Seven Types of Accuracy

Abstract

IN THE BEGINNING there were Seven Types of Ambiguity, and these mated with the sweet compliant earth and begat the Seven Heavens of modern poetry. And poetry, we all know, is radically different from prose. Prose? The sort of language epitomized, say, by a theorem in geometry. Exact scientific language. Civilized artificial language, removed from our primitive roots. Poetry, as Gary Snyder tells us, goes back to the Paleolithic. Prose only goes back to Plato. Isn't this a rather unlikely affinity: between symbolists, sophisticated creatures like Mallarm? and Rimbaud, on the one hand, and hairy hunters of extinct species of bison on the other? Not at all. For both, poetry is magic: it arises not from the calmly thinking mind, but from the deep, irrational, image-making side of man's being. From the other lobe, as the physiologists say. And therefore poetry?true poetry?is by its very nature deeply ambiguous and inexact about ordinary things. Even as William Empson's brilliantly titled book fades from memory, poetry continues to advance on the course that it helped chart?until at last, in some poets at least (and in their attendant critics), ambiguity and poetry seem to have become synonymous. If some of us plain-spoken chaps find this a little frustrating sometimes, clearly the fault is ours. One way to take issue with these prevailing notions has been to announce one's distaste for the Paleolithic?both the higher Paleolithic and the lower. It?they?were stages, beastly levels, that we have fortu nately outgrown. We can then let poetry, modern poetry, begin when ever we wish. That's the advantage of such a position. The disadvantage is that it may concede too much at the outset to the opposition. After all, there very likely were poets in the Paleolithic; and if they were as good as the artists who left those marvelous paintings on cave walls, they were very good poets indeed. Veritable Homers maybe. And there are poets among peoples still at that stage?the hunting and gathering, pre-agricultural stage?today. There is, for example, the author (the dreamer?) of the Pygmies' Elephant Hunting Song?the Pygmies of what was once the Belgian Congo. They may not be there any more; but when they were there?for the thousands of years they were there?they used to kill elephants with spears. The tribe would gather around an enormous stray from the herd and distract him with a lot of noise. Then before the befuddled beast became enraged, the