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Title: The Future of English Poetry
Author: Edmund Gosse
Release Date: May 22, 2010 [eBook #32477]
Language: English
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The English Association
Pamphlet No. 25
THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH POETRY
by
EDMUND GOSSE, C.B.
June, 1913
A copy of this pamphlet is supplied to all full members of the
Association. They can obtain further copies (price 1_s._) on application
to the Secretary, Mr. A. V. Houghton, Imperial College Union, South
Kensington, London, S.W.
The English Association
Pamphlet No. 25
THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH POETRY
by
EDMUND GOSSE, C.B.
June, 1913
THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH POETRY
J'ai vu le cheval rose ouvrir ses ailes d'or,
Et, flairant le laurier que je tenais encor,
Verdoyant à jamais, hier comme aujourd'hui,
Se cabrer vers le Jour et ruer vers la Nuit.
HENRI DE RÉGNIER.
In venturing this afternoon to address an audience accustomed to listen to
those whose positive authority is universally recognized, and in taking
for my theme a subject not, like theirs, distinct in its definitions or
consecrated by tradition and history, I am aware that I perform what you
may, if you choose, call an act of blameworthy audacity. My subject is
chimerical, vague, and founded on conjectures which you may well believe
yourselves at least as well fitted as I am to propound. Nevertheless, and
in no rash or paradoxical spirit, I invite you to join with me in some
reflections on what is the probable course of English poetry during, let
us say, the next hundred years. If I happen to be right, I hope some of
the youngest persons present will say, when I am long turned to dust, what
an illuminating prophet I was. If I happen to be wrong, why, no one will
remember anything at all about the matter. In any case we may possibly be
rewarded this afternoon by some agreeable hopes and by the contemplation
of some pleasant analogies.
Our title takes for granted that English poetry[1] will continue, with
whatever fluctuations, to be a living and abiding thing. This I must
suppose that you all accede to, and that you do not look upon poetry as an
art which is finished, or the harvest of classic verse as one which is
fully reaped and garnered. That has been believed at one time and another,
in various parts of the globe. I will mention one instance in the history
of our own time: a quarter of a century ago, the practice of writing verse
was deliberately abandoned in the literatures of the three Scandinavian
countries, but particularly in that of Norway, where no poetry, in our
sense, was written from about 1873 to 1885. It almost died out here in
England in the middle of the fifteenth century; it ran very low in France
at the end of the Middle Ages. But all these instances, whether ancient or
modern, of the attempt to prove prose a sufficing medium for all
expression of human thought have hitherto failed, and it is now almost
certain that they will more and more languidly be revived, and with less
and less conviction.
[1] I here use the word 'Poetry' (as Wordsworth did) as opposed to
the word 'Prose', and synonymous with metrical composition.
It was at one of the deadliest moments in the life of the art in England
that George Gascoigne remarked, in his 'Epistle to the Reverend Divines'
(1574) that 'It seemeth unto me that in all ages Poetry hath been not only
permitted, but also it hath been thought a right good thing'. Poetry has
occupied the purest and the fieriest minds in all ages, and you will
remember that Plato, who excluded the poets from his philosophical Utopia,
was nevertheless an exquisite writer of lyrical verse himself. So, to come
down to our own day, Ibsen, who drove poetry out of the living language of
his country, had been one of the most skilful of prosodical proficients.
Such instances may allay our alarm. There cannot be any lasting force in
arguments which remind us of the pious confessions of a redeemed burglar.
It needs more than the zeal of a turncoat to drive Apollo out of
Parnassus.
There will, therefore, we may be sure, continue to be English poetry
written and printed. Can we form any idea of the probable character of it?
There exists, in private hands, a picture by that ingenious water-colour
painter of the late eighteenth century, William Gilpin. It is very
fantastic, and means what you like, but it represents Pegasus, the horse
of the Muses, careering in air on the vast white arc of his wings, against
a sky so dark that it must symbolize the obscure discourse of those who
write in prose. You are left quite doubtful whether he will strike the
rocky terrace in the foreground with his slender, silver hooves, or will
swoop down into the valley below, or will soar to heaven and out of sight.
You are left by the painter in a pleasant uncertainty, but Hippocrene may
break out anywhere, and of the vivacious courser himself all that we can
be sure of is that we are certain to see him alighting before us when we
least expect him.
We may put our trust in the persistence of Pegasus through his apparently
aimless gyrations, and in the elasticity of the poetical spirit, and yet
acknowledge that there are difficulties in the way of believing that verse
will continue to be written in the English language for a quite indefinite
period. Perhaps we may as well face one or two of these difficulties at
once. The principal danger, then, to the future of poetry seems to me to
rest in the necessity of freshness of expression. Every school of verse is
a rising and a breaking wave. It rises, because its leaders have become
capable of new forms of attractive expression; its crest is some writer,
or several writers, of genius, who combine skill and fire and luck at a
moment of extreme opportuneness; and then the wave breaks, because later
writers cannot support the ecstasy, and only repeat formulas which have
lost their attractiveness. Shirley would have been a portent, if he had
flourished in 1595 and had written then as he did in 1645. Erasmus Darwin
would be one of the miracles of prosody if 'The Loves of the Plants' could
be dated 1689 instead of 1789. There must always be this fluctuation, this
rise and fall in value, and what starts each new wave mounting out of the
trough of the last is the instinctive demand for freshness of expression.
_Cantate Domino_ is the cry of youth, sing a _new_ song unto the Lord.
But with the superabundant circulation of language year after year, week
after week, by a myriad careful scribes, the possibilities of freshness
grow rarer and rarer. The obvious, simple, poignant things seem to have
all been said. It is not merely that the actual poems, like Gray's
'Elegy', and much of 'Hamlet', and some of Burns's songs, have been
manipulated so often, and put to such pedestrian uses, that they are like
rubbed coins, and begin to lose the very features of Apollo and the script
of the Muses, but that the road seems closed to future bards who wish to
speak with simplicity of similar straightforward things. In several of the
literatures of modern Europe--those which began late, or struggled long
against great disadvantages--it is still possible to produce pleasure by
poems which describe primitive emotions in perfectly limpid language. But
with us in England, I confess that it seems to me certain that whatever we
retain, we can never any more have patience to listen to a new shepherd
piping under the hawthorn-tree. Each generation is likely to be more
acutely preoccupied than the last with the desire for novelty of
expression. Accordingly, the sense of originality, which is so fervently
demanded from every new school of writers, will force the poets of the
future to sweep away all recognized impressions. The consequence must be,
I think,--I confess so far as language is concerned that I see no escape
from this,--that the natural uses of English and the obvious forms of our
speech will be driven from our national poetry, as they are even now so
generally being driven.
No doubt, in this condition, the originality of those who do contrive to
write strongly and clearly will be more vigorously evident than ever. The
poets will have to gird up their loins and take their sword in their
hands. That wise man of the eighteenth century, to whom we never apply
without some illuminating response, recommends that 'Qui saura penser de
lui-même et former de nobles idées, qu'il prenne, s'il peut, la manière
et le tour élevé des maîtres'. These are words which should inspire every
new aspirant to the laurel. 'S'il peut'; you see that Vauvenargues puts it
so, because he does not wish that we should think that such victories as
these are easy, or that any one else can help us to produce them. They are
not easy, and they will be made more and more hard by the rubbed-out,
conventionalized coinage of our language.
In this matter I think it probable that the little peoples, and the
provinces which cultivate a national speech, will long find a great
facility in expressing themselves in verse. I observe that it has recently
been stated that Wales, which has always teemed with vernacular poets, has
never possessed so many as she does at this time. I am debarred by what
Keats called 'giant ignorance' from expressing an opinion on the subject,
but I presume that in Welsh the resources of language are far from being
so seriously exhausted as we have seen that they are in our own
complicated sphere, where the cultivation of all the higher forms of
poetic diction through five centuries has made simple expression extremely
difficult. I am therefore ready to believe that in Welsh, as in Gaelic and
in Erse, the poets have still wide fields of lyric, epic, and dramatic art
untilled. We have seen, in the latter half of the nineteenth century,
Provençal poets capable of producing simple and thrilling numbers which
are out of the reach of their sophisticated brethren who employ the worn
locutions of the French language.
In new generations there is likely, we may be sure, to occur less
description of plain material objects, because the aspect of these has
already received every obvious tribute. So also there can hardly fail to
be less precise enumeration of the primitive natural emotions, because
this also has been done already, and repeated to satiety. It will not any
longer satisfy to write
The rose is red, the violet blue,
And both are sweet, and so are you.
Reflections of this order were once felt to be exquisite, and they were so
still as lately as when Blake and Wordsworth were young. But it is quite
impossible that we should ever go back to them. Future poets will seek to
analyse the redness of the rose, and will scout, as a fallacious
observation, the statement that the violet is blue. All schemes of art
become mechanical and insipid, and even their _naïvetés_ lose their
savour. Verse of excellent quality, in this primitive manner, can now be
written to order by any smart little boy in a Grammar-school.
We have agreed, however, to believe that poetry, as an art, in one shape
or another, will escape from the bankruptcy of language, and that Pegasus,
with whatever strange and unexpected gambollings, will continue to
accompany us. But of one thing we may be quite sure, that it will only be
at the cost of much that we at present admire and like that the continuity
of the art of verse will be preserved. If I could suddenly present to you
some characteristic passages of the best English poetry of 1963, I doubt
extremely whether I should be able to persuade you of their merits. I am
not sure that you would understand what the poet intended to convey, any
more than the Earl of Surrey would have understood the satires of Donne,
or Coleridge have enjoyed the odes of George Meredith. Young minds
invariably display their vitality by attacking the accepted forms of
expression, and then they look about for novelties, which they cultivate
with what seems to their elders to be extravagance. Before we attempt to
form an idea, however shadowy, of what poetry will be in the future, we
must disabuse ourselves of the delusion that it will be a repetition of
what is now produced and accepted. Nor can we hope by any exercise of
philosophy to do away with the embarrassing and painful, but after all
perhaps healthful antagonism between those who look forward and those who
live in the past. The earnestness expended on new work will always render
young men incapable of doing justice to what is a very little older than
themselves; and the piety with which the elderly regard what gave them
full satisfaction in their days of emotional freshness will always make it
difficult for them to be just to what seems built on the ruins of what
they loved.
If there is any feature which we can scarcely be wrong in detecting in our
vision of the poetry of the future it is an elaboration which must follow
on the need for novelty of which I have spoken. I expect to find the
modern poet accepting more or less consciously an ever-increasing symbolic
subtlety of expression. If we could read his verses, which are still
unwritten, I feel sure that we should consider them obscure. That is to
say, we should find that in his anxiety not to repeat what had been said
before him, and in his horror of the trite and the superficial, he will
achieve effect and attach interest _obscuris vera involvens_--wrapping the
truth in darkness. The 'darkness' will be relative, as his own
contemporaries, being more instructed and sophisticated than we are, will
find those things transparent, or at least translucent, which remain
opaque enough to us. And, of course, as epithets and adjectives that seem
fresh to us will smell of the inkhorn to him, he will have to exert his
ingenuity to find parallel expressions which would startle us by their
oddity if we met with them now.
A danger, therefore, which the poets of the future will need all their
ingenuity to avoid, will be the cultivation of a patent artificiality, a
forcing of the note until it ceases to rouse an echo in the human heart.
There will be a determination to sweep away all previously recognized
impressions. Affectation, that is to say the obtaining of an effect by
illegitimate means, is an offence against the Muses which they never fail
to avenge by oblivion or by a curtailed and impeded circulation. We may
instructively examine the history of literature with special attention to
this fault, and we find it in all cases to have been fatal. It was fatal
to the poetry of Alexandria, which closed, as you know, in an obscurity to
which the title of Lycophrontic darkness has been given from the name of
its most extravagant exponent. It was fatal to several highly-gifted
writers of the close of the Elizabethan period, who endeavoured to give
freshness to an outworn scheme of poetic ornament; I need only remind you
of the impenetrable cloud or fog, by Cyril Tourneur, called _The
Transform'd Metamorphosis_, and of the cryptic rhymed dramas of Lord
Brooke. It has not been fatal, I hope, but I think desperately perilous to
a beautiful talent of our own age, the amiable Stéphane Mallarmé. Nothing,
I feel, is more dangerous to the health of poetry than the praise given by
a group of irresponsible disciples to verse which transfers commonplace
thought to an exaggerated, violent, and involved scheme of diction, and I
confess that I should regard the future of poetry in this country with
much more apprehension than I do, if I believed that the purely learned
poet, the prosodical pedant, was destined to become paramount amongst us.
That would, indeed, threaten the permanence of the art; and it is for that
reason that I look with a certain measure of alarm on the excess of
verbiage about poetry which attends not merely criticism, which matters
little, but the actual production and creation. I am confident, however,
that the common sense of readers will always bring about a reaction in
favour of sanity and lucidity.
One great objection to the introduction of a tortured and affected style
into verse-writing is the sacrifice which has to be made of that dignity
and sweetness, that suave elevation, which marks all successful
masterpieces. Perhaps as difficult a quality to attain as any which the
poetry of the future will be called upon to study is stateliness, what the
French call 'la vraie hauteur'. This elevation of style, this dignity, is
foreign to democracies, and it is hard to sustain it in the rude air of
modern life. It easily degenerates, as Europe saw it degenerate for a
century and a half, into pomposity relieved by flatness. It is apt to
become a mere sonorous rhetoric, a cultivation of empty fine phrases. If
we examine the serious poetry of the end of the seventeenth and the
greater part of the eighteenth century,--especially in the other countries
of Europe, for England was never without some dew on the
threshing-floor,--if we examine it in France, for instance, between Racine
and André Chénier, we are obliged to recognize that it was very rarely
both genuine and appropriate. The Romantic Revival, which we are beginning
ungratefully to decry, did at least restore to poetry the sense of a
genuine stateliness of expression, which once more gave it the requisite
dignity, and made it a vehicle for the vital and the noble sentiments of
humanity.
Let us now turn, in our conjectural survey, from the form to the subjects
with which the poetry of the future is likely to be engaged. Here we are
confronted with the fact that, if we examine the whole of history, we see
that the domain of verse has been persistently narrowed by the incursions
of a more and more powerful and wide-embracing prose. At the dawn of
civilization poetry had it all its own way. If instruction was desired
upon any sphere of human knowledge or energy, the bard produced it in a
prosodical shape, combining with the dignity of form the aid which the
memory borrowed from a pattern or a song. Thus you conceive of a Hesiod
before you think of a Homer, and the earliest poetry was probably of a
purely didactic kind. As time went on, prose, with its exact pedestrian
method, took over more and more completely the whole province of
information, but it was not until the nineteenth century that the last
strongholds of the poetry of instruction were stormed. I will, if you
please, bring this home to you by an example which may surprise you.
The subject which I have taken the liberty of discussing with you this
afternoon has not often occupied the serious attention of critics. But it
was attempted, by no less a person than Wordsworth, more than a hundred
years ago. I make no excuse for repeating to you the remarkable passage in
which he expressed his convictions in the famous Preface of 1800:
If the labours of men of science,--Wordsworth said,--should ever
create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition,
and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will
sleep then no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the
steps of the Man of Science, not only in those general indirect
effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the
midst of the objects of the science itself. The remotest discoveries
of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper
objects of the Poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if
the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us,
and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers
of these respective sciences, thus familiarized to men, shall be
ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will
lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome
the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the
household of man.
It is plain, then, that, writing in the year 1800, Wordsworth believed
that a kind of modified and sublimated didactic poetry would come into
vogue in the course of the nineteenth century. He stood on the threshold
of a new age, and he cast his vatic gaze across it much in the same spirit
as we are trying to do to-day. But if any warning were needed to assure us
of the vanity of prophesying, it would surely be the error of one so
sublimely gifted and so enriched with the spoils of meditation. The belief
of Wordsworth was that the poetry of the future would deal, in some
vaguely inspired fashion, with the discoveries of science. But when we
look back over the field of 113 years, how much do we find our national
poetry enriched with ore from the mines of mineralogy or botany or
chemistry? It is difficult to see that there has been so much as an effort
made to develop poetry in this or in any similar direction. Perhaps the
nearest approach to what Wordsworth conceived as probable was attempted by
Tennyson, particularly in those parts of _In Memoriam_ where he dragged in
analogies to geological discoveries and the biological theories of his
time. Well, these are just those parts of Tennyson which are now most
universally repudiated as lifeless and jejune.
Wordsworth did not confine himself to predicting a revival of didactic
poetry, the poetry of information, such as, in a very crude form, had
prevailed all over Europe in his own childhood, but he conceived a wide
social activity for writers of verse. He foresaw that the Poet would 'bind
together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it
is spread over the whole earth, and over all time'. I suppose that in
composing those huge works, so full of scattered beauties, but in their
entirety so dry and solid, 'The Excursion' and 'The Prelude', he was
consciously attempting to inaugurate this scheme of a wide and
all-embracing social poetry. Nor do I suppose that efforts of this kind
will ever cease to be made. We have seen a gifted writer in whom the
memory is perhaps even more surprisingly developed than the imagination,
employ the stores of his experience to enrich a social poetry the elements
of which, _prima facie_, should be deeply attractive to us all. But I do
not know that the experiments of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, brilliant as they
are, are calculated to encourage the poets of the future to pursue their
lyric celebration of machinery and sociology and the mysteries of natural
religion. Already is it not that portion of his work which we approach
with most languor, in spite of its originality and its outlook upon 'the
vast empire of human society'? And lesser poets than he who seek for
popularity by such violent means are not, I think, rewarded by the
distinguished loyalty of the best readers. We are startled by their
novelty, and we admire them for the moment; but when, a few years later,
we return to them, we are apt to observe with distress how
their lean and flashy songs
Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw.
If, therefore, I venture upon a prophecy, where all the greater prophets,
my predecessors, have failed, it is to suggest that the energy of future
poets will not be largely exercised on themes of this intrepid social
character, but that as civilization more and more tightly lays hold upon
literature, and excludes the purest form of it from one province after
another, poetry will, in its own defence, cultivate more and more what
Hazlitt calls 'a mere effusion of natural sensibility'. Hazlitt used the
phrase in derision, but we may accept it seriously, and not shrink from
adopting it. In most public remarks about current and coming literature in
the abstract, I marvel at the confidence with which it is taken for
granted that the sphere of interest occupied by writers of the imagination
is sure to grow wider and wider. It is expected to embrace the world, to
take part in a universal scheme of pacification, to immortalize imperial
events, to be as public as possible. But surely it is more and more
clearly proved that prose is the suitable medium for such grandiose themes
as these. Within the last year our minds have been galvanized into
collective sympathy by two great sensations of catastrophe, each case
wearing the most thrilling form that tragedy can take in the revolt of
nature against the feverish advances of mankind. I suppose we may consider
the destruction of the _Titanic_ and the loss of Captain Scott's
expedition as two absolutely typical examples of what is thought by
journalists to be fitting material for poetry. Yet by common consent,
these tragic occurrences did not awaken our numerous poets to any really
remarkable effort, lyrical or elegiac. No ode or threnody could equal in
vibrating passion Captain Scott's last testament. These are matters in
which the fullness of a wholly sincere statement in prose does not
require, does not even admit, the introduction of the symbol. The impact
of the sentiments of horror and pity is too sudden and forcible.
My own view is that, whether to its advantage or not, the poetry of the
future is likely to be very much occupied with subjects, and with those
alone, which cannot be expressed in the prose of the best-edited
newspaper. In fact, if I were to say what it is which I think coming poets
will have more and more to be on their guard against, I should define it
as a too rigid determination never to examine subjects which are of
collective interest to the race at large. I dread lest the intense
cultivation of the Ego, in minutest analysis and microscopical observation
of one's self, should become the sole preoccupation of the future poet. I
will not tell you that I dread lest this should be one of his principal
preoccupations, for that would be to give way to a cheery piece of
mid-Victorian hypocrisy which would be unworthy of you and of me alike.
The time is past when intelligent persons ought to warn writers of the
imagination not to cultivate self-analysis, since it is the only safeguard
against the follies of an unbridled romanticism. But although the ivory
tower offers a most valuable retreat, and although the poets may be
strongly recommended to prolong their _villeggiatura_ there, it should not
be the year-long habitation of any healthy intelligence.
I do not question that the closing up of the poetic field, the depending
more and more completely for artistic effect upon an 'effusion of natural
sensibility', will isolate the poet from his fellows. He will be tempted,
in the pursuit of the symbol which illustrates his emotion, to draw
farther and farther away from contact with the world. He will wrap his
singing-robes not over his limbs only, but over his face, and treat his
readers with exemplary disdain. We must be prepared, or our successors
must, to find frequently revealed the kind of poet who not merely sees
nothing superior to himself, but nothing except himself. I am not
concerned to say that this will be unfortunate or blameworthy; the
moralist of the future must attend to that. But I can believe that this
unyielding and inscrutable attitude may produce some fine artistic
effects. I can believe that both intensity and dignity may be gained by
this sacrifice of the plainer human responsibilities, although I am not
prepared to say at what loss of other qualities. It is clear that such a
writer will not allow the public to dictate to him the nature or form of
his lyric message, and he will have to depend for success entirely on the
positive value of his verse.
The isolation of the poets of the future is likely to lead them to band
themselves more closely together for mutual protection against the
reasonable world. The mystery of verse is like other abstruse and
recondite mysteries,--it strikes the ordinary fleshly man as absurd. The
claim of the poet on human sympathy, if we regard it merely from the
world's standpoint, is gratuitous, vague, and silly. In an entirely
sensible and well-conducted social system, what place will there be for
the sorrows of Tasso and Byron, for the rage of Dante, for the misanthropy
of Alfred de Vigny, for the perversity of Verlaine, for the rowdiness of
Marlowe?--the higher the note of the lyre, the more ridiculous is the
attitude of the lyrist, and the coarse public applauds the violence of
Diogenes when he tramples on the pride of the poets with a greater pride
than theirs. I cannot help thinking that this attitude of the sacred bard,
maundering from the summit of his ivory tower, and hollowed out and made
haggard by a kind of sublime moral neuralgia, will have to be abandoned as
a relic of the dead romantic past. So far as it is preserved by the poets
of the future it will be peculiar to those monasteries of song, those
'little clans', of which I am now about to speak as likely more and more
to prevail.
In France, where the interest in poetry has, during the last generation,
been far more keen and more abundant than anywhere else in the world, we
already see a tendency to the formation of such experimental houses of
song. There has been hitherto no great success attending any one of these
bodies, which soon break up, but the effort to form them is perhaps
instructive. I took considerable interest in the Abbaye de Creteil, which
was a collectivist experiment of this kind. It was founded in October
1906, and it was dissolved in consequence of internal dissensions in
January 1908. It was an attempt to create, in defiance of the public, in
contemptuous disregard of established 'literary opinion', a sort of
prosodical chapel or school of poetry. It was to be the active centre of
energy for a new generation, and there were five founders, each of whom
was highly ambitious to distinguish himself in verse. At Creteil there was
a printing-press in a great park, so that the members should be altogether
independent of the outside world. The poets were to cultivate the garden
and keep house with the sale of the produce. When not at work, there were
recitations, discussions, exhibitions of sketches, for they were mixed up
with the latest vagaries of the Cubists and Post-impressionists.
This particular experiment lasted only fifteen months, and I cannot
conscientiously say that I think it was in any way a success. No one among
the abbatical founders of Creteil had, to be quite frank, any measure of
talent in proportion to his daring. They were involved in vague and
nebulous ideas, mixed up with what I am afraid I must call charlatans, the
refuse and the wreckage of other arts. Yet I consider that it is
interesting to note that the lay monks of Creteil were in a sense correct
when they announced that they were performing 'a heroic act', an act
symbolical of the way in which poetry would in the future disdainfully
protect itself against the invasion of common sense, the dreadful impact
of the sensual world. I think you will do well, if you wish to pursue the
subject of our conjectural discourse, to keep your eye on this tendency to
a poetical collectivism. We have not noticed much evidence of it yet in
England, but it is beginning to stir a good deal in France and Italy.
After all, the highest poetry is a mysterious thing, like the practices of
the Society of Rosicrucians, of whom it was said, 'Our House of the Holy
Ghost, though a hundred thousand men should have looked upon it, is yet
doomed to remain untouched, imperturbable, out of sight, and unrevealed to
the whole godless world for ever.' If I am sure of anything, it is that
the Poets of the Future will look upon massive schemes of universal
technical education, and such democratic reforms as those which are now
occupying the enthusiasm and energy of our friend the Lord Chancellor, as
peculiarly hateful expositions of the godlessness of a godless world.
To turn to another branch of our subject, it appears to me very likely
that sexual love may cease to be the predominant theme in the lyrical
poetry of the future. Erotic sentiment has perhaps unduly occupied the
imaginative art of the past. In particular, the poets of the late
nineteenth century were interested to excess in love. There was a sort of
obsession of sex among them, as though life presented no other phenomenon
worthy of the attention of the artist. All over Europe, with the various
tincture of differing national habit and custom, this was the mark of the
sophistication of the poets, sometimes delicately and craftily exhibited,
but often, as in foreign examples which will easily occur to your memory,
rankly, as with the tiresome persistence of a slightly stale perfume, an
irritating odour of last night's opopanax or vervain. And this is the one
point, almost I think the only point, in which the rather absurd and
certainly very noisy and hoydenish manifestoes of the so-called Futurists,
led by M. Marinetti and his crew of iconoclasts, are worthy of our serious
attention. It is a plank in their platform, you know, to banish eroticism,
of the good kind and of the bad, from the practice of the future. I do
not, to say the truth, find much help for the inquiry we have taken up
to-day, in the manifestoes of these raucous young gentlemen, who, when
they have succeeded in flinging the ruins of the leprous palaces of
Venice into its small stinking canals, will find themselves hard put to it
to build anything beautiful in the place of them. But in their reaction
against 'the eternal feminine', they may, I think, very possibly be
followed by the serious poets of the future.
Those who have watched rather closely the recent developments of poetry in
England have been struck with the fact that it tends more and more in the
direction of the dramatic, not necessarily in the form of what is known as
pure drama, particularly adapted for representation to listening audiences
behind the footlights, but in the increased study of life in its
exhibitions of energy. This may seem to be inconsistent with the tendency,
of which I spoke just now, to withdraw from the world itself, either into
an egotistical isolation or into some cloistered association of more or
less independent figures united only in a rebellious and contemptuous
disdain of public opinion. But the inconsistency may very well be one
solely in appearance. It may well happen that the avoidance of all
companionship with the stereotyped social surfaces of life, the
ignorance,--really, the happy and hieratic ignorance,--of what 'people',
in the fussy sense, are supposed to be saying and doing, may actually help
the poet to come more fruitfully and penetratingly to what lies under the
surface, to what is essential and permanent and notable in the solid earth
of human character. Hence, I think it not improbable that the poetry of
the future may become more and more dramatic, although perhaps by a series
of acts of definite creation, rather than as the result of observation,
which will be left to the ever-increasing adroitness of the brilliant
masters of our prose.
As a result of this obsession in creative drama, I suppose that we may
expect to find in the poetry of the future a more steady hope for mankind
than has up to the present time been exhibited. The result of an excessive
observation of the startling facts of life, a work appropriate to the
violent energy of realistic prose, has been a general exaggeration of the
darker tints, an insistence on that prominence of what was called the
'sub-fuse' colours which art-critics of a century ago judged essential to
sublimity in all art. In Continental literature, and particularly in the
very latest Russian drama, this determination to see blackness and
blackness only, to depict the ordinary scene of existence as a Valley of
the Shadow of Despair, has been painfully frequent. In England we had a
poet of considerable power, whose tragic figure crossed me in my youth, in
whose work there is not a single gleam of hope or dignity for man;--I mean
the unfortunate James Thompson, author of 'The City of Dreadful Night'. I
cannot but believe that the poetry of the future, being more deeply
instructed, will insist less emphatically upon human failure and less
savagely upon the revolt of man. I anticipate in the general tone of it an
earnestness, a fullness of tribute to the noble passion of life, an
utterance simple and direct. I believe that it will take as its theme the
magnificence of the spectacle of Man's successful fight with Nature, not
the grotesque and squalid picturesqueness of his occasional defeat.
Your chairman has admirably said, in one of his charming essays, that
'History may be abstract, science may be frankly inhuman, even art may be
purely formal; but poetry must be full of human life'. This consideration,
I think, may make us feel perfectly secure as to the ultimate maintenance
of poetic expression. For humanity will always be with us, whatever
changes may be introduced into our social system, whatever revolutions may
occur in religion, in legality, in public order, or in the stratification
of composite life. I confess the only atmosphere in which it is impossible
for me to conceive of poetry as able to breathe would be one of complete
and humdrum uniformity of existence, such as was dreamed of at one time,
but I think is no longer so rigidly insisted on, by extreme socialistic
reformers. As long as there is such variety of individual action possible
as will give free scope to the energies and passions, the hopes and fears,
of mankind, so long I think the element of plastic imagination will be
found to insist on expression in the mode of formal art. It is quite
possible that, as a result of extended knowledge and of the democratic
instinct, a certain precipitant hardness of design, such as was presented
in the nineteenth century by Tennyson in the blank verse lyrics in 'The
Princess', by Browning in the more brilliant parts of 'One Word More', by
Swinburne in his fulminating 'Sapphics', may be as little repeated as the
analogous hardness of Dryden in 'MacFlecknoe' or the lapidary splendour of
Gray in his 'Odes'. I should rather look, at least in the immediate
future, to a revival of the liquid ease of Chaucer or the soft
redundancies of 'The Faëry Queen'. The remarkable experiments of the
Symbolists of twenty years ago, and their effect upon the whole body of
French verse, lead me to expect a continuous movement in that direction.
It is difficult indeed to speak of the probable future of poetry without
introducing the word Symbolism, over which there has raged so much windy
warfare in the immediate past. I cannot help believing that the immense
importance of this idea is one of the principal--perhaps the greatest
discovery with regard to poetry which was made in the last generation.
Symbols, among the ancient Greeks, were, if I mistake not, the signs by
which the initiated worshippers of Ceres or Cybele recognized their
mysterious unison of heart. A symbol is an indication of an object, in
opposition to a direct description of the same; it arouses the idea of it
in the awakened soul; rings a bell, for we may almost put it so, which at
once rouses the spirit and reminds it of some special event or imminent
service. The importance of making this the foremost feature of poetry is
not new, although it may be said that we have only lately, and only
partially, become aware of its value. But, really, if you will consider
it, all that the Symbolists have been saying is involved in Bacon's phrase
that 'poetry conforms the shows of things to the desires of the soul,
instead of subjecting the soul to external things'.
There could never be presented a subject less calculated to be wound up
with a rhetorical flourish or to close in pompous affirmation than that
which I have so temerariously brought before you this afternoon. I hope
that you will not think that your time has been wasted while we have
touched, lightly and erratically, like birds on boughs, upon some of the
probable or possible features of the poetry of the future. Whatever you,
or I, or the wisest of professors, may predict on this theme of the unborn
poets, we may be certain that there will
hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,
Which into words no virtue
of ours can 'digest'. I began with the rococo image of a Pegasus, poised
in the air, flashing and curvetting, petulantly refusing to alight on any
expected spot. Let me return to it in closing, that I may suggest our only
sage attitude to be one of always watching for his inevitable arrival,
ready to put grateful lips to the waters of Hippocrene as soon as ever
they bubble from the blow of his hoof.
EDMUND GOSSE.
OXFORD: HORACE HART
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
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