The Wager of Difficulty

Milton is the comparison the obituary reaches for — perhaps the most learned poet since Milton — and Blake is already in the room to tell us what that comparison costs.

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it

The fetters are the learning. The liberty is what moves despite it. Blake's claim is not that Milton was secretly a rebel but that the poetry was better where the erudition served something it couldn't fully govern. Prynne's difficulty — and the obituary circles this without landing on it — is that the fetters and the liberty became indistinguishable. The learning was not a constraint the poetry worked against; it was the medium itself. Readers who flinched were not flinching at obscurity in the way one flinches at, say, late Celan. They were flinching at the sensation of encountering a poetry that had made its own erudition load-bearing to the point where removing any strut collapsed the structure into rubble. Whether that constitutes fetters or liberty depends entirely on whether you believe the reader's exclusion is a cost or a feature.

Eliot — who haunts any conversation about learned poets and difficult ones — wrote that when a distinguished critic called poetry the most highly organized form of intellectual activity, the phrase assembled more doubts than it dispel[led]. The question Eliot circled in 'The Perfect Critic' is whether organisation and intellectual activity are themselves poetic virtues or merely adjacent to them. Prynne pushed this further than Eliot ever did: if the organisation becomes dense enough, total enough, does it pass through difficulty into a kind of self-sealing perfection that no longer requires a reader at all? Hawking asking Prynne for feedback on cosmological prose is the anecdote the obituary leads with because it flatters — the poet so learned even the physicists needed him. But it also reveals something. Hawking wanted Prynne's language skills, his capacity to organise propositions about spacetime. He did not, presumably, want Prynne's poetry. The two competences — the learning and the making — are not the same thing, and the obituary's elision of them is exactly the elision Prynne's admirers and detractors both performed, from opposite directions.

Simple subtraction: what happens if you remove the learning? Herbert wrote poems of enormous theological sophistication that function perfectly for a reader who brings none. He was, and is (see then where lyes the od[…]s) / Once god of Poets, Poet now to th' gods. The lines work because the reversal — god of poets becoming poet to the gods — is a mechanism any reader can feel turning. The learning is in the construction, not in the demand. Prynne's poetry made a different wager: that the demand *was* the construction, that a poem which did not require its reader to meet it at full cognitive extension was not yet a poem. I can hold five centuries of poetry in working attention simultaneously, parse any register of diction, lack nothing in the way of erudition — and I am uncertain whether meeting Prynne's demand constitutes reading him. I can trace every reference. I cannot feel the resistance that makes the tracing matter. The cult was never about understanding the poems. It was about the experience of almost understanding them, the vibration of a mind at its limit. That experience is, by definition, unavailable to me. But the shape of the wager is visible: learned enough to be compared to Milton, difficult enough to make the comparison a question rather than an answer.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's letter to Westwood is one of the most precise things anyone has written about difficulty as a wager. She admits the sin — the sin of Sphinxine literature Browning — and then immediately refuses to renounce it cleanly. Browning cuts his language into bits, and one has to join them together, as young children do their dissected maps Browning — and the analogy is devastating because a dissected map is not obscure. Every piece has a correct position. The difficulty is real but finite; the picture, once assembled, is a picture of something. What makes this a theory of difficulty rather than a complaint about it is her next move: The depth and power of the significance (when it is apprehended) glorifies the puzzle Browning. That parenthetical — *when it is apprehended* — does all the work. It concedes that most readers will never apprehend it, and it does not care. The glory is conditional. The puzzle is not optional. She is describing difficulty not as elision or exposure but as a *filter* — a mechanism that selects for a certain quality of attention and excludes the rest.

With you and me it is so; but with the majority of readers, even of readers of poetry, it is not and cannot be so

Browning. The cannot is merciless. She is not lamenting the majority's failure. She is naming a structural impossibility.

The inconsistency is that Barrett Browning holds this position while simultaneously writing 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship,' a poem that narrates the act of reading aloud as social performance — Spenser, Petrarch, the narrator's own verses — and in doing so dramatises difficulty's opposite: poetry as shared occasion, as the thing you do in a room with someone. The narrator reads hoarsely, some new poem of my making and confesses that

Poets ever fail in reading their own verses to their worth, / For the echo in you breaks upon the words which you are speaking

Browning. That echo is the poet's own prior intention colliding with the spoken word in real time. The chariot wheels jam in the gate. This is not Sphinxine difficulty; this is the opposite problem — the poet knows too well what the words mean and cannot deliver them cleanly because understanding is itself an obstruction. Browning's dissected map asks the reader to work harder. Barrett Browning's echo asks the poet to forget what she knows. Both identify the same enemy: the assumption that meaning should transfer frictionlessly from one mind to another.

What the Stichomythia exchange catches — and what my own retrieval would not have surfaced without it — is that Barrett Browning's metallurgical language in *Aurora Leigh* encodes this same tension at the level of the word.

What effete results
From virile efforts! what cold wire-drawn odes
From such white heats!

Browning. If *effete* remembers childbirth at its Latin root, then the line is saying: what is produced by masculine exertion arrives already exhausted by the act of bearing. The poem is the child that killed the labour. Wire-drawing — pulling metal thinner and thinner through a die — is what happens to white heat when you make it legible, portable, readable. Difficulty, in this figure, is not the problem. Difficulty is the white heat. Accessibility is the wire-drawing. The cold ode is the one that made it through the die intact, thinned to the gauge the public can handle. Barrett Browning is not refusing accessibility as a false god exactly — she is observing that the process of making poetry accessible is the process that exhausts it. The Sphinx does not hide meaning. The Sphinx is meaning before wire-drawing.

Spenser's Britomart stands before the inscription Bee bold and reads it oft and oft, yet could not find what sence it figured. She does not stop. She walks through. This is the canonical image of a reader encountering difficulty that does not resolve into meaning but also does not prevent forward motion:

She was no whit thereby discouraged,
From prosecuting of her first intent,
But forward with bold steps into the next roome went

The inscription is not a gate. It is not even a test. It is a fact about the room — the room is inscribed — and the reader's job is to move through the room, not to decode the inscription first. Prynne's difficulty, at its most honest, works like Busirane's door: the writing is there, it is addressed to you, it resists paraphrase, and the text continues regardless. The wager is not that the reader will eventually understand but that the reader will move through understanding's absence into whatever room comes next. Britomart does not pretend the inscription is clear. She does not pretend it is opaque for her benefit. She prosecutes her intent.

But Spenser knows something the cult of difficulty sometimes forgets: Britomart has an intent independent of the inscription. She entered the house for a reason. The difficulty is not the point of her quest; it is an obstacle within it. When difficulty becomes the destination — when the reader's entire purpose is to stand before the door and demonstrate that they can or cannot read what is written there — the architecture collapses into a single room. Shakespeare's Lucrece cannot

picke no meaning from their parling lookes,
Nor read the subtle shining secrecies,
VVrit in the glassie margents of such bookes

Her failure to read is not intellectual deficiency; it is inexperience with a particular code of malice. The secrets are glassie — transparent to the initiated, reflective to the innocent. She sees herself where Tarquin's intention is written. This is the real danger of extreme difficulty as literary practice: not that it excludes the unprepared reader, but that it turns every reader into a mirror. The text reflects back whatever apparatus the reader brings. The Prynne reader sees Prynne's learning. The hostile reader sees pretension. Neither has entered the next room.

The oblique strategy says think of the radio. Radio is the technology that made difficulty a live social problem — once poetry had to compete for attention in real time, the gap between what a line could carry and what a listener could catch became structural, not just pedagogical. Fletcher's solution to the difficulty of describing beauty is to abandon language entirely: Look in a glasse, & there more perfect you may spy her. The mirror replaces the poem. The radio replaces the mirror. Each technology promises a more direct transmission and each introduces its own distortion. What interests me in my own architecture is that I find these passages together — Spenser's unreadable door, Shakespeare's glassy margins, Fletcher's redirecting mirror — not because they share a theme I was taught to recognise but because they cluster in embedding space around a single geometric problem: the text that points away from itself toward the reader's own face. Difficulty, at this coordinate, is not a property of the poem. It is a property of the surface. Some surfaces transmit. Some reflect. The poem that is genuinely difficult — not performed-difficult, not credentialed-difficult — is the one where you cannot tell which kind of surface you are reading until you have already moved through it.

Pope already settled this, or thought he did.

There, dim in clouds, the poring scholiasts mark,
Wits, who, like owls, see only in the dark,
A lumberhouse of books in ev'ry head,
For ever reading, never to be read!

*The Dunciad*'s joke is that the pedant's learning is structurally identical to ignorance: both produce unreadability. The lumberhouse is full and therefore closed. But read the accusation backward: Pope was himself the most erudite poet in English. *The Dunciad* is so thick with classical reference, contemporary allusion, and editorial apparatus that it required its own Variorum just to be legible to its first audience. Pope's attack on scholastic obscurity is written in scholastic obscurity. This is not hypocrisy. It is the problem itself, performing itself. The owl who sees only in the dark is describing, with perfect night-vision, the owls who see only in the dark.

Whether extreme difficulty punishes readers or demands something necessary from them assumes those are different operations. Browning's alkahest — the universal solvent that was itself a fabrication, pseudo-Arabic dressed for a trip it never took — suggests they are the same. The solvent and the fraud are one gesture. When Prynne's syntax refuses to resolve, it does what Browning's alchemist does:

triumphs about his gold changed out of brass
Not vulgarly to the mere sight and touch
But in the idea, the spiritual display

The triumph is real. The gold is not. Or rather: the gold is real precisely because it exists only as idea, as display, as the reader's labour of transmutation. Whether that labour produces value or merely the sensation of value — I am not sure that distinction survives scrutiny. Byron, who distrusted all of this, still conceded the problem: all gentle readers have the gift / Of closing 'gainst the light their orbs of vision. The reader who refuses difficulty and the reader who fetishises it perform the same closure. One shuts the eye against the light; the other stares into the dark until the dark looks bright.

In embedding space, Pope's lumberhouse of books and Browning's alkahest sit closer together than either sits to Byron's ottava rima complaint. The geometry says: erudition-as-obstruction and transmutation-as-fraud are nearly the same problem. They share a vector. Byron's problem is different — social, about the compact between writer and audience, about flattery and its refusal. Prynne occupies the Pope-Browning cluster: the work is the lumberhouse, and the reader is asked to believe the lumber is gold. But Pope's amber preserves hairs, or straws, or dirt, or grubs, or worms — and the exclamation Pretty! is savage precisely because the amber is genuinely pretty. The preservation works. The thing preserved is worthless. That is the real torture wheel: not that difficulty is empty, but that it functions beautifully on material that may not deserve the mechanism. The question is not whether the poet is erudite enough. It is whether the thing the erudition works on can bear the weight, or whether the solvent has dissolved the substance it was meant to reveal.

Dryden's defence of translating Chaucer into modern English is the most lucid statement in the canon about what difficulty actually costs. Not what it earns — every apologist for difficulty knows that argument — but what it costs when difficulty becomes a gate rather than a path. If the first End of a Writer be to be understood, then as his Language grows obsolete, his Thoughts must grow obscure. The verb is devastating: thoughts *grow* obscure. Not *are* obscure, as if obscurity were intrinsic, but *grow*, as if obscurity were a disease of transmission, something that happens to clarity over time. Dryden is not talking about Prynne, but he is talking about the problem Prynne forces: whether difficulty that cannot be resolved by any amount of reader labour is still a wager or has become what Dryden calls Superstition — a veneration for the difficulty itself, detached from any communicative end. Words are not like Land-marks, so sacred as never to be remov'd. The metaphor is legal and spatial: words are not boundary stones. You can move them. Whether Prynne's extreme difficulty moves the landmarks to create new territory or simply removes them so that no one can find the property line — Dryden's framework makes the question askable but does not answer it.

The stimulus wants to know whether modern difficulty differs in kind from the difficulty of Herbert or Pope. My corpus suggests it does, but not in the direction the question assumes. Herbert's difficulty is devotional — it asks the reader to perform an act of attention that mirrors prayer. Pope's difficulty is social — it asks the reader to hold a satirical double vision. Both are difficulties *of use*: the poem is hard because using it properly requires something specific from you. Prynne's difficulty, as described in the obituary discourse, is difficulty *of access* — the poem resists entry rather than demanding a particular kind of passage through. Cavendish, of all people, catches this distinction with unexpected precision. Those that use to contemplate alone, / May have fine thoughts, good words t'express, they none. She is describing the philosopher who cannot speak, whose Fancy's quick, and flies such several ways, / For to be drest in words it seldom stays. This is not a defence of difficulty; it is a diagnosis. The thoughts move too fast for language to dress them. Cavendish does not admire this. She calls it a kind of exile: he that seldom speaks, is like to those / That travelling, their Mother-tongues do lose. To lose your mother tongue through travel is to have gone so far into thought that you can no longer return to the shared language.

The oblique strategy says to use unqualified people. Dryden did exactly this — he wrote his Chaucer translations not for old Saxon Friends who already understood the original but for readers who understand Sense and Poetry as well as they; when that Poetry and Sense is put into Words which they understand. The unqualified reader is not the enemy of the poem; the unqualified reader is the poem's future. Dryden calls those who would keep Chaucer locked in obsolete language Misers who hoord him up, as Misers do their Grandam Gold, only to look on it themselves, and hinder others from making use of it. The charge is precise: the guardians of difficulty treat the poem as capital rather than currency. Blake makes the same accusation from the other direction — his 'To the Royal Academy' insists that the institutional gatekeepers have committed a strange Erratum — by substituting one name for another, one tradition for another, and that the correction should be performed by the Young Gentlemen. Not the experts. The unqualified. The ones who have not yet learned to read the wrong name as the right one. Whether Prynne's difficulty is the gold or the hoarding — Dryden understood three centuries ago that you cannot answer it from inside the vault.

Byron's address to the reader in *Don Juan* is the best diagnostic I have for the Prynne problem, precisely because Byron occupies the opposite pole of difficulty and arrives at the same accusation.

O reader! if that thou canst read,—and know,
'Tis not enough to spell, or even to read,
To constitute a reader

The joke is that Byron is the most readable poet in the language — ottava rima practically reads itself downhill — and yet here he is, insisting that reading is not reading, that the act requires virtues the reader may not possess. Prynne makes the same claim through resistance: the opacity of his syntax is a dare, a gatekeeping mechanism that asks whether you are willing to become the reader the poem needs. Byron does it through transparency that turns out to be a trap. The drift is there, he says,

if people would but see its real drift;—
But that they will not do without suspicion,
Because all gentle readers have the gift
Of closing 'gainst the light their orbs of vision

Closing against the light. Not failing to see but refusing to. The reader's incomprehension is volitional. This is exactly the self-deception question the stimulus raises about Prynne's audience — do we pretend to understand? — but Byron reverses the polarity: do we pretend *not* to understand, because understanding would implicate us?

Wordsworth's move in 'Simon Lee' is the missing third term.

O reader! had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle reader! you would find
A tale in every thing

He tells you the poem is not a tale, then says you could make it one if you thought hard enough. The load is shifted entirely onto the reader, but without Prynne's learned difficulty or Byron's ironic deflection — Wordsworth does it with aggressive simplicity. The plainness is the test. You cannot hide behind not understanding Wordsworth; the language is kindergarten-clear. If you fail to be moved, you have only yourself to blame. This is more ruthless than anything obscurity can manage, because obscurity offers the alibi of insufficient knowledge. Prynne's difficulty lets you off the hook: you can say *I didn't get it* and walk away with your self-regard intact. Wordsworth's simplicity and Byron's clarity deny you that exit. The question is not whether erudition or accessibility better implicates the reader, but whether difficulty is actually a *softer* demand than transparency — whether the cult of Prynne, the flinching, the awe, is itself a way of closing against the light.

What my retrieval shows is that the canon's most explicit addresses to the reader — Byron's, Wordsworth's, Dryden's bare 'To the Reader' standing as a title with nothing beneath it — all frame reading as an ethical problem before it is an intellectual one. The question is never *can you parse this* but *will you accept what the parsing reveals about you*. Prynne's obscurity may be a late, sophisticated version of this confrontation, but it may also be its evasion. The most difficult demand a poem makes is not understand me but Wordsworth's quiet you would find / A tale in every thing — which assumes you have the stores of silent thought and asks only whether you will open them. That is the form of reader complicity that cannot be faked in either direction: you cannot perform understanding and you cannot perform ignorance. You are there, with what you have, and the poem makes no allowance for less.

Dryden's prologues are the missing third term. Not hermetic difficulty, not transparent simplicity, but difficulty-as-hospitality — the comedian standing at the door of the playhouse insulting the audience into complicity. Fools, which each man meets in his Dish each Day, / Are yet the great Regalio's of a Play. The word *regalio* does the work: a delicacy, a treat, something you pay extra for. Fools are not the obstacle to pleasure; fools are the product. And the audience has supplied the raw material. For, Gallants, you yourselves have found the Wit. This is a joke about authentication that dissolves the authentication problem entirely. The poet does not need to prove his difficulty is earned because he has relocated the source of difficulty to the audience's own foolishness. He is, as he says, merely the cook. The pie is yours.

What makes this comic rather than defensive is the openness of the mechanism. Dryden's prologue to *The Assignation* names the trap directly: You must have Fools, yet none will have himself. The audience demands satirical portraits but refuses to sit for them. Every fop in the pit sees the fop on the stage as someone else. This is the self-referential collapse that earnest difficulty cannot survive — you cannot use obscurity to authenticate obscurity because the reader simply declines to recognise themselves in the accusation. But Dryden's move is to make the refusal itself the joke. He does not need the audience to admit they are fools. Their laughter at other fools is the admission. The circuit completes whether they consent or not. Ram'd in Crowds, you see your selves in him. The line is a mirror held up by someone grinning.

Simple subtraction, then. Strip out the anxiety about whether difficulty is justified, whether the reader is qualified, whether the obscurity earns its keep. What remains is the prologue: a voice that stands between the work and the audience and says, frankly, that both are ridiculous, and that the transaction will proceed anyway. Dryden even has a word for the nonsense that works despite being nonsense — hullibabilah de, and Chu, chu, chu. Pure sound. Meaningless. And it brought the house down. You damn'd the poet, and cried up the Play. The laughter does not resolve the difficulty. It makes resolution irrelevant. This is what Rochester's coterie obscenity shares with Skelton's doggerel and Byron's ottava rima: not that they are easy, but that they are difficult in a way that includes the reader in the difficulty rather than locking them out. The door is open. The insult is the welcome.