Baudelaire once wrote that “the best review of a painting might be a sonnet or an elegy”, and it is liberating to think that we can all respond to art with art. This isn’t just because it bypasses the airspace of criticism, but because art liberates something of the artist in ourselves. Baudelaire also knew that thinking needed to be rescued from academicians and from official culture.
Clive James’s verse commentary on Proust would make sense to Baudelaire. As James says in his preface: “I had always thought that the critical essay and the poem were closely related forms.” This is a very old thing to say, but perhaps now, when poetry is so marginal and introspective, is the right new time to be saying it. Part of the problem with saying that art should respond to art is the countervailing belief that great art should be in some way unanswerable. In short, what is the point of a short free-verse book on Á la recherche du temps perdu? Who’s it for? What’s it for? There is also something defiantly retro about the title (A Verse Commentary), evoking those chalk-dust-covered Latin schoolbooks we see in black-and-white films. But there’s a difference: usually the commentary is in prose and it’s longer than the poem; here, the commentary is in verse and it’s shorter (by a ratio of roughly 90:1) than the prose.
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