Quite unexpectedly as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb--
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:
And there, there overhead, there, there, hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing,--nothing at all.
Here Archibald MacLeish, who stands somewhere between the centre and
the extreme left wing in poetry, employs a traditional verse-form
in a poem the theme of which is the absurdity of the spectacle of
human antics in a cosmos without intelligibility or significance. He
guards against any specious effect of “fulfilment” by the unexpected
reiteration of the word _nothing_. Yet there remains the regrettable
necessity of rounding out the sestet and capping the rhyme; and, more
important, the method of presentation has imposed an adventitious
kind of order on a scene which, in the poet’s apprehension of it, is
an even wilder scramble and jumble of absurdities. And so the sonnet,
thoroughly “modern” in spirit, is quite conservative in technique.
The distinctiveness of this new poetry, indeed, is less a matter of
measures, whether new or old, than of the principle of association
by which it is governed. It aims at an organisation of images and a
succession of rhythms which spring more immediately from the poet’s
stream of consciousness.
In attempting to divert this stream through the reader’s mind, without
spilling over or filtering, some recent poets have adopted startling
innovations in typography, including punctuation, use of capitals and
small letters, spacing, and line-division. The fashion is prompted in
part by a spirit of mere impishness, but back of it also is a certain
amount of genuine experimentation in the resources and the graphical
representation of language, the object being to prod the reader out of
the lethargy and complacency which, it is alleged, are fostered by the
conventions of verse-form and page-arrangement. Undeniably, if one is
willing to play this game and doesn’t mind having the rules made up as
one goes along, some of the results are amusing. You will understand
most readily what it is all about if you first take one of these poems
down from some one’s dictation, then attempt to write it as you think
the poet would do to bring out the subtler shadings and nuances, and
finally compare your representation of the poem with his. Here, for
instance, are the words (written as ordinary prose) of a poem by E. E.
Cummings from a group called “Impressions.”
“I was considering how, within night’s loose sack, a star’s
nibbling infinitesimally devours darkness, the hungry star,
which will eventually jiggle the bait of dawn and be jerked into
eternity, when over my head a shooting-star burst into a stale
shriek like an alarm-clock.”[52]
On the chance that at this point the reader may wish to try the
experiment which has been suggested, I postpone to a later page Mr.
Cummings’s original arrangement of the words. If you will compare his
printing of the poem with that above, you will see how the tininess and
the quick little repeated nibbles of the mouse at the grain-sack are
suggested by the short, broken lines; how ingeniously the shooting-star
is made to interrupt the poet’s revery; how the effect of flare,
streaking, and slower fading is conveyed in the printing of “bursts”;
and how the new simile of the alarm-clock impinges upon the retinal
image of the meteor.[53] But--“the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon
exhausted.” After scrambling up a hundred or so of these typographical
escarpments, I found that there was seldom a view from the summit
commensurate with the discomforts of the climb, and my interest in
the new sport began to flag. It is hard to imagine a mature artist
interesting himself for long in this sort of preciosity.
Though each individual’s inner life is in a measure unique, the
mere attempt to convey some fraction of it to others by written or
printed words presupposes a certain shared and common ground of human
experience. Freshness, piquancy, gusto, can be properly savoured only
when they are delicately blended with “human nature’s daily food.” The
importance of a common understanding upon essentials is clear in the
sphere of our personal relationships, which become rich and satisfying
only with the mutual recognition of things that may be _taken for
granted_; oddities and varieties are most engaging in those with whom
we already own a fundamental bond. Now the forms and conventions of
poetry may be regarded as so many aids to the speedier establishment of
such understanding between reader and poet,--the indispensable means
by which an original experience is so shaped and clarified that it has
significance for others. No one of these conventions, naturally, is
absolutely fixed or static, and skilful manipulation of their elements
is constantly yielding new and unsuspected possibilities of æsthetic
pleasure, and even of social comprehension. For this reason we may look
with a tolerant and not unfriendly eye upon such experimentation by
some of our younger poets as I have described.[54] Nevertheless, it is
imperative that persons who wish to modify or to replace the accepted
vehicles of poetic expression should have a clear understanding of
what convention in literature or art is _for_. Adequate treatment of
this subject would require a separate book, and here I must content
myself with a mere statement of faith: that some set of assumptions as
to the experiences most valuable and important for mankind--in other
words, of universals in the Aristotelian sense--is as necessary in
the establishment or the maintenance of an æsthetic convention as in
any purely social or political activity. Indeed, the most promising
development in American poetry at the present time, I believe, is to
be found, not in these centrifugal and eccentric movements, but in the
considerable amount of genuine if less spectacular work which is being
done upon the lines of a firmly rooted literary tradition.[55]