Sabeena Mathayas M.

A English – 2011 Hans Raj College, University of

Delhi

Cityscapes
Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of a
poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and
rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of
reverie, the jibes of conscience?
It was, above all, out of my exploration of huge cities, out of the medley of their
innumerable interrelations, that this haunting ideal was born.
Charles Baudelaire To Arsène Houssaye," (1862)

The fact of the city is that it is as much a conscious material construct as it is a

subconscious linguistic construct. In its medley of innumerable interrelations, Lewis
Mumford identifies the inscape that holds within its communal framework many
simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn,
urban forms condition the mind. But it is only through language and the panoramic
vision it offers as conceits that the cityscape – inner and outer – becomes man’s
greatest work of art.
In analyzing the selective works of Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, John Betjeman and
Billy Collins, this paper attempts to survey the vocabulary of art, artist and
perspective, to maneuver through the peculiar relationship between man and
material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living.

1. Micro to Macro – Ezra Pound

Critical opinion on the Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley has largely been
impressionistic and diffused but it is unanimous that it reveals its virtues and
powers in its devices of representation – in the refined devices of a unique
sensibility. With Pound though, sensibility becomes a process of transfiguring
personae or masks in order to actualize a complex harmony of vision in the face of
glaring contraries.
This vision is inclusive of history: of becoming aware of it, of bearing witness to it, of
having – even tacitly – participated in it, even if it means by not. Pound’s London
was deeply steeped in its aesthete factions and capitalist structures which the artist
rebelled against and adhered to. Mauberley does not present a personality or an in-
depth psychology; it presents an inextricable indictment. Pound’s personae aren’t
just E.P and Mauberley; he presents to the reader Mr.Nixon, Lady Valentine,
Brennbaum, Monsieur Verog, the bank clerk and the ‘Conservatrix’, the stylist and
his mistress, to name a few. Each personae is never exactly equivalent to the poet’s
mind in its isolation or integral place in the sequence of the poem and the
hierarchies of society – It is their totality which is a process of cognizance in Pound’s
perspective that shifts from his insular aesthetic toward a greater social
engagement; philologically on a micro to macro scale.

The positive accent laid on the effort to give vital thrust to a poetic career is a
heroic justification for the ordeals Pound had undergone to preserve his integrity
and aesthetic. The economic and social demands of the age induce either an
escape or a compromise from the artist. The siren song of surrender and escape to
an ivory tower beguiles and chastens at the same time – a predicament exorcised
as a death of a personae in the opening ode.

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Mauberley now embraces the dualities of the self and the world in the first section.
In presenting a critique of ‘the age’ poems from II to XII now account for the futility
and irrelevance of the poet’s existence. Mauberley’s gallery of impaired, failed and
compromised artists begins with E.P and resumes in Yeux Glauques; proceeding
from Ruskin to Fort Maddox Ford and then shifting to the bourgeois, the aristocratic:
the audience that are popular representatives of contemporary taste.

The age demanded an image …

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities …
The ‘age demanded’ chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time, …

Besides this thoroughfare

The sale of half-hose has
Long since superseded the cultivation
of Pierian roses.

Attacking the Philistine priorities of society that Mauberley describes an era of

‘tawdry cheapness’ – an age that demanded a petrified image of itself, endlessly
replicable for a mass market, where beauty was ‘decreed in the market place’, art
became mechanical and politics corrupt. Society’s faith in its own structures had
ended up destroying it with the advent of the Great War.
There died a myriad
and of the bes,t among them,
For an old bitch gone in teeth,
For a botched civilization,

The second part, beginning with Mauberley 1920, is modeled on the aesthete as
protagonist. He takes full shape as an earnest Imagist poet whose response to the
age is not to yield to its demands but to withdraw into a private subjective world of
‘selected impressions,’ rare and exquisite apperceptions of beauty passively
received but not returned to the world as art. A lapse into solipsism.
I was
And I no more exist
Here drifted
An hedonist
It is the juxtaposition of the Envoi with The Medallion that seals the crux of
Mauberley. The envoi is an accomplished imitation of the Renaissance poem ‘Go
lovely Rose’ by Thomas Campion. The Medallion on the other hand stands exquisite
in its carefully cultivated aesthetic sensibilities. With Flaubertian precision, the
poem’s lapidary visuals allow only a perspective, incomplete – not the full smile…
an art / in profile – a beautiful description accomplished without inspiration. Life
becomes stone; an irrelevance.
The yearning to stay relevant, to become more, not less socially involved validates
Pound’s departure from London and the aestheticism it stood for.
The tones of fragmentation and destruction were fulfilled in ways far beyond the
modernist’s imagination with the reality of the carnage of the Great War. In the light
of a reality that slapped the artist with a vision that allowed no harmony, Pound’s
Sabeena Mathayas M.A English – 2011 Hans Raj College, University of
Delhi

adieu to London, is an adieu to the sensibility of the city. It was a rebellion against a
vision that had allowed itself to become insular in its beauty, to allow for a vision
beyond the artist, beyond the stereotypes offered by the city.

2. The Eye of the Outcast – Elizabeth Bishop

Bishop’s poetry is rooted in the subjective perception of the geography she inhabits.
Relationships with any meaning are based on observation, on discoveries that come
through focused attention on nuances, not through interaction, not through the
poetry of social beings. The delicacy of her writing, her restrained controlled style,
and her ambiguous questioning and testing of experience are through the detached
observations of the outcast, the exile, the onlooker or the tourist; themselves
observed.

the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains

the printer here experiencing the same excitement
as when emotion too far exceeds its cause

Knowing that observation is as objective as it is emblematic; The Map is replete with

imaginative promise. The artificial and the real spill over into each other – a
labyrinth of synecdoche that is minute and vast and clear. It is the sheer triumph of
vision, empirical and imaginative. As the map is a definitive construction of the
boundaries, the land and city scapes that the poet (and the reader) inhabits, the
poet suggests that individual perspectives and not the world itself may in fact
determine the real. The question of whether empirical truth or imaginative truth is
more valuable to chart the world remains unanswerable.

… can the countries pick their colors?

Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West.
More delicate than the historians’ are the map-maker’s colors.

In allowing for fact to be colored with the imagination there is a refusal to

standardize the images projected on a place. Sight is allowed renewal and the
invisible, escapable nuances of human existence – too familiar to be noticed, too
small to be important, too strange to be comprehended – made visible.

It is this very refusal for standardization of imagery and sight that she takes further
in Man-Moth.
The man-moth navigates the underworld of the city, always travelling backwards –
through the tunnels of history, and his own subconscious. Except in the moments he
emerges from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks. He aims for the
moon, imagining it an opening in the sky; a portal to another world. The city’s
vertical sublimities and the lonely cycle of aspirations and dejections of the Man-
Moth are captured by Kelly Lionel. There is a desire for security but a compulsive
attraction which draws him to the awful elevation. So that this is a type of attempt
at aesthetic transcendence, in a modernist parody of what Brooks calls the
verticality of sublime landscapes. … The vertical landscapes of the romantic
sublime with their dizzying heights and peaks lost in the clouds emphasize the
impossible but ineluctable ascent and the subsequent fall back into the merely
human. … The Man-Moth" represents the absurd quest for the harmony and totality

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and the concomitant fall back down in a cartoon version of the modern city-scape.
[from "Bishop and the Negative Sublime." In Kelly Lionel (ed.) Poetry and the Sense
of Panic: Critical Essays on Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery. Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2000.]

The lack of awareness of the man at the beginning of the poem is ironically
juxtaposed with the man-moth’s lonely awareness of imagined reality. Verbs of
sight emphatically cry out: look, watch, see, stare.
It is through the observation of the details of light and dark, of skyscrapers and
subways, the tunnels of the photographer’s lens and the sidewalks of shadows that
the gritty stark reality of the city is evoked.
If you catch him,
hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil,
an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids
one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips.
Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention
he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over,
cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink

The city is seen from the eyes of an outcast; in this case through the eyes of a
human creature – an aspect of nightmare. The city, by default too can only reveal
itself in its subverted landscapes. But as Bishop sees it, only a detached, almost
forensic anthropological stance can only allow a glimpse into the human aspect in
the city. If the reader isn’t observant, this tear, this only allowance of emotion, of
transcendence will pass by, and the ‘you’ will be akin the man, whose whole shadow
is only as big as his hat.
In this vision, the minute, the vast, the contrasting worlds of light and shadow,
surface and subterranean that inhabit the inner landscape of the city dweller aren’t
allowed exclusivity; but then neither are they allowed an assimilation. It is
nevertheless an appeal to the empathy of sight something which Bishop’s lonely
city seems to lack.

3. The Nostalgic Establishmentarian – Sir John Betjeman

Highly local about places and circumstances and nostalgic for the countryside and
‘English’ culture, Betjeman’s writing sets the spectacle of twentieth century
vulgarity and materialism jigging to old tunes; deliberate evocation, subtle parody
and famous Anglican hymns are his weapons of choice. For example, A Subaltern’s
Love Song is written in the meter of Byron’s ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’. This
doesn’t make him just a parodist of distinction but a commentator of social fact with
his tongue firmly glued to his cheek; the tone always snobbish and faintly nasty. But
toward his later years, the predominant tone is of a wry, avuncular reminiscence; of
regret that the modern world is more brutal and ugly than the one which it has
superseded.

His critically acclaimed ‘The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel’ is
important at the subtle class and power relationships that it explores. Wilde’s
dialogue is suggestive of Browning’s monologues as it describes a soul in action but
it is the particular and essence of person and atmosphere, of the fastidious
Sabeena Mathayas M.A English – 2011 Hans Raj College, University of
Delhi

cataloging of details [hock and seltzer, Nottingham lace, The Yellow Book, The
astrakhan coat, the morocco portmanteau, hansom] that set this poem as
distinctive of Betjeman’s oeuvre.
Sight is screened through the Nottingham lace curtains or the hock and seltzer or
the aesthetical temperament. Whatever the cause, the sight is inept at capturing
the reality of life as it is and by these bees-winged eyes, awareness is blurred.
Juxtaposing this is the ‘terrible-eyed’ Wilde as he brushes past the palms on the
staircase which are emblematic of the world Wilde is leaving – the artist being
extracted from his aesthetic domain – assisted, indeed, marshaled from it on the
arm of societal order. The excessive stress on the entry of the policemen and their
uncultured accent is farcical, but is directly accrediting to the broad class structures
that reflect an ongoing class conflict even in Betjeman’s day. He reverences the
class structure as a heritage of English past but at the same time he views its
hierarchical distinctions with an amused and critical eye.
A thump, and a murmur of voices—
(”Oh why must they make such a din?”)
As the door of the bedroom swung open
And TWO PLAIN CLOTHES POLICEMEN came in:
“Mr. Woilde, we ‘ave come for tew take yew
Where felons and criminals dwell:
We must ask yew tew leave with us quoietly
For this is the Cadogan Hotel.”
He rose, and he put down The Yellow Book.
He staggered—and, terrible-eyed,
He brushed past the palms on the staircase
And was helped to a hansom outside.

Seeing the city with Betjeman is a cataloging of it: its romantic past which he is
nostalgic about and its eminent future which he is horrified by. As the artist, the
social order is intolerant of his bees-winged gaze that rebels against conformity and
practice of vocation according to the pressures of the commercial world. In return
the social order is precisely what the artist critiques for it snatches away the city of
his childhood, of his aesthetic sensibility and his sense of history and place.

4. Macro to Micro – Billy Collins

A good poem, no matter how plain the language, will always have a little secret it is
not telling us … The experience of reading the poem should contain a feeling of
shifting (or being shifted) from the familiar to the strange, from coziness to
disorientation. To reread the poem would be to re-experience that shift. In just
about every poem of mine, we know exactly where we are in the opening lines, but
I would argue that explaining where we are at the end would present more of a
challenge… Billy Collins

Collins major themes of history [personal and public], travel, and the process of
writing, all enmeshed within a playful imagination, remain a constant no matter
what instance he decides to pick up and twist. Jeremy Noel Tod in his review of Nine
Horses for the Guardian writes “ …Sir Philip Sidney, in his Apology for Poetry,
exempted poets from factual truth. But the fictions of Collins's poems are founded
on a further untruth: whimsy. Whimsy affirms a simplified version of ourselves. It

Page | 5
whitewashes the complexities of consciousness, and sells the mental life short.

Characteristic of this whimsy is his poem, The Afterlife, where ruminations of life
after death are undercut with images of a person preparing for bed and waking the
next day giving it the aura of a daydream.
While you were preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,
or rifling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.

They are moving off in all imaginary directions

each according to his own private belief …
You go to the place you always thought you would go,
the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.

It is the egalitarian ‘alcove in the head’ that arrests attention. As a metaphor for the
faculty of imagination that rearranges perceptions and idea s; even in death, the
alcove is alive, vivifying the afterlife. But the alcove is very insular, very shallow.
Even in his poem ‘The Parade’ although people move along together, they’re
nevertheless lost in their own private reverie.

So many of us streaming along—

all of humanity, really—
moving in perfect step,
yet each lost in the room of a private dream.

The city itself, its customs, its traditions, its minutiae are all backdrop for an
ultimately quiet unobtrusive life engaged in an eternal whimsical solipsism – a
reflection and refraction of the self. There is a call for carpe diem but there is also
an acute awareness of the individual’s experience, the faculty to imagine existence,
to contort and personalize history, and to whimsically stay comfortably reclined in
its melancholic warmth.

5. Perverting Prognosis

Wardell MIlann’s exhibition entitled Landscapes! Romance, Recession and

Rottenness, uses floral prints to represent the idyllic conceptions of landscape and
the sentiments associated with them (tranquility, beauty, inspiration, etc). These
Images are tainted by the inclusion of collage from adult magazines – a collision.
The explicit images collide and distribute an unruffled moment, turning a study of
serenity – into an image of perversion; which like the pornographic images, remains
enticing.

The poetry of new-age poet, singer, songwriter Liam Wilkinson too resorts to art as
a purge of his perversions.
Hear of the hate I have for these poems
as they arrive, out of the night
wanting the small bowls of my appreciation
as I put out a sheet of paper
and let them piss all over the place.
Sabeena Mathayas M.A English – 2011 Hans Raj College, University of
Delhi

Having reached an insular world with Collins, perceptions of the inscape of urban
living seems to have come full circle since Pound – not quite obsessed about
sustaining the tenets of ‘beauty’ but a world obsessed with sustaining the illusions
of the self.
In the volatile fabric of an increasingly globalised city, the self seems to be enacting
itself before a keen global audience, probably causing an erosion of the very facets
that define individuality. Art then becomes a refuge, a purgatory for the perversions
of individuality. But it a fine wire between absolute transparency and absolute
privacy.
Is the way forward then, a break away from structures as Pound disastrously
resorted to? Is it a further inversion of the paranoiac semiotic structures that map
the flux of the city? Or is it something entirely new and unforeseen?
However may be the road ahead the cityscape remains the playground. As Italo
Calvino puts it: With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be
dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or,
its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desire and fears, even if the
thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives
deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

Sources:

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Criticism. Ed. Drew Kalasky. Vol. 18. Gale Cengage, 1995. eNotes.com. 2006.
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baudelaire-charles/charles-baudelaire-letter-date-1862
SOURCE: "To Arsène Houssaye," in Paris Spleen, 1869, translated by Louise
Varèse, New Directions, 1947, pp. ix-x.
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city-literature/overviews
SOURCE: "Cities of Mind, Urban Words," in Rumors of Change: Essays of Five
Decades,University of Alabama Press, 1995, pp. 68-84.
[Originally written in 1981, Hassan discusses depictions of urban life from
Plato to Samuel Delany.]

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map

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