Much of what is said and written about poetry floats into the stratosphere or merges with the dust which smothers the back issues of small-circulation magazines. Using a fine-mesh prospector's pan, one can chance upon glittering nuggets of broadcast and printed wisdom as well as tawdry chunks of fool's gold (with apophthegms as with poems, the William McGonagalls outnumber the Lord Byrons). Hamlet may have been dismissed by a disillusioned woman as a play full of quotations; but the major publishing houses recycle their material so lazily that their books of quotations resemble anthologies of clichΘs. As far as poetry is concerned, the time has surely come to update our stock of definitions, to wind our minds around something a little less timeworn than "What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed", "the best words in the best order" or "emotion recollected in tranquility".
Over-familiar though they may have grown, these aperτus of Pope, Coleridge and Wordsworth served poetry well as succinct encapsulations of the art. And it is not inappropriate that the most famous utterances about poetry should be epigrammatic; after all, good epigrams and lyric poems have much in common: they are concise, precise and memorable. Ted Berrigan's jest about poems being stories with the boring bits left out could be extended to claim that aphorisms are essays with the boring parts omitted. Besides, some of the best modern poet-critics have had epigrammatic turns of mind: WH Auden, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin and Randall Jarrell (or Randall Farrell - an Irish-sounding American - as he is listed in my edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations).
Among over 2000 uncollected remarks which I garnered over the years for my quotations column (entitled "Pickings & Choosings") in Poetry Ireland Review, I was glad to find some which complemented my favourite quotations from the not-too-distant past. One of the growls of that great epigrammist, Cyril Connolly ("Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well"), meets its match in a comparison made by Sean O'Brien between quarrelsome poets and "ferrets fighting for mastery of a septic tank". I was reminded of a droll observation of John Ashbery's ("There is a view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army") when I spotted an equally agnostic Michael Donaghy decrying the "socially self-conscious poets and very right-on, PC poets who talk about bringing poetry to the people as if it was some sacred mission, like converting the natives to Christianity". Karl Kraus's jaundiced view that "A poem is good until one knows who wrote it" is corroborated by Charles Baxter's equally colourful - and, no doubt, verifiable - gibe that "the one thing that can get a poet irritated and upset is the thought of another poet's poems".
Oscar Wilde, the most quoted of all Irish authors, remarked that "a poet can survive anything but a misprint" (a point obviously lost on publishers of quotations - in one book I consulted, the word "anything" is replaced by "everything", leaving me wavering between versions like a scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls). And was it misprints, mishearing, misunderstanding or mere misspelling that led to the misnomers in the magazine, Writers' Monthly, where it was reported that the spellbinding poet, Carol Ann Duffy - who has been known to keep a volume or two by Les Murray, Paul Durcan and Eavan Boland on her shelves - was in fact "knee deep at the moment in the poems of Lez Murray, Paul Dacre and Ivan Boland"?
A telephone poll conducted by the BBC a few years ago to find Britain's "favourite poem", left the exasperated telephonists not only knee deep but drowning in a flood of calls. According to a London newspaper, the nominations (or, at any rate, those listed by staff) included "Not Wading but Drowning", "Allergy in a Country Churchyard" and "The Rhubarb of O'Mark I am".
I collected more quotes of many colours than Tony Curtis - who assembled a selection of them - could reasonably (or, at any rate, legibly) squeeze into a 100-page book. Some of them confirmed that brevity and wit go together like boiled eggs and soldiers; other quotations were impressive for their insights, their metaphors, their sheer eloquence. The poet Wendy Cope, author of some of the best contemporary light verse, proved to be one of the shrewdest and sharpest analysts of poetry and the poetry scene - though, frustratingly, I discovered too late for my column her barb impugning the high motives of the Modernist male: "'The reason modern poetry is difficult is so that the poet's wife can't understand it."
One way of getting around Christopher Logue's conviction that "Poetry cannot be defined, only experienced" is for the definition itself to be a poem. The most swoon-inducing, hair-bristling quotation I recorded came from an interview with Seamus Heaney (the line breaks and stanzas are mine!):
What I want from poetry
is the preciousness and foundedness
of wise feeling become eternally
posthumous in perfect cadence . . .
You want it to touch you
at the melting point
below the breast-bone
and the beginning of the solar plexus.
You want something sweetening
and at the same time something
unexpected,
something that has come
through constraint into felicity.
My becoming a hunter-gatherer of quotations was perhaps a predictable destiny; as part of my schooling, I was obliged - like most of my generation - to memorise countless proverbs in Irish at school. Having learned to sound wise beyond my schoolboy years, ("There's no hearth like your own hearth"; "It's a long road that has no turning"; "Praise the young and they will flourish"), I then put this wiseacre tone into practice when writing essays in Irish which became a kind of join-the-dots of proverbs. English-language essays and school debates were also expected to showcase the student's command of the clichΘ and the quotation. Marks would be deducted for originality. Weaker students got their lines crossed and their metaphors mixed, resulting in surreal hybrids worthy of Paul Muldoon's poem, Symposium (in which "One good turn deserves a bird in the hand" and "There's no smoke after the horse is gone"). Fluid examples from Tipperary - where I grew up - include "You can take a horse to the water, but you can't make him lay an egg" and "It went in one ear and out the other, like water off a duck's back". Wasn't it that master of the one-liner, Ambrose Bierce, who defined quoting as "The act of repeating erroneously the words of another"? Memory is the mother of the Muses, but there are definitely times when absentmindedness amuses.
Extracted from Dennis O'Driscoll's Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams: Selected Prose Writings, published this month by The Gallery Press.
Dennis O'Driscoll will be reading from the book in the South Tipperary Arts Centre, Clonmel, tonight at 7 p.m.