CHAPTER I

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.