What Middlemarch and Billy Collins have in common

Besides me reading them both recently

Do not judge these books by their covers

Around this time last week I read a Billy Collins collection cover to cover for the first time. The cover itself, which is pretty awful, involves a Turner painting, and the second-hand bookshop where I found it was tucked away in the stables of a National Trust house full of Turner paintings, so I took that as a sign.

Anyway, I enjoyed it. A lot. It got repetitive by the end, but that wasn’t the poems’ fault - you’re not supposed to read these things in one sitting. There is a kind of playful, metaphysical inquiry going on, a rapture of Things and Experiences. There are some good jokes too and a pervasive, endearing sense of irony. I’ve not read much Collins, but I feel like I have been reading about him for as long as I have been interested contemporary poetry. I knew, for instance, that he was pretty popular among ‘ordinary’ readers and often disdained by other poets, or people who read a lot of modern poetry.¹

Collins’s critics (his critical critics) object to how ‘prosaic’ it all feels. The lines are superficially so simple and so steady you hesitate to call it a rhythm. Each poem settles into a set line-length which may or may not have something to do with metre and is rarely varied. (This, as much as anything, is why I tired towards the end.) Yet that steadiness – let's call it a pace – also creates the terms on which you encounter what Collins is actually delivering. The lines are a kind of high-wire act. Once he has started with them he has to keep going, and they wouldn’t work if he broke them anywhere else. But they are not the main show.

I am now going to introduce the first of several associations which come solely from recent reading and otherwise have very little justification. Collins’s poetry reminded me of the kind of poetry the English poet-critic Donald Davie advocated for in Purity of Diction in English Verse. One of the primary aims of poetry, Davie contends, is to tread a line between heightened language and the sober language of prose.1 When critics call a poem “prosey”, we usually mean it as a criticism - that it’s flat, lacking in musicality. But prose, for Davie, has its own virtues, ones that are sometimes hard to recognise in today’s world of text text tex. It’s conversational, but it is also restrained: it demands accuracy and rewards subtlety. A Collins poem leans a long way toward prose. In ‘The Thesaurus’, for instance, Collins ends with a kind of poetic manifesto:

I would rather see words out on their own, away
from their families and the warehouse of Roget,
wandering the world where they sometimes fall
in love with a completely different word.
Surely, you have seen pairs of them standing forever
next to each other on the same line inside a poem,
a small chapel where weddings like these,
between perfect strangers, can take place.

There are few words or lines here which shout this is a poem. But the very plainness of Collins’s diction is what enables him to build up the metaphor throughout the stanza, and finally retrieve the loveliness of that combination – ‘perfect strangers’ - making the phrase unfamiliar and beautiful again. You only achieve effects like these by letting a little bagginess (a little prose) in.²

Now for the second questionable association. I spent the rest of my week off reading Middlemarch for the first time. Middlemarch is often praised as the novel to end all novels (which if you are anything like me, always made it a little off putting) but I’m not sure fiction is the best comparison. It felt like discovering an entirely different genre. So much of Middlemarch is poetry. Eliot always finds the right word or metaphor. The characterisation and the psychological insight are exquisite and all the more so for the way in which they are delivered. At times it feels as though though the subject, or state of mind, under her pen is at the service of the image, not the other way around:

…the hours were each leaving their little deposit and gradually forming the final reason for inaction, namely, that action was too late.

As well as philosophy and fiction, Eliot also wrote poetry - the chapters often begin with her own verse - though she hasn’t been remembered for it. At one point, Will Ladislaw, a young, poor-ish writer, offers his own definition of poetry to the unhappily-married heroine he is in love with:

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion – a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.

It’s a definition which could only have been written before modernism: form, which we spend so much time worrying out now, doesn’t come into it.³ Poets today often describe their medium as intense language, where that intensity consists of individual word choices or word-music. On this theory, poetry is prose with the amp turned up to eleven. Whereas to Ladislaw it is obvious that what makes poetry poetry is metaphor. Metaphor is the heart of poetry, dancing along the line between thought (or discernment) and feeling.

Perhaps this is all obvious or should be. But then, as someone once said, to see what’s in front of your nose needs a constant struggle. And the truth is I find metaphors don’t come easily in my own writing. I don’t think they come easily to contemporary poetry, full stop. It is quite standard now to read poems which don’t use them.⁴ While writing this, I flicked through a few recent collections. I found more than I was expecting, but they were mostly modest, scattered (confined, for instance, to adjectives) and rarely integral to the poems. There was none of the extended scaffolding you get with Eliot’s prose, or Collins’s poems.

Sometimes I feel like a distrust of metaphor is the defining feature of contemporary poetry - perhaps fiction too. If this is true, it goes right back to modernism and the revolt against (terrible mixed metaphor incoming) the supposedly debased coinage of flowery Victorian verse. It has something to do with modern conditions, too – alienation from things, transitoriness, the destruction of old certainties. Metaphor is risky, especially extended metaphor. All metaphor is a kind of dance between an individual’s sensibility - I think this is like this - and what can be expressed in language: what you can risk depends on how far you trust your audience to make the leap with you. But modern audiences, where they exist at all, are necessarily unstable, uncertain, unknown. They may not think this is like that. They might find the association alarming (I know from experience that people are anxious about the word “blind”). ⁵

Instinctively, I know poems need metaphor even as I shy away from it. It can be tempting to squeeze one in at the end, in the same way that so many unrhyming poems close on a rhyme (if you find yourself doing this, consider not doing it). This - a strong closing image, where there’d been few images before - is also something you see a lot in contemporary verse.

Collins’s metaphors need room to roam. Almost all the poems in The Art of Drowning are two or three pages long. In ‘The End of the World’, another poem which is also a poem about metaphor, he casts a sceptical eye over the usual fire and brimstone accounts of the world’s ending, the ‘gaunt, bearded’ preacher holding up ‘the news he cannot keep / to himself’. By the end, Collins finds he has become a similar figure to the preacher, though what he calls in is not the end of the world, but perhaps the closest thing we know:

Now it’s me down on the floor lettering my sign
proclaiming that daylight is drawing out of the sky.
This is the message I will carry down the gauntlets of the city,
my eyes hollow like those of the dungeoned, the shipwrecked.
Soon it will be evening, and a fuller darkness will descend,
just as I have prophesised, and then, according to my warnings,
we will behold the starry-eyed messiah of the night.

1. Funny how often that happens.

2. When I first read this poem I thought the ‘pair’ of words being referred to was weddings and strangers, which wouldn’t work because they are on not on the same line, though they are on top of each other. Everyone who marries someone is marrying someone who was once a stranger. If we’re lucky, we also marry someone who is perfect.

3. Form in modern poetry is like money in that Henry James quote: a worry, whether you have it or not.

4. It is quite possible to write a good poem without using metaphors or similies, although often that means that the poem is the metaphor, and often a trite one.

5. See Laurence Scott’s Picnic, Comma, Lightening (2019) for a thoughtful discussion of the future of metaphor in a digital age.