III

TECHNIQUE

IN N the composition of a poem, as I have already said, we are to distinguish two stages. It does not matter much what we call them; but unless we can see pretty clearly the remarkable difference between what is usually called the Conception of a poem and what is called its Technique, we are not likely to understand the peculiar nature of poetic art.

As to the Conception of a poem, not much more needs to be said. This is the stage in which the inspiration of some imaginative experience completely establishes itself in the poet's mind, as an affair of clear imagery, vivid importance, and delightful excitement: also as a focus of varied and perhaps only just suggested associations and allusions; but above all as a single inclusive harmony, however complex, of all that it contains. Verbal art has no place in it. It may complete itself in an instant and without conscious effort; or it may be a gradual development and, in part at least, have been deliberately thought out. It certainly will have been this latter, if it is the conception of a dramatic or narrative poem, requiring a considerable organisation of parts; and in that case, no doubt, verbal thought will have helped the process of conception. But only for the purpose of clarifying

or developing the poet's own sense of what he wants to say, not for the purpose of saying it: only for the purpose of elaborating his imagination, not for the purpose of communicating it.

The art of poetry, however, does not exist until both stages have been accomplished. A man is not to be accounted a poet simply for being sensitive or excitable. A sunset may mean wonders to him; an old story may have fired his fancy into a rapture. But he is not a poet unless his wonders and raptures have ceased to be private to himself, and have become available to every one. A poet, that is to say, is not only a man of remarkable imaginative life, but a man who can express this.

Now expression is a somewhat ambiguous word. It means two quite different things in the two stages of poetic composition. This is what I want to stress in this lecture; for otherwise the peculiar manners of poetic technique might seem a mere affair of traditional etiquette. In the stage of conception, an inspiration expresses itself by the mere fact of being unmistakably and vividly known. As soon as the poet is perfectly aware of his own experience of all that can be seen and felt in it-of all that it is and all that it means to him-then, as far as he is concerned, expression is complete: the event, whatever it was, has expressed itself to him, and he has expressed himself, in his experience of it. But if a poem is to come of this, what happened in the poet's mind must somehow be made to happen in other minds: the image and its

meaning must be conveyed to us. That is to say, some vehicle must be contrived to carry it; for it cannot carry itself: by no possibility can an experience in one man's mind be transferred bodily and directly out of his mind into ours. So now begins the stage of technique: the stage in which something which does not exist as language-namely, an event in the poet's life -has to translate itself into an existence alien to its first nature: into the existence which is given by language. For not otherwise could it escape from the privacy of the poet's own mind; and it is, once more, the essential thing in poetry, that imagination should thereby escape from the self-consciousness of the poet and become the property of the whole world.

When, therefore, we say that a poet's technique is expressing his imagination, we mean something vastly different from the automatic and immediate expression that comes about when, in the privacy of his own consciousness, the poet conceived his work. We mean that his inspiration is urging something other than itself to act as its interpreter; we mean that his vivid and compelling experience is organising all the resources of language to combine into an unmistakable symbol of itself. One remarkable aspect of this process has already been noticed: the language which expresses a poetic imagination must show a certain form, in order to symbolise the original unity of its inspiration. Now this poetic form, as we have seen, results gradually from the organic connexion and proportion of the parts, whereby a sort of shapeliness finally presides over their

combination, enabling them noticeably to make one single complex impression. But what does this mean? It means that technique must first express the substance of its inspiration, and then the peculiar harmony in which the substance was disposed. Poetic technique, that is to say, will always have two aspects. We may regard it as giving some equivalent to the harmony of its inspiration, in which case we call it poetic form; or we may regard it as equivalent to the substance of the inspiration, in which case we call it poetic diction. We shall see presently how closely and inevitably these two aspects are related; and that I mean by these terms no more than two aspects of one continuous process need hardly, indeed, be said. There are those who will deny any distinction between substance and form in poetry; but surely, if it is allowable to say that a billiard ball and a tennis ball have the same form but different substance, we may permit ourselves a similar discrimination in poetry.

And this brings me to an important consequence of the symbolic nature of technique in poetry: namely, that it is never exact. How could it be? Look only at the fact we have just noted, that technique has these two distinguishable aspects of diction and form. The poet, in order to express himself in language, has to build up, phrase by phrase and moment by moment, the substance of his experience: instead of attending to it as a whole, he has to attend to it bit by bit, breaking it up into its elements and concentrating on their piecemeal translation into language. But all the time

he has to be providing for the final moment, when the series of these moments is to make one harmonious and inclusive impression, similar to the impression originally made on himself by his inspiration. It could hardly be expected that the result of this gradual and complicated process would be an exact equivalent to his imagination, which presented itself to his mind in the instantaneous harmony of its substance. It must be remembered that the effort has been not so much to embody an inspiration as to symbolise it; and symbolic expression must anyhow be indirect, since it means the expression of one thing by exhibiting its influence on another. But something else must also be remembered. The thing which has to be expressed—imaginative experience is infinitely variable; but the thing which has to become its symbolic expression is not. Language is a finite medium; it can only respond to the urgency of imagination in a limited number of ways. It is true that a skilled artist in language can get an enormous range of modulation out of its resources; but nevertheless he has to canalise, as it were, his inspiration into the special kinds of symbolism which are possible in language. The tradition of poetry, in fact, is nothing but the accumulation, from countless ages of experiment, of the knowledge how to make language approximate most closely to the infinite variety of imagination. In any case, it can only be an approximation; and if I speak in the sequel of poetic expression being "precise" or "perfect" or "just," I must be understood to mean, within the limits set by the nature of language.