Poets are Daft

A title like that is bound to get the poets rushing to the blog and all steamed-up ready to knock the stuffing out of the essay. Of course poets are not daft. Some of them maybe. But not all of them. The title or rather topic comes from a lovely little book by C. Day Lewis Poetry For You Basil Blackwell: Oxford. (1944). The intended readership was boys and girls. Boy, did CDL have fun with this book. He was really updating Sir Philip Sidney's Apology For Poetry (1597 around there). People in 1944, during the war and before, were not really appreciative of the poet's worth. You'd get these Colonel types stating with the authority of being in the Boer War, that poetry was plain daft and unmanly (memories of being buggered in public school) and others like Ernest Vanewright, an accountant at Grime & Grime would urge them to get a job, and perhaps a haircut. Then there will be the man sat in an armchair looking all Home University like, smoking a pipe, and arguing in a thick Lancashire accent, "No you can't, young man get anywhere in life by writing poetry." Then, and this is not in the order of CDL, you'd have the stockbroker dressed in pin stripes on the train platform at Barking, letting his Times slip down a crack or two, "Look you can't make money writing poetry." CDL uses these common truisms (a tautology but hey you need to double up sometimes, to supersize a point), to argue the opposite, so the little ones, those little mites, will move on from the Famous Five and tackle poetry. Not the stuff of the Victorians. Not the stuff you learnt by heart and could fart in your sleep. No, poetry you actually love. He starts with the assumption "Poetry is Daft". Now, I think he got to use a trope of that period, his poetic knickers in a twist. What he argues, in a Richard Dawkins manner, is that poets do think differently, but he does it...crazily.

Poetry who say poetry is daft are usually frightened of life, frightened of their own feelings and the mysterious of the world. (p. 1)

How true. You bastards who think poets are crazy - you need therapy! You need...poetry:

If you're afraid of having your feelings stirred in the way poetry can stir them, if don't want to see more of the world than meets the eye, if you're afraid to see beyond your own nose, then you certainly avoid poetry as you would a lunatic. (ibid, 1-2)

Not very convincing? Stirring. Like those stirrings under the bedsheets? Poets see things. Hear things perhaps. Regular Joan of the Arcs. Then CDL elaborates and makes the connection - poets and prophets. Jesus. The little kiddies are shitting themselves. Are poets really prophets? They have the "spirit breathed into" themselves. But hey,

But we must no assume, because of this, that poets are crazy.

Peter and Jane are trembling now. Was Mummy and Daddy right?

After all, you don't have to be a poet to feel "enthusiasm": each of you has moments when he feels a strange unaccountable excitement welling up inside him, a kind of "inspiration"; but you don't go whizzing off to the doctor and ask him whether he doesn't think you ought to be put in a lunatic asylum. Some poets do go mad, of course -- William Blake, William Cowper, John Clare, Christopher Smart did, and they were all fine poets. (ibid).

So Doctor, I have these episodes, when I look at a tree, and...

Yes continue Sonny.

I think it is...

Yes let your feelings out

Well Doctor I think that tree is like

Come on Sonny let it come out

Like a... banana

A what?

Doctor I see all these bananas.

Really Sonny, I thought you were going to be more imaginative than this displaced phallus simile

But Doctor...am I a ...poet

Rest assured you are not one of those, perhaps you might be a Music Hall comedian.

Oh my God Doctor - am I crazy

No Sonny you will make a lot of money...

For some daft reason, CDL has got into his head - it is only boys that want to be poets.