Jeremy Noel-Tod Chews Through the Oeuvre of J.H. Prynne

At UK magazine Prospect, Jeremy Noel-Tod explores the writing of Jeremy Prynne, noting that a "two-volume collected prose is at last in preparation." "To chew through Prynne’s oeuvre unaided would be a challenge to digestion—which may be why a recent, ineffectually angry hatchet-job in the magazine Areté concluded with the reviewer declaring that the book made him 'literally' sick."

Noel-Tod goes on to illuminate the politics, the poetry, the lectures and notes, the anecdotes--all of which may point a way toward Prynne's "ruling passion" for philology, "the study of human language as the most finely-contoured map of the world available." More from this essay:

...His more autobiographical public statements confirm that he has long seen language as an inner landscape. Speaking in 2012 about the translation of his poems into Chinese, he recalled how “being somewhere in the experience-space between English and Latin was one of the most amazingly exhilarating experiences I had as a schoolboy. It made me feel what it was like to be in the zone of language… almost as a place of awareness, almost in a sense as a place to be.”

Prynne’s criticism rises to poetry itself when he speaks about the life of words in this mystical way. “Within the great aquarium of language the light refracts and can bounce by inclinations not previously observed”; “rhyme is the public truth of language, sound paced out in shared places, the echoes are no-one’s private property or achievement”; “language is a human emotional system, an engine of love not just in nomenclature but in the syntax of passion.” Such claims for language as the symbolic medium that brings the world into being locate his literary thinking in the high modernist tradition of Stéphane Mallarmé, Gertrude Stein, TS Eliot and Wallace Stevens. In a lecture on the verse of his American mentor, Charles Olson, from 1971, he described the “language” of the universe as “its capacity for love. And the capacity of the universe for love is that for which man was born. I believe utterly that it is man’s destiny to bring love to the universe.”

Prynne’s later tendency, however, to knit words in a mesh of hermetic indirectness has dismayed some poets who might otherwise admire such visionary sentiments. Peter Riley, a close contemporary from the Cambridge poetry scene in the 1960s, writes in his latest book, Pennine Tales:

Jeremy Prynne let me play the archlute
to your physical ear. And we would walk together
over the dark moorlands believing in something
I don't know what.

A younger poet, Emily Critchley, alludes to his reluctance to cultivate a wider audience in her “translation” of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets addressing a handsome man who is reluctant to marry: “Selfish—though lovely! You, remove / yrself frm circulation, like a Prynne / poem.”

“Britain’s leading late modernist poet,” as his Poems bill him, nevertheless remains as enthusiastic about his vocation as ever. He has begun to speak more candidly in old age about his work, happily telling a Cambridge audience recently how Kazoo Dreamboats was written in a Bangkok hotel room with a view of a concrete wall (“just what I wanted”) and a physics textbook for company. In a statement from 2010, published in Kathmandu as part of a collection of essays otherwise written in Nepalese (AD Penumbra, eat your heart out), Prynne writes: “To be in and across all things a poet, in daily involvement with the dialectic of imagination and real things, has been a task giving the profoundest joy and fulfilment. The task in this work has been to maintain the fundamental argument of contradiction, even while opening one’s powers of feeling and knowledge to the largest extent, so that language occupies the entire space of the poet’s self-being and then overflows it.”

Read all of "Jeremy Prynne, prankster poet" at Prospect.