What lies in a poem?
Exploring the complex relationship between poetry and philosophy
Transcript
Edward Harcourt
Good evening, everybody, and thank you all very much for coming. A warm welcome to this the 2025 Edinburgh lecture brought to you by the Royal Institute of philosophy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. And let me take this opportunity to say how much I’ve enjoyed collaborating with all the staff at the Royal Society of Edinburgh. It’s been a very fruitful and pleasant collaboration this year, as indeed it always is. So long may it continue. I’m Edward Harcourt. I’m the academic director of The Royal Institute of philosophy. You’re not going to hear very much from me this evening. I’m just the master of ceremonies, and the first bit of ceremony that I have to get through is the boring bit. There is no planned fire drill. So if the alarm sounds, it’s the real thing, Please exit the building through the same entrance you use to enter. And of course, should an alarm sound, please follow the Royal Society of Edinburgh staff’s instructions in the case of an evacuation. I should have said to begin with, also welcome. I can’t see you. I don’t know how many of you there are, but a warm welcome.
Also, to those of you who are joining online, you’ll have the opportunity to participate in the Q&A. I’ll give you further instructions down the line as to how to do that. So the format of the evening is for those of you who’ve been to this event before, slight variation on what we’ve done in previous years. So we’ll have a talk, then we’ll have two comments from panellists, and then we’ll throw it open to you for Q and A. So let me tell you who our speaker and panellists are.
Our speaker of the evening is Professor Max de gainsford, who’s professor of philosophy at the University of Reading. He was formerly a fellow of Lincoln College Oxford and also at the College of William Mary, William and Mary in the United States. His main interests are in the philosophy of mind and language, and he’s written several books, including i the meaning of the first person term the rift in the lute attuning poetry and philosophy, and how to be radical in philosophy. And our two panellists, the first is Professor Don Patterson, who’s Professor Emeritus of poetry at the University of St Andrews. He’s the author of 16 books of poetry, aphorism, criticism, poetic theory and memoir, as well as the editor of several anthologies. He’s won numerous awards for his poetry, including the whitbed poetry prize, the Jeffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Coster poetry award, and he’s the only poet to have won the T S Eliot prize on two occasions. He was poetry editor at Picador Macmillan. He’s a fellow of the English Association and the Royal Society of literature. And he received the OBE in 2008 and the Queen’s gold medal for poetry in 2010 and our other panellist is Professor Robert Crawford, who is emeritus Ward Law Professor of poetry at the University of St Andrews. Robert’s nine collections of poetry include full volume from 2008 and old world from 2025 he also writes poetry in Scots, his work has won several awards. He’s been shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize. With Simon Armitage, he edited the penguin book of poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 and with Mick imla, he edited the penguin book of Scottish verse. His biography of Robert Burns the bard won the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award, and his recent two volume biography of TS Eliot has been described as magisterial. So you’re in for a treat with a distinguished threesome like that without more ado. Let’s introduce tonight’s speaker max to gainsford, Max The floor is yours.
Maximilian de Gaynesford
Thank you so much, Edward. Edward is an old friend, and if the only reason for my being here tonight is to bring together also two of my absolute poet heroes, Robert Crawford and Don Patterson, then it’s well worth it. Thank you very much for the invitation from the Royal Society and the Royal Institute of philosophy. Up there on the title slide, you see the title of what I’m going to be talking. About what lies in a poem. You can put a question mark there, if you like, but you can also end it with an exclamation mark. And actually, I am going to be trying to combine those two senses tonight. On the right, you have a quotation from Kafka’s diaries. Mount your attacker’s horse and ride it yourself, the only possibility, and that’s going to give you my strategy for tonight, as I’m going to explain in a moment. Right in the middle is a lovely painting by Giorgione in the National Gallery in London. It may be a follower of Giorgione. I’d rather like it the character on the right, the main character is often identified as a poet, and the title of it in a supposed title, is a tribute to a poet. But if you look at the character, he’s rather mysterious. Sitting there under his rather glorious hair dryer. Looks rather miserable, if truth be told, that tribute should be given to him, and he looks rather long faced. My daughter’s favourite old joke with the horse that goes into a bar and the barman says, Why the long face? Well, we can ask that of that figure too. Partly my interest in that paint, this painting, is that that figure is also identified as a philosopher. So it might be a poet, it might be a philosopher. The burden of what I’m going to be talking about tonight is how poetry and philosophy tussle with each other, quarrel with each other, how there’s a very, very serious charges laid by philosophers against poets. But I think it’s worth remembering from time to time, in a sort of non serious way, that philosophers and poets are pretty indistinguishable, beyond our little worlds to the public as at large. I think George Orwell said at some stage the public won’t stand for much poetry. And I can have to say that they don’t stand for much philosophy either, which is probably just as well. So without further ado, let me introduce you to a slide that I call my rogues gallery, philosophers who think of poets as liars, philosophers who think of poets as non serious and the real rogues who think that they’re both. So I’m just going to parody a familiar passage from David Hume, who’s also going to come up a little bit tonight, if we take in our hand any well known volume of philosophy that gives significant attention to poetry of ancient, early modern, modern analytic philosophy. Let’s ask, does it denounce poets as liars? If so, add it to this huge pile on the left. Does it disdain poets as non serious? If so, add it to this huge pile on the right, if it does, neither guard it with your life, because it will be an extremely rare, possibly unique book. They say all of these wonderful philosophers say these terrible things about poetry, and it is indeed very striking what philosophers say, and also poets. There’s a poet in this NIST poets too, under the influence of philosophers, a sort of Stockholm Syndrome, possibly. So there’s a quotation from Heidegger, for example, at the top. Does not Aristotle say in his metaphysics, I would spare you, the Greek poets tell many a lie. Does he not say that? In fact, Martin he Aristotle doesn’t say that, but it was believed that he did. Plutarch poets lie. Some do so willingly. Others do so unwillingly. Robert Southwell, he’s our one poet, but trained as a philosopher, poets, by abusing their talent and making the follies and feignings of love the customary subject of their base, endeavours have so discredited this faculty that a poet a lover and a liar by many reckoned but three words of one signification, and You may hear a hint there of Midsummer Night’s Dream very recently, at least, comparatively compared with those authors. JL, lost in the 1950s two very famous passages when uttered in poetry, any and every utterance is in a peculiar way, hollow or void. And if the poet says, Go and catch a falling star, he’s thinking of John Donne, or whatever it may be, whatever it may be, he doesn’t seriously issue an order. How to respond if, as a philosopher. Yeah, one actually cares about poetry. And I should put my hand up and say, you know, I care about it, and I write it. It’s very amateur stuff, and I wouldn’t share it with anybody, but nevertheless, I’ve written it for longer than I’ve not much longer than I’ve written philosophy, and I probably care about it just as much. Or, how about if one is a poet who philosophises. Both Robert Crawford and Don Patterson, I would say very clearly do most obviously in some of their most recent work in the Arctic and testament. Well, philosophers themselves can taught themselves like the Accord, to wriggle themselves off the hook. But I think there are only three extant ways in which they can do that, and you can see from what I say about it that I don’t find them very successful strategies. The most common strategy is the top one where philosophers say, oh look, poets, don’t get upset when we say you’re lying or not serious. We don’t really mean it ourselves that seriously, and I regard that as being pretty perfidious. And it’s the kind of thing that’s uncomfortably said, Isn’t it by bullies when they’re sort of caught out. The second reply, I regard as being pretty patronising. That’s where philosophers say, Well, you know, we get it. You’re not quite the same as us poets, but you mustn’t think us unsophisticated. We appreciate it that when you lie, you do so in a way that would be different from other people, because what you’re trying to do is get deeper truths, or the third and more opportunistic reply, the one which is particularly appealing in hard times like ours is the one I’ve sort of vaguely characterised by the bottom one. Don’t worry your poetical heads about the lying. You know, we philosophers. We’re pretty ingenious. If you find us a nice grant, we’ll find a possible world such that what you say turns out to be true, I don’t think any of those options is particularly appealing. I think philosophers need to stop wriggling on this and that’s why I’m suggesting we follow Kafka’s advice, mount the attacker’s horse and ride it yourself. That’s the only possibility, or in other words, stop wriggling face up to the fact that philosophers make this lying charge and try to find within it the means, either to meet it or to refute it. So our first job is to try and construct that lying charge at its very worst, to make sure that we really are mounting the horse, first of all, to level it at its worst, we need to realise that it’s levelled not just at poets, but as poetry as a whole, as it were, that it’s equally the claim or the charges that both poets and poetry is caught up in lying and also, to put it at its worst, we need to adapt or adopt the most hard edged, unforgiving, reductive definition of lying that’s going and the one that most phosphorus sign up to anyway, is a reductive definition, and it’s there on the slide. A lie is a statement which the person making it believes to be false, made to another person intending that they believe it to be true. The people who sign up to that include some really great philosophers, Augustine, Kant, Grotius and so on. Arnold Eisenberg puts it this way. He says, A lie is a statement made by one who doesn’t believe it with the intention that someone else shall be led to believe it.
And Igor Primaratz puts it by saying, lying is making a statement believed to be false with the intention of getting another to accept it as true. So that would be the thought. If we claim that poets and poetry are lying, this is what would be signing up to. Now some philosophers quibble about this. They want to say, well, of course, you can lie to yourself against the third condition, and they say that you can lie without necessarily intending to deceive. For example, if you know that the person you’re lying to realises that you are lying, you wouldn’t then be actually intending to deceive them. Telling bare faced lies is still lying. Politicians take note. So let’s drop conditions three and four. We don’t particularly need them. Let’s just focus on the first two, which are the really important ones. Lying is making a statement which you believe to be false at its worst, then the lying charge would come to that poetry. Is essentially a matter of making statements that the poet believes are false.
Canny lawyers like to exploit loopholes, so we’re going to work just as hard to make sure that we close up those gaps in order to make the lying charge as bad as it can be. I’m going to take it that the lying imply. Lying charge implies all that you see on that slide. So the use of language in poetry is essentially or fundamentally to lie. The utterances of which a poem is composed are essentially or fundamentally lies. Any such utterances occur in an essentially or fundamentally lying context. The words spoken by poets are lies essentially or fundamentally, and the words spoken by poets are to be taken as lies essentially or fundamentally, finally in constructing our lying charge at its worst, we need a figurehead top prize for lying charge philosopher, I think of all the ages might go to Plato, but actually, I think it goes To David Hume, who combines gross insult with gross disdain in his very lengthy treatment of poetry in a treatise of human nature, which he published in 1739, in book one part three, Section turned the section called of the influence of belief. So first of all, there’s the gross insult. Poets are liars by profession. He says poets themselves, though Liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions. Tis certain that in the warmth of a poetical enthusiasm, a poet has a counterfeit belief that gross insult is then followed by gross disdain. Yes, they’re lies by profession, but we needn’t take poets too seriously, as he says, the least reflection dissipates the illusions of poetry and places their objects in their proper light. Poets have formed what they call a poetical system of things, which, though it be believed, neither by themselves nor readers, is commonly esteemed a sufficient foundation for any fiction. Now interestingly, Hume uses the word profession, Liars by profession, but profession itself only four times in the whole of the treatise, and always with a very substantial sense. So take him very seriously when he says, poets are liars by profession. He doesn’t just mean that lying is what poets happen to do, or that even lying is a poet’s employment or jobs a liar for the working day as it were. He rather means that lying is literally what they profess. It’s what they deeply own, to what makes them what they are. They are, as it were, liars. 24/7 liars for life. Hume does take the trouble to distinguish between comic and tragic poets, but this actually only makes matters worse. Comic poets are liars in a plain and obvious way which we needn’t take seriously at first sight, they be known to be fictitious, whereas tragic poets are liars in a slightly more complex way. But their lying is still serious. It’s still evident we needn’t take them seriously, which isn’t to say that, on his account, there aren’t dangers. Hume worries that this lying stimulates a lively imagination which very often degenerates into madness or folly. So that completes our first task. We’ve constructed the lying charge at its worst and found a figurehead. Now to follow Kafka’s advice, we need to mount the attacker’s horse before then trying to ride it ourselves by mounting the horse. What I mean is trying to see if we can appreciate the lying charge, trying to see what, whatever it might be that actually it gets right. Because this is really the point. You might feel offended and despondent to know that people like philosophers, who think very seriously about this use these issues, have said these kinds of things about poets, but being able to resist isn’t simply a matter of rejecting the view. We have to understand what it is that motivates it in order to be able to mount a proper refutation. So I’d argue actually that the lying charge get things half right, if truth be told, there is a closeness between poetry and lying and intimacy even. And that’s partly a matter of texture, which is difficult to do to illustrate what. Without a whole book, but just relying on a single slide, we have John Milton for man will hearken to his glozing lies the tongues of all his flattering prophets glibbed with lies to his destruction. Quotation from George Meredith, wonderful, not very well known sequence Modern Love, very recommendable. I can interpret where the mouth is dumb speak and I see the side lie of a truth, wonderful and two little phrases from Jeffrey Hill, who was a connoisseur of poet’s abilities to lie, talks of the tongues atrocities and the knack of tongues. There are also parts of Denise Riley which are really wonderful on this too. So I think pronouncing these phrases, just pronouncing them, is like running your fingers over the fabric of lying. You couldn’t produce such phrases without being deeply knowledgeable about lying, sensitive to its nature, what it is to give lies, what it is to receive them, what it is to live with them. But poetry’s intimacy isn’t just a matter of texture. It’s also a matter of structure. And Hume helps us here again, because I think here again, he’s half right about poetry. This is in his slightly later essay, the sceptic, published in 1742 he says, The mathematician who took no other pleasure in reading Virgil but that of examining Aeneas voyage by the map, might perfectly understand the meaning of every Latin word employed by that divine author, and consequently, might have a distinct idea of the whole narration. He would even have a more distinct idea of it than they could attain who had not studied so exactly the geography of the poem. He knew, therefore, everything in the poem, but he was ignorant of its beauty, because the beauty, properly speaking, lies not in the poem, but in the sentiment or taste of the reader. And where a man has no such delicacy of temper as to make him feel this sentiment, he must be ignorant of the beauty, though possessed of the science and understanding of an angel, a wonderful bit of classic Hume there, the lightness, the humour and the sting in the tail. But I think that phrase that I emphasised, the geography of the poem, is deeply perceptive. What Hume means by that, clearly, is the external world what the poem is about. But that’s where I think he’s only half right, because a poem, of course, has its own geography, its arrangement on the page, which directs its presentation to the ears by a suitably perceptive and gifted performer, where a crucial element is its organisation into lines, its lineation. And I think it’s poetry’s own geography which makes it so intimate with lying. I’m going to suggest that anyway, to put it succinctly, what lies in a poem is what lies in a poem. So consider three examples, three poems, three different perspectives on the structured world of the lyre. The first is from Adrian rich cartographies of silence, the syllables uttering the old script over and over, the loneliness of the liar, living in the formal network of the lie, twisting the dials to drown the terror beneath the unsaid word. Notice the lineation, uttering line gap the old script the line end, emphasising the point that this is being done over and over. That slide on liar to living at the line end works like a conjuring trick, subtly distracting the sleight of hand in which one thing is substituted for another, the move from liar to living. And finally, the terror line gap beneath the unsaid word. The lines are organised so that the word terror is, in fact, above the unsaid word. So once the reading eye picks up this contradiction between what’s said and what’s done, it hovers uneasily in one’s consciousness, unsettling and discomforting. So from this external perspective, cool, distanced, objective into the world of the lyre, lying makes its own loneliness, opens up its own space for terror beneath the unsaid word. What is that? What would that be if it’s unsaid? What is word like about it? What makes it different from an unspoken thought? And yet, there is something different. The second poem, one of the coplers, by Jeffrey Hill, oh my dear one, I shall grieve for you for the rest of my life with slightly varying cadence. Oh my dear one, slightly and line gap varying cadence. The hesitation at the line gap at the line end is a faltering in the commitment announced brazenly in the first line, a hiccup of insincerity, the advent of qualms of vacillation. We see the speaker deliberately, that is, with care and by deliberation, entering knowingly into a falseness, into a knowing falseness. And this is a look from the inside of the liar, utterly complicit involved within lying, a look not just from the inside, but at the inside. The speaker is not proclaiming outright he’s a liar. He doesn’t even seem concerned that he might be taken as one. And that use of the line end is a transition into the world of lying, affected by peculiarly poetic means delineation, it arouses the suspicion which prowls around behind Hume stance, that there might be an uncomfortable intimacy of move and movement between the profession of poetry and the business of lying. A third example from William empsons poem, this last pain, feign then what’s by a decent tact, believed and act that state is only so conceived. And build an edifice of form for house where phantoms may keep warm, an edifice of form for house. The line end there acts like the distraction in a conjuring trick. Again, as if by magic. What was a mere form has become a house, a thing substantial. And yet, if this is something we believe, it’s only by a decent tact, because it’s still something we feign. This is a look from the internal perspective of the liar, but looking out, the speaker is protesting. He hadn’t meant to praise lying in affectation, but seems to have come to accept that that is what poems do, what some poems do, what this poem does. So we, like the speaker, are left with the ease and unease which amps and voices, by a decent tact, believed a pretence we enter into so that phantoms may keep warm as if being decent about poetry means accepting its intimacy with lying.
So we’ve achieved the first part of Kafka’s advice, or done what I can to achieve it, trying to mount the attacker’s horse. Tried to appreciate where the lying charge has got it half right. There is an intimacy between poetry and lying. Now for the second part, to try and ride that horse ourselves, which means showing where and what it’s got wrong to anticipate. I think poetry’s intimacy with lying doesn’t mean that poetry is so poets must be Liars by profession. I think it means they have great insight into the nature of lying, greater even than the philosophers who disdain poetry. So we’ve already got three poems by rich Hill and Empson, which correct Hume on the geography of the poem. We now know that lineation is often essential. The poem couldn’t do what it does without it. We’ve seen three examples of that. Hume sort of misses that in his explanation, but he could agree with it. Secondly, we’ve seen that lineation lies in the poem. It’s part of the poem’s own geography. Hume misses that, but he could agree. Thirdly, I think we can appreciate that that lineation is as objective as the external world depicted by the poem an object of our shared awareness, up for our description and evaluation. We may disagree about the effects that are achieved, but it’s a bit like saying we can disagree about whether or not, you know we can see a tower in the distance through the mist. There are occasions where things are a little bit vague, but they’re up for our joint communicative discussion and evaluation. That’s not just a purely subjective thing. Finally, lineation can itself be beautiful, and that lineation lies in the poem. So Hume can’t agree with that. Of course, he was urging in that passage, we looked at that beauty, properly speaking, lies not in the poem. So that’s the first. Sort of correction, I think that poets can offer. The second is giving us greater insight into the nature of lying. And I’ve got two examples from poetry how its intimacy with lying gives that kind of insight. The first is from somebody who is unbelievably acute about lying, and that is, of course, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, sonnet 138, I have particularly in mind when my love swears that she is made of truth. I do believe her, though I know she lies, that she might think me some untutored youth, unlearned in the world’s false subtleties, thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young, although she knows my days are past the best, simply I credit her false speaking tongue on both sides. Thus is simple truth suppressed. But wherefore says she not. She is unjust, and wherefore say not I that I am old. Oh, love’s best habit is in seeming trust and age in love loves not to have years told, therefore, I lie with her, and she with me. And in our faults by lies we flattered be in a plausible reading, we both pretend that we’re younger than we are. She by saying she is younger me by saying I believe her, knowing this makes me seem naive, and thus younger than I am. Why? Not just because it’s flattering to us both, but because this mutual pact, a seeming trust about superficial things like age nourishes a deeper Trust, which is love’s best habit, but the elineation offers a deeper guide, a life of mutual lying is more complex, uncomfortable and awkward. So looking at the lineation, it gives an appearance of flatness, because on the surface, each clause, indeed each thought, is exactly contained within its line. None runs over its as poets say, end stopped. There is no straddling of phrases over the line ends, no enjambment. Enjambment simply means straddling in French. Ezra Pound likened this containment effect to being, quote, cradled in a hammock, which I rather like. So that’s the surface. But underneath this manicured surface, there are deep connections which run over and under and around, the line endings to pictures one but perhaps the most important, those phrases wherefore says she not, and wherefore say not, I occur in two different lines. But of course, they’re being brought into a relation with each other because they mirror each other drawing the lines and the lovers together at the crossing point the chiasmus between them. So a flat, regular surface geography is set over against a variable, irregular depth geography. And it’s that contrast of smooth surface and ruffled undercurrent which prepares us to perceive what’s multiply complex about the final thought, therefore I lie with her, we flattered be, which doesn’t just mean that we lie down together bodily, which both flatters us and flattens us in an obvious way, in an obvious, bodily, visible way. It also means, of course, that we tell each other lies, which also both flatters us and flattens us, but in a deeper, less obvious and less visible sense. And it’s the sense I think, that Adrienne Rich was getting at when she talks about living in the formal network of the lie, however harmless when mutually entered into the lying nevertheless has a tendency to flatten our lives, depriving them of depth, weight, three dimension, dimensionality. Here’s another longer example from Geoffrey Hill offered in the Third Reich. And he gives it he has this quotation from Ovid diamores, which he puts in the Latin this is a sort of sanctified translation of it, because in when he read this poem, this is the way he translated it. They do not sin. Who can deny they sin. The only crime is to confess. I love my work and my children. God is distant, difficult things happen too near the ancient troughs of blood, innocence is no earthly weapon. I have learned one thing not to. Look down so much upon the damned they in their sphere, harmonise strangely with the divine love. I and mine celebrate the love choir in a plausible reading, the speaker is a deep liar, complicit in the crimes of Nazism, but presenting himself as essentially innocent, things happen different from others, the damned who are guilty and set apart from them. They in their sphere, I in mine. But again, the lineation as a deeper guide, threatening to betray the speaker, forcing him to confront the horrors with which he’s been complicit. God line end is distant, difficult. That gap creating an awkward pause, a sort of casting around in the mind before plumping on, is distant, difficult.
The line end between blood and innocence, the gap emphasising What strange bedfellows those two thoughts are preparing us for no earthly weapon where we would have expected probably no earthly use, and hence, a doubly shocked innocence as a heavenly weapon, look down gap, so much dramatising performing the very act being described, the act of looking down your eye, dropping down the page, Divine Love, final lines, the gap creating An expectation from context, we would assume divine would be completed by justice or retribution, supplying love instead makes that word seem doubly false, doubly lying. So this contrast of end stop lines and straddling lines of flatness on the one hand and jerky transitions on the other is, I think, a dramatic way of accounting for the speaker’s line. He can’t quite shake off the need to explain himself, and so gives an essentially mendacious account of his life and attitudes. I love my work, the pressure he’s exerting on his voice, to give a leaden and flat self depiction as an ordinary person living an ordinary life, how studiously he avoids any mention of lying. Is frustrated by his inability to keep himself in check, hence the bending and the jerking of his thoughts around the line ends just as he can’t silence his obsession with the smothering death had and death hand of cliche, the living and livid tell tale, words that reveal his obsessions and his fears, the ancient troughs of blood, earthly weapon, the damned, like The ship. Shakespeare’s Sonnet Ovid makes complex use of its geography to be intimate with lying in order to intimate things about lying. The Shakespeare reveals how lying flattens one’s life and the hill reveals how conscience baulks at that flattening, even when one is deeply complicit with it. So that’s what I mean when I say that what lies in a poem is very deeply what lies in a poem. Finally, I want to turn the screw or the knife a little bit further to explore this intimacy of poetry and lying is to experience poets correcting philosophers on their own home territory that is specifying what lying is its nature or essence. Recall that philosophy has allowed itself to be dominated by a reductive conception of lying. It’s a matter of making statements which one believes to be false. But Is that so? Is a poem by Louise Gluck. The final poem I’m going to be thinking about the mountain comes from her sequence the triumph of Achilles of 1985 it’s a bit long, so not all the poem goes on this one slide. It’s just two slides there.
Students look at me expectantly. I explain to them that the life of art is a life of endless labour. Their expressions hardly change. They need to know a little more about endless labour, so I tell them the story of Sisyphus, how he was doomed to push a rock up a mountain, knowing nothing would come of this effort, but that he would repeat it indefinitely in. Tell them there is joy in this, in the artist’s life, that one eludes judgement. And as I speak, I am secretly pushing a rock myself, slyly pushing it up the steep face of a mountain. Why do I lie to these children? They aren’t listening. They aren’t deceived. Their fingers tapping at the wooden desks. So I retract the myth. I tell them it occurs in hell, and that the artist lies because he is obsessed with attainment, that he perceives the summit as that place where he will live forever, a place about to be transformed by his burden with every breath, I am standing at the top of the mountain, both my hands are Free, and the rock has added height to the mountain. At first blush, this poem, like all those we’ve heard tonight, does seem to be making a set of statements. Remember, that’s the reductive conception philosophy is very keen on. That’s precisely why I’ve picked it. I’m trying again to follow Kafka’s advice, face up to things that they’re hardest if we can reject this conception, even in cases where it seems evident to be true, we can more confidently reject it in other cases. Also notice how this poem is knit together by a string of beautifully retrusive straddling thoughts moves as quiet and subtle as the thoughts themselves. And if we ask, what is the lineation doing, we shall see that none of it is a matter of making statements, let alone statements that the poet believes to be false. The first straddling moves establish a sort of comic tone. This is humorous and not just a good humour poem. They need to know a little more about the endless labour that line gap stretches the point anybody who’s involved in teaching probably will find that line very, very funny. I always do when I read it. Another sort of comic move is push a rock that uses the line end like an obstacle over which to push that rock repeat it indefinitely. What obviously uses the void like line end to model indefinitely. And I tell them, there is joy in this. Uses the line end to mark that little mini exertion required for this mini Sisyphus. As the poem develops, though the straddling moves become a bit deeper, a bit darker, there’s eludes judgement the line end, there is a wondering about what is being eluded. Or again, there’s steep face where the line end makes steepness and faceness abut each other at the poem’s geographical centre. And I’m going to use my red clicker for this. I haven’t used it yet, just there. The word slyly, that’s that’s exactly at the halfway mark of the poem, that’s the key word, really. Right afterwards, lying becomes explicit. Why do I lie to these children? But this is itself duplicitous. Because, as we’re made aware, retrospectively, lying has in fact, been present all along. So all those telling phrases in the first part of the poem, I explain to them. I tell them again. I tell them I speak. They’re all being cited. When the speaker then says, Why do I lie? Mind gap to these children. The straddling line end there means that the question is like a net cast widely and then left hanging before floating down on the children. And within that pause, we’re being nudged to ask, Who else has she been lying to all this time? Us too, perhaps, herself, perhaps. And from then on, the lineation progresses towards the poems transformation. There’s a lovely one, I think, at their fingers, then line gap tapping at the wooden desks, and then an M dash with a line that what I see there, I can’t help but see it is the sort of the plane of their desks, which is a nicely sort of ghostly image, I retract, line end, the myth the line end, creating a pause which raises and then dashes our expectation that retract is going to be intransitive, about to be. Transformed that line end marking a place and its transformation. Indeed, it’s sort of enabling a transformation of its own to take place right there the enjambment, this straddling performs the very act being named in the act of its being performed. So it is literally an explicit performative in the original and correct sense of performative, not the one that’s so hopelessly traduced constantly by politicians curse them, who make performative mean the exact opposite. And finally, the rock has added height to the mountain. The lineation there, I think of a sort of wry triumph stringing this poem along a line from poems by Ovid Horace, Pushkin, Geoffrey Hill himself, each of which finds its own way to attest exeggi monumentum, I have raised a monument so the lineation, what makes this poem The poem that it is is doing a great deal. It’s being comical. It’s developing depth. It’s marking the turn towards an admission of lying. It’s progressing towards and then performing its own apotheosis. But none of this, absolutely none of it is a matter of making statements, let alone statements believed to be false. So that’s why I think poetry proves a much better guide to lying than philosophy, and here I will dismount Catholics horse with this final slide to remind us of what we’ve seen on the journey. Thanks very much.
Edward Harcourt
Thank you very much. Max, why don’t you come and sit here and then Let’s all make ourselves comfortable up on this little stage. I So Robert, I think you’re going to go first. Thank you whenever you’re ready, if I can kick off just by thanking you max for an immensely clever, demanding and very sensitive lecture. I felt it was a privilege to listen to it. Particularly I loved what you said about lineation, which is such an important part of poetry, and perhaps arguably the fundamental part of poetry, I realise that you made Hume central to what you said, as a matter of kind of courtesy or tact, Because of where we are, but I think you’re also demonstrating that, that when Hume attacks poets as liars, that’s probably one of the least original aspects of Hume’s thought, because he’s really parroting a trope in philosophy That goes back to Plato, who says in the republic that there’s an ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. And if you go back before Plato to earlier ancient Greek philosophers, pre Socratic philosophers, you come to Parmenides, who says that, whose regarded Wikipedia tells me as the as the kind of pioneering philosopher of being, of ontology, and says that thinking and being are the same, but Parmenides says this in verse, because Parmenides is a poet, he’s translated say by John Burnet into prose, but there’s a kind of slight fun Victorian translation by another Scottish philosopher, Thomas Davidson. He is a poet, and so cheekily, as a way of agreeing with you, but also kind of disagreeing, I’d want to suggest, well, if you think about Parmenides as the one of the fundamental philosophers in the Western tradition, then he’s a poet. And philosophy in the Western tradition is a kind of offshoot of poetry, the elementary discipline and Plato, according to the Greek anthology, is also a poet. It. There are quite a lot of poems attributed to Plato in the Greek anthology, and I know that this is disputed, but there’s also a body of ancient writing that that thinks of poetry as linked to philosophy. And Plato clearly loves philosophy in the Timaeus and elsewhere. He’s very positive, sorry, clearly loves poetry. In the Timaeus and elsewhere, he’s very positive about poetry, so it’s almost as if there’s a conflict going on within Plato himself, and even in Hume, that quotation from Hume you said you you projected. Hume calls Virgil. You may be attacking poets the whole time. But he calls Virgil, Virgil, that divine author, which is an interesting phrase for him to use. And you might argue, is he being ironic? But I don’t think he is there. I think even for this apparently most anti poetical of philosophers, he thinks Virgil is wonderful if you wanted a more sympathetic Scottish philosopher when it comes to poetry, surely we turn to Hume’s friend Adam Smith. Adam Smith’s first classes that he chooses not he’s asked to teach, but he chooses to teach at Glasgow University around rhetoric and bellette, and he’s talking about poetry, he’s talking about eloquence, and he’s talking, in effect, about communicative exchange. And he moves from that to the Theory of Moral Sentiments, which is about the exchange of ideas and sympathies and emotions and burns. Finds this so attractive that he versifies it. Versifies Something from The Theory of Moral Sentiments in those famous lines of winsome power, the gift he gave us to see ourselves as others see us. So it seems to me that that Smith is a philosopher much more sympathetic to poetry than Hume. But I’m surprised you didn’t talk about T S Eliot, who is surely the most important, the most important example of a modern poet who is a rigorously trained philosopher, T, S, Eliot, of course, had written a Harvard PhD on the philosophy of F, H, Bradley, nobody quotes that now, at least, I bet you nobody in the audience could quote me phrases from that, but everybody in the audience could probably quote not with a bang, but a whimper. So Eliot is interesting, because to bring things closer to home like Kathleen Jamie in today’s Scotland, he’s someone who’s philosophically trained but defects from philosophy doesn’t, doesn’t completely reject it, because it’s still there, and say Four Quartets and elsewhere in his work, but turns away. So even in Eliot, again, I would suggest that there’s a there’s a kind of internal quality debate or quarrel with philosophy going on within the poet turns away, I’d suggest, and this is my Last point, because of something that’s articulated in the early 20th century, and it has to do with a crucial difference between what we now think of as philosophy, because we ain’t still living In pre Socratic times, and poetry, which is perhaps best summed up by a famous line from William Carlos’ Milan Carlos Williams, earliest version of his poem, Paterson, no relation, and maybe it comes partly out of the early 20th century, interest in Haiku and in imagism, no ideas, but in things. So ultimately, as somebody who writes poetry and has never been mistaken for a philosopher, I think to me, the language of philosophy is dry and abstract and ultimately a bit boring, not very enjoyable language, whereas the language of poetry mustn’t be continually and continually. Continuously abstract, but has to be image rich. Has to stick often to that dictum of William’s is no ideas but in things. And that’s what I love about my favourite poems. I love the patient etherized upon the table, and that’s why for me, although, yes, there is a kind of internal quarrel going on between within poetry and its subsection, philosophy, ultimately, for me, poetry wins out.
Edward Harcourt
So Max, I’m going to ask you to comment after Don’s remarks, but Don over to you. Thanks.
Don Paterson FRSE
I’m afraid I’m going to have to read, unlike Robert, I have to read stutteringly from my phone, although I would just like to start with pointing out that you didn’t quite catch us in the act of lying. You got us talking about lies a lot. And I think to do so would have looked rather different, because when poets lie, you usually haven’t heard about it because, because they’re bad poets. And when good poets lie, they redact and they delete, you know. And I’m thinking like of McCaig, for example, who, sort of, you know, sort of who’d realised his first book was wholly insincere and tried to buy up and burn every copy of it. And also Auden you know, who famously has deleted poems from his from his own. And more recently, Derek Mann, because they caught themselves lying or being insincere. But to turn to the business about lying, I agree. I could keep this really short and go, Max is right, but we are in one sense, I think Liars by profession, but I don’t think quite in the way that you describe. I do think of poetry insofar as the word does any exceed currency at the moment, and I’m not entirely sure that it does with this turn of the wheel is a truth telling. I mean, I think that’s one of the most basic things we understand from it. I think we can informally verify this, because there’s a little heuristic, which is readers still admit no use of the first person is the fictional construct. If you talk about the I in the poem, they always want to assume that you’re speaking confessionally, and it’s very hard to convince them that you’re not. They assume that we tell the truth, and that’s somehow our job, and it goes way back. But most sophisticated readers, I think, understand that our allegiance is to the truth. It’s not to the facts. Therefore we’re very happy to try and get closer to that truth by altering the facts and all of them, if necessary. Well, why? But anything. Whether we have a cat, what colour of Granny’s door was, you know, matters of scientific principle and world historical events, we’ll just talk rubbish if it gets us closer to what we feel, you know, as a larger truth, and along the way, that’s going to involve a lot of false proposition if you like, it may lead us to think of ourselves as liars. But my students always felt liberated about the day that I told them. You know, not only could they lie about everything, but they probably should, and it’s a liberating freedom, but even the most basic unit of poetic thought, the metaphor is lying that something is something else. It’s a lie. The moon is not a balloon. And the metaphor is our most basic unit, because our job is simply to make inadequate language adequate to a new or changing reality. It’s a natural function of language that tries to, you know, update itself in the face of a reality it can’t immediately apprehend. So it’ll coin some original phrase, whatever its natural descriptive powers are found wanting. We have to extend those powers through the lying tropes of metaphor, comparison and contraction, metonymy, as we say, symbolic representation in our world. Things are things they are not in the poet’s world, things are much less than they are. Things are summoned by other things. And none of this is true, and yet it is. But all poets can tell you that language itself is a lie. The whole business of reference and representation in language is a lie. All your nouns are dead metaphors. So neither philosophy, bar maybe Symbolic Logic nor poetry, has a true medium like the artist of the musician who works through the medium of air and light. What we have is a very unstable science system, and we use it in different ways. Philosophers try to make it more stable, we do the opposite as regards poetic truth, which is usually emotional or metaphysical, or what I would say, you know, was tonal in nature, because tone in poetry encompasses a space where emotion and meaning are really the same for us, much in the way that sound and sense are also the same. For poets, so is emotion and meaning. So there’s an obvious lap nonetheless in our disciplinary concerns there. But as I say, the function of poetry is to use the imagination. When language falls short, where words fail, everyone else often go, you know, well, wait of what one cannot speak, you know, sort of thereof, etc. When words fail poets, we get really excited, because that’s when we get a chance to just make stuff up. So just to finish off, I was kind of cleaved to the old rulers. They used to say that the old Irish bards used to talk about the poem as the half side thing. And I think this is where Hume gets it a wee bit wrong, and the reader kind of contributes the other half of the poem. So with us, it’s really the truth, the half truth, and nothing but the half truth. The reason that we have to do that is to leave the poem open to the reader and leave some space for them to project something deeply and personally relevant. I don’t mean in a nebulous way. We’ll have all sorts of very specific techniques, from riddling and ellipsis and metonymy and apostle apisis and symbol and deliberate ambiguity to accomplish that feeling of half sadness. It’s why poetry is difficult. You get half a poem, The rest you have to contribute. So as for you know what Hume says about beauty, that’s also us we you know, it’s not just the reader who’s kind of projecting that into the language. We specifically interject it into the poem to find there, but it needs a reader to release it. So the poetic truth exists in that transfer, if you like, of ascetic information, of which the poem is a kind of conducting crystal set in the middle. But I mean, you know, if you think poetry lies. I mean, read a novel or read a journalist or, you know, read a Daily Mail. As I say, I think to really lie in a poem would mean the poet lying to themselves. And as a guild, we really try not to, and the reason is that to lie to yourself is to render yourself in the poem inauthentic. And inauthenticity poets learn is something that readers can smell a mile off, and it turns your poems bad the way fish goes bad. So we learn not to lie to ourselves. And then I go on to say something really gratuitously kind of annoying about how things are at the moment and and how there’s a there’s a kind of cult of inauthenticity, and people are kind of encouraged to character themselves and their identities and victimhoods, you know. And I think currently, lying, genuine, lying to yourself, is incentivized in poetry, in a way it wasn’t before. And that that’s, that’s probably something that should be pursued at some other events. But anyway, that’s, that’s all say from there. Thank you.
Edward Harcourt:
Well, a very rich set of observations there. Thank you to both of you, Max. I’m sure you could give another lecture responding to all those but keep it brief, so that we have time for Q&A.
Maximilian de Gaynesford
What strikes me simply is, is how both of those well two things, one is the the generosity and the the willingness to enter into an attempt to try and make sense of why it is philosophers have said these awful things, which, you know, I wish that philosophers were sometimes a bit more willing to do the same with poets when, when they’re at the most sort of rude. So Robert you’ve spoken about and reminded us of t, s, Eliot and other great poets who also happen to be philosophers, and we could have mentioned, I would include Sappho Pindar, Homer, Shakespeare, Rilke, Wordsworth, Coleridge, dos grunbein, now, Denise Reilly, Elliot, obviously, I don’t think I’d include pound. Pound was tremendously rude about philosophers, and said that there hadn’t been any since Leibniz, basically. So he rules out Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and the rest of them. But so that’s that sort of impulse behind trying to think the best out of philosophy is wonderful. What I want to pick up from Don’s thoughts, most of all, I think, is the notion of the craft of being a poet, from out of which she was speaking. So I took it very much that what was directing your thoughts there was the sort of trying to think very carefully about what it might guide, what might be guiding a poet as they put words on the poet. Agent and screw it up and throw it away, put a line through it, precisely because of the insincerity point. And I just sort of add to that. It’s always worth also remembering that philosophy is no less of a craft than poetry. And although it’s absolutely true what Robert says that philosophy is often very boring. It’s not necessarily boring to a philosopher, because, and you know, maybe that puts us into it, into a weird category, but it’s, it’s very largely here. I think there is a difference with poetry. The way in which a philosopher treats the craft of philosophy is, I think, to be deeply committed to recognising below the structure of the signs, the arbitrary structure that Don was talking about its form. Formal validity or invalidity, the ability to appreciate when a reason is consistent, self, consistent, contradictory, this, this kind of thing. And when you get the habit of that, it becomes exciting. But one has to, as it were, just with poetry, you have to learn the craft in order to be able to see the joy of it. The same is true of philosophy, and it becomes progressively less boring the more that you appreciate that. But those are my two thoughts. But basically, there’s a line that Charles Altieri has where he says he’s a literary critic, and he says something like this, which I often think about. He says, analytic philosophy is a discipline that we fear and resent for wasting powers that we like to think are ours to use in our love of speculative vagueness. It’s a tremendously honest and generous thought again, but within its own self criticism of the literary task, there is a criticism which I think should be well taken by philosophers. Do we sometimes waste our powers on things? Should we redirect them towards other things. And I suppose what I’m trying to do is push gluck’s boulder a little bit further, get philosophy thinking about things which are genuinely helpful. Thank you. Over to you.
Edward Harcourt
Yes, there’s a roving mic. Wait for it to reach you or and people online. If you would like to raise questions, please put them in the chat, and then we’ll pick them up and call you to speak, but you go first.
Maximilian de Gaynesford
Thank you. I was lucky enough to read English in the late 70s at Leeds, where Jeffrey Hill, of course, was teaching. So I heard him read his poetry, which was an extraordinary thing in itself, but as a green undergraduate, I became slightly obsessed by his inaugural lecture, which is called poetry as menace and atonement. And I think what he’s arguing is that the Menace is because language is untrustworthy. It’s full of blood and violence in the past and the at one moment of atonement is that structural thing of making a crafted poet, tell poem, tell the truth. I’m not quite sure I believe the second part, but I mean, Hill does its best through that kind of intensity, but I think, surely that that the ultimate difference is that poetry is art. It’s it’s self consciously crafted, because artists recognise that getting at the truth is very difficult, and therefore you need to tell your audience that you’re just having a go. You’re not truth telling through a scientific argument, and that’s the nature of art, and that’s the nature of truth telling in art, you read a poem to think for yourself, not to be told what to think. I think Max Do you want to pick that up? I absolutely agree with that last part, and that picks up on something. Don was saying that a good poem will leave the poem open to the reader to complete. But I think I would disagree that, I mean, this will be on the path of poets. I do think that they may not be in the business of telling facts, but truth, yes, but, but that it’s a composite business. And just to get back to the Hill that you noted it, he thinks of atonement. I mean, he argues that it’s etymologically related to at one moment. And part of the at one moment of atonement would be, I take it the conjunction of the poet and the reader. I think
Robert Crawford FRSE
that also relates to what’s been discussed in Ovid in the Third Reich. And it comes the at one month, comes close to attunement. And it does seem to me that one of the most important aspects of poetry is a kind of attunement, and that that’s true of poetry in Western traditions, but also in other traditions that both Plato and Confucius are interested in poetry, not least because of what it says about harmony. You might say that the word harmonise in Ovid in the Third Reich is a dirty word, but it seems to me, the problem in Ovid in the Third Reich isn’t so much the notion of harmony as the idea that the speaker is in one sphere and that the damned, the Jews in the poem are in a completely different sphere.
Don Paterson FRSE
My only other thought was, as I think most poets, when you get talking to them, you know, see poetry serving some kind of corrective function, except they have their own highly individual metaphor for how they express that. And you might see atonement. And, you know, it’s no surprise that someone as guilt ridden as, you know, as hell would use in a word like atonement, you know, and even the word corrective, I can hear as my very kind of, you know, can hear about Protestant side going through there, but I think it amounts to the same thing, you know, it’s, you know, sort of, I think we feel ourselves to be somehow fixing the language in an area, you know, but it becomes inadequate. So it’s, although I do think that’s bodied forth quite naturally from the prosody of the language itself, you know, I think that’s something that just emerges in the best of our conversation, you know, as well as in the poems that we craft. So I think it’s quite a natural, natural function that poetry immediately codifies. But yeah.
Edward Harcourt
Thank you. Yes. Monroe Ford.
Attendee
Hi guys, thanks very much for the talk. I’ll try and string this together currently, but the basically, kind of jumped out for me was the idea of, I suppose, rhetoric and authenticity as kind of parallels for poetry and philosophy, in the sense that, for philosophy, if you rely on rhetoric, you’re not really relying on logic potentially. And with poetry, if you’re inauthentic, it’s not a kind of proper poem. And I guess the kind of balance there of how, the kind of goal of what both the poet and the philosopher, like Hume, they’re both writing something down that they’re publishing or putting out to the world. They’re intending to somehow communicate knowledge or truth to a reader and kind of create some sense of qualia. One might be very elegant in a poem. One might be very dry and boring to certain readers. That depends on you. Is this not kind of just doing the same thing, but a reflection, and we’re just potentially being a bit stickly on technical and what it’s trying to do, as opposed to trying to put a circle into a square.
Maximilian de Gaynesford
Well, I’d sort of like to agree, but I feel I can’t, in all honesty, because of cases like TS Eliot actually, and I wouldn’t have dared say anything, were it not for Robert has mentioned the name and has sort of wondered why I didn’t, but I think if you think a philosopher thinks carefully about why somebody would, as in TS Eliot’s case, work incredibly hard in the salt mines of philosophy until they were 30. He subsequently claimed he gave up philosophy in 1918 he sort of, technically maybe 1916 but he was 30, and they are sort of salt mines in the you know, he published hugely in the best journals. He had a career. He could have gone back to Harvard, and almost certainly would have been employed, and that’s obviously what his family wanted and so on. There are other complications as well. But why would somebody, I mean, if philosophy and poetry are essentially just sort of the same thing, why would somebody go through, you know, and somebody particularly of Eliot’s sort of honesty and sort of the doubting soul deep anxieties that he went through, he clearly felt that he could not continue as a philosopher and had to make this change. I. I think to understand that, one would have to accept that, at least for the for some poets and for some philosophers, it’s doing something different, very different. I mean, the contrasting example would be, one of my philosophical Heroes is Sir Peter Strawson, dead now, but I think he began as a poet, and I think he read English at Oxford and gave it all up for philosophy.
Speaker
They’re not the same thing. But rather, I think poetry often tries to capture more of philosophy training to try to deal with, often the concrete, or using things like propositional logic to understand the world, whereas with poetry, it tends to be more to understand how it feels to understand the world of that kind of emotional quality of to kind of you’re expressing your feeling of something, and then someone, as you say, is half there. So then someone else can kind of get halfway and then project themselves onto it
Robert Crawford FRSE
by calling to mind somebody Yeats says about you know that out of the quarrel with other people comes rhetoric, out of the quarrel with ourselves comes poetry. And I think that, not least for Eliot, there was within him a quarrel that breaks out several times in his verse between the poet and the philosopher and that. And he makes poetry out of that.
Edward Harcourt
Let’s move on.
Don Paterson FRSE
Yes course you can. Was the case that one of the reasons that Eliot turned against it was, was because of the particular turn for so he was taking at the time and the questions that I was asking he believed to be pathetic and unimportant, you know, as it took a more kind of positivist, kind of, you know, sort of analytic turn. I mean, it just didn’t interest him, you know. And but just, can I just can I just pick you up in the rhetoric thing, the rhetoric is a means to an end. But I mean, the reason that sometimes philosophers will go for it is because it’s a means of persuasion. And often it’s, you know, and it’s used as a tool to persuade you of something that’s, that’s, that’s evil or not true, you know, or can be, you know. But that’s no rhetoric’s fault. So we can also deploy the deploy for for good, as well as as we both do. I mean, philosophers use rhetoric and all that boys do. So, yeah, yeah, let’s have another question.
Robert Crawford FRSE
Just very quickly, we promised to disagree. So I don’t think you mean Elliot. You know, Elliot’s very interested in Husserl, for instance. He’s, you know, his, his, he’s not just interested in Bradley, his, his instant philosophy doesn’t just cut off. I think it’s just that he loves poetry more and he wants to be a poet more than he wants to be a philosopher.
Edward Harcourt
I think we’ve got a question online, so why don’t you read that one out is beauty, truth, truth, beauty. Are both activities. Good lord Max, simply phrased.
Maximilian de Gaynesford
well Keats also said in Lamia, as it did not all charms fly at the cold hand of philosophy, which is quite like that line simply because it sort of tempts. Sort of tempts you to rhyme and semi rhyme philosophy, to rhyme with fly. And if you try to do it, you turn it into philosophy, sort of something which is not quite philosophy anymore. And I’m trying to dodge your question, because I have no idea I had. I no idea how the the truth and beauty thing,
Don Paterson FRSE
do we not all have an instinct, if it can reduce the way we say thing, the say a thing, to the statement of the utmost symmetry and brevity and originality.
Maximilian de Gaynesford
And that does give me a hook, because, of course, a philosopher is going to say that you’re missing out the most important thing of all, which is a reason to believe it. And absolutely true, one can condense something down and make it moment
Don Paterson FRSE
we not trust that the two are coincident, that it should be believed in that basis, yeah, and
Robert Crawford FRSE
that’s probably why I’ve very reluctantly come to love haiku. But haiku on the other because of that absolute brevity and absolute clarity, although sometimes a kind of mixture of clarity and paradox, but on the other hand, haiku are a perfect example of poems that are full of things and are not just made out of ideas,
Don Paterson FRSE
does not point us back to the you know, the last time we were really doing exactly the same discipline was pre Socratic and Heraclitus, yes, keeping
Robert Crawford FRSE
It’s beautiful, yeah, Heraclitus is what. Look, he’s not writing in verse. He’s one of the most poetic philosophers, and for perhaps allied reasons, the same could be said of the early Wittgenstein.
Don Paterson FRSE
Yeah, very much so. But poets quote all the time.
Edward Harcourt
Thank you. Yes, gentlemen, sort of halfway back, yeah,
Attendee
Max, I’d like to pick you up on your suggestion that poetry might need this to question the idea that lying is making a statement that you believe to be false. As you were talking, I was thinking your examples of lineation were perhaps deception, but lying is only one kind of deception. I mean, philosophers would accept that there’s lots of deception which doesn’t count as lying, but then, actually, by the end of it, I was wondering, are there even, really even deception? Aren’t they more wrong footing? Wrong footing is a kind of temporary deception where you trick someone momentarily, but the idea is that by the end of it, they see the point you’re making, in which case, by the end of thinking about the poem, you’re no longer even deceived about the poet’s intention. So it can be to use the phrase that Don was using, can be sincere and authentic, even though it has temporarily wrong footed on the way to that.
Maximilian de Gaynesford
That’s certainly something that that some poets do. And I think the Louise Gluck the mountain poem is sort of example of that. It’s a sort of constant example of sort of various sorts of wrong footing. You know, here’s I’m going to tell you honestly what is going through my mind here. Oh, and by the way, I’ve probably been lying to you up until this point, and now I’m going to tell another story about what it is that I’m doing, which I is the kind of thing I might tell my students, but maybe I want to tell you as an audience. Oh, and by the way, right at the end, in having done all of that, I have, as it were, under the counter, done the very thing which a poet wants to try to do, which is create a monument out of out of the poem. So that’s a lovely example, which would go along with what you’re saying. I think if your thought is that’s all philosophers mean when they claim that poets are liars, I would disagree, because if that’s what they really mean, in other words, you as poets, you you sort of use lying in order to be able to tell the truth, they would then surely say things like, well, you know, poets are truth tellers by profession, not that they’re liars by profession, not that they as it Were, use, you know, is it where the defining feature of them is that they should be truth tellers, not liars, if, if we agree with with what you’re saying. So what I’m trying to do is sort of meet those who might disagree with both you and me, which is to say that poets probably in the business of truth. It’s just that lying is just a strategy. So trying to understand philosophers who really are committed to the claim that when you really push it right down to the bottom, what poets are really still interested in is lying, that that’s what we need to meet I think, I suppose maybe I wanted to get at the contracting two uses of truth. I mean, there’s the narrow use of truth that we’re used to in analytic philosophy. And then there’s when, when poets talk about truth that they might mean something wider, including aspects which aren’t articulable, as you know, as Phrygian propositions,
Maximilian de Gaynesford
I would like to argue that we shouldn’t have two notions of truth, and that actually we don’t have to need to use two notions of truth. There is just the one. I’m not quite sure I can understand what the two notions of truth are. And as I say, what I think I’m trying to argue is that poets don’t need it. I mean, we can distinguish between truths about general things and truth about particulars, but I don’t think there are two different kinds of truth,
Edward Harcourt
Right? So in the middle, yeah, in yes, good.
Attendee
And thank you for that. I really enjoyed that. I mean, Max criticised philosophers for being reductive about poetry, but I would argue the opposite, that actually you’re being reductive about philosophy. Because what we’re really talking about is an Anglo-centric model of philosophy, Anglo-American analytic philosophy. And what I’d be more interested in is hearing about what you think about those philosophers who have taken poetry seriously, and, for example, Socratic dialogues, which are, they’re not poetry, but they you know, they are. They are. There’s a lyricism. There also philosophers like Kierkegaard Nietzsche, who I’d argue you would be more better read as poetry than philosophy. And also, you did mention the early Wittgenstein, I’d also say the later Wittgenstein, because I think all of the real insights and the truths that you gain from those writings are from its poetic qualities, rather than the actual the much more kind of factual, logical coherence of those arguments.
Maximilian de Gaynesford
I don’t think we’re in any disagreement. I also admire non-analytic philosophers who write about poetry, but much as with Robert’s claims, completely correct identification that there are many poets who’ve been philosophers, so there have been many philosophers who are also poets, but these, I take it, as sort of the easy cases for us, right? The hard cases are cases involving straight up analytic philosophers who absolutely flatly want to deny that poets are truth tellers, that they are that they are either not serious or that they’re liars. So I sort of agree with you that I would like to spend my time amongst people who see poetry and philosophy as being more consistent with each other, more united. But my only purpose in the talk tonight was really to address those who reject that option from the beginning and try to persuade them. Well, no, hold on. You’re very the commitments you make, the way that you define what lying is, the way you define what poetry is, and the intimacy you see between them could even for you, you should be persuadable to see that actually poetry and philosophy are attunable. So that’s the reason why I didn’t talk about them, not, not because I don’t find them very, very conducive, and I’m very glad that you mentioned
Edward Harcourt
You were nodding vigorously. Do you want to come in on that one? I hadn’t got anything in particular other than my vigorous knowledge. The word Heidegger came to mind. There’s another guy. Let’s avoid that. Okay, there was another one.
Attendee
So I got into studying philosophy because I wanted to have practical guidance and how to lead a good life and discover sort of practical truths about what it was to be lead a good life. And now I’m getting more into poetry, and I feel like it’s doing a similar thing. Does the panel think that there’s a sort of asymmetry between the way that poets approach that question and the answers they give relative to the way that philosophers answer that question?
Don Paterson FRSE
What definitions of the good life, yeah, or practical solutions, practical suggestions, practical ways of thinking about the world.
Don Paterson FRSE
It depends. It’s become an unfashionable idea. You know, the idea that you know, that poet should be, should, should be conducting some kind of model discourse, you know. But you can go back even just to lock in and find people who are very easy with that. But we’ve been really talked out of it recently, you know. And it’s just, you know, and there’s been a whole bunch of know, your place that I think it’s made poetry that much less ambitious. You know, just because you’re leading a debate, you know, doesn’t mean you have to be qualified to do so, you know, because, because none of our lives stand up to that kind of scrutiny. You just know how to do it. And I do think, and this is borne out by the fact that people you know, instinctively turn on again and again to poetry, that those moments of their lives when they seek definitions of what, what is a good life? You know, how does, how does one conduct oneself honourably in dishonourable circumstances? You turn you look for answers in poetry. People you know have been used to finding them there. And I wonder if recently, we haven’t become a little derelict as poets you know, sort of and ordinary, that expectation.
Robert Crawford FRSE#
And I do think that goes back to what Plato likes about poetry, and to what Confucius likes about poetry. It is this notion of harmony, another way of putting that is a good life or a good life.
Edward Harcourt
Is there another one online that we can take now?
Maximilian de Gaynesford
Nope, not the moment can I take up just a yes, you can. So. Your question was whether there’s an asymmetry. And I was trying to think about that. I think that needn’t be, but there often is. And one of them was sort of still bugging me from that, from the online question. So the truth and beauty thing, I mean, I there is sort of asymmetry there. I think in that, the way in which poetry can work with ways. Can do it by a genuinely inspiring image or a line that just comes to your mind very constantly. I mean, we haven’t talked about religious poetry, but I think a lot of people find hymns and the Psalms and so on, just very practically useful in living a good life, in certain sense that there are phrases which which one calls on in times of distress or exaltation or whatever, which give meaning and significance and so on. But there isn’t necessarily in them a clear roadmap which could be used to persuade somebody who didn’t feel inspired by that line. And that, I think, is the difference. Philosophy aspires to be able to communicate itself to anybody, provide a reason for anybody to reach the same conclusion, as long as they’re willing to put in the time to sort of read through the premises and consider the dismissal dismissals of other things.
Don Paterson FRSE
We wouldn’t say truth and beauty if we did the two words for two different things. But like, you know, sort of philosophy and poetry, there’s a there’s a fair degree of overlap in their activities, but nonetheless, good, you know, yeah, I’m happy with that. Seems like a reasonable thing.
Edward Harcourt
One more, if you have one more yes towards the front. I to wait for the mic.
Attendee
It’s probably considerations rather than question, but I would like would appreciate your opinion from which nature, sorry if I formulate not clear. Try to formulate from which nature this theme of lion appeared in general. I mean, it looks for me like it’s a contradiction between I mean, it’s a question, this question of whether poetry lies or not might appear only for those philosophers, philosophers who experience, maybe not conscious contradiction between this more classical philosophical approach to challenge, to question stuff and This unconscious religious belief that language should be used only in this particular way. For example, if you do not use language, applying straightforward meanings, trying to describe the reality, then you are lying. So for me, it’s like, yeah. Any comments, probably to that.
Edward Harcourt
Max, would you like to respond to that?
Maximilian de Gaynesford
I hope I’m understanding your question when I say I think there’s an interesting phenomenon. So two main ways in which philosophers attack poetry is to either claim they’re liars or they’re not serious. And I think it’s important to see that sometimes very unusually, but sometimes in history, philosophers have said the same thing. They’ve said both of those things, and the three times are Plato in fifth century, Athens Hume in enlightenment, Scotland, and JL Austin in Oxford of the 1950s and if you think about why it is that those times are different from any other. An explanation is they were actually the times when both poets and philosophers could count on quite a devoted audience. So Athens because of essentially fairly religious issues, Hume because of enlightenment issues, and 1950s Oxford because I think after the Second World War, there was a pause for reflection and and so on. Suddenly there was, there was an opportunity for both philosophers and poets to have quite a major audience, and that why? Why would it be that philosophers in those times are the most insult? Towards poets. Possible explanation is simply, but I’d love to know what other people but I mean possible explanation is essentially, I mean, this can sound dreadfully un poetic, but it’s sort of market share. Once you do start to get an interested audience, then both philosophers and poets suddenly have to start distinguishing themselves quite distinguishing themselves quite carefully.
Robert Crawford FRSE
That’s an interesting argument. I mean, it does seem to me to all go back, certainly in Western culture, to ancient Greece. And since we’re here in Scotland, you know, worth remembering that the poetess, that’s a word that comes from the Greek word to make poein, which is why we have a marker in Scotland, and why we had mediaeval markers. It seems very odd to attack someone for making and although we’re talking about poetry, thank goodness in the sense of these lines on a page, probably that that that notion of a maker, they didn’t have cinema in ancient Athens, but, you know, would would now incorporate cinema, the novel, all kinds of fiction, making all kinds of imagination, to attack the imagination just seems to me a Crazy thing to do.
Don Paterson FRSE
I do like the idea, you know, it’s the ultimate mark of a healthy culture that philosophers, poets are at each other’s throats, more of that,
Edward Harcourt
And there even were, it not such a good place to leave things. I’m afraid we have to draw things to a close. Thank you very much for your questions, and thank you to our three panellists for applause.
