MODERNIST POETRY AND CIVILIZATION
THE vulgar meaning of modernism, especially when the word is employed
as a term of critical condemnation or by poets themselves as a literary
affectation, is modern-ness, a keeping-up in poetry with the pace of
civilization and intellectual history. It is thus used by the reader
or critic who makes a sentimental association of poetry with the past,
and perhaps with a particular period of the past, as an epithet for
‘new’ poetry which seems irreverent of the general tradition; and, in
the other extreme, it is deliberately adopted by individual poets and
movements as a contemporary programme. Poetry in this light becomes a
matter of temperamental politics, with a conservative flank opposed
to a radical flank; and an imaginary battle ensues in which the main
issue is lost sight of: may a poet write as a poet or must he write as
a period? For modernism, in this perverted sense, likewise becomes a
critical tyranny, increasing contemporary mannerisms in poetry instead
of freeing the poet of obligation to conform to any particular set of
literary theories. There is, indeed, a genuine modernism, which is not
a part of a ‘modernist’ programme but a natural personal manner and
attitude in the poet to his work, and which accepts the denomination
‘modernist’ because it prefers this to other denominations; also
because there is a conspicuous force operating at great odds to free
the _poem_ of many of the traditional habits which prevented it
from achieving its full significance. Keeping in mind this conspicuous
force, more excuse can be found for ‘modernist’ as applied to the poem
than to the poet; as _poems_ is a more accurate, less prejudiced
term for _poetry_ (a vague and sentimental idea in relation to
which _poet_ is a more vague and sentimental idea still). But
even into this more genuine aspect of poetic modernism creep some of
the prejudices of perverted modernism--into its criticism especially.
It has, for example, an intolerance toward contemporary poetry which
confesses no programme, a suspicion, more properly, of poetry which
does not seem to profess a literary cause; and a self-protective
sympathy for manifestations of modernism in the past--the present vogue
of eighteenth-century poetry is largely inspired by its quaintness,
which, however affected, was in its day an up-to-dateness.
For no matter how restrained, how impersonal a literary attitude may
be, it is difficult for it to resist the temptation to convert and
to receive converts; and modernist poetry, whatever its purity, is
especially in danger of succumbing to this temptation to convert,
because it is much attacked, and to receive converts, because there are
always literary loose-ends anxious to acquire character and standing by
attaching themselves to a cause.
The sense of modernism is further perverted by the existence of
a middle position between the conservative flank and the radical
flank--the intelligent, plain-man point of view. This middle view,
this middle population, we might say, is the prop and advocate of
civilization; and the idea of civilization as a steady human progress
does not exclude the idea of a modernist, _historically_ forward
poetry. A possible rapprochement exists, therefore, between this
middle population, to whom poetry is just one of the many instruments
of progress, and that type of contemporary poetical writing which
advertises itself by its historical progressiveness. It is difficult,
in attempting to make clear some of the aspects of genuine poetic
modernism, to avoid appealing to the progressiveness of this middle
population, that is, making poetry a historical branch of civilization,
and to avoid likewise the appearance of condoning that perverted
modernism which takes advantage of a false idea of ‘advance’ to
justify feeble eccentricity. The real task is, in fact, not to
explain modernism in poetry but to separate false modernism, or faith
in history, from genuine modernism, or faith in the immediate, the
_new_ doings of poems (or poets or poetry) as not necessarily
derived from history. Modernist poetry as such should mean no more than
fresh poetry, more poetry, poetry based on honest invention rather than
on conscientious imitation of the time-spirit.
But honest invention and affectation of originality can both be
confused in the single term ‘modernism’. Francis Thompson, in his
essay on Coleridge, complained that “the charge of affectation has
been hurled in turn at the outset of their careers against Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson and Browning. Wordsworth wrote
simple diction and his simplicity was termed affected; Shelley gorgeous
diction and his gorgeousness was affected; Keats rich diction and his
richness was affected; Tennyson cunning diction and his cunning was
affected; Browning rugged diction and his ruggedness was affected.
Why Coleridge was called affected passes the wit of man, except it
be that he did not write like Pope or the elegant Mr. Rogers--or,
indeed, that all critical tradition would be outraged if a mere recent
poet were not labelled with the epithetic made and provided for him by
wise critical precedent.” Now Thompson, who was writing to defend his
own poems against the charge, was a somewhat affected writer himself,
and it suited him to hint that the very fact that a poet is called
‘affected’ or ‘modernist’ is a proof of his genuineness; he did not,
therefore, stop to enquire how many of these charges of affectation
were justified at the outset of the careers of the poets concerned. As
a matter of fact, Shelley is the only one of them who can be fairly
exculpated of the charge, because the only one who was free of the
authorship ambition: his political and philosophical enthusiasms, which
were, however, real, absorbed what professional literary enthusiasm he
may have had to begin with. Wordsworth’s early simplicity _was_
affected:
A simple child, dear brother Jim,
That lightly draws its breath
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?
I met a little cottage Girl;
She was eight years old, she said;
Her hair was thick with many a curl
That clustered round her head.
Keats’ early richness _was_ affected:
here is cream
Deepening to richness from a snowy gleam;
Sweeter than that nurse Amalthea skimmed
For the boy Jupiter; and here, undimmed
By any touch, a bunch of blooming plums
Ready to melt between an infant’s gums,
And here is manna pick’d from Syrian trees,
In starlight, by the three Hesperides.
Tennyson’s early cunning _was_ affected:
The streams through many a lilied row
Down-carolling to the crisped sea,
Low tinkled with a bell-like flow
Atween the blossoms ‘We are free’.
Browning’s early ruggedness _was_ affected:
And on that young round cheek of thine
I make them recognise the tinge,
As when of the costly scarlet wine
They drip so much as will impinge
And spread in a thinnest scale afloat
One thick gold drop from the olive’s coat
Over a silver plate whose sheen
Still through the mixture shall be seen.
The history of these affectations is the history of the various social
requirements made of poetry by the middle position, by the intelligent
plain man who is religiously devoted to the idea of human uplift; and
of the conforming by poets themselves to popular notions held about
the place of poetry in this uplift. Poetry is seen first of all
as supplying an elegance and refinement which must of necessity be
neglected in practical experience. Common affairs are not genteel; and
so poetry has generally been expected to feed an upper class hunger in
man for nobility: poetry is the high polish of civilization. The next
general demand thus made on poetry is that it should be romantically
imbued with progressiveness, that it should act as a superior touter
for civilization. To this demand Tennyson devoted his maturity in the
_Princess_ and other verse tracts. This particular, assigned
function of poetry is only a development of the old idea of the poet
as the regular tribal prophet; that Tennyson could foresee air warfare
in ‘navies grappling in the central blue’ and the League of Nations
in ‘The Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World’ undoubtedly
contributed to his success with the middle reader. Following this
is the demand for poetry as a sign of intellectual advancement, as
distinct from social or political advancement: poetry as deep and
deeper thinking. Browning is an excellent example of the poet who
appreciated the popular weakness for profundity. He fed this vanity
successfully, without bringing it low; seeming to be profound without
really being profound, keeping the necessary illusion by various
technical devices such as unnecessarily protracted sentences and an
over-clipped grammar.
Poetry, consequently, is made into a constantly expanding institution,
embodying from period to period all the rapidly developing specialized
forms of knowledge, enlarging itself by broadening the definition of
poetry to include psychology, applied theories of music and painting,
philosophy, physical science and so on. The poet himself feels obliged
to appear as a sage; as Tennyson, when he became Poet Laureate,
conscientiously sent himself to school again and made and kept to a
weekly curriculum of studies, including science, foreign languages,
mathematics, philosophy. Not only is the nature of the poet, in this
view, expected to change in a scheme of constant and minute adjustment
to history, but the nature of poetry itself is supposed to undergo
historical evolution: keeping up with the times is a sign of its good
behaviour and its worthiness to be incorporated among the material
evidences of progress.
Such an opinion of poetry is based on a view of civilization as
modernist, as continuously developing in the direction of an absolute
and perfect end--which it obviously is not. The poet who considers
himself a modernist because he is successfully keeping up with his date
is, however unaware he is of so being and whatever his antagonism to
Tennyson, merely an earnest Tennysonian. A strong distinction must be
drawn between poetry as something developing through civilization and
as something developing organically by itself--not a minor branch of
human endeavour but a complete and separate form of energy which is
neither more nor less in the twentieth century A.D. than in
the tenth century B.C., nor a different kind of energy now
from what it was in Homeric times, but merely lodged in different, or
_other_, persons. Civilization develops only in the sense that one
thing follows another, not in the sense that things get progressively
better or more harmonious because they follow. Poetry does develop in
the sense that it is contemporaneous with civilization; but for this
reason it has even to protect itself from civilization, to resist, to
a certain extent, contemporaneous influences, since there is no merit
in modernism for the sake of modernism, and since civilization must,
in self-defence, believe in modernism for the sake of modernism. It is
therefore always important to distinguish between what is historically
new in poetry because the poet is contemporary with a civilization of a
certain kind, and what is intrinsically new in poetry because the poet
is a new and original individual, something more than a mere servant
and interpreter of civilization.
A great deal of poetry written to-day, in fact, must be understood
as a reaction against the demands made on it by civilized society,
an unfortunate waste of energy in defiance that is often trivial and
insincere. Reaction against civilization in a dogmatic sense is found
in nearly all modernist poets, from affected modernists to more or less
genuine modernists. It has, indeed, been one of the refinements of
contemporary poetry to react against the refinements of civilization
which poetry has generally been expected to cultivate. Even such a
sentimentalist as Rupert Brooke mentioned love and sea-sickness in the
same breath:
The damned ship lurched and slithered. Quiet and quick
My cold gorge rose; the long sea rolled; I knew
I must think hard of something, or be sick;
And could think hard of only one thing--_you_!
... Do I forget you? Retchings twist and tie me,
Old meat, good meals, brown gobbets, up I throw.
Do I remember? Acrid return and slimy,
The sobs and slobber of a last year’s woe....
The War provoked in poetry both genuine and affected examples of
reaction against heroics. These lines of Wilfred Owen’s describe with
painful literalness a man dying from poison-gas:
... If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitten as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues....
Or we find close juxtapositions of elegance and vulgarity in the
same poem, the poet’s low-brow satire of his own elegance. This is a
familiar device in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, as:
The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.
which is fine writing, immediately followed by:
When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said--
I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth.
To the demand for romantic progressiveness there is a reaction of
utterly hopeless and unpurposed pessimism, as in Miss Nancy Cunard’s
_Parallax_, an imitation of T. S. Eliot:
In the rooms
A sombre carpet broods, stagnates beneath deliberate
steps.
Here drag a foot, there a foot, drop sighs, look round for
nothing, shiver.
Sunday creeps in silence
Under suspended smoke
And curdles defiant in unreal sleep.
The gas-fire puffs, consumes, ticks out its minor chords--
And at the door
I guess the arrested knuckles of the one-time friend
One foot on the stair delaying, that turns again.
To the demand for deep thinking the reaction is a frivolousness like
Mr. Wallace Stevens’:
La--la! The cat is in the violets
And the awnings are let down.
The cat should not be where she is
And the awnings are too brown,
Emphatically so.
The reaction to the demand that poetry shall combine all arts and
sciences into a master-art is an excuse for poetry devoted to the
praise of either silliness or simpleness, as in Mr. Witter Bynner’s:
I’m a-building my house
On a mountain so high,
A good place to wait
For my love to come by.
Go ’way now, all of you,
Leave me alone
On the peacefullest mountain
Ever was known.
or A.E.’s:
Cloistered amid these austere rocks,
A brooding seer, I watched an hour
Close to the earth, lost to all else,
The marvel of a tiny flower.
To all of these demands and to this last demand particularly, there
exists also a more complex reaction. Much contemporary poetry not
only snaps its fingers at civilization; it further elaborates its
superior attitude toward it by proving that it can not only keep up
with civilization but even get ahead of it. For civilization grows so
vain that it does, in effect, tell poetry that it cannot keep up with
it, that it must disappear in the old sense of an interpretation and
mirror of life. Cock-a-hoop scientists like Mr. J. B. S. Haldane write
that “not until our poets are once more drawn from the educated classes
(I speak as a scientist), will they appeal to the average man by
showing him the beauty in his own life”. There are poets who take this
challenge seriously and even resume Tennyson’s curriculum where he left
off. Alfred Noyes, although neither mature nor serious, has written a
long narrative poem _The Torch Bearers_ to celebrate the progress
of science from its beginnings to its present days. Patronizing of
modern musical theory appears in the poetry of W. J. Turner, of modern
painting theory in that of Edith Sitwell and Sacheverell Sitwell, of
psychological theory in that of Herbert Read and Archibald Macleish,
of modern sex-engrossment in that of D. H. Lawrence, of philosophical
theory in that of Conrad Aiken and T. S. Eliot, of encyclopedic
learning in that of Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot--and so on and so on.
This reaction inspires not only an emulative display of modernist
learning and subjects, but also a cultivation of fine-writing to prove
that this generation can beat the most cunning Elizabethan, Romantic
Revivalist or Victorian at his own game. The task it sets itself is
to be advanced and yet elegant: mere low-browness being considered
too primitive a reaction. The following is an example of Sacheverell
Sitwell’s fine-writing. He is doing what John Fletcher might be doing
were he alive now: taking liberties with blank verse and imagery under
the influence of modern painting and music, while still remaining
recognizably a late-Elizabethan dramatist:
Who can have trod, before, this field of fire
The huge floor of ocean, unfoamed, shining,
Lit with loud stars and mellow harvest moon?
The sea-nymphs swimming by the galleon’s side
Have never shone, golden, in its wake before:
Like winds they play among the corn’s gold tide
Loosing those windy locks, or down they dive
Through amber furrows lifted by the keel,
Past starlight, crackling to the sad shell note
Of scalèd Tritons in deep water depths.
Mr. Sitwell’s modernism appears in such lines as the second and fifth,
which the Elizabethans or Jacobeans, great as were the liberties they
took with blank verse (far greater than those taken by the eighteenth
century or the Victorians) could not have written for a gentle lyrical
passage. They would have put instead:
The húgy flóor of ócean foámless shíning
and
Have ne’ér shone gólden ín its wáke befóre.
The first of these lines of Mr. Sitwell’s must be read:
The húge flóor of ócean (pause) unfoámed (pause) shíning
and the next
Have néver shóne (pause) gólden (pause) in its wáke béfóre.
Here the influence of modern music reveals itself in the readiness with
which the monotony of the metrical pattern is varied. It is rarely,
indeed, in a poem of modernist blank verse that so few variations are
introduced as in this passage. The pictorial element is also modern.
‘The loud stars’, ‘the corn’s gold tide’, the nymphs diving ‘crackling’
down, are not Elizabethan conceits but verbal equivalents for a modern
picture in which the size and shape of the stars, the cornfield aspect
of the sea, the sharpness of the water-flurry where the nymphs dive
would be anti-realistically represented to suggest just these figures.
Fletcher would have written ‘bright stars’ and
Like winds that wanton in the yellow corn,
So do they wanton in this golden tide
and
shivering the sad shell note
and so on.
These lines of T. S. Eliot’s further illustrate the tendency in
contemporary poetry to outdo the past in elaborate and elegant writing;
that is, to flout conservative literary elegance rather than elegance
in general. They are an improvement on all previous treatments of a
favourite refined topic--perfumes:
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered or liquid--troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern on the coppered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone
In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam.
How pale indeed is Keats beside him:
Of wealthy lustre was the banquet-room
Fill’d with pervading brilliance and perfume:
Before each lucid pannel fuming stood
A censer fed with myrrh and spiced wood,
Each by a sacred tripod held aloft,
Whose slender feet wide-swerved upon the soft
Wool-woofèd carpets: fifty wreaths of smoke
From fifty censers their light voyage took
To the high roof, still mimick’d as they rose
Along the mirror’d walls by twin-clouds odourous.
(from _Lamia_).
The combined pressure of romantic progressiveness, intellectual
advancement, knowledge-expansion and change-processes against which
contemporary poetry has tried to protect itself by showing that it
can bear this pressure and still survive, has driven it to make a
tremendous and sometimes a strained effort at over-matching its age.
In many instances, loaded with learned vanities and sophistications,
it does not, it must be confessed, succeed in keeping its head above
water. Much of this enlargement has been accomplished by incorporating
in poetry the modern science of anthropology, which is really a new
synthetic mythology composed of many mythologies. Not content with
Tritons and Galleons and neo-Keatsian or neo-Elizabethan writing, many,
as Mr. Eliot, for instance, have borrowed extensively from Sir James
Frazer’s comparative study of primitive myths. When Sacheverell Sitwell
writes of Alexander:
He is dreaming what he planned and never conquered:
Time, that summer afternoon, burns slow,
And one more chance is given him
On a battlefield, or warm, slow bank of flowers,
While a reaper on the hillside kills his fair-haired prisoners....
the reference to fair-haired prisoners is not only to the cutting down
of the yellow grain but also to the ancient harvest-field custom,
related by Sir James Frazer, of binding fair-haired or red-haired men
in the corn-straw and killing them ritually as representatives of the
corn-god.
Literary internationalism--the incorporation of foreign tongues and
atmospheres--is still another method of civilizing and enlarging
poetry. French is perhaps the most common language introduced to this
end, with Italian and Spanish closely following. Mr. Eliot not only
makes free use of French side by side with English; he has written
poems entirely in French. An even greater enlargement is made by an
abnormal cultivation of the classics, especially of the more remote
classics. Some poets are able to maintain a sense of balance and
dignity in this cultivation, if only because they are good scholars.
But it can easily become absurd, as in the poetry of Mr. Ezra Pound.
In a single volume of his, _Lustra_, occur literary references to
Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, Provençale and Chinese literature--some
of these incorrectly given. Mr. Eliot, who is a more serious scholar,
has references in _The Waste Land_ to Greek, Latin, Spanish,
Italian, French, German and Sanskrit. The English classics quoted or
referred to are not now the stock-classics to which Victorian and
post-Victorian poets paid tribute, not Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare,
Milton, Burns, but others known only to the cognoscenti--Peele, Kyd,
Lyly, the less familiar Shakespeare, Webster, Marvell, Dryden, Swift,
Darley, Beddoes; making the succession of English poetry wear a more
varied look. The same enlargement is made with the Greek, Latin,
Italian and French poets.
Sympathy with low life and the use of the vocabulary of low life in
modernist poetry, besides their simpler burlesque rôle, are both an
earnest of romantic progressiveness and of literary refinement. For,
if it would put aside previous literary affectations and yet not turn
into a crude instrument of reaction, it must have elegances of its
own; and among the few unexploited elegances left to poetry is an
affectation of the vocabulary of low life. Wordsworth’s theories on
the use of the language of simple men were, in a conservative way, a
similar counter-elegance. Modernist poets, however, surpass Wordsworth
in literary slumming. Whereas Wordsworth wrote:
And now the same strong voice more near
Said cordially, “My Friend, what cheer?
Rough doings these! as God’s my judge,
The sky owes somebody a grudge!
We’ve had in half an hour or less
A twelve month’s terror and distress!”
T. S. Eliot writes, as already shown, unexpurgated and
unsentimentalized cockney, and E. E. Cummings:
.... some
guys talk big
about Lundun Burlin an gay Paree an
some guys claims der never was
nutn like Nooer Leans Shikahgo Sain
Looey Noo York an San Fran dictaphones
wireless subways vacuum
cleaners pianolas funnygraphs skyscrapers an safety razors
sall right in its way kiddo
but as fer I gimme de good ole daze....
In this way much modernist poetry, in attempting to justify itself
to civilization, which is always the civilization of the average
intelligent person, succeeds so well that it is rejected by him as
_too_ advanced; when it turns to a smaller audience or to no
audience at all, consoling itself with its advancement. For as the
average intelligent person has no real sympathy with low life except
from vague humanitarian principles, so he is only interested in
civilization as a sentimental idea; he does not want to think harder
or work harder; he does not want to advance, but to be flatteringly
reminded that he belongs to the twentieth century. Nor does he have,
or want to have, new or different feelings. The poet formally devoted
to modernism, on the other hand, generally has or affects historically
new feelings about things. And so the space between the general reader
and the poet who is responding to the demands of this imaginary client
becomes wider and wider.
Take, as a single instance of this breach, the conception of Destiny.
To the Greek dramatists it was the strongest of the gods, the dark
power behind the thrones of Olympus. To the poets of the Romantic
Revival it was the greatest and blindest motive power; it transcended
Love, Religion and Knowledge. But Miss Sitwell can write to-day (or
perhaps yesterday):
Now from the countrysides where people know
That Destiny is wingless and bemired
With feathers dirty as a hen’s too tired
To fly--
Then follows a reference to Darkness, one of the grandest of
traditionally poetical concepts:
--where old pig-snouted Darkness grovels
For life’s mired rags among the broken hovels--
The general reader, however, will be out of sympathy with this: Destiny
to him is not as oppressive as it was to Euripides or Byron, but it
is still a force to be reckoned with, though he only calls it “Luck”
or “Joss”; and Darkness is still respected in spite of the electric
illuminations of Science.
Of some contemporary poets ‘modernist’ is used merely to describe a
certain independence in them, without definitely associating them
with modernism as a literary cause: though content to stay in the
main stream of poetry, they make judicious splashes to show that they
are aware of the date. This has been the tactical position adopted
by some poets whose modernism consists in an aloof moderateness or
sensibleness in all directions--a studied inaction--and by others who
have had neither the courage nor the capacity to go the whole way with
modernism and yet have not wished to be left behind. In the first class
belong such poets as Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Frost. Mr. Frost’s
nature-poems are unaffected nature-poems and, with the exception of a
few of Frank Prewett’s, perhaps the only real, that is, unliterary,
ones since Clare’s. (Edmund Blunden’s show accurate observation but
grow more and more literary.) The following is from Mr. Frost’s
_Runaway_, describing a foal afraid of his first sight of snow.
The faint modernism of this poem consists in its complete casualness
and matter-of-factness:
Once when the snow of the year was beginning to fall
We stopped by a mountain pasture to say “Whose colt?”
A little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall,
The other curled at his breast. He dipped his head
And snorted at us. And then he had to bolt....
And now he comes again with a clatter of stone
And mounts the wall again with whited eyes
And all his tail that isn’t hair up straight.
He shudders his coat as if to throw off flies....
Mr. Sassoon, who has, like Mr. Frost, never troubled to keep up
with literary fashions and who, when he occasionally yields to the
temptation of poeticalness, adopts the manner of a generation ago,
writes as follows about a Founder’s Feast held in one of the greater
Colleges at Cambridge University shortly after the War ended. The
poem carries on the indignation of his war-poems against the General
Staff. Modernism in Mr. Sassoon is an intelligent, satiric reaction
to contemporary political and social Bluffs; it is not a literary
policy--which is why, in fact, professed literary modernists patronize
him:
.... Gowns, rose and scarlet in flamingo ranks,
Adorned the dais that shone with ancient silver;
And guests of honour gazed far down the Hall
With precognition of returning thanks.
There beamed the urbanest Law-lord on the Bench,
Debating with the Provost (ceremonious
In flushed degrees of vintage scholarship)
The politics of Plato--and the French
But on the Provost’s left, in gold and blue
Sat ... O my God! ... great Major-General Bluff
Enough enough enough enough enough!
In the second class belong poets like Mr. Yeats who, observing that
his old poetical robes have worn rather shabby, acquires a new outfit.
But the old romantic weaknesses are not so easily discarded: even when
he writes of ‘Lois Fuller’s Chinese Dancers’--a high-brow Vaudeville
turn--instead of Eire and the ancient ways, And the Red Rose upon the
Rood of Time.
Such are the shifts to which poets have been driven in trying to cope
with civilization and in rejecting or keeping up with, from an imagined
necessity of action, the social requirements that seem to be laid upon
poetry. In the resulting confusion one thing at least is clear, that in
modernist poetry, however it has been weakened or perverted by its race
with civilization, is to be found the best and undoubtedly the most
enduring contemporary poetry. This is not because historical modernism
is in itself an excellence, but because the best poets happen to be
modernists: whether they are deliberately so or not, they can be called
modernist if only because they are good, and because what is good
always seems advanced.
_Modernist_, indeed, should describe a quality in poetry which
has nothing to do with the date or with responding to civilization.
Poetry to which _modernist_ in this sense could be fully
applied would derive its excellence neither from its reacting against
civilization, by satiric or actual primitivism; nor from its proved
ability to keep up with or keep ahead of civilization. It would not,
however, ignore its contemporaneous universe, for the reason that it
would not be stupid and that it would have a sense of humour--the most
intelligent attitude toward history is not to take one’s own date too
seriously. There would occur evidences of time in such poetry; but
always its modernism would lie in its independence, in its relying on
none of the traditional devices of poetry-making in the past nor on
any of the artificial effects to be got by using the atmosphere of
contemporary life and knowledge to startle or to give reality. If, in
such poetry, a topical institution or person or object should occur,
it would be only because it made an image more accurately suited to
the particular requirements of the poem than another less recent one.
Most of all, such poetry would be characterized by a lack of strain, by
an intelligent ease. Not only would its references have a simplicity
and naturalness no matter how difficult, that is, no matter how highly
developed aside from references, such poetry was--not only would it
not have to rely on references; it would not, either, have to rely
on modern short-story material, such as Mr. Pound, for example, has
incorporated in one of his poems:
Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal of a sort of emotional anaemia
It would not have to rely on such material because it would have
something to say that had nothing to do with reporting contemporary
life or with vying with the progress of intelligence.
And even poetry that is _modernist_ only in the historical
sense--even Ezra Pound’s or Vachel Lindsay’s--accomplishes at least
this: by its enlarging process it has widened the limits of reference,
diction and construction in poetry; by extending the poet’s curriculum
it has also extended his acceptable scope. So that poetry that is
modernist only in the personal sense has some chance of attention, its
frowardness being taken for historical modernism.
Many common symbols of civilization, in any case, are bound to be
absorbed naturally by poetry, although at the beginning they cannot but
be used with self-consciousness. The naturalness with which some new
invention or scientific discovery may be uttered in poetry depends on
its recentness. There is even a definite time-limit before such a ‘new’
thing becomes a common object and before which it is affected to write
of it in poetry except rarely and then with deliberate affectation.
This time-limit varies, of course, with the nature of the oddity--with
the train, for example, the period was about seventy years. During this
period of human acclimatization the oddity gradually loses the capital
letter and the italics with which it was perhaps originally written;
its name comes to be pronounced without any sense of strangeness or
second-thought. It gradually approaches a stage, in fact, when it is
nearly quaint; and it is just in this stage when it is most natural.
The train has passed from a stage of complete strangeness to one of
complete familiarity. Wordsworth was one of the first poets to notice
the train, but as a curiosity rather than as a common object and on
the theory that poetry should take recognition of modern scientific
development. Although his view was that poetry was conferring favour
on the scientists in recognizing their products, it will be seen from
the following lines that he admitted minutely and specifically the
various requirements which civilization puts upon poetry: material
progressiveness, literal prophecy, intellectual advancements, ‘future
change’, and, finally, elegance, which he achieves by calling
Steamboats, Viaducts, Railways otherwise than by their own names
(‘Motions and Means’, ‘Nature’s lawful offspring’). But he mentions
them in the title:
STEAMBOATS, VIADUCTS, AND RAILWAYS
Motions and Means, on land and sea at war
With old poetic feeling, not for this
Shall ye, by Poets even, be judged amiss!
Nor shall your presence, howsoe’er it mar
The loveliness of Nature, prove a bar
To the Mind’s gaining that prophetic sense
Of future change, that point of vision, whence
May be discovered what in soul ye are.
In spite of all that beauty may disown
In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace
Her lawful offspring in Man’s art; and Time,
Pleased with your triumphs o’er his brother Space,
Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown
Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime.
Tennyson was forced to accept the train, but he handled it gingerly.
_Lady Godiva_ has this short prelude to show his broadmindedness;
but it is only a foil to the romantic story:
I waited for the train at Coventry;
I hung with grooms and porters on the bridge,
To watch the three tall spires; and there I shaped
The city’s ancient legend into this:--
In “_Mechanophilus_--in the time of the first railways” he frankly
romanticizes:
Now first we stand and understand,
And sunder false from true,
And handle boldly with the hand,
And see and shape and do.
Dash back that ocean with a pier,
Strow yonder mountain flat,
A railway there, a tunnel here,
Mix we this Zone with that....
As we surpass our fathers’ skill,
Our sons will shame our own;
A thousand things are hidden still
And not a hundred known....
Browning was rather more courageous; he first introduced the train
as a commonplace into poetry, but through the back door, in what was
known as serio-comic verse. The lines are from _Christmas-Eve and
Easter-day_:
A tune was born in my head last week
Out of the thump-thump and shriek-shriek
Of the train, as I came by it, up from Manchester;
And when, next week, I take it back again,
My head will sing to the engine’s clack again
While it only makes my neighbour’s haunches stir.
By the use of rhymes like ‘back again’ and ‘engines clack again’,
‘Manchester’ and ‘haunches stir’, he is saying in effect that a train
is no proper subject for true poetical feelings; that as it is a part
of modern life we must include it in our poems but in the low style
proper to it. Emily Dickinson was perhaps the first to confess to a
feeling of personal affection for the train as such:
I love to see it lap the miles,
And lick the valleys up,
And pause to feed itself at tanks;
And then prodigious, step
Around a pile of mountains
And, supercilious, peer
In shanties by the sides of roads....
And neigh like Boanerges;
Then, punctual as a star,
Stop--docile and omnipotent--
At its own stable door.
To John Davidson it was an appealing creature, too, although more
terrible; in no way comic. His _Song of the Train_ begins:
A monster taught
To come to hand
Amain,
As swift as thought
Across the land
The train.
... O’er bosky dens
By marsh and mead,
Forest and fens
Embodied speed
Is clanked and hurled....
In a poem of Mr. Robert Nichols we find the train treated with more
modern nonchalance. _The Express: Hereford to London_ begins:
On sways the tilting train:
We feel the carriage bluffly sideways blown,
We see the chill shower brighten on the pane,
We hear the high wind through the lantern moan,
We three borne ever through the wind and rain,
We three who meet here not to meet again,
We three poor faring fools who sit alone.
But toward the end there is a romantic lapse to excuse the liberties
taken:
But the giant Train begins a confident song
“Why be so meek, so proud, when both are wrong.”
Sacheverell Sitwell can write even more casually of the train. For
romantic lapses like the following in _At Breakfast_:
A railway engine ran across the field
Galloping like a swift horse down the rails.
As it came quicker the window-panes rattled,
The roof shook side to side: all its beams trembled,
Thundering hoofs were upon us--glass chariots.
are not even real lapses like Mr. Nichols’ but a half-satiric “Look:
modernist though I am, I can still be romantic about old-fashioned
romantic subjects like the railway train.” It is now not a ‘monster’
but a charming early-Victorian _objet de vertu_ under a glass
dome. We find Miss Marianne Moore describing expanding bookcases
and books printed on india-paper in a serious poem, without
self-consciousness:
the vast indestructible necropolis
of composite Yawman-Erbe separable units;
the steel, the oak, the glass, the Poor Richard publications
containing the public secrets of efficiency
on “paper so thin that one thousand four hundred and
twenty pages make one inch.”
Without self-consciousness? Perhaps that is too much to say when
so short a space of years separate poetry of this sort from the
once-advanced poetry of, say, Richard Le Gallienne, a ‘decadent’ of
the ’nineties still alive and at present living in the same city as
Miss Moore, like her a literary critic; a city where there must be
large backward sections of the reading public to whom Mr. Le Gallienne
is still an advanced writer because he has, perhaps, written familiarly
of the Devil and the sweets of sin.
But is it necessary for the poet to come to the point, after a long
history of gradually acclimatizing his verse to what were once
considered unpoetical subjects, where he can, with Miss Moore, bring
himself to insert fourteen unrevised and consecutive words straight
from a newspaper advertisement into his poem, and put them into
quotation marks as well? Though a feat of poetic self-martyrdom,
doubtless, and perhaps the logical conclusion of giving civilization
what it wants--verse actually interpretative of what is called ‘the
poetry of modern business’--it is bad for both poetry and business:
the quotation would have been much more effective left in the original
setting to compose the daily synthetic advertisement-poem of the
morning newspaper.
True modernist poetry can appear equally at all stages of historical
development from Wordsworth to Miss Moore. And it does appear when the
poet forgets what is the correct literary conduct demanded of him
in relation to contemporary institutions (with civilization speaking
through criticism) and can write a poem having the power of survival
in spite of its disregarding these demands; a poem of purity--of
a certain old-fashionedness even, but not an old-fashionedness of
reaction against the time to archaism, or of retreat to nature and
the primitive passions. All poetry that deserves to endure is at once
old-fashioned and modernist. How much of modernist poetry is merely
up-to-date conduct-poetry, the poetry of conversion to the last-minute
salvationism of civilization, and how much is poetry in need of no
conversion, but working out its own salvation by itself, is a difficult
question to settle offhand. The proportions vary with individuals. With
Mr. Pound the former sort predominates greatly, one would say; with
Cummings, though he is more ‘daring’ than Mr. Pound, there is much less
of this than at first sight appears; with Mr. Archibald Macleish, an
ambitious imitator of Cummings, much more.
The great danger in any discussion of modernist poetry which may reach
the plain reader is that in pointing out how many of its qualities
are inspired by necessity, sincerity or truthfulness, these qualities
may endear themselves to him not because of necessity, sincerity or
truthfulness but only because he can understand them as up-to-date;
the danger, in fact, that the plain reader may fall in love with the
up-to-dateness of this poetry. In this case, with modernist poetry seen
and applauded as a part of the movement of civilization, the demands
made upon it as such would become intensified. A world of plain readers
hungering for up-to-date poetry would turn poetry into one of the
gross industries. There is such a great gap between Victorian poetry
and the poetry of just before the War, and again between this poetry
and advanced modern poetry, that the converted plain reader might
fail to see that the theories of 1860 or 1910 or 1927 have nothing to
do with the essential goodness of poetry, though much to do with its
up-to-dateness. Would not, it may be asked, a hunger for essential
goodness in poetry also turn it into one of the gross industries?
Perhaps; on the other hand perhaps not, since the reader’s capacity
for essential goodness is to his capacity for up-to-dateness as the
capacity for writing essentially good poetry to the capacity for
writing up-to-date poetry.