VARIETY IN MODERNIST POETRY
THE plain reader whose introduction to poetry is generally not
through personal compulsion or curiosity but through the systematic
requirements of his education, naturally associates it with the
utilitarian point of view, which must dominate any formal educational
process. If the school-system has happened to be old-fashioned and has
used poetry merely as a means of teaching grammar, or as so many lines
to be learned by heart as a disciplinary task or penalty, the reaction
to poetry is negative: the reader either discounts poetry for ever
as a dreary pedagogical invention or he can perhaps rediscover it as
something so different from the classroom exercise as to be unaffected
by the unpleasant associations attached to it as such. A ‘liberal
school-system’ does not however leave alone poetry as poetry. It
attempts to interest the child in the ‘values’ of poetry; the child’s
reaction to this method will therefore be a positive one: he will
subscribe to these values and accept poetry through them, or he will
not subscribe to these values but reject poetry through them. ‘Beauty’
is the term of approval which the schoolmaster applies to the ‘values’
of poetry; character-formation is their expressed practical end, or if
not character-formation, at least a wholesome relief from its ardours.
The elder system, which on the whole was preferable, has been generally
superseded by the new both in England and America: the official report
on “The Teaching of English in England” (1919) lays great stress on
the folly of the teacher in ‘throwing away’ an important ‘weapon’,
if he refuses to win his pupils over to him by making the literature
lesson interesting, particularly through poetry. Particularly through
Shakespeare. The report, in reply to an objection that “Shakespeare
is over the heads of the children”, approves a professor-witness who
replied “He is over all our heads”; as though that made it any better.
One of the stock essay-subjects in the schools is “The Uses of Poetry”;
and when the essays come up to be “corrected” and the humanistic
teacher prepares a composite specimen-essay on the subject, the ‘uses’
are found to be as follows:
1. Poetry gives the reader joy.
2. Poetry gives relief to sorrow, pain or weariness.
3. Poetry teaches the reader to love the Good.
4. Poetry is the concentrated wisdom of former ages.
5. Poetry teaches other-worldliness.
and so on until to the final summing-up:
Poetry’s uses may be expressed in a single phrase: Spiritual Elevation.
All poetry, that is, tends toward the same general tone and the same
general purpose.
Now it is unimportant to decide whether education since the time of
Aristotle has been responsible for the spread of this view of poetry;
or whether it is the great numerical predominance of poets who have
professed it from a policy of self-protection, and have written most
of their poetry to support it, over poets who have either dissented
or refused to commit themselves, that has been responsible. The fact
remains that this has been the officially accepted academic view and
the view of orthodox criticisms: even a self-proclaimed dissenter
like Poe defined the end of poetry as spiritual elevation. Poetry in
every Classical period has been formed according to this principle.
The mass-impressiveness of Classical poetry is, indeed, largely due
to its uniformity. And though we know from historical reconstructions
that even between romantics like Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge
and Shelley there was about as much personal dissimilarity as could
possibly be found between contemporary poets, yet the lip-service
that each of these paid to this creed of the uses of poetry induced
for the most part a corresponding pen-service. The emphasis that the
educational system lays on personal and literary similarities in poets
makes it still more difficult to appraise them separately. Here are
descriptive passages by six more or less contemporary writers, typical
classroom passages:
the hoar
And aery Alps towards the North appeared
Through mist, an heaven-sustaining bulwark reared
Between the East and West, and half the sky
Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry
Dark purple at the Zenith, which still grew
Down the steep West into a wondrous hue
Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent
Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent
Among the many folded hills....
It was no marvel--from my very birth
My soul was drunk with love--which did pervade
And mingle with whate’er I saw on earth.
Of objects all inanimate I made
Idols, and out of wild and lonely flowers
And rocks, whereby they grew, a paradise.
Woodlark may sink from sandy fern--the Sun may hear his lay;
Runnels may kiss the grass on shelves and shallows clear,
But their low voices are not heard, though come on travels drear;
Blood-red the Sun may set behind black mountain peaks;
Blue tides may sluice and drench their time in caves and weedy creeks.
Mournfully breaks the north wave on thy shore,
Silent Iona, and the mocking blast
Sweeps sternly o’er thy relics of the past,
The stricken cross, the desecrated tomb
Of abbots and barbarian kings of yore....
Since risen from ocean, ocean to defy
Appeared the Crag of Ailsa, ne’er did morn
With gleaming lights more gracefully adorn
His sides, or wreathe with mist his forehead high
Now, faintly darkening with the sun’s eclipse,
Still is he seen, in lone sublimity.
I stood on Brocken’s sovran height, and saw
Woods crowding upon woods, hills over hills,
A surging scene, and only limited
By the blue distance. Heavily my way
Downward I dragged through fir groves evermore.
Actually these pieces are by Shelley, Byron, Keats, Tupper, Wordsworth
and Coleridge, in that order: but what reader could offhand ascribe
them correctly? Who would not give the first to Keats, the second to
Wordsworth and stumble over the last four?
This extraordinary sameness in poets of such entirely different
personal character is due principally to the limitations which
‘spiritual elevation’ in the academic sense imposes: these poets
only wrote authentic poetry when off their guard. The sameness is
accentuated by the nationalistic element: every poet wrote as an
Englishman first, bound by his very use of the language to a policy of
increasing the national heritage of song rather than to the development
of a strictly personal idiom. He also wrote as a member of a class,
the governing class. One of the last surviving rewards of the poet as
a privileged member of the community was that, whatever his birth, by
writing acceptable poetry he became a gentleman; even in the narrowly
aristocratic eighteenth century this tradition obtained. (Even to-day,
when literary culture is the only gentility possible to affect.)
Stephen Duck, the “Thresher Poet”, whose works pleased George II.’s
Queen, was officially confirmed in his gentility by being presented
with a country-living as a clergyman. Burns was, for a while at least,
given the freedom of smart Edinburgh society and allowed to write
familiar epistles to members of the aristocracy. Poetical ideas and
poetical technique--the substance of poetical education, in fact--have
always been class-institutions, and poets born from the labouring or
shop-keeping classes have with very few exceptions tried to elevate
themselves by borrowing ideas and techniques to the enjoyment of
which they were not born. Even revolutionary ideas are, by a paradox,
upper-class ideas, a rebound from excesses of poetical refinement.
Burns’ romantic sympathy with the French Revolution in its earlier
stages could be read as a sign of natural breeding, the gentlemanly
radicalism of the literary _jeunesse_. The social gap between the
crofters and the gentry was, moreover, not so wide a one in Scotland as
in England; and Burns soon learned the trick of drawing-room writing.
Keats, not being, like Burns or John Clare, an obvious example of
peasant genius, or an aristocrat like Shelley, always had difficulty in
discovering his temperamental biases. The son of a tradesman, he could
not afford to be politically as radical as those inferior and superior
to him in class; though he went with Leigh Hunt as far as he thought
it safe. Blake was also a radical: one of the few Englishmen who dared
walk about in London wearing a cap of Liberty. But he is a very rare
instance of a poet who could afford not to affect a class-technique:
for he was on intimate terms with the angels and wrote like an angel
rather than like a gentleman. His radicalism was part of his religion
and not a sentimentality as Wordsworth’s early radicalism was. If a
man has complete identity with his convictions, then he is tough
about them, he is not sentimental; if not, then his convictions are a
sentimental weakness however strongly he feels about them. The Romantic
Revivalists were all spoiled as revolutionaries by their gentility.
Blake was in no sense a Romantic Revivalist. He was a seer, or a poet.
He despised the gentry in religion, literature and painting equally.
That is why there is little or nothing of Blake’s mature work that
could be confused with that of any contemporary or previous writer.
He did not forfeit his personality by submitting to any conventional
medium; and he did not complain of the neglect of his poems by the
greater reading public.
The sameness of poetry is likewise accentuated rather than diminished
by the spirit of competition. Once there is a tacit or written critical
agreement as to the historical form proper to the poetry of any
period, all the poets of fashion or ‘taste’ vie with each other in
approximating to the perfect period manner. In the eighteenth century
such major poets as Pope and Shenstone were only to be distinguished
from such minor ones as Ambrose Philips and Richard Graves by being
more willing to polish away every vestige of personal eccentricity
from their work. Period-monotony is further increased by imitation
of the most successful ‘period’ poets. In the last century there
were successively dozens of imitation Moores, Byrons, Wordsworths,
Tennysons, Brownings, Swinburnes and Wildes; and dozens more who tried
to synthesize the methods of these several inventors of slightly
different styles. Among these, as we have seen, the several inventors
themselves, who were all in search of a single period style.
All such monotony sprang from the necessity of having socially secure
convictions. Poetry was to poets of the school-room tradition the
instrument, the illustration of their convictions, whether (to take
examples only from the nineteenth century) patriotic as with Campbell,
moral as with Tupper, religious as with Aubrey de Vere, ‘philosophical’
as with Wordsworth and Whitman, social as with Moore, ‘artistic’ as
with Poe and the pre-Raphaelites. Even the decadents at the end of
last century were decadent from conviction rather than from wilfulness
or inertia. Decadence introduced no variety. It merely substituted
self-satisfied pessimism for self-satisfied optimism; and one
nationalism for another by moving the poetical centre from London to
Paris.
When Decadence decayed and was succeeded by the spurious healthiness
of the country-rambler, the beer-drinker and the earlier patriotic
soldier-poet, and this in turn broke down, the spirit of scepticism
began seriously to invade poetry. It had found expression before
in the poems of Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman; but with certain
important conservative reservations in the former, while in the latter
it was confused with the shy or aggressive anti-religiousness of
the eighteen-nineties. Modern scepticism was of a different order.
The conscious bravado of anti-social or anti-idealistic writing
disappeared. The poet did not feel cut off from his fellow-men by the
loss of his more bigoted convictions, for he could assume that an
increasingly large section of the educated classes was in agreement
with him. At the time of the Romantic Revival, though the debaucheries
of Byron could be sympathetically discounted because of his rank, a
confessed atheist like Shelley was not admitted into polite society:
it was assumed that every reader at least professed allegiance to
Christianity, however lax his private life. The modernist poet assumes
that his readers owe no trite emotional allegiance to any religious or
social or national institution, even that they have emerged from the
combative stages of mere ‘doubt’ or ‘naughtiness’ and are organizing
their lives more intellectually; that to them the consistent and
humane atheism of Shelley, or the consistent and humane saintliness
of Traherne or Blake is preferable to the vulgarly incongruous lives
of Byron and Wilde, as reflected in their poetry. The school-room
may still remain the citadel of convictions; and Byron and Wilde may
be morally whitewashed because their poetry abounds in old-fashioned
convictions. But the modernist poet does not write for the school-room:
if for anything at all, for the university.
This refinement of conviction, this maturing of social purposiveness,
contributes more than any other cause to the raising of the barriers
of poetical monotony. The poet may admit spiritual elevation as one
possible personal ‘tone’ of poetry and spiritual depression as another;
or an evenness of spiritual temper or a rapid alternation between
depression and exaltation--the poeticizing of bathos and anticlimax--as
further alternatives. But poetry ceases to be the maintenance of a
single idealistic tone; it has a less obvious, a more complicated
consistency. It is a broader intellectual exercise than before; even at
its most pedantic it is still an intellectual exercise.
The old world of poetry, however, is going on at the same time; the old
institutions are still officially and indeed numerically predominant;
though it is not too much to say that no single poet of any real
distinction since the death of Charles Doughty believes fervently
in them or even pays them homage. The lack of narrow school-room
purposiveness shown by modernist poets is actually as offensive to
the survivors of the aggressively ungodly school and their followers
as to the true believers: the anthologies and poets’ corners in
public periodicals are strictly censored both against abstruseness of
conviction and against ungodliness. The public that enjoys the simple
ruralities of W. H. Davies’:
A Rainbow and a Cuckoo! Lord!
How rich and great the times are now!
is unaware that he has written even such naughty lines as:
Lord, I say nothing; I profess
No faith in thee nor Christ thy Son:
in which he mildly idealizes Christ the Man, as opposed to Christ the
God; still less of his modernism, which is a genuine modernism, though
of rare occurrence in his recent work, as in the poem beginning:
I took my oath I would enquire
Without affection, hate or wrath
Into the death of Ada Wright.
So help me God, I took that oath
and describing without reticence or sentimentality how the coroner’s
jury condoned a child-murder, how the mother gave evidence:
It was a love-child, she explained,
And laughed for our intelligence.
and how the emaciated corpse, that had but one eye shut and the other
half-open, “seemed a knowing little child”. Though Mr. Davies consented
to omit this poem from his _Collected Poems_, he wrote it,
nevertheless; a poem that could not possibly have been written even at
the end of last century.
The raising of the barriers of monotony by modernism has encouraged
imitative or feeble poets, who in the eighteenth century would have
been happy in formal submission to them, to adventure into all the new
fields now opened to them with great audacity of subject and form. Some
of these-poets are more self-confident than others, and hence call more
attention to themselves; and the confusion of the modern poetic scene
is increased by the failure of even the specialized poetry-reading
public to distinguish genuine poetry like a not inconsiderable
part of Messrs. Eliot, Cummings and Miss Sitwell from the spurious
individuality of, say, Dr. William Carlos Williams. It is possible at
once to recognize a writer like Mr. Harold Acton as a Sitwellite by his
borrowed stage-properties, or Miss Cunard as an Eliotite in the same
way. But Dr. Carlos Williams is not quite so clumsy. This is from a
poem, _Struggle of Wings_:
... the string from the windowshade
has a noose at the bottom, a noose? or
a ring--bound with white cord, knotted
around the circumference designedly in a design
And all there is is won
And it is Inness on the meadows and fruit is
yellow ripening in windows every minute
growing brighter in the bulblight by the
cabbages and spuds--
And all there is is won
What are black 4 A.M’s after all but black
4 A.M’s like anything else: a tree,
a fork, a leaf, a pane of glass--?
And all there is is won
A relic of old decency; a very personal friend
And all there is is won
_Envoi_
Pic, your crows feed at your windowsill
Asso, try and get near mine....
And all there is is won
This is obvious charlatanry: a synthetic modernist poetry composed
of ingredients plainly imitative of those that go to make up the
poems of more genuine writers, and yet not too closely resembling
them. There is a mystic refrain such as T. S. Eliot has used,
typographic nonconformity as in E. E. Cummings, a reference to modern
painting--the divided word _Picasso_, which also suggests the
verbal disintegration which appears more completely in James Joyce.
Possibly the crows occur in an actual picture: possibly they refer
to the black 4 A.M.’s. There is also the up-to-date mannerism of
marking the poem “Incomplete” and publishing it with lacunae shown by
dots enclosed in parentheses. There is a passing satiric reference
to Philosophy in “Inness on the meadows”, called attention to by the
modernist diction of “bulblight” and “spuds”. The pretended subject is
the random thoughts that occur to a poet half awake and half asleep
at 4 A.M. The realistic window cord gives the reader a false
confidence that “And all there is is won” has some sense; whereas it is
an unrelated phrase suggesting those that occur without discoverable
sense in dreams. The poem continues:
Out of such drab trash as this
by a metamorphosis
bright as wallpaper or crayon
or where the sun casts ray on ray on
flowers in a dish, weave, weave
for Poesy a gaudy sleeve
a scarf, a cap and find him gloves
white as the backs of Turtledoves....
This last, dangerously near enough to Edith Sitwell in the third line
and in the last three lines, is an assumption of poetic awareness
within the poem of the poem itself--another modernist mannerism. The
‘drab trash’ is carefully collected--in imitation of T. S. Eliot--to
set off the ‘fine writing’ that follows. Not only Edith Sitwell but,
in the rest of the poem, Milton’s nativity hymn, a popular song and a
reference to oleochromes contribute. Dr. Williams’ early poetic travels
are outlined on the dust-cover of his _Sour Grapes_:
The surer and sounder but not the less unusual handling of free verse
by a contributor to the original Imagist anthology and a later member
of the so-called “Others” school, who has already made a distinct
place for himself in contemporary poetry.
his more recent ones in the first paragraph of a chapter of his _In
the American Grain_:
Picasso (turning to look back, with a smile), Brague (brown cotton),
Gertrude Stein (opening the doors of a cabinet of MSS.), Tzara
(grinning), André Germain (blocking the door), Van der Pyl (speaking
of St. Cloud) ... the Prince of Dahomi, Clive Bell (dressed); ...
James and Nora Joyce (in a taxi at the Place de l’Étoile); McAlmon,
Antheil Bryher, H.D. and dear Ezra (Pound) who took me to talk with
Léger; and finally Adrienne Monnier--these were my six weeks in Paris.
To such a poetry and such an atmosphere who would not prefer an
unassuming authentic piece of contemporary writing no more ‘new’ than
‘old’? Say, Mr. Prewett’s:
Seeing my love but lately come
And unexpecting she should be found
I trembled, I was dumb
And fell upon the ground;
Her only thus in distance to see
Was to me pain so profound
I fell down in an agony....
Free-lance modernists do not make ‘individuality’ their object: their
object is to write each poem in the most fitting way. But the sum of
their work has individuality because of their natural variousness; like
the individuality of the handwriting of all independent-minded men
or women, however clearly and conventionally they form their actual
letters. The only legitimate use of the word ‘style’ in poetry is as
the personal handwriting in which it is written; if it can be easily
imitated or defined as a formula it should be immediately suspect to
the poets themselves. To professional modernists individuality is
the earnest of a varied social purposiveness. To pseudo-modernists
individuality is the earnest of a narrow literary purposiveness. In
this they are not dissimilar from those eighteenth-century poets whose
sole object was to write correctly, to conform to the manner of the
period. In practice this conforming individualism means an imitation,
studiously concealed, merely of the eccentricities of poetry that is
really individual.
‘Groups’ may spring up in the old style around any poet; but in
general the free-lance modernist who had by accident become popular
or notorious and still retained a sense of personal dignity would
shrink from being made a ‘_cher maître_’ as a grotesque position
for him to occupy in a literary scene that he can only take casually.
Indeed, as soon as any imitation is made of his work, and his style
by imitation becomes a formula of mannerisms, he may be even inclined
to change them to preserve his integrity. It is not, as Mr. Philip
Guedalla suggests, that there is no English equivalent for ‘_cher
maître_’, but merely that the modern English poet good enough to be
one does not take his poetry like that. A certain sifting and grading
of personalities and groups, however, does occur where modernism is a
professional conscience rather than a personal trait: the modernist
poetry-producing world has the look of a complicated hierarchy. The
complication is increased by the efforts of professional modernists to
enrol free-lance modernists in their socially purposive movement, and
of pseudo-modernists to enrol themselves in it by literary forgery.
In every modernist group the members are aware who is the Queen Bee
and who are the drones of the _schwärmerei_. Eventually the
parasitical members ambitious to become Queen Bees will desert to other
hives and to other modes. They make a quick-change from one group to
another, acquiring as they go a patchwork synthetic style that they
hope to impose on general readers and critics as a large-scale exercise
of originality, a contemporary grand manner. The aspirant has a much
more difficult problem to face in the new poetic order than in the old.
In the old it was sufficient for him to write well. Now he must not
only write well, he must be original. A desperate hunt for originality
ensues in which aspirants are driven for inspiration to foreign
literatures, to old French, to eighteenth century quaintness, to
Spanish, to Demotic Greek, to mediaeval Latin, to Chinese or Javanese
or Aztec; to various low dialects--Bowery, Whitechapel, Chicago,
journalese; to ancient religious writers, particularly the Early
Fathers and Buddhists, and so on.
The contemporary poetic scene, then, appears to the interested but
perplexed reader a chaotic conglomerate of free-lance originality
or group originality; a restless multitude of types, imitation
of types, antithesis and synthesis of types. Variety is the most
characteristic general feature of contemporary poetry, and variety
means quantity: it not only encourages poets themselves to experiment
freely, it encourages a great many people who are not poets in
literary competition. Although it was comparatively easier in periods
where a single poetical type prevailed for people who were not poets
to write poetry, there are undoubtedly more people who are not
poets writing poetry at the present time than ever before, though
proportionately fewer find publishers. Even when one has cut out of
critical consideration the quantities of backward verse directly
imitative of Keats or Tennyson or Oscar Wilde or Swinburne or Francis
Thompson or Whitman; of ordinary adolescent verse of distinguishable
male and female varieties; there still remains an enormous quantity of
miscellaneous verse to be sorted. Criticism (even advanced criticism),
reared for centuries on the faith of the technical and philosophical
consistency of poetry (a faith continuously derived and revised from
Aristotle), cannot cope with poetry in quantity; as it could a hundred
years ago, when the possible varieties of poetical composition were
countable on the fingers and the most daring were either imitations of
Chaucer, Ossian or Spenser, or affectations of country simplicity or
of childishness. Criticism in the simplest literary scenes has never
been able to recognize who are the authentic contemporary poets and
how much of each poet is authentic. To-day, having either fallen in
arrear of its age or dashed ahead of its age into vague philosophical
formulas, it is not even as sure as it once was who are the innovators
of any particular type, and who are the copyists, or to what extent
striking resemblances are attributable to unconscious contemporary
sympathy; or, in the case of imitations of the Chinese or Japanese or
American Indian, how close these imitations are to their originals.
The following are lines from the work of two poets, Donald Davidson
and John Crowe Ransom, between whom a fairly conscious contemporary
sympathy exists, without callow imitation on either side.
Here’s one Phineas
Out for a walk,
Tired of skulls
And bones that talk....
There’s a palimpsest
In a puff of spring,
But Phineas looks
At the blossoming,
Transfigures road
Into new corpuscles,
Elucidates bush
With a bound of muscles.
and
Now what can he want,
The vagrant, the lout,
Who leers in the parson’s face,
Lolls with tongue out?
Nothing that you have,
Men with a motor car;
God keep you your high hats
And fine things you are!
With a knot in his bosom
And a bee in his brains,
He goes full of pictures
Around the flat lanes.
Even supposing a reader or a critic were able to make a just valuation
of an existent sympathy between two particular contemporary poets:
how is he to make a satisfactory definition of the relation between
the work of either of these two poets, or both, and that of a poet in
an entirely different walk of modernism, the work, for example, of
Mr. Osbert Sitwell? The following is from Mr. Sitwell’s _English
Gothic_:
The souls of bishops, shut in stone
By masons, rest in quietude
As flies in amber. They atone
Each buzzing long-dead platitude.
Above, where flutter angel-wings
Caught in the organ’s rolling loom,
Hang in the air, like jugglers’ rings,
Dim quatrefoils of coloured gloom.
Tall arches rise to imitate
The jaws of Jonah’s whale. Up flows
The chant. Thin spinsters sibilate
Beneath a full-blown Gothic rose.
Could the reader or critic be expected to have the courage or presence
of mind to say that mere contemporaneousness was an insufficient
basis for making critical comparisons between poets; that Mr. Sitwell
and Mr. Ransom or Mr. Sitwell and Mr. Davidson were so separated by
locality, nationality and formative tradition as to belong, so to
speak, to entirely different ‘periods’? Suppose that, the problem of
Mr. Sitwell, Mr. Ransom and Mr. Davidson having been settled, a new
element of confusion were introduced by quoting from Mr. T. S. Eliot’s
‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Service’ the following lines as being perplexingly
similar to Mr. Sitwell’s _English Gothic_:
A painter of the Umbrian school
Designed upon a gesso ground
The nimbus of the Baptized God.
The wilderness is cracked and browned
But through the water pale and thin
Still shine the unoffending feet
And there above the painter set
The Father and the Paraclete
The sable presbyters approach
The avenue of penitence;
The young are red and pustular
Clutching piaculative pence.
Suppose, it being possible to determine from the date of publication of
the volumes in which these poems appeared the date of their writing and
the degrees of intimacy between these two poets at the time of their
respective writings--suppose these poems are set down as an example
of contemporary sympathy? Especially as Mr. Eliot is a transplanted
American now for a long time acclimatized to literary England? What,
however, is to be said when we come upon lines in Mr. Eliot’s work
which do not show him writing in a certain way out of contemporary
sympathy with Mr. Osbert Sitwell, but writing simply and originally as
Mr. Eliot? As in the following lines:
Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin;
And breastless creatures underground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin ...
Donne, I suppose, was such another
Who found no substitute for sense;
To seize and clutch and penetrate,
Expert beyond experience ...
Suppose we say, then, that Mr. Eliot is himself. He may, as a
transplanted American, have moments of contemporary sympathy with
modernist English poets, but he is, in the main, uniquely himself.
But what if we are suddenly confronted, in the work of an American
poet, Allen Tate, who has not been transplanted, with lines like the
following from a poem called “Non Omnis Moriar”:
I ask you: Has the Singer sung
The drear quintessence of the Song?
John Ford knew more than I of death--
John Ford to death has passed along.
I ask you: Has the Singer said
Wherefore his spirit is not dust?
Marlowe went muttering to death
When he had done with song and lust.
As the volume in which Mr. Eliot’s poem appeared was published in
1920 and as Mr. Tate’s poem was not printed until 1922 and then in a
magazine, Mr. Eliot must be accorded priority rights in the manner
in which both poems are written. Yet we know directly from Mr. Tate
that he was writing in this manner long before he was aware that Mr.
Eliot was also writing in this manner. Since to an American poet who
has not been transplanted an American poet transplanted to England
is as good as an English poet, the complicated situation now reads
something like this: between Mr. Osbert Sitwell, an English poet and
Mr. T. S. Eliot, an American poet transplanted to England, there exists
a contemporary sympathy, stronger on Mr. Eliot’s side because he is
the transplanted one; but Mr. Eliot’s contemporary sympathies with
modernist English poets, shall we say, are only incidental in his
work--he is, in the main, inimitably himself; yet not entirely so, for
other poets have contemporary sympathies with him, which he cannot
help, but which nevertheless detract from his inimitability; in fact,
at least one American poet has had a contemporary sympathy with him
as a modernist English poet (of whom he was not, at a time when the
sympathy was strong, aware), not as a transplanted American poet or a
resident American poet with whom a contemporary sympathy might have
existed without detracting from the inimitability of either; finally,
the situation is further complicated by the fact that a certain
contemporary sympathy did exist at the time of the poem “Non Omnis
Moriar”, between Mr. Tate and Mr. Davidson and Mr. Ransom, without,
as it later appeared, detracting from the inimitability of any one of
these in relation to any other--which makes an unconscious accidental
contemporary sympathy more significant than a sympathy derived from
conscious personal association. So the circle is tied, and so it might
be tied over and over again in contemporary poetry without making the
situation read more clearly.
It might, however, be made clearer than it is if bigoted inefficiency
of criticism were replaced by an intelligent policy of laissez-faire;
which would allow that a variety of modes may exist side by side
in a period, having strong or slight dissimilarities and strong
or slight correspondences with one another; that sometimes the
dissimilarities can be explained as conscious disaffections or as
the unconscious result of dissimilar personal background; that
sometimes the correspondences can be explained as conscious affections
or affectations or as the unconscious results of similar personal
associations, a personal association being at times nothing more
definite than a certain literary slant two poets may have caught
from some common source of infection--Mr. Tate, without having read
Wordsworth or his imitators, might as easily have caught the Wordsworth
germ as the Eliot germ, had he happened to be constitutionally subject
to infection from it.
The situation would be clearer still if many dissimilarities were left
as unexplainable, except as facts of absolute personal eccentricity;
and if many correspondences were left as unexplainable, except as
facts of mysterious personal coincidence not to be accounted for in
terms of causality or of excessive openness to infection from without.
Some obvious correspondences must be explained, if only because
they are easily explained, and because poetry in which too obvious
correspondences occur is part of the clutter in the poetry of any time
that can be immediately cleared away. The following complete poems are
all by different authors:
The beech-leaves are silver
For lack of the tree’s blood.
At your kiss my lips
Become like the autumn beech-leaves.
An old willow with hollow branches
Slowly swayed his few high bright tendrils
And sang:
Love is a young green willow
Shimmering at the bare wood’s edge.
As cool as the pale wet leaves of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.
Among twenty snowy mountains
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the black bird
Richard Aldington, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound and Wallace
Stevens are the so-called authors of these poems. These might pass
as legitimate instances of correspondence and not be suspect as
parasitical inter-imitativeness, were any of the poems in themselves
of separate poetic importance; were not all of these poems, and many
more like them, closely dependent on one another--were they private
individuals and not members of an institution; and were not the
Imagist school, to which all of these poets at one time or another
belonged, a notoriously self-advertising institution. These things
being so, we are provoked to ask questions that we need not ask in the
case of legitimate instances of correspondence. Such as: who was the
inventor of the style of the first two pieces, Mr. Aldington or Mr.
Williams? or yet H.D. or F. S. Flint? Is not Mr. Williams at least
suspect for his later obvious imitation of T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings,
Edith Sitwell? Is not Mr. Aldington at least suspect as the husband of
H.D.? In the two last pieces who is responsible for the form? Who first
thought of imitating the Japanese _hokku_ form? Or rather who
first thought of imitating the French imitations of the _hokku_
form? Did Mr. Aldington suggest a slightly shorter poem to Mr. Stevens
or Mr. Pound or did Mr. Pound suggest a slightly longer poem to Mr.
Aldington, etc., or did Mr. Pound and Mr. Stevens and Mr. Aldington
and Mr. Williams decide, as mutual pairs, to work as a school team, or
did Mr. Williams and Mr. Stevens and Mr. Aldington and Mr. Pound pair
off, as being by nationality more pairable--Mr. Pound, a transplanted
American, counting as either English or French, as the need may be?...
These are questions to concern the curious dustman, but not the plain
reader, least of all the critic. The reader, even the critic, does not
have to trouble to plot out a literary chart, to develop a carefully
graded technical vocabulary. All that either of them needs is a simple
and instinctive recognition of the real, which is easily discovered
if all other personal or critical questions are brushed aside as
irrelevant.
When modernist poetry or what, not so long ago, passed for modernist
poetry, can reach the stage where the following:
PAPYRUS
Spring ...
Too long ...
Gongula ...
is seriously offered as a poem, there is some justification for the
plain reader and orthodox critic who are frightened away from anything
which may be labelled ‘modernist’ either in terms of condemnation or
approbation. Who or what is Gongula? Is it a name of a person? of a
town? of a musical instrument? Or is it the obsolete botanical word
meaning ‘spores’? Or is it a mistake for Gongora, the Spanish poet from
whom the word ‘gongorism’ is formed, meaning “an affected elegance
of style, also called ‘cultism’?” And why “Papyrus”? Is the poem a
fragment from a real papyrus? Or from an imaginary one? Or is it the
poet’s thoughts about either a real or imaginary fragment? Or about
spring too long because of the gongula of the papyrus-reeds? Rather
than answer any of these questions and be driven to the shame-faced
bluff of making much out of little, the common-sense reader retires
to surer ground. Better, he thinks, presumably, that ten authentic
poets should be left for posterity to discover than that one charlatan
should be allowed to steal into the Temple of Fame. The plain reader
objects to the idea of charlatanry in poetry more than he objects to
the idea of stupidity, excess of learnedness, or honest inferiority:
charlatanry being dishonest superiority. As the usual type of
unorthodox critic is generally so superior himself that he either
tolerates charlatanry because it is superior or snubs it because it is
not superior enough; and as the usual type of orthodox critic is more
equipped with prejudices than the plain reader, if only because his
position forces him to know quantitatively more, and as he therefore
has a less reliable instinct than the plain reader for determining what
is genuine and what is not; the plain reader bears the full burden of
challenging and unmasking charlatanry. The critic, of whatever type,
is always over-cautious because his professional vanity is at stake
in his judgement. The plain reader, because he is of a disorganized,
unprofessional and unassisted majority, and therefore more easily
imposed upon if too ingenuous, is only over-suspicious.
So cautious and suspicious, in fact, is the whole reading population,
the critics and the readers, that a poet like Isaac Rosenberg, for
instance, a young English Jew who was killed in France and whose
poems were posthumously published, can pass them by altogether. Isaac
Rosenberg was one of the few poets who might have served as a fair
challenge to sham modernism. He had, one would say, everything to
recommend him. His verse was irregular but not too irregular; his
meaning was difficult but not too difficult; his references were not
far-fetched; he knew his Bible well--a great recommendation to any
public; and he died young and in battle. But he was not celebrated and
for this reason: that the two editors of his posthumous volume, Mr.
Bottomley and Mr. Binyon, both ‘safe’ poets, introduced him merely as a
poet of promise killed in defence of his country: “the immaturities of
style and taste are apparent on the surface”. The critics in England by
1922 had ceased to blow the trumpet over young poets of promise killed
in the War--the reaction against war-poetry had set in. In America,
however, because he was a Jew he was used as a pawn in literary
politics; but his vogue was short-lived. The real reason why he was
generally overlooked was that, in spite of falling into the friendship
of the early Georgian Group and accepting their criticism of his work
through loneliness, he was not classifiable as a member of a group, or
yet, because of his quietness, as a sensational individual type. The
following is a passage from his play _Moses_. A young Hebrew is
speaking of Moses himself:
Yesterday as I lay nigh dead with toil
Underneath the hurtling crane oiled with our blood
Thinking to end all and let the crane crush me
He came by and bore me into the shade:
O, what a furnace roaring in his blood
Thawed my congealed sinews and tingled my own
Raging through me like a strong cordial.
He spoke! Since yesterday
Am I not larger grown?
I’ve seen men hugely shapen in soul,
Of such unhuman shaggy male turbulence
They tower in foam miles from our neck-strained sight,
And to their shop only heroes come;
But all were cripples to this speed
Constrained to the stables of flesh.
I say there is a famine in ripe harvest
When hungry giants come as guests:
Come knead the hills and ocean into food,
There is none for him.
The streaming vigours of his blood erupting
From his halt tongue are like an anger thrust
Out of a madman’s piteous craving for
A monstrous baulked perfection.
Such work as this had to pass as ‘promise’; work better than this
will undoubtedly have to pass for a time entirely unnoticed; because
variety itself, especially when it becomes a social programme, tends
to harden into defined types, or groups, of variety. For an individual
poet to achieve the smallest popular reputation to-day he must,
indeed, have a certain ‘groupish’ quality, or, to put it differently,
he must suggest a style capable of being imitated; or he must be a
brilliant group-member or imitator. Otherwise he is likely, as one of
the consequences of the diversification of poetic activity, to be lost
to the literary news-sheets of every critical colour and not even to
occur as a subject of the plain reader’s suspicion or of the critic’s
caution: to exist, in fact, only unto himself. Which is not, if the
poet appreciates the privilege of privacy, so bad a fate as it sounds.
Never, indeed, has it been possible for a poet to remain unknown with
so little discredit and dishonour as at the present time. The prima
donna reputation acquired by Mr. Humbert Wolfe with work of the most
crudely histrionic and imitative brilliance (his original comma-effects
in _Kensington Gardens_ began it) should not only comfort the
obscure poet but drive him further into his obscurity.