Poetry Notebook by Clive James Page B

true. That would get us into an area a long way from the thirties, when most poets – and their critics along with them – started taking it for granted
that a straight statement could only be banal.
    Geoffrey Grigson, the most irascible of London’s young literary arbiters in that era, hated the assumption that was supposed to be its mark: the assumption that no plain statement could be
poetically interesting. In thrall to Auden, he nevertheless had no hankerings for the wilfully meaningless, and when the art deco modernism of that decade gave way to the surrealism of the next, he
was ready with a pressure hose of cold water. In his hard-to-find but treasurable
Private Art: A Poetry Notebook
, Grigson repeatedly insists that only a poet could have useful critical opinions about poetry. Much as I always liked his approach, I also always thought that he was overdoing it. Though Grigson was an excellent editor and an unrivalled anthologist, his own poetry,
nervously echoing Auden’s oratorical verve, was never distinctive enough to establish his credentials for such an ex cathedra confidence. Grigson was able to reach the correct estimation of
most of the ‘apocalyptic’ poets of the forties – i.e. that they were writing junk – without analysing anything except their hopelessly arbitrary diction, and anyway there
are always critics who are not poets but whose opinions we find fully adequate to the level of what they are examining.
    Frank Kermode has consistently been a fine instance, especially in his later phase, when he has had less time to waste tolerating the theorists, and when he has allowed the weight of his
accumulated experience as a reader to push him to the point where he can argue, about the later Shakespeare, that the metaphors probably seemed impenetrably mixed even to listeners at the time they
were first spoken. That judgement is as good as any by a poet, although we have to remember that Kermode himself
was
a poet when young, and might even have gone on being one if he had not
lost his composition book on his way home from the war. Usually you find that a critic who talks sense about poetry gave it a try early on. But it would be foolish to rule out the possibility that
somebody incapable of writing a single convincing line could still say something pertinent about someone else’s poem as a whole. Just because Dr Leavis, for example, who never wrote a poem,
rarely said anything interesting about one either, does not prove a case. But with all that considered, and in all fairness, it still seems legitimate to contend that for once, in a way, it’s
a case of those who can, teach.
    •
    Must we, however, resurrect Samuel Johnson’s reputation as a poet just so that we can give him more weight as a critic? Let’s hope not. Argued in verse, Johnsons
moral points are worth noting, but not remembering: he put them better in prose. Beside Goldsmith, Johnson is in the same area, and yet he is nowhere. Johnson not only didn’t write
The
Deserted Village
, he couldn’t have. He had the technique – when Goldsmith asked him to contribute a few lines to the poem, he was able to do so – but Goldsmith’s
socially sensitive vision was not one that Johnson could share at the creative level. To that extent, the great man was limited. And yet the craft of Johnson’s couplets gave him the knowledge
to spot a serious recurring flaw in Pope. The real strength of Johnson’s
Lives of the Poets
is in his kitchen criticism. It was the term that the Elizabethans once used for the
analysis of poetic technique: when to invert the foot, how to get a spondee by dropping a trochee into an iamb’s slot, and things like that. Kitchen criticism is a term that should be
revived, because its unlovely first word might have the merit of persuading the fastidious to make themselves scarce until they can accept that there is an initial level of manufacture at which the
potatoes have to be peeled. Johnson had a