II

In the last few paragraphs, though concerned primarily with the aspect

of communicability, I have been skirting the topic which lies at the

centre of all movements of thought and feeling in our day, and with

which I shall be concerned through the rest of this essay. I refer

to the prevalent spirit of disillusionment, a state of mind which in

America has made itself felt, acutely and widely, only within the last

three or four years.

Certainly the mood of the younger generation of poets (the men and

women now in their twenties or early thirties) is very different from

the poetic temper of fifteen years ago--those exciting, strained,

exalted, painful years that witnessed, among other things, the rise

of the “new poetry” in England and America and, somewhat later, the

beginning of the war. Any comprehensive view of the stream of poetry

warns us not to make too much of these twists and turns between one

decade and the next; yet there is some reason to think that we have now

reached or are approaching one of the major bends in the course. The

“poetic renascence” of 1912-1917 was, it is true, in reaction against

certain nineteenth-century attitudes,--against its Puritan code in

morals and its tradition of gentility in belles-lettres; as some one

has said, it delighted in hurling bricks at the silk hat of Hamilton

W. Mabie; but to the most characteristic force of nineteenth-century

thought and life--namely, an expansive philosophy of naturalism,

embraced with enthusiasm and glorified by a romantic imagination--it

merely gave a fresh impetus.

The serene and humble mould

Does in herself all selves enfold--

Kingdoms, destinies, and creeds,

Great dreams, and dauntless deeds,

Science that metes the firmament,

The high, inflexible intent

Of one for many sacrificed--

Plato’s brain, the heart of Christ;

* * * * *

Out of the earth the poem grows

Like the lily, or the rose;

And all man is, or yet may be,

Is but herself in agony

Toiling up the steep ascent

Toward the complete accomplishment

When all dust shall be, the whole

Universe, one conscious soul.[56]

These lines by John Hall Wheelock epitomise the thought that had been

the main inspiration of the nineteenth century. Despite their regular

metrical form, with its reminiscence of Emerson, we recognise in them

the ecstatic evolutionary naturalism of Walt Whitman.

Indeed, it was the spirit of Whitman, more than any other, that

presided over our “poetic renascence.” Not, of course, that all the

poets who made their appearance in those years were akin to him. Frost,

for instance, was hardly more like Whitman than he was like Pope;

consciously, in his living and in his poetry, he was facing and he has

continued to move in just the opposite direction. Nor perhaps in the

work of Masters or of Robinson[57] is the relation to Whitman at once

apparent, for superficially neither the _Spoon River Anthology_, that

sardonic record of stunted human growths, nor Robinson’s sombre studies

of the thwarted lives of his New Englanders suggest the tolerance,

the breadth and human warmth of the older poet’s sympathies. But the

analysis of these unfortunate victims of a repressive and unhumane

morality (for such is the way the poetry of both writers was commonly

described, and such, in one aspect, it is) was really in line with

Whitman’s gospel of emotional emancipation, as well as with the new

direction given to psychology by Freud and Jung. In the work of Lindsay

and Sandburg, and notably in that of the far less original Oppenheim

(whose disappearance from current collections is itself significant

of the change that has taken place), the influence of Whitman was

patent. All the spokesmen and contemporary critics of the movement,

from Amy Lowell (1917) to Bruce Weirick (1924), with varying degrees

of emphasis, stress Whitman’s primacy in American literature. He had

had his lovers and disciples before, but now for the first time a

group of American poets could give him whole-hearted welcome with no

inner abashment to overcome. Throughout the earlier productions of the

movement, even in the poems of the Imagists, whose theory and practice

of verse were so different from his own, is diffused the vibrant

spirit of Walt Whitman. It is experienced as a certain buoyancy and

expectancy of mood, and most characteristically as an underlying trust

in a life-force which is felt to be working here in America to high,

unforeseen ends.

It would be an over-simplification, but somewhere near the heart of the

matter, to say that the presence we are most aware of in the poetry of

to-day is not Walt Whitman, but Thomas Hardy--his desolating irony,

at least, if not his artistic and personal elevation. These younger

poets accept, but coldly and without enthusiasm, the account which

contemporary science offers of the universe and of the human make-up,

and they are as hostile to the glowing affirmations of the great

romantics as they are to the evasions and tepidity of the Victorians.

Perhaps this is but an inversion, a different guise, of that restless

and changeable temper which we call romanticism, but to me at least

its emergence seems to be more significant than were any of the varied

energies released by the last poetic movement. This new spirit is not

more characteristic of poetry, of course, than of other expressions

of the age. To some extent, though less here than abroad, it is an

after-effect of the war--the inability of nervous organisations

overstrained by the excitements of those years to respond to normal

stimuli. It may be briefly described as a despair of achieving any

reading of life in its totality which will be tolerable in the light

of all we know and feel. “In the course of a few centuries,” writes

Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch in _The Modern Temper_, “[man’s] knowledge, and

hence the universe of which he finds himself an inhabitant, has been

completely revolutionised, but his instincts and his emotions have

remained, relatively at least, unchanged. He is still, as he always

was, adjusted to the orderly, purposeful, humanised world which all

peoples unburdened by experience have figured to themselves, but that

world no longer exists.” This modern sense of frustration differs

from states of disillusion or pessimism experienced in the past in

two respects. It is, for one thing, more widespread, producing a

considerable body of poetry of sheer negation, turning some writers

to mere elaboration of surfaces and appearances, and making itself

felt as an undercurrent, now cynical, now passionate, in much

writing which seems superficially to be almost free of philosophical

implications. And secondly, this spirit of denial is a more positive

and uncompromising thing than we have known in the past. Not only is it

unable to effect any synthesis of its intelligence and its emotional

promptings; it has come to believe that such a synthesis is in the

nature of things impossible. It grows “more and more likely,” continues

Mr. Krutch, “that [man] must remain an ethical animal in a universe

which contains no ethical element.” His dilemma is that he cannot

either feel as his intelligence bids him or think as his emotions would

have him. Even the highest of the personal emotions, love itself, which

had somehow eluded the cold touch of nineteenth-century science, has

not been able to withstand the psycho-analysis of the twentieth. “Have

you not heard,” asks the lady in _Cavender’s House_,

“Have you not heard yet, anywhere, death-bells ringing

For Love and poor Romance? Biologists

And bolshevists are ringing them like mad--

So loud that Love, we’re told, will soon be lost

With dodos, dinosaurs, and pterodactyls.”

Specifically, a feeling is abroad that poetry is at some kind of crisis

or turning-point, and there are even predictions that poetry of a sort

that the past would recognise as such cannot continue much longer to be

produced.

The poetry of T. S. Eliot has been praised for its seizing of just

this aspect of the modern situation, the sense of frustration, of

insignificance. “The passions which swept through the once major

poets,” writes Mr. Krutch, “no longer awaken any profound response,

and only in the bleak, tortuous complexities of a T. S. Eliot

does [the present age] find its moods given adequate expression.”

Love-making carried on with an accompanying sense of its futility

and ridiculousness, an acquaintance with art and poetry which serves

only to confirm misgivings as to their relevancy for us to-day, the

employment of religious symbols to arouse a poor mirthless mockery--in

such experiences our young intellectuals find mirrored the age and body

of their time. The cryptic character of the writing, the sometimes

arbitrary connection between one image and the next, the casual

allusions to one person’s recondite reading, are all indications of

the contemporary sense of the individual’s isolation. The broken

rhythms, the fragmentariness of the scenes or movements, the deliberate

foregoing of any rational principle of organisation, reflect the

feeling of the fragmentariness of life itself, the modern inability to

effect any kind of integration of experience. And this, we are told by

some, is the only kind of poetry which an honest and sensitive mind in

an age like ours can be expected to produce.

Mr. Eliot, though no longer belonging even nominally to American

literature, is worth attention because of his present high reputation

in intellectual circles. He has written literary criticism of a kind

especially needed at the present time, based as it is on a wide

knowledge of literature, informed by a delicate taste, and guided by

severe yet humane standards. And in his poetry he has shown himself

capable of finding a comedy of the mind in these hesitations and

inhibitions of modernity,--as in the early “Love Song of J. Alfred

Prufrock.” By the haunting, individual rhythms of his poems alone,

we are apprised of an exceptional poetic endowment. Yet Mr. Eliot’s

literary output, poetry and prose, constitutes, to my mind, one of the

most arresting paradoxes of this paradoxical age: an advocate of the

sterner disciplines of the past (“classicist in literature, royalist in

politics, and anglo-catholic in religion”), who gives to these causes

all the organising power of a firm intelligence, and is content to let

his poetry express chiefly the states of confusion, doubt, faintness,

with which the positive principles of his thought have had to wrestle.

“We are the hollow men,

We are the stuffed men.”

In a recent essay Mr. Eliot has ventured the opinion that a great

event in the intellectual world would be the conversion of Professor

Irving Babbitt to Roman or Anglo-Catholicism, but, he concludes

regretfully, such a consummation, though devoutly to be wished, is

hardly likely, for Mr. Babbitt “knows too much.” Perhaps an even more

salutary conversion, in its immediate effects upon other poets, would

be Mr. Eliot’s compassing, in his creative work, of those genuinely

classical values of which, in his critical writing, he shows such fine

apprehension. For a transformation of that kind, one need not fear that

any man of letters knows too much. One may at least entertain the hope

that Mr. Eliot’s permanent reputation as a poet is not going to lie

in the fact that he has voiced, more completely than any one else in

verse, the confusion and disillusionment of this post-war generation.

The humanist is aware that poetry, like mythology, possesses no

power of conferring immediate revelation of truth; he knows that its

scenes and personages, its thoughts and passions, from the earthiest

to the most ethereal, belong to the world of unsubstantiality, of

illusion--of dreams, if you will. He will go further: this element of

illusion, this impassable gulf between reality and our comprehension

or representation of reality, is not confined to poetry and mythology;

it is part of all our conscious life; it baffles us even in our

attempt to comprehend that nearest thing of all--ourself. “... beneath

the surface of all we see and feel, beneath the very act of seeing

and feeling, lies the unredeemed chaos of desires and impressions,

unlimited, unmeaning, unfathomable, incalculable, formless, dark.

Life is but appearance, and this personality we call by our name is

but illusion within illusion.”[58] But working within the illusion is

also a power to control and order these impulses, to check them or to

bring them into a harmonious co-operation, yielding a serenity and a

sense of stability which, of all human experiences, seems freest of

illusion. It was the characteristic error of much nineteenth-century

poetry (of Browning’s in England, of Whitman’s in America) to limit

personality to the mere welter of desires and feelings, to find there

its central “urge” (the favourite word of romantic criticism), and

to erect upon such foundations a philosophy of the “ideal.” But the

hollowness of _this_ illusion (the philosophy which found an immediacy

of truth in natural instincts, impulses, and feelings) has to-day

become all too apparent; and when its former adherents ask where then

certainty can be found, they are bidden to direct their gaze to the

abstract world of the physicist and the mathematician. Here, in the

words of Mr. I. A. Richards, “intellectual certainty is, almost for

the first time, available, and on an unlimited scale.”[59] But even

if this were so,--and one hears of developments in these fields that

appear to make the certainty considerably less than absolute,--it would

still be a certainty about matters that have no particular relation to

the behaviour and feelings of human beings, and that give no support

for poetry. The beguiling mirage of an Absolute fostered by romantic

poetry has disappeared, only to be replaced by the mirage of another

Absolute, terrifying though incomprehensible. And so we have come to

the _impasse_ already described.

From the point of view of the humanist, what has so suddenly collapsed

is the towering structure of nineteenth-century romanticism, not any

dwelling necessary to the continued life of poetry. For he has long

recognised those metaphysical limitations with which contemporary

physics is so deeply entangled; and he has been unwilling to trust

metaphysics, any more completely than natural science, with the whole

determination of a philosophy of life. Instead of asserting that

intellectual certainty in the field of science is available now almost

for the first time on an unlimited scale, he would postulate a large

degree of what amounts to _practical_ certainty, in all that concerns

us most nearly as ethical beings, available now, as it has been for

centuries. This assurance is embodied, for him, in the dualism of the

great historic religions, in the teachings of Socrates and of Jesus,

and in the most persistent traditions of European literature. But

its final sanctions are not found in any “great tradition,” however

imposing; they are arrived at empirically and experimentally by any

one who, divesting his mind of shibboleths and catch-words, will

honestly examine his own impulses and springs of action. In his own

soul he will find the cleavage, the dualism, which runs through human

nature. This opposition of forces, by whatever names he calls them,

by whatever symbols he represents them, may never be resolved; but in

his mysterious power of intervention in their unending conflict lies,

for him, the ultimate reality within the illusion. To the reading of

poetry, then, he will bring the same habit of discrimination that

serves him in the conduct of life, mindful that it is still a world

communicating with ours by the gate of horn and the gate of ivory, and

that the phantasms which issue therefrom may light our way a few steps

nearer truth, or may deepen for us the shadows of the dark, chaotic

flux.

To the consciousness of intellectual defeat and spiritual dismay,

evidenced so widely in contemporary literature, it is not to be

expected that poetry will for the present make any very direct or

explicit answer. For we do not look to poetry for polemics, for the

formulation of ethical or metaphysical ideas; and when poetry tries

to assume a burden that belongs rather to criticism and philosophy,

the result may have literary interest and excellence, as does Pope’s

_Essay on Man_, but is more likely to be merely dull and forced, like

the later work of Wordsworth or Browning. In either case some fulness

of life belonging to poetry when confident in its own right is missing.

No, what we look for in the poet is some more pervasive or implicit

evidence of his scale of values, some intuitive, and for that reason

more certain, indication of the quality of his response to life, felt

as unmistakably in his imagery, his diction, and his rhythms as in

those more ponderable elements of style which the eighteenth century

called “fable” and “sentiments.” Thus, in two stanzas[60] of A. E.

Housman--

The year might age, and cloudy

The lessening day might close,

But air of other summers

Breathed from beyond the snows,

And I had hope of those.

They came and were and are not

And come no more anew;

And all the years and seasons

That ever can ensue

Must now be worse and few.

--something that belongs to his deepest intuition (his acceptance,

without evasion and without reconciliation, of life’s transitoriness)

is caught in the very movement of the lines and the simplicity of the

words:

They came and were and are not.

This pervasive sense of things chiefly valued and most deeply felt,

which every great poet’s work gives us, is surely not determined

altogether by forces external to him. The poet is something more than a

highly sensitised receiving-set for remote, scattered goings-on in the

world at large. What we prize in every poet we come to know intimately

is some irreducible, _given_ quality of the personality. We shall not

easily accept, therefore, the current argument that, in an age like

ours of dissolving faiths, the only genuine kind of poetry must be one

which has cut itself off from belief of any kind.[61] The history

of English literature is not lacking in instances of poets who have

withstood the pressure of their age: to recall only the greatest, the

poems of Milton, from _Lycidas_ to _Samson Agonistes_, are triumphant

testimonies against the idea that poetry need be so utterly subject to

contemporaneous disintegrating influences. But if we claim for poetry a

certain power of immunity from such forces, neither, by the same course

of reasoning, should we expect too much from the _direct_ effect upon

it of those forces which we think salutary, such as humanism.

I do not mean to suggest here the notion of poetry’s having a life of

its own in any transcendental sense, or to imply that poets possess

mysterious astral powers. My thought is simply that the new humanism,

before it is given any large imaginative expression in American poetry,

must expect to prove its worth by responding to broadly human, and

not alone specifically poetic needs. It will do this by its power

of bringing harmony into lives which are ordered in accordance with

its insight, of establishing in society “a current of fresh and true

ideas,” and of creating thus “a quickening and sustaining atmosphere”

which poetry can breathe. I feel no need of apologising for my use of

these well-worn phrases of Matthew Arnold; not only was he the best

representative of the spirit of humanism in nineteenth-century England

or America, but also, in his realisation of the hopeless disparity

between natural processes and human aims, he anticipated the very

pattern of our own dilemma. The paralysis which came over Arnold’s

poetic powers in later life is sometimes attributed to the steady

growth of his humanistic interests, requiring the ampler medium of

prose. However that may be, I believe it certain that his humanism--his

sense, that is, of the worth and fruitfulness of human powers when

wisely exercised and his acceptance of the limitations which such a

view imposes--gave to his poetry nearly all that power of invigoration

and refreshment for which we chiefly value it. A contemporary critic,

R. H. Hutton, observed how frequently Arnold closes a poem on the

burdensomeness of existence by some seemingly unconnected figure or

story, such as the simile of the Tyrian trader in “The Scholar Gipsy,”

instinct with the pride and buoyancy of old world enterprise. “‘The

problem is insoluble,’ he seems to say, ‘but insoluble or not, let

us recall the pristine strength of the human spirit, and not forget

that we have access to great resources still.’”[62] In such ways

to-day, indirectly and obliquely, humanism may make itself felt as one

influence among many upon contemporary poetry: by rendering accessible

and operative, for the poets as for the rest of us, some of these

moral energies from times of more robust faith and higher intellectual

vitality than our own.