to emphasise its gentler, more conservative tendencies as an ‘English line’: ‘this was a poetry in extremis – existential, denuded, disabused’.¹⁴ Thurley’s case is that an art which cleaves with such fidelity to the personal, for all its exhilarating directness, ultimately represents a narrowing of scope and a diminishment of poetic potential. It denies the imagination its ‘projective power’, inhibits adventure with irony, and reduces poetry to a ‘situation-report’.¹⁵ We turn to the greatest poetry for a truth beyond the individual. And yet the peculiar transparency of Clare’s stanza—its way of elucidating unconventional trails of thought, its fragile voicing of bold conviction—offers a small instance of how personal ‘directness’ and ‘honesty’ can acquire its own potency: an individuality whose narrowness is compensated for by its depth, its extremity matched by its extravagance. Thomas’s characterisation of Clare’s voice as one that ‘knows not what it sings’ describes a candour far from any ironic defensiveness; it signals a commitment to voicing the unplumbed depths and intricacies of personal consciousness, a way of writing with spontaneous responsiveness to the self’s apprehensions, which grants force and richness to the poetry’s individual accent. And this is what this book pays tribute to: adding Gurney to the mix alongside Clare, Hopkins, and Thomas, it shows the verve and vitality of an art which, grounding itself in the personal, responds to a Romantic notion of poetry as self-expression with searching and sometimes disconcerting intensity and immediacy. Reading these poets, one feels the force of the inalienably personal.

To adopt Thomas’s term ‘individualism’ as a label for this personal emphasis may seem to nudge the word a little from his original intentions. Thomas’s comments, made in a review of an anthology of contemporary verse, are borne along on the currents of thought about lyric sketched above, and one might well judge that they merely reduplicate the existing stock of critical terminology and ideas. Coleridge in 1834 coined subjectivity to describe the sort of poet ‘who is himself before himself in every thing he writes’,¹⁶ the ‘quality in literature or art which depends on the expression of the personality or individuality of the artist’ as the OED defines it ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Lyric Individualism
• 2. Individualism in Post-Romantic Lyric: Standing Single
• Part I. John Clare: Striving to Be Himself
• Part II. Gerard Manley Hopkins: Oddity and Obscurity
• Part III. Edward Thomas: A Personal Accent
• Part IV. Ivor Gurney: Unquiet Achings
• Back Matter