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Title: A survey of modernist poetry
Author: Laura Riding
Robert Graves
Release date: June 27, 2025 [eBook #76401]
Language: English
Original publication: London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1927
Credits: Hannah Wilson, Laura Natal and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A SURVEY OF MODERNIST POETRY ***
A SURVEY OF
MODERNIST POETRY
BY
LAURA RIDING AND ROBERT GRAVES
LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD.
1927
NOTE
This book represents a word-by-word collaboration; except for the last
chapter, which is a revision by both authors for the purposes of this
volume of an essay separately written and printed by one of them.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. MODERNIST POETRY AND THE PLAIN READER’S RIGHTS 9
II. THE PROBLEM OF FORM AND SUBJECT-MATTER IN
MODERNIST POETRY 35
III. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AND E. E. CUMMINGS: A
STUDY IN ORIGINAL PUNCTUATION AND SPELLING 59
IV. THE UNPOPULARITY OF MODERNIST POETRY WITH
THE PLAIN READER 83
V. MODERNIST POETRY AND DEAD MOVEMENTS 110
VI. THE MAKING OF THE POEM 131
VII. MODERNIST POETRY AND CIVILIZATION 155
VIII. VARIETY IN MODERNIST POETRY 189
IX. THE HUMOROUS ELEMENT IN MODERNIST POETRY 223
X. CONCLUSION 258
INDEX 293
CHAPTER I
MODERNIST POETRY AND THE PLAIN READER’S RIGHTS
IT must be assumed for the moment that poetry not characteristically
“modernist” presents no difficulty to the plain reader; for the
complaint against modernist poetry turns on its differences from
traditional poetry. These differences would seem to justify themselves
if their effect was to bring poetry any nearer the plain reader;
even traditional poetry, it is sometimes charged, has a tendency
to withdraw itself from the plain reader. But the sophistications
of advanced modern poetry seem only to make the breach wider. In
the poetry of E. E. Cummings, for example, who may be considered
conveniently to illustrate the divorce of advanced contemporary poetry
from the common-sense standards of ordinary intelligence, is to be
found apparently not only a disregard of this intelligence, but an
insult to it. Such poetry seems to say: “Keep out. This is a private
performance.”
What we have to do, then, is to discover whether or not the poet means
to keep the public out. If, after a careful examination of poems that
seem to be only part of the game of high-brow baiting low-brow, they
still resist all reasonable efforts, then we must conclude that such
work is, after all, merely a joke at the plain reader’s expense and
let him return to his newspapers and to his Shakespeare (who we are
for the moment assuming is understood without difficulty). But if, on
the other hand, we are able to get out of these poems the experiences
we are accustomed to expect of poetry, or at least see that the poet
originally wrote them as poetry and not as literary tricks, then the
plain reader must make certain important alterations in his critical
attitude. In the first place, he must admit that what is called our
common intelligence is the mind in its least active state: that poetry
obviously demands a more vigorous imaginative effort than the plain
reader has been willing to apply to it; and that, if anthologies
compiled to refresh tired minds have indulged his lazy reading habits,
the poet can be excused for using exceptional means to make him do
justice to his poems, even for inventing a new kind of poem in this
end. Next he must wonder whether such innovations have not a real place
in the normal course of poetry-writing. Finally, if these things are
so, he must question the depth of his understanding of the poetry
which, like Shakespeare’s, is taken for granted and ask whether a poet
like E. E. Cummings must not be accepted, if not for his own sake, at
least for his effect on the future reading of poetry of any age or
style.
To begin with, we shall choose one of E. E. Cummings’ earlier and
simpler poems, one which will nevertheless excite much the same
hostility as his later work. It is unusually suitable for analysis,
because it is on just the kind of subject that the plain reader
looks for in poetry. It appears, moreover, in Mr. Louis Untermeyer’s
popular _Anthology of Modern American Poetry_ side by side with
the work of poets more willing than E. E. Cummings to defer to the
intelligence-level of the plain reader. It is all the more important
to study, because Mr. Untermeyer seems personally hostile to Cummings’
work and yet to have been forced by the pressure of more advanced
critical opinion to include it in a book where modernism in poetry
means, in Mr. Untermeyer’s own definition, simplicity (“the use of
the language of everyday speech” and the discarding of that poetical
padding which the plain reader and the plain critic enjoy more than
Mr. Untermeyer would admit). But Mr. Untermeyer is speaking of a
modernism no longer modern, that of such dead movements as Georgianism
and Imagism which were supposedly undertaken in the interests of the
plain reader. We are dealing here with a modernism with apparently no
feelings of obligation to the plain reader, undertaken, presumably, in
the interests of poetry.
SUNSET
stinging
gold swarms
upon the spires
silver
chants the litanies the
great bells are ringing with rose
the lewd fat bells
and a tall
wind
is dragging
the
sea
with
dream
-S
With so promising a title, what barriers does the poem raise between
itself and the plain reader? In what respects does it seem to sin
against the common intelligence? To begin with, the lines do not begin
with capitals. The spacing does not suggest any regular verse-form,
though it seems to be systematic. No punctuation marks are used. There
is no obvious grammar either of the prose or of the poetic kind. But
even overlooking these technical oddities, it still seems impossible to
read the poem as a logical sequence. A great many words essential to
the coherence of the ideas suggested have been deliberately omitted;
and the entire effect is so sketchy that the poem might be made to mean
almost anything or nothing. If the author once had a precise meaning
it was lost in the writing of the poem. Let us, however, assume for
the sake of this argument that it is possible to discover the original
poem at the back of the poet’s mind; or at least to gather enough
material from the poem as it stands from which to make a poem that
would satisfy all formal requirements, the poem that Cummings perhaps
meant to hint at with these fragments. Just as the naturalist Cuvier
could reconstruct an extinct animal in full anatomical detail from a
single tooth, let us restore this extinct poem from what Cummings has
permitted to survive.
First we must decide if there are not positive features in the poem
which make it possible to judge it in these respects as a formal poem
and which should occur in any rewriting of the poem with much the
same emphasis. The title might undergo some amplification because
of a veiled literary reference in lines five and six to Rémy De
Gourmont’s _Litanies De La Rose_: it might reasonably include
some acknowledgement of the poet’s debt to French influences, and read
“Sunset Piece: After Reading Rémy De Gourmont”; although the original
title _Sunset_ would be no less literary. The heavy alliteration
in _s_ in the first seven lines, confirmed in the last by the
solitary capitalized _S_, cannot be discarded. The context demands
it--certain inevitable associations are connected with the words as
they stand. The first word, _stinging_, taken alone suggests
merely a sharp feeling; its purpose is only to prepare for the poem
and supply an emotional source from which the other _s_ ideas may
derive. In the second line _swarms_ develops the alliteration,
at the same time colouring _stinging_ with the association of
golden bees and softening it with the suppressed idea of buzzing. We
are now ready for the more tender _s_ word, _spires_, in the
third line. _Silver_, the single word of the fourth line, brings
us back to the contrast between cold and warm in the first and second
lines (_stinging_ suggests cold in contrast with the various
suggestions of warmth in the _gold swarms_) because _silver_
reminds one of cold water as _gold_ does of warm light. Two
suppressed _s_ words play behind the scenes in this first part of
the poem, both disguised in _silver_ and _gold_, namely,
_sea_ and _sun_. _Sea_ itself does not actually occur
until the twelfth line, when the _s_ alliteration has flagged:
separated from alliterative associations, it becomes the definite image
_sea_ and the centre around which the poem is to be built up. But
once it has appeared there is little more to be said; the poem trails
off, closing with the large _S_ echo of the last line. The hyphen
before this _S_ detaches it from _dream_ and sets it apart as
the alliterative summary of the poem; in a realistic sense _-S_
might stand for the alternation of quiet and hiss in wave movement. As
a formal closing it leaves us with a feeling like the one we started
with, but less acute, because the _z_ sound has prevailed over the
_s_ sound with which the poem was begun. The sunset is over, the
final impression is darkness and sleep, though the _-S_ vaguely
returns to the two large _S_’s of the title.
Another feature which would recur in the rewriting is the slowing
down of the rhythm in the last half of the poem, indicated by the
shortening of the line and by the double spacing. In regular verse this
would naturally mean line lengthening, the closing of a ten-syllabled
line series with a twelve-syllabled couplet, for example. Though
no end-rhymes occur in the poem as it stands, the rhyme element is
undoubtedly strong. The only obvious rhyme sympathy is between
_stinging_ and _ringing_, but many suppressed rhymes are
present: not only _swinging_ accompanying the idea of bells but
other new rhyme suggestions such as _bees_ and _seas_,
_bells_ and _swells_, _spires_ and _fires_. In the
rewritten poem a definite metrical scheme would have to be employed,
but the choice would be governed by the character of the original
poem. The rhythm would be gentle and simple, with few marked emphases.
Monosyllables would prevail, with a noticeable recurrence of _ing_
words; and _bells_ would have to be repeated. Here, then, is a
poem embodying the important elements of E. E. Cummings’ poem, but with
each line starting with a capital, with normal spacing and punctuation,
and with a regular verse-form. It contains no images not directly
suggested by him, but links up grammatically what appeared to be an
arrangement based on caprice.
SUNSET PIECE
_After reading Rémy De Gourmont_
White foam and vesper wind embrace.
The salt air stings my dazzled face
And sunset flecks the silvery seas
With glints of gold like swarms of bees
And lifts tall dreaming spires of light
To the imaginary sight,
So that I hear loud mellow bells
Swinging as each great wave swells,
Wafting God’s perfumes on the breeze,
And chanting of sweet litanies
Where jovial monks are on their knees,
Bell-paunched and lifting glutton eyes
To windows rosy as these skies.
And this slow wind--how can my dreams forget--
Dragging the waters like a fishing-net.
This version shows that Cummings was bound to write the poem as he
did in order to prevent it from becoming what we have made it. To
write a new poem on an old subject like sunset and avoid all the
obvious poetical formulas the poet must write in a new way if he is
to evoke any fresh response in his readers at all. Not only does the
rewritten poem demand much less attention than the first poem; but it
is difficult to feel respect for a poem that is full of reminiscences
not only of Rémy de Gourmont, but of Wordsworth (“To the imaginary
sight”), Milton (in the metrical variations taken from L’Allegro),
Messrs. Belloc and Chesterton (“Where jovial monks ...” etc.) and
Tagore in English translation (“Dragging the waters like a fishing
net”). Stale phrases such as “vesper wind” and “silver seas” have
come to mean so little that they scarcely do their work in the poem.
And yet we shall see that such phrases cannot be avoided if we are
to revise the poem for the plain man. “White foam” is understood
from the sea setting, the movement of the poem, the cold hissing
implied in the sequence of _s_’s. “Vesper wind” is suggested by
_sunset_, _spires_, _monks_, _bells_, _tall
wind_. “Salt air”, as well as resulting from the embrace of “white
foam” and “vesper wind”, is built up from _stinging_, _sea_,
and _wind_. The transformations are fairly obvious in the next
three lines. “Imaginary sight” is necessary to remind the plain reader
that the poem is not to be taken literally, a hint that E. E. Cummings
disdained to give. It should be noticed that “imaginary” is the longest
and slowest word in the poem but adds nothing to the picture; in fact,
makes it less real. The seventh and eighth lines express the connection
between bells and waves that Cummings leaves the reader to deduce, or
not. The ninth line is the expansion of the rose idea demanded by the
context: _Monks_, _spires_, _litanies_ are all bound
up with the Catholic symbolism of the rose; and in rewriting the poem
it is impossible not to develop the literary associations of the rose
as well (wafting, perfumes). The rose-windows of cathedrals are also
obviously suggested. Unfortunately _lewd_, too strong a word
for a formal sunset piece, has to be broken up into _jovial_
and _glutton_, recalling the Christmas-annual type of monk. The
analogy between _great bells_ and _fat monks_ has to be
made definite, thus introducing gratuitous words like _mellow_,
_bell-paunched_, _on their knees_, etc. Instead of taking
advantage of the natural associations in certain highly pictorial
words, we have had to go over much unnecessary ground and ended by
being merely dull and banal. In lengthening the metre in the last
two lines to match the slowing down in the original piece it will
be noticed how many superfluous words and images have had to be
introduced here too. First of all, _slow_ itself, as weakening to
the concentration of the poem as the line “To the imaginary sight”.
Then, “--how can my dreams forget--”, to account grammatically for
the vivid present tense in which the whole poem is written, and to
put _dream_ in its more logical position, since in the original
poem it is doing double duty for a specific image (_fishing-net_,
following from _dragging_) and the vagueness with which the image
is felt.
The conclusion to be drawn from this exercise might be that poems must
in the future be written in the Cummings way if poetry is not to fall
to pieces altogether. But the poetry of E. E. Cummings is clearly
more important as a sign of local irritation in the poetic body than
as the model for a new tradition. The important thing to recognize,
in a time of popular though superficial education, is the necessity
of emphasizing to the reading public the differences between good
and bad poems, just such differences as we have been pointing out
here. Poems in such a time, indeed, may forget that they have any
function other than to teach the proper approach to poetry: there is
an exaggerated though excusable tendency to suspend the writing of
all poetry not intentionally critical. (There are, of course, always
exceptions: poets whose writing is so self-contained that it is not
affected by stalenesses in traditional poetry or obliged to attack
them or escape from them.) Cummings in this poem was really rewriting
the other poem which we gave into a good poem. But for the rarer poet
there is no ‘other poem’; there is only the poem which he writes.
Cummings’ technique, indeed, if further and more systematically
developed, would become so complicated that poetry would be no more
than mechanical craftsmanship, the verse patterns growing so elaborate
that the principal interest in them would be mathematical. In their
present experimental stage, and only in their experimental stage, these
patterns are undoubtedly suggestive. Poets, however, do not pursue
innovations for their own sake. They are on the whole conservative in
their methods so long as these ensure the proper security and delivery
of the poem.
For the virtue of the poem is not in its being set down on paper, as a
picture’s is in the way it is set down on canvas. Genius in the poet
is a sympathy between different parts of his own mind, in the painter
between his paint-brush and his canvas. Method in poetry is therefore
not anything that can be talked about in terms of physical form. The
poem is not the paper, not the type, not the spoken syllables. It is
as invisible and as inaudible as thought; and the only method that
the real poet is interested in using is one that will present the
poem without making it either visible or audible, without turning it
into a substitute for a picture or for music. But when conservatism
of method, through its abuse by slack-minded poets, has come to mean
the supplanting of the poem by an exercise in poet-craft, then there
is a reasonable place for innovation, if the new method defeats the
old method and brings up the important question: how should poetry be
written? Once this question is asked, the new method has accomplished
its end. Further than this it should not be allowed to go, for poems
cannot be written from a formula. The principal value of a new method
is that it can act as a strong deterrent against writing in a worn-out
style. It is not suggested here that poets should imitate Cummings, but
that poems like Cummings’ and the attention they demand should make it
harder for the standardized article to pass itself off as poetry. If we
return to the two versions of the sunset piece, it will be seen just
how this benefit is conferred. We may not accept the Cummings version,
but once we have understood it we cannot return with satisfaction to
the standardized one.
Turning back for a more direct comparison of these two versions, we
perceive how much of the force of the original has been lost in the
second. We have used capitals throughout as in formal verse, but have
thus eliminated the large final _S_, which was one of the most
important properties of the original, and given a look of unnecessary
importance to words like _And_, _To_, and _So_. By
substituting normal spacing and verse-form we have had to disregard
the significance of the double spacing and indentation, and of the
variation in the length of the lines. Formal indentation can either be
a guide to rhyming pairs or a sign that the first part of a line is
missing, but it cannot denote musical rests of varying value as with
Cummings. We have also expanded the suggested ideas by grammatic means
and supplemented them with the words that seemed to have been omitted.
But in so doing we have sacrificed the compactness of the previous poem
and introduced a definiteness which is false to its carefully devised
dreaminess. So by correcting the poem in those poetic features in
which it seemed deficient we have not added anything to it but on the
contrary detracted from it.
What, now, has happened to the formal features of the Cummings’ poem
when reproduced in the rewritten poem? The expansion of the poem by
the addition of the suppressed words has necessarily multiplied the
number of _s_’s in the poem, because these suppressed words show
a high proportion of _s_’s. This alliteration, sustained over
several couplets, does not match the alliteration of the shorter poem,
especially since we have been obliged to use many _s_’s that have
no alliterative significance (“To windows rosy as the skies”). Neither
has the gradual slowing down of the rhythm in the last half of the
poem been effectively reproduced. In the actual poem the slowing down
extends over the sestet of this fragmentary sonnet (the fragmentary
line, _-S_, being an alliterative hang-over). But as in the formal
treatment Cummings’ simple octave develops a prolixity which destroys
the proper balance between it and its sestet, we have had to abandon
the sonnet form and pack into two lines words which should have had
the time-value of six. The best we have been able to do is to keep
fourteen lines (or rather seven rhyming couplets, one of which has an
extra line). The rhymes, too, in the new poem have mutilated the sense:
they express the remoteness of the scene by a series of echoes instead
of by silences: for Cummings’ lines can definitely be regarded as
sonnet-lines filled out with musical rests. So by putting the poem into
a form in which a definite metrical scheme could be recognized we have
entirely altered the character of the poem. We have not even been able
to save the scraps of quite regular iambic rhythm with which we started.
Certain admissions must, therefore, be made. We have not only rejected
the formal poem in favour of the Cummings poem: we have seen that the
Cummings poem itself was an intensely formal poem. Indeed, its very
technicalities caused it to be mistaken for a mere assemblage of words,
a literary trick. But as it is apparently capable of yielding the kind
of experiences customarily expected from poetry, in fact the most
ordinary of such experiences, our conclusion must be that the plain
reader’s approach to poetry is adequate only for poems as weak as the
critical effort that he is ready to apply to them; and that Cummings,
to disregard the satiric hilarity in which many of his poems are
written, really means to write serious poetry and to have his poetry
taken seriously, that is, read with the critical sympathy it deserves.
The importance of any new technical methods that he makes use of to
bring this about lies not in their ultimate permanence or impermanence,
but in their establishment of what the poet’s rights are in his poem:
how free he is to proceed without regard to the inferior critical
efforts to which the poem will probably be submitted. What, then, of
the plain reader’s rights? They are, presumably, like the poet’s,
whatever his intelligence is able to make them.
It must be admitted that excessive interest in the mere technique of
the poem can become morbid both in the poet and the reader, like the
composing and solving of cross-word puzzles. Once the sense of a poem
with a technical soul, so to speak, is unriddled and its patterns
plainly seen, it is not fit for re-reading; as with the Sphinx in the
fable, allowing its riddle to be guessed is equivalent to suicide.
A poem of this kind is nevertheless able to stave off death by
continually revealing, under examination, an unexpected reserve of new
riddles; and as long as it is able to supply these it can continue to
live as a poem. Yet at some stage or other the end must come. If it
is asked: “Is this really a poem?” the answer must be: “Yes, as long
as one can go on discovering new surprises in it.” But clearly the
surprises cannot last for ever; nor can we, as in the indestructible
poem whose soul is not technical, go back to the beginning and
start all over again as with a new poem. The obvious weakness in the
surprise-poem is that it encourages the reader to discover many things
not consciously intended by the poem. But, while there is no way of
being absolutely sure that the steps taken in unravelling the poem are
the same as those involved in inventing the poem, the strength of such
a poem is proved by the room it allows for surprises thus improvised
by the reader, by the extent to which it is tactically disposed to
resist critical attacks. As long as a poem is so disposed, it justifies
itself. One thing we can be sure of, that this particular poem of E.
E. Cummings was not examined in this way by Mr. Untermeyer. Otherwise
he would not have included it as an example of poetry that “does not
provoke the reader to anything more than irritation” in an anthology
whose principal aim is to soothe, not irritate. He would have left it
out, because it could no longer serve as a foil to the more formal
poem, seeing that it was a formal poem.
How much more life is left in the poem at this point? Have we come
to an end; or are there still further reasons why it should continue
to be called a poem, since it is only a poem as long as there is a
possibility of its yielding still more meaning? Did we not, without
assuming any formal verse-pattern, give a satisfactory explanation
of the poem? Did we not also find it possible to give an entirely new
view of it on the basis of its being a suppressed sonnet? Did we not
accept the poem as a non-grammatic construction and make sense of it
nevertheless? Could we not show it to be potentially or even actually
grammatic and make sense of it because it was grammatic? By reading
_swarms_ and _chants_, which we have probably been regarding
as nominative plural nouns, as third person singular verbs, and by
reading _silver_ and _gold_ not as adjectives but as nouns?
The poem would then stand grammatically as follows:
Stinging gold swarms upon the spires.
Silver [_i.e._ a voice or tone of silver] chants the litanies
The great bells are ringing with rose--
The lewd fat bells--
And a tall wind is dragging the sea with dreams.
Nor could we allow ourselves to be stopped by the length of the poem,
since by thus limiting the number of possible discoveries to its length
we should be implying that the virtue of a poem was in its length.
Even if we had exhausted all the possibilities in a poem of thirty-one
words--the grammar, the metre and other technical aspects, the context
and the association of images--we should still have the fact that the
poem had thirty-one words, and perhaps find in it another formalism.
Can it be a coincidence that this is also the standard length of
the tanka, the dominant verse-form in Japanese poetry--thirty-one
syllables, each of word value? The Japanese influence is further
intimated by Cummings’ tendency to suggest and symbolize rather than to
express in full. In Japanese, according to the conventional arrangement
of the thirty-one word-units in lines of five, seven, five, seven,
seven, this poem would be set down like this:
stinging gold swarms upon the
spires silver chants the litanies the great
bells are ringing with rose
the lewd fat bells and a tall
wind is dragging the sea with dreams.
But stronger than the Japanese influence in modern English and American
poetry is the French, which in turn has borrowed so much from the
Japanese. Mallarmé, the father of French symbolism, turned the art of
suggestion in poetry into a science. He found the tradition of his
national poetry so exhausted by sterile laws of prosody that he had
to practise poetry as a science to avoid malpractising it as an art.
Rimbaud, with all Mallarmé’s science behind him and endowed with a
natural poetic mind as well, was able to practise poetry as an art
again. Similarly Cummings and other experimentalists--Cummings is to
be regarded rather as an inspired amateur than a scientist--may be
preparing the way for an English or American Rimbaud. As Paul Valéry,
the French critic and poet, says of Mallarmé and Rimbaud, discussing
their employment of the vehicles of sense in poetry: “What is only a
system in Mallarmé becomes a domain in Rimbaud”. So modernist poets are
developing resources by mechanical means to which a future poet will
have easy access when he turns the newly opened-up territory into a
personal poetic domain.
Although an elaborate system of poetry-writing can go into the making
of a natural poet like Rimbaud, it may on the other hand end in mere
preciousness, which in turn may harden into a convention as tyrannic
as the one it was originally invented to criticize. There is more
danger of this, however, in French poetry than in English. Paul Valéry
has even been made a member of the French Academy, in recognition,
presumably, of his formal influence on contemporary poetry. Like
Cummings, although as classical in form as Cummings is romantic, he
relies almost entirely on the effectiveness of images--on their power
to evoke sensations and on their strangeness. To describe how night hid
from Narcissus his own beloved image in the fountain, he says that
night slid between him and his image like “a knife shearing a fruit
in two”. What he means is that Narcissus and the image form a whole
as symmetrical as the two halves of an apple before they are divided.
Cummings’ images are as strange and vivid as this (“gold swarms” or
“ringing with rose”, for example); but we do not suggest making an
academician of Cummings or calling his most recent and more methodical
phase ‘Pope-ian’ as Valéry’s last phase is known by his admirers as
‘Racinian’, after the master craftsman of the most formal period in
French poetry.
Modernist English poetry also imitates the French in the use of
combinations of sounds to give a musical picture. This is, of course,
no new thing in English poetry. Gray, one of the most traditional of
all English poets, wishing to give the picture of slow and painful
descent down a steep mountain, writes:
As down the steep of Snowdon’s shaggy side
He wound with toilsome march his long array.
But this usage has never been applied except in occasional decoration,
and even as such has been discouraged rather than encouraged by
criticism. It may escape adverse criticism only where the combinations
of sounds add musicalness without taking away from the meaning;
but never where they over-represent the meaning. For example,
Milton’s _Lycidas_ and Tennyson’s _Blow, Bugle, Blow_ have
been praised, because the predominance of _l_’s, _m_’s,
_n_’s, and _r_’s in the former and the variation of
vowel sounds in the latter please the ear by acting as a musical
accompaniment to the idea and cannot be regarded as in any sense
containing the idea itself. The only general principle implied in such
practice is that poetry should be, where possible, as pleasing to the
ear as to the mind. The danger in it is that it can have the effect of
allowing the thought of the poem to be controlled by its ability to
please musically, as in Victorian poetry.
But musicalness in modern French verse means something else, the
treating of word-sounds as musical notes in which the meaning itself
is to be found. This makes poetry curiously like acrostics and takes
it even further from its natural course than Victorianism in its worst
coloratura effects. The bond between the Victorian poet and his reader
was at least an agreement between them of a common, though not an
original, sentiment. The meaning of a poem was understood between them
beforehand from the very title, and the persuasion of the word-music
was intended to keep the poem vibrating in the memory long after it
had been read. The bond, however, between the French modernist poet and
his reader is one of technical ingenuity, in the poet in setting the
meaning down in combinations of sounds, in the reader in interpreting
words as combinations of sounds rather than as words. Actually there
is very little poetic thought in Victorian poetry because of the
compromise it makes between ideas and their pleasurable expression. But
the compromise in this other poetry, though less apparent, is still
more destructive of poetic thought. It is between ideas and typography,
and as such means the domination of ideas by mechanics. By giving the
letters of words a separate personality we have a new psychology of
letters entirely distinct from the psychology of images. A striking
illustration of the attempt to reconcile these two psychologies is
a poem of Rimbaud’s on the colours of the vowels. It is plain that
the colours associated with vowels will vary widely with the person
and may be determined by so irrelevant a cause as the colour of the
alphabet blocks which one used as a child. A better case might perhaps
be made for the meaning-associations of consonants, particularly of
combinations of consonants such as _st_, as in _stinging_,
_strike_, _stench_, to denote sharp assault, and the final
_nch_, as in _clinch_, _munch_, _wrench_, to denote
strain. But such imitation by the letters of a word of its meaning
is only occasional: it cannot be made a general rule. There are many
more instances of letters out of harmony with word-meanings than in
harmony with them. The word _kiss_. Is this _iss_ any gentler
than the _iss_ of _hiss_? Or is the _k_ in _kiss_
gentler than the _k_ of _kick_? Logically such a theory
should mean that a French poem written in this way would produce the
same effect on a person who did not understand French as on one who did.
When it is remembered how such theories fill the literary air, it will
be realized what great restraint E. E. Cummings imposed on himself in
the matter of alliteration and other tricks with letters. He would
not, we feel, let such theories run away with him to the extent of
forcing his choice of words to depend more on the sense of their sounds
than on the sense of their images. His choice of _swarms_, for
instance, is primarily determined by the three meanings combined in the
word (the crowding sense, the bee-buzzing sense, and another hitherto
not noted--the climbing sense associated with _spires_ and the
eye looking up to the light); not by the occurrence of _s_ and
_z_ or by the presence of _warm_ in _swarms_, though
these are accidents of which he takes every advantage. And this is
the way such things should happen in poetry, by coincidence. The poet
appreciates and confirms rather than elaborately stage-manages. A
certain amount of superstitious faith in language is necessary if the
poet is going to perform the sort of miracles expected of and natural
to poetry.
CHAPTER II
THE PROBLEM OF FORM AND SUBJECT-MATTER IN MODERNIST POETRY
MODERN French poetic theory lays a great deal of emphasis on the
phonetic sense of words; and has done so increasingly since the
Symbolists. For a long time, indeed, the French have been dissatisfied
with the success of poetry as compared with other arts, and have
attempted to remedy its supposed deficiencies by bringing it
closer to music. To do this they have had to insist on a musical
meaning accompanying the word-meaning, on introducing a system of
letter-notation similar to musical notation. Three lines from Paul
Valéry will illustrate this picture-making in poetry by the help of
sounds:
Il se fit Celui qui dissipe
En conséquences son Principe,
En étoiles, son Unité.
Now, since we are able to recognise _dissipe_,
_conséquences_, _Principe_, and _Unité_ by their English
parallels, we must rewrite these lines in some practical phonetic
notation which will completely divorce them from any associated
meaning, if we would test their direct phonetic value:
Eel s’ fee s’ lwee kee deesseep p’
Ahng kohnsaykahng s’ sohng Prangseep p’,
Ahng aytwal l’, sonn Ewneetay.
This is the best rough phonetic approximation that we can make without
the use of a formal phonetic system. We are immediately impressed by
the recurrence of the strong _s_ and the narrow _ee_ sound,
as we are supposed to be. This might denote a number of things: a man
whetting a scythe, a child writing on a slate, or a serpent trying to
talk. On the other hand, such sounds might have nothing to do with the
subject; as in the couplet:
As fleecy sheep we leap
Across this grassy sweep;
the _s_ and _ee_ sounds are contrary to the sense. Suppose,
however, we did actually choose the idea of a serpent’s talking, as
we were meant to. What, then, is our clue to what the serpent is
talking about? Or are the lines merely meant to represent a serpent
talking, without any collateral meaning? No. They represent, as a
matter of fact, a serpent talking about God. But how are we to deduce
God from the sound of the poem or know indeed when the alliteration
is to indicate the subject or the elocutionist? We must admit that for
the special purpose of representing a serpent sneering at God such
sound-combinations may be very wittily employed. But as a general
thing a poetic practice like this becomes as tiresome and puerile as,
say, the incessant puns and jokes of Goldsmith, Hood, or Calverley.
Wit in poetry should be devoted to the irony in ideas rather than in
phonetics. Phonetics, if they get the upper hand in a poem, turn it
into an exercise in elocution.
But let us try another Valérian specimen, one in which there is no
speaking in character:
Vous me le murmurez, ramures!... O rumeur déchirante.
Because _murmurez_ and _rumeur_ are suggestive of their
meanings in English, we might be able to get something of the intended
sense (the murmur of wind among leaves) and even make a good guess at
the meaning of the other words; if only because we have Tennyson’s
immemorial elms
And murmur of innumerable bees,
as a classroom quotation to help us to it. Could we not, however,
easily improvise a line of the same musical character but with a
totally different meaning?
More ordure never will renew our midden’s pure manure.
This line will show how misleading to the sense letters can be, and
makes us suspect that the aim of such poetry as Valéry’s is to cast a
musical enchantment unallied with the meaning of a poem. The meaning
becomes merely a historical setting for the music, which the reader
need or need not be aware of. We are made to feel that the poet would
not object to his reader’s adopting the same attitude to his poems as
his own _Mme. Teste_ to lofty and abstract questions: instead of
being bored by them, she was musically entertained by them. Valéry,
perhaps realizing the strain put upon his reader by the preciousness of
his images, holds his attention by the masterly skill of these musical
distractions.
It is here important to understand the close connection between Paul
Valéry and E. E. Cummings, and the question of impressionism. The chief
claim of impressionism is that the realistic truth about anything may
be conveyed better by the impressions it gives the observer, however
disjointed or irrelevant these may seem, than by systematic reasoning
or study. Impressionist poetry describes an object by creating in
the reader the indefinite feelings he would have on seeing it, not
by giving definite facts about it. This is a method in poetry first
formally recommended by Poe, borrowed from him to justify and explain
the things that began to happen to French poetry with Baudelaire, and
re-imported into America when French poetry had carried Poe’s theory
far beyond his intentions, which had to do more with the sentiment
than with the technical theory of poetry. Poe defined poetry as a
combination of music and an idea, resulting in indefinite feelings.
But this is, after all, only a re-statement of the most historically
familiar definition of the aim of poetry: to create a pleasant
effect on the reader; while formal impressionism aims at a technical
correctness--it wishes the reader to have the same frame of mind as
the poet had when he wrote, to help the reader to rewrite the poem for
himself with the poet’s mind. These so-called ‘indefinite feelings’ of
impressionism, therefore, must be expressed in painstakingly precise
images, since the whole effect of the poem depends on an accurate
identity of the reader’s feelings with the poet’s.
If, then, the poet practises impressionism according to its literal
meaning, it is unfair to call him an impressionist in the loose,
popular sense of the word. He rejects reason and logic as poetic
aids, not because they lead to definite feelings, but because the
feelings they lead to are not definite, not subtle enough for his
purpose. ‘Indefinite’ should be understood in its opposite sense,
namely, not to be defined by the more ordinary methods of speech; so
_definite_, in fact, that ordinary methods of measurement are not
accurate enough. Images in poetry that seem strained and obscure are
often like distances so small or so large that the foot-rule is of no
use in measuring them, so that one has to work in abstract mathematics,
though the distances are real. Suppose a poet wishes to describe a
sunset. He can say in substance: “It was beautiful. The sea was flecked
with gold as the sun sank into it. Above my head floated rosy clouds.
At my feet hissed the silvery foam. Bells were ringing somewhere.
There was a salt taste in the air and the evening wind blew slowly in
from the sea as night drew on.” Or he can say: “It was beautiful. At
first I felt invigorated. My eyes ached with the dazzle of the sun
and the saltiness of the air. As I looked up to the rosy glory above
me, a great religious feeling overcame me; I seemed in the presence
of God. There was a ringing in my ears. I felt warm and cold at once.
But after a time the wind made me feel sleepy, so I turned in.” Now it
would be possible to call either of these poems impressionist in the
colloquial sense, for they would record objectively or subjectively
the poet’s impressions with a view to reproducing them in the reader.
In reality, however, they would convey only a vague and somewhat
insincere atmosphere, as would a formalized version of Cummings’ early
poem _Sunset_. For an actual experience of this sunset one would
have to go to some such poem as Cummings’. In it would be found a
complicated recipe for a sunset experience, as if for a pudding, not
merely a description of what the pudding looked like or how it tasted.
For such a method turns the reader into a poet.
This _Sunset_ poem of Mr. Cummings, then, is not, strictly
speaking, Mr. Cummings’ poem, but the poem of anybody who will be at
pains to write it. What at first sight strikes the plain reader as
external peculiarities that hindered him from approaching the meaning
of the poem--its oddness of form--now appear to be the poet’s means of
avoiding that conventional form which generally does stand between the
reader and the poem. Indeed, if we look upon form as something distinct
from the subject-matter of a poem, in this sense true impressionist
poems are usually without form; or rather they are capable of having
a new form with every reader. The poet blends the subject of the poem
with the feelings that the subject arouses into one expression. This
unity makes the poem a living whole; it is impressionistic, but not
because the subject and the feelings it arouses become indefinite in
the combination. They make a blend, not a blur.
Looking on impressionism as one of the earliest manifestations of
the general modernist tendency to overcome the distinction between
subject-matter and form, we realize that Valéry draws the same
old-fashioned line between _music_ and _idea_ that Poe
did; that he subscribes, in fact, to the historically most familiar
conception of poetry. He is a classicist in the musical associations
he gives his poems, all intricately designed to create the indefinite
feelings that he desires to arouse in the reader. Although in his
choice of the images through which he conveys poetic ideas he is
a modernist, the images apparently intended, that is, to arouse
_definite_ feelings, these feelings are really more like the
physical sensation a thing gives than the idea of itself it gives.
To these definite feelings provoked by the images, or, we might say,
the thought, of a poem of Valéry’s, the indefinite feelings provoked
by the _sounds_ of the words form a musical background. In fact,
paradoxically, it is in this musical background that the ideas are
suggested rather than in the logical thought of the images. Valéry
deliberately suppresses Reason in poetry; but he allows the musical
background to make the logical connections between the images. And this
is what we mean by calling him a classicist in form and a modernist
in the thought-content of his poems. He handles the modernist problem
of achieving a unity between form and subject-matter by letting form
suggest the subject of the poem and thought-content do all that form
is ordinarily supposed to do. The only reason for calling this method
impressionistic is that it does not and could not succeed in arriving
at an ingenious balance between the two sets of feelings, definite and
indefinite, which are supposed to combine to give the poetry meaning;
all it results in is the vague blur that impressionism has come to
stand for in its most derogatory sense.
Valéry is only one familiar contemporary example of these modern French
theories of poetry which have had such an abnormal and unwholesome
influence on the younger poets of America and England. In Cummings’
defence it should be said that, though his poetry by its immediate
effect of oddness does invite labels, it is possible to understand
it without reference to labels. Particularly as regards the label
_impressionism_--it is not necessary to associate him with it in
order to explain the poem _Sunset_; although as an impressionist
he makes a very good case for impressionism. But any fairly good poet
can be used to justify any practicable theory of poetry, however
inadequate a theory it may be by which to write poetry. Shakespeare,
indeed, can be used to justify impressionism or any other poetic theory
simply because he is such a good poet. It would be as reasonable to
explain Shakespeare, who was independent of poetic theory, in terms
of impressionism as by any of the poetic theories prevailing at his
time. It would be wrong to overlook the influence on Shakespeare of
contemporary theories, but it would be false to say that he wrote as
he did from a conscious use of these theories. If Shakespeare had
been critical in the way a good poet is generally supposed to be,
then we should expect to find in Shakespeare merely evidences of
well-chosen poetic theories. As a matter of fact, his work was such
a clearing-house of good and bad elements in contemporary poetry and
drama that they cannot have been introduced by any conscious critical
choice.
It would be as absurd to say that Cummings sat down to write a
poem with all the rules of impressionism before him as to say that
Shakespeare sat down to write a play with all the theories of the
so-called ‘university wits’ before him. These men--Lodge, Peele,
Greene, Nashe, Lyly, and Marlowe--had to set themselves the deliberate
task of compromising between the old popular type of play, which was
very violent, disorderly and exciting, and the new blank-verse play
on the classical model, which was very orderly and very dull. They had
for the time being to treat the drama as a scientific problem. But when
we get past Marlowe’s early work and past Kyd’s _Spanish Tragedy_
we find the drama no longer treated as a problem; it is already a
successful convention; the London theatres are paying concerns, and
Shakespeare, fortified by his long apprenticeship in these theatres,
has nothing to worry about. These dramatic experimenters provided him
with a legacy; but he was the natural heir to it by the right of his
genius. What were conscious theories in the dramatists of the previous
generation became in him native habits. We may say generally that
there are no technical inventions in Shakespeare’s plays or sonnets.
The nearest thing to invention in Shakespeare is his original use of
other people’s inventions. The convention of the Court Fool, introduced
by the wits to make a link between the old farcical play and the new
classical tragedy, was no longer with Shakespeare mere comic relief,
but a living, even a serious, part of the tragedy itself. Likewise
with the sonnet: though pre-Elizabethan experiments with the sonnet,
which little by little removed it from the Italian model, were made
by Wyatt and Surrey, the Elizabethan sonnet is nevertheless called
after Shakespeare, in spite of the fact that Shakespeare made no new
experiments with it, that by the time it reached him it had been
successfully used by all the Elizabethan small fry. Yet the sonnet
theory can be proved in Shakespeare’s sonnets as all pre-Shakespearian
dramatic theories can be proved in his plays.
An undue prominence is given to poetic theories either when people who
are not real poets are encouraged by the low state of poetry to try to
write it themselves: such poets must obviously depend on theories in
proportion as they are wanting in genius. Or when critics without any
poetic sense attempt to explain changes in poetry to themselves and
to the reading public. No genuine poet or artist ever called himself
after a theory or invented a name for a theory. And it was surely a
critic who first pointed out the distinction between subject-matter
and form, and from this began to philosophize on form; as it is surely
criticism which has always stood between poetry and the plain reader,
made possible the writing of so much false poetry and, by granting too
much respect to theories, lost the power of distinguishing between what
is false and what is true.
The struggle on the part of poets to make subject-matter and form
coincide in spite of criticism is an old one, as old, perhaps, as the
first critic. It should not be confused with attempts to make form suit
subject-matter (as the Pindaric Ode was cast to contain any stately
flattery); or to suit subject-matter to a popular form (as the sonnet
has become a general utility form designed to do for a variety of
subjects). The whole trend of modern poetry is toward treating poetry
like a very sensitive substance which succeeds better when allowed to
crystallize by itself than when put into prepared moulds: this is why
modern criticism, deprived of its discussions of questions of form,
tries to replace them by obscure metaphysical reflections. Modern
poetry, that is, is groping for some principle of self-determination
to be applied to the making of the poem--not lack of government, but
government from within. Free verse was one of the largest movements
toward this end. But it has too often meant not self-government but
complete laissez-faire on the part of the poet, a licence to metrical
anarchy instead of a harmonious enjoyment of liberty. Strangely enough,
when we come upon an example of free verse that shows clearness and
restraint and proportion, we do not think of it as free verse, though
we do not think of it, on the other hand, as poetry of a traditional
form. And this is as it should be. An example is the opening of a poem
by Hart Crane, _Passage_:
Where the cedar leaf divides the sky
I heard the sea.
In sapphire arenas of the hills
I was promised an improved infancy.
The rhyme between _sea_ and _infancy_ is not strong enough to
mislead one into construing this as a regular stanza. The impression
of regularity comes from a careful alternation of images, from a
regularity of design more fundamental than mere verse regularity. The
authorized version of the Bible, in passages where the original text
was in poetic form, is the most familiar example of this:
The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places:
How are the mighty fallen!
Tell it not in Gath,
Publish it not in the streets of Askelon;
Lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice,
Lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph.
The effect of regularity is here again achieved by the recurrence of
ideas in varying alternations to show the movement of the poem. As
in Mr. Crane’s poem a parallelism exists between the first and third
lines and the second and fourth, the third and fourth carrying the
imaginative experience of the first and second to a more specialized
meaning, from which the direction of the remainder of the poem
may be taken; so in the Biblical lines quoted a parallelism also
exists between the _beauty of Israel_ and _the mighty_,
and between _slain upon thy high places_ and _fallen_ of
the first and second lines. The scorn with which the last four lines
here must be pronounced is obviously dictated by the ironic contrast
between the _high places_ of Israel and the _streets_
of Gath and Askelon (the streets of these cities being generally
trenches below ground-level) and between the _beauty of Israel_
and the _daughters of the Philistines_. In Mr. Crane’s poem the
sympathetic connection between the first four lines and the rest of
the poem depends not so much on the general technical symmetry of the
poem as on the use of the images directly stated in these lines in a
more indirect and complicated sense in the following lines. Poetry
so treated is nothing more than a single theme subjected to as many
variations as its first or simplest statement will allow, even to the
point where it ironically contradicts itself. There is in it no room
for, and no reason for, a separate element of form. Obvious mechanical
form imposed on a poem, unless the poem is deficient in the balance
of its ideas, is like architectural dressing that spoils the natural
proportions of a building and has not even structural usefulness.
How, now, does the question of form affect the long poem? Let us take
Tennyson’s _In Memoriam_, which embroiders the theme of his
friend’s death in a sequence of episodes, and T. S. Eliot’s poem,
_The Waste Land_, which enlarges the introductory theme of the
death and decay implicit in Spring to embrace the death and decay
implicit in all forms of hopeful human energy. In the first, the same
rhymed stanza is maintained through all the varying moods of the poem;
in the second the progress of the poem is marked by the most sensitive
change--not only from episode to episode but from passage to passage.
It is just at these delicate transitions from one atmosphere to
another, where the separate parts are joined into a single continuous
poem, that the poetic quality is to be looked for. No such transitions
are to be found in Tennyson’s poem, or for that matter in a poem like
the _Aeneid_: length in such poems means bulk. The poem is as long
as the poet’s endurance and the reader’s patience permit.
Just how long this will be depends on the period in which it is
written: we generally find long poems when poetic themes are limited
to a few approved subjects, such as war, religion, lamentation or
love. The length of the poem is then only a sign of the dignity of the
subject. It has not until recent times been considered as something
beside dignified bulk. A long poem was not thought to need the same
unity as a short poem: the unchanging metre was enough to keep the
loosely connected parts of the poem together. This is the case with
_In Memoriam_, where the different sections are digressive rather
than progressive. But _The Waste Land_ has to be read as a short
poem: that is, as a unified whole. The reader can no more skip a
passage in it than a line in a short poem and expect to understand the
poem. For it is not a long poem in the usual sense of being a number of
short poems in a uniform metre, joined by mere verse padding.
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smooths her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.
This formal rhymed stanza, reminiscent of Goldsmith, is by Mr. Eliot
ironically applied to a sordid modern love-scene. We are to go from
here back to a romantic picture of Queen Elizabeth and Leicester in
amorous progress down the same Thames over whose waters the noise of
this gramophone is now carried. How is the transition between these
two passages made? The ten-syllabled iambic line of the stanza quoted
turns into blank verse beginning with a romantic quotation from _The
Tempest_, getting more and more ragged as the music is interrupted
by the Thames-side noises, and finally trailing off with syncopated
phrases suggested by a mandoline.
“This music crept by me upon the waters”
And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishermen lounge at noon; where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.
The step is now made from the riverside to the river by allowing the
rhythm to break up into short verse units proper to a river song.
The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
The lyrical quality of this passage is, according to the poet’s
explanatory note, to be associated with the song of the Rhinedaughters
in _Götterdämmerung_. And this operatic atmosphere imposed on a
modern river-scene makes the fitting transition to the picture of
Elizabeth and Leicester not in a barge foul with oil and tar but in a
gilded state-barge:
Elizabeth and Leicester
Beating oars
The stern was formed
A gilded shell
Red and gold
The brisk swell
Rippled both shores
Southwest wind
Carried down stream
The peal of bells
White towers
Weilala leia
Wallala leilala
In contrast with this apparently irregular transition, let us consider
three successive sections of _In Memoriam_: 119, 120, 121. The
first is a return in reverie to the early days in Cambridge when
Tennyson and his dead friend were undergraduates. Arthur Hallam seems
to stand before him as in life:
And bless thee, for thy lips are bland,
And bright the friendship of thine eye;
And in my thoughts with scarce a sigh
I take the pressure of thine hand.
This stanza closes the first section. The next section continues in
exactly the same metre. But not only are the sections separated by a
double space and further cut off from each other by a new numbering;
when we begin to read section 120 we seem to be in an entirely
different poem.
I trust I have not wasted breath:
I think we are not wholly brain,
Magnetic mockeries; not in vain
Like Paul with beasts, I fought with death;
We find him here right in the midst of an elementary philosophical
discussion of Darwinism and the materialistic conception of the
universe. Apparently we are supposed to read in this the triumph of
mind over matter as particularly shown by the poet’s persistence in
regarding his friend as still alive. This may also be a reminiscence of
undergraduate discussions on the same subject. But we only make these
connections in default of a true connection between the texts of the
separate sections. This is not a case of making the lazy reader think
and work along with the poet, but of the lazy poet taking advantage of
his reader’s faith and industry. The next section begins:
Sad Hesper o’er the buried sun
And ready, thou, to die with him,
Thou watchest all things ever dim
And dimmer and a glory done:
Here again no strict connection can be construed. That the section
opens in this strain is probably due to a reaction against the prosy
scientific language he used in the previous section. Casting about for
a more elegiac tone, the poet is naturally brought back to Milton’s
_Lycidas_, from which he borrows the image of the setting sun,
emblem of his dead friend. It is all very well to be able to account
for Tennyson in this way. It does not, however, justify his binding
together of random leaves from his poetic notebook into a long
poem. The division into sections has certainly done away with the
padding that would have been necessary had the poem been treated as a
continuous piece without breaks. But it does not conceal the fact that
these sections have no logical connection with one another. Deprive the
poem of its sectional division; deprive it of its metrical regularity;
and it will appear the loose and ill-assorted bundle of lost ideas
it really is. Such feeble and false material would certainly not be
tolerated in a poem which, like _The Waste Land_, had to invent
its metrical changes as it went along. It is especially in the long
poem that the distinction between form and subject-matter has the most
vicious effect. In a short poem, even if form and subject-matter are
not made identical, it is possible to keep them proper to each other:
as in Milton’s _L’Allegro_. Compare this with its companion piece
_Il Penseroso_, which is a praise of pensive melancholy as the
former is a light-hearted denial of melancholy; and the metre will be
found to be identical, though it is used with a different effect in
both.
But come thou Goddes fair and free,
In Heav’n ycleap’d Euphrosyne,
And by men, heart-easing Mirth,
Whom lovely Venus, at a birth
With two sister Graces more
To Ivy-crownèd Bacchus bore;
is exactly the same metre as:
But hail thou Goddes, sage and holy,
Hail divinest Melancholy,
Whose saintly visage is too bright
To hit the sense of human sight;
And therefore to our weaker view,
Ore laid with black staid Wisdom’s hew.
But in the first all is hurried, little punctuation is used; in the
second all is slowed down, there is comparatively more punctuation,
we get heavy internal rhymes, such as _Ore laid_ with _black
staid_, and the rhythm is further delayed by _s’s_ used in
close juxtaposition, as _Goddes_, _sage_, _Whose saintly
visage_, etc. Neither the tripping movement nor the slow-pacing
movement, however, could have been effectively kept up if the poems had
been any longer. Certainly if they had been printed together as the two
halves of a single poem, the contrastive use of the metre would have
not been so striking, a greater uniformity would have been necessary.
It must be concluded from this that even more strictness is to be
demanded of the long poem than of the short poem. A long poem must
give good reason for its length, it must account strictly for every
line. Often the greater part of a long poem would be more properly
put in a prose footnote. The apology of a long poem should be: “I am
really a long _short_ poem”. Poe was the first modern critic to
explode the dignity of the long poem of major poetry. In his _The
Poetic Principle_ he writes: “That degree of excitement which would
entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout
a composition of any great length. After the lapse of half an hour, at
the very utmost, it flags--fails--a revulsion ensues--and then the poem
is, in effect, and in fact, no longer such.” Although he saw that the
long poem was of necessity weak in structure, that length in itself was
destructive of poetic form; by form he meant that regular form imposed
on subject-matter which we have here been questioning in both the short
and long poem. Modernist poetry seems to be composed chiefly of short
poems--_The Waste Land_, one of the longest modernist poems, is
only 433 lines long. But this is not because of a belief in the short
poem _per se_ as against the long poem. It is rather a result of a
feeling that form and subject-matter are structurally identical; which
affects the short and the long poem alike. Well-controlled irregularity
instead of uncontrollable regularity makes _short_ and _long_
obsolete critical standards. The very purpose of this ‘irregularity’ is
to let the poem find its own natural size in spite of the demands put
upon poetry by critics, booksellers and the general reading public.
CHAPTER III
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AND E. E. CUMMINGS: A STUDY IN ORIGINAL PUNCTUATION
AND SPELLING
THE objections that are raised against the ‘freakishness’ of modernist
poetry are usually supported by quotations from poems by E. E. Cummings
and others which are not only difficult in construction and reference
but are printed queerly on the page. The reader naturally looks for
certain land-marks in the poem before he can begin to enjoy it: as
the visitor to Paris naturally sets his mental map of the city by the
Eiffel Tower and, if the Eiffel Tower were to collapse, would have a
difficult time finding his way about for a few days. Modernist poets
have removed the well-known land-marks and the reader is likewise
bothered. The reasons given for this removal are that land-marks tend
to make paths, that paths grow to roads, that roads soon mean walls and
railings, and that the pedestrian or motorist, who must keep to the
roads, never sees any new scenery.
because
you go away i give roses who
will advise even yourself, lady
in the most certainly (of what we
everywhere do not touch) deep
things;
remembering ever so ... etc.
This is the beginning of one of Mr. Cummings’ poems. The first obvious
oddity is the degrading of the personal pronoun ‘I’ into ‘i’. This has
a very simple history. The ‘upper case’ was in mediaeval times used for
all nouns and proper names and the adjectives formed from them; for
the Deity; for Royalty (in ‘We’ and ‘Our’); for certain quasi-divine
abstractions such as Mystery, Power, Poetry; and sometimes for ‘She’
and ‘Thou’ and so on, where love gives the pronoun a quasi-divine
character. Mr. Cummings protests against the upper case being also
allotted to ‘I’: he affects a casualness, a humility, a denial of
the idea of personal immortality responsible for ‘I’. Moreover ‘i’
is more detached: it dissociates the author from the speaker of the
poem. This use of ‘i’ is in keeping with his use of the word ‘who’,
instead of ‘which’, to qualify the roses; the roses become so personal
as to deserve the personal rather than the neutral relative. His next
idiosyncrasy is his refusal of a capital letter to each new line of
the poem. Now, if this convention were not so ancient, it would
seem as odd and unnecessary as, for instance, quotation-marks seem
in eighteenth-century books enclosing each line of a long speech
instead of occurring only at the beginning and end of a passage. The
modernist rejection of the initial capital can be justified on the
grounds that it gives the first word of each line, which may be a
mere ‘and’ or ‘or’, an unnatural emphasis. If for special reasons the
poet wishes to capitalize the first word, the fact that it is anyhow
capitalized like all the other initial ‘And’s’ and ‘Or’s’ makes any
such niceness impossible. Later in the poem Cummings uses the capital
letter at the beginning of a new sentence to call attention to the
full-stop which might otherwise be missed: but the ‘because’ at the
beginning of the poem need not be capitalized because it obviously
_is_ the beginning. Similarly, he has suppressed the conventional
comma after ‘lady’ because the end of the line makes a natural pause
without punctuation. Commas he uses to mark pauses, not merely as
the geographical boundaries of a clause. He has even in another poem
inserted one between the ‘n’ and ‘g’ of the word ‘falling’ to suggest
the slowness of the falling. Colons and semicolons and full stops he
uses to mark pauses of varying length. To give a longer pause still
he will leave a blank line. In the quotation just given, the new line
at ‘remembering’ is to mark a change of tone, though the pause is not
longer than a semicolon’s worth. Parentheses he uses for _sotto
voce_ pronunciation; or, if they occur in the middle of the word, as
in “the taxi-man p(ee)ps his whistle”, they denote a certain quality
of the letters enclosed--here the actual sharp whistling sound between
the opening and closing (the two p’s) of the taxi-man’s lips. When this
system is carried to a point of great accuracy we find lines like the
following:
with-ered unspea-king: tWeNtY, f i n g e r s, large
which, quoted detached from their context, seem to support any charge
of irrational freakishness, but in their context are completely
intelligible. Moreover, Mr. Cummings is protecting himself against
future liberties which printers and editors may take with his work, by
using a personal typographical system which it will be impossible to
revise without destroying the poem.
It may be that he has learned a lesson from the fate that has overtaken
Shakespeare’s sonnets: in which not only have changes in spelling
and pronunciation been used to justify the liberties that have been
taken in ‘modernizing’ the texts; but certain very occasional and
obvious printer’s errors in the only edition printed in Shakespeare’s
lifetime have been made the excuse for hundreds of quite unjustifiable
emendations. Mr. Cummings and Shakespeare have in common a deadly
accuracy, and that accuracy makes poems difficult rather than easy.
It is this accuracy that frightens Mr. Cummings’ public, it was
Shakespeare’s accuracy that provoked his editors to meddle with his
texts as being too incomprehensible as they were written. Actually we
shall find that Shakespeare is more difficult than Mr. Cummings in
thought, though his poems have a more familiar look on the page: Mr.
Cummings expresses with an accuracy peculiar to him what is common to
everyone, Shakespeare expresses in the conventional form of the time,
with greater accuracy, what is peculiar to himself. Let us print two
versions of a sonnet by Shakespeare, first the version found in the
_Oxford Book of English Verse_ and other popular anthologies
which have apparently chosen this sonnet from all the others as
being particularly easy to understand, and next the version printed
in the 1609 edition of the Sonnets, and apparently, though pirated,
printed from Shakespeare’s original manuscript. The alterations, it
will be noticed in a comparison of the first with the second, are,
with a few exceptions which we will point out later, chiefly in the
punctuation and spelling. By showing what great difference in the sense
the juggling of punctuation marks has made in Shakespeare’s original
sonnet, we shall perhaps be able to sympathize somewhat with what seems
typographical perversity in a poet like Mr. Cummings. The modernizing
of the spelling is not quite so serious a matter, though we shall see
that to change a word like _blouddy_ to _bloody_ makes a
difference not only in the atmosphere of the word but in its sound as
well.
I
Th’ expense of Spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy’d no sooner but despisèd straight;
Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell
II
(No. 129)
Th’ expence of Spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action, and till action, lust
Is periurd, murdrous, blouddy full of blame,
Sauage, extreame, rude, cruell, not to trust.
Injoyd no sooner but dispised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated as a swollowed bayt,
On purpose layd to make the taker mad.
Made In pursut and in possession so,
Had, hauing, and in quest, to have extreame,
A blisse in proofe and proud and very wo,
Before a joy proposd behind a dreame,
All this the world well knowes yet none knowes well,
To shun the heauen that leads men to this hell.
Let our method first be, before trying to match our own intelligence
with Shakespeare’s intelligence, to compare these two versions, the
original one and the modern one, in order to feel as intimate with
the language in which the poem was written as if all these years
did not stand between ourselves and Shakespeare. First, then, as to
the spelling. As a matter of course the _u_ in _proud_
and _heauen_ changes to _v_; the Elizabethans had no
typographical _v_. There are other words in which the change
of spelling does not seem to matter. _Expence_, _cruell_,
_bayt_, _layd_, _pursut_, _blisse_, _proofe_,
_wo_--any of these words taken by themselves are not necessarily
affected by modernization; but undoubtedly much of the original
atmosphere of the poem is lost by changing them in the gross. Sheer
facility in reading a poem is no gain when we are trying to discover
what the poem was like for the poet. And when one considers all
that has happened to the language since Shakespeare’s time one can
understand why Mr. Cummings should set his poems down so that when
read they are read as ‘in the original’. But other changes to make
this sonnet comprehensible to modern readers have involved more
than changes in spelling. _Periurd_ to _perjured_ would
have meant, to Shakespeare, the addition of another syllable, as
_murdrous_ to _murderous_. _Injoyd_, with the same
number of syllables as _periurd_, is however made _Enjoy’d_;
while _swollowed_, which must have been meant as a three-syllabled
word (Shakespeare used _ed_ as a separate syllable very strictly
and did frequently allow himself an extra syllable in his iambic
foot) is printed _swallow’d_. When we come to _dispised_,
we find in the modern version an accent over the last syllable. By
apostrophes and accents and changes of spelling the rhythm and the
consistency in spelling of the original is sacrificed; and without
making it an easier poem, only a less accurate one. The sound of the
poem suffers through respelling as well as through false alterations in
the rhythm. _Blouddy_ was pronounced more like _blue-dy_ than
_bluddy_; the _ea_ of _extreame_ and _dreame_ were
sounded like the _ea_ in great; _Injoyd_ was pronounced as
it was written; _periurd_ was probably pronounced _peryurd_.
But the changes in punctuation do the most damage: not only to the
personal atmosphere of the poem but to the meaning itself. In the
second line a semicolon after the first _action_ instead of a
comma gives a longer rest than Shakespeare gave; but it also cuts
off the idea at _action_ instead of keeping _in action_
and _till action_ together as well as the two _lust_’s. A
comma after _blouddy_ separates it from _full_ with which
it really forms a single word meaning “full as with blood”. Next come
several semicolons for commas; these introduce pauses which break up
the continuous flow of ideas treading on one another’s heels. (If
Shakespeare had wanted such pauses he would have used semicolons as he
does elsewhere.) Particularly serious is the interpolation of a comma
after _no sooner had_; for this confines the phrase to a special
meaning, _i.e._ “lust no sooner had is hated past reason,” whereas
it also means “lust no sooner had _past reason_ is hated past
reason”. The comma might as well have been put between _reason_
and _hated_; it would have limited the meaning but no more than
has been done. On the other hand a comma is omitted where Shakespeare
actually did put one, after _bayt_. With the comma, _On purpose
layd_--though it refers to _bayt_--also takes us back to the
original idea of _lust_; without the comma it merely carries
out the figure of _bayt_. In the original there is a full stop
at _mad_, closing the octave; in the revised version a colon is
used, making the next line run right on and causing the unpardonable
change from _Made_ to _Mad_. The capital _I_ of
_In_ shows how carefully the printer copied the manuscript.
Shakespeare undoubtedly first wrote the line without _Made_, but
probably deciding that such an irregular line was too bold, added
_Made_ without changing the capital _I_ to a small one.
_Made_ logically follows from _make_ of the preceding line:
‘to make the taker mad, Made (mad)’; but it also returns to the general
idea of lust. This change from _Made_ to _Mad_ limits the
final _so_ of this line to _Mad_ and provokes another change
from comma to semicolon, _i.e._ ‘Mad in pursut and in possession
so (mad)’, whereas the idea of _Mad_ is only vaguely echoed in
this line from the preceding line. The meaning of the line might
reasonably be restricted to: ‘Made In pursut and in possession as
follows’: since it is the first line of the sestet, it is more likely
to refer forward than back. As a matter of fact, it does both.
The comma between _in quest_ and _to have extreame_ has been
moved forward to separate _have_ from _extreame_. The line
originally stood for a number of interwoven meanings:
1. The taker of the bait, the man in pursuit and in possession of lust,
is made mad, is made like this: he experiences both extremes at once.
(What these extremes are the lines following show.)
2. The _Had, having, and in quest_, might have been written
in parentheses if Shakespeare had used parentheses. They say, by
way of interjection, that lust comprises all the stages of lust:
the after-lust period (_Had_), the actual experience of lust
(_having_), and the anticipation of lust (_in quest_); and
that the extremes of lust are felt in all these stages (_to have
extreame_, _i.e._ to have extremes, to have in extreme degrees).
3. Further, one stage in lust is like the others, as extreme as the
others. All the distinctions made in the poem between _lust in
action_ and lust _till action_, between lust _In pursut_
and lust _in possession_ are made to show that in the end there
are no real distinctions. _Had, having and in quest_ is the
summing up of this fact.
4. The _Had_, _having_, separately sum up _possession_:
that is, the _action_ of lust includes the _expence of
Spirit_, _the waste of shame_. The _in quest_, naturally
refers to _In pursut_.
5. It must be kept in mind throughout that words qualifying the
lust-business refer interchangeably to the taker (the man who lusts),
the bait (the object of lust) and lust in the abstract. So: _Had_
may mean the swallowing of the bait by the taker, or the catching of
the taker by the bait, or ‘lust had’, or ‘had by lust’; _having_
and _in quest_ are capable of similar interpretations.
These are the numerous possibilities in the line if the original
punctuation is kept. But in the revised punctuation it has only one
narrow sense, and this not precisely Shakespeare’s intention. By the
semicolon placed after _so_ of the preceding line, it is cut
off from close co-operation both with the line before and the other
preceding lines. By the shifting of the comma not only is a pause
removed where Shakespeare put one and the rhythm thus changed, but
the line itself loses its point and really does not pull its weight
in the poem. In this punctuation the _whole_ line ought to be
put into parentheses, as being a mere repetition. The _to have_
linked with _in quest_ is superfluous; _extreme_ set off
by itself like this is merely a descriptive adjective already used.
Moreover, when the line is thus isolated between two semicolons (after
_so_, after _extreme_) _Had_, _having_, etc.,
instead of effecting a harmony between the various senses given to
_lust_ (taker, bait, lust in the abstract), disjoint them and
become ungrammatical. _Mad in pursuit, and in possession so_;
only refers to _the taker mad_. _A bliss in proof, and proved,
a very woe_; can only refer to lust in the abstract. Thus this
intervening line is just a pompous confusion. The next line (_A
blisse in proofe and provd and very wo_,) should explain _to have
extreame_; it is not merely another parenthetical line as in the
revised version. To fulfil the paradox implied in _extreame_ it
should mean that lust is a bliss during the proof and after the proof,
and also _very wo_ (real woe) during and after the proof. The
altered line only means that lust is a bliss during the proof but a woe
after the proof, denying what Shakespeare has been at pains to show all
along, that lust is all things at all times. Once the editors tried to
repunctuate the line they had to tamper with words themselves in the
text. A comma after _proof_ demanded a comma after _proved_.
A comma after _proved_ made it necessary to change _and very
wo_ to apply to _provd_ only. Another semicolon at the end of
this line again detaches a line and further breaks the continuity of
the poem. Specifically, by cutting off the following line from itself,
it in turn does to the following line what the preceding line did to
it: makes it only another antithesis or rhetorical balance (‘a joy in
prospect, as against a dream in retrospect’, to repeat the sense of a
bliss during proof as against a woe after proof) instead of permitting
it to carry on the intricate and careful argument that runs without a
stop through the whole sestet. The important thing about this line is
that it takes all the meanings in the poem one stage further. Lust in
the extreme goes beyond both bliss and woe; it goes beyond reality. It
is no longer lust _Had, having and in quest_, it is lust face
to face with _love_. Even when consummated, lust still stands
before an unconsummated joy, a proposed joy, and proposed not as a joy
possible of consummation but one only to be desired through the dream
by which lust leads itself on, the dream behind which this proposed
joy, this love, seems to lie. This is the final meaning of the line. It
is inlaid with other meanings, but these should follow naturally from
the complete meaning, it should not be built up from them. For example
the line may also be read: “Before a joy (lust) can be proposed, there
must be a dream behind, a joy lost by waking” (“So that I wake and cry
to dream again”); or: “Before a joy can be proposed, it must first be
renounced as a joy, it must be put behind as a dream; you know in the
pursuit that possession is impossible”; or: “Before the man, in lust
is a prospect of joy, yet he knows by experience that this is only a
dream”; or: “Beforehand he says that he definitely proposed lust to be
a joy, afterwards he says that it came as a dream”; or: “Before (in
face of) a joy proposed only as a consequence of a dream, with a dream
pushing him from behind”. All these and even more readings of the line
are possible and legitimate, and each reading could in turn be made
specially to explain why the taker is made mad or how lust is _to
have extreme_ or why it is both _a bliss_ and _very wo_.
The punctuated line in the revised version, cut off from what has gone
before and from what follows, can only mean: ‘In prospect, lust is a
joy; in retrospect, a dream.’ Though a possible contributory meaning,
as the _only_ meaning it makes the theme of the poem that lust is
impossible of satisfaction, whereas the theme is, as carried on by the
next line, that lust as lust _is_ satisfiable but that satisfied
lust is in conflict with itself. The next line, if unpunctuated except
for the comma Shakespeare put at the end, is a general statement of
this conflict: the man in lust is torn between lust as he well-knows it
with the world and lust in his personal experience, which crazes him to
hope for more than lust from lust. The force of the second _well_
is to deny the first _well_: no one really knows anything of lust
except in personal experience, and only through personal experience can
lust be known _well_ rather than “well-known”. But separate the
second _well_ from the first, as in the revised version, and the
direct opposition between _world_ and _none, well knowes_
and _knowes well_ is destroyed, as well as the whole point of the
word-play between _well knowes_ and _knowes well_; for by the
removal of the comma after the second _well_, this is made merely
an adverb to modify _To shun_ in the following line--_well_
here means merely _successfully_ with _To shun_, not _well
enough_ with _knowes_. This repunctuation also robs _All
this_ of its real significance, as it refers not only to all that
has gone before but to the last line as well: “All this the world
well knows yet all this none knows well” (_i.e._ the character
of lust), and “All this the world well knows yet none knows well”
the moral to be drawn from the character of lust (_i.e._ _to
shun the heaven that leads men to this hell_). The character and
the moral of lust the whole world well knows, but no one knows the
character and the moral really well unless he disregards the moral
warning and engages in lust, no one knows lust well enough to shun it
because, though he knows it is both heavenly and hellish, lust can
never be recognized until it has proved itself lust by turning heaven
into hell.
The effect of this revised punctuation has been to restrict meanings
to special interpretations of special words. Shakespeare’s punctuation
allows the variety of meanings he actually intends; if we must choose
any one meaning, then we owe it to Shakespeare to choose at least one
he intended and one embracing as many meanings as possible, that is,
the most difficult meaning. It is always the most difficult meaning
that is the most final. (There are degrees of finality because no prose
interpretation of poetry can have complete finality, can be difficult
enough.) Shakespeare’s emendators, in trying to make him clear for the
plain man, only weakened and diluted his poetry. Their attempts to make
Shakespeare easy resulted only in depriving him of clarity. There is
but one way to make Shakespeare clear: to print him as he wrote or as
near as one can get to this. Making poetry easy for the reader should
mean showing clearly that it is difficult.
Mr. Cummings makes himself safe from emendation by setting down his
poems, which are really easy as poetry, so that their most difficult
sense strikes the reader first. By giving typography an active part to
play he makes his poems fixed and accurate in a way that Shakespeare’s
are not. In doing this he loses the fluidity Shakespeare got by not
cramping his poems with heavy punctuation and by placing more trust
in the plain reader--by leaving more to his imagination than he seems
to have deserved. The trouble with Mr. Cummings’ poems is that they
are too clear, once the plain reader puts himself to work on them.
Braced as they are, they do not present the eternal difficulties that
make poems immortal, they merely show one difficulty, how difficult
it is for Mr. Cummings or for any poet to stabilize a poem once and
for all. Punctuation marks in Mr. Cummings’ poetry are the bolts and
axels that make the poem a methodic and fool-proof piece of machinery
requiring common-sense for its operation rather than imagination. The
outcry against his typography shows that it is as difficult to engage
the common-sense of the reader as his imagination. A reviewer of Mr.
Cumming’s latest book, “is 5”, writes:
I know artists are always saying that a good painting looks as well
upside down as any other way. And it may be true. The question now
arises: does the same principle apply to a poem? But it is not
necessary to answer the question; if a poem is good, people will
gladly stand on their heads to read it. It is conceivable, if not
probable, that the favourite poetic form of the future will be a
sonnet arranged as a cross-word puzzle. If there were no other way
of getting at Shakespeare’s sonnets than by solving a cross-word
puzzle sequence, I am sure the puzzles would be solved and the sonnets
enjoyed. But what about Mr. Cummings? Can his poems surmount such
obstacles? Well, perhaps if they cannot survive as poems they can
survive as puzzles.
This may be the immediate verdict on Mr. Cummings’ typography; but one
thing Cummings can be sure of that Shakespeare could not have been
sure of, is that three centuries hence his poems if they survive (and
worse poets’ have) will be the only ones of the early twentieth century
reprinted in facsimile, not merely because he will be a literary
curiosity but because he has edited his poems with punctuation beyond
any possibility of re-editing. The Shakespeare to whose sonnets this
reviewer makes a rhetorical appeal is the popular Shakespeare of the
anthologies and not the facsimile Shakespeare. How many of those who
read this had ever before read sonnet 129 in the original? So few,
surely, that it is safe to conclude that no one is willing to stand on
his head to understand Shakespeare, that everyone wants a simplified
Shakespeare as well as a simplified Cummings. Indeed, very few people
can have looked at Shakespeare’s sonnets in the original since the
eighteenth century, when the popular interest in Shakespeare’s more
high-spirited comedies sent a few dull commentators and book-makers
to his poems. In 1766 George Steevens printed the _Sonnets_ in
the original and without annotations apparently because he thought
they were not worth them. Twenty-seven years later he omitted the
_Sonnets_ from an edition of Shakespeare’s works “because the
strongest Act of Parliament that could be framed would fail to compel
readers into their service”. People were certainly not more ready to
stand on their heads to understand Shakespeare in that time than in
this and Malone, who undertook in 1780 to justify Shakespeare to an
apathetic public by simplifying the difficult originals (cross-word
puzzles, if you like), was considered by Steevens to be “disgracing his
implements of criticism by the objects of their culture”. Steevens’
view was the general one; (Chalmers reaffirmed it in 1810), and if
Malone by his emendations, which have become the accepted Shakespearian
text, had not overridden the general critical opinion of the
_Sonnets_ and presented them fileted to the plain man, the plain
man of to-day would undoubtedly be unaware of the existence of the
_Sonnets_. Unlike Cummings’ poems, Shakespeare’s _Sonnets_
would not even have “survived as puzzles”.
Thus far does a study of the typography of Shakespeare take one.
The lesson of this for modernist poetry is an appreciation of the
difficulties of a poet with a large audience to whom his meanings are
mysteries and for the most part must remain mysteries. The modernist
poet handles the problem by trying to get the most out of his audience;
Shakespeare by trying to get the most out of his poem. Logically,
the modernist poet should have more readers than Shakespeare with an
elementary understanding of his poems, and Shakespeare only a few
readers, but these with an enlarged understanding of his poems.
The reverse, however, is true because the reading public has been
so undertrained on a simplified Shakespeare and on anthology verse
generally, that modernist poetry seems as difficult as Shakespeare
really ought to seem. Typography, we see, then, is really the subject
of the fate of poetry with its audience. Since it is, even at its
worst, the least disturbing method of communication, both for the ideas
communicated and for the audience, it is still the surest guide to the
understanding of a poem that we have--even when the typography of a
poem has been through a whole history of misunderstanding.
Only a few points in sonnet 129 have been left uncovered in our
typographical survey of the poem, and these occur principally in the
first few lines; for these suffer less from emendations than the rest
of the poem. The very delicate interrelation of the words of the first
two lines should not be overlooked: the strong parallelism between
_expense_ and _waste_ and _Spirit_ and _shame_
expressing in the very first line the terrible quick-change from
lust as lust-enjoyed to lust as lust-despised; the double meaning
of _waste_ as ‘expense’ and as ‘wilderness’, the _waste_
place in which the Spirit is _wasted_; the double meaning of
_expense_ as ‘pouring out’ and as the ‘price paid’; the double
meaning of _of shame_ as ‘shameful’, _i.e._ ‘deplorable’ and
as _ashamed_, _i.e._ ‘self-deploring’; the double meaning
of _shame_ itself as ‘modesty’ and ‘disgrace’; again the double
meaning of _lust in action_ as ‘lust’ unsuspected by man ‘in his
actions’ because disguised as ‘shame’ (in either sense of the word)
and condemned by him because he does not recognize it in himself, and
as ‘lust in progress’ as opposed to ‘lust contemplated’. All these
alternate meanings acting on each other, and even other possible
interpretations of words and phrases, make as it were a furiously
dynamic cross-word puzzle which can be read in many directions at
once, none of the senses being incompatible with any others. This
intensified inbreeding of words continues through the rest of the poem.
_Periurd_ is another obvious example, meaning both ‘falsely spoken
of’ and ‘false’. Again, _heaven_ and _hell_ have the ordinary
prose meaning of ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’, but also the particular
meanings they had in Shakespeare’s poetic vocabulary. ‘Heaven’ to
Shakespeare is the longing for a temperamental stability which at the
same time he recognizes as false. ‘Hell’ is Marlowe’s hell, which
hath no limits nor is circumscribed
In one selfe place, for where we are is hell.
The reader complaining of the obscurity of modernist poets must be
reminded of the intimate Shakespearian background he needs to be
familiar with before he can understand Shakespeare. The failure of
imagination and knowledge in Shakespeare’s emendators has reduced
Shakespeare to the indignity of being easy for everybody. Beddoes, an
early nineteenth century imitator of Shakespeare, said:
About Shakespeare. You might just as well attempt to remodel the
seasons and the laws of life and death as to alter one “jot or tittle”
of his eternal thoughts. ‘A Star’, you call him. If he was a star all
the other stage-scribblers can hardly be considered a constellation of
brass buttons.
The modernist poets are not many of them Stars but they are most of
them very highly polished brass buttons and are entitled to protect
themselves from the sort of tarnishing from which Shakespeare, though a
Star, has suffered.
Shakespeare’s attitude toward the perversely stupid reorganizing of
lines and regrouping of ideas is jocularly shown in the satire on
repunctuation given in the prologue of _Pyramus and Thisbe_ in his
_A Midsummer Night’s Dream_.
_Bottom._ If we offend, it is with our good will.
That you should think, we come not to offend,
But with good will. To show our simple skill,
That is the true beginning of our end.
Consider, then, we come but in despite.
We do not come, as minding to content you,
Our true intent is. All for your delight,
We are not here. That you should here repent you
The actors are at hand; and by their show,
You should know all, that you are like to know.
_Theseus._--This fellow doth not stand upon points. His speech
was like a tangled chain, nothing impaired but all disordered.
CHAPTER IV
THE UNPOPULARITY OF MODERNIST POETRY WITH THE PLAIN READER
THE eighteenth-century reading public had poetry made clear for it,
both by the way in which new poetry was written and previous poetry,
early English and Classical, rewritten. But the eighteenth century had
a very limited recipe for poetry; for metre the heroic couplet, which
broke thought up into very short lengths; for language a stock poetical
vocabulary of not more than a couple of thousand words. Anybody
could write poetry then if he obeyed the rules, without necessarily
being a poet. In the nineteenth century, because of a reading public
enlarged by democracy, clearness meant not so much obeying rules as
writing for the largest possible audience. The twentieth-century
reaction in poetry against nineteenth-century standards is not against
clearness and simplicity but against rules for poetry made by the
reading public, instead of by the poets themselves as they were in
the eighteenth century. This is why so many modern poets are forced
to feel themselves in snobbish sympathy with the eighteenth century.
The quarrel now is between the reading public and the modernist poet
over the definition of clearness. Both agree that perfect clearness is
the end of poetry, but the reading public insists that no poetry is
clear except what it can understand at a glance; the modernist poet
insists that the clearness of which the poetic mind is capable demands
thought and language of a far greater sensitiveness and complexity
than the enlarged reading public will permit it to use. To remain true
to his conception of what poetry is, he has therefore to run the risk
of seeming obscure or freakish, of having no reading public; even of
writing what the reading public refuses to call poetry, in order to
be a poet. The only fault to be found with a poet like E. E. Cummings
is that he has tried to do two things at once: to remain loyal to the
requirements of the poetic mind for clearness, and to get the ordinary
reading public to call the result ‘poetry’. He has tried to do this by
means of an elaborate system of typography, and the only gratitude he
has had from the reading public is to be called freakish and obscure
because of his typography.
The following is a poem describing day-break seen through a railway
carriage window in Italy.
Among
these
red pieces of
day (against which and
quite silently hills
made of blueandgreen paper
scorchbend ingthem
--selves--U
pcurv E, into:
anguish (clim
b)ing
s-p-i-r-a-
l
and, disappear)
Satanic and blasé
a black goat lookingly wanders
There is nothing left of the world but
into this noth
ing il trene per
Roma si-gnori?
jerk.
ilyr, ushes.
The cleverness of this as mere description can be shown by putting the
poem into ordinary prose with conventional typography; and afterwards
showing how the unconventional typography improves the accuracy of the
description:
Among these red pieces of day (against which--and quite
silently--hills made of blue and green paper, scorch-bending
themselves, upcurve into anguish, climbing spiral, and disappear),
satanic and blasé, a black goat lookingly wanders. There is nothing
left of the world; but into this nothing “il trene per Roma signori?”
jerkily rushes.
‘Red pieces of day’ suggests sunset fragments--the disintegration of
the universe as the train moves toward night. The hills become as
unreal as blue and green paper. The rocking of the train seems to give
their rounded outlines, as they stream past, the sort of movement a
long strip of paper makes when it curls up in the heat of fire, or that
the pen makes when it writes u’s and e’s in copperplate handwriting.
As the train comes close up to the hills their rounded outlines seem
to spiral upward against the red pieces (‘into anguish’) because the
eye strains itself looking up at them: they can only just be seen by
pressing the face against the window, and as the train gets nearer
still, they are no more visible. The eye is forced to drop to the
foreground and there exchanges glances with a diabolic-looking goat.
The traveller is utterly confused by these perceptual experiences:
when the line of hills that he has been watching is snatched away from
his eyes it seems like the end of the world, like death, and the goat
seems like the Devil greeting the dead. He pulls himself together.
“Where am I?” The movement of rocking and jerking continues. He
remembers the last words he has heard spoken, the question “The Rome
train, gentlemen?” which is all that he can think of to account for the
motion.
This is not the prose summary of the poem, that is to say, the
common-sense substitute for a piece of poetical extravagance. A prose
summary cannot _explain_ a poem, else the poet, if he were honest,
would give the reader only a prose summary, and no poem. The above
is rather the expansion, the dilution, even the destruction of the
poem which one reader may perform for another if the latter is unable
to face the intensity and compactness of the poem. The indignity of
literary criticism is largely due to the fact that it has had to
perform this levelling service for generations of plain readers. It has
never yet performed any services for poetry itself, which it tries to
suit either to philosophy or to the reader. Poetry cannot be judged by
its adaptability to a philosophical system, and criticism’s services
to the reader are doubtful. By encouraging him in his reading vanity
and in his demand for poems to be written down to him it has reduced
him to critical imbecility. Perhaps from the above expansion of the
poem the spoiled reader may be able to infer the greater accuracy and
truthfulness of the poetic version. The irregularity of the lines as
printed in the poem is evidently intended to give two movements in one,
the jerking and the rocking of the train. ‘Blueandgreen’ is printed
as a single word to show that it is not parti-coloured paper but
paper which is blue and green at once, the colours run together by the
rocking motion. ‘scorchbend ingthem’ represents the up-and-down rhythm
of the diagonal spiral movement. ‘--selves--’ stresses the realistic
character of this movement. The capitalized ‘U’ and ‘E’ enlarge the
mounting copperplate curves. The parentheses enclosing the syllable
‘climb’ means perhaps a slight catch of the breath at that point. The
comma after the ‘E’, the colon after ‘into’ are used as pauses of a
certain length marking the rhythm of the spirals. The word ‘spiral’ is
distended by hyphens to mark the final large spiral that sweeps the sky
out of view at the letter ‘l’. ‘Satanic’ is capitalized to make the
goat personally diabolic. The full stop after ‘jerk’ probably marks a
sudden jolt back to a consciousness of the inside of the train and the
purposefulness of the journey.
There is no experience here with which the plain reader cannot
sympathise, and only a little imaginative recollection has been needed
to make this analysis; no key from the author except the poem itself.
The poem combines two qualities of clearness: clearness of composition
in the interests of the poem as a thing in itself, clearness of
transmittance in the interests of the reader. It is obvious that the
poet could have given the poem this double accuracy in no other way.
Can it be that the poet has been wrong in paying too much attention to
the rendering of the poem for the reader: that if he had allowed it to
be more difficult, if he had concentrated exclusively on the poem as a
thing in itself, it would have seemed less freakish?
The ‘freakishness’ and abnormality of feeling with which the modernist
poet is often charged, it needs to be explained, are not due to the
fact that this is not an age for poetry and that therefore to write
poetry at all is a literary affectation. The trouble is rather that
ordinary modern life is full of the stock-feelings and situations with
which traditional poetry has continually fed popular sentiments; that
the commonplaces of everyday speech are merely the relics of past
poetry; so that the only way for a modern poet to have an original
feeling or experience that may eventually become literature is to have
it outside of literature. It is the general reading public, indeed,
which gets its excitement from literature and literary feelings instead
of from life. To appreciate this fully it must be realized that it is
always the poets who are the real psychologists, that it is they who
break down antiquated literary definitions of people’s feelings and
make them or try to make them self-conscious about formerly ignored or
obscure mental processes; for which an entirely new vocabulary has to
be invented. The appearance of freakishness generally means: poetry is
not in a “poetical” period, it is in a psychological period. It is not
trying to say “Things often felt but ne’er so well expressed” but to
discover what it is we are really feeling.
One of the first modernist poets to feel the need of a clearness and
accuracy in feelings and their expression so minute, so more than
scientific, as to make of poetry a higher sort of psychology, was
Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Catholic poet writing in the ’eighties. We
call him a modernist in virtue of his extraordinary strictness in the
use of words and the unconventional notation he used in setting them
down so that _they had to be understood as he meant them to be, or
understood not at all_ (this is the crux of the whole question of
the intelligibility of ‘difficult’ poetry). Hopkins cannot be accused
of trying to antagonize the reading public. In 1883 he wrote about the
typographical means he used in order to explain an unfamiliar metre
and an unfamiliar grammar: “There must be some marks. Either I must
invent a notation throughout, as in music, or else I must only mark
where the reader is likely to mistake, and for the present this is
what I shall do.” In 1885 he wrote again: “This is my difficulty, what
marks to use and when to use them: they are so much needed and yet so
objectionable. About punctuation my mind is clear: I can give a rule
for everything I write myself, and even for other people, though they
might not agree with me perhaps.” These lines from a sonnet written in
his peculiar metre will show to what an extent he is a modernist.
Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
’s not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather--as skies
Betweenpie mountains--lights a lovely mile.
First of all _Jackself_. The plain reader will get no help
from the dictionary with this, he must use his wits and go over
the other uses of _Jack_ in combination: jack-screw, jackass,
jack-knife, Jack Tar, Jack Frost, Jack of all trades, boot-jack,
steeple-jack, lumber-jack, jack-towel, jack-plane, roasting-jack.
From these the central meaning of ‘jack’ becomes clear. It represents
a person or thing that is honest, patient, cheerful, hard-working,
undistinguished--but the fellow that makes things happen, that does
things that nobody else would or could do. (Tom in English usage is
the mischievous, rather destructive, impudent and often unpleasant
fellow--tomboy, tomcat, tomfoolery, tomtit, peeping Tom, etc.).
‘Jackself’, then, is this workaday self which he advises to knock
off work for awhile; to leave comfort or leisure, crowded out by
work, some space to grow in, as for flowers in a vegetable garden;
to have his pleasure and comfort whenever and however God wills it,
not, as an ordinary Jackself would, merely on Sundays (Hopkins uses
“God knows when” and “God knows what” as just the language a Jackself
would use). God’s smile cannot be forced from him, that is, happiness
cannot be postponed until one is ready for it. Joy comes as suddenly
and unexpectedly as when, walking among mountains, you come to a point
where the sky shines through a cleft between two mountains and throws
a shaft of light over a mile of ground thus unexpectedly illumined for
you. We must appreciate the accuracy of the term _Betweenpie_.
Besides being again just the sort of homely kitchen language that
the Jackself would use to describe how sky seems pressed between two
mountains (almost as a smile is pressed between lips) it is also the
neatest possible way of combining the patching effect of light--as in
the word ‘pied’ (The Pied Piper of Hamelin) or in ‘magpie’--with the
way this light is introduced between the mountains.
Of Hopkins, who carefully observed so many rules, his editor, Dr.
Robert Bridges, who postponed publication of his poems for thirty
years, thus making Hopkins even more of a modernist poet, writes:
Apart from faults of taste ... affectations such as where the hills
are ‘as a stallion stalwart very-violet-sweet’ or some perversion of
human feeling, as, for instance, the “nostrils’ relish of incense
along the sanctuary side”, or “the Holy Ghost with warm breast and
with ah! bright wings”, which repel my sympathy more than do all the
rude shocks of his purely artistic wantonness--apart from these there
are faults of style which the reader must have courage to face. For
these blemishes are of such quality and magnitude as to deny him even
a hearing from those who love a continuous literary decorum.
Why cannot what Dr. Bridges calls a fault of taste, an affectation, in
the description of hills as ‘a stallion stalwart very-violet-sweet’
be, with the proper sympathy for Hopkins’ enthusiasm, appreciated as a
phrase reconciling the two seemingly opposed qualities of mountains,
their male, animal-like roughness and strength and at the same time
their ethereal quality under soft light for which the violet in the
gentle eye of the horse makes exactly the proper association? What Dr.
Bridges and other upholders of ‘literary decorum’ object to most in a
poet is not as a matter of fact either “faults of taste” or “faults
of style” (in Hopkins supposedly consisting chiefly in the clipping of
grammar to suit the heavily stressed metre) but a daring that makes the
poet socially rather than artistically objectionable. As a reviewer
in the _Times’ Literary Supplement_ states the grievance against
modernist poetry:
It is as if its object were to express that element only in the
poet’s nature by virtue of which he feels himself an alien in the
universe, or at least an alien from what he takes to be the universe
acknowledged by the rest of mankind.
But the truth is that ‘the rest of mankind’ is for the most part
totally unaware of the universe and constantly depends on the poet to
give it a second-hand sense of the universe through language. Because
this language has been accepted ready-made by “the rest of mankind”
without understanding the reasons for it, it becomes, by ‘progress’,
stereotyped and loses its meaning; and the poet is called upon again
to remind people what the universe really looks and feels like, that
is, what language means. If he does this conscientiously he must use
language in a fresh way or even, if the poetical language has grown too
stale and there are few pioneers before him, invent new language. But,
if he does, he will be certain to antagonize for a while those who keep
asking poetry to do their more difficult thinking for them; for they
have a proprietary affection for the old language, however meaningless
it may have become, and do not realize that it must be brought up
to date or, if need be, entirely recast if poetry is to do its job
properly. How irate they become can be seen from a further statement by
the same reviewer.
Language itself is an accepted code: and if the poet is really to be
the man who cannot accept what others do, he ought to begin squarely
at the beginning and have nothing to do with their conventional jargon.
But let the poet begin squarely at the beginning in order to discover
whether there is anything to accept and the cry will be immediately
raised: “Language is an accepted code.”
It is easy in any period to look back with satisfaction on the
growth of language and, for instance, to accuse the early nineteenth
century of dullness and conservatism for being so slow to recognize
the services to the refreshment of poetry rendered by Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. But it is natural for every period to
regard itself as the final stage of everything that has come before
it, so that it can only imagine new poets, of an originality equal
to that of Wordsworth and others in their own day, as writing now
exactly as they wrote then. The same is true in music: the charge
of freakishness has been brought by critics in their time against
Debussy, Wagner and even Brahms. Literary critics who bring charges
of freakishness against modernist poets find it possible to tolerate
modernism in contemporary music; as conservative musical critics will
not be so hard on modernism in literature--the proprietary interest in
their medium is not threatened in either case.
In the midst of this conflict stands the plain reader, the timid
victim of orthodox criticism on the one hand, and unorthodox poetry
on the other (unorthodox criticism overlooks him entirely, which is
perhaps the most severe affront he has to bear). His attitude toward
poetry has, therefore, to be one of self-defence. He must be cautious
in his choice of what he reads. He must not make a fool of himself
by reading anything in which he may be called on to rely on his own
critical opinion. He must not read anything which will be a waste of
time, anything not likely to last for a long time, not destined to be
a classic. Forced to be on his guard, he will be inclined to emphasize
the value of the ‘practical’ things which are not poetry, such as time
in the quantitative, financial sense; also to develop a shrewd sense of
the ‘practical’ value of poetry: he will avoid new poetry about which
no final judgement has been made, whatever its emotional appeal may
be--poetry that seems too different from the poetry that has lasted
to be a good investment, poetry likely to prove a dead movement. His
poem must not only be plain, it must correspond with what he accepts,
by reputation, as classics. And to a certain extent he is right in
this, for there is a great deal of waste material left behind by dead
movements in poetry; but only to a certain extent, for a great many
really bad poems also survive as classics because of the plain reader’s
literary conservatism: he will prefer an unoriginal but undisturbing
poem to an original but disturbing one.
The plain reader is, in fact, more conservative in poetry than in any
other thing but religion; and in poetry more than in religion. The
reader who may be said to occupy an enlightened middle position toward
various historical changes he must face in his life is generally many
generations behind himself in poetry and religion. This is perhaps not
out of incapacity, but because he realizes that the demands put upon
him by religion and poetry are too pressing, too personal. It is a case
of all or nothing. So it is nothing; because no common Christian could
seriously turn the other cheek when smitten or sell all that he had and
give it to the poor, and no common poetry reader could bring himself
without great effort to meet the demands of thought put upon him by
an authentic poem. An advocacy in modern Christianity of the turning
of the other cheek and of the communalizing of private property would
be regarded as an obnoxious modernism in the most devout Christian;
as an increase in poetry of the demands put upon the plain reader
antagonizes him against modernist poetry no matter how much he loves
poetry in general. Poetry, then, like religion, has to be dissociated
from practical life, except as a sentimentality: he will give a saint
or a poet lip-service, but only lip-service: particularly he must
reject a saint or a poet if he is still living, for it is only time
that reveals to a worshipper or a reader which of the saints or poets
are real and which are charlatans. The common Christian will prefer
a popular preacher of the orthodox type to a ‘fanatic’ like General
Booth: this preserves his self-respect. We purposely make this analogy
between poetry and religion, which is a false one, because it is a
traditional analogy and largely accountable for readers’ shyness of
poetry. Religion can be in actual conflict with social principles; to
turn the smitten cheek is to abandon the virtue of self-pride, is to
compromise ‘honour’: Poetry, on the other hand, in its more exacting
side, makes no demands of a social nature, no demands which exceed the
private intimacy of the reader and the poem; particularly when, as now,
the poet asks for no personal bays or public banquets. But the plain
reader is even more afraid of the infringements that poetry may make on
his private mental and spiritual ease than of the social infringements
that modernism in religion would lead him to. And undoubtedly the way
that anything can interfere most with an individual’s privacy is by
demanding criticism (complete attention, complete mental intimacy and
confidence) for itself from him.
So it is that when Wordsworth and Coleridge were producing their best
poetry the plain reader would have nothing to do with them but was
reading dull writers such as Shenstone and Meikle, who are now mere
names in literary history; when Keats and Shelley were writing their
best he was reading Thomas Moore and Samuel Rogers; when he should have
been reading the early Tennyson he was reading Mrs. Hemans and Martin
Tupper; when he should have been reading Whitman he was reading Robert
Montgomery and the later Tennyson. And so on to the present day: when
even the plain reader trying to keep up with the poetry of his time
will be more likely to choose a poet such as the American Carl Sandburg
or the English John Drinkwater, belonging to a dead movement which has
reached its limit and will expire with the death of its authors, than
one belonging to a live movement (such as E. E. Cummings or John Crowe
Ransom) which asks him to risk his critical judgement.
Let us compare a poem of Carl Sandburg’s, who tried to create a
democratic poetry in the spirit of the American Middle West by using
free verse, slang and sentimental lower-class subjects, with a poem of
John Crowe Ransom’s, who, without making a sensational appeal to the
locality in which he lives or to a particular social class, yet has
a colloquial dignity and grace which it is possible to call Southern
and a quality in his poetry that is definitely aristocratic. Strangely
enough, it is Sandburg whose work is in the natural course of events
shelved among the dull relics of dead movements and Ransom, though his
poems are a formal and careful evasion of violence, who represents
poetic modernism to the plain reader--which is the same to him as
sensationalism. Here is a poem of Carl Sandburg’s, then, especially
designed to match the intelligence-level of the plain reader and
present him with no allusions that may mystify him.
MAMIE
Mamie beat her head against the bars of a little Indian town and
dreamed of romance and big things off somewhere the way the railroad
trains all ran.
She could see the smoke of the engines get lost down where the streaks
of steel flashed in the sun and when the newspapers came in on the
morning mail she knew there was a big Chicago far off, where all the
trains ran.
She got tired of the barber shop boys and the post office chatter and
the church gossip and the old pieces the band played on the Fourth of
July and Decoration Day.
And sobbed at her fate and beat her head against the bars and was
going to kill herself,
When the thought came to her that if she was going to die she might
as well die struggling for a clutch of romance among the streets of
Chicago.
She has a job now at six dollars a week in the basement of the Boston
Store.
And even now she beats her head against the bars in the same old way
and wonders if there is a bigger place the railroads run to from
Chicago where maybe there is
romance
and big things
and real dreams
that never go smash.
Perhaps this poem will show why the plain reader prefers bad
contemporary poetry to good contemporary poetry: the former can give
him as much innocent enjoyment as a good short story or his newspaper
or an up-to-date jazz orchestra, the latter, because it is good yet
too novel for any of the ordinary tests for a Classic to apply to it,
demands an effort of criticism which robs him of his power of enjoying
it. Poetry, like fashions in clothes, has to be ‘accepted’ before the
man in the street will patronize it. Next to the permanently ‘accepted’
literature, the plain reader places literature of dead movements of his
own time, literature that does not have to be accepted. ‘Modern’ poetry
means to him poetry that will pass; he has a good-humoured tolerance
of it because he does not have to take it seriously. ‘Modernist’
poetry is his way of describing the contemporary poetry that perplexes
him and that he is obliged to take seriously without knowing whether
it is to be accepted or not. The cautiousness of the plain reader’s
opinion creates an intermediary stage between himself and this poetry:
the literary critic. However, such public authority is usually
slower-acting and slower-witted than private taste. For, thinking
the plain reader more stupid than he really is, the literary critic
is in his turn cautious in what he recommends to him, being anxious
not to earn his disapproval. Therefore much modernist poetry has been
confined to limited editions for connoisseurs whose private taste is
not dependent on the literary critic; which further antagonizes the
plain reader, since whatever is patronized by a _few_ seems
self-condemned as a high-brow performance for a snobbish cult. So the
plain reader gets the impression that this poetry was never meant to
be common literature and so is only too glad to leave it alone; and
it never reaches him except in pieces torn out of their context by
the literary critic, for ridicule, to justify his ignoring them. This
vicious circle repeats itself when the modernist poet, left without
any public but the highly trained literary connoisseur, does not
hesitate to embody in his poems remote literary references which are
unintelligible to a wider public and which directly antagonize it. The
following is an example of the sort of poetry which, because it is too
good, has to be temporarily brushed aside as a literary novelty.
CAPTAIN CARPENTER
Captain Carpenter rose up in his prime
Put on his pistols and went riding out
But had got wellnigh nowhere at that time
Till he fell in with ladies in a rout.
It was a pretty lady and all her train
That played with him so sweetly but before
An hour she’d taken a sword with all her main
And twined him of his nose forever more.
Captain Carpenter mounted up one day
And rode straightway unto a stranger rogue
That looked unchristian but be that as may
The Captain did not wait upon prologue.
But drew upon him out of his great heart
The other swung against him with a club
And cracked his two legs at the shinny part
And let him roll and stick like any tub.
Captain Carpenter rode many a time
From male and female took he sundry harms
He met the wife of Satan crying “I’m
The she-wolf bids you shall bear no more arms.”
Their strokes and counters whistled in the wind
I wish he had delivered half his blows
But where she should have made off like a hind
The bitch bit off his arms at the elbows.
And Captain Carpenter parted with his ears
To a black devil that used him in this wise
O Jesus ere his threescore and ten years
Another had plucked out his sweet blue eyes.
Captain Carpenter got up on his roan
And sallied from the gate in hell’s despite
I heard him asking in the grimmest tone
If any enemy yet there was to fight?
“To any adversary it is fame
If he risk to be wounded by my tongue
Or burnt in two beneath my red heart’s flame
Such are the perils he is cast among.
“But if he can he has a pretty choice
From an anatomy with little to lose
Whether he cut my tongue and take my voice
Or whether it be my round red heart he choose.”
It was the neatest knave that ever was seen
Stepping in perfume from his lady’s bower
Who at this word put in his merry mien
And fell on Captain Carpenter like a tower.
I would not knock old fellows in the dust
But there lay Captain Carpenter on his back
His weapons were the old heart in his bust
And a blade shook between rotten teeth alack.
The rogue in scarlet and grey soon knew his mind
He wished to get his trophy and depart
With gentle apology and touch refined
He pierced him and produced the Captain’s heart.
God’s mercy rest on Captain Carpenter now
I thought him Sirs an honest gentleman
Citizen husband soldier and scholar enow
Let jangling kites eats of him if they can.
But God’s deep curses follow after those
That shore him of his goodly nose and ears
His legs and strong arms at the two elbows
And eyes that had not watered seventy years.
The curse of hell upon the sleek upstart
Who got the Captain finally on his back
And took the red red vitals of his heart
And made the kites to whet their beaks clack clack.
In the first place this is a ballad, and the plain reader will insist
that a ballad in the old style like _Chevy Chace_, or _Sir
Patrick Spens_, or the Robin Hood Ballads may be imitated by a
modern hand, but imitated with an affected simplicity like that
of _The Schooner Hesperus_ or of _The Ancient Mariner_.
_Captain Carpenter_ makes use of an old ballad metre and of an
archaic vocabulary; the poet even goes so far as to imitate the
typography of the first ballads set down in print, by omitting all
incidental punctuation. But this is not enough for the plain reader:
the poet has committed the unforgivable modernist sin of allowing the
audience to have more than one possible reaction to a single poem.
Indeed to such a poem as this a variety of reactions are possible; and
it is the balance of these various possible reactions that should form
the reader’s critical attitude toward the poem. But the ordinary reader
does not want to have a critical attitude, only a simple pleasure or
pain reaction. He does not want to understand poetry so much as to
have poetical feelings. He wants to know definitely whether he is to
laugh or cry over Captain Carpenter’s story and if he is not given a
satisfactory clue he naturally doubts the sincerity of the poet, he
becomes suspicious of his seriousness and leaves him alone. The plain
reader makes two general categories for poetry; the realistic (the
true), which is supposed to put the raw poetry of life felt dumbly
by him into a literary form, a register of the nobler sentiments of
practical life; and the non-realistic or romantic (the untrue), which
covers his life of fantasia and desires, the world that he is morally
obliged to treat as unreal. Now this particular poem is based on
an interplay between these two worlds in which fact and fancy have
equal value as truth. Captain Carpenter is both the realistic hero
or knight-errant, who is bit by bit shorn of his strength until there
is nothing left but his hollow boasts, and the fairy-tale hero who is
actually reduced bit by bit to a tongue; and the double meaning has to
be kept in mind throughout. The ordinary psychology, therefore, of the
reader trained to look for a single reaction in himself is upset, and
modernist poetry becomes the nightmare from which he tries to protect
his sanity.
When examined, _Captain Carpenter_ reads innocently enough. There
are a few literary echoes of the old ballads, such as the use of
_twined_ for ‘robbed’ and _jangling_ for ‘making a discordant
noise’, but for the most part they are very familiar archaisms. There
are also references to the old ballads, typically eighteenth century
words like _rout_ for ‘dance’, Victorian expressions like _with
gentle apology and touch refined_, and unmistakably modern usages
like _the shinny part, like any tub_. But this mixture of styles
is only an amiable satire of styles (the same sort of satire more
violently employed in prose by James Joyce in the second part of his
_Ulysses_ against successive period styles) which only adds to the
charm of Captain Carpenter’s character, thus seen as a legendary figure
of many successive ages. But the chief feeling against the poem would
be that Captain Carpenter is not an easily defined or felt subject,
neither a particular historical figure nor yet a complete allegory.
He confounds the emotions of the reader instead of simplifying them
and provides no answer to the one question which the reader will ask
himself: “Who or what, particularly, is Captain Carpenter?” The chief
condition the reader makes about the poetry he reads is that it shall
not be difficult. For if it is difficult it means that he must think
in unaccustomed ways, and thinking to the plain reader, beyond the
range necessary for the practical purposes of living, is unsettling
and dangerous; he is afraid of his own mind. The poet is expected to
respect this fear in the plain reader if only because he himself is
supposed to have a mind much more obsessed with imaginative terrors.
The difference is that the poet is on intimate terms with these terrors
or mental ghosts; but how intimate the plain reader is unwilling to
recognize. A certain convention has existed until recently restraining
the poet from troubling the public with the more unsettling forms of
thought, which are vaguely known to be involved in the making of poetry
but not supposed to be evident in the reading of poetry. Caliban, for
example, is just such a mental ghost of Shakespeare’s. But by giving
him a physical personality in a drama (‘to airy nothing, a local
habitation and a name’) he makes him a fairy-story character, more
realistic, less real. The modernist poet at his best neither conceals
his private mind nor sends Calibans or Hamlets out upon the stage while
he remains behind the scenes. His mind, if we may so put it, puts in a
personal appearance; and it is the shock of this contact that the plain
reader cannot bear.
CHAPTER V
MODERNIST POETRY AND DEAD MOVEMENTS
THE refusal of the reading public to spend time on contemporary poetry
can to a great extent be excused when we recall the decrepitude to
which poetry was reduced by the death of the great Victorians and the
survival of too many of the small ones. By domesticating itself in
order to be received into the homes of the ordinary reading public and
by allowing its teeth to be drawn so that it would no longer frighten,
poetry had grown so tame, so dull, that it ceased to compete with other
forms of social entertainment, especially with the new religion of
sport. Callow or learned echoes of accepted poetry have now become as
unattractive to the plain reader as the poetry he would classify as
dangerous; and he does not realize that the alarming ‘new’ poetry with
which he is at present surrounded is at least acting as a deterrent
against the production of old-fashioned trash. For modernist poetry, if
it is nothing else, is an ironic criticism of false literary survivals.
The feebleness with which poetry survived the poets who had made it
feeble caused a general depression in the market-interest of all poetry
except for academic or devotional purposes. To choose between such
lines of John Drinkwater’s as:
O fool, o only great
In pride unhallowed, O most blind of heart.
Confusion but more dark confusion bred,
Grief nurtured grief, I cried aloud and said,
“Through trackless ways the soul of man is hurled,
No sign upon the forehead of the skies,
No beacon, and no chart
Are given to him, and the inscrutable world
But mocks his scars and fills his mouth with dust.”
and of Marianne Moore’s (_To a Steam Roller_) as:
The illustration
is nothing to you without the application.
You lack half wit. You crush all particles down
into close conformity, and then walk back and forth
on them.
Sparkling chips of rock
are crushed down to the level of the parent block.
Were not “impersonal judgment in aesthetic
matters a physical impossibility,” you
might fairly achieve
it. As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive
of one’s attending you, but to question
the congruence of the complement is vain, if it
exists.
involves an effort of criticism in the reader which it is not worth
his while to make, when so many other alternative possibilities of
enjoyment are offered outside of poetry. The first piece obviously
takes him nowhere. The second (an insulting address to a man with a
steam roller mind, lacking that half of wit which is to leave the
whole unsaid) presupposes in the reader a critical attitude toward
poetry; assumes that he is willing to part with the decayed flesh of
poetry, the deteriorated sentimental part, and to confine himself to
the hard, matter-of-fact skeleton of poetic logic. The plain reader may
be brought to admire such a poet’s puritanical restraint in resisting
the temptation to write an emotional poem of abuse in the style of Mr.
Drinkwater, in conveying her meaning as dryly and unfeelingly as a
schoolmistress would explain a mathematical problem. But while he may
desire a reformation in poetry, he is interested only in results, not
in the technical discipline to which poetry must perhaps be submitted.
And Miss Moore’s poetry is wholly concerned with such discipline.
The reader will therefore not sympathize with the prose quotation in
the above poem which its author thought necessary as the documentary
justification of her tirade, or appreciate the logical application of
_butterflies_; a butterfly being the mathematical complement
to a steam roller, and, as a metaphorical complement, suggesting the
extreme, unrelieved dullness of this steam roller mind that has no
possible complement, even in metaphor. Anything indeed which reveals
the poet at work, which reveals the mechanism of his wit, is obnoxious
to the plain reader. The poetic process, he declares, is a mystery; and
any evidence, therefore, of what he may consider the technical aspect
of poetry marks a poem as incomprehensible. Miss Moore, who turns her
poetry into matter-of-fact prose demonstrations in order to avoid
mystery, thus expresses the plain reader’s antagonism to poetry that
perplexes rather than entertains. He might not understand her sympathy,
but he would undoubtedly agree with her sentiments.
POETRY
I too, dislike it:
there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
The bat, upside down; the elephant pushing,
a tireless wolf under a tree,
the base-ball fan, the statistician--
“business documents and schoolbooks”--
these phenomena are pleasing,
but when they have been fashioned
into that which is unknowable,
we are not entertained.
It may be said of all of us
that we do not admire what we cannot understand;
enigmas are not poetry.
It would be foolish to ask the plain reader to accept poetry that he
does not understand; but it can perhaps be suggested to him, with more
success than to the literary critic, that it would be wise to refrain
from critical comments such as “that is incomprehensible” unless he is
willing to make the effort of criticism. If he does this, much that at
first glance antagonized him will appear not incomprehensible but only
perhaps difficult or, if not difficult, only different from what he has
been accustomed to consider poetical. He may even train himself to read
certain contemporary poets with interest; or, if he persists in keeping
the critical process separate from the reading process, have at least a
historical sense of what is happening in poetry.
It may be objected that modern poetry does not leave the plain
reader alone, that it is constantly making advances to him; if not
conciliatory advances, at any rate challenges which his self-respect
does not permit him to overlook. It is true that modern poetry is full
of noticeable peculiarities toward which the reader is bound to have
some reaction either of sympathy or self-defence. But an important
distinction must be drawn between peculiarities resulting from a
deliberate attempt to improve the status of poetry by jazzing up its
programme and those resulting from a concentration on the poetic
process itself. The first class of peculiarities are caused by a desire
to improve the popularity of poetry with the public and constitute a
sort of commercial advertising of poetry. The second, while equally
provoked by the cloud under which poetry has fallen, are concentrated
on improving its general vitality, even to the point of making it
temporarily more unpopular than ever: but for reasons opposite to those
which reduced it to the state of disfavour in which it found itself
at the beginning of this century. The plain reader has an exaggerated
antagonism toward poetry of this second sort because it is too serious
to permit of a merely neutral attitude in him and because, instead of
presenting him with the benefits of its improvements, the poet seems
impudently intent on advertising poetry for its own sake rather than
for the reader’s. A false sympathy, therefore, is likely to spring up
between the plain reader and poetry especially designed to recapture
his interest. This poetry attains a disproportionate importance and
is artificially prolonged beyond the length of life to which it is
naturally entitled. So has the long sequence of dead movements which
have confused the history of contemporary poetry been perpetuated.
A dead movement is one which never had or can have a real place in
the history of poets and poems. It occurs because some passing or
hitherto unrealized psychological mood in the public offers a new field
for exploitation, as sudden fashion crazes come and go, leaving no
trace but waste material. In poetry such dead movements do not even
survive as literary curiosities. From the ’eighties onward the writing
of real poetry has been postponed by an increasing succession of such
dead movements: the use of playful French forms for drawing-room
occasions, of which the triolet became the most popular, by Austin
Dobson, Arthur Symons and Sir Edmund Gosse; the wickedness movement
of the ’nineties, also of French origin, the characteristic words
of whose poetical vocabulary were _lutany_, _arabesque_,
_vermilion_, _jade_, _languid_, _satyr_; then a
long end-of-the-century lull; then a new train of dead movements,
only more interesting because they belong to a more alarming phase of
world history. None of these movements which we call ‘dead’ because
they never had any real poetic excuse for being, made any lasting
contribution to English poetry: they were all merely modernized
advertisements of the same old product of which the reader had grown
tired.
Imagism is one of the earliest and the most typical of these
twentieth-century dead movements. It had the look of a movement of pure
experimentalism and reformation in poetry. But the issuing of a public
manifesto of Imagism, its massed organization as a literary party with
a defined political programme, the war it carried on with reviewers,
the annual appearance of an Imagist anthology--all this revealed it
as a stunt of commercial advertisers of poetry to whom poetic results
meant a popular demand for their work, not the discovery of new values
in poetry with an indifference to the recognition they received. The
Imagists had decided beforehand the kind of poetry that was wanted
by the time: a poetry to match certain up-to-date movements in music
and art. They wanted to express ‘new moods’, and in free verse (or
cadence). They _believed_ in free verse; and to believe in one
way of writing poetry as against another is to have the attitude of a
quack rather than of a scientist toward one’s art, to be in a position
of selling one’s ideas rather than of constantly submitting them to new
tests. That is, they wanted to be _new_ rather than to be poets;
which meant that they could only go so far as to say everything that
had already been said before in a slightly different way. ‘Imagism
refers to the manner of presentation, not to the subject.’ Authentic
‘advanced’ poetry of the present day differs from such programmes
for poetry in this important respect: that it is concerned with a
reorganization of the matter (not in the sense of subject-matter but of
poetic thought as distinguished from other kinds of thought) rather
than the manner of poetry. This is why the plain reader feels so balked
by it: he must enter into that matter without expecting a cipher-code
to the meaning. The ideal modernist poem is its own clearest, fullest
and most accurate meaning. Therefore the modernist poet does not have
to talk about the use of images ‘to render particulars exactly’,
since the poem does not give a rendering of a poetical picture or
idea existing outside the poem, but presents the literal substance of
poetry, a newly created thought-activity: the poem has the character
of a creature by itself. Imagism, on the other hand, and all other
similar dead movements, took for granted the principle that poetry was
a translation of certain kinds of subjects into the language that would
bring the reader emotionally closest to them. It was assumed that a
natural separation existed between the reader and the subject, to be
bridged by the manner in which it was presented.
Georgianism was a dead movement contemporary with Imagism. Although not
so highly organised as Imagism, it had a great vogue between the years
1912 and 1918 and was articulate chiefly upon questions of style. Its
general recommendations seem to have been the discarding of archaistic
diction such as ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and ‘floweret’ and ‘whene’er’ and
of poetical constructions such as ‘winter drear’ and ‘host on armèd
host’ and of pomposities generally. Another thing understood between
the Georgians was that their verse should avoid all formally religious,
philosophic or improving themes, in reaction to Victorianism; and all
sad, wicked café-table themes in reaction to the ’nineties. It was to
be English yet not aggressively imperialistic; pantheistic rather than
atheistic; and as simple as a child’s reading book. This was all to
the good, perhaps, but such counsels resulted in a poetry that could
rather be praised for what it was not than for what it was. Eventually
Georgianism became principally concerned with Nature and love and
leisure and old age and childhood and animals and sleep and other
uncontroversial subjects. Unfortunately there was no outstanding figure
either among the Imagists, the Vers Librists generally, or among the
Georgians, capable of writing a new poetry within these revised forms.
So in both cases all that happened was that the same old stock-feelings
and situations were served up again, only with a different sauce. And
poetry became shabbier than ever. The extent of this shabbiness was
concealed by the boom which the War brought about in poetry, as part
of the general mobilization of public industries. A great many poets
were carried through to popular recognition on the wave of the War
who would otherwise never have been heard of again. Alan Seegar is an
American example of this temporary immortalization. The place of Rupert
Brooke in English tradition is likely to be more secure only because
this tradition has more powerful methods of literary propaganda:
Rupert Brooke writing at the present moment unconnected with the war
idea would be as coldly disregarded as indeed he was before his death
on active service, when practically all the poems for which he has
since become famous had already appeared. War-poetry was Georgianism’s
second-wind, for the contrast between the grinding hardships of
trench-service--which as a matter of fact none of the early-Georgians
experienced--and the Georgian stock-subjects enumerated above was a
ready poetic theme. Imagism also profited by the war, though, as it was
more an American than an English product, it was only mobilized for
war-service when neo-Georgianism had already made a good start. The
expansion of feminism in poetry as in other war-services introduced
a number of other dead movements which had, roughly speaking, one of
two common sentimental ‘tones’: daintiness or daring. The ‘daintiness’
movements employed an Elizabethan or Cavalier atmosphere and were
a form of escape from the War; they were further characterized by
‘cuteness’ (in the American sense), archness, slyness and naughtiness;
the impression they left was of an argument in which the poet always
won by having the last word. The ‘daring’ movements used for the most
part free, very free, verse; they were ‘confessing’ movements in which
the poet, under the influence of war-excitement, indulged in one burst
of confidence after another. Imagism may be said to have engaged only
the upper half of the plain reading public. But Georgianism in England
and the daintiness and daring movements in America made poetry pay for
a long time; until the poets and the plain readers grew tired, at about
the same time. It can be said unreservedly that of all that creative
and reading enthusiasm _nothing_ remains except, perhaps, a few
shadowy names. Of the war poets whose works were temporarily advertised
by their death in action only three can be regretted: Sorley, Rosenberg
and Owen.
Of the Imagists H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) was the most publicly applauded;
all we have left of her now is the blushing memory of a short-lived
popularity in the more adventurous reviews, and a few false metaphors.
What disappears first in the poetry of dead movements is the personal
reality of the poet, which has been represented with false intensity to
make a romantic personal appeal to the reader (an appeal which does not
appear so extravagantly in modernist poetry); the poetry itself drags
on a little longer, waste.
O night,
you take the petals
of the roses in your hand
but leave the stark core
of the rose
to perish on the branch.
Compare this metaphor with an equally eccentric one of Emily
Dickinson’s, a poet belonging to no ‘movement’ and whose personal
reality pervades her work, though she kept it strictly out of her work:
Victory comes late
And is held low to freezing lips
Too wrapt with frost
To take.
The only excuse to be made for those who once found H.D.
‘incomprehensible’ is that her work was so thin, so poor, that its
emptiness seemed ‘perfection’, its insipidity to be concealing a
‘secret’, its superficiality so ‘glacial’ that it created a false
‘classical’ atmosphere. She was never able, in her temporary
immortality, to reach a real climax in any of her poems.
I can almost follow the note
where it touched this slender tree
and the next answered--
and the next.
Shall I let myself be caught
in my own light?
shall I let myself be broken
in my own heat?
or shall I cleft the rock as of old
and break my fire
with its surface?
All that they told was a story of feeble personal indecision; and her
immortality came to an end so soon that her bluff was never called.
All dead movements are focussed on the problem of style. To the
Imagists style meant the ‘use of the language of common speech’, but in
a very careful way, as a paint-box. Language in poetry should not be
treated as if it were a paint-box, or the poem as if it were something
to be hung on the wall, so to speak. The reader should enter the life
of the poem and submit himself to its conditions in order to know it as
it really is; instead of making it enter his life as a symbol having
no private reality, only the reality it gets by reflection from his
world. Style may be defined as that old-fashioned element of sympathy
with the reader which makes it possible for the poem to be used as
an illustration to the text of the reader’s experience; and much
modernist poetry may be said to be literally without style, at least
in so far as it is possible for poetry to make a radical change in a
tradition within the memory of that tradition. So the modernist poet
does not have to issue a programme declaring his intentions toward the
reader or to issue an announcement of tactics. He does not have to call
himself an individualist (as the Imagist poet did) or a mystic (as the
poet of the Anglo-Irish dead movement did) or a naturalist (as the
poet of the Georgian dead movement did). He does not have to describe
or docket himself for the reader, because the important part of poetry
is now not the personality of the poet as embodied in a poem, which is
its style, but the personality of the poem itself, that is, its quality
of independence from both the reader and the poet, once the poet has
separated it from his personality by making it complete--a new and
self-explanatory creature.
Perhaps more than anything else characteristic modernist poetry is a
declaration of the independence of the poem. This means first of all a
change in the poet’s attitude toward the poem: a new sense has arisen
of the poem’s rights comparable with the new sense in modern times of
the independence of the child, and a new respect for the originality of
the poem as for the originality of the child. One no longer tries to
keep a child in its place by suppressing its personality or laughing
down its strange questions, so that it turns into a rather dull and
ineffective edition of the parent; and modernist poetry is likewise
freeing the poem of stringent nursery rules and, instead of telling
it exactly what to do, is encouraging it to do things, even queer
things, by itself. The poet pledges himself to take them seriously
on the principle that the poem, being a new and mysterious form of
life in comparison with himself, has more to teach him than he it. It
is a popular superstition that the poet is the child. It is not the
poet, but the poem: the most that the poet can do is to be a wise,
experimenting parent.
Experiment, however, may be interpreted in two ways. In the first sense
it is a delicate and constantly alert state of expectancy directed
towards the discovery of something of which some slight clue has been
given; and system in it means only the constant shifting and adjustment
of the experimenter as the unknown thing becomes more and more known:
system is the readiness to change system. The important thing in the
whole process is the initial clue, or, in old-fashioned language, the
inspiration. The real scientist should have an equal power of genius
with the poet, with the difference that the scientist is inspired to
discover things which already are (his results are facts), while the
poet is inspired to discover things which are made by his discovery
of them (his results are not statements about things already known to
exist, or knowledge, but truths, things which existed before only as
potential truth). Experiment in the second sense is the use of a system
for its own sake and brings about, whether in science or poetry, no
results but those possible to the system. As it is only the scientific
genius who is capable of using experiment in the first of these senses,
and as the personnel of science must be necessarily far more numerous
than that of poetry, experiment in the second sense is the general
method of the labouring, as against the inventive, side of science,
perhaps properly so.
Poets, then, who need the support of a system (labourers pretending
to be inventors, since in poetry, unlike science, there is no place
for labourers) are obliged to adopt not only the workshop method of
science, but the whole philosophical point of view of science, which is
directly opposite to the point of view of poetry. For in science there
is no personality granted to the things discovered, which are looked
upon as soulless parts of a soulless aggregate, with no independent
rights or life of their own. Such poets, therefore, produce poems that
are only well-ordered statements about chosen subjects, not new,
independent living organisms; facts, not truths; pieces of literature,
not distinct poetic personalities. Poetry of this sort (and there has
been little poetry of any other sort, as there have been few real
poets) is thus the science of poem-training instead of the art of
poem-appreciation. The real poet is a poet by reason of his creative
vision of the poem, as the real parent is a parent by reason of his
creative vision of the child: authorship is not a matter of the right
use of the will but of an enlightened withdrawal of the will to make
room for a new will.
It is this delicate and watchful withdrawal of the author’s will at
the right moments which gives the poem or the child an independent
form. But as the creative will is of as rare appearance in poetry as
in parenthood, there are, in its absence, very few real poems and very
few real children. Or if a real poem or child occurs in spite of its
absence, the poem or child will have to stand in the relation of a
creator to itself, which means a dangerous enlargement of the creative
will in either of them, an enlargement that we may call genius.
But with genius there is as much chance of self-destruction as of
fulfilment of the creative will. And therefore the poem which survives
great odds, the poem of genius, is as rare as the child who survives to
become the poet of genius. Most real poems and real poets have come to
be in this way, it being as impossible to arrange that the poet with a
capacity for writing real poems should have any to write as that two
people with a capacity for being the right parents for a real child
should have one who could benefit by this capacity. All that can be
done is to encourage an attitude toward the poem and the child which
shall provide for the independence of either in proportion to its power
of independence. In poetry at least this would mean that people would
not write poems unless they were complete ones, that is, they would not
force a poem by violent training to behave independently when it had
no independence. In general it would mean that people would not have
to be ‘geniuses’ (_i.e._ turn sports in order to survive the odds
against them) to use their creative will freely, to behave with genius.
When we say, then, that the modernist poet has an experimental attitude
toward the poem, we do not mean to imply that he is experimenting
with the poem in order to prove some system he has developed. This is
properly only the attitude of such a dead movement as Imagism, merely a
sign that something is wrong with the education of the poem (literally,
the ‘drawing out’ of it). The Montessori system of education, for
example, corresponds in the history of pedagogical reform with Imagism
and other such systems in the reformation of poetry. Both are schools
with new systems of training or form to replace old systems: they do
not imply the existence of a new kind of relationship between the
parent and the child, the poet and the poem, a feeling of mutual
respect favourable to the independent development of each and therefore
to a maximum of benefit of one to the other. Of course, if the poem is
left to shift entirely for itself and its independence is really only
a sign of the irresponsibility of the poet, then its personality, by
its wildness, is likely to be as indecisive as the personality of the
formalized poem is by its reliance on discipline.
The policy of leaving the poem to write itself makes it only a form of
automatic writing which inevitably leads to the over-emphasis of the
dream element in the writing of poetry. It is true that dreams seem
to exercise the same kind of control over the mind as the poem does
over the poet. But in dreams we have thought in an uncreative state
running itself out to a solution out of sheer inertia, unrefreshed by
any volitional criticism of it; a solution which is like a negative
image of the solution which thought would arrive at in a creative,
waking state, refreshed by volitional criticism. The dream solution
is therefore as arbitrary a substitute for the solutions of waking
thought as the dream-poem (or automatic poem) is for the poem that
would naturally result from the deliberate adjustment of the creative
will to the solution which seems to come nearer and nearer as the
creative will grows more and more discreet. The problem of preventing
poetry from sinking into rapid decline and disuse does not seem to
point, then, to a sense of responsibility in the poet toward the
reader as shown in the use of a carefully designed ‘style’. It points
rather to the responsibility which the poet owes to the poem because
of its dependence on him until it is complete, a dependence which
shall not, however, be reflected as a weakness in the poem after it
has been completed; as childhood should survive in a person as the
element of continuous newness in him, not as the permanent bad effect
of discipline that made him less, rather than more, independent as he
grew.
CHAPTER VI
THE MAKING OF THE POEM
A DECLARATION of the independence of the poem naturally causes a
change in the attitude of the poet towards himself. This does not
mean that the poet ceases to be important; he merely acquires a new
sense of privacy which his relation to the poem in the old regime made
impossible. He shrinks from the strenuous publicity into which he might
be dragged by the author-worship of traditional poetry or the abnormal
sense of self-importance usually displayed in the official programmes
of such dead movements as Imagism. E. E. Cummings’ foreword to his
volume ‘is 5’ is undoubtedly inspired by a distaste for the sentimental
display by which the poet has in the past been expected to advertise
himself; and perhaps explains his tendency, the modernist tendency in
general, to let the poem take precedence over the poet:
On the assumption that my technique is either complicated or original
or both, the publishers have politely requested me to write an
introduction to this book.
At least my theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from
original; nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words,
by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk, viz.
“Would you hit a woman with a child?--No, I’d hit her with a brick.”
Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision
which creates movement.
If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very
little--somebody who is obsessed by Making. Like all obsessions, the
Making obsession has disadvantages; for instance, my only interest
in making money would be to make it. Fortunately, however, I should
prefer to make almost anything else, including locomotives and roses.
It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring
electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara
Falls) that my “poems” are competing. They are also competing with
each other, with elephants and with El Greco.
Ineluctable preoccupation with The Verb gives a poet one priceless
advantage: whereas non-makers must content themselves with the merely
undeniable fact that two times two is four, he rejoices in a purely
irresistible truth (to be found, in abbreviated costume, upon the
title page of the present volume).
Cummings, then, writing according to what would seem to the reader to
be a very carefully constructed poetic system, refrains from delivering
a critical key to his poems except as a semi-prefatorial confidence.
Indeed the more independent poems become, the less need or sense there
is in accompanying them with a technical guide for their understanding.
This would seem to imply that, the more difficult poems become, the
less chance there would be of understanding them. But in fact it
would only mean that the reader was becoming less and less separated
from poetry by the technique that had formerly been concentrated on
connecting him with it. Technique itself has then taken on a different
character; it is no longer the way a poem is presented to the reader,
but the way it corresponds in every respect with its own governing
meaning. For in making a poem the poet may be said to be governed
by this meaning, which may only be the necessity of the poem to be
written: in this foreshadowing, inevitable meaning the poem really
exists even before it is written. This it is that Cummings should
mean by ‘the obsession of making’ and this it is that the reader will
have to reckon with if poetry continues in its present tendency of
forcing him inside the framework of the poem and making him repeat
the steps by which it came to be. So that technique in the modernist
definition does not refer to the method by which a poem is written but
that evolutionary history of the poem which is the poem itself. The
Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk in literary terms are:
“Do you write poems with a prearranged technique?--No, I write them
with a pen.” Meaning: the question of technique in the writing of a
poem is irrelevant to the writing of it. If one talks about poems as
being mechanically put together by the poet, then the pen is the thing
that does it. Like the brick, it is the only practical answer possible
to a theoretical question conditioned by an irrelevant practical
qualification.
This brings us to the crucial complication in the adjustments to be
made between poetry itself and the reader of poetry, who is unable
to have a free and straightforward personal intimacy with a poem but
is continually haunted by the idea of the presence of the poet in
the poem. Between the reader and the poem therefore there is this
embarrassment caused by the reader’s awareness of the poet. He is not
at his ease with the poem: it is never entirely his own--he reads the
poem with the uncomfortable feeling that the poet’s eyes are on him
and that he will be expected to say something when he is finished. The
reader cannot get over the idea that the poet had designs on him in
writing the poem, to which he must respond. With traditional poetry
the reader is less embarrassed because, although he is aware of the
poet in a formal way, he is not made particularly self-conscious by
him. He knows what to expect, since traditional poetry is formed
with an eye to its serviceability as reading matter. We may compare
traditional poetry in this sense with the conservative, well-appointed
restaurant where the customer is placed in a soft light, the waiters
address him in a respectful monotone and he is left to himself to eat.
Modern poetry of the dead-movement sort, of which Imagism is a complete
example, bears a resemblance to the ‘artistic’ tea-room where the
customer finds himself besieged by orange curtains, Japanese prints,
painted furniture, art-china instead of the plain white service of
the ordinary restaurant, and conversational waitresses in smocks who
give the personal touch with a cultured accent. As a result, the plain
eater goes back to his corner restaurant and the tea-room becomes a
dead movement. _Modernist_ as distinct from _modern_ poetry
is, at its most uncompromising, neither the corner restaurant nor the
tea-room. It seems inaccessible to the plain reader: the approach to
it is like the front of a private residence and he is afraid that he
is expected to lunch personally with the poet. So in this case again
he goes back to the corner restaurant where he can at least reduce
the personality of the waiters to a minimum. Actually, if the plain
reader could conquer his initial self-consciousness before it he would
find an interior in which it should be possible to be on completely
unembarrassed and impersonal terms with poetry: he would find himself
alone with it. But this is only theoretically possible. For the plain
reader does not really want to be left all alone with poetry. The
mental ghosts, which only poets are supposed to have natural commerce
with, assail him. The real discomfort to the reader in modernist poetry
is the absence of the poet as his protector from the imaginative
terrors lurking in it.
What the reader, then, calls the clearness of a poem often means
merely its freedom from those terrors which he, in his defence
against them, attacks as obscurities. Clearness for him is really
the suppression of everything in the poem over and above the average
standard of comprehension--of everything likely to disturb normal
ease. A poem, therefore, that really is potentially superior to the
average standard of comprehension and which nevertheless conforms to it
actually obscures its real meaning the more it observes this standard,
_i.e._ the _clearer_ it is to the average reader. A poem
that is potentially superior to the average standard of comprehension
and which, disregarding it, fulfils all its potentialities, makes its
real meaning clearer and clearer, as it retreats from this average,
_i.e._ as it becomes more and more obscure to the average
reader. The trouble is not with the reader or with the poem but with
the government of criticism by the sales-principle, which must make
an average standard of public taste allowing for the most backward
reader of each of the three reading classes corresponding with the
three different degrees of popular education. If a variable standard
of comprehension were admitted, the poem would have the privilege of
developing itself to the degree of clearness corresponding with the
degree of comprehension in the reader most above the average. As the
poet himself would thus be allowed as a possible reader of his own
poem, it would be encouraged to attain its maximum, not its minimum, of
real clearness; and the word _obscure_ would disappear from the
vocabulary of criticism except to denote the obscurity of particular
references. _Bad_ would be the only possible critical term by
which a poem could be categorically dismissed: at the present time,
regardless of the possible classification of a poem as _good_ or
_bad_ according to the standards it suggests, it is enough for
the critic to call a poem _obscure_ to relieve himself of the
obligation of giving a real criticism of it.
Here is an example, in the first eighteen lines of what might be called
a modernist poem, of the ‘obscurity’ which would probably cause it
to be put aside by the critic after he had allowed it the customary
two-minute reading (for if the poet has obeyed all the rules, this is
long enough to give a rough idea of what the poem is all about--and
that is all that is generally wanted). Or if by chance the critic is
‘advanced’, serving such a limited public that his criticism is mere
literary snobbery, he may pretend to understand it and dislike it
equally, because he does not understand it; or, if he does, he may
dislike it all the same because it is ‘too simple’ (a common charge
against the ‘obscure’ poem when its obscurity is seen to have been only
excessive clearness).
The rugged black of anger
Has an uncertain smile-border.
The transition from one kind to another
May be love between neighbour and neighbour;
Or natural death; or discontinuance
Because so small is space,
The extent of kind must be expressed otherwise;
Or loss of kind when proof of no uniqueness
Strikes the broadening edge and discourages.
Therefore and therefore all things have experience
Of ending and of meeting,
And of ending, that much being
As grows faint of self and withers
When more is the intenser self
That is another or nothing.
And therefore smiles, when least smiling--
The gift of nature to necessity
When relenting grows involuntary.
The reaction, then, will be either one of ‘blank incomprehension’ or,
since the critic-reader recognizes a few long words and a certain
atmosphere created by the poet’s ‘saying what he means’, one of
antagonism due to the impression that the poem gives of being didactic.
The reaction of blank incomprehension will be commonest. “What, in so
many words”, the critic-reader will ask, “is this all about?” Now, to
tell what a poem is all about in “so many words” is to reduce the poem
to so many words, to leave out all that the reader cannot at the moment
understand in order to give him the satisfaction of feeling that he is
understanding it. If it were possible to give the complete force of
a poem in a prose summary, then there would be no excuse for writing
the poem: the ‘so many words’ are, to the last punctuation-mark,
the poem itself. Where such a prose summary does render the poem in
its entirety, except for rhymes and other external dressings, the
poem cannot have been a complete one; and indeed a great deal of
what passes for poetry is the rewriting of the prose summary of a
hypothetical poem in poetical language. Before further discussing this
particular poem, let us quote the beginning of a ballad by Mr. Ezra
Pound in illustration of the prose-idea poeticalized:
THE BALLAD OF THE GOODLY FERE[1]
(_Simon Zelotes speaketh it somewhile after the Crucifixion_)
Ha’ we lost the goodliest fere o’ all
For the priests and the gallows tree?
Aye, lover he was of brawny men
O’ ships and the open sea.
When they came wi’ a host to take Our Man
His smile was good to see,
“First let these go!” quo’ our Goodly Fere,
“Or I’ll see ye damned”, says he.
Aye, he sent us out through the crossed high spears,
And the scorn of his laugh rang free,
“Why took ye not me when I walked about
Alone in the town?” says he.
Oh, we drank his “Hale” in the good red wine
When we last made company,
No capon priest was the Goodly Fere
But a man o’ men was he.
I ha’ seen him drive a hundred men
Wi’ a bundle o’ cords swung free
When they took the high and holy house
For their pawn and treasury....
Stripped of its imitated antiqueness, the substance of all this
could be given simply as follows: “It would be false to identify the
Christ of the sentimentalists with the Christ of the Gospels. So far
from being a meek or effeminate character He strikes us as a very
_manly_ man, and His disciples, fishermen and others, must have
reverenced Him for His manly qualities as much as for His spiritual
teaching. His action in driving the money-changers from the Temple with
a scourge of cords is a proof of this. So is His courageous action when
confronted by the soldiers of the High Priest sent to arrest Him--He
mockingly enquired why they had not dared arrest Him previously when He
walked about freely in the city of Jerusalem, and consented to offer
no resistance only if His disciples were allowed to escape. The Last
Supper was surely a very different scene from the Church Sacrament
derived from it, where a full-fed priest condescendingly officiates;
it was a banquet of friends of which the Dearest Friend was Our
Saviour.” Here we see that the poeticalization has in fact weakened the
historical argument. By using the ballad setting Mr. Pound has made the
fishermen of Galilee into North-country sailors of the Patrick Spens
tradition and given them sentiments more proper to the left wing of the
Y.M.C.A.
The extravagant use of metaphor and simile in poetry is thus seen to
be governed by the necessity of making a poem of this sort equal the
prose summary which really is dictating it. This practice is founded
on two fallacies, one of which follows from the other: the first,
that the poet is not saying what he means but something _like_
what he means in prettier language than he uses to himself about it;
the second, from which the first is deduced, that the ideas of truth
in which poetry deals are not agreeable in themselves but that a
distinction is to be made by the poet between what is pretty and not
pretty, poetical and not poetical. When, therefore, bare, undressed
ideas are found in poetry instead of the rhetorical devices by which
poets try to ‘put over’ their ideas, such poetry is naturally accused
of being didactic. Another way of saying this is that the poet has cut
off all his communications. As a matter of fact all that has happened
is that he has made the poem out of the poem itself: its final form
is identical in terms with its preliminary form in the poet’s mind,
uncorrupted by hints to the reader, familiar asides to make it less
terrifying, and flattering conceits to enliven, to entertain and to
display the poet’s virtuosity. But it is almost impossible for a poet
who does really mean what he says to make the critic-reader believe
that he does: the more he means what he says and the more earnest he is
to make this clear, the more he will be thought to be concealing his
meaning in clever evasions called ‘obscurity’.
If, then, the author of the lines beginning ‘The rugged black of anger’
were asked to explain their meaning, the only proper reply would be to
repeat the lines, perhaps with greater emphasis: by which, presumably,
they would only become more obscure. If the poet were pressed to employ
some familiar metaphor or simile to explain them, then he would have to
prefix his remarks with some such insult: “At your request I shall make
my poem into a bad imitation of itself. I shall, in fact, call this
version _your_ poem, the more yours the sillier it grows. But you
must promise not to deceive yourself that this is what the poem means.
It is rather what it does not mean.” This method of understanding a
poem may be called Smoking Out The Meaning. To consider how the meaning
may be smoked out here let us put these lines into the first metaphor
that occurs to us. Indeed it is not wholly impossible that the first
two lines may conceal an incidental satire on the popular poetical
sentiment:
Look around and you will find
Every cloud is silver-lined.
The sun still shines
Although the sky’s a gray one....
It’s a short life but a gay one.
If such is the interpretation suggested by the first two lines, then
they are being treated as the prose idea from which the real poem,
apparently unwritten, is derived. That is, the ordinary translation
system of poetry, thus:
(I.)
A B C
_Poet’s prose idea_ _Poem_ _Reader’s prose summary_
1. | 1. | 1.
2. | 2. | 2.
3. | 3. | 3.
4. | 4. | 4.
is assumed to have been reversed, thus:
(II.)
A B C
_Poem (suppressed)_ _Prose idea as poem_ _Reader’s poetical summary_
1. | 1. | 1.
2. | 2. | 2.
3. | 3. | 3.
4. | 4. | 4.
The truth is that there is no fundamental difference between these two
systems. The same principle that 1 = 1 = 1 prevails (_i.e._ that
prose ideas have their exact equivalents in poetry, and many of them
to one idea); though in a different order, we find the same categories
representing the stages of the poem from creation to criticism. And
the fact that the reader finds it necessary to make a poetical rather
than a more strictly prose summary in (II.) would really make no
appreciable difference in his enjoyment of the poem if it were really
written as set forth in (II.). For the element of strangeness and
excitement would perhaps be added to his enjoyment if the ordinary
system were reversed: the novelty would at least last for a few poems
of this sort, as it lasted for the first year or two of the recent
_Vers Libre_ movement, a dead movement which tried to coué poetry
back into health by depriving it of its crutches. But if the lines in
question were not the prose idea as poem--B of (II.)--that is, the
prose idea in a slightly poetical form which the reader had to amplify
along suggested poetical lines, a discrepancy would appear between
the poem as it stands and the reader’s poetical summary of it, should
he find it possible to make one: we should have not two equivalent
meanings but one meaning and another gratuitous meaning derived from
it. B1 would not equal C1, but C1 would merely be X1, one of the many
possible derived meanings of B1, but not the real meaning. B and C of
(II.) would therefore read:
B C
1. | X 1
2. | X 2
3. | X 3
4. | X 4
X 1-2-3-4 being but a digression from B, B then would not be the
prose idea as poem, but the poem itself. If, as such, without the
addition of any associations not provided in the poem, or of collateral
interpretations, it could reveal an internal consistency strengthened
at every point in its development and free of the necessity of external
application, that is, complete without criticism--if it could do this,
it would have established an insurmountable difference between prose
ideas and poetic ideas, prose facts and poetic facts. This difference
would mean the independence of poetic facts, as real facts, from any
prose or poetical explanation in the terms of practical workaday
reality which would make them seem unreal, or poetical facts.
If we assume that the first two lines here do not mean what they
say, and accept the silver-lined cloud explanation, we find that
we are brought into a sentimental personal atmosphere in which
_anger_ is anger as felt by someone, or bad-luck seen as the
anger of providence or fate, and in which _smile-border_ is
either personal happiness or good luck. Any such interpretation of
_anger_ and _smile-border_, indeed, would involve us in some
such sympathetic history of the poem. But if we consult the poem itself
we find, after the first two lines, that any possible parallelism with
an interpretation of this sort ends: _anger_ means just anger,
_smile-border_ just smile-border. So much so do they mean just
what they are that the rest of the poem is developed from their being
just what they are: _anger_, anger; _smile-border_, the
smiling border of anger which apparently separates it from some other
kind, or concept, whose border separating it from anger might equally
be called an ‘anger-border’. What are we to do, then, since the poem
really seems to mean what it says? All we can do is to let it interpret
itself, without introducing any new associations or, if possible, any
new words.
The rugged black of anger
Has an uncertain smile-border.
The transition from one kind to another,
As from anger, rugged black,
To what lies across its smile-border,
May be love between neighbour and neighbour
(Love between neighbouring kind and kind);
Or natural death (death of one,
Though not of the other); or discontinuance
(Discontinuance of kind,
As anger no more anger)
Because so small is space
(So small the space for kind and kind and kind),
The extent of kind must be expressed otherwise
(The extent of kind beyond its border
Is end of kind, because space is so small
There is not room enough for all
Kinds: anger _angrier_ has to be
Expressed otherwise than by anger,
So by an uncertain smile-border);
This will serve as a sufficient illustration of the method of letting
the poem interpret itself. It was done without introducing any words
not actually belonging to the poem, without throwing any of the poem
away as superfluous padding and without having recourse to a prose
version: the poem interpreted is practically itself repeated to three
times its own length. It may be objected that it is still not entirely
clear, but not that it is not _any_ clearer, that it could not
be made clearer still by an increase in length proportionate to the
need of the reader in question. For instance, if the reader is puzzled
by the sixth of the original lines and cannot at the first reading
persuade himself that _Because so small is space_ really means
_Because so small is space_, yet sees that it can mean nothing
else, he can repeat to himself:
Because so small is space,
Because so small is space,
until he is convinced; or, perhaps,
Because space is so small,
Because space is so small,
an inversion which the poet would surely mind less than the use of a
prose summary, such as a philosophical reading: “Because so small is
Space or the Universe or the Human Mind, not allowing Ideas to reach
their full development but crowding them into cramped quarters so that
they have a hard time keeping their independence and are often even
completely extinguished.”
The important thing that would be revealed by a wide application of
this method to the reading of poems that really mean what they say
(for obviously it could not be applied to poems that do not) would
be that much of the so-called obscurity of poems was created by the
laziness of the plain reader, who wishes to hurry through poetry as
quickly as he does through prose, not realizing that he is dealing
with a kind of thought which, though it may have the speed of prose to
the poet, he must follow with a slowness proportionate to how much he
is not a poet. Indeed, with a just realization of this proportion it
should be possible for the plain reader to read a very difficult poem
without even adding any repetitional lines. Increasing the time-length
of reading is one way of getting out of the prose and into the poetic
state of mind, of developing a capacity for minuteness, for seeing all
there is to see at a given point and for taking it all with one as one
goes along. We have forgotten, however, that the plain reader, while
he does not object to the poetic state of mind in the poet, has a fear
of cultivating it in himself. This is why he prefers the prose summary
to the poem and to see the poem, as it began in the poet’s mind, as a
genial prose idea free of those terrors which the poet is supposed to
keep to himself or carefully disguise. Part of the reader’s reaction
to what he calls the obscurity of certain poems is really his nervous
embarrassment at feeling himself left alone with the meaning of the
poem itself.
But whatever may be the cause of the reader’s embarrassment with the
poem, the important fact is, from the point of view of the poem and the
poet, that the ‘making’ poet does not write because of the demand of
the reader to be fed with poetry but because certain poems demand to be
written and the poet is ‘somebody who is obsessed by Making’. Once the
poems are ‘made’, his personal activity ceases in them. They begin a
life of their own toward which he has no responsibility of advertising
or selling: that they reach the reader at all is an accident, an affair
entirely between them and the reader. This, by the way, is not what
used to be meant by ‘art for art’s sake’. ‘Art for art’s sake’ was as
if a cook should say, “I am employed as a cook, I know, but I am such
a superior cook that what I cook is not to be eaten, it is a purely
esoteric culinary mystery.” The modernist poet will not adopt this
attitude at all, because he will not start with the sense of being an
artist in an official, public-service sense.
The purpose of printing in book-form poetry construed in this private
sense is not to convert it into a selling product but merely to give it
an identity separate from the author’s; and the disinterested anxiety
of poets to get their work printed must be attributed partly to this
desire to see it as a separate life. It is practically impossible for
a poet to read his own poetry intelligently unless separated from
him in some way. The easiest and most obvious way is to have it set
down in print, since his own handwriting is like a physical part of
himself: the printed page acts as a mirror. This explains the mystery
of Shakespeare’s failure to have his plays uniformly printed in his
lifetime: they had become sufficiently externalized by being presented
on the stage. But the process of externalization must be seen to have
two aspects: externalization for the sake of a legitimate vanity in the
poet, a curiosity in him about his own poems; and externalization as a
poet’s duty toward his poem. When both of these aspects are balanced,
the poem has an outward and an inward sincerity. When externalization,
or formalizing, has only what we may call the _printing_ aspect,
which has only to do with the poem as something made by the poet and
read by the reader--a theatrical ‘showing off’ on the part of the poet;
when it means only this and has no _creative_ aspect, then the
more facile the poem is as a printed piece the more insincere it is as
a private, independent poem-person.
In a great deal of traditional poetry the problem of externalizing his
work is an easy one for the poet because there is a whole apparatus
of conventions at his service ready to give it a formal literary
independence of him. But as such conventions (stanza, rhyme, poetical
punctuation, etc.) are really the conventions of the printing, not
of the making, of poetry, this independence is only an artificial
one. Of course there undoubtedly are really independent poems written
in traditional forms, for which such conventions have only meant an
additional guarantee of their individuality. But as these conventions
give an artificial appearance of independence to poems, they are
a constant temptation to people who are not poets to write things
that look like poems and to poets themselves to be lazy, because the
finality of traditional verse-forms can make an incomplete poem seem
complete (‘incomplete’ meaning, of course, “not thoroughly separated
from the poet”). Poetry like this, then, principally composed of
literary conventions, is bound sooner or later to show its shabbiness;
and attempts to smarten it up again only change the old conventions
for new ones instead of striking at the underlying fallacy, that it
is completeness of method that turns out good poems, or technical
indefatigability, rather than an indefatigable obsession for making
until the poem is made.
For if the poet has poems in him they will get themselves made
regardless of the poet’s method of setting them down. No technical
method, whatever its merits, can extract poems where there are no
poems: a method can _seem_ to make, it cannot _make_. The
Imagists, for example, did not make new poems, only a new kind of
stanza which seemed to them more real than traditional stanza-forms
because it was new. When Mr. Cummings says that his ‘poems are
competing with locomotives and roses’ he means that they were made as
real entities, whether mechanical or natural. He does not claim to have
a sure method to be used over and over again in making more and more
poems, but to be irresistibly besieged by poems of even contradictory
natures and of contradictory principles of growth, each with its own
separate method of being made. All that the methodist poet boasts,
however, is a trick for producing things that resemble locomotives or
roses. In constantly repeating his method in poems he is only saying
over and over again that two times two is four. The making poet, on
the other hand, has no method, but a faculty for allowing things to
invent themselves. As he cannot then write a poem unless there is one
to write and is consequently incapable of repeating himself, he is
declaring, with each new poem, a new truth, a complete truth, even a
contradictory truth. He is allowing two times two (or truth) to become
all it is possible for it to be, since truth cannot be reduced to a
fixed mathematical law any more than poetry to a fixed literary method:
two times two, like poetry, may be everything and anything.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Mate or companion.]
CHAPTER VII
MODERNIST POETRY AND CIVILIZATION
THE vulgar meaning of modernism, especially when the word is employed
as a term of critical condemnation or by poets themselves as a literary
affectation, is modern-ness, a keeping-up in poetry with the pace of
civilization and intellectual history. It is thus used by the reader
or critic who makes a sentimental association of poetry with the past,
and perhaps with a particular period of the past, as an epithet for
‘new’ poetry which seems irreverent of the general tradition; and, in
the other extreme, it is deliberately adopted by individual poets and
movements as a contemporary programme. Poetry in this light becomes a
matter of temperamental politics, with a conservative flank opposed
to a radical flank; and an imaginary battle ensues in which the main
issue is lost sight of: may a poet write as a poet or must he write as
a period? For modernism, in this perverted sense, likewise becomes a
critical tyranny, increasing contemporary mannerisms in poetry instead
of freeing the poet of obligation to conform to any particular set of
literary theories. There is, indeed, a genuine modernism, which is not
a part of a ‘modernist’ programme but a natural personal manner and
attitude in the poet to his work, and which accepts the denomination
‘modernist’ because it prefers this to other denominations; also
because there is a conspicuous force operating at great odds to free
the _poem_ of many of the traditional habits which prevented it
from achieving its full significance. Keeping in mind this conspicuous
force, more excuse can be found for ‘modernist’ as applied to the poem
than to the poet; as _poems_ is a more accurate, less prejudiced
term for _poetry_ (a vague and sentimental idea in relation to
which _poet_ is a more vague and sentimental idea still). But
even into this more genuine aspect of poetic modernism creep some of
the prejudices of perverted modernism--into its criticism especially.
It has, for example, an intolerance toward contemporary poetry which
confesses no programme, a suspicion, more properly, of poetry which
does not seem to profess a literary cause; and a self-protective
sympathy for manifestations of modernism in the past--the present vogue
of eighteenth-century poetry is largely inspired by its quaintness,
which, however affected, was in its day an up-to-dateness.
For no matter how restrained, how impersonal a literary attitude may
be, it is difficult for it to resist the temptation to convert and
to receive converts; and modernist poetry, whatever its purity, is
especially in danger of succumbing to this temptation to convert,
because it is much attacked, and to receive converts, because there are
always literary loose-ends anxious to acquire character and standing by
attaching themselves to a cause.
The sense of modernism is further perverted by the existence of
a middle position between the conservative flank and the radical
flank--the intelligent, plain-man point of view. This middle view,
this middle population, we might say, is the prop and advocate of
civilization; and the idea of civilization as a steady human progress
does not exclude the idea of a modernist, _historically_ forward
poetry. A possible rapprochement exists, therefore, between this
middle population, to whom poetry is just one of the many instruments
of progress, and that type of contemporary poetical writing which
advertises itself by its historical progressiveness. It is difficult,
in attempting to make clear some of the aspects of genuine poetic
modernism, to avoid appealing to the progressiveness of this middle
population, that is, making poetry a historical branch of civilization,
and to avoid likewise the appearance of condoning that perverted
modernism which takes advantage of a false idea of ‘advance’ to
justify feeble eccentricity. The real task is, in fact, not to
explain modernism in poetry but to separate false modernism, or faith
in history, from genuine modernism, or faith in the immediate, the
_new_ doings of poems (or poets or poetry) as not necessarily
derived from history. Modernist poetry as such should mean no more than
fresh poetry, more poetry, poetry based on honest invention rather than
on conscientious imitation of the time-spirit.
But honest invention and affectation of originality can both be
confused in the single term ‘modernism’. Francis Thompson, in his
essay on Coleridge, complained that “the charge of affectation has
been hurled in turn at the outset of their careers against Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson and Browning. Wordsworth wrote
simple diction and his simplicity was termed affected; Shelley gorgeous
diction and his gorgeousness was affected; Keats rich diction and his
richness was affected; Tennyson cunning diction and his cunning was
affected; Browning rugged diction and his ruggedness was affected.
Why Coleridge was called affected passes the wit of man, except it
be that he did not write like Pope or the elegant Mr. Rogers--or,
indeed, that all critical tradition would be outraged if a mere recent
poet were not labelled with the epithetic made and provided for him by
wise critical precedent.” Now Thompson, who was writing to defend his
own poems against the charge, was a somewhat affected writer himself,
and it suited him to hint that the very fact that a poet is called
‘affected’ or ‘modernist’ is a proof of his genuineness; he did not,
therefore, stop to enquire how many of these charges of affectation
were justified at the outset of the careers of the poets concerned. As
a matter of fact, Shelley is the only one of them who can be fairly
exculpated of the charge, because the only one who was free of the
authorship ambition: his political and philosophical enthusiasms, which
were, however, real, absorbed what professional literary enthusiasm he
may have had to begin with. Wordsworth’s early simplicity _was_
affected:
A simple child, dear brother Jim,
That lightly draws its breath
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?
I met a little cottage Girl;
She was eight years old, she said;
Her hair was thick with many a curl
That clustered round her head.
Keats’ early richness _was_ affected:
here is cream
Deepening to richness from a snowy gleam;
Sweeter than that nurse Amalthea skimmed
For the boy Jupiter; and here, undimmed
By any touch, a bunch of blooming plums
Ready to melt between an infant’s gums,
And here is manna pick’d from Syrian trees,
In starlight, by the three Hesperides.
Tennyson’s early cunning _was_ affected:
The streams through many a lilied row
Down-carolling to the crisped sea,
Low tinkled with a bell-like flow
Atween the blossoms ‘We are free’.
Browning’s early ruggedness _was_ affected:
And on that young round cheek of thine
I make them recognise the tinge,
As when of the costly scarlet wine
They drip so much as will impinge
And spread in a thinnest scale afloat
One thick gold drop from the olive’s coat
Over a silver plate whose sheen
Still through the mixture shall be seen.
The history of these affectations is the history of the various social
requirements made of poetry by the middle position, by the intelligent
plain man who is religiously devoted to the idea of human uplift; and
of the conforming by poets themselves to popular notions held about
the place of poetry in this uplift. Poetry is seen first of all
as supplying an elegance and refinement which must of necessity be
neglected in practical experience. Common affairs are not genteel; and
so poetry has generally been expected to feed an upper class hunger in
man for nobility: poetry is the high polish of civilization. The next
general demand thus made on poetry is that it should be romantically
imbued with progressiveness, that it should act as a superior touter
for civilization. To this demand Tennyson devoted his maturity in the
_Princess_ and other verse tracts. This particular, assigned
function of poetry is only a development of the old idea of the poet
as the regular tribal prophet; that Tennyson could foresee air warfare
in ‘navies grappling in the central blue’ and the League of Nations
in ‘The Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World’ undoubtedly
contributed to his success with the middle reader. Following this
is the demand for poetry as a sign of intellectual advancement, as
distinct from social or political advancement: poetry as deep and
deeper thinking. Browning is an excellent example of the poet who
appreciated the popular weakness for profundity. He fed this vanity
successfully, without bringing it low; seeming to be profound without
really being profound, keeping the necessary illusion by various
technical devices such as unnecessarily protracted sentences and an
over-clipped grammar.
Poetry, consequently, is made into a constantly expanding institution,
embodying from period to period all the rapidly developing specialized
forms of knowledge, enlarging itself by broadening the definition of
poetry to include psychology, applied theories of music and painting,
philosophy, physical science and so on. The poet himself feels obliged
to appear as a sage; as Tennyson, when he became Poet Laureate,
conscientiously sent himself to school again and made and kept to a
weekly curriculum of studies, including science, foreign languages,
mathematics, philosophy. Not only is the nature of the poet, in this
view, expected to change in a scheme of constant and minute adjustment
to history, but the nature of poetry itself is supposed to undergo
historical evolution: keeping up with the times is a sign of its good
behaviour and its worthiness to be incorporated among the material
evidences of progress.
Such an opinion of poetry is based on a view of civilization as
modernist, as continuously developing in the direction of an absolute
and perfect end--which it obviously is not. The poet who considers
himself a modernist because he is successfully keeping up with his date
is, however unaware he is of so being and whatever his antagonism to
Tennyson, merely an earnest Tennysonian. A strong distinction must be
drawn between poetry as something developing through civilization and
as something developing organically by itself--not a minor branch of
human endeavour but a complete and separate form of energy which is
neither more nor less in the twentieth century A.D. than in
the tenth century B.C., nor a different kind of energy now
from what it was in Homeric times, but merely lodged in different, or
_other_, persons. Civilization develops only in the sense that one
thing follows another, not in the sense that things get progressively
better or more harmonious because they follow. Poetry does develop in
the sense that it is contemporaneous with civilization; but for this
reason it has even to protect itself from civilization, to resist, to
a certain extent, contemporaneous influences, since there is no merit
in modernism for the sake of modernism, and since civilization must,
in self-defence, believe in modernism for the sake of modernism. It is
therefore always important to distinguish between what is historically
new in poetry because the poet is contemporary with a civilization of a
certain kind, and what is intrinsically new in poetry because the poet
is a new and original individual, something more than a mere servant
and interpreter of civilization.
A great deal of poetry written to-day, in fact, must be understood
as a reaction against the demands made on it by civilized society,
an unfortunate waste of energy in defiance that is often trivial and
insincere. Reaction against civilization in a dogmatic sense is found
in nearly all modernist poets, from affected modernists to more or less
genuine modernists. It has, indeed, been one of the refinements of
contemporary poetry to react against the refinements of civilization
which poetry has generally been expected to cultivate. Even such a
sentimentalist as Rupert Brooke mentioned love and sea-sickness in the
same breath:
The damned ship lurched and slithered. Quiet and quick
My cold gorge rose; the long sea rolled; I knew
I must think hard of something, or be sick;
And could think hard of only one thing--_you_!
... Do I forget you? Retchings twist and tie me,
Old meat, good meals, brown gobbets, up I throw.
Do I remember? Acrid return and slimy,
The sobs and slobber of a last year’s woe....
The War provoked in poetry both genuine and affected examples of
reaction against heroics. These lines of Wilfred Owen’s describe with
painful literalness a man dying from poison-gas:
... If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitten as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues....
Or we find close juxtapositions of elegance and vulgarity in the
same poem, the poet’s low-brow satire of his own elegance. This is a
familiar device in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, as:
The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.
which is fine writing, immediately followed by:
When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said--
I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth.
To the demand for romantic progressiveness there is a reaction of
utterly hopeless and unpurposed pessimism, as in Miss Nancy Cunard’s
_Parallax_, an imitation of T. S. Eliot:
In the rooms
A sombre carpet broods, stagnates beneath deliberate
steps.
Here drag a foot, there a foot, drop sighs, look round for
nothing, shiver.
Sunday creeps in silence
Under suspended smoke
And curdles defiant in unreal sleep.
The gas-fire puffs, consumes, ticks out its minor chords--
And at the door
I guess the arrested knuckles of the one-time friend
One foot on the stair delaying, that turns again.
To the demand for deep thinking the reaction is a frivolousness like
Mr. Wallace Stevens’:
La--la! The cat is in the violets
And the awnings are let down.
The cat should not be where she is
And the awnings are too brown,
Emphatically so.
The reaction to the demand that poetry shall combine all arts and
sciences into a master-art is an excuse for poetry devoted to the
praise of either silliness or simpleness, as in Mr. Witter Bynner’s:
I’m a-building my house
On a mountain so high,
A good place to wait
For my love to come by.
Go ’way now, all of you,
Leave me alone
On the peacefullest mountain
Ever was known.
or A.E.’s:
Cloistered amid these austere rocks,
A brooding seer, I watched an hour
Close to the earth, lost to all else,
The marvel of a tiny flower.
To all of these demands and to this last demand particularly, there
exists also a more complex reaction. Much contemporary poetry not
only snaps its fingers at civilization; it further elaborates its
superior attitude toward it by proving that it can not only keep up
with civilization but even get ahead of it. For civilization grows so
vain that it does, in effect, tell poetry that it cannot keep up with
it, that it must disappear in the old sense of an interpretation and
mirror of life. Cock-a-hoop scientists like Mr. J. B. S. Haldane write
that “not until our poets are once more drawn from the educated classes
(I speak as a scientist), will they appeal to the average man by
showing him the beauty in his own life”. There are poets who take this
challenge seriously and even resume Tennyson’s curriculum where he left
off. Alfred Noyes, although neither mature nor serious, has written a
long narrative poem _The Torch Bearers_ to celebrate the progress
of science from its beginnings to its present days. Patronizing of
modern musical theory appears in the poetry of W. J. Turner, of modern
painting theory in that of Edith Sitwell and Sacheverell Sitwell, of
psychological theory in that of Herbert Read and Archibald Macleish,
of modern sex-engrossment in that of D. H. Lawrence, of philosophical
theory in that of Conrad Aiken and T. S. Eliot, of encyclopedic
learning in that of Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot--and so on and so on.
This reaction inspires not only an emulative display of modernist
learning and subjects, but also a cultivation of fine-writing to prove
that this generation can beat the most cunning Elizabethan, Romantic
Revivalist or Victorian at his own game. The task it sets itself is
to be advanced and yet elegant: mere low-browness being considered
too primitive a reaction. The following is an example of Sacheverell
Sitwell’s fine-writing. He is doing what John Fletcher might be doing
were he alive now: taking liberties with blank verse and imagery under
the influence of modern painting and music, while still remaining
recognizably a late-Elizabethan dramatist:
Who can have trod, before, this field of fire
The huge floor of ocean, unfoamed, shining,
Lit with loud stars and mellow harvest moon?
The sea-nymphs swimming by the galleon’s side
Have never shone, golden, in its wake before:
Like winds they play among the corn’s gold tide
Loosing those windy locks, or down they dive
Through amber furrows lifted by the keel,
Past starlight, crackling to the sad shell note
Of scalèd Tritons in deep water depths.
Mr. Sitwell’s modernism appears in such lines as the second and fifth,
which the Elizabethans or Jacobeans, great as were the liberties they
took with blank verse (far greater than those taken by the eighteenth
century or the Victorians) could not have written for a gentle lyrical
passage. They would have put instead:
The húgy flóor of ócean foámless shíning
and
Have ne’ér shone gólden ín its wáke befóre.
The first of these lines of Mr. Sitwell’s must be read:
The húge flóor of ócean (pause) unfoámed (pause) shíning
and the next
Have néver shóne (pause) gólden (pause) in its wáke béfóre.
Here the influence of modern music reveals itself in the readiness with
which the monotony of the metrical pattern is varied. It is rarely,
indeed, in a poem of modernist blank verse that so few variations are
introduced as in this passage. The pictorial element is also modern.
‘The loud stars’, ‘the corn’s gold tide’, the nymphs diving ‘crackling’
down, are not Elizabethan conceits but verbal equivalents for a modern
picture in which the size and shape of the stars, the cornfield aspect
of the sea, the sharpness of the water-flurry where the nymphs dive
would be anti-realistically represented to suggest just these figures.
Fletcher would have written ‘bright stars’ and
Like winds that wanton in the yellow corn,
So do they wanton in this golden tide
and
shivering the sad shell note
and so on.
These lines of T. S. Eliot’s further illustrate the tendency in
contemporary poetry to outdo the past in elaborate and elegant writing;
that is, to flout conservative literary elegance rather than elegance
in general. They are an improvement on all previous treatments of a
favourite refined topic--perfumes:
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered or liquid--troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern on the coppered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone
In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam.
How pale indeed is Keats beside him:
Of wealthy lustre was the banquet-room
Fill’d with pervading brilliance and perfume:
Before each lucid pannel fuming stood
A censer fed with myrrh and spiced wood,
Each by a sacred tripod held aloft,
Whose slender feet wide-swerved upon the soft
Wool-woofèd carpets: fifty wreaths of smoke
From fifty censers their light voyage took
To the high roof, still mimick’d as they rose
Along the mirror’d walls by twin-clouds odourous.
(from _Lamia_).
The combined pressure of romantic progressiveness, intellectual
advancement, knowledge-expansion and change-processes against which
contemporary poetry has tried to protect itself by showing that it
can bear this pressure and still survive, has driven it to make a
tremendous and sometimes a strained effort at over-matching its age.
In many instances, loaded with learned vanities and sophistications,
it does not, it must be confessed, succeed in keeping its head above
water. Much of this enlargement has been accomplished by incorporating
in poetry the modern science of anthropology, which is really a new
synthetic mythology composed of many mythologies. Not content with
Tritons and Galleons and neo-Keatsian or neo-Elizabethan writing, many,
as Mr. Eliot, for instance, have borrowed extensively from Sir James
Frazer’s comparative study of primitive myths. When Sacheverell Sitwell
writes of Alexander:
He is dreaming what he planned and never conquered:
Time, that summer afternoon, burns slow,
And one more chance is given him
On a battlefield, or warm, slow bank of flowers,
While a reaper on the hillside kills his fair-haired prisoners....
the reference to fair-haired prisoners is not only to the cutting down
of the yellow grain but also to the ancient harvest-field custom,
related by Sir James Frazer, of binding fair-haired or red-haired men
in the corn-straw and killing them ritually as representatives of the
corn-god.
Literary internationalism--the incorporation of foreign tongues and
atmospheres--is still another method of civilizing and enlarging
poetry. French is perhaps the most common language introduced to this
end, with Italian and Spanish closely following. Mr. Eliot not only
makes free use of French side by side with English; he has written
poems entirely in French. An even greater enlargement is made by an
abnormal cultivation of the classics, especially of the more remote
classics. Some poets are able to maintain a sense of balance and
dignity in this cultivation, if only because they are good scholars.
But it can easily become absurd, as in the poetry of Mr. Ezra Pound.
In a single volume of his, _Lustra_, occur literary references to
Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, Provençale and Chinese literature--some
of these incorrectly given. Mr. Eliot, who is a more serious scholar,
has references in _The Waste Land_ to Greek, Latin, Spanish,
Italian, French, German and Sanskrit. The English classics quoted or
referred to are not now the stock-classics to which Victorian and
post-Victorian poets paid tribute, not Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare,
Milton, Burns, but others known only to the cognoscenti--Peele, Kyd,
Lyly, the less familiar Shakespeare, Webster, Marvell, Dryden, Swift,
Darley, Beddoes; making the succession of English poetry wear a more
varied look. The same enlargement is made with the Greek, Latin,
Italian and French poets.
Sympathy with low life and the use of the vocabulary of low life in
modernist poetry, besides their simpler burlesque rôle, are both an
earnest of romantic progressiveness and of literary refinement. For,
if it would put aside previous literary affectations and yet not turn
into a crude instrument of reaction, it must have elegances of its
own; and among the few unexploited elegances left to poetry is an
affectation of the vocabulary of low life. Wordsworth’s theories on
the use of the language of simple men were, in a conservative way, a
similar counter-elegance. Modernist poets, however, surpass Wordsworth
in literary slumming. Whereas Wordsworth wrote:
And now the same strong voice more near
Said cordially, “My Friend, what cheer?
Rough doings these! as God’s my judge,
The sky owes somebody a grudge!
We’ve had in half an hour or less
A twelve month’s terror and distress!”
T. S. Eliot writes, as already shown, unexpurgated and
unsentimentalized cockney, and E. E. Cummings:
.... some
guys talk big
about Lundun Burlin an gay Paree an
some guys claims der never was
nutn like Nooer Leans Shikahgo Sain
Looey Noo York an San Fran dictaphones
wireless subways vacuum
cleaners pianolas funnygraphs skyscrapers an safety razors
sall right in its way kiddo
but as fer I gimme de good ole daze....
In this way much modernist poetry, in attempting to justify itself
to civilization, which is always the civilization of the average
intelligent person, succeeds so well that it is rejected by him as
_too_ advanced; when it turns to a smaller audience or to no
audience at all, consoling itself with its advancement. For as the
average intelligent person has no real sympathy with low life except
from vague humanitarian principles, so he is only interested in
civilization as a sentimental idea; he does not want to think harder
or work harder; he does not want to advance, but to be flatteringly
reminded that he belongs to the twentieth century. Nor does he have,
or want to have, new or different feelings. The poet formally devoted
to modernism, on the other hand, generally has or affects historically
new feelings about things. And so the space between the general reader
and the poet who is responding to the demands of this imaginary client
becomes wider and wider.
Take, as a single instance of this breach, the conception of Destiny.
To the Greek dramatists it was the strongest of the gods, the dark
power behind the thrones of Olympus. To the poets of the Romantic
Revival it was the greatest and blindest motive power; it transcended
Love, Religion and Knowledge. But Miss Sitwell can write to-day (or
perhaps yesterday):
Now from the countrysides where people know
That Destiny is wingless and bemired
With feathers dirty as a hen’s too tired
To fly--
Then follows a reference to Darkness, one of the grandest of
traditionally poetical concepts:
--where old pig-snouted Darkness grovels
For life’s mired rags among the broken hovels--
The general reader, however, will be out of sympathy with this: Destiny
to him is not as oppressive as it was to Euripides or Byron, but it
is still a force to be reckoned with, though he only calls it “Luck”
or “Joss”; and Darkness is still respected in spite of the electric
illuminations of Science.
Of some contemporary poets ‘modernist’ is used merely to describe a
certain independence in them, without definitely associating them
with modernism as a literary cause: though content to stay in the
main stream of poetry, they make judicious splashes to show that they
are aware of the date. This has been the tactical position adopted
by some poets whose modernism consists in an aloof moderateness or
sensibleness in all directions--a studied inaction--and by others who
have had neither the courage nor the capacity to go the whole way with
modernism and yet have not wished to be left behind. In the first class
belong such poets as Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Frost. Mr. Frost’s
nature-poems are unaffected nature-poems and, with the exception of a
few of Frank Prewett’s, perhaps the only real, that is, unliterary,
ones since Clare’s. (Edmund Blunden’s show accurate observation but
grow more and more literary.) The following is from Mr. Frost’s
_Runaway_, describing a foal afraid of his first sight of snow.
The faint modernism of this poem consists in its complete casualness
and matter-of-factness:
Once when the snow of the year was beginning to fall
We stopped by a mountain pasture to say “Whose colt?”
A little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall,
The other curled at his breast. He dipped his head
And snorted at us. And then he had to bolt....
And now he comes again with a clatter of stone
And mounts the wall again with whited eyes
And all his tail that isn’t hair up straight.
He shudders his coat as if to throw off flies....
Mr. Sassoon, who has, like Mr. Frost, never troubled to keep up
with literary fashions and who, when he occasionally yields to the
temptation of poeticalness, adopts the manner of a generation ago,
writes as follows about a Founder’s Feast held in one of the greater
Colleges at Cambridge University shortly after the War ended. The
poem carries on the indignation of his war-poems against the General
Staff. Modernism in Mr. Sassoon is an intelligent, satiric reaction
to contemporary political and social Bluffs; it is not a literary
policy--which is why, in fact, professed literary modernists patronize
him:
.... Gowns, rose and scarlet in flamingo ranks,
Adorned the dais that shone with ancient silver;
And guests of honour gazed far down the Hall
With precognition of returning thanks.
There beamed the urbanest Law-lord on the Bench,
Debating with the Provost (ceremonious
In flushed degrees of vintage scholarship)
The politics of Plato--and the French
But on the Provost’s left, in gold and blue
Sat ... O my God! ... great Major-General Bluff
Enough enough enough enough enough!
In the second class belong poets like Mr. Yeats who, observing that
his old poetical robes have worn rather shabby, acquires a new outfit.
But the old romantic weaknesses are not so easily discarded: even when
he writes of ‘Lois Fuller’s Chinese Dancers’--a high-brow Vaudeville
turn--instead of Eire and the ancient ways, And the Red Rose upon the
Rood of Time.
Such are the shifts to which poets have been driven in trying to cope
with civilization and in rejecting or keeping up with, from an imagined
necessity of action, the social requirements that seem to be laid upon
poetry. In the resulting confusion one thing at least is clear, that in
modernist poetry, however it has been weakened or perverted by its race
with civilization, is to be found the best and undoubtedly the most
enduring contemporary poetry. This is not because historical modernism
is in itself an excellence, but because the best poets happen to be
modernists: whether they are deliberately so or not, they can be called
modernist if only because they are good, and because what is good
always seems advanced.
_Modernist_, indeed, should describe a quality in poetry which
has nothing to do with the date or with responding to civilization.
Poetry to which _modernist_ in this sense could be fully
applied would derive its excellence neither from its reacting against
civilization, by satiric or actual primitivism; nor from its proved
ability to keep up with or keep ahead of civilization. It would not,
however, ignore its contemporaneous universe, for the reason that it
would not be stupid and that it would have a sense of humour--the most
intelligent attitude toward history is not to take one’s own date too
seriously. There would occur evidences of time in such poetry; but
always its modernism would lie in its independence, in its relying on
none of the traditional devices of poetry-making in the past nor on
any of the artificial effects to be got by using the atmosphere of
contemporary life and knowledge to startle or to give reality. If, in
such poetry, a topical institution or person or object should occur,
it would be only because it made an image more accurately suited to
the particular requirements of the poem than another less recent one.
Most of all, such poetry would be characterized by a lack of strain, by
an intelligent ease. Not only would its references have a simplicity
and naturalness no matter how difficult, that is, no matter how highly
developed aside from references, such poetry was--not only would it
not have to rely on references; it would not, either, have to rely
on modern short-story material, such as Mr. Pound, for example, has
incorporated in one of his poems:
Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal of a sort of emotional anaemia
It would not have to rely on such material because it would have
something to say that had nothing to do with reporting contemporary
life or with vying with the progress of intelligence.
And even poetry that is _modernist_ only in the historical
sense--even Ezra Pound’s or Vachel Lindsay’s--accomplishes at least
this: by its enlarging process it has widened the limits of reference,
diction and construction in poetry; by extending the poet’s curriculum
it has also extended his acceptable scope. So that poetry that is
modernist only in the personal sense has some chance of attention, its
frowardness being taken for historical modernism.
Many common symbols of civilization, in any case, are bound to be
absorbed naturally by poetry, although at the beginning they cannot but
be used with self-consciousness. The naturalness with which some new
invention or scientific discovery may be uttered in poetry depends on
its recentness. There is even a definite time-limit before such a ‘new’
thing becomes a common object and before which it is affected to write
of it in poetry except rarely and then with deliberate affectation.
This time-limit varies, of course, with the nature of the oddity--with
the train, for example, the period was about seventy years. During this
period of human acclimatization the oddity gradually loses the capital
letter and the italics with which it was perhaps originally written;
its name comes to be pronounced without any sense of strangeness or
second-thought. It gradually approaches a stage, in fact, when it is
nearly quaint; and it is just in this stage when it is most natural.
The train has passed from a stage of complete strangeness to one of
complete familiarity. Wordsworth was one of the first poets to notice
the train, but as a curiosity rather than as a common object and on
the theory that poetry should take recognition of modern scientific
development. Although his view was that poetry was conferring favour
on the scientists in recognizing their products, it will be seen from
the following lines that he admitted minutely and specifically the
various requirements which civilization puts upon poetry: material
progressiveness, literal prophecy, intellectual advancements, ‘future
change’, and, finally, elegance, which he achieves by calling
Steamboats, Viaducts, Railways otherwise than by their own names
(‘Motions and Means’, ‘Nature’s lawful offspring’). But he mentions
them in the title:
STEAMBOATS, VIADUCTS, AND RAILWAYS
Motions and Means, on land and sea at war
With old poetic feeling, not for this
Shall ye, by Poets even, be judged amiss!
Nor shall your presence, howsoe’er it mar
The loveliness of Nature, prove a bar
To the Mind’s gaining that prophetic sense
Of future change, that point of vision, whence
May be discovered what in soul ye are.
In spite of all that beauty may disown
In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace
Her lawful offspring in Man’s art; and Time,
Pleased with your triumphs o’er his brother Space,
Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown
Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime.
Tennyson was forced to accept the train, but he handled it gingerly.
_Lady Godiva_ has this short prelude to show his broadmindedness;
but it is only a foil to the romantic story:
I waited for the train at Coventry;
I hung with grooms and porters on the bridge,
To watch the three tall spires; and there I shaped
The city’s ancient legend into this:--
In “_Mechanophilus_--in the time of the first railways” he frankly
romanticizes:
Now first we stand and understand,
And sunder false from true,
And handle boldly with the hand,
And see and shape and do.
Dash back that ocean with a pier,
Strow yonder mountain flat,
A railway there, a tunnel here,
Mix we this Zone with that....
As we surpass our fathers’ skill,
Our sons will shame our own;
A thousand things are hidden still
And not a hundred known....
Browning was rather more courageous; he first introduced the train
as a commonplace into poetry, but through the back door, in what was
known as serio-comic verse. The lines are from _Christmas-Eve and
Easter-day_:
A tune was born in my head last week
Out of the thump-thump and shriek-shriek
Of the train, as I came by it, up from Manchester;
And when, next week, I take it back again,
My head will sing to the engine’s clack again
While it only makes my neighbour’s haunches stir.
By the use of rhymes like ‘back again’ and ‘engines clack again’,
‘Manchester’ and ‘haunches stir’, he is saying in effect that a train
is no proper subject for true poetical feelings; that as it is a part
of modern life we must include it in our poems but in the low style
proper to it. Emily Dickinson was perhaps the first to confess to a
feeling of personal affection for the train as such:
I love to see it lap the miles,
And lick the valleys up,
And pause to feed itself at tanks;
And then prodigious, step
Around a pile of mountains
And, supercilious, peer
In shanties by the sides of roads....
And neigh like Boanerges;
Then, punctual as a star,
Stop--docile and omnipotent--
At its own stable door.
To John Davidson it was an appealing creature, too, although more
terrible; in no way comic. His _Song of the Train_ begins:
A monster taught
To come to hand
Amain,
As swift as thought
Across the land
The train.
... O’er bosky dens
By marsh and mead,
Forest and fens
Embodied speed
Is clanked and hurled....
In a poem of Mr. Robert Nichols we find the train treated with more
modern nonchalance. _The Express: Hereford to London_ begins:
On sways the tilting train:
We feel the carriage bluffly sideways blown,
We see the chill shower brighten on the pane,
We hear the high wind through the lantern moan,
We three borne ever through the wind and rain,
We three who meet here not to meet again,
We three poor faring fools who sit alone.
But toward the end there is a romantic lapse to excuse the liberties
taken:
But the giant Train begins a confident song
“Why be so meek, so proud, when both are wrong.”
Sacheverell Sitwell can write even more casually of the train. For
romantic lapses like the following in _At Breakfast_:
A railway engine ran across the field
Galloping like a swift horse down the rails.
As it came quicker the window-panes rattled,
The roof shook side to side: all its beams trembled,
Thundering hoofs were upon us--glass chariots.
are not even real lapses like Mr. Nichols’ but a half-satiric “Look:
modernist though I am, I can still be romantic about old-fashioned
romantic subjects like the railway train.” It is now not a ‘monster’
but a charming early-Victorian _objet de vertu_ under a glass
dome. We find Miss Marianne Moore describing expanding bookcases
and books printed on india-paper in a serious poem, without
self-consciousness:
the vast indestructible necropolis
of composite Yawman-Erbe separable units;
the steel, the oak, the glass, the Poor Richard publications
containing the public secrets of efficiency
on “paper so thin that one thousand four hundred and
twenty pages make one inch.”
Without self-consciousness? Perhaps that is too much to say when
so short a space of years separate poetry of this sort from the
once-advanced poetry of, say, Richard Le Gallienne, a ‘decadent’ of
the ’nineties still alive and at present living in the same city as
Miss Moore, like her a literary critic; a city where there must be
large backward sections of the reading public to whom Mr. Le Gallienne
is still an advanced writer because he has, perhaps, written familiarly
of the Devil and the sweets of sin.
But is it necessary for the poet to come to the point, after a long
history of gradually acclimatizing his verse to what were once
considered unpoetical subjects, where he can, with Miss Moore, bring
himself to insert fourteen unrevised and consecutive words straight
from a newspaper advertisement into his poem, and put them into
quotation marks as well? Though a feat of poetic self-martyrdom,
doubtless, and perhaps the logical conclusion of giving civilization
what it wants--verse actually interpretative of what is called ‘the
poetry of modern business’--it is bad for both poetry and business:
the quotation would have been much more effective left in the original
setting to compose the daily synthetic advertisement-poem of the
morning newspaper.
True modernist poetry can appear equally at all stages of historical
development from Wordsworth to Miss Moore. And it does appear when the
poet forgets what is the correct literary conduct demanded of him
in relation to contemporary institutions (with civilization speaking
through criticism) and can write a poem having the power of survival
in spite of its disregarding these demands; a poem of purity--of
a certain old-fashionedness even, but not an old-fashionedness of
reaction against the time to archaism, or of retreat to nature and
the primitive passions. All poetry that deserves to endure is at once
old-fashioned and modernist. How much of modernist poetry is merely
up-to-date conduct-poetry, the poetry of conversion to the last-minute
salvationism of civilization, and how much is poetry in need of no
conversion, but working out its own salvation by itself, is a difficult
question to settle offhand. The proportions vary with individuals. With
Mr. Pound the former sort predominates greatly, one would say; with
Cummings, though he is more ‘daring’ than Mr. Pound, there is much less
of this than at first sight appears; with Mr. Archibald Macleish, an
ambitious imitator of Cummings, much more.
The great danger in any discussion of modernist poetry which may reach
the plain reader is that in pointing out how many of its qualities
are inspired by necessity, sincerity or truthfulness, these qualities
may endear themselves to him not because of necessity, sincerity or
truthfulness but only because he can understand them as up-to-date;
the danger, in fact, that the plain reader may fall in love with the
up-to-dateness of this poetry. In this case, with modernist poetry seen
and applauded as a part of the movement of civilization, the demands
made upon it as such would become intensified. A world of plain readers
hungering for up-to-date poetry would turn poetry into one of the
gross industries. There is such a great gap between Victorian poetry
and the poetry of just before the War, and again between this poetry
and advanced modern poetry, that the converted plain reader might
fail to see that the theories of 1860 or 1910 or 1927 have nothing to
do with the essential goodness of poetry, though much to do with its
up-to-dateness. Would not, it may be asked, a hunger for essential
goodness in poetry also turn it into one of the gross industries?
Perhaps; on the other hand perhaps not, since the reader’s capacity
for essential goodness is to his capacity for up-to-dateness as the
capacity for writing essentially good poetry to the capacity for
writing up-to-date poetry.
CHAPTER VIII
VARIETY IN MODERNIST POETRY
THE plain reader whose introduction to poetry is generally not
through personal compulsion or curiosity but through the systematic
requirements of his education, naturally associates it with the
utilitarian point of view, which must dominate any formal educational
process. If the school-system has happened to be old-fashioned and has
used poetry merely as a means of teaching grammar, or as so many lines
to be learned by heart as a disciplinary task or penalty, the reaction
to poetry is negative: the reader either discounts poetry for ever
as a dreary pedagogical invention or he can perhaps rediscover it as
something so different from the classroom exercise as to be unaffected
by the unpleasant associations attached to it as such. A ‘liberal
school-system’ does not however leave alone poetry as poetry. It
attempts to interest the child in the ‘values’ of poetry; the child’s
reaction to this method will therefore be a positive one: he will
subscribe to these values and accept poetry through them, or he will
not subscribe to these values but reject poetry through them. ‘Beauty’
is the term of approval which the schoolmaster applies to the ‘values’
of poetry; character-formation is their expressed practical end, or if
not character-formation, at least a wholesome relief from its ardours.
The elder system, which on the whole was preferable, has been generally
superseded by the new both in England and America: the official report
on “The Teaching of English in England” (1919) lays great stress on
the folly of the teacher in ‘throwing away’ an important ‘weapon’,
if he refuses to win his pupils over to him by making the literature
lesson interesting, particularly through poetry. Particularly through
Shakespeare. The report, in reply to an objection that “Shakespeare
is over the heads of the children”, approves a professor-witness who
replied “He is over all our heads”; as though that made it any better.
One of the stock essay-subjects in the schools is “The Uses of Poetry”;
and when the essays come up to be “corrected” and the humanistic
teacher prepares a composite specimen-essay on the subject, the ‘uses’
are found to be as follows:
1. Poetry gives the reader joy.
2. Poetry gives relief to sorrow, pain or weariness.
3. Poetry teaches the reader to love the Good.
4. Poetry is the concentrated wisdom of former ages.
5. Poetry teaches other-worldliness.
and so on until to the final summing-up:
Poetry’s uses may be expressed in a single phrase: Spiritual Elevation.
All poetry, that is, tends toward the same general tone and the same
general purpose.
Now it is unimportant to decide whether education since the time of
Aristotle has been responsible for the spread of this view of poetry;
or whether it is the great numerical predominance of poets who have
professed it from a policy of self-protection, and have written most
of their poetry to support it, over poets who have either dissented
or refused to commit themselves, that has been responsible. The fact
remains that this has been the officially accepted academic view and
the view of orthodox criticisms: even a self-proclaimed dissenter
like Poe defined the end of poetry as spiritual elevation. Poetry in
every Classical period has been formed according to this principle.
The mass-impressiveness of Classical poetry is, indeed, largely due
to its uniformity. And though we know from historical reconstructions
that even between romantics like Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge
and Shelley there was about as much personal dissimilarity as could
possibly be found between contemporary poets, yet the lip-service
that each of these paid to this creed of the uses of poetry induced
for the most part a corresponding pen-service. The emphasis that the
educational system lays on personal and literary similarities in poets
makes it still more difficult to appraise them separately. Here are
descriptive passages by six more or less contemporary writers, typical
classroom passages:
the hoar
And aery Alps towards the North appeared
Through mist, an heaven-sustaining bulwark reared
Between the East and West, and half the sky
Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry
Dark purple at the Zenith, which still grew
Down the steep West into a wondrous hue
Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent
Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent
Among the many folded hills....
It was no marvel--from my very birth
My soul was drunk with love--which did pervade
And mingle with whate’er I saw on earth.
Of objects all inanimate I made
Idols, and out of wild and lonely flowers
And rocks, whereby they grew, a paradise.
Woodlark may sink from sandy fern--the Sun may hear his lay;
Runnels may kiss the grass on shelves and shallows clear,
But their low voices are not heard, though come on travels drear;
Blood-red the Sun may set behind black mountain peaks;
Blue tides may sluice and drench their time in caves and weedy creeks.
Mournfully breaks the north wave on thy shore,
Silent Iona, and the mocking blast
Sweeps sternly o’er thy relics of the past,
The stricken cross, the desecrated tomb
Of abbots and barbarian kings of yore....
Since risen from ocean, ocean to defy
Appeared the Crag of Ailsa, ne’er did morn
With gleaming lights more gracefully adorn
His sides, or wreathe with mist his forehead high
Now, faintly darkening with the sun’s eclipse,
Still is he seen, in lone sublimity.
I stood on Brocken’s sovran height, and saw
Woods crowding upon woods, hills over hills,
A surging scene, and only limited
By the blue distance. Heavily my way
Downward I dragged through fir groves evermore.
Actually these pieces are by Shelley, Byron, Keats, Tupper, Wordsworth
and Coleridge, in that order: but what reader could offhand ascribe
them correctly? Who would not give the first to Keats, the second to
Wordsworth and stumble over the last four?
This extraordinary sameness in poets of such entirely different
personal character is due principally to the limitations which
‘spiritual elevation’ in the academic sense imposes: these poets
only wrote authentic poetry when off their guard. The sameness is
accentuated by the nationalistic element: every poet wrote as an
Englishman first, bound by his very use of the language to a policy of
increasing the national heritage of song rather than to the development
of a strictly personal idiom. He also wrote as a member of a class,
the governing class. One of the last surviving rewards of the poet as
a privileged member of the community was that, whatever his birth, by
writing acceptable poetry he became a gentleman; even in the narrowly
aristocratic eighteenth century this tradition obtained. (Even to-day,
when literary culture is the only gentility possible to affect.)
Stephen Duck, the “Thresher Poet”, whose works pleased George II.’s
Queen, was officially confirmed in his gentility by being presented
with a country-living as a clergyman. Burns was, for a while at least,
given the freedom of smart Edinburgh society and allowed to write
familiar epistles to members of the aristocracy. Poetical ideas and
poetical technique--the substance of poetical education, in fact--have
always been class-institutions, and poets born from the labouring or
shop-keeping classes have with very few exceptions tried to elevate
themselves by borrowing ideas and techniques to the enjoyment of
which they were not born. Even revolutionary ideas are, by a paradox,
upper-class ideas, a rebound from excesses of poetical refinement.
Burns’ romantic sympathy with the French Revolution in its earlier
stages could be read as a sign of natural breeding, the gentlemanly
radicalism of the literary _jeunesse_. The social gap between the
crofters and the gentry was, moreover, not so wide a one in Scotland as
in England; and Burns soon learned the trick of drawing-room writing.
Keats, not being, like Burns or John Clare, an obvious example of
peasant genius, or an aristocrat like Shelley, always had difficulty in
discovering his temperamental biases. The son of a tradesman, he could
not afford to be politically as radical as those inferior and superior
to him in class; though he went with Leigh Hunt as far as he thought
it safe. Blake was also a radical: one of the few Englishmen who dared
walk about in London wearing a cap of Liberty. But he is a very rare
instance of a poet who could afford not to affect a class-technique:
for he was on intimate terms with the angels and wrote like an angel
rather than like a gentleman. His radicalism was part of his religion
and not a sentimentality as Wordsworth’s early radicalism was. If a
man has complete identity with his convictions, then he is tough
about them, he is not sentimental; if not, then his convictions are a
sentimental weakness however strongly he feels about them. The Romantic
Revivalists were all spoiled as revolutionaries by their gentility.
Blake was in no sense a Romantic Revivalist. He was a seer, or a poet.
He despised the gentry in religion, literature and painting equally.
That is why there is little or nothing of Blake’s mature work that
could be confused with that of any contemporary or previous writer.
He did not forfeit his personality by submitting to any conventional
medium; and he did not complain of the neglect of his poems by the
greater reading public.
The sameness of poetry is likewise accentuated rather than diminished
by the spirit of competition. Once there is a tacit or written critical
agreement as to the historical form proper to the poetry of any
period, all the poets of fashion or ‘taste’ vie with each other in
approximating to the perfect period manner. In the eighteenth century
such major poets as Pope and Shenstone were only to be distinguished
from such minor ones as Ambrose Philips and Richard Graves by being
more willing to polish away every vestige of personal eccentricity
from their work. Period-monotony is further increased by imitation
of the most successful ‘period’ poets. In the last century there
were successively dozens of imitation Moores, Byrons, Wordsworths,
Tennysons, Brownings, Swinburnes and Wildes; and dozens more who tried
to synthesize the methods of these several inventors of slightly
different styles. Among these, as we have seen, the several inventors
themselves, who were all in search of a single period style.
All such monotony sprang from the necessity of having socially secure
convictions. Poetry was to poets of the school-room tradition the
instrument, the illustration of their convictions, whether (to take
examples only from the nineteenth century) patriotic as with Campbell,
moral as with Tupper, religious as with Aubrey de Vere, ‘philosophical’
as with Wordsworth and Whitman, social as with Moore, ‘artistic’ as
with Poe and the pre-Raphaelites. Even the decadents at the end of
last century were decadent from conviction rather than from wilfulness
or inertia. Decadence introduced no variety. It merely substituted
self-satisfied pessimism for self-satisfied optimism; and one
nationalism for another by moving the poetical centre from London to
Paris.
When Decadence decayed and was succeeded by the spurious healthiness
of the country-rambler, the beer-drinker and the earlier patriotic
soldier-poet, and this in turn broke down, the spirit of scepticism
began seriously to invade poetry. It had found expression before
in the poems of Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman; but with certain
important conservative reservations in the former, while in the latter
it was confused with the shy or aggressive anti-religiousness of
the eighteen-nineties. Modern scepticism was of a different order.
The conscious bravado of anti-social or anti-idealistic writing
disappeared. The poet did not feel cut off from his fellow-men by the
loss of his more bigoted convictions, for he could assume that an
increasingly large section of the educated classes was in agreement
with him. At the time of the Romantic Revival, though the debaucheries
of Byron could be sympathetically discounted because of his rank, a
confessed atheist like Shelley was not admitted into polite society:
it was assumed that every reader at least professed allegiance to
Christianity, however lax his private life. The modernist poet assumes
that his readers owe no trite emotional allegiance to any religious or
social or national institution, even that they have emerged from the
combative stages of mere ‘doubt’ or ‘naughtiness’ and are organizing
their lives more intellectually; that to them the consistent and
humane atheism of Shelley, or the consistent and humane saintliness
of Traherne or Blake is preferable to the vulgarly incongruous lives
of Byron and Wilde, as reflected in their poetry. The school-room
may still remain the citadel of convictions; and Byron and Wilde may
be morally whitewashed because their poetry abounds in old-fashioned
convictions. But the modernist poet does not write for the school-room:
if for anything at all, for the university.
This refinement of conviction, this maturing of social purposiveness,
contributes more than any other cause to the raising of the barriers
of poetical monotony. The poet may admit spiritual elevation as one
possible personal ‘tone’ of poetry and spiritual depression as another;
or an evenness of spiritual temper or a rapid alternation between
depression and exaltation--the poeticizing of bathos and anticlimax--as
further alternatives. But poetry ceases to be the maintenance of a
single idealistic tone; it has a less obvious, a more complicated
consistency. It is a broader intellectual exercise than before; even at
its most pedantic it is still an intellectual exercise.
The old world of poetry, however, is going on at the same time; the old
institutions are still officially and indeed numerically predominant;
though it is not too much to say that no single poet of any real
distinction since the death of Charles Doughty believes fervently
in them or even pays them homage. The lack of narrow school-room
purposiveness shown by modernist poets is actually as offensive to
the survivors of the aggressively ungodly school and their followers
as to the true believers: the anthologies and poets’ corners in
public periodicals are strictly censored both against abstruseness of
conviction and against ungodliness. The public that enjoys the simple
ruralities of W. H. Davies’:
A Rainbow and a Cuckoo! Lord!
How rich and great the times are now!
is unaware that he has written even such naughty lines as:
Lord, I say nothing; I profess
No faith in thee nor Christ thy Son:
in which he mildly idealizes Christ the Man, as opposed to Christ the
God; still less of his modernism, which is a genuine modernism, though
of rare occurrence in his recent work, as in the poem beginning:
I took my oath I would enquire
Without affection, hate or wrath
Into the death of Ada Wright.
So help me God, I took that oath
and describing without reticence or sentimentality how the coroner’s
jury condoned a child-murder, how the mother gave evidence:
It was a love-child, she explained,
And laughed for our intelligence.
and how the emaciated corpse, that had but one eye shut and the other
half-open, “seemed a knowing little child”. Though Mr. Davies consented
to omit this poem from his _Collected Poems_, he wrote it,
nevertheless; a poem that could not possibly have been written even at
the end of last century.
The raising of the barriers of monotony by modernism has encouraged
imitative or feeble poets, who in the eighteenth century would have
been happy in formal submission to them, to adventure into all the new
fields now opened to them with great audacity of subject and form. Some
of these-poets are more self-confident than others, and hence call more
attention to themselves; and the confusion of the modern poetic scene
is increased by the failure of even the specialized poetry-reading
public to distinguish genuine poetry like a not inconsiderable
part of Messrs. Eliot, Cummings and Miss Sitwell from the spurious
individuality of, say, Dr. William Carlos Williams. It is possible at
once to recognize a writer like Mr. Harold Acton as a Sitwellite by his
borrowed stage-properties, or Miss Cunard as an Eliotite in the same
way. But Dr. Carlos Williams is not quite so clumsy. This is from a
poem, _Struggle of Wings_:
... the string from the windowshade
has a noose at the bottom, a noose? or
a ring--bound with white cord, knotted
around the circumference designedly in a design
And all there is is won
And it is Inness on the meadows and fruit is
yellow ripening in windows every minute
growing brighter in the bulblight by the
cabbages and spuds--
And all there is is won
What are black 4 A.M’s after all but black
4 A.M’s like anything else: a tree,
a fork, a leaf, a pane of glass--?
And all there is is won
A relic of old decency; a very personal friend
And all there is is won
_Envoi_
Pic, your crows feed at your windowsill
Asso, try and get near mine....
And all there is is won
This is obvious charlatanry: a synthetic modernist poetry composed
of ingredients plainly imitative of those that go to make up the
poems of more genuine writers, and yet not too closely resembling
them. There is a mystic refrain such as T. S. Eliot has used,
typographic nonconformity as in E. E. Cummings, a reference to modern
painting--the divided word _Picasso_, which also suggests the
verbal disintegration which appears more completely in James Joyce.
Possibly the crows occur in an actual picture: possibly they refer
to the black 4 A.M.’s. There is also the up-to-date mannerism of
marking the poem “Incomplete” and publishing it with lacunae shown by
dots enclosed in parentheses. There is a passing satiric reference
to Philosophy in “Inness on the meadows”, called attention to by the
modernist diction of “bulblight” and “spuds”. The pretended subject is
the random thoughts that occur to a poet half awake and half asleep
at 4 A.M. The realistic window cord gives the reader a false
confidence that “And all there is is won” has some sense; whereas it is
an unrelated phrase suggesting those that occur without discoverable
sense in dreams. The poem continues:
Out of such drab trash as this
by a metamorphosis
bright as wallpaper or crayon
or where the sun casts ray on ray on
flowers in a dish, weave, weave
for Poesy a gaudy sleeve
a scarf, a cap and find him gloves
white as the backs of Turtledoves....
This last, dangerously near enough to Edith Sitwell in the third line
and in the last three lines, is an assumption of poetic awareness
within the poem of the poem itself--another modernist mannerism. The
‘drab trash’ is carefully collected--in imitation of T. S. Eliot--to
set off the ‘fine writing’ that follows. Not only Edith Sitwell but,
in the rest of the poem, Milton’s nativity hymn, a popular song and a
reference to oleochromes contribute. Dr. Williams’ early poetic travels
are outlined on the dust-cover of his _Sour Grapes_:
The surer and sounder but not the less unusual handling of free verse
by a contributor to the original Imagist anthology and a later member
of the so-called “Others” school, who has already made a distinct
place for himself in contemporary poetry.
his more recent ones in the first paragraph of a chapter of his _In
the American Grain_:
Picasso (turning to look back, with a smile), Brague (brown cotton),
Gertrude Stein (opening the doors of a cabinet of MSS.), Tzara
(grinning), André Germain (blocking the door), Van der Pyl (speaking
of St. Cloud) ... the Prince of Dahomi, Clive Bell (dressed); ...
James and Nora Joyce (in a taxi at the Place de l’Étoile); McAlmon,
Antheil Bryher, H.D. and dear Ezra (Pound) who took me to talk with
Léger; and finally Adrienne Monnier--these were my six weeks in Paris.
To such a poetry and such an atmosphere who would not prefer an
unassuming authentic piece of contemporary writing no more ‘new’ than
‘old’? Say, Mr. Prewett’s:
Seeing my love but lately come
And unexpecting she should be found
I trembled, I was dumb
And fell upon the ground;
Her only thus in distance to see
Was to me pain so profound
I fell down in an agony....
Free-lance modernists do not make ‘individuality’ their object: their
object is to write each poem in the most fitting way. But the sum of
their work has individuality because of their natural variousness; like
the individuality of the handwriting of all independent-minded men
or women, however clearly and conventionally they form their actual
letters. The only legitimate use of the word ‘style’ in poetry is as
the personal handwriting in which it is written; if it can be easily
imitated or defined as a formula it should be immediately suspect to
the poets themselves. To professional modernists individuality is
the earnest of a varied social purposiveness. To pseudo-modernists
individuality is the earnest of a narrow literary purposiveness. In
this they are not dissimilar from those eighteenth-century poets whose
sole object was to write correctly, to conform to the manner of the
period. In practice this conforming individualism means an imitation,
studiously concealed, merely of the eccentricities of poetry that is
really individual.
‘Groups’ may spring up in the old style around any poet; but in
general the free-lance modernist who had by accident become popular
or notorious and still retained a sense of personal dignity would
shrink from being made a ‘_cher maître_’ as a grotesque position
for him to occupy in a literary scene that he can only take casually.
Indeed, as soon as any imitation is made of his work, and his style
by imitation becomes a formula of mannerisms, he may be even inclined
to change them to preserve his integrity. It is not, as Mr. Philip
Guedalla suggests, that there is no English equivalent for ‘_cher
maître_’, but merely that the modern English poet good enough to be
one does not take his poetry like that. A certain sifting and grading
of personalities and groups, however, does occur where modernism is a
professional conscience rather than a personal trait: the modernist
poetry-producing world has the look of a complicated hierarchy. The
complication is increased by the efforts of professional modernists to
enrol free-lance modernists in their socially purposive movement, and
of pseudo-modernists to enrol themselves in it by literary forgery.
In every modernist group the members are aware who is the Queen Bee
and who are the drones of the _schwärmerei_. Eventually the
parasitical members ambitious to become Queen Bees will desert to other
hives and to other modes. They make a quick-change from one group to
another, acquiring as they go a patchwork synthetic style that they
hope to impose on general readers and critics as a large-scale exercise
of originality, a contemporary grand manner. The aspirant has a much
more difficult problem to face in the new poetic order than in the old.
In the old it was sufficient for him to write well. Now he must not
only write well, he must be original. A desperate hunt for originality
ensues in which aspirants are driven for inspiration to foreign
literatures, to old French, to eighteenth century quaintness, to
Spanish, to Demotic Greek, to mediaeval Latin, to Chinese or Javanese
or Aztec; to various low dialects--Bowery, Whitechapel, Chicago,
journalese; to ancient religious writers, particularly the Early
Fathers and Buddhists, and so on.
The contemporary poetic scene, then, appears to the interested but
perplexed reader a chaotic conglomerate of free-lance originality
or group originality; a restless multitude of types, imitation
of types, antithesis and synthesis of types. Variety is the most
characteristic general feature of contemporary poetry, and variety
means quantity: it not only encourages poets themselves to experiment
freely, it encourages a great many people who are not poets in
literary competition. Although it was comparatively easier in periods
where a single poetical type prevailed for people who were not poets
to write poetry, there are undoubtedly more people who are not
poets writing poetry at the present time than ever before, though
proportionately fewer find publishers. Even when one has cut out of
critical consideration the quantities of backward verse directly
imitative of Keats or Tennyson or Oscar Wilde or Swinburne or Francis
Thompson or Whitman; of ordinary adolescent verse of distinguishable
male and female varieties; there still remains an enormous quantity of
miscellaneous verse to be sorted. Criticism (even advanced criticism),
reared for centuries on the faith of the technical and philosophical
consistency of poetry (a faith continuously derived and revised from
Aristotle), cannot cope with poetry in quantity; as it could a hundred
years ago, when the possible varieties of poetical composition were
countable on the fingers and the most daring were either imitations of
Chaucer, Ossian or Spenser, or affectations of country simplicity or
of childishness. Criticism in the simplest literary scenes has never
been able to recognize who are the authentic contemporary poets and
how much of each poet is authentic. To-day, having either fallen in
arrear of its age or dashed ahead of its age into vague philosophical
formulas, it is not even as sure as it once was who are the innovators
of any particular type, and who are the copyists, or to what extent
striking resemblances are attributable to unconscious contemporary
sympathy; or, in the case of imitations of the Chinese or Japanese or
American Indian, how close these imitations are to their originals.
The following are lines from the work of two poets, Donald Davidson
and John Crowe Ransom, between whom a fairly conscious contemporary
sympathy exists, without callow imitation on either side.
Here’s one Phineas
Out for a walk,
Tired of skulls
And bones that talk....
There’s a palimpsest
In a puff of spring,
But Phineas looks
At the blossoming,
Transfigures road
Into new corpuscles,
Elucidates bush
With a bound of muscles.
and
Now what can he want,
The vagrant, the lout,
Who leers in the parson’s face,
Lolls with tongue out?
Nothing that you have,
Men with a motor car;
God keep you your high hats
And fine things you are!
With a knot in his bosom
And a bee in his brains,
He goes full of pictures
Around the flat lanes.
Even supposing a reader or a critic were able to make a just valuation
of an existent sympathy between two particular contemporary poets:
how is he to make a satisfactory definition of the relation between
the work of either of these two poets, or both, and that of a poet in
an entirely different walk of modernism, the work, for example, of
Mr. Osbert Sitwell? The following is from Mr. Sitwell’s _English
Gothic_:
The souls of bishops, shut in stone
By masons, rest in quietude
As flies in amber. They atone
Each buzzing long-dead platitude.
Above, where flutter angel-wings
Caught in the organ’s rolling loom,
Hang in the air, like jugglers’ rings,
Dim quatrefoils of coloured gloom.
Tall arches rise to imitate
The jaws of Jonah’s whale. Up flows
The chant. Thin spinsters sibilate
Beneath a full-blown Gothic rose.
Could the reader or critic be expected to have the courage or presence
of mind to say that mere contemporaneousness was an insufficient
basis for making critical comparisons between poets; that Mr. Sitwell
and Mr. Ransom or Mr. Sitwell and Mr. Davidson were so separated by
locality, nationality and formative tradition as to belong, so to
speak, to entirely different ‘periods’? Suppose that, the problem of
Mr. Sitwell, Mr. Ransom and Mr. Davidson having been settled, a new
element of confusion were introduced by quoting from Mr. T. S. Eliot’s
‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Service’ the following lines as being perplexingly
similar to Mr. Sitwell’s _English Gothic_:
A painter of the Umbrian school
Designed upon a gesso ground
The nimbus of the Baptized God.
The wilderness is cracked and browned
But through the water pale and thin
Still shine the unoffending feet
And there above the painter set
The Father and the Paraclete
The sable presbyters approach
The avenue of penitence;
The young are red and pustular
Clutching piaculative pence.
Suppose, it being possible to determine from the date of publication of
the volumes in which these poems appeared the date of their writing and
the degrees of intimacy between these two poets at the time of their
respective writings--suppose these poems are set down as an example
of contemporary sympathy? Especially as Mr. Eliot is a transplanted
American now for a long time acclimatized to literary England? What,
however, is to be said when we come upon lines in Mr. Eliot’s work
which do not show him writing in a certain way out of contemporary
sympathy with Mr. Osbert Sitwell, but writing simply and originally as
Mr. Eliot? As in the following lines:
Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin;
And breastless creatures underground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin ...
Donne, I suppose, was such another
Who found no substitute for sense;
To seize and clutch and penetrate,
Expert beyond experience ...
Suppose we say, then, that Mr. Eliot is himself. He may, as a
transplanted American, have moments of contemporary sympathy with
modernist English poets, but he is, in the main, uniquely himself.
But what if we are suddenly confronted, in the work of an American
poet, Allen Tate, who has not been transplanted, with lines like the
following from a poem called “Non Omnis Moriar”:
I ask you: Has the Singer sung
The drear quintessence of the Song?
John Ford knew more than I of death--
John Ford to death has passed along.
I ask you: Has the Singer said
Wherefore his spirit is not dust?
Marlowe went muttering to death
When he had done with song and lust.
As the volume in which Mr. Eliot’s poem appeared was published in
1920 and as Mr. Tate’s poem was not printed until 1922 and then in a
magazine, Mr. Eliot must be accorded priority rights in the manner
in which both poems are written. Yet we know directly from Mr. Tate
that he was writing in this manner long before he was aware that Mr.
Eliot was also writing in this manner. Since to an American poet who
has not been transplanted an American poet transplanted to England
is as good as an English poet, the complicated situation now reads
something like this: between Mr. Osbert Sitwell, an English poet and
Mr. T. S. Eliot, an American poet transplanted to England, there exists
a contemporary sympathy, stronger on Mr. Eliot’s side because he is
the transplanted one; but Mr. Eliot’s contemporary sympathies with
modernist English poets, shall we say, are only incidental in his
work--he is, in the main, inimitably himself; yet not entirely so, for
other poets have contemporary sympathies with him, which he cannot
help, but which nevertheless detract from his inimitability; in fact,
at least one American poet has had a contemporary sympathy with him
as a modernist English poet (of whom he was not, at a time when the
sympathy was strong, aware), not as a transplanted American poet or a
resident American poet with whom a contemporary sympathy might have
existed without detracting from the inimitability of either; finally,
the situation is further complicated by the fact that a certain
contemporary sympathy did exist at the time of the poem “Non Omnis
Moriar”, between Mr. Tate and Mr. Davidson and Mr. Ransom, without,
as it later appeared, detracting from the inimitability of any one of
these in relation to any other--which makes an unconscious accidental
contemporary sympathy more significant than a sympathy derived from
conscious personal association. So the circle is tied, and so it might
be tied over and over again in contemporary poetry without making the
situation read more clearly.
It might, however, be made clearer than it is if bigoted inefficiency
of criticism were replaced by an intelligent policy of laissez-faire;
which would allow that a variety of modes may exist side by side
in a period, having strong or slight dissimilarities and strong
or slight correspondences with one another; that sometimes the
dissimilarities can be explained as conscious disaffections or as
the unconscious result of dissimilar personal background; that
sometimes the correspondences can be explained as conscious affections
or affectations or as the unconscious results of similar personal
associations, a personal association being at times nothing more
definite than a certain literary slant two poets may have caught
from some common source of infection--Mr. Tate, without having read
Wordsworth or his imitators, might as easily have caught the Wordsworth
germ as the Eliot germ, had he happened to be constitutionally subject
to infection from it.
The situation would be clearer still if many dissimilarities were left
as unexplainable, except as facts of absolute personal eccentricity;
and if many correspondences were left as unexplainable, except as
facts of mysterious personal coincidence not to be accounted for in
terms of causality or of excessive openness to infection from without.
Some obvious correspondences must be explained, if only because
they are easily explained, and because poetry in which too obvious
correspondences occur is part of the clutter in the poetry of any time
that can be immediately cleared away. The following complete poems are
all by different authors:
The beech-leaves are silver
For lack of the tree’s blood.
At your kiss my lips
Become like the autumn beech-leaves.
An old willow with hollow branches
Slowly swayed his few high bright tendrils
And sang:
Love is a young green willow
Shimmering at the bare wood’s edge.
As cool as the pale wet leaves of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.
Among twenty snowy mountains
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the black bird
Richard Aldington, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound and Wallace
Stevens are the so-called authors of these poems. These might pass
as legitimate instances of correspondence and not be suspect as
parasitical inter-imitativeness, were any of the poems in themselves
of separate poetic importance; were not all of these poems, and many
more like them, closely dependent on one another--were they private
individuals and not members of an institution; and were not the
Imagist school, to which all of these poets at one time or another
belonged, a notoriously self-advertising institution. These things
being so, we are provoked to ask questions that we need not ask in the
case of legitimate instances of correspondence. Such as: who was the
inventor of the style of the first two pieces, Mr. Aldington or Mr.
Williams? or yet H.D. or F. S. Flint? Is not Mr. Williams at least
suspect for his later obvious imitation of T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings,
Edith Sitwell? Is not Mr. Aldington at least suspect as the husband of
H.D.? In the two last pieces who is responsible for the form? Who first
thought of imitating the Japanese _hokku_ form? Or rather who
first thought of imitating the French imitations of the _hokku_
form? Did Mr. Aldington suggest a slightly shorter poem to Mr. Stevens
or Mr. Pound or did Mr. Pound suggest a slightly longer poem to Mr.
Aldington, etc., or did Mr. Pound and Mr. Stevens and Mr. Aldington
and Mr. Williams decide, as mutual pairs, to work as a school team, or
did Mr. Williams and Mr. Stevens and Mr. Aldington and Mr. Pound pair
off, as being by nationality more pairable--Mr. Pound, a transplanted
American, counting as either English or French, as the need may be?...
These are questions to concern the curious dustman, but not the plain
reader, least of all the critic. The reader, even the critic, does not
have to trouble to plot out a literary chart, to develop a carefully
graded technical vocabulary. All that either of them needs is a simple
and instinctive recognition of the real, which is easily discovered
if all other personal or critical questions are brushed aside as
irrelevant.
When modernist poetry or what, not so long ago, passed for modernist
poetry, can reach the stage where the following:
PAPYRUS
Spring ...
Too long ...
Gongula ...
is seriously offered as a poem, there is some justification for the
plain reader and orthodox critic who are frightened away from anything
which may be labelled ‘modernist’ either in terms of condemnation or
approbation. Who or what is Gongula? Is it a name of a person? of a
town? of a musical instrument? Or is it the obsolete botanical word
meaning ‘spores’? Or is it a mistake for Gongora, the Spanish poet from
whom the word ‘gongorism’ is formed, meaning “an affected elegance
of style, also called ‘cultism’?” And why “Papyrus”? Is the poem a
fragment from a real papyrus? Or from an imaginary one? Or is it the
poet’s thoughts about either a real or imaginary fragment? Or about
spring too long because of the gongula of the papyrus-reeds? Rather
than answer any of these questions and be driven to the shame-faced
bluff of making much out of little, the common-sense reader retires
to surer ground. Better, he thinks, presumably, that ten authentic
poets should be left for posterity to discover than that one charlatan
should be allowed to steal into the Temple of Fame. The plain reader
objects to the idea of charlatanry in poetry more than he objects to
the idea of stupidity, excess of learnedness, or honest inferiority:
charlatanry being dishonest superiority. As the usual type of
unorthodox critic is generally so superior himself that he either
tolerates charlatanry because it is superior or snubs it because it is
not superior enough; and as the usual type of orthodox critic is more
equipped with prejudices than the plain reader, if only because his
position forces him to know quantitatively more, and as he therefore
has a less reliable instinct than the plain reader for determining what
is genuine and what is not; the plain reader bears the full burden of
challenging and unmasking charlatanry. The critic, of whatever type,
is always over-cautious because his professional vanity is at stake
in his judgement. The plain reader, because he is of a disorganized,
unprofessional and unassisted majority, and therefore more easily
imposed upon if too ingenuous, is only over-suspicious.
So cautious and suspicious, in fact, is the whole reading population,
the critics and the readers, that a poet like Isaac Rosenberg, for
instance, a young English Jew who was killed in France and whose
poems were posthumously published, can pass them by altogether. Isaac
Rosenberg was one of the few poets who might have served as a fair
challenge to sham modernism. He had, one would say, everything to
recommend him. His verse was irregular but not too irregular; his
meaning was difficult but not too difficult; his references were not
far-fetched; he knew his Bible well--a great recommendation to any
public; and he died young and in battle. But he was not celebrated and
for this reason: that the two editors of his posthumous volume, Mr.
Bottomley and Mr. Binyon, both ‘safe’ poets, introduced him merely as a
poet of promise killed in defence of his country: “the immaturities of
style and taste are apparent on the surface”. The critics in England by
1922 had ceased to blow the trumpet over young poets of promise killed
in the War--the reaction against war-poetry had set in. In America,
however, because he was a Jew he was used as a pawn in literary
politics; but his vogue was short-lived. The real reason why he was
generally overlooked was that, in spite of falling into the friendship
of the early Georgian Group and accepting their criticism of his work
through loneliness, he was not classifiable as a member of a group, or
yet, because of his quietness, as a sensational individual type. The
following is a passage from his play _Moses_. A young Hebrew is
speaking of Moses himself:
Yesterday as I lay nigh dead with toil
Underneath the hurtling crane oiled with our blood
Thinking to end all and let the crane crush me
He came by and bore me into the shade:
O, what a furnace roaring in his blood
Thawed my congealed sinews and tingled my own
Raging through me like a strong cordial.
He spoke! Since yesterday
Am I not larger grown?
I’ve seen men hugely shapen in soul,
Of such unhuman shaggy male turbulence
They tower in foam miles from our neck-strained sight,
And to their shop only heroes come;
But all were cripples to this speed
Constrained to the stables of flesh.
I say there is a famine in ripe harvest
When hungry giants come as guests:
Come knead the hills and ocean into food,
There is none for him.
The streaming vigours of his blood erupting
From his halt tongue are like an anger thrust
Out of a madman’s piteous craving for
A monstrous baulked perfection.
Such work as this had to pass as ‘promise’; work better than this
will undoubtedly have to pass for a time entirely unnoticed; because
variety itself, especially when it becomes a social programme, tends
to harden into defined types, or groups, of variety. For an individual
poet to achieve the smallest popular reputation to-day he must,
indeed, have a certain ‘groupish’ quality, or, to put it differently,
he must suggest a style capable of being imitated; or he must be a
brilliant group-member or imitator. Otherwise he is likely, as one of
the consequences of the diversification of poetic activity, to be lost
to the literary news-sheets of every critical colour and not even to
occur as a subject of the plain reader’s suspicion or of the critic’s
caution: to exist, in fact, only unto himself. Which is not, if the
poet appreciates the privilege of privacy, so bad a fate as it sounds.
Never, indeed, has it been possible for a poet to remain unknown with
so little discredit and dishonour as at the present time. The prima
donna reputation acquired by Mr. Humbert Wolfe with work of the most
crudely histrionic and imitative brilliance (his original comma-effects
in _Kensington Gardens_ began it) should not only comfort the
obscure poet but drive him further into his obscurity.
CHAPTER IX
THE HUMOROUS ELEMENT IN MODERNIST POETRY
THE motto to Mr. Hemingway’s modernist novel _The Sun Also Rises_
is: ‘“You are all a lost generation”--Gertrude Stein, in conversation.’
The title (“The sun also ariseth”) is taken from Ecclesiastes, from the
passage in which occurs the better-known text: “Vanity of vanities,
saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” This is the
conclusion of the greater number of the modernist poets, though not a
counsel of altogether unrelieved gloom. Miss Sitwell’s chief message,
if she may be said to have one, is the endless, minute triviality of
life. Mr. Eliot’s _Waste Land_ is prefixed by a Latin motto which
relates how the Cumaean Sibyl, when asked by the acolytes what her
wishes were, replied (exhausted by her prophetic visions) “I wish to
die”. But in general, although the total effect of modernist poetry
on the reader may be depressing because it does not shine with those
convictions and grandeurs which have made poetry in the past a beacon
of seldom-failing optimism, the modernist poet himself is gay--if
drearily gay--under the triviality of life or the philosophy of gloom
to which he may be committed. The vanity of the world seen without
other-worldly compensation does, in fact, demand a wilful cheerfulness
in the poet. And it is this gloomy cheerfulness, if anything, which
produces an effect of gloom on the reader; and perhaps rightly, if
the reader’s temperament is not thus complicated. The temper of this
generation, however, is not to be confused with the temper of two other
previous lost generations, the generation of Byron and the generation
of the ’nineties. The first was gloomy because gloom gave a tone of
romantic defeat to fanciful ideals that could not be seriously lived up
to; the next was gloomy because gloom gave a tone of romantic defeat
to a fanciful want of ideals. The poet of the ’nineties could either
get over his gloominess by becoming successful, or by becoming a
blindly devout Catholic; or he could blow out his brains. The present
lost generation does not feel its lack of ideals as sinfulness, but
rather as sophistication. It does not love itself, but it does not hate
itself. It does not think much of life, but neither does it think
much of death. It is a cynically common-sense generation which would
not, for example, consider dying for the freedom of a small enslaved
nation or for literary fame, for that matter. The gloom, then, that it
seems to cast does not come from self-pity or emotional prostration;
but even from its painful wittiness, as extreme common-sense is always
witty. The intellectuality of the humour of this generation may indeed
be responsible for the impression of gloom it gives--its passion to
show that common-sense is not common, that it is, in fact, not of the
substance of happy platitudes but of hard wit.
Because it is a common-sense generation, it must claim experience,
it must have tried everything. Because it emphasises the wit in
common-sense rather than the common-sense in wit, and because wit is
cynical, it is a cynical generation; yet not a sentimental generation,
because of its common-sense; nor a pessimistic generation, because
pessimism is sentimental. It has tried everything and like Ecclesiastes
found it lacking. But it has reached a degree of sophistication which
is a stage beyond that of Thomas Hardy or Anatole France. It is not
interested in denouncing. It cannot be bothered any more about the
failure of Heaven to answer prayers, or the hypocrisy of the ‘unco
guid’, or the inconstancy of lovers and fortune. It declares, more
definitely, a drastic alteration in traditional values; but without
the violence characteristic of minds that have reached this stage by
more emotional paths. It is a generation opposed to stress; and to
go on living is always easier than to die. Above all things, it is
interested in self-preservation. It is therefore an intensely serious
generation in its way, whose wilful cheerfulness is often mistaken for
drunken frivolousness: a generation that the War came upon at its most
impressionable stage and taught the necessity for a self-protective
scepticism of the stability of all human relationships, particularly of
all national and religious institutions, of all existing moral codes,
of all sentimental formulas for future harmony. From the War it also
learned a scale of emotional excitement and depression with which no
subsequent variations can compete; yet the scale was too nervously
destructive to be wished for again. The disillusion of the War has been
completed by the Peace, by the continuation of the old regime patched
up with political Fascism, by the same atmosphere of suspense that
prevailed from 1911 to the outbreak of nationalistic war and now again
gathering around further nationalistic and civil wars.
The other set of experiences beside the War that have most
impressed this generation might be called knowledge-experiences.
It has witnessed, as well as a variegation, a fresh synthesis of
intellectual interests. It must not only revise traditional values;
it must appreciate new ones. That is, as a generation writing in the
limelight of modernism it has an over-developed historical sense and
professional self-consciousness. It is mentally uncomfortable--shrewd,
nervous, suspicious of itself. It rejects philosophy and religion in
the old drivelling romantic sense, but would welcome an intellectual
system--a permanently accessible mental cock-tail--that would be a
stiff, sane, steadying combination of both. It cares so much that in
all matters where the plain reader is accustomed to meet with earnest
conviction of one kind or another in the poet, it is hysterically,
gruesomely ‘I-don’t-care-ish’. It is like a person between life and
death: everything that would ordinarily seem serious to him now seems
a tragic joke. This nervousness, this superior sort of stage-fright,
is aggravated by the fact that in the new synthesis of values--even
in the system that he is attempting to realize for himself--the
historically-minded modernist poet is uncertain whether there is
any excuse for the existence of poets at all. He finds himself in a
defensive position; and in sympathy with his position; but also with
the system that has put him in this position. So he brazens out the
dilemma by making cruel jokes at his own expense--jokes which he
expects no one to see or not to be laughed at if seen.
The modernist poet, then, as a type (and a type can, of course,
contradict itself in its individuals) may be said to possess a peculiar
and a recognizable intellectual slant; or, if we feel ‘intellectual’ to
imply too bland a sort of seriousness, we may say that the modernist
has such and such a technique of opinion in his poetry. He does not
commit himself whole-heartedly to any obvious conviction. He does not,
on the other hand, waste himself in obvious attack. When any choice of
faith, action or habit is held to belong to the lower, less developed
processes of reasoning, the making of a choice is a vulgarism. It is a
point of intellectual pride with him to refrain from making utilitarian
choices: his choices are in the more serious realm of speculation. His
aversion to indulging in feelings merely because they are temporarily
pleasant to him or to others, or because they are the feelings expected
of him as a poet, or because they best show off his talents, or because
they are easy and obvious feelings to have--this emotional abstinence
amounts to a severe asceticism, as one modernist poet has himself put
it. But asceticism is an easily parodied position and the modernist
poet is aware of this. He is also aware, because he is a hard-headed,
common-sense creature, that asceticism is in practice impossible. So he
has common-sense even about his common-sense, which has led him to this
asceticism: he is able to do what no generation of poets before him has
been able to do--to make fun of himself when he is at his most serious.
The poet’s self-mockery is that feature of modernist poetry most likely
to puzzle the reader or the critic who has not properly appraised the
poet’s intellectual slant. A poem which is a joke at the poet’s expense
can obviously not be sympathized with as it should be unless the reader
sees it as in some respects a joke against himself too. Obviously he
cannot do this unless he is at least capable of discovering in the poem
clues to the poet’s wit and its direction: the reader himself must have
wit. The probable failure of wit in the reader, whether plain reader or
critic, removes from the poet that measure of _address_ which an
audience imposes. Relieved of the obligations of address the modernist
poem frequently leaps from formal clownishness to unrestrained
burlesque. The closing lines of a poem, _Winter Remembered_, by
John Crowe Ransom illustrates that formal clownishness which is the
poet’s rôle when he intentionally keeps himself within reach of his
audience’s sentiment:
Dear Love, these fingers that had known your touch,
And tied our separate forces first together,
Were ten poor idiot fingers not worth much,
Ten frozen parsnips hanging in the weather.
Mr. Ransom, therefore, though a modernist in his disrespect to himself,
leans rather toward the sentimental tradition of irony. He insists upon
the wit of his reader; he makes an appeal which it is impossible that
the reader shall overlook: if the reader be slow in discovering the
clues to the poet’s clownishness, the poet forces his clownishness in
a way that the reader cannot mistake. It is as if a performing clown
had made a deep but delicate joke against himself which the audience
had missed. Bound to have his audience appreciate his mood, the clown
slaps himself very hard and makes a long face. The audience now sees
the joke and laughs. But the clown was obliged to brutalize his joke in
order to soften his audience to him. It is a question whether irony, as
a means of self-mockery, does not fail, in overstepping the disrespect
which the poet wishes to do himself. For it adds a pathetic element, a
tearfulness, which rarely is entirely sincere.
In the main, however, the modernist clown, feeling a want in his
audience, turns his back on it and performs his ritual of antics
without benefit of applause. As he is not out to make anyone laugh
and cry in the same breath, and as his audience is not likely to
respond unless he exerts himself to do this, he relieves himself of the
burden of an audience. It is for this reason that we find in modernist
poetry so many examples of _pure_ burlesque, not in the trapeze
tradition, but in the tearless, heartless tradition of the early
Italian comedy. Miss Sitwell, as much as any modernist poet, belongs to
this tradition:
The wind’s bastinado
Whipt on the calico
Skin of the Macaroon
And the black Picaroon
Beneath the galloon
Of the midnight sky.
Came the great Soldan
In his sedan
Floating his fan,--
Saw what the sly
Shadow’s cocoon
In the barracoon
Held. Out they fly.
“This melon,
Sir Mammon,
Comes out of Babylon:
Buy for a patacoon--
Sir, you must buy!”
So far, so good. The poem is a fantasia, a sort of a mime-show, and the
antic figures are expressed by obsolete romance words like Macaroon
(a clown) Picaroon (a rogue) galloon (rich embroidery) barracoon
(convict-prison) patacoon (Spanish dollar). The clown and rogue come
out from the shadow of the prison dressed in their white calico
pierrot costumes (see the cover of Sacheverell Sitwell’s _Thirteenth
Caesar_) and offer a fruit to the great Soldan: as two old-style
poets might offer their works to the great Public.
Said il Magnifico
Pulling a fico,--
With a stoccado
And a gambado
Making a wry
Face: “This corraceous
Round orchidaceous
Laceous porraceous
Fruit is a lie!
It is my friend King Pharaoh’s head
That nodding blew out of the Pyramid....”
In effect, the Soldan, snapping his fingers (pulling a fico) with a
stoccado (a lunge as in fencing) and a gambado (gambol) said--but by
this time Miss Sitwell, who has been going very fast, has left her
audience far behind: they have either deserted her, or are a dozen
lines behind fumbling in the dictionary. So at this point she whips up
her horse and goes faster than she knows herself. Even the dictionary
sense, at this speed, falls to pieces and the words themselves turn
into clowns. It no longer matters that ‘orchidaceous’ means ‘belonging
to the orchid family’ or that ‘porraceous’ means ‘belonging to the
leek family’ or that (unless Miss Sitwell has a bigger dictionary
than ours) ‘laceous’ and ‘corraceous’ are mere nonsense-words. For
by this time nothing matters and nothing makes sense, not even what
the great Soldan says. Indeed the boisterous collapse is so sudden
and so complete that ‘laceous’ and ‘corraceous’ may be deliberate
misspellings to indicate the state of merry disintegration that the
poem has reached. The principal observation to be made about this
performance is, perhaps, that it has two separate aspects, a theatrical
aspect and a poetic aspect. The first is the poem as a visible
gesture which either is or is not a signal to the reader’s wit. If
it is, the reader may perceive the poetic aspect according to his
capacity or leisure. The theatrical aspect at any rate remains and,
if the eye is quick, includes the poetic aspect. For it is possible
that a sensitive audience which did not catch all her words, so to
speak, might by the excellence of Miss Sitwell’s pantomime follow
with perfect understanding her light-hearted gallop to despair and
self-stultification. If it could not, then be assured Miss Sitwell
would _not_ slap herself in the face.
Limitations in the sense of humour of the critic-reader have thus the
effect of making the modernist poem more and more difficult. For,
the poet tells himself, if the reading public is bound anyhow to be a
limited one, the poem may as well take advantage of its isolation by
using references and associations which are as far out of the ordinary
critic’s reach as the modernist sense of humour. When, for example,
Edith and Sacheverell Sitwell both introduce a Captain Fracasse into
their poems as a symbol of the comic opera sword-and-cape hero, they
are going too far for the average English reader and critic who is
perhaps entirely unaware of Gautier’s romance of that name or of
Catulle Mendes’ comic-opera drawn from it, but would immediately
recognize a character corresponding to Fracasse in English literature.
Fracasse is used because French comic opera heroes have an eccentric
quality not to be matched quite accurately in the English Classics; but
he would undoubtedly not have been used if a freer commerce in humour
existed between the reader and the poet. Again, when Miss Sitwell
writes of:
winding
Roads whose dust seems gilded binding
Made for “Paul et Virginie”--
(so flimsy-tough those roads are), see
The panniered donkey pass....
the reference is to a pastoral by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, an
old-fashioned French nursery-classic. It is a sentimental record of
true love in the picturesquely savage Isle of Mauritius, a mixed
flimsiness and toughness of story with which we may imagine the format
of Miss Sitwell’s school-room copy to have been analogous--heavy gilt
binding and the usual flimsy French paper. This is a little more than a
family joke, but certainly not a popular one.
A poem by Mr. Eliot may be quoted in full as an example of how limited
the humorous appeal of modernist verse may become. The extreme
particularity of some of the references may be called the teasing
element of modernist wit. Here is our poor understanding of the poem.
We do not pretend to be wise to all the jokes in Mr. Eliot’s poem;
undoubtedly the pertinaceous and joke-shrewd reader will be able to
carry the scent further; and of course Mr. Eliot himself could, if
pressed, make everything clear:
BURBANK WITH A BAEDEKER:
BLEISTEIN WITH A CIGAR.
Tra-la-la-la-la-la-laire--nil nisi divinum stabile est; caetera
fumus--the gondola stopped, the old palace was there, how charming
its grey and pink--goats and monkeys with such hair too!--so the
countess passed on until she came through the little park, where Niobe
presented her with a casket, and so departed.
Burbank crossed a little bridge
Descending at a small hotel;
Princess Volupine arrived,
They were together, and he fell.
Defunctive music under sea
Passed seaward with the passing bell
Slowly: the God Hercules
Had left him, that had loved him well
The horses, under the axle-tree
Beat up the dawn from Istria
With even feet. Her shuttered barge
Burned on the water all the day.
This is evidently modern Venice visited by two tourists, one an
American, who may or may not be called Burbank on account of Burbank
the botanist, the other a caricature-Jew. The Latin quotation means:
“Nothing is lasting unless it is divine: the rest is smoke.” The rest
of the introduction, with the exception of ‘with such hair too’ out of
Browning, may be by Ruskin or by some obscure diarist or by Mr. Eliot
himself: we cannot be bothered to discover whom. The best that we can
do for it is to apply it to the poem. The old palace is one of the many
show-places on the Grand Canal: the one possibly where Lord Byron’s
intrigue with the Countess Guiccoli took place. The goats and monkeys
may be part of the zoo that Lord Byron kept there and later conveyed
to Pisa; but also may symbolise lechery. Not only are monkeys permanent
features, like gargoyles, of Venetian palaces; but monkeys play a
symbolic part in the _Merchant of Venice_, and the _Merchant
of Venice_ is a suppressed _motif_, shaping the poem from
behind the scenes, so to speak. Jessica, it will be remembered, turned
her back on Jewry, took up with Christians and immediately bought a
monkey. The little parks are features of these Venetian palaces. Niobe
is the Greek emblem of sorrow; her children were slain as a punishment
for her pride in them. The casket is a memorial of Niobe’s sympathy
with Venice, whose pride has also been brought low. Princess Volupine
evidently represents the degenerate aristocratic romanticism of
Venice: she has an intrigue with Burbank who stands for the element of
sentiment in modern civilization--a sort of symbolical ‘decent chap’.
‘Defunctive music’ is from Shakespeare’s _Phoenix and Turtle_.
The last line of the first stanza, like the last two of the second
and the first two of the third, is possibly also a quotation, but
here again we leave pedigrees to more reference-proud critics than
ourselves. Burbank’s power leaves him. (The God Hercules is the Latin
god of strength and also the guardian of money.) The third stanza marks
an increase from the second in the mock-grandeur of the writing:
at this point it seems to fall in love with itself and threatens to
become serious. This in turn demands the sudden bathetic drop of the
fourth stanza. The manner of the third stanza accounts for the especial
artificiality of the symbols used: their grandiosity and the obscurity
of their source throw a cloud over their precise significance. The
horses under the axle-tree may be the horses of the sun under the
axle-tree of heaven; but they may also suggest the little heraldic
horses fixed at the side of every Venetian gondola, which may be said
to be under the axle-tree of the gondola, _i.e._ the oar. So this
may be a conceit that amounts to calling the sun a sky-gondola rather
than a chariot. Or it may not. Istria lies East from Venice on the road
to Vienna. Princess Volupine’s shuttered barge burns significantly on
the water all day, a sign that she is now closeted with someone else.
There is an echo here from _Antony and Cleopatra_:
‘The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water...!’
At this point the other half of the cast enters the poem: Bleistein
the Jew. Burbank walks through Venice with a Baedeker, that is, with
a melancholy respect for the past. Bleistein, on the contrary,
walks through Venice with a cigar, a symbol of vulgar and ignorant
self-enjoyment. The name Bleistein itself is a caricature of the common
Goldstein or ‘Goldstone’: it means ‘Leadstone’.
But this or such was Bleistein’s way:
A saggy bending of the knees
And elbows, with the palms turned out,
Chicago Semite Viennese.
A lustreless protrusive eye
Stares from the protozoic slime
At a perspective of Canaletto.
The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once.
The rats are underneath the piles.
The jew is underneath the lot.
Money in furs. The boatman smiles,
Burbank sees the strength and wealth of Venice departed, the remnants
of her glory enjoyed by an upstart Chicago Jew who probably started
life as a tailor’s apprentice in Galicia (whose origin is Austria,
whither Hercules first went from Venice in 1814). Canaletto was a
painter of the eighteenth century whose aristocratic pictures of Venice
are a long way from Bleistein’s kind. The smoky candle end recalls the
Latin motto: ‘the rest is smoke’. Burbank pictures sorrowfully the
Rialto of other days. The rats are underneath the piles now, and the
Jew (the eternal Shylock) is the rat of rats. The jew (Jew is written
with a small initial letter like rat) is apparently a rat because he
has made money and because for some reason Jewish wealth, as opposed to
Gentile wealth, has a mystical connection with the decline of Venice.
This may not be Burbank’s private opinion or even Mr. Eliot’s. It at
any rate expresses for Mr. Burbank and Mr. Eliot the way Venice at
present feels or should feel about the modern Jew strutting through its
streets. ‘Money in furs’ refers not only to the fact that the fur trade
is largely in Jewish hands and that this is how Bleistein probably
made his money, but also to some proverbial witticism, perhaps, about
the ability of a Jew to make money even out of rats’ skins, out of
the instruments of decay, that is. The smiling boatman, who has for
centuries seen everything, stands as an ironic fate between Bleistein
and Princess Volupine.
Princess Volupine extends
A meagre, blue-nailed, pthisic hand
To climb the waterstair. Lights, lights,
She entertains Sir Ferdinand
Klein. Who clipped the lion’s wings
And flea’d his rump and pared his claws?
Thought Burbank, meditating on
Time’s ruins, and the seven laws.
Venice in the person of Princess Volupine (is this another French
comic-opera character; or a coined word compounded of the Latin for
‘pleasure,’ _Voluptas_, and the name of a play of Ben Jonson’s
_Volpone, the Fox_; or a character from one of the obscurer
dramatists of the _Mermaid Series_? We confess we do not care) has
now descended so low that, no longer content with Byronic intrigues
with civilization, she actually admits the Jew (in the person of Sir
Ferdinand Klein, an English financier) to her embraces. Sir Ferdinand’s
name is an epitome of contempt and pathetic comedy: the Jew, having
made money, has likewise conquered and corrupted English society;
his noble Christian name is stolen from the very country which most
persecuted him (now also in decay); his family name means ‘little’ and
is, appropriately enough, from the German (there is no sentimental
condolence with the Germans because, presumably, they do not suffer
from this peculiarly Mediterranean type of decay). So, in the person
of Sir Ferdinand Klein, Bleistein succeeds where Burbank fails; the
implication being that the Jew is not an individual but an eternal
symbol, each Jew always being the entire race. “Lights, lights!” is
a Shakespearianism further evoking the _Merchant of Venice_
atmosphere. The lion is the winged lion of St. Mark, the patron saint
of Venice; but also, in a secondary sense, the British lion, whose
wings have been clipped by the Jew. What the seven laws are in the
Venetian context will probably be found in Baedeker or the Classical
Dictionary or the _Merchant of Venice_ (where rats, the Rialto and
pet monkeys also occur).
This is not, of course, popular writing. It is aristocratic writing,
and its jokes are exclusive; but only exclusive if the reader has no
capacity or interest for sharing in them: the Baedeker is common to
all men, so are the Classical Dictionary and La Rousse. The jokes are
against modern civilization, against money, against classicism, against
romanticism, against Mr. Eliot himself as a tourist in Venice with a
Baedeker. One of the privileges of the comedian is to have prejudices
without being held morally accountable for them; and the modernist poet
is inclined to take full advantage of this privilege, to have caprices
without being obliged to render a dull, rationalistic account of them.
The anti-Jewish prejudice, for instance, occurs frequently in modernist
poetry, and the anti-American prejudice also. It is part of the comedy
that a Jew or an American may equally have these prejudices.
Although written in a mood of intellectual severity, modernist poetry
retains the clown’s privilege of having irrational prejudices in favour
of a few things as well as against a few things. It assumes, indeed,
the humorous championship of things that the last centuries have either
hated, neglected or mishandled. Toward poetical items that have been
worn out by spiritual elevation, such as motherhood, childhood, nature,
national pride, the soul, fame, freedom and perfection, it maintains
a policy of disinterested neutrality; not because of a prejudice
against motherhood, nature, etc., but because of a feeling that they
have had their day and that it is now the turn of other things like
obscenity, lodging-house life, pedantry, vulgarity, frivolousness,
failure, drunkenness, and so on, to be put into the scales. This is out
of a desire not for sensationalism but for emotional equilibrium. The
generation to which the modernist poet belongs is, as we have said, an
exceedingly common-sense, ‘sensible’ generation, to which most things
are equally poetic because equally commonplace.
The only way that traditional poetry could treat drink, for example,
was either with sentimental gaiety, as in Shakespeare’s:
Let the canakin clink,
And let the canakin clink!
A soldier’s a man
And life’s but a span,
So let the canakin clink!
or with irony, as in Gay’s song from _The Mohocks_:
Come fill up the glass!
Round, round, let it pass,
Till our reason be lost in our wine:
Leave conscience’s rules
To women and fools,
_This_ only can make us divine.
or with loathing for its fatal fascination as in Lefanu’s _Drunkard’s
address to a Bottle of Whiskey_:
Oh terrible darling,
How have you sought me,
Enchanted, and caught me,
See, now, where you’ve brought me
To sleep by the road-side, and dress out in rags.
Drunkenness, as a poetical subject, was either comic or disgusting.
Comic, as in George Colman’s _Toby Tosspot_: when the drunken man
on his way home at midnight saw a notice on a street-door “Please Ring
the Bell”, and did so vigorously out of mere friendliness. Disgusting,
as in Mr. Masefield’s _Everlasting Mercy_:
“Look on him, there”, she says, “look on him
And smell the stinking gin upon him,
The lowest sot, the drunk’nest liar,
The dirtiest dog in all the shire.”
The modernist poet, however, does not have, properly speaking,
‘poetical’ subjects, since most subjects are to him commonplaces. So
that when the fact of drunkenness gets into poetry, the poem does
not explain how the poet feels about drunkenness but, in a callous,
precise way, what drunkenness is. If, therefore, the poem is a ‘comic’
poem, it is not so because the poet thinks drunkenness a comic subject
but because it happens, as a shrewd mental condition, to share in his
wit. So Mr. Cummings:
death is more than
certain a hundred these
sounds crowds odours it
is in a hurry
beyond that any this
taxi smile or angle we do
not sell and buy
things so necessary as
is death and unlike shirts
neckties trousers
we cannot wear it out
no sir which is why
granted who discovered
America ether the movies
may claim general importance
to me to you nothing is
what particularly
matters hence in a
little sunlight and less
moonlight ourselves against the worms
hate laugh shimmy
The wit of drunkenness can easily be deciphered from this taxi-and-gin
shorthand. Drunkenness is a mental dare-devilry; one of the few
conditions, indeed, in which it is not disgraceful to be sentimental.
The last thing drunkenness takes notice of is drink; and it is not
sufficiently understood that a person in drunkenness is not drunk, but
only very serious and therefore very hilarious or very gloomy. Mr.
Cummings’ most serious poems, for example, are drunken poems; except
his love poems--but these, perhaps, may also be classified as drunken
poems. Therefore Mr. Cummings does not here say: “Death is more than
certain, fellow drunkards. Out of every hundred people born a hundred
die”, and proceed, as in _Down Among the Dead Men_:
Then come, let us drink it while we have breath,
For there’s no drinking after death!
He clips his grammar, increases his speed and goes on with the
argument, and does not stop until he has reached the conclusion that
all there is left to do under the circumstances is to ‘hate, laugh,
shimmy’--and speculate. For in drunkenness, it appears, one’s mind is
not less but more clear than usual. It holds more, it thinks faster,
it sees and understands everything; it is even like the taxi which,
we gather, is assisting the poet in his poetic argument. So death
triumphs, it is not left behind by the taxi (no sir!) together with
the shops, the crowds and our rake’s fast thoughts. Nothing matters,
therefore, (and here our rake turns, perhaps, to the other occupant of
the taxi) except a little bragging sunshine to show the worms we don’t
care and to hate, laugh, shimmy. And so Death does not triumph. Thus
reads an old comic subject in nineteen twenty-six.
The haughty intellectual slant of the modernist poet involves him in a
bright game of spite against the middle-classes, which are responsible
for the front of solemn good-breeding and politeness that poetry
acquired in the last century. He combines upper-class impeccability and
lower-class rough-neckedness into a disdainful modernist recklessness
on the road. The stalest joke of comic song (but not of poetry) is the
mother-in-law. Miss Sitwell’s _Fantasia for Mouth Organ_ dashingly
takes the mother-in-law joke and sends it round the world to India, the
North Pole and South Pole, the land of the red-skins, the land of the
humming birds and the equatorial isles where the savages sank upon one
knee--
For when they saw
My mother-in law
They decided not to tackle
Me!
She is tough as the armorian
Leather that the saurian
Sun spreads over the
Sea--
So she saved my life
Did the mother of my wife
Who is more than a mother to
Me!
The humorous element in poetry, it is seen, has undergone a complete
reversal and become part of the mechanism of fine writing; Miss
Sitwell’s mother-in-law poem, for instance, is not offered as a comic
poem. Even what appears to be an obvious comic satire of Victorianism
in many of her poems is, in reality, a spiteful championship of a
former comic subject--Victorianism as a bourgeois comic subject was
long ago worn out. The humorous element here lies in the spice which
a much abused institution acquires when restored by impudent artifice
to connoisseur sentiment. A sophisticated partiality for Victorianism,
is at any rate, one of the disingenuously irrational prejudices in
which the three Sitwells indulge themselves. The Queen becomes a rather
robustious and slangy old lady telling Lady Venus just where to get off.
“For the minx”,
Said she,
“And the drinks,
You can see,
Are hot as any hottentot and not the goods for me!”
Victorian fashions evoke literary enthusiasm:
Rose Castles
Those bustles
Beneath parasols seen!
Fat blondine pearls
Rondine curls
Seem.
Even Victorian rococo architecture and interior decoration become
semi-humorously aetherialized: Balmoral’s towers, its pitch-pine floors
and special tartan, the Crystal Palace, the Albert Memorial and the
horse-hair settees of Buckingham Palace.
On the other hand this serious poem of Miss Marianne Moore’s:
Openly, yes
with the naturalness
of the hippopotamus or the alligator
when it climbs out on the bank to experience the
Sun, I do these
things which I do, which please
no one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am sub-
merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object
in view was a
renaissance; shall I say
the contrary? the sediment of the river which
encrusts my joints, makes me very gray but I am used....
or the many serious pieces of Mr. Cummings written in comic vernacular,
bring the full circle round to the professionally comic vein of
traditional poetry. A poem by J. W. Morris, a writer of the American
’sixties, should be brought face to face with Miss Moore’s poem to mark
the reversal that serious and comic elements have undergone in poetry.
It is called ‘Collusion between a Alegaiter and a Water-Snaik.’ The
scene is ‘Guatimaly’. It should be read as a parody of ‘unpoetical’
poetry, even perhaps as a prophetic parody. The following lines from it
in fact might have been written by Mr. Cummings were he a traditional
poet of the ’sixties, satirizing Miss Moore, a modernist poet of the
nineteen-twenties:
Evidently a good chance for a water snaik
Of the large specie, which soon appeared
Into the horison, near the bank where repos’d
Calmly in slepe the Alegaiter before spoken of
About 60 feet was his length (not the ’gaiter)
And he was aperiently a well-proportioned snaik.
When he was all ashore he glared upon
The island with approval but was soon
“Astonished with the view and lost to wonder”
(from Watts)
(For jest then he began to see the Alegaiter)
Being a natural enemy of his’n he worked hisself
Into a fury, also a ni position.
Before the Alegaiter well could ope
His eye (in other words perceive his danger)
The Snaik had enveloped his body just 19
Times with “foalds voluminous and vast”
(from Milton)
... But soon by grate force the tail was bit complete-
Ly off....
The mental agility required of the poet who wishes to reconcile
poetry to modernism and modernism to poetry gives him an exaggerated
nimbleness that one modernist poet may have had in mind when speaking
of the ‘athleticism’ of this generation. Much of his superfluous
energy is consumed in an ostentatious display--sometimes childish but
in general harmless--of the Protean powers of poetry. The badge of
the modernist poet might well be the one that the Stanley family gave
to the Isle of Man--three legs conjoined at the middle and the motto
“Wherever you throw it, it will stand”. For, though by his technical
flexibility he may seem to be continually standing on his head, by
his common-sense he inclines to be all legs; and however extreme the
comedy--however wilful his caprices, however grotesque the contrasts
between innocence and obscenity or brutality and preciousness--it is
a point of intellectual vanity in him to laugh last, to be found on
his feet when the performance is over. He completes and in a sense
contradicts his clownishness by revealing that even clownishness
is a joke: that it is a joke to be writing poetry, a joke to be
writing modernist poetry. By this token he belongs to the most
serious generation of poets that has ever written; with the final
self-protective corollary, of course, that it is also a joke to be
serious.
Sometimes, however, the modernist poet in his grotesque pantomime is
very nearly tempted, out of virtuosity, to leave himself standing
on his head. The following is a passage from _Causerie_, a
poem by Mr. Allen Tate. It is a rambling midnight pillow-cogitation
on the vulgarization and mechanization of the language of Homer,
Catullus, Shakespeare and Rousseau. The poem is otherwise historically
interesting as a psychological synthesis of the manners of his
contemporaries, among them T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, John Crowe
Ransom, Marianne Moore, and at least one other poet:
Hermes decorates
A cornice on the Third National Bank. Vocabulary
Becomes confusion, decoration a blight; the Parthenon
In Tennessee stucco, art for the sake of death. Now
(the bedpost receding in stillness) you brush your teeth
“Hitting on all thirty-two”; scholarship pares
The nails of Catullus, sniffs his sheets, restores
His “passionate underwear”; morality disciplines the other
Person; snakes speak the idiom of Rousseau; Prospero
Serves Humanity in steam-heated universities, three
Thousand dollars a year;--for simplicity is obscene.
Sunlight topples indignant from the hill.
In every railway station everywhere, every lover
Waits for his train. He cannot hear. The smoke
Thickens. Ticket in hand he pumps his body
Toward lower six, for one more terse ineffable trip,
His very eyeballs fixed in disarticulation. The berth
Is clean; no elephants, vultures, mice, or spiders
Distract him from nonentity; for his metaphors are dead.
_Notescatque magis mortuus atque magis,_
_Nec tenuem texens sublimis aranea telam...._
The motto to the poem is from an American newspaper:
... party on the stage of the Earl Carrol Theatre on February 23.
At this party Joyce Hawley, a chorus-girl, bathed in the nude in a
bathtub filled with alleged wine.
The comic technique is devoted to a contrast between Imperial America
and Imperial Rome in general conversational style. The mind, in being
democratized, runs the theme, has grown large, complicated, vulgar and
dead. The poet’s clownishness consists in swift and showy acrobatic
turns from present-day vulgar sophistication to the comparative
simplicity of classical manners and from classical civilization on the
other hand to twentieth-century vocabularistic vulgarity. A snobbish
prejudice in favour of classical phrasing is the special privilege in
which this poet indulges himself. The Latin verse from Catullus reads:
“And may he when dead grow more and more famous, nor may the spider
spinning its fine thread from above ... (make a web upon the forgotten
name of Allius).” The quotation, somewhat forced in its application we
must confess, is from an elegy on the death of Allius, a friend who has
helped Catullus in his intrigues by providing him and his Lesbia with
a rendezvous at the house of a mistress of his own: for which Catullus
thanks him in all frankness and simplicity. The vultures occur in this
poem of Catullus’: and “hitting on all thirty-two”--an advertisement
for a tooth-paste--is probably an ironic comment in the style of
Catullus’ ironic comment on the fine teeth of his friend Egnatius.
Prospero is the symbol of learning, which did not become, until
advanced times, humanitarian and democratic, commercialized and vulgar.
The element of humour in this poem is not entirely sincere because
the prejudice is somewhat too dogmatic, the poet failing to identify
himself with both subjects of the contrast. He was not willing, that
is, to be the complete clown and has thus very nearly left himself on
his head.
The bourgeois character of common convictions and of human progress
in the popular sense does indeed inspire in the modernist generation
a temperamental antagonism to old-fashioned democratic civilization.
In pseudo-modernist types this antagonism is inclined to manifest
itself in a social, political or literary gospel of pessimism. Genuine
professional modernism inclines rather toward the two extremes of
radicalism and conservatism, or aristocraticness and rough-neckedness;
not so much out of militant opposition to bourgeois liberalism as
out of peripatetic avoidance of a crowded thoroughfare--bourgeois
liberalism, being a position of compromise between all extremes, is
the breeding place of settled, personally secure convictions. At the
extremes instead of convictions there is a border-sense, a well-poised
mental hysteria, a direct exposure to time: there is the far-driven
boundary-line of humour: there is, in both, the callous haughtiness of
indifference to danger, of a more acute technique of self-preservation.
The mind, human nature, poetry, are at their best when they combine
the elements of both roughness and gentleness; and this is not a
politician’s trick or a philosopher’s trick or a sentimentalist’s
trick, but a clown’s trick.
The only flaw in humour of the modernist poet is his failure to include
the bourgeois in his intellectual scale. It is, we might say, the
only turn missing in his clownish repertory. Indeed James Joyce has
suggested that Shakespeare’s greatness lay in his power to play the
bourgeois impersonally, but as a bourgeois, without having a bourgeois
dummy to kick or yet slapping his own face:
And the sense of property, Stephen said. He drew Shylock out of his
own long pocket. The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was
himself a cornjobber and moneylender with ten tods of corn hoarded
in the famine riots.... He sued a fellow-player for the price of a
few bags of malt and exacted his pound of flesh in interest for every
money lent. How else could Aubrey’s ostler and callboy get rich quick?
Death, a common bourgeois conviction, is the only progressive liberal
subject which the modernist poet sometimes treats without prejudice.
One contemporary poet actually writes of it:
This I admit, death is terrible to me,
To no man more so naturally,
And I have disenthralled my natural terror
Of every comfortable philosopher
Or tall dark doctor of Divinity.
Death stands again in his true rank and order.
But even with Death the modernist poet is in the main not quite at his
clownish best because of his awareness of its bourgeois applications:
it is very difficult to deal with Death and, considering its history,
not treat it as a religious conviction--to treat it as a dead-earnest
joke. A similar difficulty exists with Love, the twin bourgeois
conviction to Death. In Love even the most modernist of modernist poets
is bourgeois. He is narrowly idealistic and therefore incapable, except
in rare cases, of making it another dead-earnest joke: The clown in
this feat is afraid of not landing on his legs. The most he trusts
himself to is a few ribald high jumps.
CHAPTER X
CONCLUSION
So far our sympathy with modernist poetry has been contemporary
sympathy. We have been writing as it were from the middle of the
modernist movement in order to justify it if possible against criticism
which was not proper to it, which belonged to the preceding stage in
poetry-making and which should have passed as the stage passed. It is
now possible to reach a position where the modernist movement itself
can be looked at with historical (as opposed to contemporary) sympathy
as a stage in poetry that is to pass in turn, or may have already
passed, leaving behind only such work as did not belong too much to
history. The apparent contradictions that will occur in this chapter
and seem to gainsay the emphatic sympathy of former chapters will be
found to be caused by this superseding of contemporary sympathy by
historical sympathy. As nothing can remain contemporary for very long,
we were obliged to assume this position if our criticism was to stand
before rather than behind its subject.
In discussing the difficulties which exist between contemporary poetry
and the contemporary reader, it is necessary to discuss also the
difficulties which the contemporary poet has had to face if he has
wished to write as a contemporary--to be included in the generation
to which by birth and personal sympathy he historically belongs. As
the poet, if a true poet, is one by nature and not by effort, he must
be seen writing as unconsciously as regards time as his ordinary
reader lives. For one remembers the date only by compulsion; no one
really feels older to-day than he felt yesterday. The relation of a
poet’s poetry to Poetry as a whole and to the time in which it is
written is the problem of criticism; and if this problem becomes part
of the making of a poem, it adds to the unconscious consciousness of
the poet when he is in the act of composition an alien element, a
_conscious_ consciousness which we may call the ‘historical effort’.
In reading poetry in which this alien element appears one must indeed
make the same historical effort if the full intention of the poem is
to be appreciated. Therefore the plain reader is likely to prefer to
modernist poetry of a past period, in which the historical effort,
wherever it has been present, has been absorbed or neutralized by the
automatic passing of the period into history.
The greatest difficulty is obviously to define ‘poetry as a whole’ from
the point of view of a _temporary_ personal consciousness--that
of the poet or reader--attempting to connect itself with a long-term
impersonal consciousness, an evolving professional sense. Yet it
is easier to do this now than formerly, since poetry, which was
once an all-embracing human activity, has been narrowed down by the
specialization of other general activities, such as religion and
the arts and sciences, into a technical branch of culture of the
most limited kind. It has been changed from a ‘humanity’ into an
‘art’; it has attempted to discipline itself with a professionalized
criticism which was not needed in the time of the balladists or in
primitive societies where poetry went hand in hand with magical
religion. Modern civilization seems to demand that the poet should
justify himself not only by writing poems but furthermore by proving
with each poem the contemporary legitimacy of poetry itself--the
professional authority of the term ‘poet’ in fact. And though in a few
rare cases the poet may succeed even now in writing by nature without
historical or professional effort, he is in general too conscious
of the forced professionalization of poetry to be able to avoid
justifying himself and his work professionally, that is, critically, as
a point of honour. Yet if he does admit poetry to be only one of the
specialized, professionalized activities of his period, like music,
painting, radiology, aerostatics, the cinema, modern tennis or morbid
psychology, he must see it as a very small patch on the time-chart,
a mere dot; because society allows less and less space for poetry in
its organisation. The only way that this dot on the time-chart can
provide itself with artificial dignity and space is through historical
depth; if its significance in a particular period is no greater than
the size of a dot on the period’s time-chart, then to make itself an
authoritative expression of this period it must extend this dot into
the past, it must make a historical straight line of it. Poetry becomes
the tradition of poetry.
The tradition of poetry, or rather of the art of poetry, then, is the
formal organization which the modernist poet finds himself serving as
an affiliated member. He must not only have a personal capacity for
poetry; that is merely an apprentice certificate. He must also have
a master’s sense of the historical experience of poetry--of its past
functions and usefulness, its present fitness and possibilities. He
must have a science of the ‘values’ of poetry, a scale of bad and good,
false and true, ephemeral and lasting; a theory of the tradition of
poetry in which successive period-poetries are historically judged
either favourably or unfavourably and in which his own period-poetry
is carefully adjusted to satisfy the values which the tradition is
believed to be continuously evolving. As this tradition is seen as a
logical historical development, these values, in their most recent
statement, are considered, if observed, sufficient to produce the
proper poetic expression of the age. So the poet has no longer to make
adjustment to his social environment, as the hero-celebrating bard of
the _Beowulf_ time or the religious poet of ancient Egypt had,
but critical adjustments to a special tradition of poetic values; and
to his own period only an indirect adjustment through the past, the
past seen as the poetry of the past narrowing down to the poetry of the
present.
The modernist poet therefore has an exaggerated preoccupation
with criticism. He has a professional conscience forced on him
by the encroachments and pressure of new period activities; and
this is understandable. When the prestige of any organization is
curtailed--the army or navy for example--a greater internal discipline,
morality and study of tactics results, a greater sophistication and
up-to-date-ness. In poetry this discipline means the avoidance of all
the wrongly-conceived habits and tactics of the past: poetry becomes
so sophisticated that it seems to know at last how it should be written
and written at the very moment. The more definitely activities like
religion, science, psychology and philosophy, which once existed in
poetry as loose sentiment, are specialized and confined to their proper
departmental technique, the more pure and sharp the technique of poetry
itself seems bound to become. It ceases to be civilized in the sense of
becoming more and more cultured with loose sentiment; everything in it
is particular and strict. It is, indeed, as if poetry were beginning as
at the beginning; using all its civilized sophistications to inaugurate
a carefully calculated, censored primitiveness.
This new primitive stage, however, has been implied rather than
reached in contemporary poetry. There is an increased strictness
and experimenting in the construction of the poem, and an increased
consciousness of what a poem should not be. But, so far, critical
self-consciousness has been only a negative element in the making of
poetry. It might seem that the atmosphere it has created would at
least make it easier for those who are poets by nature to write well,
by removing the temptation to write badly. But on the contrary it
hampers them with the consideration of all the poets who have ever
written or may be writing or may ever write--not only in the English
language but in all languages of the world under every possible social
organization. It invents a communal poetic mind which sits over the
individual poet whenever he writes; it binds him with the necessity of
writing correctly in extension of the tradition, the world-tradition of
poetry; and so makes poetry internally an even narrower period activity
than it is forced to be by outside influences. In consequence the
modernist generation is already over before its time, having counted
itself out and swallowed itself up by its very efficiency--a true ‘lost
generation’. Already, its most ‘correct’ writers, such as T. S. Eliot,
have become classics over the heads of the plain reader, having solved
the problem of taste, or period-fashion, so strictly and accurately
by themselves and having been so critically severe with themselves
beforehand, that their ‘acceptance’ by contemporary or future plain
readers has been made superfluous. Creation and critical judgement
being made one act, a work has no future history with readers; it is
ended when it is ended.
There has been, we see, a short and very concentrated period of
carefully disciplined and self-conscious poetry. It has been followed
by a pause in which no poetry of any certainty is appearing at all,
an embarrassed pause after an arduous and erudite stock-taking. The
next stage is not clear. But it is not impossible that there will
be a resumption of less eccentric, less strained, more critically
unconscious poetry, purified however by this experience of historical
effort. In the period just passing no new era was begun. A climax was
merely reached in criticism by a combination of sophistication and a
desire for a new enlightened primitiveness. Wherever attempts at sheer
newness in poetry were made they merely ended in dead movements. Yet
the new feeling in criticism did achieve something. It is true in the
more extreme cases that by turning into a critical philosophization of
itself, poetry ceased to be poetry: it became poetically introspective
philosophy. But this was perhaps necessary before poetry could be
normal without being vulgar, and deal naturally with truth without
being trite.
The abstract nature of poetry in this time became more important than
the poetic nature of the poet; the poet tried to write something better
than poetry, that is, the poetry of poetry. This laboratory phase,
this complex interrelation of metaphysics and psychology blighted the
creative processes wherever it was the predominant influence in the
actual moments of writing. Compare the highly organized nature of Mr.
Eliot’s criticism in its present stage with the gradual disintegration
of his poetry since the _Waste Land_. The poem, indeed, gained a
certain degree of freedom by the weakening of the personal relationship
between it and its creator, but this freedom was, on the other hand,
compromised by the forced relation of the poem to the historical period
to which it accidentally belonged. The time-element was made the
foundation of composition, and any poem which could not be related to
its period could not be said to have any immediate critical value, and
critical value was the only value by which poetry could become current.
The only virtue in this critical tyranny has been to make the world
in general more conscious of poetry in a specialized sense and more
conversant with its processes and problems.
Briefly, the developments which account for the historical effort which
has characterized the period are these. Poetry in the past had found
it expedient to accept barbaric philosophical or religious ‘ideas’ and
to cast itself within the limits imposed by them. They were barbaric
ideas because they were large but definite; infinite, yet fixed by the
way that they fixed man; crude and unshaded but incontestable--such
as the barbaric idea of God as compared with the civilized idea of
God (who is contestable if only in small points, while in barbaric
God there are no small points). A barbaric view or order depends on
the underlying conception of a crude, undifferentiated, infinite,
all-contemporaneous time, and of a humanity co-existent with this time,
a humanity consolidated as a mass and not composed of individuals. But
when the idea of humanity as a consolidated mass was discredited by
the Renaissance, the idea of gross contemporaneousness--of barbaric
time--also fell to pieces. Gross time was superseded by relative
time--the sense of many times going on at once; as we talk of the
suburbs being five years behind the town, of the country being ten
years behind the suburbs, of the colonies being ten years behind
the country, of the primitive community in Africa being a thousand
years behind the colonies; of an inventor being fifty years ahead of
commercial recognition. Living, in fact, in different communities of
time, or more than this, in different personalities of time, means
the same degree of freedom that living in barbaric time does. The
poet in the first case need make no historical effort because he has
such perfect control over time; he need make none in the second case
because time has such perfect control over him. Intense differentiation
of time is romanticism, strict uniformity and stabilization of time
is classicism. And it would be thought, considering that these
distinctions, however contradictory in appearance, did not affect
the poetry-making faculties in the poet himself, but only the look
of poetry as a whole, that criticism could go on using them without
prejudice; as verbal conveniences, for example, for describing
the general character of all poetry-making during a particular
period--chaotic and individualistic, or orderly and severely
conventionalized, as the case might be.
But when poetry began to lose caste among other cultural activities
by its diversification of professional method and manners, modernist
criticism found it convenient to attack this apparent lack of
professional coherence as romantic, to insist on the traditional
character of Poetry as an _art_, to reintroduce barbaric (or
‘classical’) time by emphasizing the element of contemporaneousness in
composition. When all other activities, particularly those classified
as scientific, were developing carefully relative time-senses,
poetry now attempted to stabilize itself by reverting to an absolute
time-sense. A relative time-sense in poetry was critically condemned
as vulgar, unprofessional, extravagant, because much that was vulgar,
falsely poetic and personally extravagant could in fact smuggle itself
into poetry under the guise of relativity. It seemed to criticism
hopeless and silly to attempt to repair the dignity of poetry by
demanding greater personal integrity in the poet. The only practicable
remedy seemed to be the declaration of an absolute which should bring
about immediate--if artificial--order and uniformity. For this,
however, an intellectual time-effort was necessary in workmanship which
stultified or deformed this workmanship. The absoluteness or barbarism
of the modern poet was an unhappy strained product of sophistications.
It is one thing to observe historically that at such and such a
period an idea of humanity, time and art, each consolidated as a
mass, prevailed, and that a peculiarly fixed kind of perfection, as
in Egyptian art, appeared in this period. But it is another thing to
try to give such an idea of consolidation artificially to poetry: that
it is creating not poetry but historical criticism. Such an attempt
to submerge all separate poetic faculties in a single professional
communism would by its simplicity be naturally pleasing to criticism;
but the more simple in theory, the more complicated in practice. In
a natural classical period the elaborate complexity of the personal
poetic faculty--at any time nearly insoluble--becomes soluble because
the demands made on it for conformity are superficial, formal,
ritualistic. The poetic faculty does not only have to betray its
complexity in an artificially classical period. The poetic faculty
itself is called upon to invent the rituals by which it is to become
formalized; to do the impossible, in other words--to invent simplicity
with complexity. Which explains why there is more eccentric variety
in this modernist classicism than ever appeared in romanticism. The
early nineteenth-century poets wrote so similarly principally because,
in spite of their individualistic propensities and their private
purposes or passions, they were historically one in reacting against
the same sort of classicism, and were never, moreover, able to get
beyond serving this reaction; modernism, in the early nineteenth
century, meant reaction. Modernism in the early twentieth century has
also meant reaction, a reaction against reaction, setting itself the
impossible task of individually but not individualistically creating a
new classicism--a classicism founded on a philosophical theory which
each poet was bound to interpret differently because he was not, so to
speak, classically born.
The habit of philosophy is to observe and from observations to
order conduct; to generalize from particulars and to simplify its
generalities, in search of a code of perfection: and thus to minimize
the reality of variation, digression, error in order to arrive at
a single barbaric whole. Pure philosophy is thus always classical
in spirit. When the relativist idea of personality began to break
down classical social formality, pure philosophy grew more and more
feeble. Philosophy could either devote itself to attacking caprice
(it could fight the battle of classicism against romanticism), or it
could become romantic--that is, it could allow itself to decay. This
in the main is what it did, any other alternatives being generally
too obscure, unhistorical and eccentric to be attractive. The chance,
however, eventually came to philosophy of reviving its old authority
as the science of sciences against the encroachment of modern
differentiation and specialization, in a prospective alliance with
poetry, which originally had first-class and general significance as
the undifferentiated art of arts in a barbaric order. Poetry itself,
dissatisfied with the position to which it had been reduced by the
romantic nineteenth century--a position in which it seemed to be
allowed to exist only by the humour and grace of science--was, of
course, favourably inclined to such an alliance. And so began the new
classicism.
This alliance, in the beginning only a sentimental one, needed to be
legalized by some tame philosopher, some Aristotle of modernism who
would make the new barbarism respectable and provide it with a coherent
argument and a vocabulary. Such a person was found in T. E. Hulme,
who was killed in 1917 before he had developed a well-defined system
of aesthetics; who had, however, left enough fragments to be accepted
as gospel by a generation starved for suitable philosophico-literary
dogma. Hulme was, naturally, a man disappointed with philosophy since
the Renaissance. It was no longer ‘pure’; and, searching for a way to
purify it, he stumbled on the need which art--painting or sculpture or
poetry--had to be philosophically organized and corrected. His concept
of the absolute (the search for the absolute is the chief concern, as
we have seen, of ‘pure’ philosophy) derided any idea of relativity:
it emphasized the general principle of poetic co-ordination; but the
general principle rather than the form in which co-ordination should
take place. It is significant that the few poems Hulme wrote himself
fall under the period classification popular in his time, Imagism. In
his desire to co-ordinate and correctly generalize, Hulme fell into
the familiar philosophical confusion--the confusion of analogy. Art,
for instance, is a philosophical term invented for the convenience
of classification, not a term that poetry would naturally invent for
itself, though painting and sculpture, on the other hand, might. To
the philosopher, however, the most accurate term is the most general
rather than the most particular, and so to Hulme a common co-ordination
of the ‘arts’ of painting, sculpture and poetry seemed possible and
necessary. The fundamental fallacy in such an attempted co-ordination
appears with the difficulty which poetry has to face in entering a new
artificially barbaric era. In painting and sculpture neither colour
nor stone had been intrinsically affected by the romantic works in
which they had been used. To escape the Renaissance, painting and
sculpture merely had to revert to barbaric modes--negroid, Oceanic,
Aztec, Egyptian, Chinese, archaic Greek--creating modern forms as if
in primitive times; forms primitive, obedient to the conventions which
they accepted, therefore final, absolute, ‘abstract’. But poetry could
not seemingly submit itself to an _as if_, because its expressive
medium, language, had been intrinsically affected not only by the works
in which it had been used but also by all the non-poetic uses of which
language is capable. This difference between poetry and more regular
arts points to a variance in poetry and suggests the probable falsity
of all philosophical generalizations on art. The falsity is the falsity
of analogy; yet analogy is the strongest philosophical instrument of
co-ordination. Since poetry as an art is not sufficiently regular,
not sufficiently professional, it is to become so by being made more
sculptural or pictorial, by having grafted on it the values and methods
of more professional arts.
Language, therefore, had to be reorganized, used as if afresh, cleansed
of its experience: to be as ‘pure’ and ‘abstract’ as colour or stone.
Words had to be reduced to their least historical value; the purer they
could be made, the more eternally immediate and present they would be;
they could express the absolute at the same time as they expressed the
age. Or this was at any rate the logical effect of scientific barbarism
if taken literally.
Gertrude Stein is perhaps the only artisan of language who has ever
succeeded in practising scientific barbarism literally. Her words are
primitive in the sense that they are bare, immobile, mathematically
placed, abstract: so primitive indeed that the theorists of the new
barbarism have repudiated her work as a romantic vulgar barbarism,
expressing the personal crudeness of a mechanical age rather than a
refined historical effort to restore a lost absolute to a community
of co-ordinated poets. Mr. Eliot has said of her work that “it is not
improving, it is not amusing, it is not interesting, it is not good for
one’s mind. But its rhythms have a peculiar hypnotic power not met with
before. It has a kinship with the saxophone. If this is the future
then the future is, as it very likely is, of the barbarians. But this
is the future in which we ought not to be interested.” Mr. Eliot was
for the moment speaking for civilization. He was obliged to do this
because it seemed suddenly impossible to reconcile the philosophy of
the new barbarism with the historical state of the poetic mind and with
the professional dignity of poetry which the new barbarism was invented
to restore: a sincere attempt to do so was at once crude and obscure
like the work of Miss Stein. Except for such whole-hog literalness
as hers, professional modernist poetry has lacked the co-ordination
which professional modernist criticism implies: and this contradiction
between criticism and workmanship makes it incoherent. It has been too
busy being civilized, varied, intellectual--too socially and poetically
energetic--to take advantage of the privileged consistency of the new
barbarism.
Criticism has been so busy talking about criticism (criticism has been
so philosophical, that is) that it has had little either relevant or
helpful to say about poetry itself--not poetry as a philosophical
abstraction but as _poems_ and as the poets, who are potential
poems. Though objecting to the romantic disorganization in which there
are ‘beauties’ instead of beauty, it has nevertheless had no absolute
canon of beauty to offer to the classical poetry it has wished to
inspire, but only an undifferentiated satire of beauties and a counsel
to suppress the obvious because the obvious is often romantically,
personally and therefore sentimentally beautiful. It has insisted
that a fixed dogmatic abstract beauty is the only possible system
for poetic perfection and yet has had nothing better to offer than a
few elementary suggestions and clues such as that ‘golden lad’ is a
beautiful classical phrase and ‘golden youth’ a beautiful romantic
phrase (Hulme). “The thing has got so bad now”, wrote Hulme, “that a
poem which is all dry and hard, a properly Classical poem, would not be
considered poetry at all. They cannot see that accurate description is
a legitimate object of verse.”
Hulme was asking a forward-looking twentieth-century generation to
arm itself against romanticism, an early nineteenth-century bogey,
or against the Renaissance bogey itself. He wanted to oppose a
sophisticated levity to the idiot-headed seriousness of romanticism,
a classical fancy to a romantic imagination; but in practice the
opposition was of a heavy, rigid, originally dull seriousness to a
rather ingenuous sometimes successful often droll though perhaps
eventually dull seriousness. “Wonder must cease to be wonder”, Hulme
complained: but in the beginning while there is wonder there is always
the chance of a surprise success in romanticism. In classicism, which
sets out with a very limited, certain intention, there is never the
chance of success in this sense. If romantic freakishness generally
quiets down to triteness and is for this reason dull, classical
freakishness is fixed and eternal from the outset; and thus eternally
dull.
The most serious flaw in poetic modernism has been its attachment
to originality. The modernist poet has not been able to forsake
originality however directly it might contradict the classical idea
of discipline; and the effect of discipline has therefore only been
to make originality more original. As originality increased and as
modernist poetry consequently became more and more romantic, the
contradiction between it and modernist criticism was intensified.
Criticism became more dogmatic and unreal, poetry more eccentric and
chaotic. Classicism and originality could only be reconciled in the
invention of an original type, were this possible, of a form entirely
new, peculiar, particular, uncommon, and yet universal, general,
common; when once invented, as old as the hills. But obviously the
invention of an original type in personal embodiments can get no
further than an earnest caricature of the ordinary, as in Joyce’s
Leopold Blum, or T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and other low types; no further
certainly in mechanical embodiments. Originality becomes an attack on a
degenerated ordinary.
The problem was further complicated by the insistence (as in Hulme)
on the ‘direct communication’ by which originality was to make
itself effective; direct communication referring to an immediate
ideal intelligibility. But since language had been tainted by false
experiences, much of the energy of this originality had to be devoted
to an attack on the ordinary language of communication; and direct
communication, like the original type, could get no further than an
earnest caricature of ordinary language. This is from Mr. Eliot’s most
recent stage:
DUSTY: Do you know London well, Mr. Krumpacker?
KLIPSTEIN: No, we have never been here before.
KRUMPACKER: We hit this town last night for the first time.
KLIPSTEIN: And I certainly hope it won’t be the last time.
DORIS: You like London, Mr. Klipstein?
KRUMPACKER: Do we like London? Do we like London!
Do we like London!! Eh, what Klip?
KLIPSTEIN: Say, Miss--er--uh! London’s swell.
We like London fine.
KRUMPACKER: Perfectly slick.
DUSTY: Why don’t you come and live here then?
But caricature is romantic. Miss Edith Sitwell’s poetry is perhaps the
clearest instance of the romantic caricature of language that critical
classicism is obliged to take under its wing.
Another aspect of the same general flaw is the incompatibility of the
‘things’ which were supposed to be revealed in the direct communication
(‘things’ in which apparently the first principle inheres) with
the talent of the artist to see things ‘as no one else sees them’.
The barbaric absolute, the divine source of things, wherever it
has prevailed naturally, has always been marked by a penetrating
obviousness. The pyramids are penetratingly obvious, so much so that
they nearly make the absolute synonymous with obviousness.
But a belief in the fundamental obviousness or absoluteness of ‘things’
is inconsistent with a belief in an eccentricity in things which
the artist is supposed to reveal: and a belief in the fundamental
obviousness or ordinariness of a mass humanity, adhering personally
to the same absolute to which ‘things’ adhere, is inconsistent with a
belief in the creative originality which is to reveal the eccentricity
latent in obviousness to this mass humanity equipped only to seize
the obvious. The only possible way for creative originality to be
consistent with mass humanity is by some mystical process in which the
artist is chosen as the inspired instrument of mass-ordinariness to
reveal ‘things’ which he sees as no one else sees because everything is
so obvious and everyone so ordinary that one does not ordinarily ‘see’
the obviousness and ordinariness unless one is possessed of creative
originality.
While such a philosophical tangle was forcing modernist poets into
an unwitting romanticism, Gertrude Stein went on--and kept going on
for twenty years--quietly, patiently and successfully practising an
authentic barbarism; quite by herself and without encouragement.
Her only fault, from the practical point of view, was that she took
primitiveness too literally, so literally that she made herself
incomprehensible to the exponents of primitivism--to everyone for that
matter. She exercised perfect discipline over her creative faculties
and she was able to do this because she was completely without
originality. Everybody being unable to understand her thought that this
was because she was too original or was trying hard to be original.
But she was only divinely inspired in ordinariness: her creative
originality, that is, was original only because it was so grossly, so
humanly, all-inclusively ordinary. She used language automatically
to record pure ultimate obviousness. She made it capable of direct
communication not by caricaturing contemporary language--attacking
decadence with decadence--but by purging it completely of its false
experiences. None of the words Miss Stein uses ever had experience.
They are no older than the use she makes of them, and she has been
herself no older than her age conceived barbarically.
Put it there in there where they have it
Put it there in there there and they halve it
Put it there in there there and they have it
Put it there in there there and they halve it
These words have had no history, and the design that Miss Stein
has made of them is literally ‘abstract’ and mathematical because
they are commonplace words without any hidden etymology; they are
mechanical and not eccentric. If they possess originality it is that of
mass-automatism.
Miss Stein in her _Composition as Explanation_ has written:
Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen,
and that makes a composition.
Her admission that there are generations does not contradict her belief
in an unvarying first principle. Time does not vary, only the sense of
time.
Automatically with the acceptance of the time-sense comes the
recognition of the beauty, and once the beauty is accepted the beauty
never fails anyone.
Beauty has no history, according to Miss Stein, nor has time: only the
time-sense has history. When the time-sense acclaims a beauty that
was not at first recognized, the finality of this beauty is at once
established; it is as though it had never been denied. All beauty is
equally final. The reason why the time-sense if realized reveals the
finality or classicalness of beauty, is that it is the feeling of
beginning, of primitiveness and freshness which is each age’s or each
generation’s version of time.
Beginning again and again and again explaining composition and time
is a natural thing. It is understood by this time that everything is
the same except composition and time, composition and the time of the
composition and the time in the composition.
Originality of vision, then, is invented, she holds, not by the artist
but by the collective time-sense. The artist does not see things ‘as
no one else sees them’. He sees those objective ‘things’ by which the
age repeatedly verifies and represents the absolute. He sees concretely
and expressibly what everyone else possessed of the time-sense has
an unexpressed intuition of: the time-sense may not be generally and
particularly universal; but this does not mean that the artist’s
vision, even his originality of vision, is less collective or less
universal.
The composition is the thing seen by everyone living in the living
they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the
time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are
living. It is that that makes living a thing they are doing. Nothing
else is different, of that almost anyone can be certain. The time
when and the time of and the time in that composition is the natural
phenomena of that composition and of that perhaps everyone can be
certain.
All this Gertrude Stein has understood and executed logically because
of the perfect simplicity of her mind. Believing implicitly in an
absolute, she has not been bothered to doubt the bodily presence of
a first principle in her own time. Since she is alive and everybody
around her seems to be alive, of course there is an acting first
principle, there is composition. This first principle provides a
theme for composition because there is time, and everybody, and the
beginning again and again and again, and composition. In her primitive
good-humour she has not found it necessary to trouble about defining
the theme. The theme is to be inferred from the composition. The
composition is clear because the language means nothing but what it
means through her using of it. The composition is final because it is
‘a more and more continuous present including more and more using of
everything and continuing more and more beginning and beginning and
beginning’. She creates this atmosphere of continuousness principally
by her progressive use of the tenses of verbs, by intense and
unflagging repetitiousness and an artificially assumed and regulated
child-mentality: the child’s time-sense is so vivid that an occurrence
is always consecutive to itself, it goes on and on, it has been going
on and on, it will be going on and on (a child does perhaps feel the
passage of time, does to a certain extent feel itself older than it was
yesterday because yesterday was already to-morrow even while it was
yesterday).
This is from Miss Stein’s _Saints in Season_:
Saint--
A Saint
Saint and very well I thank you.
Two in bed.
Two in bed.
Yes two in bed.
They had eaten.
Two in bed.
They had eaten.
Two in bed.
She says weaken.
If she said.
She said two in bed.
She said they had eaten.
She said yes two in bed.
She said weaken.
Do not acknowledge to me that seven are said that a
Saint and seven that it is said that a saint in seven
that there is said to be a saint in seven.
Now as to illuminations.
They are going to illuminate and everyone is to put into
their windows their most beautiful object and everyone
will say and the streets will be crowded everyone
will say look at it.
They do say look at it.
To look at it. They will look at it. They will say
look at it.
Repetition has the effect of breaking down the possible historical
senses still inherent in the words. So has the infantile jingle of
rhyme and assonance. So has the tense-changing of verbs, because
restoring to them their significance as a verbal mathematics of motion.
Miss Stein’s persistence in her own continuousness is astonishing: this
is how she wrote in 1926, and in 1906. She has achieved a continuous
present by always beginning again, for this keeps everything different
and everything the same. It creates duration but makes it absolute by
preventing anything from happening in the duration.
And after that what changes what changes after that, after that what
changes and what changes after that and after that and what changes
and after that and what changes after that.
The composition has a theme because it has no theme. The words are a
self-pursuing, tail-swallowing series and are thus thoroughly abstract.
They achieve what Hulme called but could not properly envisage--not
being acquainted, it seems, with Miss Stein’s work--a ‘perpendicular’,
an escape from the human horizontal plane. They contain no reference;
no meaning, no caricatures, no jokes, no despairs. They are ideally
automatic, creating one another. The only possible explanation of lines
like the following is that one word or combination of words creates the
next.
Anyhow means furls furls with a chance chance with a change change
with as strong strong with as will will with as sign sign with as west
west with as most most with as in in with as by by with as change
change with as reason reason to be lest lest they did when when they
did for for they did there and then. Then does not celebrate the there
and then.
This is repetition and continuousness and beginning again and again and
again.
Nothing that we have said here should be understood as disrespectful to
Gertrude Stein. She has had courage, clarity, sincerity, simplicity.
She has created a human mean in language, a mathematical equation of
ordinariness which leaves one with a tender respect for that changing
and unchanging slowness that is humanity and Gertrude Stein.
Miss Stein’s sterilization of words until they are exhausted of history
and meaning must be distinguished from sophisticated abandonment
of meaning in the midst of a feverish pursuit of meaning, a blasé
renouncement of significance to confusion. The following from a poem by
Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell is an instance of such a renouncement:
Y. “... a thundering motor
drumming its persistence on the giggling air.
Persistence, and I mean the everlasting life....
And in feet the rolling drums should rattle in the square
before a thick curtain that no eye can pierce
And trumpets should sound out from all the square-set towers....
Persistence, I said--I mean the giggling air,
rather I should say I mean the giggling drums
or rolling drums: persistence--and I mean the....”
X. “... persistent air?...”
Y. “No, no: Persistence, and I mean the giggling air;
I meant to talk about the everlasting life,
Until you muddled me and made me stop.”
Miss Stein’s tidy processes must also be distinguished from the
deliberate untidying of language to give it more meaning, more history,
more dramatic excitement, as in James Joyce’s _Ulysses_:
The Quaker librarian, quaking, tiptoed in, quake, his mask, quake,
with haste, quake, quack.
Door closed. Cell. Day.
They list. Three. They.
I you he they.
Come, mess.
This needs only to be accurately read in the rather complicated
context, to be tidied into its context, so to speak, to make obvious
sense. Even the following poem by E. E. Cummings is neither pure nor
abstract, but realistic, wilfully linked to history.
life hurl my
yes, crumbles hand (ful released conarefetti) ev eryflitter,
inga, where
mil (lions of aflickf) litter ing brightmillion ofS hurl;
edindodg: ing
whom are Eyes shy-dodge is bright cruMbshandful,
quick-hurl edinwho
Is flittercrumbs, fluttercrimbs are floatfallin,g; allwhere:
a: crimflitterinish, is arefloatsis ingfallall! mil, shy,
milbrightlions
my (hurl flicker handful
in) dodging are shybrigHteyes is crum bs(alll)if, ey, Es[2]
It is an attempt to represent, in the manner of the early futurists,
the book of life torn into a million fragments as small as confetti,
the bread of life crumbled nervously under the disorganizing influence
of shy bright eyes, bright like the million stars. A most romantic
theme and a most romantic treatment, but Mr. Cummings was never
apprenticed to the new barbarism; he is a freebooter.
One way the modernist poet has of keeping romantically alive in
this classicism, whether or not he goes as far as Gertrude Stein’s
automatism, is by carefully avoiding a theme. When Mr. Allen Tate
says, for instance, in his introduction to Hart Crane’s _White
Buildings_ that Mr. Crane has not yet found a theme to match his
poetic vision, he is really explaining that Mr. Crane is preserving
his vision from a theme, that his vision is reacting romantically
against contemporary classicism. Hart Crane’s poems reveal many of the
qualities peculiar to enforced romantics: it is noticeable that Mr.
Tate allies him with other enforced romantics--Poe, Rimbaud, Edith
Sitwell, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens--though Mr. Crane has sufficient
dignity to be able to dispense with such literary support. Much of the
intensity of his poetry--intensity often protracted into strain--is due
to the conflict between discipline and originality. The result is a
compromise in the mysticism of rhetoric:
Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.
This romantic mysticism of rhetoric--romantic because discipline merges
with originality rather than originality with discipline--results in
a mysticism of geography, not to say of subjects. The movements of
his poems are the fluctuations of surfaces: they give a sea-sense of
externality: the moon, the sea, frost, tropical horizons, the monotony
of continuous exploration. Their direction is classical; that is, they
tend to become mechanical by a sort of ecstasy of technical excellence:
O I have known metallic paradises
Where cuckoos clucked to finches
Above the deft catastrophes of drums.
While titters hailed the groans of death
Beneath gyrating awnings I have seen
The incunabula of the divine grotesque.
This music has a reassuring way.
And here he would rest if he did not, in his restraint ‘have extreame’,
have what he calls ‘fine collapses’--
We can evade you and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on?
By such fine collapses, composition just manages to escape with its
life--beginning again and again and again in spite of its posthumous
classicism.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: It has been found impracticable in the printing of this
poem to set it vertically on the page, as it was originally printed--to
suggest a downward fluttering movement.]
INDEX OF PRINCIPAL PROPER NAMES
Acton, Harold, 201
A. E., 166
Aiken, Conrad, 166
Aldington, Richard, 216, 217
Anglo-Irish mystics, 124
Aristotle, 191, 208
Baedeker, 242
Baudelaire, 39
Beddoes, T. L., 81, 173
Belloc, Hilaire, 17
_Beowulf_, author of, 262
Binyon, L., 220
Blake, William, 195, 196, 198
Blunden, Edmund, 176
Bottomley, Gordon, 220
Brahms, 96
Bridges, Dr. Robert, 92, 93
Brooke, Rupert, 120, 164
Browning, R., 158, 160, 161,
183, 197, 236
Burns, Robert, 173, 195
Bynner, Witter, 166
Byron, Lord, 176, 192, 193,
197-199, 224, 236, 241
Calverley, C. S., 37
Campbell, T., 197
Canaletto, 239
Catullus, 252-254
Chalmers, A., 78
Chaucer, G., 173
Chesterton, G. K., 17
Clare, John, 195
Coleridge, S. T., 95, 99, 105,
158, 192-193
Colman, G., 244
Crane, Hart, 47, 289-291
Cummings, E. E., 9-34, 38-41,
44, 59-64, 84-88, 100, 131-134,
153, 174, 187, 201-202,
217, 245-247, 249-250, 252,
288-289
Cunard, Nancy, 165, 201
Darley, G., 173
David, King, 48
Davidson, Donald, 209, 211, 214
Davidson, John, 184
Davies, W. H., 200-201
Debussy, 96
de Gourmont, Rémy, 14
de Saint Pierre, B., 235
de Vere, Aubrey, 197
Dickinson, Emily, 122, 183
Dobson, Austin, 116
Doolittle, Hilda (“H.D.”), 121-123,
204, 217
Doughty, C. M., 199
Drinkwater, J., 100, 111-112
Dryden, J., 173
Duck, Stephen, 194
Ecclesiastes, 222, 225
Eliot, T. S., 50-53, 165, 167-174,
201-202, 211-215, 217,
223, 235-242, 252, 264, 265,
275, 278, 289
Euripides, 176
Fletcher, John, 168, 170
Flint, F. S., 217
France, Anatole, 225
Frazer, Sir James, 171-172
Frost, Robert, 176-177
Gautier, 234
Gay, J., 243
Georgians, the, 118-120, 221
Goldsmith, Oliver, 37
Gongora, 218
Gosse, Sir Edmund, 116
Graves, Richard, 196
Gray, Thomas, 30
Greene, R., 44
Guedalla, Philip, 206
Haldane, J. B. S., 167
Hardy, Thomas, 198, 225
Hemans, Felicia, 99
Hemingway, Ernest, 223
Homer, 252
Hood, Thomas, 37
Hopkins, G. M., 90-94
Housman, A. E., 198
Hulme, T. E., 272-278, 286
Imagists, the, 116-124, 131, 135, 204, 272
Japanese poets, the, 28, 217
Jonson, Ben, 241
Joyce, James, 107, 203, 204,
256, 278, 288
Keats, John, 95, 99, 158, 160,
170, 171, 192-195, 208
Kydd, T., 45, 173
La Rousse, 242
Lawrence, D. H., 167
Lefanu, Joseph Sheridan, 244
Le Gallienne, Richard, 186
Leigh Hunt, J. H., 195
Lindsay, Vachel, 180
Lodge, 44
Longfellow, H. W., 105
Lyly, J., 44, 173
Mallarmé, 28
Malone, E., 78
Marlowe, Christopher, 44, 45, 80
Marvell, Andrew, 173
Masefield, J., 244
Meikle, J., 99
Mendes, Catulle, 234
Milton, John, 17, 31, 55, 56,
173, 204
Montgomery, R., 99
Moore, Marianne, 111-114, 168,
185-186, 249
Moore, Thomas, 99, 197
Morris, J. W., 250
Nashe, T., 44
Nichols, Robert, 184-185
Noyes, Alfred, 167
Ossian, 208
Owen, Wilfred, 121, 164
Peele, G., 44, 173
Philips, Ambrose, 196
Picasso, P., 202, 204
Poe, E. A., 38-39, 57, 191, 197,
289
Pope, Alexander, 159, 196
Pound, Ezra, 140, 141, 172,
180, 187, 204, 216-219
Pre-Raphaelites, the, 197
Prewett, Frank, 176, 205
Ransom, John Crowe, 100, 103-109,
209, 211, 214, 229-230, 252
Read, Herbert, 167
Rimbaud, 28, 32, 289
Rogers, Samuel, 99, 159
Rosenberg, Isaac, 121, 220-222
Rousseau, J. J., 252
Ruskin, John, 236
Sandburg, Carl, 100-102
Sassoon, Siegfried, 176-177
Shakespeare, W., 9, 10, 44-46,
62-82, 108, 151, 173, 190,
237-243, 252
Shelley, P. B., 95, 99, 158, 192-193,
195, 198
Shenstone, W., 99, 196
Sitwell, Edith, 167, 175, 201,
203, 204, 217, 223, 231-235,
247-249, 279, 289
Sitwell, Osbert, 210-213
Sitwell, Sacheverell, 167-171,
185, 232, 234, 287
Sorley, Charles, 121
Spenser, Edmund, 173, 208
Steevens, George, 77-78
Stein, Gertrude, 204, 223, 274-275,
280-289
Stevens, W., 166, 216, 217, 289
Surrey, Earl of, 45
Swift, Jonathan, 173
Swinburne, A. C., 197, 208
Symons, Arthur, 116
Tagore, Rabindranath, 17
Tate, Allen, 213-215, 252-254,
289
Tennyson, Lord, 31, 37, 49-55,
158, 160-163, 167, 182, 197,
208
Thompson, Francis, 158, 159,
208
Traherne, 198
Tupper, Martin, 99, 193, 197
Turner, W. J., 167
Untermeyer, Louis, 11, 26
Valéry, Paul, 29, 30, 35-38,
42-43
Vers Librists, the, 119, 145
Virgil, 50
Wagner, 96
Webster, J., 173, 212
Whitman, Walt, 99, 197, 208
Wilde, O., 197, 199, 208
Williams, Dr. W. C., 201-204,
216-217
Wolfe, Humbert, 222
Wordsworth, William, 95, 96,
99, 158, 159, 173, 181, 186,
192-195, 197, 215
Wyatt, Sir T., 45
Yeats, W. B., 178
THE END.
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