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Angela Leighton On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the
Legacy of a Word (
[This more academic review was first published as ‘Angela Leighton’s On Form’, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 3 (1), March 2011. Some of it fed directly into my critical volume The Meaning of Form. See here: Pages: Robert Sheppard The Meaning of Form: forms and forming in contemporary innovative poetry (Summary and Weblinks) Other parts didn’t.]
Angela Leighton has the benefit of
coming relatively late to a debate about form that has been raging in some
areas of literary studies (chiefly Romanticism) for some years, and in her book
she judiciously accounts for her immediate predecessors’ works: Wolfson’s Formal Charges (1997), Bollas’ Art Matters (2001), Attridge’s
magisterial The Singularity of Literature
(2004), and Wood’s Literature and the
Taste of Knowledge (2005). (It is perhaps symptomatic of the state of
current British criticism that theorists associated with innovative poetry are
not within her scope. But then, this area of criticism has not been taken up by
critics of radical poetry.) Her book offers useful readings of the history of
the term ‘form’ and of aesthetic criticism and of its relationship to poetry
since the Romantics and Tennyson, with useful foci upon Pater and Vernon Lee,
Woolf and Yeats.
She adopts a
multiple distinction found also in the earlier studies, one which I take to be at
its simplest a distinction between ‘form’ as devicehood and forms and ‘forming’ as a constitutive act of
readerly reception. She explains: ‘Form can signify both the finished object,
the art form in its completion, or the parts that make up its technical
apparatus. It can signify a visionary apparition in the mind, or the real,
physical properties of a work. In addition, it can suggest the force that
drives to completion.’ She offers a brief historical reading of aestheticist
thought since Kant, focussing on the notions of form and force. The refinements
of Schiller are singled out as the source for many later definitions and tropic
play: ‘Schiller fidgets’ she says, with the term form, ‘trying out grammatical
alternatives: “form-drive”, “formal qualities”… as if to push the noun into new
shapes, new “forms”. So the “play-drive” of art is a “form-drive”, a wish to
make forms, and that leads to a notion of “living form”,’ a phrase often used
to introduce dynamic impulse into the arguments. When such notions are picked
up by Coleridge, as ‘forma efformans’ [forming form] form has ‘become not a
body but an agent. It forms.
Leaving aside considerations of the relationship between beauty and truth in post-Romantic thought, which culminates in Pater’s purist awareness that ‘form…shuts in beauty and shuts out truth’, Leighton draws out the ambiguities of Clive Bell’s and Roger Fry’s Modernist mantra of ‘significant form’, which is usually taken as a plea for the autonomy of the artwork but actually ‘registers the contrary pressure of significance, and therefore the stress of incompatibles being brought together’, content and form. It echoes recent arguments that form signifies and has semantic and cognitive value, that artificial devices are meaningful (Charles Bernstein revising Forrest-Thomson, for example). Mid-century thinkers Henri Focillon and Suzanne Langer are shown synthesising views that ‘form … is not a fixed shape to be seen, but the shape of a choice to be made’. Leighton notes of Langer’s Feeling and Form:
‘Form
and Feeling’ would once have been a contradiction, but it is now a hybrid,
rather like… ‘living form’ which, like Schiller’s original, or Coleridge’s
‘forma efformans’, or Focillon’s ‘life of forms’, insists on life at the heart
of form…She thus continues the project … of wresting form away from the museum
of untouchable … art forms, and giving it back to the human beings who make or
perceive it,
thus preparing the way for an
aesthetic theory that has at its centre the receptiveness and response of the
user of the artwork, even the responsibility of, or to, forms (as Barthes says)
that ‘suggests that form stops us in our tracks of thinking, and asserts itself
in that moment of stillness’. Form discovers us as we discover it.
If
‘form is not a matter of correct technique; it is a force of creativity
generally’, how should we approach it critically? Leighton answers the question
for her own book, which negotiates her chosen texts with a scrupulousness and
subtlety that derives from her aesthetic tradition and also, I would like to
believe, from her own sensitivity to form as a poet. She derives her
methodology from her immediate precursors. She quotes Attridge’s verbal
adjustments, ‘taking form’, ‘losing form’, and the one I favour, ‘forming’,
with approval of their distension of temporality and of attention, and
comments, ‘Thus we catch form in the act.’ Once we espy this rare entity, she
wonders ‘what kind of criticism could be devoted to’ these dynamic formulations
of form? She takes from Bolla and Wood the cognitive imperative the former formulated:
‘Perhaps to think of form as a way of knowing, not as an object of knowledge,
might be the beginning of the answer.’ She
also inherits from her forebears the cautious tone and tentative suggestiveness
that seems the hallmark of this (necessarily?) conjectural mode of thinking.
‘Being willing to listen to the strange things that are said’ by form (28)
prepares us for a state of alertness to alterity but seems strangely disarming
at once.
Had she
considered Simon Jarvis’ ‘Prosody as Cognition’ essay or Joan Retallack’s The Poethical Wager she might have found
cognate theorists interested in more radial poetries, but the book is what we
have in any case and she offers illuminating readings of Douglas Oliver, W.S.
Graham and Roy Fisher (who are arguably within the ‘linguistically innovative’
umbrella) but also writes about Geoffrey Hill, Anne Stevenson and Heather McHugh,
among others. In many ways it is refreshing to see a range of poetries
considered together and when they are meeting under the sign of form then much
must be well. Poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities
through the means (meanings) of form.
Oliver is
present as a poetic commentator upon Celan, a link from British shores to both
European culture and to the horrors conducted upon Continental Europe during
the War. She is snappily apt when she rejects post-Adorno pleas for the eloquence
of a silenced post-Holocaust poetry, and shows how Pater’s condition of music
is approached by Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’ as aestheticism at its most engaged, if we
may put it thus. The figure of the ‘urn’ is uncannily traced throughout this
book, whether embodied in the well-wrought urn the New Criticism borrowed from
Donne or the supernal isolate one they ventriloquized after Keats, or in
cracked ones in Henry James’ fiction, or in the funerary urns in Roy Fisher’s
comic transportation of post-cremation ashes (up the ramp of a car-repair shop,
onto the garden, its residual fragments to be binned, re-incinerated, and
eventually lifted ‘clear of Sheffield/ and over the North Sea’ in his ‘They
Came Home’).Oliver’s poem on Celan is analysed for the way it proves that ‘the
aestheticist “urn” is always in danger of becoming a purely ceremonial
container of the past, a bland appeaser of guilt and a museum-piece in the
memory’.
Leighton traces
another persistent trope connecting notions of ‘form’ to notions of ‘nothing’;
to be an aesthetic writer is to articulate form but to say nothing, as Oscar
Wilde and others assert. But ‘nothing’ (appearing so pertinently in her chapter
on Wallace Stevens not just in the present-absent artefact-being ‘snowman’) is
an inheritance of the formal tradition, in her reading. Again Fisher – a poet
whose abandoned ‘Collected Poems 1968’ were called ‘the ghost of a paper bag’ –
harbours a mania for ‘true nothing’ as the true content of poetry. Realist
depiction is famously and persistently ‘nondescript’ for Fisher, present as its
own negation. One of a number of recent critics to pick up on Fisher’s
non-metaphysical obsession with the dead, Leighton is particularly good at showing
how Fisher fills the urn of remembrance with the nothing-doings of the dead. On
the other hand, W.S. Graham is obsessed with events of forming when he
considers the sea in ‘The Nightfishing’, but also with nothing or Nobody when
he turns to modes of address to absent addressees in the self-reflexive later
work. ‘The Constructed Space’ of the poem of that title could just as easily be
the formed space or the empty space across which poetry forms itself as a
listening mouth, as it were. In all these texts, Leighton concludes, ‘the
aestheticist programme of deflecting matter into form, message into style, is
reiterated in different ways’.
This
summary is not able to chart the way that an obsessive set of themes (images
even) recurs across the programme she outlines. Hers is less of an objective account,
more a knowing surrender to, and witness account of, her encounters with these
thinkers and (in the second part of the book) with contemporary poets. She has
much in common with others in this tradition of thinking in adopting a
conjectural, elusive or allusive approach to defining form: ‘To regard form,
not as a shape, an object, or technique, but as a “charge”, with all its
headlong, economic, even judicial connotations, is to release it from stasis.
Form does not stay still; in many senses, it “charges”’. Onwards.
Robert Sheppard
