Rebecca Watts was born in Suffolk in 1983 and currently lives in Cambridge. In 2014 she was one of the Poetry Trust’s Aldeburgh Eight, and in 2015 a selection of her work was included in Carcanet’s New Poetries VI anthology. The Met Office Advises Caution is her first collection.
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| Photo credit: Alice Archer, 2015 |
The Poet and the Liberal
I am not naturally inclined towards political debate. Indeed, I have actively sought to avoid it since I read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, from which I learned that it is a rare character who listens with an open mind to others’ political views. In politics, as in so much of human endeavour, instinct leads the charge; our eloquent, reasoned arguments create the impression that the subject is open for debate, when in fact the horse of conviction has long since galloped off, the barn door slamming shut behind it. In the past couple of years, avoiding predictable conversations has proven a daily challenge for me, as has remembering that tolerance – a key tenet of the liberal outlook – does not mean allowing to speak only those who are saying what you want to hear.In light of this I was somewhat alarmed to be asked to give a reading and talk in Oxford as part of an event series titled ‘On Liberalism’. There are threads of social commentary in my book, with implications for politics if you care to consider them, but I shouldn’t think I’m anyone’s idea of a political poet. How could I engage with the topic, and with a general audience, and keep the focus on poetry, when all anyone wants to talk about is armageddon?
It’s not often I can say that William Wordsworth has provided the solution to my problems. But I thought of him: official usher of the liberal spirit into British poetry. At least this was somewhere I could begin. Having previously worked as a tour guide in Dove Cottage, I knew that in his twenties Wordsworth spent time in France and drew spiritual inspiration from the political and social upheaval he witnessed there. Subsequently, in 1798, he and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge anonymously published the Lyrical Ballads – a volume of poems that presented itself as a game changer. The first edition contained a brief ‘advertisement’, instructing readers to prepare for something different from the norm. Poetry – traditionally characterised by what Wordsworth refers to as ‘gaudiness’ and ‘inane phraseology’ – was here the subject of the authors’ ‘experiments […] to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure’. In other words: to make poetry out of everyday language.
Through this revolution in style, Wordsworth was aiming to achieve what he calls ‘a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents’. Eschewing gods and princes, grand narratives and national epics, and metaphysical conceits considered abstractly, Wordsworth would instead render the experiences of individual human beings into poetry.
As readers we take for granted poetry’s potential as a channel for individuals’ emotional reactions to personal experiences. Indeed, the most embarrassing thing about having to admit you write poems is the knowledge that most people, who don’t read contemporary poetry, associate poetry writing with self-indulgent emotional outpourings. We have Wordsworth, and the poets associated with and influenced by him, to thank for the freedoms and the embarrassments that poetry grants us today.
The Lyrical Ballads’ first readers and reviewers were generally bewildered, by both its style and its content. For the second edition, published in 1800 (and this time bearing his name, but not Coleridge’s), Wordsworth added a ‘Preface’ in which he fleshed out the aims of his project and his proposed means of seeing it through. The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads is now taken as a manifesto for the liberal revolution in poetry that it describes and advocates. In summary, Wordsworth proposed: that the subject matter of poetry should consist of ‘incidents and situations from common life’; that the language of poetry should be the ‘language really used by men’ (for our purposes we’ll assume women fall under that handy catch-all term); and that common-life incidents become poetry by virtue of ‘a certain colouring of imagination’ provided by the poet, and are made interesting through their relation to ‘the primary laws of our nature’.
For us, now, it’s hard to see Wordsworth’s principles as novel or radical, because the majority of poetry written since takes them as a given. But to the extent that modern poetry is concerned with the articulation and siting of individual human experience in the context of broader notions of universal human experience, we can trace its heritage directly back to the Romantics and their liberal ideals.
Does this mean there is something inherently liberal – or liberalising – about the act of writing (and reading) poetry today? In mapping the Wordsworthian version of liberalism onto our own poetic landscape, we encounter ructions. For one thing, between us and the publication of the Lyrical Ballads stand two centuries of social progress; our conception of individual rights is inevitably more nuanced than Wordsworth’s, who was writing before Abolition, before compulsory education, before women’s rights, workers’ rights and animal rights, before universal suffrage, before state welfare… the list goes on. Rousseau’s pronouncement that ‘man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’ was fresh in Wordsworth’s mind.
Thankfully our society is largely free of both the actual and the metaphorical chains against which post-Enlightenment philosophers and poets wrote, so we don’t have to rely on the imagination as a substitute for physical freedoms, and we are generally at liberty to think and speak as we like. And yet, there are constraints of which Rousseau and Wordsworth were blissfully unaware – not least the Darwinian conception of human nature, which muddies the Romantics’ idea of ‘Nature’ as offering an escape from, or a cure for, social problems. If we are a part of nature – and we are – then we cannot use it to escape from ourselves. Having said this, the more we learn about human nature, the better we understand our likely behaviours (and how to marginalise and harness aspects of them), and this in turn empowers us to organise society in ways that make it easier for all of us to flourish.
The modern liberal faces difficult questions – practical and philosophical – concerning the trade-off between, on the one hand, the technological advancements that facilitate and accelerate social progress and, on the other hand, the damage, or at least alterations, done to the environment in the process. Harmful climate change is in the long term the opposite of progress. Equally, Rousseau’s ideal of the noble savage – ignorant man living in perfect harmony with his natural surroundings – has been invoked countless times by those who would obstruct the kinds of technological progress that give philosophers and poets the freedom to think and write.
Similarly, history demonstrates how readily the arts can be commandeered and corrupted by people who would curtail or deny others’ freedoms in order to gain political and social advantages for themselves. Political extremes left and right are united against the arts in their hatred of nuance and individual expression; yet they share an enthusiasm for conceptions of ‘universal’ experience (however ill-conceived, however de facto exclusive), the like of which Wordsworth recognised as being central to poetry’s liberalising spirit.
In any case, in our age of personal freedoms and individual rights, including the right to privacy, we might wonder to what extent it is OK to appropriate the experiences of others as poetic material. The Lyrical Ballads consisted almost entirely of poems about people Wordsworth encountered, or conjured up, from the ‘lower classes’ of the society he was a part of. He took aspects of their speech and experience, and threw his ‘certain colouring of imagination’ over them, to make poems that he hoped would shift society at large in the direction of empathy and equality. From a modern liberal perspective this is both a noble and a problematic aim. In bending ‘the language really used by men’ and ‘incidents and situations from common life’ to poetic purposes, the poet not only claims this material for his own – he changes it. Before, it was life, and now it is his poem.
Wordsworth’s notion that poetry originates from ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’ is also problematic. Accepting that the composition of a poem is an act of recollection (or at least collection), ‘tranquility’ strikes me as something of a privileged condition, from which not many of us are able – or perhaps would wish – to write. And then, what if it’s not your emotion to (re)collect? Is the very idea of universal human experience, which poetry strives to awaken, reductive? Taking a historical perspective is always disingenuous in the sense that history exists only in abstraction; individuals don’t experience history, they experience life. And to adopt a personal perspective outside of one’s own sphere of experience – which an outward-looking, liberal-minded artist must be willing to do, the foundation of social progress being empathy – is to run the risk of laying claim to experiences that belong to others, or of speaking for others who might rather not be spoken for.
Worse still for the modern liberal is the risk of being thought judgemental, an epithet that can lead to discomfort, or even paralysis. Empathy and tolerance don’t always pull in the same direction, and if we prize individual freedoms above all else how are we to tolerate the views of oppressors? We can think easily of moments in life when we, as individuals and as a society, have faced this inherent contradiction within liberalism and had to decide whether to take action. In the midst of the fallout, it’s not clear (and may never be) whether we chose right, or even how we could make such an assessment.
As social creatures, it’s impossible for us to avoid some of the pitfalls I’ve described here. Our thoughts and imaginations are shaped by what happens to us, which necessarily involves other people – and poetry that takes a purely solipsistic approach is unlikely to find a community of readers! But poetry is not life – as Wordsworth knew, hence that ‘certain colouring of imagination’ he identified, which the poet brings to the source material of real-world experience. I like to operate on the basis that we are more free to express and work through difficult ideas in poems than we are in life, because, whereas in life there’s always a bigger picture to consider, in a poem the only thing that’s at stake is the integrity of the poem. (In other words, in poems you don’t always have to be nice.)
This approach requires the open-mindedness of readers, though: it only works if everyone accepts that the voice of a poem belongs to the poem, not to the poet. It’s an important consideration. How free are we, really, to say what we think – or what we don’t think – in a poem? It’s easy enough if you’re writing in the voice of something obviously other – a washing machine, say, or a mountain goat; but if the voice is a human voice (and especially if the poem draws on aspects of personal experience) people will be inclined to assume it’s you. The challenge is not to be censored by this prospect, and to experiment, and to be prepared to feel uncomfortable – as writer and reader – from time to time.
As a poet you have to be open to the possibility that readers will interpret your work differently from how you intended; once it’s out there, its meaning or effect isn’t yours to control. Likewise, as readers we should champion those poems that strive to do more than tell us what we already know – that push against the boundaries of our comfort zones, and maybe even through them. I’m with Leonard Cohen: ‘Forget your perfect offering. / There is a crack, a crack in everything. / That’s how the light gets in.’
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Rebecca Watts' debut collection The Met Office Advises Caution (2016) is available to buy here.
