Twenty-five years ago, when my generation were beginning to find their
way around in the world of print and paint, a group of us used to
meet occasionally to share each other’s discoveries in contemporary
thought and literature. You may smile at the association of the date
1904 and contemporary literature, and confessedly some of the objects
of our attention were fantastic enough--Elbert Hubbard, Edward Howard
Griggs, and even “I, Mary MacLane.” The more daring among us were
delving in Haeckel and Henry George; our conservatives, according to
their bents, delighted in Kipling and Barrie, or a group of alluring
Celts, or became expert in discriminations between the earlier and the
later manner of Henry James. We all read, of course, William James and
Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells and Chesterton. In poetry, to be sure, we
had no such variegated menu as the contemporary road-house affords; I
should say that our diet was easily digestible and a little saccharine.
For the most part, as I recall, we followed along the vagabondia trail
after Richard Hovey and Bliss Carman. In that old college town near the
coast, we could still thrill to such verses as
Three of us without a care
In the red September
Tramping down the roads of Maine,
Making merry with the rain,
With the fellow winds a-fare
Where the winds remember.
Frost and Sandburg, Lindsay and Masefield, had not come into our
world--much less Walter de la Mare or Aldous Huxley or Robinson
Jeffers. But we were not so entirely neglected by the contemporary
muse as you may suppose. We knew the early work of Yeats, and “The
Hound of Heaven” of Francis Thompson; we had discovered the sonnets
of Santayana; we could repeat a large part of _A Shropshire Lad_; and
of course for our more cosmic moods we had Walt Whitman. Hundreds of
other such groups must have existed, like ours callow, inexperienced,
bumptious, but very inquisitive, very receptive. Not against us did the
“new poetry” (no longer such) have to hurl its bolts.
And even in that distant, unreal decade of the nineteen-hundreds,
before President Roosevelt, by a few kindly pages in the _Outlook_, put
Edwin Arlington Robinson’s name into every one’s mouth, we knew the
poet of “Tilbury Town” (only thirty miles from our own). There was one
poem of his whose meaning used to be a great subject of dispute,--for
we were than naïve enough to think that a poem must be susceptible of
some rational explanation. It was entitled “Cortège,” and had appeared
in the _Captain Craig_ volume of 1902.[45]
Four o’clock this afternoon,
Fifteen hundred miles away:
So it goes, the crazy tune,
So it pounds and hums all day.
Four o’clock this afternoon,
Earth will hide them far away:
Best they go to go so soon,
Best for them the grave to-day.
Had she gone but half so soon,
Half the world had passed away.
Four o’clock this afternoon,
Best for them they go to-day.
Four o’clock this afternoon
Love will hide them deep, they say;
Love that made the grave so soon,
Fifteen hundred miles away.
Four o’clock this afternoon--
Ah, but they go slow to-day:
Slow to suit my crazy tune,
Past the need of all we say.
Best it came to come so soon,
Best for them they go to-day:
Four o’clock this afternoon,
Fifteen hundred miles away.
The half-benumbing, half-intensifying effect of the “crazy tune,” the
curious way in which a mere pattern of words can usurp the mind, now
stealing its attention from the very grief they point to, and now
flashing upon it a new aspect of that grief--something like that,
I suppose, accounts for the fascination the poem had for us. But a
number of us were dissatisfied with an explanation so simple. No, we
wanted to know, first, who and how many persons were being buried at
four o’clock to-day, and their relationship to the poet (was it, for
instance, a former sweetheart and her husband?), and whether “she” in
the third stanza was one of the deceased, and in what sense it could
be said that Love “made the grave so soon,” and what “half so soon”
meant--was it any different from “twice as soon”? We even calculated
that the burial must be taking place some fifteen hundred miles to the
_west_, since otherwise, all (Protestant) funerals being held commonly
at two o’clock, the poet’s time would be twelve noon instead of four
afternoon. All, of course, very silly and irrelevant questions.
Only a few years ago, in a poetry course, I was recalling these old
agitations of ours, as a warning, I feel sure, against such literalness
of interpretation. But, as will happen with class-room instruction, my
admonitions produced quite the opposite effect from that intended, for
one member of the class was so intrigued by the problem, even as we had
been twenty years before, that he evolved the staggering theory that
the poem was not about a funeral at all, but about a marriage. This
ingenious view having been communicated, in a circuitous way, to Mr.
Robinson, he settled the matter quite simply with the following note to
the inquirer:
“I have long given up attempting to interpret my own poetry, but
in this instance, would go so far as to suggest a funeral rather
than a marriage. I remember this poem chiefly as a more or less
reprehensible experiment in sound and feeling--a performance more
pardonable thirty years ago--perhaps--than it would be to-day.”
Of course, it was not Mr. Robinson’s performance, but ours, which was
reprehensible. We were treating an “experiment in sound and feeling”
as we might have treated a deposition in court or an application for
the payment of life-insurance; we were bringing to a poem an attitude
of mind alien to its character _as a poem_. It was as if one should
read Mr. Frost’s “The Thatch” and demand to know _why_ he “would not
go in till the light went out.” For “Cortège” in essential matters is
not cryptic in the least; it is only irrelevant, external details that
are left unexplained. And ultimately, I suppose, what we call a taste
for poetry, of any except a very elementary sort, depends upon the
possession of tact or intelligence to perceive just such a distinction.
I have used this personal recollection because much more frequently
to-day and to a greater degree a somewhat similar feeling of puzzlement
assails the reader of contemporary poetry. This simple instance of an
obscurity gratuitously created by readers may lead to the consideration
of a problem of poetic form more comprehensive than any question of
mere technique (though technical elements of poetry are involved in
it too), I mean the question of those necessities which are laid on
poetry from its being a form of communication between mind and mind.
For, I believe, from misapprehension and confusion in this matter,
on the part now of poets and now of their readers, springs, to some
extent, the unsatisfactory state of poetry at the present time. On
the one side, there is reported a feeling of exasperation, by readers
competent enough in other kinds of literature or in the older poetry,
who “can make nothing of this modernist stuff,” and on the other side
the modernists’ rejoinder that such readers are precisely in the
position of my group of twenty-five years ago--lacking the intelligence
to grasp what is essential and to disregard non-essentials. Surely a
consideration of the nature and limits of that community of mind which
must be assumed to subsist between the poet and his readers is not
foreign to the subject of this book.
I
At the outset we encounter the Crocean view of all art, including
poetry, as expression merely, and conversely of all expression
as art. But leaving the confusions of Signor Croce to be dealt
with by others,[46] we are warranted in assuming, I think, that,
generally and typically, the poet desires communication with other
persons,--conceivably only one other person, or persons of the
future, but at any rate communication and not merely self-expression.
Otherwise, he wouldn’t publish or circulate or read his poems, as
generally and typically poets do. The theory of Laura Riding and
Robert Graves[47] that the poet publishes (or “externalises”) only
out of consideration for the rights of the poem, which, like physical
offspring, has attained an independent status with a life of its own,
is a naïve and superfluous bit of mystification, sufficiently answered
by the query, “Why then sign one’s name?”--and I have not remarked any
unusually wide return to the practice of anonymity. And one is led
to wonder, as one turns the pages of our more advanced periodicals,
what possible readers some of these poets are addressing. After a
moderate success in comprehending, let us say, such diverse productions
as those of the mediæval mystics, the wits of the Roman Empire and
the Restoration, the English metaphysical poets, and the symbolist
group in France, and after a period of conscientious schooling in
the pronouncements of this newest movement, it is disconcerting to
find oneself completely balked by the innocent-appearing contents of
the latest anthology of verse. Among the ten possible but improbable
interpretations of some poem, it seems somehow less than a sporting
chance that the one you finally choose as the least implausible will be
what was intended.
Take, for instance, this poem of Mr. Wallace Stevens, which I select
not as an example of that writer’s often delightful connoisseurship in
verse, but as fairly representative of this decline in what has been
called “communicative efficacy.”