MODERNIST POETRY AND DEAD MOVEMENTS
THE refusal of the reading public to spend time on contemporary poetry
can to a great extent be excused when we recall the decrepitude to
which poetry was reduced by the death of the great Victorians and the
survival of too many of the small ones. By domesticating itself in
order to be received into the homes of the ordinary reading public and
by allowing its teeth to be drawn so that it would no longer frighten,
poetry had grown so tame, so dull, that it ceased to compete with other
forms of social entertainment, especially with the new religion of
sport. Callow or learned echoes of accepted poetry have now become as
unattractive to the plain reader as the poetry he would classify as
dangerous; and he does not realize that the alarming ‘new’ poetry with
which he is at present surrounded is at least acting as a deterrent
against the production of old-fashioned trash. For modernist poetry, if
it is nothing else, is an ironic criticism of false literary survivals.
The feebleness with which poetry survived the poets who had made it
feeble caused a general depression in the market-interest of all poetry
except for academic or devotional purposes. To choose between such
lines of John Drinkwater’s as:
O fool, o only great
In pride unhallowed, O most blind of heart.
Confusion but more dark confusion bred,
Grief nurtured grief, I cried aloud and said,
“Through trackless ways the soul of man is hurled,
No sign upon the forehead of the skies,
No beacon, and no chart
Are given to him, and the inscrutable world
But mocks his scars and fills his mouth with dust.”
and of Marianne Moore’s (_To a Steam Roller_) as:
The illustration
is nothing to you without the application.
You lack half wit. You crush all particles down
into close conformity, and then walk back and forth
on them.
Sparkling chips of rock
are crushed down to the level of the parent block.
Were not “impersonal judgment in aesthetic
matters a physical impossibility,” you
might fairly achieve
it. As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive
of one’s attending you, but to question
the congruence of the complement is vain, if it
exists.
involves an effort of criticism in the reader which it is not worth
his while to make, when so many other alternative possibilities of
enjoyment are offered outside of poetry. The first piece obviously
takes him nowhere. The second (an insulting address to a man with a
steam roller mind, lacking that half of wit which is to leave the
whole unsaid) presupposes in the reader a critical attitude toward
poetry; assumes that he is willing to part with the decayed flesh of
poetry, the deteriorated sentimental part, and to confine himself to
the hard, matter-of-fact skeleton of poetic logic. The plain reader may
be brought to admire such a poet’s puritanical restraint in resisting
the temptation to write an emotional poem of abuse in the style of Mr.
Drinkwater, in conveying her meaning as dryly and unfeelingly as a
schoolmistress would explain a mathematical problem. But while he may
desire a reformation in poetry, he is interested only in results, not
in the technical discipline to which poetry must perhaps be submitted.
And Miss Moore’s poetry is wholly concerned with such discipline.
The reader will therefore not sympathize with the prose quotation in
the above poem which its author thought necessary as the documentary
justification of her tirade, or appreciate the logical application of
_butterflies_; a butterfly being the mathematical complement
to a steam roller, and, as a metaphorical complement, suggesting the
extreme, unrelieved dullness of this steam roller mind that has no
possible complement, even in metaphor. Anything indeed which reveals
the poet at work, which reveals the mechanism of his wit, is obnoxious
to the plain reader. The poetic process, he declares, is a mystery; and
any evidence, therefore, of what he may consider the technical aspect
of poetry marks a poem as incomprehensible. Miss Moore, who turns her
poetry into matter-of-fact prose demonstrations in order to avoid
mystery, thus expresses the plain reader’s antagonism to poetry that
perplexes rather than entertains. He might not understand her sympathy,
but he would undoubtedly agree with her sentiments.
POETRY
I too, dislike it:
there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
The bat, upside down; the elephant pushing,
a tireless wolf under a tree,
the base-ball fan, the statistician--
“business documents and schoolbooks”--
these phenomena are pleasing,
but when they have been fashioned
into that which is unknowable,
we are not entertained.
It may be said of all of us
that we do not admire what we cannot understand;
enigmas are not poetry.
It would be foolish to ask the plain reader to accept poetry that he
does not understand; but it can perhaps be suggested to him, with more
success than to the literary critic, that it would be wise to refrain
from critical comments such as “that is incomprehensible” unless he is
willing to make the effort of criticism. If he does this, much that at
first glance antagonized him will appear not incomprehensible but only
perhaps difficult or, if not difficult, only different from what he has
been accustomed to consider poetical. He may even train himself to read
certain contemporary poets with interest; or, if he persists in keeping
the critical process separate from the reading process, have at least a
historical sense of what is happening in poetry.
It may be objected that modern poetry does not leave the plain
reader alone, that it is constantly making advances to him; if not
conciliatory advances, at any rate challenges which his self-respect
does not permit him to overlook. It is true that modern poetry is full
of noticeable peculiarities toward which the reader is bound to have
some reaction either of sympathy or self-defence. But an important
distinction must be drawn between peculiarities resulting from a
deliberate attempt to improve the status of poetry by jazzing up its
programme and those resulting from a concentration on the poetic
process itself. The first class of peculiarities are caused by a desire
to improve the popularity of poetry with the public and constitute a
sort of commercial advertising of poetry. The second, while equally
provoked by the cloud under which poetry has fallen, are concentrated
on improving its general vitality, even to the point of making it
temporarily more unpopular than ever: but for reasons opposite to those
which reduced it to the state of disfavour in which it found itself
at the beginning of this century. The plain reader has an exaggerated
antagonism toward poetry of this second sort because it is too serious
to permit of a merely neutral attitude in him and because, instead of
presenting him with the benefits of its improvements, the poet seems
impudently intent on advertising poetry for its own sake rather than
for the reader’s. A false sympathy, therefore, is likely to spring up
between the plain reader and poetry especially designed to recapture
his interest. This poetry attains a disproportionate importance and
is artificially prolonged beyond the length of life to which it is
naturally entitled. So has the long sequence of dead movements which
have confused the history of contemporary poetry been perpetuated.
A dead movement is one which never had or can have a real place in
the history of poets and poems. It occurs because some passing or
hitherto unrealized psychological mood in the public offers a new field
for exploitation, as sudden fashion crazes come and go, leaving no
trace but waste material. In poetry such dead movements do not even
survive as literary curiosities. From the ’eighties onward the writing
of real poetry has been postponed by an increasing succession of such
dead movements: the use of playful French forms for drawing-room
occasions, of which the triolet became the most popular, by Austin
Dobson, Arthur Symons and Sir Edmund Gosse; the wickedness movement
of the ’nineties, also of French origin, the characteristic words
of whose poetical vocabulary were _lutany_, _arabesque_,
_vermilion_, _jade_, _languid_, _satyr_; then a
long end-of-the-century lull; then a new train of dead movements,
only more interesting because they belong to a more alarming phase of
world history. None of these movements which we call ‘dead’ because
they never had any real poetic excuse for being, made any lasting
contribution to English poetry: they were all merely modernized
advertisements of the same old product of which the reader had grown
tired.
Imagism is one of the earliest and the most typical of these
twentieth-century dead movements. It had the look of a movement of pure
experimentalism and reformation in poetry. But the issuing of a public
manifesto of Imagism, its massed organization as a literary party with
a defined political programme, the war it carried on with reviewers,
the annual appearance of an Imagist anthology--all this revealed it
as a stunt of commercial advertisers of poetry to whom poetic results
meant a popular demand for their work, not the discovery of new values
in poetry with an indifference to the recognition they received. The
Imagists had decided beforehand the kind of poetry that was wanted
by the time: a poetry to match certain up-to-date movements in music
and art. They wanted to express ‘new moods’, and in free verse (or
cadence). They _believed_ in free verse; and to believe in one
way of writing poetry as against another is to have the attitude of a
quack rather than of a scientist toward one’s art, to be in a position
of selling one’s ideas rather than of constantly submitting them to new
tests. That is, they wanted to be _new_ rather than to be poets;
which meant that they could only go so far as to say everything that
had already been said before in a slightly different way. ‘Imagism
refers to the manner of presentation, not to the subject.’ Authentic
‘advanced’ poetry of the present day differs from such programmes
for poetry in this important respect: that it is concerned with a
reorganization of the matter (not in the sense of subject-matter but of
poetic thought as distinguished from other kinds of thought) rather
than the manner of poetry. This is why the plain reader feels so balked
by it: he must enter into that matter without expecting a cipher-code
to the meaning. The ideal modernist poem is its own clearest, fullest
and most accurate meaning. Therefore the modernist poet does not have
to talk about the use of images ‘to render particulars exactly’,
since the poem does not give a rendering of a poetical picture or
idea existing outside the poem, but presents the literal substance of
poetry, a newly created thought-activity: the poem has the character
of a creature by itself. Imagism, on the other hand, and all other
similar dead movements, took for granted the principle that poetry was
a translation of certain kinds of subjects into the language that would
bring the reader emotionally closest to them. It was assumed that a
natural separation existed between the reader and the subject, to be
bridged by the manner in which it was presented.
Georgianism was a dead movement contemporary with Imagism. Although not
so highly organised as Imagism, it had a great vogue between the years
1912 and 1918 and was articulate chiefly upon questions of style. Its
general recommendations seem to have been the discarding of archaistic
diction such as ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and ‘floweret’ and ‘whene’er’ and
of poetical constructions such as ‘winter drear’ and ‘host on armèd
host’ and of pomposities generally. Another thing understood between
the Georgians was that their verse should avoid all formally religious,
philosophic or improving themes, in reaction to Victorianism; and all
sad, wicked café-table themes in reaction to the ’nineties. It was to
be English yet not aggressively imperialistic; pantheistic rather than
atheistic; and as simple as a child’s reading book. This was all to
the good, perhaps, but such counsels resulted in a poetry that could
rather be praised for what it was not than for what it was. Eventually
Georgianism became principally concerned with Nature and love and
leisure and old age and childhood and animals and sleep and other
uncontroversial subjects. Unfortunately there was no outstanding figure
either among the Imagists, the Vers Librists generally, or among the
Georgians, capable of writing a new poetry within these revised forms.
So in both cases all that happened was that the same old stock-feelings
and situations were served up again, only with a different sauce. And
poetry became shabbier than ever. The extent of this shabbiness was
concealed by the boom which the War brought about in poetry, as part
of the general mobilization of public industries. A great many poets
were carried through to popular recognition on the wave of the War
who would otherwise never have been heard of again. Alan Seegar is an
American example of this temporary immortalization. The place of Rupert
Brooke in English tradition is likely to be more secure only because
this tradition has more powerful methods of literary propaganda:
Rupert Brooke writing at the present moment unconnected with the war
idea would be as coldly disregarded as indeed he was before his death
on active service, when practically all the poems for which he has
since become famous had already appeared. War-poetry was Georgianism’s
second-wind, for the contrast between the grinding hardships of
trench-service--which as a matter of fact none of the early-Georgians
experienced--and the Georgian stock-subjects enumerated above was a
ready poetic theme. Imagism also profited by the war, though, as it was
more an American than an English product, it was only mobilized for
war-service when neo-Georgianism had already made a good start. The
expansion of feminism in poetry as in other war-services introduced
a number of other dead movements which had, roughly speaking, one of
two common sentimental ‘tones’: daintiness or daring. The ‘daintiness’
movements employed an Elizabethan or Cavalier atmosphere and were
a form of escape from the War; they were further characterized by
‘cuteness’ (in the American sense), archness, slyness and naughtiness;
the impression they left was of an argument in which the poet always
won by having the last word. The ‘daring’ movements used for the most
part free, very free, verse; they were ‘confessing’ movements in which
the poet, under the influence of war-excitement, indulged in one burst
of confidence after another. Imagism may be said to have engaged only
the upper half of the plain reading public. But Georgianism in England
and the daintiness and daring movements in America made poetry pay for
a long time; until the poets and the plain readers grew tired, at about
the same time. It can be said unreservedly that of all that creative
and reading enthusiasm _nothing_ remains except, perhaps, a few
shadowy names. Of the war poets whose works were temporarily advertised
by their death in action only three can be regretted: Sorley, Rosenberg
and Owen.
Of the Imagists H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) was the most publicly applauded;
all we have left of her now is the blushing memory of a short-lived
popularity in the more adventurous reviews, and a few false metaphors.
What disappears first in the poetry of dead movements is the personal
reality of the poet, which has been represented with false intensity to
make a romantic personal appeal to the reader (an appeal which does not
appear so extravagantly in modernist poetry); the poetry itself drags
on a little longer, waste.
O night,
you take the petals
of the roses in your hand
but leave the stark core
of the rose
to perish on the branch.
Compare this metaphor with an equally eccentric one of Emily
Dickinson’s, a poet belonging to no ‘movement’ and whose personal
reality pervades her work, though she kept it strictly out of her work:
Victory comes late
And is held low to freezing lips
Too wrapt with frost
To take.
The only excuse to be made for those who once found H.D.
‘incomprehensible’ is that her work was so thin, so poor, that its
emptiness seemed ‘perfection’, its insipidity to be concealing a
‘secret’, its superficiality so ‘glacial’ that it created a false
‘classical’ atmosphere. She was never able, in her temporary
immortality, to reach a real climax in any of her poems.
I can almost follow the note
where it touched this slender tree
and the next answered--
and the next.
Shall I let myself be caught
in my own light?
shall I let myself be broken
in my own heat?
or shall I cleft the rock as of old
and break my fire
with its surface?
All that they told was a story of feeble personal indecision; and her
immortality came to an end so soon that her bluff was never called.
All dead movements are focussed on the problem of style. To the
Imagists style meant the ‘use of the language of common speech’, but in
a very careful way, as a paint-box. Language in poetry should not be
treated as if it were a paint-box, or the poem as if it were something
to be hung on the wall, so to speak. The reader should enter the life
of the poem and submit himself to its conditions in order to know it as
it really is; instead of making it enter his life as a symbol having
no private reality, only the reality it gets by reflection from his
world. Style may be defined as that old-fashioned element of sympathy
with the reader which makes it possible for the poem to be used as
an illustration to the text of the reader’s experience; and much
modernist poetry may be said to be literally without style, at least
in so far as it is possible for poetry to make a radical change in a
tradition within the memory of that tradition. So the modernist poet
does not have to issue a programme declaring his intentions toward the
reader or to issue an announcement of tactics. He does not have to call
himself an individualist (as the Imagist poet did) or a mystic (as the
poet of the Anglo-Irish dead movement did) or a naturalist (as the
poet of the Georgian dead movement did). He does not have to describe
or docket himself for the reader, because the important part of poetry
is now not the personality of the poet as embodied in a poem, which is
its style, but the personality of the poem itself, that is, its quality
of independence from both the reader and the poet, once the poet has
separated it from his personality by making it complete--a new and
self-explanatory creature.
Perhaps more than anything else characteristic modernist poetry is a
declaration of the independence of the poem. This means first of all a
change in the poet’s attitude toward the poem: a new sense has arisen
of the poem’s rights comparable with the new sense in modern times of
the independence of the child, and a new respect for the originality of
the poem as for the originality of the child. One no longer tries to
keep a child in its place by suppressing its personality or laughing
down its strange questions, so that it turns into a rather dull and
ineffective edition of the parent; and modernist poetry is likewise
freeing the poem of stringent nursery rules and, instead of telling
it exactly what to do, is encouraging it to do things, even queer
things, by itself. The poet pledges himself to take them seriously
on the principle that the poem, being a new and mysterious form of
life in comparison with himself, has more to teach him than he it. It
is a popular superstition that the poet is the child. It is not the
poet, but the poem: the most that the poet can do is to be a wise,
experimenting parent.
Experiment, however, may be interpreted in two ways. In the first sense
it is a delicate and constantly alert state of expectancy directed
towards the discovery of something of which some slight clue has been
given; and system in it means only the constant shifting and adjustment
of the experimenter as the unknown thing becomes more and more known:
system is the readiness to change system. The important thing in the
whole process is the initial clue, or, in old-fashioned language, the
inspiration. The real scientist should have an equal power of genius
with the poet, with the difference that the scientist is inspired to
discover things which already are (his results are facts), while the
poet is inspired to discover things which are made by his discovery
of them (his results are not statements about things already known to
exist, or knowledge, but truths, things which existed before only as
potential truth). Experiment in the second sense is the use of a system
for its own sake and brings about, whether in science or poetry, no
results but those possible to the system. As it is only the scientific
genius who is capable of using experiment in the first of these senses,
and as the personnel of science must be necessarily far more numerous
than that of poetry, experiment in the second sense is the general
method of the labouring, as against the inventive, side of science,
perhaps properly so.
Poets, then, who need the support of a system (labourers pretending
to be inventors, since in poetry, unlike science, there is no place
for labourers) are obliged to adopt not only the workshop method of
science, but the whole philosophical point of view of science, which is
directly opposite to the point of view of poetry. For in science there
is no personality granted to the things discovered, which are looked
upon as soulless parts of a soulless aggregate, with no independent
rights or life of their own. Such poets, therefore, produce poems that
are only well-ordered statements about chosen subjects, not new,
independent living organisms; facts, not truths; pieces of literature,
not distinct poetic personalities. Poetry of this sort (and there has
been little poetry of any other sort, as there have been few real
poets) is thus the science of poem-training instead of the art of
poem-appreciation. The real poet is a poet by reason of his creative
vision of the poem, as the real parent is a parent by reason of his
creative vision of the child: authorship is not a matter of the right
use of the will but of an enlightened withdrawal of the will to make
room for a new will.
It is this delicate and watchful withdrawal of the author’s will at
the right moments which gives the poem or the child an independent
form. But as the creative will is of as rare appearance in poetry as
in parenthood, there are, in its absence, very few real poems and very
few real children. Or if a real poem or child occurs in spite of its
absence, the poem or child will have to stand in the relation of a
creator to itself, which means a dangerous enlargement of the creative
will in either of them, an enlargement that we may call genius.
But with genius there is as much chance of self-destruction as of
fulfilment of the creative will. And therefore the poem which survives
great odds, the poem of genius, is as rare as the child who survives to
become the poet of genius. Most real poems and real poets have come to
be in this way, it being as impossible to arrange that the poet with a
capacity for writing real poems should have any to write as that two
people with a capacity for being the right parents for a real child
should have one who could benefit by this capacity. All that can be
done is to encourage an attitude toward the poem and the child which
shall provide for the independence of either in proportion to its power
of independence. In poetry at least this would mean that people would
not write poems unless they were complete ones, that is, they would not
force a poem by violent training to behave independently when it had
no independence. In general it would mean that people would not have
to be ‘geniuses’ (_i.e._ turn sports in order to survive the odds
against them) to use their creative will freely, to behave with genius.
When we say, then, that the modernist poet has an experimental attitude
toward the poem, we do not mean to imply that he is experimenting
with the poem in order to prove some system he has developed. This is
properly only the attitude of such a dead movement as Imagism, merely a
sign that something is wrong with the education of the poem (literally,
the ‘drawing out’ of it). The Montessori system of education, for
example, corresponds in the history of pedagogical reform with Imagism
and other such systems in the reformation of poetry. Both are schools
with new systems of training or form to replace old systems: they do
not imply the existence of a new kind of relationship between the
parent and the child, the poet and the poem, a feeling of mutual
respect favourable to the independent development of each and therefore
to a maximum of benefit of one to the other. Of course, if the poem is
left to shift entirely for itself and its independence is really only
a sign of the irresponsibility of the poet, then its personality, by
its wildness, is likely to be as indecisive as the personality of the
formalized poem is by its reliance on discipline.
The policy of leaving the poem to write itself makes it only a form of
automatic writing which inevitably leads to the over-emphasis of the
dream element in the writing of poetry. It is true that dreams seem
to exercise the same kind of control over the mind as the poem does
over the poet. But in dreams we have thought in an uncreative state
running itself out to a solution out of sheer inertia, unrefreshed by
any volitional criticism of it; a solution which is like a negative
image of the solution which thought would arrive at in a creative,
waking state, refreshed by volitional criticism. The dream solution
is therefore as arbitrary a substitute for the solutions of waking
thought as the dream-poem (or automatic poem) is for the poem that
would naturally result from the deliberate adjustment of the creative
will to the solution which seems to come nearer and nearer as the
creative will grows more and more discreet. The problem of preventing
poetry from sinking into rapid decline and disuse does not seem to
point, then, to a sense of responsibility in the poet toward the
reader as shown in the use of a carefully designed ‘style’. It points
rather to the responsibility which the poet owes to the poem because
of its dependence on him until it is complete, a dependence which
shall not, however, be reflected as a weakness in the poem after it
has been completed; as childhood should survive in a person as the
element of continuous newness in him, not as the permanent bad effect
of discipline that made him less, rather than more, independent as he
grew.