I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was grey and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
Now the elements of this experience--the jar, its shape, colour, and
quality, the hill in Tennessee where it is placed, the behaviour or
appearance of the wilderness, the bird, the bush--stand doubtless in
some kind of relation with each other in the poet’s mind, have possibly
certain symbolic values. Since we have no clues to these relationships
and values, our mind is free to do anything it pleases with the bare
grey jar, the hill, and the wilderness. This freedom, however, and any
pleasure we may take in the separate images, in the rhythms, or the
placing of the words, are not sufficient compensation for the state of
uncertainty and slight irritation in which we are left. Very likely
the little poem is meant to suggest nothing more than the superiority,
to an intensely civilised person, of the simplest bit of handicraft
over any extent of unregulated “nature,” but it has been seriously
interpreted to me, by devotees of recent poetry, as, respectively, an
_objet d’art_, a sex-symbol, and a burial-urn containing the remains of
a valued friend. And so it must remain, for me, not only like nothing
else in Tennessee but like nothing else in the universe.
Considerable damage was done to this shallow affectation of knowingness
of the last few years by Max Eastman’s witty article in the April
(1929) _Harper’s_. A young intellectual from one of our well-known
private schools told me that members of his group were observed to
discontinue their perusal of _transition_[49] upon the appearance
of Mr. Eastman’s “The Cult of Unintelligibility.” But contemporary
poetry is still afflicted by an acute attack of that extreme of
Puritanism--separatism: it asserts the right not only of private
judgment, but of a private symbolism,--which is, æsthetically, of
much graver consequences. My point here, of course, has nothing to do
with the values or qualities of the experience which the writer is
presumably seeking to share. I am simply saying that, in the reading
of the slightest as of the most profound poem, a sense of singleness
or wholeness is the most essential part of the experience, and that
this totality of effect cannot be achieved if all clues to the way the
poem is organised are withheld or too casually indicated. The enigmatic
character of Dr. William Carlos Williams’s poems, we are told, is due
in part to his habit of jotting down free-verse impressions in the
intervals between his professional visits to patients. I can only hope
that in writing out his prescriptions he makes a greater allowance for
the mental capacity of the pharmacist than he seems to make for mine.
To speak bluntly, the difficulty of reading much “modernist” verse is
due less to the superior sophistication or cleverness of these writers
than to their essential lack of art.
By contrast, in the following lyric of Elinor Wylie, even though it is
a repudiation of something accustomed, beautiful, and comforting, there
is so clear and deft an employment of symbol, so perfect a fusion of
mood with image, that the effect of totality is achieved; the peace
denied to this orthodox landscape (or universe) is momentarily attained
in the very denial of it, and thus one of the functions of poetry is
discharged.