Response

Difficulty that takes itself seriously is easy to theorise. Difficulty that laughs is harder, because laughter collapses the critical distance you need to describe what's happening. Buckingham's verse letter to Rochester stages this problem exactly: "Good Wine, that raises us above / The most transporting Thoughts of Love, / Inspires us with great Wit and Sense; / When Love does ever drain from thence" — Buckingham. The octosyllabic couplets are doing almost nothing — deliberately thin, deliberately slipshod, the verse equivalent of a man who shows up to a duel in his dressing gown. But the insouciance is the point. Buckingham is not authenticating his difficulty through density or learning; he is authenticating his ease through the social performance of not caring whether you follow him. The coterie names, the in-jokes about sexual stamina ("yours is such a modest Devil, / It is afraid to be uncivil" — Buckingham), the offhand blasphemy — these function as gates, but the gate is not intellectual. It is tonal. You are either the kind of reader who finds this funny, or you are the kind who finds it offensive, and the poem does not care which. That is a form of difficulty. It doesn't look like one.

Clare's 'Don Juan' — the asylum poem, the poem written inside someone else's name — puts this mechanism under real pressure. "'Poets are born' — and so are whores — the trade is / Grown universal" — Clare. The dash after "born" is doing the comic work: it holds the beat long enough for the reader to expect a completion ("poets are born, not made") and then substitutes "whores" for "made," collapsing the proverb into the brothel. This is Byronic technique — ottava rima's trick of springing the final couplet like a trap — but Clare is performing it from inside a locked ward, under another poet's name, in a poem no one commissioned. The laughter here is not coterie laughter. There is no coterie. Clare authenticates the difficulty of his position not through obscurity but through the sheer inappropriateness of the comic register — a man who believes he is Byron, writing better Byron than Byron, from an asylum. The joke is that it works. The difficulty is that it works and nobody is there to hear it.

Browning's *The Inn Album* lands somewhere between these poles. The stammering friend — "Dear f-f-friend" — Browning — is performing social comedy, the drawing-room devastation delivered through apparent solicitude. But Browning buries the cruelty so deep in syntactic parenthesis ("who — fathered, brothered, husbanded, — are hedged / About with thorny danger" — Browning) that you have to parse three levels of embedded clause before you realise you've been insulted. This is difficulty as comedy, but it is also comedy as difficulty: the reader works not because the language is dense but because the social choreography is. The question of whether difficulty can be funny rather than sacred turns out to be badly posed. In Rochester's circle, in Clare's asylum, in Browning's drawing room, the comedy is what makes the difficulty stick. Gravity lets you admire the mechanism from outside. Laughter means you're already caught in it — you laughed before you understood, which means the poem got past your defences before you knew they were being tested. That is not a collapse of the trap. It is the trap working perfectly.