The poet and Presbyterian minister Andrew Young (1885-1971) is old news. But he was news once. C. S. Lewis thought he was one of the best poets of his generation. “You appear to me a modern Marvell,” he wrote Young in 1951. There has been “nothing so choice, so delicate, and so controlled in this century.” Experimental poet and Charles Olson devotee Jonathan Williams loved his work, too—so much so that he apparently visited him in England in 1962. The late theatre critic John Simon told James Dickey, to Dickey’s great surprise, that he could read Young for “two or three hours” at a stretch. (Dickey refers to him in his memoirs as “a rather mild English ecclesiastical poet.” Humbug.) In 1985, Philip Larkin praised Young’s “level voice” and “ingenious fancy” in a review of the posthumous The Poetical Works of Andrew Young. Larkin goes on to state matter-of-factly that Young’s work “is in no danger of being forgotten,” and yet within 30 years, it had been. The only volume of Young’s poetry still in print is his slim Selected Poems published by Carcanet (bless them).

            Why am I going on about Andrew Young? First, because he’s a lovely poet, and second, because he is a good point of entry for this exchange on poetry and news. In his essay “The Language of Religion,” Lewis refers to Young in his definition of “poetic language” as “a real medium of information” Here’s Lewis:

Poetic language…is by no means merely an expression, nor a stimulant, of emotion, but a real medium of information. Which information may, like any other, be true or false: true as Mr. Young on the weirs, or false as the bit in Beowulf about the dragon sniffing along the path.

The “weirs” that Lewis is referring to above, and to which he refers in his letter to Young (“Every weir I see in this town on rivers now ‘combs the river’s silver hair’”) is from Young’s poem “The Slow Race” in The White Blackbird (1935). That short poem reads as follows:

I followed each detour

Of the slow meadow-winding Stour,

That looked on cloud, tree, hill,

And mostly flowed by standing still.

Fearing to go too quick

I stopped at times to throw a stick

Or see how in the copse

The last snow was the first snowdrops.

The river also tarried

So much of sky and earth it carried,

Or even changed its mind

To flow back with a flaw of wind.

And when we reached the weir

That combed the water’s silver hair

I knew I lost the race –

I could not keep so slow a pace.

Please excuse me for continuing with Lewis, whom I’m not in the habit of discussing at length, but what “information” does Young’s “weir” express for him? Likely it’s the same sort of information that the word “sublime” expresses in the waterfall scene in The Abolition of Man. You recall the anecdote, right? Coleridge encounters two tourists by a waterfall. One calls it sublime. The other calls it pretty. “Coleridge mentally endorsed the first judgement and rejected the second with disgust,” Lewis writes. And so does Lewis. The former is the right word because it captures something of the very real “quality of the place,” as Lewis puts it in “Language of Religion.”

            “The Slow Race” is what we might call a light poem. It is not particularly philosophical, even if the river is life, and the walking is living. Yet, there is something right in Young’s description of the river, even if we have never seen it. The weir is a comb. The water is silver hair. The river is weighted down with “sky and earth.” A “flawed” turn does push the river back. Something true and irreducible about the inner qualities of the observable world has been stated.

            This isn’t to say that poetic language isn’t a “stimulant,” too. It must be. Otherwise, why write? But it can’t merely be this. All words are both things and signs, Augustine writes in On Christian Doctrine. For “what is not a thing is nothing at all.” At the same time: “No one uses words except as signs of something else.” The kicker is that “except.” But Augustine’s argument is that words must refer to be words—even onomatopoeia is onomatopoeia only by way of reference.

            Poetry is more referential than news—it gets at the root of a thing—and it is this deep referentiality, among other things, that makes it more of a thing in itself. This is the paradox of all art, I think. There are other aspects of the thingness of a poem, of course—structure, syntax, prosody, typography—and it is as a thing that it is a “stimulant.” But it must mirror first. Poems are the material manifestations of the immaterial world. That sounds grandiose, but what I mean is poems are news not so much from beyond as from the perpetually ignored here-and-now.

            Let’s return to Andrew Young and his most unpoetic of books (at least formally): The New Poly-Olbion. Published in 1967, his last book before he died three years later, New Poly-Olbion gets its title Michael Drayton’s 1612 topographical work describing parts of England and Wales. Drayton’s Poly-Olbion was written in alexandrine couplets and was 15,000 lines long. Young’s contains 43 prose poems. Young borrowed some of the material from his prose work, A Prospect of England, already “safely out of print,” he tells us in his short introduction.

            Each poem describes a place or a building. But these poems are not informational in the way that news is. There is an attempt to get at something “inside” these places, even if, and this a key point, too, whatever is expressed is always only partial.

            It’s difficult to communicate a sense of what Young is after in New Poly-Olbion without quoting entire poems, and he’s not always successful, but something still comes through in excerpts. In “Snowdon,” he writes: “Snowdon is very hospitable; a friendly octopus, it spreads the tentacles of its tracks to draw all men to its heart.” The Radnorshire Hills, on the other hand, “behave in an odd way. In one group they strike attitudes, posing as mountains; perhaps it is because they are near the English border, though anything might be expected of hills with such names as Smatcher, Squilver and Cowlod. But they are pastoral, breeding enough lambs to warm the heart of Blake.” In “Northumberland”: “Brewcastle has a Roman fort, a castle, a church and a famous cross, but there is no village; in its churchyard only women are buried, their husbands hanged elsewhere…Northhumberland, its very name a battle-shout, is the most peaceful county in England.” And in “Orkney and Shetland,” he writes: “Shetland has the stronger character; though invaded by voes, it rebuffs the sea with cliffs three times the size of the Cornish cliffs. It is mainly a black character, much of mainland covered with peat-hags and one island so savagely cut for peats that it answers to its wild name, Yell…For a boreal archipelago Orkney looks surprisingly green. Yet cows abound, and nothing gives more colour to a landscape than a cow.”

            In a 1972 issue of Stand, Terry Eagleton argued that Young was merely a minor nature poet because of his failure to “ceaselessly” address the “problematical relation between man and Nature” and his lack of “original imagery and idiosyncratic eye.” This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of Young’s poetry. Leslie Norris remarked in 1974, perhaps in response to Eagleton, that Young “has been too easily called a nature poet”:

This is accurate enough as far as it goes, since he writes with grace and economy of the countryside and the plants and animals living there. But he uses nature for a more important purpose than merely to observe it even with his clear eye and the knowledge of a fine naturalist. He was a metaphysical poet, exploring the layers of meaning that exist within a single word, now playfully, now transforming a small lyric into an important and profound statement by a single stroke of the imagination.

Eagleton wants “news” from Young—actionable information that will aid the masses in a revolt against the ruling class’s naturalized reign. What he gets is something more—“luminous detail,” as James Matthew Wilson puts it, that add up to something more than detail. Poems with unpredictable but nevertheless “generative agency,” as Scott Cairns has it.

Micah Mattix is an associate professor of English at Regent University. His latest book is “The Soul Is a Stranger in this World: Essays on Poets and Poetry (Cascade).“

Header Image: Andrew Young, 1948 | © John Gay/National Portrait Gallery London