Irish Jesuit Province

What I Look for in PoetryAuthor(s): Thomas CallaghanSource: The Irish Monthly, Vol. 70, No. 831 (Sep., 1942), pp. 351-353Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20515043 .

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What I Look for in Poetry By THOMAS CALLAGHAN

N a poet I look for vision, feeling and imagination: vision that he may see, feeling that he may tinderstand and imagination that he mnay be able to commiunicate his under

standing to me. If with these three gifts of nature I find acquired excellence in word-craft I am ready to acclaim a true poet.

Let us examine these requirements, one by one. By saying that a poet must have vision we imply a power, -a range, a depth of insight above the common. Poets have this in varying degrees. Homer at a glance takes in the surge of mortal sorrow that springs from the waywardness of man when he tells us how the " baleful wrath of Achilles" sent to Hades the souls of

mighty warriors, gave their bodies to the dogs and caused the Greeks innumerable woes. Virgil's pensive gaze is fixed on the mysterious working out of human destiny with all the multi tudinous suffering it entails as men who love peace and home are forced into war, exile and death by some unalterable necessity.

Dante's profound regard plunges into the deepest pit of hell and watches the fruit of wilfulness angelic, and human, through successive stages of hopeless and hopeful pain till, with purified eyes, he can look aloft above the crystalline sky into the " blessed kingdom " in which is the fulness of light and life and everlasting peace in the Divine Will. Shakespeare from a hill by Vanity Fair watches all the actions and all the mov-ements of the heart of man. Lesser poets have a vision less profound, less universal, less penetrating, but all see in some uncommon measure into the springs of human action and into the inevitableness of things which impinges on the shaping of our lives and the circumstances of them.

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352 THE IRISH MONTHL Yt

Next to vision a poet must have feeling; his affections, his

susceptibility, his capacity for emotion must be out of the ordinary. He must have a vivid realisation of human limitations and human dignity and he mtust react violently, whether to tears or laughter. When Shakespeare says that life is

"but a tale told by an idiot, Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"

he is expressing a sentiment which comes to all men at those odd monments at which they are crushed by failure or disappointed by success and thus forced to pause and reflect. What differentiates Shakespeare from the rest of us is the intensity of his feeling, together with his power to feel with and for all men in all situa tions. Terence makes one of his old characters say:

" I am a man, xnothing human is outside my interest."

In this he sums up not only what all men ought to be in regard to each other, but also expresses one of the prime requisites of Poetry, universal understanding.

The third mark of a poet is imagination. Imagination, indeed, enters into all art, but in poetry it is of the essence, for as the poet is a painter in words he must appeal to us through this faculty alone. Thus all the great poets abound in allegory and imagery. Open any at random and you will have to turn but few leaves before lighting on an image. Take, for example, Burns,

" My luve is like a red, red rose

or Milton, " Fell from his zenith like a falling star

or Shakespeare, "Stars, stars, and all eyes else dead coals ",

or Wordsworth, " Lonely as a cloud ".

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IVHAT I LOOK- FOR IN, POETRY 353

Paraphrase these passages as followss: " My love has a ruddy complexion ", "

Fell down ",

" Eyes brighter than others ",

" Alone ".

Thus, we may safely say that the three qualities, vision, feeling and imagination are the characteristics of all true poetry.

Word-craft, the other quality which goes along with these by which it is made possible, though it is perfected in practice, is mainly a matter of melody and rhythm, as can be seen in these lines from the first book of Paradise Lost:

"And all w-ho since, baptised or infidel, Jousted in Aspramont, or Montalban,

Damasco, or Morocco, or Trebisond, Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore,

When Charlemain with all his peerage fell By Fontarabia."

Here effortless sublimity is achieved by the use of resonant

place-names whose open vowvels fill the mouth with I do not know what sweetness, while the movement of the iambics which flow irregularly over into the next line lends a majestic grace to the

whole. These three, therefore, vision, feeling, imagination with craft

of words sum up for me the excellence of a poet.

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