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Sabeena Mathayas M.A English 2011 Hans Raj College, University ofDelhi

Cityscapes

Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of apoetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough andrugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of

reverie, the jibes of conscience?It was, above all, out of my exploration of huge cities, out of the medley of theirinnumerable interrelations, that this haunting ideal was born.Charles Baudelaire To Arsne Houssaye," (1862)

The fact of the city is that it is as much a conscious material construct as it is asubconscious linguistic construct. In its medley of innumerable interrelations, LewisMumford identifies the inscape that holds within its communal framework manysimpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn,urban forms condition the mind. But it is only through language and the panoramicvision it offers as conceits that the cityscape inner and outer becomes mansgreatest work of art.

In analyzing the selective works of Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, John Betjeman andBilly Collins, this paper attempts to survey the vocabulary of art, artist andperspective, to maneuver through the peculiar relationship between man andmaterial that exists in the continual creative play of urban living.

1. Micro to Macro Ezra Pound

Critical opinion on the Pounds Hugh Selwyn Mauberley has largely beenimpressionistic and diffused but it is unanimous that it reveals its virtues andpowers in its devices of representation in the refined devices of a uniquesensibility. With Pound though, sensibility becomes a process of transfiguringpersonae or masks in order to actualize a complex harmony of vision in the face of

glaring contraries.This vision is inclusive of history: of becoming aware of it, of bearing witness to it, ofhaving even tacitly participated in it, even if it means by not. Pounds Londonwas deeply steeped in its aesthete factions and capitalist structures which the artistrebelled against and adhered to. Mauberley does not present a personality or an in-depth psychology; it presents an inextricable indictment. Pounds personae arent

just E.P and Mauberley; he presents to the reader Mr.Nixon, Lady Valentine,Brennbaum, Monsieur Verog, the bank clerk and the Conservatrix, the stylist andhis mistress, to name a few. Each personae is never exactly equivalent to the poetsmind in its isolation or integral place in the sequence of the poem and thehierarchies of society It is their totality which is a process of cognizance in Poundsperspective that shifts from his insular aesthetic toward a greater social

engagement; philologically on a micro to macro scale.

The positive accent laid on the effort to give vital thrust to a poetic career is aheroic justification for the ordeals Pound had undergone to preserve his integrityand aesthetic. The economic and social demands of the age induce either anescape or a compromise from the artist. The siren song of surrender and escape toan ivory tower beguiles and chastens at the same time a predicament exorcisedas a death of a personae in the opening ode.

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Mauberley now embraces the dualities of the self and the world in the first section.In presenting a critique of the age poems from II to XII now account for the futilityand irrelevance of the poets existence. Mauberleys gallery of impaired, failed andcompromised artists begins with E.P and resumes in Yeux Glauques; proceedingfrom Ruskin to Fort Maddox Ford and then shifting to the bourgeois, the aristocratic:the audience that are popular representatives of contemporary taste.

The age demanded an image Not, not certainly, the obscure reveriesOf the inward gaze;Better mendacities The age demanded chiefly a mould in plaster,Made with no loss of time,

Besides this thoroughfareThe sale of half-hose hasLong since superseded the cultivationof Pierian roses.

Attacking the Philistine priorities of society that Mauberley describes an era oftawdry cheapness an age that demanded a petrified image of itself, endlesslyreplicable for a mass market, where beauty was decreed in the market place, artbecame mechanical and politics corrupt. Societys faith in its own structures hadended up destroying it with the advent of the Great War.There died a myriadand of the bes,t among them,For an old bitch gone in teeth,For a botched civilization,

The second part, beginning with Mauberley 1920, is modeled on the aesthete asprotagonist. He takes full shape as an earnest Imagist poet whose response to theage is not to yield to its demands but to withdraw into a private subjective world ofselected impressions, rare and exquisite apperceptions of beauty passivelyreceived but not returned to the world as art. A lapse into solipsism.I was

And I no more existHere drifted

An hedonistIt is the juxtaposition of the Envoi with The Medallion that seals the crux ofMauberley. The envoi is an accomplished imitation of the Renaissance poem Golovely Rose by Thomas Campion. The Medallion on the other hand stands exquisitein its carefully cultivated aesthetic sensibilities. With Flaubertian precision, thepoems lapidary visuals allow only a perspective, incomplete not the full smilean art / in profile a beautiful description accomplished without inspiration. Lifebecomes stone; an irrelevance.

The yearning to stay relevant, to become more, not less socially involved validatesPounds departure from London and the aestheticism it stood for.

The tones of fragmentation and destruction were fulfilled in ways far beyond themodernists imagination with the reality of the carnage of the Great War. In the lightof a reality that slapped the artist with a vision that allowed no harmony, Pounds

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Sabeena Mathayas M.A English 2011 Hans Raj College, University ofDelhi

adieu to London, is an adieu to the sensibility of the city. It was a rebellion against avision that had allowed itself to become insular in its beauty, to allow for a visionbeyond the artist, beyond the stereotypes offered by the city.

2. The Eye of the Outcast Elizabeth Bishop

Bishops poetry is rooted in the subjective perception of the geography she inhabits.Relationships with any meaning are based on observation, on discoveries that comethrough focused attention on nuances, not through interaction, not through thepoetry of social beings. The delicacy of her writing, her restrained controlled style,and her ambiguous questioning and testing of experience are through the detachedobservations of the outcast, the exile, the onlooker or the tourist; themselvesobserved.

the names of cities cross the neighboring mountainsthe printer here experiencing the same excitementas when emotion too far exceeds its cause

Knowing that observation is as objective as it is emblematic; The Map is replete withimaginative promise. The artificial and the real spill over into each other alabyrinth of synecdoche that is minute and vast and clear. It is the sheer triumph ofvision, empirical and imaginative. As the map is a definitive construction of theboundaries, the land and city scapes that the poet (and the reader) inhabits, thepoet suggests that individual perspectives and not the world itself may in factdetermine the real. The question of whether empirical truth or imaginative truth ismore valuable to chart the world remains unanswerable.

can the countries pick their colors?Topography displays no favorites; Norths as near as West.

More delicate than the historians are the map-makers colors.

In allowing for fact to be colored with the imagination there is a refusal tostandardize the images projected on a place. Sight is allowed renewal and theinvisible, escapable nuances of human existence too familiar to be noticed, toosmall to be important, too strange to be comprehended made visible.

It is this very refusal for standardization of imagery and sight that she takes furtherin Man-Moth.

The man-moth navigates the underworld of the city, always travelling backwards through the tunnels of history, and his own subconscious. Except in the moments heemerges from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks. He aims for the

moon, imagining it an opening in the sky; a portal to another world. The citysvertical sublimities and the lonely cycle of aspirations and dejections of the Man-Moth are captured by Kelly Lionel. There is a desire for security but a compulsiveattraction which draws him to the awful elevation. So that this is a type of attemptat aesthetic transcendence, in a modernist parody of what Brooks calls theverticality of sublime landscapes. The vertical landscapes of the romanticsublime with their dizzying heights and peaks lost in the clouds emphasize theimpossible but ineluctable ascent and the subsequent fall back into the merelyhuman. The Man-Moth" represents the absurd quest for the harmony and totality

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and the concomitant fall back down in a cartoon version of the modern city-scape.[from "Bishop and the Negative Sublime." In Kelly Lionel (ed.) Poetry and the Senseof Panic: Critical Essays on Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery. Amsterdam: Rodopi,2000.]

The lack of awareness of the man at the beginning of the poem is ironically

juxtaposed with the man-moths lonely awareness of imagined reality. Verbs ofsight emphatically cry out: look, watch, see, stare.It is through the observation of the details of light and dark, of skyscrapers andsubways, the tunnels of the photographers lens and the sidewalks of shadows thatthe gritty stark reality of the city is evoked.If you catch him,hold up a flashlight to his eye. Its all dark pupil,an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightensas he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lidsone tear, his only possession, like the bees sting, slips.Slyly he palms it, and if youre not paying attentionhell swallow it. However, if you watch, hell hand it over,

cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink

The city is seen from the eyes of an outcast; in this case through the eyes of ahuman creature an aspect of nightmare. The city, by default too can only revealitself in its subverted landscapes. But as Bishop sees it, only a detached, almostforensic anthropological stance can only allow a glimpse into the human aspect inthe city. If the reader isnt observant, this tear, this only allowance of emotion, oftranscendence will pass by, and the you will be akin the man, whose whole shadowis only as big as his hat.In this vision, the minute, the vast, the contrasting worlds of light and shadow,surface and subterranean that inhabit the inner landscape of the city dweller arentallowed exclusivity; but then neither are they allowed an assimilation. It isnevertheless an appeal to the empathy of sight something which Bishops lonelycity seems to lack.

3. The Nostalgic Establishmentarian Sir John Betjeman

Highly local about places and circumstances and nostalgic for the countryside andEnglish culture, Betjemans writing sets the spectacle of twentieth centuryvulgarity and materialism jigging to old tunes; deliberate evocation, subtle parodyand famous Anglican hymns are his weapons of choice. For example, A SubalternsLove Song is written in the meter of Byrons The Destruction of Sennacherib. Thisdoesnt make him just a parodist of distinction but a commentator of social fact withhis tongue firmly glued to his cheek; the tone always snobbish and faintly nasty. Buttoward his later years, the predominant tone is of a wry, avuncular reminiscence; ofregret that the modern world is more brutal and ugly than the one which it hassuperseded.

His critically acclaimed The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel isimportant at the subtle class and power relationships that it explores. Wildesdialogue is suggestive of Brownings monologues as it describes a soul in action butit is the particular and essence of person and atmosphere, of the fastidious

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Sabeena Mathayas M.A English 2011 Hans Raj College, University ofDelhi

cataloging of details [hock and seltzer, Nottingham lace, The Yellow Book, Theastrakhan coat, the morocco portmanteau, hansom] that set this poem asdistinctive of Betjemans oeuvre.Sight is screened through the Nottingham lace curtains or the hock and seltzer orthe aesthetical temperament. Whatever the cause, the sight is inept at capturingthe reality of life as it is and by these bees-winged eyes, awareness is blurred.

Juxtaposing this is the terrible-eyed Wilde as he brushes past the palms on thestaircase which are emblematic of the world Wilde is leaving the artist beingextracted from his aesthetic domain assisted, indeed, marshaled from it on thearm of societal order. The excessive stress on the entry of the policemen and theiruncultured accent is farcical, but is directly accrediting to the broad class structuresthat reflect an ongoing class conflict even in Betjemans day. He reverences theclass structure as a heritage of English past but at the same time he views itshierarchical distinctions with an amused and critical eye.

A thump, and a murmur of voices(Oh why must they make such a din?)

As the door of the bedroom swung openAnd TWO PLAIN CLOTHES POLICEMEN came in:

Mr. Woilde, we ave come for tew take yewWhere felons and criminals dwell:

We must ask yew tew leave with us quoietlyFor this is the Cadogan Hotel.

He rose, and he put down The Yellow Book.He staggeredand, terrible-eyed,

He brushed past the palms on the staircaseAnd was helped to a hansom outside.

Seeing the city with Betjeman is a cataloging of it: its romantic past which he isnostalgic about and its eminent future which he is horrified by. As the artist, thesocial order is intolerant of his bees-winged gaze that rebels against conformity andpractice of vocation according to the pressures of the commercial world. In returnthe social order is precisely what the artist critiques for it snatches away the city ofhis childhood, of his aesthetic sensibility and his sense of history and place.

4. Macro to Micro Billy Collins

A good poem, no matter how plain the language, will always have a little secret it isnot telling us The experience of reading the poem should contain a feeling ofshifting (or being shifted) from the familiar to the strange, from coziness todisorientation. To reread the poem would be to re-experience that shift. In justabout every poem of mine, we know exactly where we are in the opening lines, but

I would argue that explaining where we are at the end would present more of achallenge Billy Collins

Collins major themes of history [personal and public], travel, and the process ofwriting, all enmeshed within a playful imagination, remain a constant no matterwhat instance he decides to pick up and twist. Jeremy Noel Tod in his review of NineHorses for the Guardian writes Sir Philip Sidney, in his Apology for Poetry,exempted poets from factual truth. But the fictions of Collins's poems are foundedon a further untruth: whimsy. Whimsy affirms a simplified version of ourselves. It

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whitewashes the complexities of consciousness, and sells the mental life short.

Characteristic of this whimsy is his poem, The Afterlife, where ruminations of lifeafter death are undercut with images of a person preparing for bed and waking thenext day giving it the aura of a daydream.While you were preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,

or rifling through a magazine in bed,the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.

They are moving off in all imaginary directionseach according to his own private belief You go to the place you always thought you would go,the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.

It is the egalitarian alcove in the head that arrests attention. As a metaphor for thefaculty of imagination that rearranges perceptions and idea s; even in death, thealcove is alive, vivifying the afterlife. But the alcove is very insular, very shallow.Even in his poem The Parade although people move along together, theyre

nevertheless lost in their own private reverie.

So many of us streaming along

all of humanity, really

moving in perfect step,

yet each lost in the room of a private dream.

The city itself, its customs, its traditions, its minutiae are all backdrop for anultimately quiet unobtrusive life engaged in an eternal whimsical solipsism areflection and refraction of the self. There is a call for carpe diem but there is alsoan acute awareness of the individuals experience, the faculty to imagine existence,

to contort and personalize history, and to whimsically stay comfortably reclined inits melancholic warmth.

5. Perverting Prognosis

Wardell MIlanns exhibition entitled Landscapes! Romance, Recession andRottenness, uses floral prints to represent the idyllic conceptions of landscape andthe sentiments associated with them (tranquility, beauty, inspiration, etc). TheseImages are tainted by the inclusion of collage from adult magazines a collision.

The explicit images collide and distribute an unruffled moment, turning a study ofserenity into an image of perversion; which like the pornographic images, remains

enticing.

The poetry of new-age poet, singer, songwriter Liam Wilkinson too resorts to art asa purge of his perversions.Hear of the hate I have for these poemsas they arrive, out of the nightwanting the small bowls of my appreciationas I put out a sheet of paperand let them piss all over the place.

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elizabeth-bishop-168000505

- JoAnn Balingit. "The Map." Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition. SalemPress, 2002. eNotes.com. 2006. 31 Oct, 2010 http://www.enotes.com/map-elizabeth-bishop-salem/map

- www.english.illnois.edu/maps/poets/a-f/bishop/manmoth.htm

- Vivien Stableford. "John Betjeman." Critical Survey of Poetry, Second RevisedEdition. Salem Press, 2003. eNotes.com. 2006. 31 Oct, 2010http://www.enotes.com/john-betjeman-salem/

john-betjeman

- Glenn Grever. "The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel."MasterplotsII: Poetry, Revised Edition. Salem Press, 2002. eNotes.com. 2006. 31 Oct,2010 http://www.enotes.com/arrest-oscar-wilde-cadogan-hotel-salem/arrest-oscar-wilde-cadogan-hotel

- www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/brookej/btjmn/chap1.htm

- Ann D. Garbett. "Billy Collins." Critical Survey of Poetry, Second RevisedEdition. Salem Press, 2003. eNotes.com. 2006. 31 Oct, 2010http://www.enotes.com/billy-collins-salem/billy-collins

- "The Afterlife: Introduction." Poetry for Students. Ed. Marie RoseNapierkowski. Vol. 18. Detroit: Gale, 1998. eNotes.com. January 2006. 31October 2010. .

- http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/

- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/

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