POETRY AS PRIMITIVE LANGUAGE

By JOHN CROWE RANSOM

Reprinted from MICHIGAN ALUMNUS QUARTERLV REVIEW, July 25, 1942, Vol. XLVTII, No. 24

POETRY AS PRIMITIVE LANGUAGE

By JOHN CROWE RANSOM

i\RIEND of mine said he had been

driving in the neighborhood ofMemphis. The new highway was in

places a sort of causeway built up abovebayou water, and right at the base of it onone side an old Negro was fishing. Thinkingthat the water was too near the slag and thenoise of the highway for this sport, myfriend stopped his car and had the fol­lowing conversation with the fisherman.

Good morning, Uncle, are you fishing?YessiJ', Cap'n, I'm fishin'.Have you caught any fish yet?Nassir, I ain't yet.Have you had any bites?Nossir, I don't believe I has.Have you had any nibbles?Nossir, I can't say I is.Do you think there are any fish in that hole?Cap'n, I don't much reckon there's any fish

there nohow.Well, Uncle, why do you keep fishing there?Well, Cap'n, this is the hole I'se always done

my fishin' in, 'cause that's my house right upyonder on the rise.

This anecdote has several possible mor­als, and I may have used it in the past tosuit the occasion. The one I read from ittoday is the truest of all its meanings, andhas to do with a spiritual affinity betweenthe fisherman and Mr. T. S. Eliot of TheWaste Land. The big new road symbolizesmodernity. It had killed out the fish in thisparticular hole, but the old man went on

fishing there just the same. The fact is thatfishing is not a single action like a science,but an ambiguous activity like an art. Itmeans to take fish and be effective, just aspoetry means to carry on a rational argu­ment and say something. But it means alsoto sit on the ground, smell the water, watchthe snakes and dragonflies, slap the mos­quitoes, feel the sun and smoke a pipe­all of which together amount to a diffusedelicious context which goes with fish­taking, and parallels most precisely thesplendid contextual detail of poetic lan­guage. But in the forms of modern life thecolored man and Mr. Eliot have found itso hard to attach the old familiar contextsto the new effective actions that they havedecided to take the contexts and let the ef­fective actions go. Modern art tends thatway. It does a pretty piece of fishing, andallows for all the business that belongs tofishing except the taking of fish.

Let that wait a moment. My topic is notthe ineffectiveness but the primitivism ofpoetry, and they do not necessarily come tothe same thing though sometimes they may.By primitivism I mean an antique or out­moded cast of thought, so that the poetryis likely to seem heroic as compared withcontemporary thought, or to seem pastoral,agrarian, medieval, pre-Raphaelitish ormerely old-fashioned and quaint. Aftersome progress of civilization comes a move­ment of regress, with poets in charge of it.

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But I have generally labored this point inlarge or philosophical terms, with the re­sult that I seemed to myself profound butnot very pointed, and academically correctbut as a student of poetry not really closeto the topic. Today in your honor I willtalk about the primitive quality that ap­pears in poetry as language. This version ofcritical theory is brand-new for me, andexperimental, since I have not worked itout, but it seems more streamlined and pre­sentable than any other I have hit upon.Literary criticism is not identical with phi­losophy at large, but it occurs to me that itmay well be identical with linguistic. Or, ifyou prefer the term, it may be identicalwith semantic, one of the newest, mostcapable and sharpest of analytic tools. Theadvantage is that in applying it, whether toa poetry or to a science, you can uncover alot of philosophical elements that belong toyour topic, and escape from uncovering alot of philosophical elements that do notbelong to your topic. I am at the momenta sort of convertite to linguistic, and amtrying to translate into its forms such theo­retical notions as I have otherwise arrived at.

I have assembled my observations nottoo systematically under the head of anumerical series of Points. This is logicallya bad style, but it is a fast one, and greatstatesmen have recommended it to yourfavor. I will not say how many Points ap­pear in my notes, but they were too many;they greatly exceeded Fourteen. I havenow reduced them slightly below that num­ber. I proceed.

I. A primitive language is one whosestandard discourse, in trying to be concep­tual (or rational), is obliged also, andwhether or no, to be imaginal (or substan­tival). That is, in trying to make usefulformulations about things, relating them byvirtue of some common or class property,it is obliged to refer to the many-propertiedor substantial things themselves, the thingsas wholes. Primitive languages are some­times called radical languages: they consistalmost wholly in root words, each one de-

noting a whole thing or whole event. Indiscourse these roots are jumbled together,and it devolves upon the hearer to figure .out the properties in which the thingsnamed are related, and by elimination toread into the jumble a consecutive argu­ment. Here is the famous ambiguity oflanguage. You still have it in poetic meta­phor, for example, and in all unskillfulspeech. Does your metaphorical word referto the single property which makes it logi­cally fit for the argument, or does it alsoevoke an image and refer to the independ­ent substance? Homer was fond of the,wine-dark sea, and used the locution againand againj ostensibly he meant a shade ofcolor, but incidentally his readers and sing­ers were sure to receive a fleeting image oft~e substantial and very good thing namedwme.

z. A language develops out of its primi­tive or radical condition in at least two ways.First, it improves its vocabulary, findingwords which denote the several propertiesof the thing and not having to keep on de­noting every time the whole manifold ofproperties which make up the substance­adjectives for the leading aspects of thething, adverbs and highly restricted verbsfor aspects of the event. They are relativelyabstract, technical, scientific and useful.Second, the primitive language developssyntactically. It learns to place the partsof predication in a definitive order expres­sive of their relation; it invents inflections,prefixes and suffixes, and relational wordslike the conjunction and the preposition. Itis improving the precision of discourse, andmore and more squeezing imagination,which looks for its substantial images, outof the action. I do not mention as a syn­tactical development the device of com­pounding or hyphenating wordsj that isgenerally the crudest primitivism thoughpoets are given to it, and it either antedatesor repudiates the close syntactical articula­tion. In short, suppose an American Indianplenipotentiary, knowing his English onlyto the extent of a few root-words like those

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of some primitive language, and treatingwith the white invaders, who know evenless than that about his language, as fol­lows: Heap big Indian hunting go, heapbig paleface firewater come. Against its par­ticular background this discourse mightjust be intelligible. But now conceive theplenipotentiary as having behind him amodern Indian's college studies and thewhole recent development of the Englishlanguage, and phrasing his proposition likethis: The designated territories are obvi­ously extensive and valuable, and my gov­ernment would require in compensation forthem a fully proportionate volume of dis­tilled liquor of acceptable alcoholic content.But to phrase the bargain in this way seemsto insult the intelligence of the party of thefirst part, and the honesty of the party ofthe second part, and we should remark thatlinguistic precision illuminates the valuesoffered in a bargain, or anywhere else. Ido not think poets, Indians, heroes, demi­gods or any other primitives could look outfor themselves in a society whose advancedprose precision they could not master.

3. An advanced language is one in whichthe standard discourse is perfect or nearlyperfect conceptually, and the imaginal orsubstantival range of meaning has all butdisappeared. At this stage language con­quers its involuntary ambiguity. It becomesfit for big business, technical science and allother abstract forms of thinking. This is thekind of language that seems exclusivelyto be coveted by some semanticists, such asKorzybski. Kenneth Burke wrote to me thatall semanticists of his acquaintance werenaturalists, meaning that they tolerated onlydiscourse after the scientific ideal, and in hisview were bad people; that is, they wouldlike to impose this ideal upon all discoursesregardless of its suitability. I for my partjust now referred to conceptual discourse asthe standard of language; and certainly, aslanguage improves its prose, it approximatesmore and more to that standard; even if weinclude its literary prose. Sir ThomasBrowne sustained his imagistic magnilo-

quence proudly as something that in his daywould be set to the credit of a writer. It issignificant that we have no Brownes today;but we do have for instance Mr. LoganPearsall Smith whose phantasies are onesentence or at most several sentences long,whose mock-seriousness represents an authorwith tongue in cheek and who denominateshis pieces as Trivia.. But I think not all se­manticists are uncompromising partisans ofscience for all occasions, and my acquaint­ance with them has been a little morefortunate than Mr. Burke's.

4. As a language develops, and discoursebecomes more rigorously conceptual, andthe imaginal fringe of substance is oblit­erated from view, poetry intervenes. Poetryrecovers to language its imaginal or sub­stantival dimension, almost as fast as lan­guage loses it, though of course not quite.That is probably what poetry is for, asnearly as we can state it. It is a special andartificial kind of discourse fighting for ex­cuse to live in a society which has proscribedit. Naturally it might court the more primi­tive groups of this society and claim to speaktheir language, and Wordsworth offers adoctrine of poetry as the language of com­mon men. But if it is not more regressiveand braver in its diction than that it willnot have for common men the value of apoetry, and on the whole I think it needsto be maintained that poetry has a valueonly for those who are familiar with theadvancement of contemporary language anddisaffected by the failure of its imaginaldimension. The imaginal dimension in lan­guage is something you did not know wasthere till it is gone, and then you turn topoetry in order to get it back. The primitivecharacter of the poetic language will show,of course, in the radical quality of its termsand in the looseness of its syntax.

S. Our own present language is highlyadvanced, so that its prose standard en­forces a conceptual purity that would besimply fabulous for a primitive mind. Theneed for poetry is probably all the moreimperative. But evidently the difficulty is

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greater than usual, perhaps greater thanever. It is harder to go primitive in yourlanguage when you are bred up to main­tain its rationality; and at the same time itmay be harder to palm poetry off upon apublic that has come under an aggressiveeducational establishment and learned some­thing about linguistic duty and linguisticdestiny; the whole artifice of poetry be­comes transparent, and a little shabby.What will the modern poet do? Mr. Eliothas advised him to ((dislocate language" ifnecessary, and in his own verse has prac­ticed many violences. That is a bold strat­egy, and does not appeal to the middlingpublic which, from its casual acquaintancewith older poetry, is not used to outragingthe contemporary modes of discourse sorecklessly. But Mr. Eliot is a wise manand a veteran of the wars, and we shouldnot dismiss his counsel hastily. Poets appearto be faced with a crisis of language, thecritical difficulty being that the imaginalelement of language is now so slurred andabridged that there is not room enough inreputable discourse for poetry to begin itsusual procedures.

6. The style of poetic discourse has al­ways been outwardly loyal to the purposeof primitive language (indeed to the rulingpurpose of any language) in preserving theimpression of being a conceptual discourseintending to say something rather clearand useful. But now there appear excep­tions: poems in which no binding argumentis visible supporting the images of thepoem. There are for example the poemsof Eliot, of Hart Crane, of a school of sur­realists, and there is the poetic prose ofJames Joyce. In France, where there ismore consciousness of language than else­where, the exceptions began with the Sym­bolists far back in the nineteenth century.But in general these poems are highly mod­ern, and still under question. I advert againto my colored fisherman who achieved thefishing without the fish: they are trying toprovide the body of poetry without pro­viding a skeleton to hold it together. On

the whole I think the tactic is wrong. Butthat does not mean that the situation is notdesperate, and I hesitate to offer a generaljudgment because the poets may really bemore subtle and penetrating than I am intheir analysis of the poetic situation. I tendto take comfort from the example of Wil- iIiam Butler Yeats. His understanding wasdeep, his strategy perfectly adventurous,so that he tried many experiments thatfailed; but I am very sure he found an areaof language in which images and definitivearguments accommodated themselves toeach other; I am not yet sure how big thisarea was and how much room remains therefor further poetic farming.

7. Modern psychology' seems to en­force Point 6; especially Gestalt psychologywith its studies of the process of attentionand the process of learning. I believe it ad­mits scarcely any such thing as a pure image,that is, an image in which our attention dif­fuses equally upon all the properties. Onthe contrary, we achieve the image of athing only in the process of recognizing thething, and we recognize it by virtue of de­tecting in it some dominating surface­property or facet-property which is obvi­ously valuable. We then apprehend theother properties of the image in a sort of .sub rosa fashion, thinking we are engrossed 'or pretending to be engrossed still with thedominant property, but really rioting inthat territory of the image which is rela­tively out of focus and forbidden. How­ever, it remains true that we attend to theimage by focusing it, and when it falls outof all focus we cannot attend to it. We getthe fringe items by looking out of the cor­ner of our eye; or we turn our eye straighton them but not for long. Such a techniqueis probably the one employed by poetry; away of indirection, but perhaps the onlyway on earth of realizing the vividness,magnificence and beauty of the world. Apsychology of poetry would work alongthese lines and show the devices by whichpoetry permits us to have this truancy with­out offending the public censor, or even the

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Freudian censor who presides over our ownconsciousness. But the Freudian allusionmay be misleading. I think the remarkableproperty of the poetic image, aside from itsexistence at all, is its innocence. There is nochance of accounting for poetic beauty as alibidinous gratification, nor even as some­thing useful, nor even as something moral.Such accounts have been pushed hard andingeniously but they have failed. But per­haps I do not need to declare to you thatthe poetic beauty survives all the failures ofour crude analysis, and we continue to re­ceive it after we confess that it cannot beisolated as easily as we had thought.

8. There is no primitivism in poetry soubiquitous, so atmospheric, as the primitiv­ism of its language, which is almost identi­fiable with the process of consciousness it­self. But there are primitive characters init more obvious than this; and for examplethat of its cosmology, theology or ideology.To be completely contemporary you mustgive up the Oxford Book of English Verse,and you must expurgate large tracts fromthe corpus of most of the famous poets andsome of your favorite poets: because in re­spect of their ideas you come upon theprimitive. Even in their own day they wereprepared to commit anachronism. Think ofthe Christian poets who have restored theOlympian deities, and the Copernicans whohave reverted to the Ptolemaic cosmos;a notorious infidelity on the part of thepoets, and they must rate broadly andideologically, as well as in ways much sub­tler and harder to remark, as apostates fromour achieved culture. We are obliged toremark that there often appears in poetryprecisely the mode of primitivism that hasthe official sanction of the religious estab­lishments. Religion seems fundamentallyto be a resistance to the purification of ourcosmic conceptions, and in the face of prog­ress a regression to beautiful but primitivedogmas. The new concepts are too pure andemasculated; the old dogmas registeredbetter the contingent density of the actual

created world; the concept and the dogmastand for different modes of knowledge.Construed philologically (religio = a tyingback), religion may be expected, when theissue is joined, to espouse the dogma againstthe concept. The poetic ideas may likewiseshow very well the general direction thatpoetry takes, but they are not strictly mytopic. They are a topic for poetic criticismunquestionably, and we know that while itis easy to spot the ideas it is not easy totrace them with precision. But what is stillharder, and of a more enveloping impor­tance, and probably more fascinating, is theanalysis of the poetic language.

9. Returning to language. It must notbe supposed that the poetic regression ismerely a matter of finding some actual his­toric idiom that is now archaic and out­moded. That would be a defiance compa­rable to the religious recital of the olddogma, but poetry lacks the support of agreat institutional establishment to approvean overt defiance; so that would be too boldto succeed, and too simple and literal torate as a technique. It is true that archaicdiction figures in poetry, but it is also true,in my estimation, that the effect is bad. Itis possible for poetry to cover up its tracks,and to seem contemporary without con­forming to the level of conceptual attain­ment that is in vogue. Consequently itwould be a poor critical project to plan, forexample, to discover in the poetic dictionof the eighteenth century a diction recov­ered bodily from the seventeenth centuryafter the latter had vanished from eight­eenth century prose. Poetry must preserve((face." It should sound contemporary, andwith the accomplished poets I think it does;it even sounds felicitous, elegant and fash­ionable. This requires of the poet the great­est linguistic ingenuity.

10. The diction of fine poetry is alwaysfresh and individual, but there are sev­eral broad techniques or strategies whichpoets have handed down to their successorssince time immemorial. They have become

POETRY AS PRIMITIVE LANGUAGE

publicly licensed, and no public has beenquerulous enough to challenge them unlessit is very recently. They make up the onlyobjective institutional establishment thereis for poetry to shelter under. I do notknow what would happen to poetry if itshould be deprived of them, and its tenuousestablishment should collapse. I do notknow what would happen, but perhapsthere is a chance of my finding out beforevery long if there is no shift in the lin­guistic climate. They are rank solecisms,either by nature or by the extravagant man­ner of their practice. The first of thesestrategies is meter. It is a way of enforcinga phonetic imagery upon attention, whichotherwise might be completely occupiedwith the semantic character, or meaning, ofthe words. That makes a dispersal of at­tention, enough by itself perhaps to be de­cisive and to convert reception into anaesthetic experience; the phonetic effect be­comes a context round the semantic action.But it has a strange effect upon the seman­tic action itself which it is important to con­sider. The meter works upon the poet whenhe composes and alters his composition, andthen it works upon the hearer and alters hissense of what he is reading. Look first atthe poet. He is not quite free to use thewords that express his intended meaning,because these do not automatically fall intothe prescribed meter; so he must tinkerwith them, and try substitutions, till themeter has been realized and the meaningis not too remote. In this process the mean­ing gets loosened up. He has sacrificed theconceptual precision of his vocabulary, andthe cogency of his syntax. If it was difficultto know how to escape from the bondageof a conceptual discourse, his metrical neces­sities have driven him to do just that, onelittle step at a time. And now observe thereader. I have observed the reader, manytimes, and professionally. I have observedthat often the reader of a poetry that isperilously on the loose, imaginal and primi­tive side is unaware of the fact, because he

is fooled by the tidiness of the meter. Ittakes a reader from one of the science de­partments of the college to ignore the meterand dig into the obscurities of the discourse.The student from the science departmenthas a harder head than one of our studentsand is useful to have on hand during poeticstudies; but he is rather at the disadvantageof being committed to attending to onething at a time; first the meaning, then themeter, hardly the two together. Perhaps hehas lost his rugged primitive constitutionand is effete. On the other hand the preju­dice of the arts-trained student is all againstpicking a good thing to pieces; but his habitof taking the whole thing in stride exposeshim to blind spots as to just what he is tak­ing. You can hardly persuade him that theelaborate musical development in Swin­burne for example, or even in Shelley, wentalong with, and indeed necessitated, a seri­ous deficiency in the meaning.

I I. Another licensed poetic convention,whose loss poetry could hardly survive, isfigure of speech, or trope, in all its luxuri­ant variety. I believe linguistic is preparedto lay down the general rule that any troperepresents an aberration from the concep­tual ideal of discourse. It is surprising thatin collegiate departments of English litera­ture the tropes are not systematicallystudied as logical or a-logical devices. Inthis respect the moderns have lapsed fromthe critical scholarship of the ancients. Iwould like to write a critical note entitled,"From Aristotle to Longinus to Genung."The point would be that Aristotle made avery close analysis of a great group oftropes under the general head of metaphor,classifying its lawless procedures with atleast a show of system; it might be saidthat he was examining the dodges, or thedevices, by which reputable poets, whoknew better, imported radicals or imaginalterms into an argument expecting concep­tual or abstract terms. Longinus also wasmore than an ordinary analyst, and shouldbe useful to us because his interest, in part

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at least and perhaps chiefly, was in thetropes which are purely syntactical, andwhich obscure discourse by jumbling wordstogether without showing their articulation;waiving conjunctions, and mixing up tenses,for example. The Greeks recognized bothkinds of trope, and a regressive poetryneeds both, though we hear today almostexclusively about the first kind, and findthe second kind isolated from their poeticoccasions and held up to detestation infreshman manuals under such heads as"Unco-ordinate Series" and "the andFault." And, last, Genung, American authorof a famous textbook of rhetoric, whonames and defines most of the tropes witha very pretty scholarship, and appears in­nocent of any suspicion that the tropes ofhonored poets were acting with insubordi­nation against the sequence and the unityof their discourses. But Genung flourishedyears ago, when official studies in Englishliterature were new. The collocation ofAristotle, Longinus and Genung mightprompt the query: What are the Englishstudies doing? And when will intelligentlinguistic come into them?

12. This will be my concluding Point.It concerns the over-all or generic motive ofthe poet, and in the light of his record ofapostasy, aberration, sabotage and furtive­ness I should not want to waive that ques­tion. I do not like to surrender to that in­genious motive-hunting which finds us do­ing everything for the sake of somethingelse. We do many things because we mustdo them, and it only occurs to us later thatwe probably did them because we wantedto and must have had some "reason."Poetry is a discourse ordinarily in the in­dicative mode, therefore a mode of know­ing, and probably one could say with touch­ing piety that its motive is Truth. But whowill tell us what that means? The truth,for the linguist at any rate, is what weknow. Poetry is therefore a mode of know­ing whose motive is to know. But someillumination is gained if we contrast thepoetic language with the scientific lan-

guage. If my linguistic orientation is cor­rect, poetic language arises historicallybecause we are not happy over the improve­ments we make in our scientific language.Weare not happy because these improve­ments require us to abandon progressivelythe imaginal or substantival elements. Butthe imaginal or substantival elements char­acterized a kind of language with whichwe were familiar by inheritance from ourprimitive ancestors-an actual and evi­dently a satisfying kind of language. Thelinguist will remark, perhaps by a slightdeparture from his professional dutiesthough with all the more weight because ofhis disinterest, that there seems to be notestimony on the record to dispute the over­whelming agreement of the poets that thesewords refer to aspects of the world whichare still there and visible in the world,thougb. it may be that our modern lin­guistic training encourages us to pay littleattention to them any more. As a man useslanguage so is he. But I do not mean toabuse scientific language in order to praisepoetic language. There is as much impul­sion upon us to develop our scientific lan­guage as there is to protect our poetry.These are two actual and valid languages,though the one is in protest against theother and their fraternal relations becomemore and more uncomfortable. I do notknow anything further to say on this pointunless I should import into a linguistic dis­course for the sake of a final flourish a bigword from formal philosophy. The wordwould be: ontological. The poet's motiveis ontological just as is the motive of whatwe call the pure scientist; he is predicatingabout a character of the natural world,and it is not the character about which thescientist is predicating; though both mightbe said to be predicating about some char­acter of The Way Things Are. But onto­logical would add little to the linguist'sown nice sense of the poet's strategic situa­tion except an impressive polysyllabic pho­netic item. Suffice it to say that for linguisticthe poet is in his duty.