Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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I am a great believer in poetry. In fact at one time I fancied myself a poet. It was during my university years at the English Department of the Faculty of Arts here in Cairo. For four successive years, I won the Sonnet prize, against enormously important contestants like Mahmoud El-Manzalawi, more recently a professor of English literature at some Canadian university.

The prizes I received were always books, and one of them which I have always treasured is Knapsack. The Knapsack was first published in 1939, at the beginning of the Second World War. It is the literary equivalent of a canvas or leather bag strapped to the back and used for carrying necessaries. The choice of name is significant and it symbolises the fact that literature is one such necessity in life.

In his preface the editor Herbert Read, a leading critic and educationalist, writes, "During the last war, as a soldier on active service, I was very conscious of the need of a book, which I could carry about with me as part of my kit, and which would suit the various moods and circumstances of my unsettled existence."

Thus the idea of the Knapsack was born. It is some kind of a micro library with selections from Homer's Iliad, Beowulf, La Chanson de Roland, the sonnets of Shakespeare, poems by Donne, Marlowe, Milton, Blake, the Romantics, Yeats and Eliot.

I received the prize in 1943 and since then it has become a permanent companion on all my travels. As Herbert Read writes, "It is impracticable to carry about with one an adequate library." So the Knapsack, with its poetry and prose, carefully selected, meets one's needs.

The interest in poetry has survived through the years, and each generation has seen new poets and new techniques, but the music has not changed.

I remember when my son went to school as a child, in London, where I was then working, he brought home a book with the title The Way Opens, which contained what one might call "graded" poems. It was intended to introduce the child to poetry, by going from the simplest, to the simple, then move up to more sophisticated poems. The book was divided into sections, bearing the titles: nature, animals, laughter, adventure, ships and seamen, songs. I even found in it one of my favourite poems by William Butler Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, with its beautiful opening: "I will rise and go now, and go to Innisfree / And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattle mode: / Nine beam rows will I have there, a hive for a honey- bee, / And live alone in the bee loud gate."

And the interest in poetry continues. I recently read an article in the books supplement of The Times, with the title "How to Read a Poem". It is taken from Terry Eagleton's book of the same title. In this particular article he discusses imagery in poetry. All language is metaphorical, he claims. "Those afflicted by misfortune," he goes on to say, "do not literally reel under a grievous blow, dust themselves down or stagger valiantly on their way." The history of thought, he claims "is the history of its models and metaphors."

Poets work to make their own language and thus one cannot change one word of what they write. They make us believe that only this set of words could possibly stand for this set of things. Similes and metaphors are their weapons. One cannot always visualise them in any coherent sense. When WH Auden writes of patients in a hospital ward that "lie apart like epochs from each other", one cannot visualise such an image. Eagleton quotes TS Eliot in his poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock in which he writes about the evening like a patient etherised on a table: that is not giving us an image, writes Eagleton. "He is telling us something about the snares and illusions of imagery. And that goes for the art of poetry as a whole."

Eagleton ends this article by saying, and here I quote him in full, "Why, finally, does poetry matter? One could do worse than reply, because it is completely useless. Like all art, it is a scandal to a world governed by grim utility, in which anything that lacks an instant cash value is bound to be worthless. Like human beings, poetry is entirely pointless -- and in this, precisely, lies its point."

Which brings up an issue often discussed these days, namely "culture, with all its manifestations, as a commodity". But I'll leave that for another time.