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.