Two Kinds of Badness

[steepholm]

Two voices are there: one is of the deep,
And one is of an old half-witted sheep,
And, Wordsworth, both are thine!

I've filleted J. K. Stephen's sonnet there, but those are officially the best bits - the rest is filler. And of course it's perfectly true - some Wordsworth is wonderful, but he can also be banal.

Of course, most poets write better at some times than others. It's the norm for novelists, artists and composers, too, maybe in fact for pretty much any human activity. But the badness of early Wordsworth, at least, is interesting. In that early work, bad Wordsworth and good Wordsworth aren't really very different from each other: each continually teeters on the other's brink. When your shtick is using ordinary language and everyday situations, banality is never going to be more than a redundant syllable away. (W. D. Snodgrass's De/Compositions: 101 Good Poems Gone Wrong illustrates this beautifully.) A change of light can prove your fairy feast a pile of stinking leaves, or blow beauty into a drift of dirt.

It's different from the badness of late Wordsworth, such as his sonnet sequence in praise of capital punishment:

IS 'Death', when evil against good has fought
With such fell mastery that a man may dare
By deeds the blackest purpose to lay bare?
Is Death, for one to that condition brought,
For him, or any one, the thing that ought
To be 'most' dreaded? Lawgivers, beware,
Lest, capital pains remitting till ye spare
The murderer, ye, by sanction to that thought
Seemingly given, debase the general mind;
Tempt the vague will tried standards to disown,
Nor only palpable restraints unbind,
But upon Honour's head disturb the crown,
Whose absolute rule permits not to withstand
In the weak love of life his least command.

Why this is not as good as the Lucy poems is not something I propose to discuss here; I leave that to the sagacity of the reader.

Anyway, this all prompts me to ask: what other writers exhibit the quality of keeping greatness and banality not at opposite ends of a spectrum, but as each other's shadows? I'm sure Wordsworth isn't alone.

Comments

[cmcmck]

I'd say Tennyson.

[steepholm]

Nods.

[larryhammer]

Late Yeats.

[sovay]

Late Yeats.

Do you think in early Yeats the two strains are more separate, or just that early Yeats was better about not going wrong?

[larryhammer]

In early and even middle Yeats, you can generally tell pretty quickly whether it's going to be good or bad. Late Yeats, you have to keep slogging through to figure out what he was doing, before you can tell.

[poliphilo]

I've never come across a late poem by Yeats I didn't like. The early greenery-yallery stuff appeals to me less but even there he rarely put a foot wrong. His blind spot, I think, was in rating himself as a playwright.

[steepholm]

I can relate to that.

[lilliburlero]

"In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid,
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago; a church stands near..."

It is, um, usual, for churchyards to be near, you know, churches...

[larryhammer]

Heh.

[steepholm]

ROFL!

[calimac]

Two composers: Dvorak and Tchaikovsky.

[steepholm]

I'll have to take your word for it with them, but I do feel I've had a similar experience with Brahms.

[calimac]

That's curious, because I would classify Brahms as the exact opposite kind of composer: he is always at his best. (And indeed, he was a ferocious self-critic, discarding far more music than he published. Essentially none of the discards survive.)

But there's another side to this: Brahms is also one of the few composers whom many people with demonstratably good taste loathe. Although I've found that if you enquire further, they usually say, "Except for this piece, and that one, and this other one," and on until they show that they like more Brahms than they hate.

[cmcmck]

It might explain why Brahms comes and goes in fashion. He was huge when I was an undergrad in the seventies to the extent that Rick Wakeman, then keys player with the prog rock band Yes, wrote a piece called 'Cans and Brahms'. He went back out of fashion in the eighties and nineties but now gets a lot of airtime on the classical music station 'Classic fm' quite a bit of concert play and a lot of new recordings.

And have you noticed the comeback of Louis Spohr in recent years?

[calimac]

I don't follow the trends in classical composers' popularity in pop music. But within classical music itself, Brahms has never fallen out of popularity. He is one of the basic repertoire composers. (Remember "the three B's"?)

As for Spohr, yes, I hear something by him now and again. But that's part of a general trend over the last few decades to occasionally resurrect once-popular forgotten composers. Hummel and Ries show up once in a while too.

[sovay]

Anyway, this all prompts me to ask: what other writers exhibit the quality of keeping greatness and banality not at opposite ends of a spectrum, but as each other's shadows?

Kipling. (Sometimes within the same poem.)

[larryhammer]

Ooo -- good example.

[poliphilo]

Kipling is at his worst, I think, when he's writing Times editorials in verse. When he sticks to slangy, soldier speak he rarely goes wrong.

[steepholm]

Yes! (And how different from Wordsworth! Which goes to show the explanatory power of the theory.)

[poliphilo]

How about Auden? Sometimes he blazes and sometimes he's just being clever- and often in the same poem.

"Lay you sleeping head, my love" has a heartbreakingly plainspoken first verse- then descends into high-sounding verbiage.

The same complaint could be made about Donne.

[steepholm]

Definitely agree about Auden. I'm a bit of a Donne fan-girl, though: he always gives you something to chew on in my experience.

[cmcmck]

'Go and catch a falling star'.........

Give or take the last couple of lines, I've always wished I'd written that one!

unseen waters' ejaculations awe me

[lilliburlero]

Thomas Hardy, very often in the same poem.