A Critical Performance of Thom Gunn's "Misanthropos"

If one attends to his own experience of reading poems rather than to that of hearing a poet read poems in a crowded hall, he will, I believe, agree that the performance to which a poem summons him is not so much a public recitation as it is a form of criticism analogous to the performing arts.If the poet is a performing self, as Richard Poirier claims, if no work of art comes alive except in the presence of an audience, as R. G. Collingwood argues, if the reader of poems must accept these claims, nonetheless he will modify them because of his recognition that the poet is always his own first audience.1The echoing quality of all poetic language depends on the presence of this primary audience, on the felt presence of the poet as his own first listener, and this essential echo is drowned out and rendered inaudible by the assumption that the life of poetry depends on its metropolitan audiences which are reached through our great publishing firms and on those crowds who are gathered to gether by the business of organizing poetry reading circuits.Unless misled by the prospect of a cash reward, no poet would think he was reciting his poems in order that they might be heard.For he could not even compose a poem unless it were heard in the very act of composition.The experience of reading poems to oneself and especially reading them silently must reveal that the listening presence of the poet has to be attended to just as much as his speaking presence.One cannot, in fact, even hear the words of poetry unless he also attends to the echoing into silence which is, at a conceptual level, the poet's act of shaping the poem.A poet works with his words in order to articulate that innermost feeling which determines the quality of his self, his world, and his experience.His words work poetically only in so far as they are the echo of that upsurge of feeling.A reader of those words can respond to them as echoingly resonant only to the extent that he also attends to the echo of that echo, to the over arching action which is the poet's own attending to his words as echoing the deepest impulsion of his experience.Words working poetically are neither transitive nor intransitive.They do not, like words used practically or intellectually, have the reason for their being in the conventional patterns and structures and frameworks to which they refer, even though they may include such transitive references.Nor are they self-subsistent, only internally referential, elements of an autonomous artifact, a fiction, a sort of 1 See chap.14 of Collingwood's The Principles of Art ( Oxford, 1938 ) and Poirier's The Performing Self ( Oxford, 1971 ).