How much depends on the exactness of the spell
Alex Wong on embarrassment, 'bad' puns, and the poems of Thomas Hood
Some Poems by Thomas Hood, selected and introduced by Alex Wong, is the latest (and second) pamphlet from Headless Poet.
Alex was kind enough to answer a few questions — on embarrassment, ‘bad’ puns, questionable taste, and more. Some Poems is available to order here, and in stock at the London Review Bookshop.
Jeremy Wikeley: I thought we might start by putting Hood in some kind of context, but every time I do this, I’ve no idea where to start. This is partly my own ignorance, but also because he straddles so many styles or concerns. There’s a romantic Hood, there’s a comic Hood, there’s a polemical Hood engaged in Victorian debates about poverty. The romantic, ‘Keatsian’ Hood was the biggest surprise to me. Is it fair to say he falls between the gaps?
Alex Wong: I think it is fair, if we’re talking about the gaps in current understandings of literary history. I mean the gaps between what have become the most familiar categories and groupings. For a start, when W.M. Rossetti called him ‘the finest English poet between the generation of Shelley and the generation of Tennyson’ he was placing Hood in a gap, and I think it’s still a gap in most people’s sense of the history of English poetry. It’s a small gap, almost not a gap at all unless you’re thinking in terms of ‘generations’, but in its small way it’s a little like the reign of Mary Tudor, or the gap between Chaucer and Malory: ask the average intelligent Eng Lit graduate who was writing in those periods and you’d be lucky to get more than one or two names. Very lucky, I should think.
And then he muddles our distinction between serious and ‘light’ verse, and between high and popular culture. Humorous poets who are basically doing something quite serious, though inconsistently and a bit under cover, tend to be hard to place ... Stevie Smith for instance. But Hood muddles it further, because he also delves so deeply, and so obviously, into topical moral concerns — ‘big issues’ — without giving up the trappings of his light verse. And he muddles it all even further still, by also having written those comparatively highbrow ‘romantic’ poems you’re alluding to.
But I don’t think you could say that he fell between the gaps in his own day. A lot of people were reading Hood when not very many were reading Keats. Hood sold a lot of books, a lot of magazines and annuals. And also we sometimes forget about the reading rooms and circulating libraries that allowed people across classes to access these texts. He was truly popular. He found a gap in the market, and in the culture, but he filled it pretty effectively; he didn’t fall through it.
JW: What does he get from someone like Keats?
AW: The influence was there from early on; one of his early publications was a kind of sequel to ‘Lamia’. And although he never met Keats, there was a sort of concrete connection to him — though Hood’s brother-in-law, John Hamilton Reynolds, who had been Keats’s close friend and correspondent. In fact Hood’s first volume of verse, Odes and Addresses to Great People, was co-written with Reynolds.
I wonder whether it’s partly owing to that connection that the Keatsian aspect of Hood’s more ‘romantic’ poems has been particularly easy to fasten upon, while the debts to others — obviously the funny rhymes in Byron, etc. — are less often noticed. But it’s certainly palpable, the Keatsian inspiration. For example in ‘Lycus’, from which I’ve included some wonderful passages in the pamphlet; and you can see quite clearly in those that one of the affinities he has with Keats, which involves some degree of direct influence, is to do with a particular kind of sensuousness in his imagery and diction, a sensual quality, which is at the same time laden with anxiety. It’s exciting, beautiful, sexy, luscious, but also filled with anxiety; and in Hood it tends a bit more towards the grotesque.
But that aspect of Keats that was easy for contemporaries to ridicule, precisely because it has an implicit sexual component — the aspect that John Bayley and Christopher Ricks argued about so beautifully, his lovely ‘badness’ or embarrassing aspect — is something Hood seems to me to run with in a freer way, perhaps losing some of the tension, but maybe, at least in ‘Lycus’, bringing the sexual anxiety into a more direct focus. Byron famously scoffs at Keats for a masturbatory, juvenile quality. I think Hood really goes for it. In the introduction to the pamphlet I say that ‘Lycus’ feels like a pubertal nightmare. But a very beautifully expressed one.
JW: Keats and Embarrassment is one of the books I’ve carried with me between flats without ever actually getting on with. Possibly I just like having it around because the title is so good. Embarrassment feels like a good way into Hood, too. The puns are, if you like, embarrassing.
AW: I’m actually more with Bayley in the end.
The puns are embarrassing. Exactly. And I think ‘badness’ is very relevant there too. The attitude to puns shared by a lot of people today, at least in the anglophone world, is that they’re either ‘so bad, they’re good’, or else just bad. Some people feel they’re always just bad. But I think — and I’m only just thinking about this now, so I wouldn’t stake my life on it — I think that sense of the enjoyment of ‘badness’ in punning may well have developed most fully in Hood’s day, and that Hood probably did more than any other English writer to shape it as we know it.
JW: Sticking with Hood and Keats for a moment: the other side of the ‘pubertal nightmare’ is this ungraspable female figure (beautiful, naturally) who’s present in many of the poems in this selection, even — awkwardly, embarrassingly — a poem like ‘The Bridge of Sighs’. Like you say in the introduction, even that title is in questionable taste.
AW: Yes, questionable taste — like so many compelling works of art. But of course there are people in the world who don’t like Rabelais or the films of Ken Russell.
In ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, I think the emphasis on the ‘beautiful’ appearance of the drowned woman will tend to make modern readers more or less squeamish, and that’s partly to do with our own particular ideas and misgivings about ‘beauty’ and images of the female body. I think Hood and his contemporaries felt differently about personal beauty, and Hood was trying, and showing that he was trying, to restore dignity to the dead woman in a very immediate way — because the body is all there is, at first — as the basis for his imaginative reconstructions of her story, her psychology. But he’s definitely also leaning heavily into the discomfort (or the embarrassment) of the encounter with death, and with shame and hypocrisy. A negotiation with queasiness was always central to the poem. And the element of eros in the description of the dead protagonist is both a part of what is embarrassing, and also perhaps an attempt to make the horror of death more tolerable — whilst, as I say, pretty frankly admitting to the impulse to make it so.
Fundamentally, if you’ll excuse a bit of psychological speculation, I tend to see these beautiful, ungraspable female figures in Hood as echoes of a lost maternal figure. Take it or leave it. They are a bit ‘Belle Dame’, and there’s also the influence of Shelley’s ‘Alastor’, which I think comes across particularly in ‘Lycus’. For some reason these figures often have something to do with water, too; in ‘Lycus’ there’s the water nymph, who may or may not be a narcissistic reflection; there’s ‘The Water-Lady’, most obviously, and you could say the same thing about her; and then there’s the drowned woman of ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, who is all but explicitly a young mother-to-be.
In the ‘Ode to Melancholy’, which I also include in the selection, there’s the passage about seeing his mother in her shroud and never being able to recover. It’s an ironic poem, but irony is often there to show you that there’s something vulnerable behind it. It seems to me that Hood’s work is full of highly charged, very poignant images of the mother and child. Some rather oedipal father-images too, although less of them. I would say that Hood was, in a sense, often writing quite exposingly from the unconscious, which is bound to be embarrassing and awkward — as well as somewhat anxious and erotic.
JW: Punning must have something to do with writing from the unconscious? Could you say something more about the way in which Hood shaped that appreciation (for puns) at the time, or in perhaps in the poets he’s influenced? You mention Auden was a fan in the introduction — so much of Auden is in terribly ‘bad taste’. And Victoria Moul recently spotted that J. H. Prynne’s first published poem seems to have been a translation (into German, I mean really) of ‘Silence’.
AW: Well, the Lacanians say the unconscious is structured like a language — but we won’t get into that. Anyway a mind that is habitually punning is a mind that is letting associations range pretty freely, you could say. And I think Hood, not only when he’s punning, does tend to be open to the associations of things – erotic, violent or scatological associations, awkward afterthoughts – and he’s happy to run with them. It’s part of what makes his writing seem a bit overcharged for some tastes, the O.T.T. quality. As with the puns and ingenious rhymes, so with other things; there’s an opportunism, if you like, or just a huge openness. He goes for it. But Empson makes an interesting point in Seven Types of Ambiguity, when he argues that Hood’s comical verse seems to use punning to pull back from things that could get really awkward, to dispel the tension somehow. Which is almost the opposite point of view. And I guess it does relate to what I was saying about ‘Bridge of Sighs’ and the impulse to make something tolerable, even though that’s a poem in which he does get seriously involved in something genuinely challenging.
Of course, the puns are also embarrassing when you don’t get them. That’s another important aspect of the embarrassment of puns. And I suppose it connects with Prynne, about whom I can’t say very much because generally I don’t ‘get’ him. I mean I haven’t reached a satisfactory accommodation with what he’s doing, at least after the earliest poems. And I’m somewhat embarrassed about it. But, well, I suppose it’s not surprising that Prynne should have had an interest in Hood. Although that particular sonnet isn’t a punning one (it’s about ‘silence’, so in a sense it’s about the terrifying void that’s left when the punning has to stop), still there’s conceivably a relationship between Hood’s almost maniacal aliveness to double-entendre and Prynne’s — I would call it rather intellectual — love of etymological and phonetic play.
The really fundamental difference for me is that Hood’s poems always create the illusion of a real utterance, a person speaking, with the bonhomie that comes with that; he’s appealing more directly to our ways of reading small adjustments of tone in our everyday communications. Auden is closer to Hood in that respect, although in some ways ... I think you could say that where his debt to light verse is most apparent, his urbane wit probably feels closer in inspiration to other predecessors, like Praed. But it’s been a long time since I’ve spent much time with Auden, so I may be wrong.
JW: I am with you on Prynne. In the end I prefer poets who involve me their embarrassment to those who make me feel embarrassed (‘self-conscious and alone’), though of course that might be on me. Perhaps the Auden/Hood connection — I’m writing about Auden at the moment, so I’ll have to go on a bit — is the willingness to mix registers even when writing about serious subjects, which of course is how some people do talk.
AW: The mixing of registers makes for so much of what’s interesting to me in certain kinds of writing or art. Not only registers exactly (although it depends on your precise understanding of register), but something to do with elaborately nuanced identifications and ironies, ironies of standing-point or commitment. (There was a time I almost set about writing a book about High Camp.) Is this part of what allows Hood to be so gung ho in the direction of ‘sentimentality’? A kind of ambiguity between total commitment to whatever big feeling the poem might want or suggest, and at the same time an irony or reservation, a sense of play and artifice, even silliness? Put like that, it might be, at bottom, the same kind of structure than makes the films of Cocteau work so beautifully. Or Kate Bush.
And yes, people do mix registers when they talk about serious subjects, although some have more powerful internal police officers than others.
JW: Has Hood been of any use to you in your own poetry?
AW: I don’t know if I can say Hood has been of any ‘use’ to me, but then I tend to be quite uncomfortable with the idea of ‘use’ in the arts. I know that rubs up a little against the concept of Poems Beautiful and Useful. But I read Pater at an impressionable age and have never quite recovered, nor do I want to. So if I answer the question simply in terms of influence and affinities... I think Hood probably does have something to do with my enjoyment of puns and awful rhymes and a slight tendency to move toward excess in various ways, though usually I try to keep those impulses under control. I think the most arresting things Hood did, especially the social conscience poems like ‘The Song of the Shirt’ and ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, are basically unrepeatable. Just weird magic. Beguiling and very interesting to study, but I don’t know what you can learn from them practically, as a poet, except how much depends on the exactness of the spell. And they’re single-use spells. You can’t be Hood.
My own poetry has been preoccupied with irony and what it conveys -- not just what it obscures, but what it conveys by purporting to cover or evade, and the intimacy that produces (with, and because of, the risk of alienation). And the mixing of registers, tones, kinds of diction, has been important to me. So probably, of the poems in the pamphlet -- ‘in the Hood’, I want to say -- it might be the ‘Ode to Melancholy’ that feels closest to the kind of thing I might be trying to do.
Generally I just love how subtle he is in his unsubtlety, or maybe vice versa. It’s all in the tension between blatancy and a very fine sensitivity to language, working finely and trusting to the reader’s own sensitivity.
JW: I don’t think Victoria would mind me saying that the title of Poems Beautiful and Useful was more a marketing ruse on my part than a manifesto… I ask (in part) because I have this notion that the nineteenth century is slightly underutilised, for want of a better word, by contemporary poets — that there are resources down there going unmined. The Romantics never go out of fashion, but I think it’s fair to say the Victorians haven’t fared so well. (It’s taken me years to get over my own prejudices.) You’ve edited Swinburne, Pater, Meynell…
AW: I’m not sure what to say about the resources of nineteenth-century poetry as a whole. I sometimes reflect that one of the ways in which I feel a kinship with the Modernists, in spite of the post-modern elements of my sensibility, is that I just happened to grow up with the same influences as them. And, like them, I’ve had to try to turn those influences into something that doesn’t look embarrassingly old-fashioned. Because Victorian poetry is what turned me on to literature in the very first place; that was what excited me in my late teens, when I started reading seriously. The Rossettis and Swinburne and Tennyson — very potent influences that are hard to shake.
One thing they offer, because their verse is musical in so obvious a way (and this is often true in Hood too), is a thrilling sense of form. Form and style; style and tone moving within the verse form; a real sense of the shape of a poem or stanza or line, so that the suggestiveness of the language feels inseparable from that. I started with parody and pastiche and found I loved imitating the forms and effects, even if the ‘content’ was trash. After that, I had to unlearn some of these influences. And still later, seeing that I hadn’t really unlearned them, I learned ways of getting my very old-fashioned sense of rhythm and the sound of poetry into a kind of vaguely acceptable ‘freed verse’. I write and think about every poem in a very prosodic way, even if the reader doesn’t notice; I think free or freed verse must give the impression of some kind of rhythmic ‘character’, even if most people don’t hear it. But sometimes I do write conventionally metrical verse, and then I have to find other ways of making it acceptable in a modern context, partly by just the kind of register-mixing or irony we’ve been discussing.
JW: I like ‘vaguely acceptable’. That comes across very clearly in your poem in The Little Review (‘The Poet Compareth Himself unto a Village’). The image is so strange, so funny, that a reader with their guard up might be distracted enough not to notice the purity of the metre.
There is so much Hood, and we had a hard time (I gave you a hard time) fitting him in the format. What one poem would you put back in?
AW: Thank you. The Little Review is one of those journals that are open to the vaguely unacceptable.
I would like to have included the whole of ‘Lycus’, which is really strange and beautiful. It even becomes a bit Frankenstein later on. Otherwise, probably ‘The Elm-Tree’. Equally weird, very evocative. Full of delicate subtle things but also very in-your-face. A little too long for the pamphlet, but it’s a dilly.
Alex Wong is the author of two collections of poetry, Poems Without Irony (2016) and Shadow and Refrain (2021), both from Carcanet Press. He has also edited and introduced selections from the work of the Victorian writers A.C. Swinburne, Walter Pater and Alice Meynell.
Jeremy Wikeley is a poet, critic, and the editor of Headless Poet, a new small press dedicated to the art of the introduction. Subscribe for a year’s worth of (five) pamphlets, here: https://www.headlesspoet.com/subscribe