It should theoretically be possible to make poetry out of anything
whatsoever of which the spirit of man can take cognizance. We find,
however, as a matter of historical fact, that most of the world’s best
poetry has been content with a curiously narrow range of subject-matter.
The poets have claimed as their domain only a small province of our
universe. One of them now and then, more daring or better equipped than
the rest, sets out to extend the boundaries of the kingdom. But for the
most part the poets do not concern themselves with fresh conquests; they
prefer to consolidate their power at home, enjoying quietly their
hereditary possessions. All the world is potentially theirs, but they do
not take it. What is the reason for this, and why is it that poetical
practice does not conform to critical theory? The problem has a peculiar
relevance and importance in these days, when young poetry claims
absolute liberty to speak how it likes of whatsoever it pleases.
Wordsworth, whose literary criticism, dry and forbidding though its
aspect may be, is always illumined by a penetrating intelligence,
Wordsworth touched upon this problem in his preface to _Lyrical
Ballads_—touched on it and, as usual, had something of value to say
about it. He is speaking here of the most important and the most
interesting of the subjects which may, theoretically, be made into
poetry, but which have, as a matter of fact, rarely or never undergone
the transmutation: he is speaking of the relations between poetry and
that vast world of abstractions and ideas—science and philosophy—into
which so few poets have ever penetrated. “The remotest discoveries of
the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist, will be as proper objects of
the poet’s art as any upon which he is now employed, if the time should
ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations
under which they are contemplated shall be manifestly and palpably
material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.” It is a formidable
sentence; but read it well, read the rest of the passage from which it
is taken, and you will find it to be full of critical truth.
The gist of Wordsworth’s argument is this. All subjects—“the remotest
discoveries of the chemist” are but one example of an unlikely poetic
theme—can serve the poet with material for his art, on one condition:
that he, and to a lesser degree his audience, shall be able to apprehend
the subject with a certain emotion. The subject must somehow be involved
in the poet’s intimate being before he can turn it into poetry. It is
not enough, for example, that he should apprehend it merely through his
senses. (The poetry of pure sensation, of sounds and bright colours, is
common enough nowadays; but amusing as we may find it for the moment, it
cannot hold the interest for long.) It is not enough, at the other end
of the scale, if he apprehends his subject in a purely intellectual
manner. An abstract idea must be felt with a kind of passion, it must
mean something emotionally significant, it must be as immediate and
important to the poet as a personal relationship before he can make
poetry of it. Poetry, in a word, must be written by “enjoying and
suffering beings,” not by beings exclusively dowered with sensations or,
as exclusively, with intellect.
Wordsworth’s criticism helps us to understand why so few subjects have
ever been made into poetry when everything under the sun, and beyond it,
is theoretically suitable for transmutation into a work of art. Death,
love, religion, nature; the primary emotions and the ultimate personal
mysteries—these form the subject-matter of most of the greatest poetry.
And for obvious reasons. These things are “manifestly and palpably
material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.” But to most men,
including the generality of poets, abstractions and ideas are not
immediately and passionately moving. They are not enjoying or suffering
when they apprehend these things—only thinking.
The men who do feel passionately about abstractions, the men to whom
ideas are as persons—moving and disquietingly alive—are very seldom
poets. They are men of science and philosophers, preoccupied with the
search for truth and not, like the poet, with the expression and
creation of beauty. It is very rarely that we find a poet who combines
the power and the desire to express himself with that passionate
apprehension of ideas and that passionate curiosity about strange remote
facts which characterize the man of science and the philosopher. If he
possessed the requisite sense of language and the impelling desire to
express himself in terms of beauty, Einstein could write the most
intoxicating lyrics about relativity and the pleasures of pure
mathematics. And if, say, Mr. Yeats understood the Einstein
theory—which, in company with most other living poets, he presumably
does not, any more than the rest of us—if he apprehended it exultingly
as something bold and profound, something vitally important and
marvellously true, he too could give us, out of the Celtic twilight, his
lyrics of relativity. It is those distressing little “ifs” that stand in
the way of this happy consummation. The conditions upon which any but
the most immediately and obviously moving subjects can be made into
poetry are so rarely fulfilled, the combination of poet and man of
science, poet and philosopher, is so uncommon, that the theoretical
universality of the art has only very occasionally been realized in
practice.
Contemporary poetry in the whole of the western world is insisting,
loudly and emphatically through the mouths of its propagandists, on an
absolute liberty to speak of what it likes how it likes. Nothing could
be better; all that we can now ask is that the poets should put the
theory into practice, and that they should make use of the liberty which
they claim by enlarging the bounds of poetry.
The propagandists would have us believe that the subject-matter of
contemporary poetry is new and startling, that modern poets are doing
something which has not been done before. “Most of the poets represented
in these pages,” writes Mr. Louis Untermeyer in his _Anthology of Modern
American Poetry_, “have found a fresh and vigorous material in a world
of honest and often harsh reality. They respond to the spirit of their
times; not only have their views changed, their vision has been widened
to include things unknown to the poets of yesterday. They have learned
to distinguish real beauty from mere prettiness, to wring loveliness out
of squalor, to find wonder in neglected places, to search for hidden
truths even in the dark caves of the unconscious.” Translated into
practice this means that contemporary poets can now write, in the words
of Mr. Sandburg, of the “harr and boom of the blast fires,” of “wops and
bohunks.” It means, in fact, that they are at liberty to do what Homer
did—to write freely about the immediately moving facts of everyday life.
Where Homer wrote of horses and the tamers of horses, our contemporaries
write of trains, automobiles, and the various species of wops and
bohunks who control the horsepower. That is all. Much too much stress
has been laid on the newness of the new poetry; its newness is simply a
return from the jewelled exquisiteness of the eighteen-nineties to the
facts and feelings of ordinary life. There is nothing intrinsically
novel or surprising in the introduction into poetry of machinery and
industrialism, of labour unrest and modern psychology: these things
belong to us, they affect us daily as enjoying and suffering beings;
they are a part of our lives, just as the kings, the warriors, the
horses and chariots, the picturesque mythology were part of Homer’s
life. The subject-matter of the new poetry remains the same as that of
the old. The old boundaries have not been extended. There would be real
novelty in the new poetry if it had, for example, taken to itself any of
the new ideas and astonishing facts with which the new science has
endowed the modern world. There would be real novelty in it if it had
worked out a satisfactory artistic method for dealing with abstractions.
It has not. Which simply means that that rare phenomenon, the poet in
whose mind ideas are a passion and a personal moving force, does not
happen to have appeared.
And how rarely in all the long past he has appeared! There was
Lucretius, the greatest of all the philosophic and scientific poets. In
him the passionate apprehension of ideas, and the desire and ability to
give them expression, combined to produce that strange and beautiful
epic of thought which is without parallel in the whole history of
literature. There was Dante, in whose soul the mediæval Christian
philosophy was a force that shaped and directed every feeling, thought
and action. There was Goethe, who focussed into beautiful expression an
enormous diffusion of knowledge and ideas. And there the list of the
great poets of thought comes to an end. In their task of extending the
boundaries of poetry into the remote and abstract world of ideas, they
have had a few lesser assistants—Donne, for example, a poet only just
less than the greatest; Fulke Greville, that strange, dark-spirited
Elizabethan; John Davidson, who made a kind of poetry out of Darwinism;
and, most interesting poetical interpreter of nineteenth-century
science, Jules Laforgue.
Which of our contemporaries can claim to have extended the bounds of
poetry to any material extent? It is not enough to have written about
locomotives and telephones, “wops and bohunks,” and all the rest of it.
That is not extending the range of poetry; it is merely asserting its
right to deal with the immediate facts of contemporary life, as Homer
and as Chaucer did. The critics who would have us believe that there is
something essentially unpoetical about a bohunk (whatever a Bohunk may
be), and something essentially poetical about Sir Lancelot of the Lake,
are, of course, simply negligible; they may be dismissed as
contemptuously as we have dismissed the pseudo-classical critics who
opposed the freedoms of the Romantic Revival. And the critics who think
it very new and splendid to bring bohunks into poetry are equally
old-fashioned in their ideas.
It will not be unprofitable to compare the literary situation in this
early twentieth century of ours with the literary situation of the early
seventeenth century. In both epochs we see a reaction against a rich and
somewhat formalized poetical tradition expressing itself in a
determination to extend the range of subject-matter, to get back to real
life, and to use more natural forms of expression. The difference
between the two epochs lies in the fact that the twentieth-century
revolution has been the product of a number of minor poets, none of them
quite powerful enough to achieve what he theoretically meant to do,
while the seventeenth-century revolution was the work of a single poet
of genius, John Donne. Donne substituted for the rich formalism of
non-dramatic Elizabethan poetry a completely realized new style, the
style of the so-called metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century.
He was a poet-philosopher-man-of-action whose passionate curiosity about
facts enabled him to make poetry out of the most unlikely aspects of
material life, and whose passionate apprehension of ideas enabled him to
extend the bounds of poetry beyond the frontiers of common life and its
emotions into the void of intellectual abstraction. He put the whole
life and the whole mind of his age into poetry.
We to-day are metaphysicals without our Donne. Theoretically we are free
to make poetry of everything in the universe; in practice we are kept
within the old limits, for the simple reason that no great man has
appeared to show us how we can use our freedom. A certain amount of the
life of the twentieth century is to be found in our poetry, but precious
little of its mind. We have no poet to-day like that strange old Dean of
St. Paul’s three hundred years ago—no poet who can skip from the heights
of scholastic philosophy to the heights of carnal passion, from the
contemplation of divinity to the contemplation of a flea, from the rapt
examination of self to an enumeration of the most remote external facts
of science, and make all, by his strangely passionate apprehension, into
an intensely lyrical poetry.
The few poets who do try to make of contemporary ideas the substance of
their poetry, do it in a manner which brings little conviction or
satisfaction to the reader. There is Mr. Noyes, who is writing four
volumes of verse about the human side of science—in his case, alas, all
too human. Then there is Mr. Conrad Aiken. He perhaps is the most
successful exponent in poetry of contemporary ideas. In his case, it is
clear, “the remotest discoveries of the chemist” are apprehended with a
certain passion; all his emotions are tinged by his ideas. The trouble
with Mr. Aiken is that his emotions are apt to degenerate into a kind of
intellectual sentimentality, which expresses itself only too easily in
his prodigiously fluent, highly coloured verse.
One could lengthen the list of more or less interesting poets who have
tried in recent times to extend the boundaries of their art. But one
would not find among them a single poet of real importance, not one
great or outstanding personality. The twentieth century still awaits its
Lucretius, awaits its own philosophical Dante, its new Goethe, its
Donne, even its up-to-date Laforgue. Will they appear? Or are we to go
on producing a poetry in which there is no more than the dimmest
reflection of that busy and incessant intellectual life which is the
characteristic and distinguishing mark of this age?