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.