Volume 30, Number 1 · February 3, 1983
Looking in on Pushkin
By John Bayley
Robert Frost said: 'Poetry is what gets left out in translation.' That will do quite nicely, but it is like saying that the smell is what defines the cheese. Poetry, like prose, is a bulky, discrete, variable substance. It can be all of a piece or carry a great deal inside it. It can undergo successful transformations. Pope's Iliad is not the same poem as Homer's but it has the same story, the same characters, the same moving moments, and its own particular smell which is of course not the same as Homer's. Frost was making the same fastidious point as A.E. Housman, who thought that poetry was often made to carry a lot of sense, meaning, or morality, and yet remained separate from them, aloof, pure, unmeaningful, to be recognized only by the tears it brought to the eyes or the prickles it raised on the skin.
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