A survey of modernist poetry — A Closer Reading

osy glory above me, a great religious feeling overcame me; I seemed in the presence of God. There was a ringing in my ears. I felt warm and cold at once. But after a time the wind made me feel sleepy, so I turned in.” Now it would be possible to call either of these poems impressionist in the colloquial sense, for they would record objectively or subjectively the poet’s impressions with a view to reproducing them in the reader. In reality, however, they would convey only a vague and somewhat insincere atmosphere, as would a formalized version of Cummings’ early poem _Sunset_. For an actual experience of this sunset one would have to go to some such poem as Cummings’. In it would be found a complicated recipe for a sunset experience, as if for a pudding, not merely a description of what the pudding looked like or how it tasted. For such a method turns the reader into a poet.

This _Sunset_ poem of Mr. Cummings, then, is not, strictly speaking, Mr. Cummings’ poem, but the poem of anybody who will be at pains to write it. What at first sight strikes the plain reader as external peculiarities that hindered him from approaching the meaning of the poem--its oddness of form--now appear to be the poet’s means of avoiding that conventional form which generally does stand between the reader and the poem. Indeed, if we look upon form as something distinct from the subject-matter of a poem, in this sense true impressionist poems are usually without form; or rather they are capable of having a new form with every reader. The poet blends the subject of the poem with the feelings that the subject arouses into one expression. This unity makes the poem a living whole; it is impressionistic, but not because the subject and the feelings it arouses become indefinite in the combination. They make a blend, not a blur.

Looking on impressionism as one of the earliest manifestations of the general modernist tendency to overcome the distinction between subject-matter and form, we realize that Valéry draws the same old-fashioned line between _music_ and _idea_ that Poe did; that he subscribes, in fact, to the historically most familiar conception of poetry. He is a classicist in the musical associations he gives his poems, all intricately designed to create the indefinite feelings that he desires to arouse in the reader. Although in his choice of the images through which he conveys poetic ideas he is a modernist, the images apparently intended, that is, to arouse _definite_ feelings, these feelings are really more like the physical sensation a thing gives than the idea of itself it gives. To these definite feelings provoked by the images, or, we might say, the thought, of a poem of Valéry’s, the indefinite feelings provoked by the _sounds_ of the words form a musical background. In fact, paradoxically, it is in this musical background that the ideas are suggested rather than in the logical thought of the images. Valéry deliberately suppresses Reason in poetry; but he allows the musical background to make the logical connections between the images. And this is what we mean by calling him a classicist in form and a modernist in the thought-content of his poems. He handles the modernist problem of achieving a unity between form and subject-matter by letting form suggest the subject of the poem and thought-content do all that form is ordinarily supposed to do. The only reason for calling this method impressionistic is that it does not and could not succeed in arriving at an ingenious balance between the two sets of feelings, definite and indefinite, which are supposed to combine to give the poetry meaning; all it results in is the vague blur that impressionism has come to stand for in its most derogatory sense.

Valéry is only one familiar contemporary example of these modern French theories of poetry which have had such an abnormal and unwholesome influence on the younger poets of America and England. In Cummings’ defence it should be said that, though his poetry by its immediate effect of oddness does invite labels, it is possible to understand it without reference to labels. Particularly as regards the label _impressionism_--it is not necessary to associate him with it in order to explain the poem _Sunset_; although as an impressionist he makes a very good case for impressionism. But any fairly good poet can be used to justify any practicable theory of poetry, however inadequate a theory it may be by which to write poetry. Shakespeare, indeed, can be used to justify impressionism or any other poetic theory simply because he is such a good poet. It would be as reasonable to explain Shakespeare, who was independent of poetic theory, in terms of impressionism as by any of the poetic theories prevailing at his time. It would be wrong to overlook the influence on Shakespeare of contemporary theories, but it would be false to say that he wrote as he did from a conscious use of these theories. If Shakespeare had been critical in the way a good poet is generally supposed to be, then we should expect to find in Shakespeare merely evidences of well-chosen poetic theories. As a matter of fact, his work was such a clearing-house of good and bad elements in contemporary poetry and drama that they cannot have been introduced by any conscious critical choice.

It would be as absurd to say that Cummings sat down to write a poem with all the rules of impressionism before him as to say that Shakespeare sat down to write a play with all the theories of the so-called ‘university wits’ before him. These men--Lodge, Peele, Greene, Nashe, Lyly, and Marlowe--had to set themselves the deliberate task of compromising between the old popular type of play, which was very violent, disorderly and exciting, and the new blank-verse play on the classical model, which was very orderly and very dull. They had for the time being to treat the drama as a scientific problem. But when we get past Marlowe’s early work and past Kyd’s _Spanish Tragedy_ we find the drama no longer treated as a problem; it is already a successful convention; the London theatres are paying concerns, and Shakespeare, fortified by his long apprenticeship in these theatres, has nothing to worry about. These dramatic experimenters provided him with a legacy; but he was the natural heir to it by the right of his genius. What were conscious theories in the dramatists of the previous generation became in him native habits. We may say generally that there are no technical inventions in Shakespeare’s plays or sonnets. The nearest thing to invention in Shakespeare is his original use of other people’s inventions. The convention of the Court Fool, introduced by the wits to make a link between the old farcical play and the new classical tragedy, was no longer with Shakespeare mere comic relief, but a living, even a serious, part of the tragedy itself. Likewise with the sonnet: though pre-Elizabethan experiments with the sonnet, which little by little removed it from the Italian model, were made by Wyatt and Surrey, the Elizabethan sonnet is nevertheless called after Shakespeare, in spite of the fact that Shakespeare made no new experiments with it, that by the time it reached him it had been successfully used by all the Elizabethan small fry. Yet the sonnet theory can be proved in Shakespeare’s sonnets as all pre-Shakespearian dramatic theories can be proved in his plays.

An undue prominence is given to poetic theories either when people who are not real poets are encouraged by the low state of poetry to try to write it themselves: such poets must obviously depend on theories in proportion as they are wanting in genius. Or when critics without any poetic sense attempt to explain changes in poetry to themselves and to the reading public. No genuine poet or artist ever called himself after a theory or invented a name for a theory. And it was surely a critic who first pointed out the distinction between subject-matter and form, and from this began to philosophize on form; as it is surely criticism which has always stood between poetry and the plain reader, made possible the writing of so much false poetry and, by granting too much respect to theories, lost the power of distinguishing between what is false and what is true.

The struggle on the part of poets to make subject-matter and form coincide in spite of criticism is an old one, as old, perhaps, as the first critic. It should not be confused with attempts to make form suit subject-matter (as the Pindaric Ode was cast to contain any stately flattery); or to suit subject-matter to a popular form (as the sonnet has become a general utility form designed to do for a variety of subjects). The whole trend of modern poetry is toward treating poetry like a very sensitive substance which succeeds better when allowed to crystallize by itself than when put into prepared moulds: this is why modern criticism, deprived of its discussions of questions of form, tries to replace them by obscure metaphysical reflections. Modern poetry, that is, is groping for some principle of self-determination to be applied to the making of the poem--not lack of government, but government from within. Free verse was one of the largest movements toward this end. But it has too often meant not self-government but complete laissez-faire on the part of the poet, a licence to metrical anarchy instead of a harmonious enjoyment of liberty. Strangely enough, when we come upon an example of free verse that shows clearness and restraint and proportion, we do not think of it as free verse, though we do not think of it, on the other hand, as poetry of a traditional form. And this is as it should be. An example is the opening of a poem by Hart Crane, _Passage_:

Where the cedar leaf divides the sky I heard the sea. In sapphire arenas of the hills I was promised an improved infancy.

The rhyme between _sea_ and _infancy_ is not strong enough to mislead one into construing this as a regular stanza. The impression of regularity comes from a careful alternation of images, from a regularity of design more fundamental than mere verse regularity. The authorized version of the Bible, in passages where the original text was in poetic form, is the most familiar example of this:

The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: How are the mighty fallen! Tell it not in Gath, Publish it not in the streets of Askelon; Lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, Lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph.

The effect of regularity is here again achieved by the recurrence of ideas in varying alternations to show the movement of the poem. As in Mr. Crane’s poem a parallelism exists between the first and third lines and the second and fourth, the third and fourth carrying the imaginative experience of the first and second to a more specialized meaning, from which the direction of the remainder of the poem may be taken; so in the Biblical lines quoted a parallelism also exists between the _beauty of Israel_ and _the mighty_, and between _slain upon thy high places_ and _fallen_ of the first and second lines. The scorn with which the last four lines here must be pronounced is obviously dictated by the ironic contrast between the _high places_ of Israel and the _streets_ of Gath and Askelon (the streets of these cities being generally trenches below ground-level) and between the _beauty of Israel_ and the _daughters of the Philistines_. In Mr. Crane’s poem the sympathetic connection between the first four lines and the rest of the poem depends not so much on the general technical symmetry of the poem as on the use of the images directly stated in these lines in a more indirect and complicated sense in the following lines. Poetry so treated is nothing more than a single theme subjected to as many variations as its first or simplest statement will allow, even to the point where it ironically contradicts itself. There is in it no room for, and no reason for, a separate element of form. Obvious mechanical form imposed on a poem, unless the poem is deficient in the balance of its ideas, is like architectural dressing that spoils the natural proportions of a building and has not even structural usefulness.

How, now, does the question of form affect the long poem? Let us take Tennyson’s _In Memoriam_, which embroiders the theme of his friend’s death in a sequence of episodes, and T. S. Eliot’s poem, _The Waste Land_, which enlarges the introductory theme of the death and decay implicit in Spring to embrace the death and decay implicit in all forms of hopeful human energy. In the first, the same rhymed stanza is maintained through all the varying moods of the poem; in the second the progress of the poem is marked by the most sensitive change--not only from episode to episode but from passage to passage. It is just at these delicate transitions from one atmosphere to another, where the separate parts are joined into a single continuous poem, that the poetic quality is to be looked for. No such transitions are to be found in Tennyson’s poem, or for that matter in a poem like the _Aeneid_: length in such poems means bulk. The poem is as long as the poet’s endurance and the reader’s patience permit.

Just how long this will be depends on the period in which it is written: we generally find long poems when poetic themes are limited to a few approved subjects, such as war, religion, lamentation or love. The length of the poem is then only a sign of the dignity of the subject. It has not until recent times been considered as something beside dignified bulk. A long poem was not thought to need the same unity as a short poem: the unchanging metre was enough to keep the loosely connected parts of the poem together. This is the case with _In Memoriam_, where the different sections are digressive rather than progressive. But _The Waste Land_ has to be read as a short poem: that is, as a unified whole. The reader can no more skip a passage in it than a line in a short poem and expect to understand the poem. For it is not a long poem in the usual sense of being a number of short poems in a uniform metre, joined by mere verse padding.

When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone, She smooths her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone.

This formal rhymed stanza, reminiscent of Goldsmith, is by Mr. Eliot ironically applied to a sordid modern love-scene. We are to go from here back to a romantic picture of Queen Elizabeth and Leicester in amorous progress down the same Thames over whose waters the noise of this gramophone is now carried. How is the transition between these two passages made? The ten-syllabled iambic line of the stanza quoted turns into blank verse beginning with a romantic quotation from _The Tempest_, getting more and more ragged as the music is interrupted by the Thames-side noises, and finally trailing off with syncopated phrases suggested by a mandoline.

“This music crept by me upon the waters” And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street. O City city, I can sometimes hear Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street, The pleasant whining of a mandoline And a clatter and a chatter from within Where fishermen lounge at noon; where the walls Of Magnus Martyr hold Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.

The step is now made from the riverside to the river by allowing the rhythm to break up into short verse units proper to a river song.

The river sweats Oil and tar The barges drift With the turning tide Red sails Wide To leeward, swing on the heavy spar. The barges wash Drifting logs Down Greenich reach Past the Isle of Dogs. Weialala leia Wallala leialala

The lyrical quality of this passage is, according to the poet’s explanatory note, to be associated with the song of the Rhinedaughters in _Götterdämmerung_. And this operatic atmosphere imposed on a modern river-scene makes the fitting transition to the picture of Elizabeth and Leicester not in a barge foul with oil and tar but in a gilded state-barge:

Elizabeth and Leicester Beating oars The stern was formed A gilded shell Red and gold The brisk swell Rippled both shores Southwest wind Carried down stream The peal of bells White towers Weilala leia Wallala leilala

In contrast with this apparently irregular transition, let us consider three successive sections of _In Memoriam_: 119, 120, 121. The first is a return in reverie to the early days in Cambridge when Tennyson and his dead friend were undergraduates. Arthur Hallam seems to stand before him as in life:

And bless thee, for thy lips are bland, And bright the friendship of thine eye; And in my thoughts with scarce a sigh I take the pressure of thine hand.

This stanza closes the first section. The next section continues in exactly the same metre. But not only are the sections separated by a double space and further cut off from each other by a new numbering; when we begin to read section 120 we seem to be in an entirely different poem.

I trust I have not wasted breath: I think we are not wholly brain, Magnetic mockeries; not in vain Like Paul with beasts, I fought with death;

We find him here right in the midst of an elementary philosophical discussion of Darwinism and the materialistic conception of the universe. Apparently we are supposed to read in this the triumph of mind over matter as particularly shown by the poet’s persistence in regarding his friend as still alive. This may also be a reminiscence of undergraduate discussions on the same subject. But we only make these connections in default of a true connection between the texts of the separate sections. This is not a case of making the lazy reader think and work along with the poet, but of the lazy poet taking advantage of his reader’s faith and industry. The next section begins:

Sad Hesper o’er the buried sun And ready, thou, to die with him, Thou watchest all things ever dim And dimmer and a glory done:

Here again no strict connection can be construed. That the section opens in this strain is probably due to a reaction against the prosy scientific language he used in the previous section. Casting about for a more elegiac tone, the poet is naturally brought back to Milton’s _Lycidas_, from which he borrows the image of the setting sun, emblem of his dead friend. It is all very well to be able to account for Tennyson in this way. It does not, however, justify his binding together of random leaves from his poetic notebook into a long poem. The division into sections has certainly done away with the padding that would have been necessary had the poem been treated as a continuous piece without breaks. But it does not conceal the fact that these sections have no logical connection with one another. Deprive the poem of its sectional division; deprive it of its metrical regularity; and it will appear the loose and ill-assorted bundle of lost ideas it really is. Such feeble and false material would certainly not be tolerated in a poem which, like _The Waste Land_, had to invent its metrical changes as it went along. It is especially in the long poem that the distinction between form and subject-matter has the most vicious effect. In a short poem, even if form and subject-matter are not made identical, it is possible to keep them proper to each other: as in Milton’s _L’Allegro_. Compare this with its companion piece _Il Penseroso_, which is a praise of pensive melancholy as the former is a light-hearted denial of melancholy; and the metre will be found to be identical, though it is used with a different effect in both.

But come thou Goddes fair and free, In Heav’n ycleap’d Euphrosyne, And by men, heart-easing Mirth, Whom lovely Venus, at a birth With two sister Graces more To Ivy-crownèd Bacchus bore;

is exactly the same metre as: