In one of the lectures he gave while Oxford Professor of Poetry – on ‘clarity and obscurity’ – the now Poet Laureate Simon Armitage recalled attending a poetry reading with a non-poet friend (all the lectures are available to listen to here). After the reading, the friend asks Armitage about the mini-introductions the readers had given to their poems: why, his friend wants to know, don’t they put them in the books? In reply, Armitage reels off various defences – a book is a privileged space, that any one explanation might preclude other readings.
“I still think they should put them in the books,” his friend says. “Or in the poem.”
While he doesn’t go as far as advocating for individual introductions, Armitage goes on to describe how poems can be more or less generous with the information they offer. He suggests that the contemporary tendency to hold something back – those references which have a personal, or particular, but unexplained resonance – may even be an attempt to recreate the kind of ‘enigma’ which was previously summoned up by the conflict between form and meaning, now that poetry itself is increasingly formless.
Free verse is sometimes defended as a less elitist way of writing, so it has always struck me as curious that it often goes hand in hand with obfuscation, deliberate or otherwise. What, Armitage asks, if obscurity is just another ‘club membership by which the ignorant and uninformed are kept outside the door’?
Several of the poems Armitage discusses are ekphrastic poetry: responses to works of art. He shows how some contemporary examples require the reader to be familiar with niche works of art (allowing for the fact nicheness is relative). Others do not even reference the work they are responding to: only the ‘in the know’ would know the poem is a response at all. What is the rationale behind deciding not to give the reader this kind of information?
By contrast, W. H. Auden’s ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ (one of my favourite poems full stop), describes the whole picture: it takes what Armitage calls a ‘belt and braces’ approach, even at the risk of providing ‘unnecessary subtitles’ to a familiar image. The Fall of Icarus by Breughel, was not familiar to me when I first read the poem, though I knew the myth. But that is the point. The poem still works: it might even work if you didn’t know the myth, or at least make you want to seek out both the story and the picture. The enigma is in the delivery of the idea of the awful ordinariness of suffering (in the rhymes, as Armitage puts it).
It’s possible the internet has encouraged writers to feel like they can demand more of their readers. Armitage describes having to Google a sculpture in order to properly appreciate one poem. If Auden’s readers had wanted to see Breughel’s The Fall of Icarus for themselves they would have had to go to Brussels (I Googled that) – or find a reproduction.
NB In the spirit of explanation, the title of this blog is taken from a line in Armitage’s lecture and the image is The Fall of Icarus (c.1555).
Jeremy Wikeley 
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