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Title: Contemporaries And Snobs Author: Laura Riding Date: 1928 Language: en Topics: poetry, modernism, art criticism, literature, history, academy, sociology, individualism, gertrude stein, ts eliot,
Contemporaries and Snobs
MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY POETICS
Series Editors
Charles Bernstein
Hank Lazer
Series Advisory Board
Maria Damon
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Alan Golding
Susan Howe
Nathaniel Mackey
Jerome McGann
Harryette Mullen
Aldon Nielsen
Marjorie Perloff
Joan Retallack
Ron Silliman
Jerry Ward
LAURA RIDING
Edited by Laura Heffernan and Jane Malcolm
THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS
Tuscaloosa
Introduction, supplemental notes, bibliography, and index copyright ©
2014
The University of Alabama Press
Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Contemporaries and Snobs © Cornell University Library
First published 1928. Restored © owned by Division of Rare and
Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
Typeface: Minion and Futura
Cover image: Courtesy of Laura Heffernan and Jane Malcolm.
Cover design: Mary Elizabeth Watson
â
The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements
of American National standard for information sciencesâpermanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Riding, Laura, 1901â1991.
Contemporaries and snobs / Laura Riding ; edited by Laura Heffernan and
Jane Malcolm.
pages cm. â (Modern and contemporary poetics)
Originally published: Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Doran, 1928.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8173-5767-2 (quality paper : alk. paper) â ISBN
978-0-8173-8737-2 (e book) 1. Poetry. I. Heffernan, Laura, editor. II.
Malcolm, Jane editor. III. Title.
PN1136.J27 2014
808.1âdc23
2013030768
We Must Be Barbaric: An Introduction to Contemporaries and Snobs
1. Poetry and the Literary Universe
II. Poetry, Out of Employment, Writes on Unemployment
III. Escapes from the Zeitgeist
IV. Poetic Reality and Critical Unreality
2. T. E. Hulme, the New Barbarism, and Gertrude Stein
3. The Facts in the Case of Monsieur Poe
We Must Be Barbaric: An Introduction to Contemporaries and Snobs
1. Poetry and the Literary Universe
II. Poetry, Out of Employment, Writes on Unemployment
III. Escapes from the Zeitgeist
IV. Poetic Reality and Critical Unreality
2. T. E. Hulme, the New Barbarism, and Gertrude Stein
3. The Facts in the Case of Monsieur Poe
We would like to thank the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections,
Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University for their assistance.
Elizabeth Friedmann's knowledge of Laura Riding's life and letters is
vast, and she provided us with crucial insight at key stages of our
research. Charles Bernstein and Josephine Park were our earliest readers
and supporters. Our thanks also to Jeremy Braddock, Lisa Samuels, and
Rachel Buurma for their help along the way.
An Introduction to Contemporaries and Snobs
Laura Heffernan and Jane Malcolm
I was, as a poet, an inveterate propounder of a necessity of
non-distinction between person and poet.
âLaura (Riding) Jackson, âAn Autobiographical Summaryâ
Laura Riding's Contemporaries and Snobs, first published in 1928, drew a
line down the center of the literary scene in the late 1920s. With
characteristic incisiveness, Riding divided friends from foes: she
counted as enemies those âsnobs,â or critics, who sought to systematize
and professionalize modern poetry. As allies, Riding counted all
âcontemporariesâ who continued to honor poetry as an individual and
eccentric practice. Yet Riding's bold and uncongenial treatise was not
merely a call to arms in and of the modernist moment. For readers today,
it offers a compelling accountâby turns personal, by turns historicalâof
how the institutionalization of modernism denuded experimental poetry.
Most importantly, Contemporaries offers a counter history of the
idiosyncratic, of what the institution of modernism left (and leaves)
behind. With Gertrude Stein as its figurehead, the book champions the
non-canonical, the âbarbaric,â and the under-theorized. Riding's nuanced
defense of a poetics of the person in Contemporaries represents a
forgotten but essential first attempt to identify and foster what is now
a well-defined poetic lineage that leads from Stein to the experimental
avant-garde.
Riding began writing Contemporaries in 1926, but the book did not appear
until early 1928. The latter half of the 1920s was a prolific period for
Riding. Her A Survey of Modernist Poetry, written with Robert Graves,
appeared in late 1927, followed by Contemporaries in February of 1928,
Anarchism Is Not Enough (the creative sequel to Contemporaries) in May,
and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (also written with Graves) in July.
Contemporaries is the most ignored of this varied bunch, perhaps because
it responds so directly to the criticism and poetry of its moment.
Riding takes her readers on a remarkably thorough tour through the
âself-critical, severe, sophisticatedâ literary scene of the 1920s (53).
Among other influential treatises, she considers T. S. Eliot's The
Sacred Wood and his editorial essays in The Criterion, Allen Tate's
âPoetry and the Absolute,â John Crowe Ransom's essays on the modernist
poet, Edgell Rickword's essays in The Calendar of Modern Letters, and
Herbert Read's posthumous publication of T. E. Hulme's essays.
All of this criticism, Riding notes, gave modern poets a sheen of
seriousness and professionalism, but was it good for poetry? Her
decisive answer is âno.â Poets, taking their marching orders from
criticism, had begun to churn out deadened, impersonal poetry that gave
voice to an imagined âzeitgeistâ rather than individual experience.
Contemporaries was Riding's attempt to stem this tideâto resist the
consolidation of poetic experimentalism into monolithic modernism. Not
only a critical diatribe, Contemporaries was also a self-help manual for
those poets who wished to write âoutside the shelter of contemporary
criticismâ (4). To sustain these âincorruptible individuals,â Riding
builds a purely provisional canon of poets as persons, writers who use
language to sense the unknown (4). Her perceptive reading of Stein forms
the cornerstone of this revaluation of the personal in poetry, and she
uses the example of Stein's âbarbaricâ writing to question the very
process of self-representation that languageâStein's âarrangement in a
system to pointingââmakes possible (Tender Buttons 245). At a moment
when poet-critics were offering poets a loaded choice between naive
expressionism and sophisticated impersonality, Riding denounced both as
escapist. As modernism turned self-referentially inward, Contemporaries
forged a pathway outward toward newly referential uses of language,
toward an unknown and unsanctioned poetry of the person.
From A Survey of Modernist Poetry to Contemporaries and Snobs
Riding was better situated than most to reflect on modernism's
condensation. By 1928, she had come into contact with an astonishing
number of modernist groups in Nashville, New York, London, and Paris. As
an early member of John Crowe Ransom's Fugitive Group in Nashville, she
befriended Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren. Her poetry first appeared
in the pages of The Fugitive in 1923 and later in Harriet Monroe's
Chicago-based Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. In 1925, Riding moved from
Louisville to Greenwich Village where she befriended Hart Crane and met
Eugene O'Neill, Edmund Wilson, and Kenneth Burke. While in New York,
Riding corresponded with Robert Graves who had written in admiration of
her poem âThe Quids.â She soon moved to England to live with Graves and
his wife, Nancy Nicholson. Riding and Graves's collaboration (and
eventual romantic relationship) continued throughout the 1920s, when
they moved between Egypt, Islip, Vienna, Hammersmith, Germany, Paris,
and Mallorca. During this time, Riding published creative work with
Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press, was introduced to Gertrude
Stein, exchanged work with Wyndham Lewis, and contributed essays to
Eugene Jolas's Joyce-centric little magazine transition. Of the three
essays collected in Contemporaries, two had debuted in other venues. The
second chapter and core of the book, âT. E. Hulme, the New Barbarism,
and Gertrude Stein,â was published in transition in 1927 as âThe New
Barbarism and Gertrude Stein,â and again, in altered form, as the
âConclusionâ to A Survey of Modernist Poetry, while a version of the
volume's third chapter, âThe Facts in the Case of Monsieur Poe,â
appeared in transition as âJamais Plusâ and was given as a talk to the
undergraduate Oxford English Club in March of 1927 (Friedmann 102).
Riding herself was one of the first critics to coin the term âmodernistâ
to describe a group of contemporary poets, and she and Graves are cited
accordingly in the Oxford English Dictionary's entry. Their A Survey of
Modernist Poetry (1927) was the first formal study to consider the work
of E. E. Cummings, Hart Crane, Conrad Aiken, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound,
Vachel Lindsay, T. S. Eliot, John Crowe Ransom, Edith Sitwell, and Allen
Tate as a single movement. In that volume, Riding and Graves set out to
consider whether the âplain readerâ was justified in his complaint that
the modernist âpoet means to keep the public outâ (Survey 10). Selecting
a few representative examples of modern poetry, Riding and Graves
carefully considered the significance of the poems' format, or the ways
in which their radical formal departures, viewed together, came to
signify a new modernist poetry. Through such close interpretations
Riding and Graves modeled how the plain reader might âmake certain
important alterations in his critical attitudeâ in order to appreciate
Cummings as much as Shakespeare, John Crowe Ransom as much as Wordsworth
(10).
Though Survey of Modernist Poetry defends modernist poets from charges
of willful obscurity, Riding and Graves resisted the urge to put forward
an overarching definition or theory of modernism. Indeed, we can already
see in that volume the beginnings of Riding's fears that poetic theories
were overtaking poetry. In frequent asides, the Survey warns poets about
the danger of âgranting too much respect to theoriesâ or committing
oneself to the âofficial programmes of such dead movements as Imagismâ
and expresses disdain for those âwho need the support of a systemâ or
adopt one as a way of âattempting to justify [poetry] to civilizationâ
(Survey 126). In the âConclusionâ to Survey, a version of Chapter 2 of
Contemporaries, Riding and Graves jettison the âcontemporary sympathyâ
they have shown for modernist poetry in order to consider it as a
movement that âmay have already passedâ:
We have been writing as it were from the middle of the modernist
movement in order to justify it if possible against criticism which was
not proper to it. . . . It is now possible to reach a position where the
modernist movement itself can be looked at with historical (as opposed
to contemporary) sympathy as a stage in poetry that is to pass in turn,
or may have already passed, leaving behind only such work as did not
belong too much to history. (258)
Here, at the end of Survey, we see Riding and Graves âleavingâ modernism
âbehindâ: no longer defending it from the inside, they now scrutinize it
from the outside.
Contemporaries extends this newly skeptical perspective on a âmodernist
movementâ that, having just come into clear view, now seems about to
âpass in turn.â Indeed, the modernism of Contemporaries is markedly
different from that of Survey. Where Survey presented close readings of
individual poems, Contemporaries takes a distant, multicentury view of
modernism's development. Where Survey presented modernism as âunpopularâ
with contemporary critics and readers, Contemporaries finds evidence
everywhere of modernism's newfound prestige, evenâperhaps
especiallyâamong the mainstream press and the middle classes. From the
suburban Bournemouth Poetry Society's advertisement for a âpaper by Mrs.
Leslie Goodwin on âFurther Aspects of Modern Poetry,ââ to the fact that
the London Mercury dares not question [T. S. Eliot's] The New Criterion,
(28) to the way Eliot's poems become instant classics upon their
publication, all signs point to the sanctification of modernismâa status
that seems, in Contemporaries, as ill-deserved as its negative
reputation seemed in Survey (29, 28).
One way to understand the drastic shift in perspective between the two
volumes is to consider that modernism's new recognition and popularity
did not extend to Riding herself. Having once felt herself working in
concert with many modernist groups and owing allegiance to none, Riding
suddenly found herself an onlooker to the mainstream of modernismâa
mainstream dominated by male critics. Indeed, Riding begins a 1927
letter to Wyndham Lewis by explaining: âI belong (most decidedly) to no
group.â Reviewers (most famously, William Empson) repeatedly failed to
credit Riding as co-author of Survey, despite Graves's insistence that
their collaboration had been âword by wordâ (Friedmann 100). Riding's
correspondence from this era, preserved in the Laura (Riding) Jackson
archive at Cornell University, documents her dogged attempts to make
publishers and authors responsible for their errors of attribution.
Riding's archive tells a similarly bleak tale about the publication and
reception of Contemporaries. Though the book was a solo effort (written
over several years and for various venues), Graves traded on his own
success to secure its publication: when Jonathan Cape sought to publish
Graves's popular biography of T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence and the Arabs
(1927), Graves made it a condition of his contract that they also
publish Contemporaries (Friedmann 107). In 1933, Riding's publisher
wrote to request her permission to remainder the unsold copies from the
modest print run of Contemporaries. Indeed, the volume was so under-read
that no one would bat an eyelash two years later when Geoffrey West
matter-of-factly adopted Riding's own opposition between the
âphilosophicalâ criticism of T. E. Hulme and T. S. Eliot on the one hand
and Stein's writing on the other, in order to dismiss Riding herself. In
Deucalion: Or the Future of Literary Criticism, written for Kegan Paul's
To-Day and To-Morrow series, West announced that âphilosophical criticsâ
like T. E. Hulme and T. S. Eliot were âof greatest importanceâ to the
future of literary criticism, âwhile reference may . . . be omitted to
such isolated, unrelated phenomena as the smoky brilliances of Miss
Rebecca West and the ultra-feminine Steinish incoherencies of Miss Laura
Ridingâ (48â49).
Despite the chauvinism that Riding faced, Contemporaries hardly reads
like a personal complaint, nor does the gossipy feel of the title extend
to the essays. Graves wrote to T. S. Eliot in 1926 that âher critical
detachment is certainly greater than mineâ (qtd. Friedmann 78). Instead,
Contemporaries offers perhaps the most distanced, historical analysis
possible of how and why Riding's fellow modernists traded their
individuality for the security of a professional institution. And though
Riding advocates, in Contemporaries, for a poetics of the âperson,â the
volume's voice is hardly personable. Riding insists that readers
understand her embrace of Stein and a poetics of the person not as
feminist revaluations but as matter-of-fact corrections to modernists'
symptomatic, even effeminate, attempts to escape from personality.
Indeed, it is Riding's own detachment, imperiousness, and misogynist
mud-slinging that makes Contemporaries such a fascinating documentâa
critical book that denounces criticism's growing influence. (The
self-contradictions of Riding's position would only increase. After
denouncing critical organs like The Criterion in Contemporaries, Riding
would in 1935 found Epilogue, a little magazine which, as Joyce Wexler
has documented, Riding edited with an iron fist in an attempt to
institutionalize her very particular point of view.) These paradoxical
positions, perhaps even more than Riding's specific argument, reveal a
moment in which the range of avant-garde possibilities seemed suddenly
whittled down into equally distasteful options: to become an âaffiliated
memberâ (53) of modernism, which held a monopoly on intellectual
seriousness, or to find oneself shelved with the book-club âpoetry
enthusiastsâ (29).
The Argument of Contemporaries and Snobs
The opening sections of Contemporaries offer a broad historical account
of how the rise of scientific empiricism has gradually marginalized
poetry. Crucially for Riding, science and poetry are equal forms of
knowledge but with different orientations to the world. Science uses
what Riding terms âconcrete intelligence,â which âregards everything as
potentially comprehensible and measurableâ (5). In contrast, âpoetic
intelligenceâ evinces âan accurate sensation of the unknown, an inspired
comprehension of the unknowableâ (5). Centuries ago, Riding argues, the
two coexisted without rancorâeach occupying its own âcorner of human
knowledgeâ (33). But over the course of the nineteenth century, which
âshowed a more material increase than perhaps any other preceding
century in this mass-consciousness of human knowledge,â scientific
empiricism began to take precedence and to popularize the false idea
that all life might be measured and known (7). Riding describes, for
instance, how concrete intelligence gives birth to ânatural man,â a
scientific specimen âwho did not act originally; he did not act at all.
It was his function to be observedâ (2). This passive, statistical
version of man takes the place of the âerratic person,â upon whose
activity and unknowability poetry had thrived.
Turning to the twentieth century, Riding describes how poetry has
gradually become ashamed of itself. In the face of natural man, it
develops a distaste for idiosyncrasy and a âshame of the personâ (11);
in the face of concrete intelligence, it ceases to regard its
âilluminating ignoranceâ as a species of knowledge at all (1, 5).
Riding's metaphors suggest that poets, within a rationalized modernity,
have come to seem like unprofitable workers: society gives poetry its
âdismissal papersâ (28) and âPoetry, Out of Employment, Writes on
Unemploymentâ (5). Like underemployed workers, poets begin to reflect
upon their social position, develop a collective consciousness, and
unionize in order to put themselves back to work. Riding describes how
individual poets have, increasingly in the twentieth-century, gathered
together under the auspices of the âpublic institutionâ of literary
criticism. Rather than looking to their own erratic personhood for
poetic inspiration, they look now to the collective, critical mandates
of their time. Yet in the inhospitable atmosphere of rationalized
modernity, these critical mandates have themselves become increasingly
directive and systematized. Riding likens poetry to any
organizationââthe army, or the navy, for exampleââthat introduces
âgreater internal disciplineâ when its âprestige . . . is curtailedâ
(53).
In the remainder of Chapter 1 and in Chapter 2, Riding looks to the
modernist literature and criticism around her to offer an astonishing
array of examples of literary culture's increased discipline. She
describes a new injunction to âwrite about nothingâ or about the death
of poetry itself (as in Edwin Muir's Chorus of the Newly Dead or Eliot's
The Hollow Men) (8). She detects a new scholastic tendency to look back
on the literature of the past as a continuous âtradition.â (She points
here, among other things, to James Joyce's âOxen of the Sunâ episode of
Ulysses in which Joyce provides a catalogue of past literary styles.)
Reviewing the table of contents for one issue of Eliot's The New
Criterion, Riding finds a new love of âpedigree, learning and literary
internationalismâ (25). She describes a new âemphasis on the medium as
material,â as in Ezra Pound's book on the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska (72).
She notes a new imperative for poets to express the âZietgeistâ to the
point of âself-extinction,â as in Eliot's âposthumousâ poetry or Edith
Sitwell's âstrict technical organization of her non-humanistic universeâ
(9). Above all, she finds a new philosophical inquiry into the function
of poetry itselfâAllen Tate's philosophizing about âPoetry and the
Absolute,â Pound's âmathematical and geometricâ metaphors, Eliot's
insistence that âin our time the most vigorous critical minds are
philosophical minds,â and everyone's elevation of T. E. Hulme's
âbarbaricâ criticism into a dogmatic philosophy of art (75, 25, 63).
Riding regards all of the above as signs of the increasing and
pernicious influence of literary criticism, which seeks to present poets
as serious specialists and thus to win back a modicum of status from an
uninterested society: âThe reason why contemporary critics are so
interested in inquiring into the nature of the function of literature is
not, as Mr. Eliot suggests, because they do not wish âto take for
granted a whole universeâ, but because a whole universe has given
literature its dismissal papersâ (28).
For Riding, then, the danger of this âforcedâ systematism is that it has
begun to change how poets write. A âgroup poetic mind,â the book argues,
lurks âat the elbow of the individual poet,â preventing him from writing
authentically because he is burdened by a self-referential network of
modernist institutions that dictate the terms of poetic composition
(54). A âprofessional conscience dawns on the poet,â creation and
criticism become folded into a single act (as Eliot had predicted), and
the poet begins to edit himself in the process of writing (53). The
results, in Riding's view, are disastrous: homogeneous, vacant poetry
that is âreally more interested in maintaining a defensive attitude
toward the literary past than in sponsoring a ânewâ poetryâ (4). Riding
mentions a few poetsâArthur Rimbaud, Robert Graves, and Hart Crane, for
exampleâwho have succeeded in avoiding these mandates, but the vast
majority have succumbed to the imperative to write impersonally.
Impersonality/Personality
Riding's preoccupation with the dangers of impersonality critically
shapes the argument in Contemporaries. The rise of an impersonal
aesthetic and the waning of emotion in modernist poetry are, for Riding,
symptomatic of an ironic romanticism, a need to âsuppress the obvious
because the obvious is often romantically (personally), therefore
sentimentally beautifulâ (70). Unlike many of her contemporaries, she
did not believe that the surrender of meaning or the disappearance of
the personal signaled bold shifts in literary practice. On the contrary,
Riding argues throughout Contemporaries that poets who disavow their own
âvulgar humanityâ (75) are in fact ashamed of it and of the emotions
that shape their âorganic existenceâ as poets:
It is romantic to say, while denouncing as romantic the meanings which
the creative mind gives to its fictions, that these can only be valid if
they confess their meaninglessness. Is not a belief in the lack of
meaning in organic existence merely a new meaning that art is to adopt
for the sake of the prestige given it by the metaphysics from which it
is drawn? (68)
Poets who âconfess their meaninglessness,â to a certain extent do so in
order to avoid the shame and human difficulty of modernity, which for
Riding are precisely the realms poetry should confront.
Riding's seemingly anachronistic reclamation of the person, of the poet
as person, evinces her supreme ambivalence about modernism, and her
reasons for promoting a poetics of personality are as fascinating as
they are complex. Poets, Riding insists, might shed the âclassical
desideratumâ of mentors likes Eliot and Pound by embracing emotion,
personality, and embodied language as a condition of their art, so that
poetry might tell the truth (70). Yet this definition of poetry seems
contrary to the very underpinnings of modernismâthe unstable âI,â the
erased ego, the elevation of language over subject. Riding, whose own
Survey coined the term âmodernistâ to describe a generation of poets
invested in suppressing the âI,â declares that poetry should be
personal, that we cannot âsubstitute poetics for personsâ (47). This
statement is perhaps the best condensation of Riding's argument in
Contemporaries, the closest the book comes to providing a rallying cry
for her fellow poets. As a thesis it is controversial, to say the least,
and in this respect, Contemporaries seeks to refute Eliot's key
assertion, in âTradition and the Individual Talentâ (1919), that âpoetry
is not a turning loose of emotion, but is an escape from emotion; it is
not the expression of personality, but an escape from personalityâ
(Sacred Wood 58). If Eliot welcomes impersonality as a creative
reprieve, Riding laments it and the âgeneral degradation of the personâ
as the compromised methodology of institutional modernism that âset
about . . . exterminating the personâ as a matter of aesthetics (68).
Riding sees in this methodology a deeply rooted fear of innovation and
understands the reluctance to produce truly new poetry as the inevitable
result of a group mentality.
Throughout Contemporaries, Riding portrays poetic impersonality as the
warped outcome of an intensely felt shame of the person. Thus, for
instance, she depicts Eliot's desire to âescape from emotionâ and
âescape from personalityâ as childish, effeminate, and fearful. Calling
The Waste Land the âgreat twentieth-century nursery rhymeâ (45), she
argues that, by avoiding emotion, or as in Eliot's theory of the
âobjective correlative,â displacing the weight of emotions onto objects
rather than subjects, the poet compels his readers to engage in
psychologically driven close readings, mining the poem for evidence of
authorial trauma (45). Hard modernism, she explains, should confront
humanity (a dangerously amorphous entity) in all of its emotional
complexity. The poet as person should not seek to sever personality from
poetics. Accordingly, Riding refers to Eliot, Joyce, and Co.
collectively as âladiesâ precisely because they âavoid the temptations
to sentimentality inherent in the poetic facultyâ and thus reject the
humanity inherent in their medium, language (48). Riding's ironic use of
gender demonstrates the depth of her scorn for the calculated modernist
(im)persona, even as it suggests that we should understand her
reclamation of the poet as person not as the romantic agenda of an
iconoclast woman modernist, but as the cornerstone of a grittier, more
authentic, and truly hard (both difficult and obdurate) poetics in and
of the modernist moment. Why insist upon and theorize the ââdifficultyâ
of modernist poetry,â Riding asks, when âwell-written poetry is always
difficultâ (54)?
Riding's ideal poet, then, displays true originality by refusing to
reflect a shared modernist dogma, by casting aside a poetics of
impersonality, and by acknowledging language itself as a unique medium
(and burden), one âto accept . . . from humanity at largeâ (57). Indeed,
Riding's poetics of the person emerges in precisely this matter-of-fact
way, as a kind of recognition and reminder that the poet and poetic
language remain always embedded in unsystematized life. As Lisa Samuels
explains, Riding âis always personal and always looking for unfoldings
of what the self cannot quite conceiveâ (Anarchism is Not Enough xi).
For Riding, the âpersonâ behind a poem cannot ever be âexterminated.â
Poets are persons always, not persons when life is messy and poets when
they are at work on clean and sharp angles. Nor does Riding's emphasis
on the person arise from a lyric expressivism in which poetry emanates
from the poetic mind. Rather, good poets, for Riding, stand in a
respectful and somewhat diminutive relation to their relatively
independent poems: âThe poem itself is supreme, above persons; judging
rather than judged; keeping criticism at a respectful distance; it is
even able to make a reader of its authorâ (23). In A Survey of Modernist
Poetry, Riding and Graves likened the relation between a poet and his
poem to the relationship between a âwise, experimenting parentâ and
child. Just as a parent would not wish to keep a child in âits placeâ by
âsuppressing its personality or laughing down its strange questions, so
that it turns into a rather dull and ineffective edition of the parent,â
poets are likewise âfreeing the poemâ and âencouraging it to do things,
even queer things, by itselfâ (124â125). Riding continues this logic in
Contemporaries, arguing that the role of poetry is to create âan ever
immediate reality confirmed afresh and independently in each new work,â
a reality âconfirmed personally rather than professionallyâ (56). Only
by fostering this relation of connection and freedom can poets write
poems that are not mere copies of what already exists, but that bring,
out of language, something new into being.
Gertrude Stein and the âNew Barbarismâ
Contemporaries finds its ambassador of the everyday, its poet as person,
in Gertrude Stein. Riding first became familiar with Stein's work in
1926 when the Hogarth Press published her own collection of poems, The
Close Chaplet, as well as Stein's âComposition as Explanation,â a text
whose influence in Contemporaries cannot be underestimated. Riding began
writing about Stein in Survey, and the two became friends and frequent
correspondents after âThe New Barbarism and Gertrude Steinâ appeared in
the June 1927 issue of transition. (Stein was understandably pleased to
have been so thoroughly championed by Riding.) That essay prompted Stein
to send Riding and Graves a manuscript version of An Acquaintance With
Description, which their Seizin Press published in 1929. The intensity
of their relationship during these years, particularly as reflected in
Riding's letters, translates into an equally intense critical devotion
in Chapter 2 of Contemporaries, in which Riding explains and lauds
Stein's âbarbarism.â
As a continuation of her essay in transition, the Stein chapter clearly
responds to Eliot's ominous denunciation of Stein in âCharleston, Hey!
Hey!,â a review written for Nation & Athenaeum in January 1927:
â[Stein's] work is not improving, it is not amusing, it is not
interesting, it is not good for one's mind. But its rhythms have a
peculiar hypnotic power not met with before. It has a kinship with the
saxophone. If this is the future, then the future is, as it very likely
is, of the barbarians. But this is the future in which we ought not to
be interestedâ (595). Riding seizes upon the word âbarbarians,â upending
Eliot's dismissive analogy, and proceeds to sketch out a positive
poetics of barbarism in Contemporaries (66). Riding argues that by
âtaking everything around her very literally and many things for granted
which others have not been naive enough to take so,â Stein has
fundamentally altered poetic modernism (78). She insists that âno one
but Miss Stein has been willing to be as ordinary, as simple, as
primitive, as stupid, as barbaric as successful barbarism demands,â and
that Stein, by doing âwhat everyone else has been ashamed to do,â is the
only modernist whose compositions are firmly rooted in the everyday
(78). Because Stein writes so far outside the generic parameters of her
contemporaries, Riding argues, she has managed to achieve authenticity,
while at the same time subverting modernism's prestige-obsessed
institutions: âShe has courage, clarity, sincerity, simplicity. She has
created a human mean in language, a mathematical equation of
ordinariness, which leaves one with a tender respect for that changing
and unchanging slowness that is humanity and Gertrude Steinâ (84). If
Stein is a âbarbaricâ writer, or if, as Eliot warns, she is âgoing to
make trouble for us,â for Riding this trouble will be the salvation of
the avant-garde.
At least one reviewer of Contemporaries recognized that Riding was
attempting, through a revaluation of Stein, to radically redefine poetic
practice for the modernist moment. A 1928 Times Literary Supplement
review finds merit in Riding's preoccupation with the person and in her
insistence that âpoetry should be a humanityâ (254). As a treatise
âriding on the backsâ (pun certainly intended) of contemporary poets,
the reviewer argues, Contemporaries articulates a much needed theory of
poetic practice wedded to personal language and the commonplace, to the
âapples and napkins of poetry, associations of which no poet should be
queasyâ (254). Riding does indeed extol the âapples and napkins of
poetry,â both in her insistence that poetry cannot be divorced from
everyday language, and in her theorization of Stein's radical poetics.
Professional modernists, Riding argues, try to make language an external
mediumâlike paint to the painter or stone to the sculptor. In so doing,
modernists transform poetry into a specialist disciplineâa rigidly
defined cultural production, one âArtâ among others. As Jerome McGann
puts it, Riding replaced modernism's vision of poetry as âan art of
makingâ (which she saw as an evasion of âwhat is most human about the
way we use languageâ) with a vision of poetry as an art âof tellingâ
(McGann 313). Returning, as Stein does in Tender Buttons, to the apples
and napkinsâthe everyday and everywhere of languageâRiding reinvents the
poet as person and sets the terms for a poetic practice that grapples
with the uncertainties of language and personhood.
Above all, Riding and Stein both value particularity, and Riding uses
the Stein chapter in Contemporaries to argue for the everyday
singularity of poetic language in the hands of the poet as person.
Stein's influence is most evident in the pages devoted to the
âtime-sense,â as Riding's own exposition and locution begin to echo the
recursive diction in âComposition as Explanation.â Much like Stein's
often quoted adage, âeverything is the same except composition and time,
composition and the time of the composition and the time in the
compositionâ (500), Riding's definition of the âtime-senseâ is derived
from her own understanding of Steinian language: âThe composition is
clear because the language means nothing but what it means in her using
of itâ (82). Stein's version of modernist composition is âdivinely
inspired in ordinarinessâ and uses utterly contextual, ahistorical
language: â[n]one of the words Miss Stein uses have ever had any
experienceâ (80). Most happily, Stein's work is unburdened by criticism
and is conceived outside of the dreaded Zeitgeist: âThis is how Gertrude
Stein wrote in 1906 and this is how she was still writing in 1926.
Writing by always beginning again and again and again keeps everything
different and everything the sameâ (83). For Riding, Stein radicalizes
poetic language by refusing metaphysical complexity and by making the
reader's primal encounter with language truly new. Thus the difficulty
in reading Stein lies not in the words themselves, but in the ways they
are rendered unfamiliar in the moment of the composition and in the act
of reading. Stein exemplifies barbaric modernism by writing
authentically as herself in the present, by creating a language-based
poetry that lies at the very foundation of avant-garde poetics, even to
the present day.
Out of these valuations of Stein's barbarism, Contemporaries sketches an
alternative modernist project that works against, rather than with, the
specialization and disciplinarity that had come to define poetic
practice by the late 1920s. If modernists, as Riding extensively argues,
accept and even accelerate modernity's gradual separation of the spheres
of human knowledge and activity, a poetics of barbarism might return us
to a state in which these activities and orientations had equal range:
âIn a barbaric society religion does not occupy one mental compartment,
philosophy another, science another, painting another, poetry another,
and so on. But religion is everything and everything is religion,
philosophy is everything and everything is philosophy, and so on. In a
civilized society, religion is a sentiment, philosophy a speculation,
science a pursuit of knowledge, painting and poetry artsâ (58). In a
sense, Riding's desire to return to this barbaric state finds a close
cousin in Eliot's description of the literary periods that predate the
âdissociation of sensibility,â in which poets âpossessed a mechanism of
sensibility which could devour any kind of experienceâ (âThe
Metaphysical Poetsâ 669). Yet the two differâcrucially for
Contemporariesâin their responses to this shift in human experience.
Eliot studies it, while Riding audaciously invites poets to overcome it,
so that poetry âmight be normal without being vulgar, and deal naturally
with truth without being triteâ or so that poetry might be âeverything,â
and âeverythingâ poetry (55).
After Contemporaries and Snobs
In the years following the publication of Contemporaries, Riding
gradually distanced herself, both physically and philosophically, from
the modernist debates she took on in the book. On the heels of
Contemporaries, she wrote Anarchism is Not Enough, a text written in
response to Wyndham Lewis's The Art of Being Ruled (1926), which derided
the âpicturesque dementia of Gertrude Steinâ and her âchildishâ cohort
(416). After Riding's suicide attempt in 1929 (the impetus for which
remains the subject of great debate), she and Graves relocated to
Mallorca and lived there in relative isolation until the impending
Spanish Civil War forced them to flee. During Riding's convalescence,
Stein ceased to communicate with her, and after several of Riding's
letters went unanswered, their friendship ended in 1930. In the years
leading up to the Second World War, the problem of professionalism
descried in Contemporaries and the importance of the modernist project
more generally were eclipsed by the increasingly sinister geopolitical
landscape and by Riding's own growing frustration with abstract language
and metaphor. During this period, she drafted an âOpen Letterâ to
hundreds of writers and artists asking âWhat shall we do?â about the
rise of fascism; she wrote Everybody's Letters, a semi-fictional
compendium of her correspondence from various friends and writers, and
The Word âWoman,â which investigates gender, language, and the
ambivalent muse (and is almost certainly a reflection on her
relationship with Graves). In 1938, Riding published her Collected
Poems, after which she publicly repudiated poetry and ceased to write
it. As Charles Bernstein has noted, Riding, like many public
intellectuals in the midst of war, experienced a âcrisis of and for
expression, in which the abuse of language became inextricably
identified with the abuse of the humanâ (259). Leaving Europe (and
Graves) behind by 1940, Riding relocated to New York and married
journalist Schuyler Jackson, changing her name (for the final time) to
Laura (Riding) Jackson, with intentional parentheses. Increasingly
reclusive in her writing and personal life, she and Jackson moved to
rural Florida and adopted an ascetic lifestyleâliving in a cabin with no
electricity or running water, cultivating oranges, and writing together
a Dictionary of Related Meanings. After Jackson's death in 1968, Riding
continued to work on the Dictionary, which went through several
iterations, and eventually became a lengthy philosophical treatise on
language itself that was published posthumously as Rational Meaning: A
New Foundation for the Definition of Words (1997).
Completely severed from those âcontemporaries and snobsâ she analyzed in
the 1920s, Riding achieved in her later writingâespecially The Telling
and Rational Meaningâthe idiosyncrasy that even her peripheral
involvement in modernism never fully allowed. Reflecting on those years
in âThe New Immorality,â she explains: âI have, thus, been given the
role, in the historical drama Twentieth-Century Literature, of a
non-belonger, one resisting the camaraderie of spoken-word literary
linguisticismâand accorded the shabby honor of being dubbed âneglectedâ
by specialists in obscurities of literary justice. And I have deemed it
my duty to bear myself, against that role-assignment, as the true
belongerâwere there a contemporary actuality of literature as the home
of the written word (the word of purposeful thought) to which to belongâ
(261). Despite Riding's sense of her own isolationâthat she belonged in
a canon of oneâand despite the increasingly arch, even mystical tone she
adopted in her later work, the long view of modernism Riding outlines in
Contemporaries inaugurates its own significant tradition. Whether or not
she would welcome the associations, Contemporaries prefigures later
feminist critiques of male modernism, as well as Marxist understandings
of criticism and its effect on literature as a discipline. Above all,
Contemporaries gives critical shape to an avant-garde tradition with
Stein as its figureheadâa genealogy of poets who value and uphold the
eccentricities of poetry, the particularity of the poet, and the true
difficulty of human language. We cannot underestimate, then, the value
of Riding's treatise in the history of modernist criticism, nor the
value of her outsider perspective on modernism. Neither contemporary nor
snob, she was uniquely situated to recognize its radicality as well as
its weaknesses. In view of both, it is Riding's instinctive defense of
the poet as person and of the inherent idiosyncrasy of the poetic
endeavor that distinguishes Contemporaries and asks us to revisit and
reevaluate the modernist enterprise.
Works Cited
Anonymous. âContemporaries and Snobs by Laura Riding.â Times Literary
Supplement, April 5, 1928, 254.
Bernstein, Charles. âRiding's Reason.â In My Way: Speeches and Poems,
255â267. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Eliot, T. S. âCharleston, Hey! Hey!â Nation & Aethenaeum. January 1927,
595.
âââ. âThe Metaphysical Poets.â Times Literary Supplement, October 20,
1921, 669.
âââ. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen,
1960. First published 1920.
Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace: The Life of Laura Riding
Jackson. New York: Persea, 2005.
Graves, Robert, and Laura Riding. A Survey of Modernist Poetry. London:
William Heinemann, 1927.
Jackson, Laura (Riding). âAn Autobiographical Summary.â Laura (Riding)
Jackson and Schuyler B. Jackson collection, #4608. Division of Rare and
Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, n.d., series 1, box
1, folder 1.
âââ. âThe New Immorality.â In Under the Mind's Watch: Concerning Issues
of Language, Literature, Life of Contemporary Bearing. Edited by John
Nolan and Alan J. Clark. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2004, 241â259.
Lewis, Wyndham. The Art of Being Ruled. London: Chatto and Windus, 1926.
McGann, Jerome. âThe Grand Heretics of Modern Fiction: Laura Riding,
John Cowper Powys, and the Subjective Correlative.â Modernism/modernity
13, no. 2, (2006): 309â323.
Riding, Laura. Contemporaries and Snobs. New York: Doubleday Doran &
Company, 1928.
âââ. âThe New Barbarism and Gertrude Stein.â transition 3 (June 1927):
153â68.
âââ. to Wyndham Lewis, April 22, 1927. Wyndham Lewis collection, #4612.
Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library,
box 112, folder 97.
âââ. See also Jackson, Laura (Riding).
Samuels, Lisa. âCreating Criticism: An Introduction to Anarchism Is Not
Enough.â Anarchism Is Not Enough by Laura Riding. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2001, xiâlxxviii.
Stein, Gertrude. âComposition as Explanation.â In A Stein Reader, edited
by Ulla Dydo. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993, 493â503.
âââ. Three Lives and Tender Buttons. New York: Signet Classics, 2003.
West, Geoffrey. Deucalion: Or the Future of Literary Criticism. London:
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1930.
Wexler, Joyce. âEpilogue: How Modernist Authority Became Authoritarian.â
In Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches, edited by Adam
McKible and Suzanne W. Churchill. London: Ashgate, 2007, 133â147.
I: Shame of the Person
There is a sense of life so real that it becomes the sense of something
more real than life. Spatial and temporal sequences can only partially
express it. It introduces a principle of selection into the
undifferentiating quantitative appetite and thus changes accidental
emotional forms into deliberate intellectual forms; animal experiences
related by time and space into human experiences related in infinite
degrees of kind. It is the meaning at work in what has no meaning; it
is, at its clearest, poetry.^(=> #calibre_link-1 1
)
Unfortunately this sense, which can in its origin be only a personal
one, is easily professionalized. From observations of it in written
works, rules are made for it, intentions ascribed to it. There results
what has come to be called criticism. Criticism in turn uses this sense
against itself. It dissociates it from its creative origin. In the end
the âliteraryâ sense comes to be the authority-to-write which the poet
is supposed to receive, through criticism, from the age that he lives
in. It is not even in each age a new literary sense, but merely a
tradition revised and brought up to date. More and more the poet has
been made to conform to literature instead of literature to the
poetâliterature being the name given by criticism to works inspired by
or obedient to criticism. Less and less is the poet permitted to rely on
personal authority. The very word genius, formerly used to denote the
power to intensify a sense of life into a sense of literature, has been
boycotted by criticism; not so much because it has become gross and
meaningless through sentimentality as because professional literature
develops a shame of the person, a snobbism against the personal
self-reliance which is the nature of genius. What is all current
literary modernism but the will to extract the literary sense of the age
from the Zeitgeist at any cost to creative independence? The readiness
to resort to any contemporary fetish rather than to the poetic person?
To strengthen its argument this snobbism may use all the unfortunate
examples in poetry of reliance on the person: they are the moral lesson
to which it does not even need to point. The fortunate examples it does
not explain as reliance on the person but as authorized literature.
It was not until the late sixteenth century that the literary sense
began to be professionalized in English literature, and then only
loosely. The Elizabethan literary sense was capricious and eccentric. It
contradicted itself. It was a grotesque but charming combination of
coarse exuberance and elaborate refinement. There are uniform
eccentricities in Elizabethan poetry because Elizabethan poets were
personally alive in an eccentric age, not because, as a mass, they
obeyed a contemporary programme. A constant human character runs through
all the literature of this period, accentuated by the active share that
most of the writers took in public life, which must be distinguished
from the constant literary character of eighteenth-century literature,
most of whose writers were also active in public life, but in a public
life standardized in party politics. And although Elizabethan literature
had a certain conformity of manner, it had little conformity of
structure. It is impossible to treat any of the prevailing literary
habits as items in a contemporary corpus. Euphuism, the luxurious
politico-allegorical conceits of Spenser, the Arcadian refinements of
Sidney, the pastoral affectations of Lodge, Peele and Greene, the
philosophical realism of Shakespeare, even the foreign fashions
reborrowed after Chaucer from the French and the Italian Renaissanceâall
of these were the erratic creative gestures of a time of erratic
personality.
The period following the post-Elizabethan decay and the Puritan
usurpation (roughly covering the first three-quarters of the eighteenth
century) pulled itself together with French classicism. It wished to
wipe out Elizabethan irregularity and its consequences. It looked down
upon the Elizabethans because they had been too much alive. Said Johnson
of Shakespeare: âA minute analysis of life at once destroys that
splendour which dazzles the imagination; whatsoever grandeur can display
or luxury can enjoy, is procured by offices of which the mind shrinks
from contemplation.â It is natural that this shrinking mind should have
found its happiest expression in a form as negative as satire.
For between these two periods there was born the natural man, the
common-sense antithesis to the erratic person. He was now in the centre
of the stage and on all fours. Serving as a literary and sociological
convenience, he did not act originally; he did not act at all. It was
his function to be observed. âThe proper study of mankind is man.â
Conduct in the abstract now became, in the hands of these early
behaviourists, the morbid final value of the cultivated mind. The sole
provision left the creative genius was an impersonal intelligence which,
not guided by feelings, had to be guided by good manners.
Donne, an advanced contemporary of Shakespeare's, stands like a Janus
between these two periods, in a separate period of his own, howeverââto
himself a Diocletian.â On the one hand, he had more intellectual reserve
than the Elizabethans; his poetry did not prove enduringly popular, as
so much Elizabethan poetry did, because the proportion of
surface-entertainment in it was smaller. On the other hand, his satiric
epistles have a lyrical flexibility generally foreign to satiric poetry.
The strength of the satires of Dryden, or, after him, Pope, lies in an
energetic critical obedience, a contemporary piety, we might say; of
Donne, in a sturdy and unruly self-reliance. The eighteenth-century
satire was a literary custom, the least human and experimental form
possible; while in Donne the satire was a vehicle of strong humanity and
daring. Eighteenth-century literary policy demanded a formal inhumanity
of the poet, since humanity was according to contemporary belief merely
a philosophical abstraction upon which to moralize. Instead of passion,
there was intelligence; and intelligence meant a servility to certain
canonical ideas according to which the learning of the time was framed.
Poets became, in the satire, ministers of instruction. By philosophy the
poet was conceived and by classicism he had grace.
But what was philosophy more than the callow sophistries of deism or
optimism or perfectionism? And what was classicism more than a plausible
gloss to sophistries that could not without verbal pompousness support
their inconsistencies? The poet was not a person but the spokesman of
his age, a mechanical recorder of time. But time is only criticism and a
poet is supposed to have to do with poetry. Poetry is not contemporary
poetry. It is not philosophy. It is not even literature. As between
literature and life, it is closer to life. But life invents time rather
than poetry, a sanctimonious comment on itself, a selflessness. Poetry
invents itself. It is nearly a repudiation of life, a selfness. Unless
it is this, it is a comment on a comment, sterile scholasticism.
Public interference with poetry rests on the popular delusion that an
immediate commerce exists between historical truth and poetic truth;
that the historical universe is potentially the poetic universe. The
historical universe is, however, only a temporary aggregate of ideas.
These ideas may direct the structure of the literary universe, which
produces the philosophical journalism of a period; the structure of the
poetic universe is directed by a person in single-handed conflict with
the time-community. Science, the present-day aggregate of tribal ideas,
puts on the creative mind a social compulsion to accept these ideas; and
criticism acts, as usual, as the nattered instrument of conversion.
Official literature is born of a critical rather than of a literary
sense; it is a social institution which the poet is hired to serve.
Criticism makes time-poets, who court favour for literature from the
historical universe. A great deal of up-to-date poetry is thus written
which becomes immediately out-of-date and is therefore rejected by the
criticism that called for it; which consoles itself with a cynical
classicism, a cult-cult of previous exemplary time-poets (such as Pope).
The truth is that critical modernism is really more interested in
maintaining a defensive attitude toward the literary past than in
sponsoring ânewâ poetry. It equivocates between an unreserved adherence
to poetic formalism and an unreserved disavowal of poetic formalism. It
outformalizes formalism and thus has a ready snobbism to employ against
formalism or irregularity, as may be required. Any new poetry which
finds it necessary to disconnect itself from previous poetry, as
Rimbaud's did, must be written outside the shelter of contemporary
criticism of any sort; its creator must be âle grand malade, le grand
criminel, le grand mauditâet le suprĂȘme savant. Car il arrive Ă
l'inconnu.â^(=> #calibre_link-2 2
) Even the most advanced phase of critical modernism is in many respects
more reactionary than the most conservative phase of contemporary
critical traditionalism. For the latter, in its greybeard innocence, is
sentimentally inclined toward any new idea that can be socially
administered and justified personally on inspirational grounds: it has a
pious hunger for the unknown and a superstitious respect for prophecy.
The former, on the contrary, has an intellectual distaste for the
unknown and an abhorrence of personal exhibitionism: shame in the
person, as found in the various inhibitions which govern critical
modernism, is the real reason for abetting the known historical
universe. Even the element of obscurity resulting from an observance of
the official shame-taboo is strictly limited to an obscurity of
reference.
The presence of excessive criticism in a time is a sign that it fears
its own literature; and overzealous critics are the agents of a
compromise between poetry and society. They keep peace by forcing poetry
to hide its personal criminalities behind the privilege-walls of
literary tradition; they apply pressure only to poetry in the making,
never to society. The gospel of contemporaneity is an expression of the
mob-fear of the organized society of time against those incorruptible
individuals who might reveal life to be an anarchy whose only order is a
blind persistence. In the energy of this persistence occur intense
flashes, the poetry or lightning of sense. The mob, looking on, reads an
official code of revelation. Otherwise it must admit the mind of man to
dwell in man; which would be as troublesome as fire in the brain and as
shameful as thunder in the stomach.
II: Poetry, Out of Employment, Writes on Unemployment
The social office of poetry in both classical and romantical periods has
been to formulate progress. It has been called upon to do this because
history, philosophy, religion, science, even literature itself in so far
as it is a knowledge-category, are constantly changing forms of wisdom
that need the language of finality to help them impose themselves as
absolute upon their periods. So it is that human tyrannies have enlisted
poetry to conceal their insufficiencies, at the same time denying to
poetry its own self-sufficiency. It was against such tyrannies that
Shelley rebelled. But though he felt the social subjection of poetry
more intensely than any poet before him, he attempted to justify its
independence by its social excellence.
For while poetry was âat once the centre and circumference of knowledge,
which comprehends all science and to which all science must be
referred,â^(=> #calibre_link-3 3
) it had also a civic usefulness (âThe production and assurance of
pleasure in this highest sense is true utilityâ) since âthe great
instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to
the effect by acting as the cause.â Poetry still remained, even in
Shelley's view, a first-rate public servant jealous of its duties. He
could go so far as to prove the superiority of poetry to other forms of
human wisdom in its benefits to society; he could not go so far as to
dissociate the critical from the social values of poetry, because he
still thought of poetry as communal poetry, of the poet in his primitive
function as the community's all-round medicine-man and of society as the
origin of poetry through the action and interaction of the social
sympathies. Indeed he seems to be defending poetry not so much for its
own as for society's sake and thus translating his poetic
incorruptibility into social orthodoxy instead of into real criticism.
Much of the criticism and much of the poetry he wrote was only earnest
propaganda for goodness.
This common misapplication of poetry to supplementary offices is the
result of a confusion between an intelligence that we may call concrete,
because it regards everything as potentially comprehensible and
measurable, and the poetic intelligence, which is an accurate sensation
of the unknown, an inspired comprehension of the unknowable. The
concrete intelligence suffers from the illusion of knowledge since it
does not recognize a degree in knowledge at which all its laws and
implements cease to operate and at which another order of intelligence
enters. It is at this degree that the poetic intelligence begins, an
illuminating ignorance in which everything is more than certain, that
is, absolute because purely problematical. The degree, which is one of
clarity, is presupposed in the poet, whatever the condition of knowledge
may be at his time, however far knowledge may be from the
knowledge-limit. The poetic intelligence is a fixed proportion, the
concrete intelligence a relative one. Confusion of these has led to the
establishment of false rational equivalents to the poetic intelligence:
so that, as in the present time, when the illusion of knowledge seems
completely to satisfy the vanity of the concrete intelligence, poetry
becomes a superfluous office and is either peremptorily dismissed or
allowed to continue as a graceful tribute to the triumph of the concrete
intelligence. However, the dignity historically conferred by society on
poetry for its prophetic usefulness makes it impossible for poetry to
accept this humiliation. (To use Shelley's distinction, society was
using prophecy in the gross sense of the word, in which poetry was an
attribute of prophecy, while poetry applied to this public charge the
most favourable interpretation possible, in which prophecy was an
attribute of poetry.) A competition ensues between the concrete
intelligence and the poetic intelligence, futile because it cannot
produce an increase in knowledge and because it has the effect on the
poet of a snobbish display of contemporary sophistication. Indeed, in an
actual hand-to-hand conflict between these two intelligences, the
concrete intelligence would necessarily occupy the defensive position,
since it takes only a very small pressure from the unknown to overthrow
the most quantitatively formidable known. As a matter of fact no such
practical contact can exist between them. For though one begins where
the other leaves off, they are separated by the very degree which marks
the change from one kind into another. Even if it were possible for the
concrete intelligence to arrive at the full knowledge-limit, it would
not automatically pass into the next stage but have achieved
self-destruction and exhaustion; and the poetic intelligence would
continue irrespective of accidents to the concrete intelligence, it
being not a consumable surplus of intellectual power but a constant
surplus. The relation between these two kinds of intelligence is further
falsified by making the poetic intelligence the internal consciousness
of the external concrete intelligence; whereas both have a strictly
separate set of internal and external experiences, the external
experience of the poetic intelligence being the personal life of the
poet, the internal experience of the concrete intelligence being the
impersonal mechanical soul which facts in a certain stage of
assimilation assume and which gives to them a false poetic appearance of
significant unity. Poets sin most of all perhaps in identifying this
mass-consciousness, which contemporaneous facts seem to form
automatically, with the self-consciousness of the poetic intelligence.
(Paul Valéry is an exaggerated contemporary instance of this weakness.
He made a gigantic effort to accomplish poetically the synthesis of the
various modern knowledge-forms of the concrete intelligence and got, not
a poetic equivalent, but a mathematical sum, a mystical number not
further translatable into poetry. Having thus brought the concrete
intelligence and the poetic intelligence of the present time to a
deadlock and exerted a damping influence on creative enthusiasm, he was
obliged to write his own poetry in the past to remove it from the
necessity of accounting for itself otherwise than technically.)
The nineteenth century showed a more material increase than perhaps any
other preceding century in this mass-consciousness of human knowledge
which had for so long been feeding on poetry while pretending to feed
it. There was a chance that, dismissed from pseudo-poetic occupations,
poetry might enter into its proper domain. But the old connection was
too strong a literary habit and poetry continued to search for a poetic
equivalent to the newly enlarged universe long after this universe, so
increasingly intelligible to itself, had begun to deny the reality of
poetic values (as it was right in doing if poetic values are understood
as interpretative values). As an epic is the most tangible poetic
equivalent to a group of associated rational experiences, poets went on
writing in an epic vein, but without producing an epic, since normally
an epic cannot be produced without a historical demand for itâthe
nineteenth century was finding its own epic in progressive material
expansion. The character put upon this futile Victorian type was
realism, to describe the rational tests to which poetry submitted itself
and which therefore made it slavish and petty in substance, in manner
disproportionately grandiose. Tennyson's Princess and other similar
writings designed to make poetry keep pace with progress never looked
anything but feeble and old-fashioned beside progress itself.
With the advance of the twentieth century, progress was gradually
dropped from the vocabulary of the concrete intelligence as too small a
word for so large a thing; and relativity permitted to take its place,
not for its mathematical sense, but because it was the most poetic word
available in scientific language to convey the immensity of the great
atomic epic of the concrete intelligence.^(=> #calibre_link-4 4
) Poetry, as the diminutive prophet of progress, was also dropped out.
Even history, the life-size image of man, made a philosophical
recantation of faith in the personal mind, and a new century had its
moment when it declared formally that the myth of humanity was no more.
This meant a complete isolation of the poetic intelligence in the
personal unknown, in an unconquerable interior: a state that had been
the unconscious desire of poetry since its beginnings as a community
handmaiden of tribal success, that is, of progress. The liberation of
the poetic intelligence from its indenture would coincide, naturally,
with the disappearance of poetry as such in the social sense of the
word. Poetry had become the property of society and like any other
manufactured commodity had ceased to have any organic connection with
its makers. It might now be possible to re-establish this connection.
It was to be hoped that criticism would use its offices to bring this
about. But as criticism's professional status depended on the
maintenance of the old order, it could not be expected to celebrate
poetry's forced dissociation from social uses. The best it could do was
to believe cheerfully that nothing had really changed and protest
against poetry's exclusion from social uses. It could insist upon
looking for the joke. The joke was found. The universe still had a myth
requiring the ritualistic services of poetry. The new myth was that
there was no myth. Delighted with this discovery, criticism rushed to
the rescue of the unnumbered poets who, being individuals and not, like
criticism, a public institution, had perhaps not noticed that anything
was happening at all but continued to write as they had always written,
for reasons that they left to others to discover. For people never
really live in contemporary history: they live either in the past or
completely outside the time-sense. So the course of criticism (or of
certain forces and influences which, by their effect, become criticism)
was to announce, first, that historical conditions had put an end to
poetry, removing all hope in order to bring home to poets the proper
time-sense, then, to follow this melancholy report with the cheerful
amendment that, after all, all hope was not gone, since, if poetry had
all subjects taken away from it, there was always one subject of which
poetry could not be deprived, namely, that poetry had come to an end.
Here was an ingenious method for indefinitely postponing the end of
poetry; and, after the general applause which followed this remarkable
solution, many volunteers stepped forward and declared feelingly that
the time-sense had been brought home to them and that, now that it had
been made clear to them that poetry was at an end, they felt sure that
they could write better poetry than ever. Never indeed, they said, had
such an urgent reason for writing poetry been presented to poets. Under
the spell of this enthusiasm a tremendous revival of poetry took place;
and not only was better poetry, but more poetry than ever written. Since
poetry was to write about nothing, it could write about everything from
the standpoint of nothing; it could still have its epic without the
burden of having to have convictions about it.
The most notable exponent of this non-committal epic was T. S. Eliot.
His period poem fulfilled the time-sense requirements even to the point
of self-extinction. It was indeed everything and nothing. It composed
and decomposed. It was contemporaneously sympathetic and
contemporaneously apathetic. It ran from classical minor to romantic
major, to romantic minor, to classical major and back again. It
disciplined itself learnedly in the pious unbelief of scholasticism.
Everything is Nothing. But Nothing is eternal. âWe have not reached
conclusion. . . . â^(=> #calibre_link-5 5
)
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog. . . .
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal^(=> #calibre_link-6 6
)
One would have thought this left nothing to be desired. But one thing
had been overlooked in this revival, the importance of not being
earnest. Poetry had perhaps taken the time-sense too literally, had been
too much of an advocate and therefore too little of a snob against
itself: even irony can betray convictions if it becomes too ironical.
Or, to put the complaint practically, this posthumous poetry was not
formal enough: it bore too little resemblance to poetry proper. This was
the general objection made by many who were on the inside, so to speak,
of the movement to keep poetry going. Mr. Edwin Muir is a typical
spokesman of the reaction against intensity.^(=> #calibre_link-7 7
) T. S. Eliot, he protests in effect, is a true posthumist, but too
heartbreaking. Edith Sitwell is also a true posthumist and has, besides,
a strict technical organization of her non-humanistic universe of
death-in-life. She has, in fact, managed to leave the heart-break out.
But even this does not satisfy Mr. Muir, to whom such a complete
extinction of the heart-break seems to bespeak a stoicism likely to
become, in its own way, paradoxically intense; so that he begs Miss
Sitwell to reinstate the heart-break. Nor does Robert Graves satisfy in
any respect, since he is too casual, and so not a posthumist at all.
Because he constantly changes (as he makes personal rather than critical
interpretation of the time-sense) he is, Mr. Muir concludes, creatively
unbalanced; that is, he disregards the official demise of the poetic
intelligence and writes on a realistic basis, making private terms with
the time-sense instead of negotiating with it through critical
headquarters. (This desire to look for secret understandings in Mr.
Graves' poetry has led Mr. Muir to morbid misinterpretations of certain
of his poems, such as The Clipped Stater, in which Mr. Muir reads only
as a flirting with the theory of metempsychosis what is a poetic
narration of the personal absolute, dramatized as the deified Alexander
the Great, experimenting with the time and space humiliations of
historical life.)
To illustrate just what he considers to be the proper tone for
posthumist poetry, Mr. Muir has gone to the trouble of writing a little
specimen poem to be used, perhaps, as the standard posthumistic primer
and very fittingly named, indeed, Chorus of the Newly Dead. A single
stanza will serve to show what Mr. Muir means. The Poet says:
And through our souls the vast tormented world
Passed slow in splendid pictures without pain.
Where, in what distant night, have these been hurled?
When shall dawn rise on those lost mounts again?
As this method seems to be no more than the adoption of the Tennysonian
hat, mantle and trousers with Tennyson left out, posthumistic poets
should not find it difficult to follow, especially since such minute
instructions for the playing of the part are contained in T. S. Eliot's
Hollow Men.
The throw-back to the ordinary poetic tradition in which the fanatic
observance of the contemporary time-sense has culminated reminds us that
this time-sense is nothing but the familiar historical Zeitgeist in a
more complicated disguise than usual. It would be well to recall here
the distinction between the formal Zeitgeist, as it is manifested in
literatureâin contemporary poetry for exampleâand the personal literary
sense, as it was possessed by the Elizabethans. The former translates a
whole period into a single emotion which is used as artificial colouring
for the period's literature. The latter is the actual, the moving nerve
of many emotions, which do not need to have existed as worn-out history
before they can enter poetry: they are historical only in the sense that
they may compose poetryâbut not historical until the poetry is composed.
Zeitgeist poetry is out-of-date poetry, because it describes an emotion
derived from history. A faithful, up-to-date historical record of this
emotion may be inspired by the Zeitgeist, but not an up-to-date poetry;
for the poetry it purposes to inspire was or was not written in the time
when the period was a period, before it was called a period. All
Zeitgeist poetry is, in truth, posthumous poetry; and it is periods of
poetry that die, because periods die, not poetry. Byron, Goethe and
Lamartine, for example, who considered themselves poetic universalists,
were typical Zeitgeist writers, much more important as the recording
spirits of a period of revolution and reaction which they helped to
bury, than as poets: their poetry died as it was being written. There is
a way of living in history that goes forward, but by facing backwards;
and poetry written in this way cannot claim to belong anywhere.
III: Escapes from the Zeitgeist
Satire
A certain amount of poetic activity naturally seeks to protect itself
from the Zeitgeist by making use of one of two historically respectable
modesâthe nature-mode or the satire-mode; or, disdaining these, it may
retire to the proud exile of what is known as the poetic absolute. With
the coming of age of the universe the infant call of nature is supposed
to have been superseded by the vast silence of intelligence in matter
(so that the poet has no more questions to answer, having lost his job
as tutor in the nursery of time). The pathetic fallacy, however, still
remains a possible romantic escape for sentiment in flight from a new
system of facts; as irony, the antipathetic fallacy, for wit in flight
from a new system of intellectual expediency.
Although the formal eighteenth-century satire was in some respects a
romantic escape by classicism from threatening romanticism, it was more
definitely an instrument of subjection to the Zeitgeist, one of
literature's social mannerisms. Conforming satire must be distinguished
from the satire of revolt, which is a weak gesture of social
non-conformity. The former is the satire in its literal sense, an
elegant and conscientious exercise in a form, a medley of localisms (the
satire being by derivation a medley) on which stylistic uniformity is
superimposed. When Dryden described wit as âthe essence of all verse,â
he was using it in this satiric scissors-and-paste
sense.^(=> #calibre_link-8 8
) (It is interesting to notice that he did not say the essence of all
poetry. Dryden is perhaps the founder of the snobbism, developed by
eighteenth-century contempt of the person, which limits the use of
poetry to great poetry, that is, bad poetry which succeeds in spite of
itself. Before Dryden verse had been chiefly a poetical word; with
Dryden it came to denote critical respectability. In the eighteenth
century it was regularly applied to poetry too superior to be great
poetry. Verse still prevails today, except in old-fashioned corners, as
a term of deprecation which gratifies contemporary shame of the person
and emphasizes the vulgarity of poetry.) Indeed Dryden was opposing
practical wit to impassioned Elizabethan witââa finer speech than the
language will allow,â as it was defined for Euphues or The Anatomy of
Wit.^(=> #calibre_link-9 9
) Donne, it will be remembered, was abused by Johnson because he had
employed wit too earnestly. Speaking of Cowley, whom he considered
superior to Donne, Johnson said: âThe fault of Cowley, and perhaps of
all writers of the metaphysical race, is that of pursuing his thoughts
to their last ramifications, by which he loses the grandeur of
generality.â^(=> #calibre_link-10 10
) Wit in the eighteenth century did not mean âhappiness of languageâ
(for which Johnson had to condemn even Pope) or happiness of thought, as
it was for the metaphysicians.^(=> #calibre_link-11 11
) It was the wit of the formal satire, a cozenage of contemporary
banality called âstrength of thought,â the common sense of the
prevailing system of intellectual expediency.
In the satire of revolt wit performs a philosophical evasion. It
compromises with that which it opposes by treating it with a
semi-playful, semi-sorrowful pessimism. Irony defeats sentiment, but in
doing so it proves itself to be inverted sentiment, self-defeated. The
most successful romantic satirist in contemporary poetry is John Crowe
Ransom,^(=> #calibre_link-12 12
) who by a happy conjunction of sentiment and irony, has managed to
elevate defeat to a note of such unembittered renouncement that it
amounts, in its suppressed optimism, to a dignified compromise with the
all-conquering time-sense. This fortunate solution permits him to be a
gentle and aristocratic non-conformer in his métier and a democrat in
the adjustment of his poetry to its social milieu. A less astute satire
of revolt is to be found in the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon. In his
high-principled refusal of a helping hand from the Zeitgeistâa mixture
of the fanatic and the debonairâhe has a paradoxical bond with perhaps
his most removed contemporary, James Joyce; who, by a colossal evasion,
which involved swallowing the Zeitgeist and then vomiting it up again,
accomplished the dual and monstrous feat of capitulation and revolt in
one huge, involuntary reflex-spasm.
Satire in this non-conforming sense is obviously unfit to supply the
period-poem which the age, through criticism, demands as its tribute
from poetry. At its best it produces, like the conforming satire,
period-tracts. The conforming eighteenth-century satire dissolved when
its wit had exhausted its material, and the period-epic was driven into
such obscurity as Darwin's Botanic Garden.^(=> #calibre_link-13 13
) Only satire in a broad, summarizing sense may culminate in a
representative epic, a large-scale poem of cancellation and
substitution. And then it is generally accompanied by a prose morality
which makes the work of cancellation easier. If however the age is in
motion and yet lacking in constructive substitute values (whether
specious or real) to replace disappearing values, the contemporary
satire will probably be confined solely to the prose morality; it will
be merely an epic of cancellation. Fielding was thus the real author of
the eighteenth-century satiric epic. The nineteenth century was
deficient in cancelling power and therefore produced no great
contemporary satire. Like the eighteenth century, the present period can
get no further than such an epic of cancellation as Ulysses; with the
difference that, though both epics are equally devoid of creative values
and alike designed to produce a catharsis of stale emotional matter (it
is remarkable how closely the Fielding-epic and the Joyce-epic tally in
material and structureâthe use of obscenity, destructive literary
criticism, minute reports of the working of the minds of plain people),
the eighteenth-century view of literature made a place for the prose
morality, while the ethics of contemporary criticism force the epic of
cancellation to conclude with a cancellation of itself. Criticism is the
voice of the age; and as the age feels itself the consciousness of an
arrived universe, it does not call for an expression of new values or
for a summary of the distribution of values, but merely for
congratulation. The poetic consciousness, which criticism treats as a
historical consciousness, has become superfluous. Poetry, however, will
be permitted to indulge in the bravado of despair, the universe's mark
of pity for poetry thus obliged to sever its connections with it. Poetry
seeking to escape the Zeitgeist, and therefore not properly of this age,
the universe leaves to an out-of-date criticism that seems to have
survived by grace to take care of it. For poetry that is trying to win a
postponement of judgment by good behaviour, the universe finds itself
fortunately provided with an advanced criticism recruited largely from
the ranks of poetry itself; so that the universe expects no trouble to
come of its clemencyâthat is, it is not likely to have poets, though
much poetry of an obituary nature. The important thing to be remembered
by poetry is that shifting historical values have been brought to a
state of equilibrium by the heavy forefinger of science and that there
can therefore be no new values, only a methodic resolution of the values
we have, which are, potentially at least, all the values there are: in
life, if not in literature, we have reached conclusion. This is the
lesson poetry is supposed to learn, and no more; lest, by meddling in
science itself, it acquire the confidence of science and be tempted to
observe that every age has had the illusion of an equilibrium and the
illusion of new learning through revolutions in nomenclature.
The Poetic Absolute
The satire-escape and the nature-escape, creating as they do a moral
barrier of protective contempt between the poet and the Zeitgeist,
involve perhaps less equivocation than any other forms attempting to
live in spite of the age.^(=> #calibre_link-14 14
) A hypocritical and suppressed romanticism lurks in the resignation of
professedly Zeitgeist poetry, a depression difficult at times to
distinguish from self-pity. Not that there is anything wrong with
romanticism in itself, but suppressed romanticism is pathological; which
is why the only possible interpretation for much contemporary poetry is
psycho-analytic. As the detachment in such poetry, of which The Waste
Land is an easy clue for identification (and imitations of it like Nancy
Cunard's Parallax), is not voluntary but forced on the poet by the
universe from which he has been banished, its romanticism can be easily
detected in its wasting, its loss of appetite and weight, its obvious
pining for home. It is more difficult, however, to recognize suppressed
romanticism in poetry which tries to achieve detachment by a pretentious
creative system.
A great deal of literary shop-talk is devoted to the aesthetic absolute
and a forced dignity attends any effort to free the poem from
destructive circumstances which the poet is himself subject to. But
there is a difference between that absoluteness in a poem which is the
poet's own irrefutability, his power to write a poem that does not have
to support him in his weakness, or be supported by him in its weakness;
and that absoluteness which is philosophically read into a poem to give
it an authority that the poet is unable to find in life. In the first
sense absoluteness is a critical term that may be applied
retrospectively to any good poem. In the second it is a
moralistic-philosophical term to be applied prospectively to the
compensating function the poem is supposed to perform in the poet's and
everybody's life. Not until this distinction is perceived do we become
aware of the romantic unfulfilment and disappointment which most
theories of the absolute conceal.
The imposition of an absolute on the poem means the exclusion of all
loose relative references, the use of symbols that have no association
outside of the literary range of the poem itself, and an effect of great
technical rigidity that we may call creative strain. Hart Crane is
perhaps the only contemporary romantic absolutist who succeeds in
matching technical tenseness with emotional
tenseness.^(=> #calibre_link-15 15
) He maintains the ideal of romantic absoluteness by admitting the
philosophical dualism on which it is really based: he postulates a
normal and an abnormal reality, and his poems are real in so far as they
identify one reality with the other. In this he is an exception to the
usual romantic absolutist whose poems achieve a fixed mechanical reality
by excluding all correspondencesâthey are real because they admit no
reality but their own. Rimbaud, the last-century absolutist most relied
on by contemporary absolutists, made intellectual monstrosity the first
condition of poetic finalityâan âimmense et raisonnĂ© dĂ©rĂšglement de tous
les sens.â^(=> #calibre_link-16 16
) But in him intellectual monstrosity was a personal fact rather than a
poetic theory, one so intensified by poetic abuse that he was obliged,
in the end, to turn normal, to suppress his personal monstrosity in
order to avoid destruction through creative strain.
Evidences of creative strain in contemporary poets who profess no theory
of the absolute reveal the same effort to escape from the destructive
influences of the Zeitgeist into the constructive possibilities of the
poem when viewed as totality. In virtue of his creative strain E. E.
Cummings may be considered effectively an absolutist. His technical
caprice is a deliberate dissociation from contemporary reason. (He is
generally labelled an impressionist; but this only means that he treats
his absolute, his poem, as a stage-joke, and that humour introduces
sympathy, memory and related experience. His absolute may be more
properly called the comic relief of the absolute.) In Marianne Moore,
from whom all thoughts of the absolute must be far removed, creative
strain is a conscientious, scientific analysis of the germs which are
assumed to be responsible for the poetic condition; and her absolute is
that pure residuum of mental activity which is left when the imagination
has been excluded and, with it, sympathetic affiliations with emotional
environment. Edith Sitwell's absolute is perhaps more perplexing than
any of these. For though the technical pattern is maintained by strain,
the strain itself proves to be merely the romantic inventiveness of
frankly trivial emotions. But it would be absurd to deny that Miss
Sitwell's poetry had an absolute simply because it was romantic, that
is, because it confessed the triviality of escape. It is this refreshing
and disarming frankness which makes her work so popular. Her absolute
seems all the more genuine because, besides being fixed, formalized
romance, it is also an imitation of the practical absolute of modern
pictorial art. The absolute of painting is a technical necessity imposed
by the limitations of the medium. It may therefore develop into a mature
creative fact in painting, while in poetry, except where the methods of
painting are deliberately imitated, it rarely goes beyond the stunt
stage. Since Miss Sitwell arbitrarily adopts the methods of painting,
her poetry passes beyond the stunt stage. Yet it is not quite fair to
say that it is poetry written with the methods of painting, for this
would mean that it was something neither poetry nor painting. Miss
Sitwell, by the careful use of a limited number of symbols (of constant
value and fairly uniform recurrence), actually creates paintings, not
poems; which, from the inferred poetic value of these symbols, may be
made into poems by the reader. By confining herself to painting (which
is her real medium) in poetry, she succeeds in writing poetry and in
immortalizing it in picture-frames labelled romantic. Inside the
picture-frame everything is, as has so often been pointed out,
motionless. But the label reminds one that the painted cherry is able to
hang so still only because it is painted.
The safest form of poetic absolute is probably one derived from a
theological absolute. In Franceâwhere poetry has a great tendency to let
itself be written by the Zeitgeist; where the poet is supposed to be the
man of numbers who is sensible, in the words of Paul Valéry, the present
high-priest of Zeitgeist mysticism, of the passage de l'infinité des
individus;^(=> #calibre_link-17 17
) and where national vanity makes poetry an opportunistic blend of the
romantic and the classical, of accidental crowd literature and academic
grand homme literatureâCatholicism provides a practical refuge in which
the poet can write with creative purity. Absolutes must go in pairs, one
the assumption, the other the demonstration; and when the assumption on
which the poetic absolute is based is vaguely formulated, as it is
likely to be if a critical assumption, the poem gives an effect of
insincerity and false power. The principle of technical dissociation
from influences, on which the absolute poem is supposed to depend, best
follows from such an article of faith as Jean Cocteau expresses
uncritically in: âJ'apprendrai Ă fabriquer les poĂšmes (le mot est de La
Fontaine) et pour le reste Ă laisser faire
Dieu.â^(=> #calibre_link-18 18
) If the absolute poem is, as the professed absolutist pretends, a
superior experience, then it can have no value as superior experience
unless it is accompanied by an expressed belief in the possibility of a
superior experience: the poetic absolute at its most literal implies
religious experience. A child is the perfect absolutist, since by an
initial acquiescence of the imagination in everything, it makes the
general one absolute, the particular another. The result is an
independence of the particular from the general, though it suggests the
general as one complementary colour suggests another: a quality for
which simplicity is perhaps a happier term than absoluteness. The want
of simplicity is the striking discrepancy in most âabsoluteâ poetry and
poetic theory.
An absolute confers freedom in return for recognition, and freedom
should confer health, clearness, courage and variety. What is our
contemporary absolute poetry like?âHealth? It is ashen with
misanthropyâClearness? Where technical intricateness permits any light
to shine through, it is a light thinned out by a mystical vanity in
defeat. An absolute implies fulfilment; and mysticism is a simple
instrument of success. Indeed, a poetry that takes its absolute from a
religious absolute does not have to trouble to be either mystical or
religious; it does not have to confound its own intensity with argument.
The non-religious romantic absolute in poetry, having no supporting
absolute, is obliged to be overcharged with sophistication.âCourage? How
may such an evasive dogmatism presume to make attacks on open,
intrenched dogmatisms? On science? On literature itself? âImaginez, mon
cher Jacques, la joie d'une langue dégagée de Rimbaud (à l'heure
actuelle plus encombrant que Hugo) et de la superstition de Maldoror. La
jeunesse respirerait.â^(=> #calibre_link-19 19
)
We gasp for the air in which to make declarations of similar freedom.
Our most uncompromising poetic programme is a string of fine names
(Donne, Poe, Rimbaud) worn as a charm round the neck of the
snob-aesthete.âVariety? The only material sign of absoluteness in
so-called absolute poetry is a technical limit the approach to which
means an increasing effect of monotony: the absolutist is only
interesting in his lapses.
What is here concealed? A timid desire or a perverse will to write
poetry which shall not involve personal accountability; disguised as a
protective snobbism against the Zeitgeist, which is seen as vulgarity
sitting in moral judgment. But if the poem is to be protected from moral
judgments it must have a morality of its own; and the morality of a poem
cannot reside in mere technical integrity. Technical integrity should
presuppose a scrupulous respect between the poet and the poem, and this
cannot exist if the poem is a convenience of the poet, a kind of moral
dummy. It is then but an annex of the poet, and without morality, as the
poet, being without morality, becomes an instrumental annex of the poem.
The poem cannot be absolute unless it belongs to itself; and it cannot
belong to itself unless the poet belongs to himself. The poet, then, is
the true companion absolute of the poetic absolute, which in this light
acquires a simpler and more explicit critical character: it is the
goodness of a poem without regard to its supplementary experience-value
to the poet. But for a poem to be free of the necessity to provide
experience-value the poet must have no poetic prejudice toward actual
experience. He must not ask poetic truth of reality or realistic truth
of poetry. He must see that there is logic but also illogic, ârealityâ
but also an equally real or more real unreality. And he must be strong
enough to endure in one person both kinds of experience. If the romantic
absolute is the harmless invention of a personality strong enough to
endure only one kind of experience, it is perhaps a legitimate device by
which such a personality may have an illusion of power both in poetry
and life. If, however, it threatens to impose as a doctrinaire
metaphysic of poetry what is only a hypocritically and elegantly worded
counsel of personal evasion, then it demands to be refuted by a complete
rehabilitation of the poetic mind and by a bold reinstatement of the
person in poetry. A rampant, undisguised romanticism is preferable to
it, or an ingenuous religious profession.
This is the kind of extreme which the poetic intelligence may be driven
to when the victorious concrete intelligence seems to have taken
possession of all the facts of actual experience, leaving the poetic
intelligence nothing but shadow with which to build a shadowy empire. It
at first seems strange that the poetic intelligence should accept defeat
so easily from the concrete intelligence. This is due, however, to the
illusion of numbers which the concrete intelligence has always been able
to practise. For it is, as has already been suggested, a
mass-consciousness whose numerical index is a social unit rather than a
personal one; a synthetic force, as the poetic intelligence is an
analytic one, which at its weakest may disintegrate into its component
groups (whose variety is a sign of its weakness, as the present
inclusion of everything in one category, science, is a sign of its
strength), such as the religious mind, the philosophical mind, the
political mind, but never into individual unitsâwhen it reaches
individual units it is the mass-consciousness once more. All arts except
poetry are a cross between the concrete intelligence and the poetic
intelligence: they have, by nature of their respective mediums, group
rather than individual motivation. The poetic intelligence has therefore
to fight alone against the aggressions of the concrete intelligence and,
at times of intense synthesizing like the present, is even forced to
disappear from itself or to cover its tracks with the dry leaves of
philosophical sentiment. But for whom is poetry being advertised as
possessing when read the virtue of an absolute? The concrete
intelligence does not read, nor is reading done in dozens, or even in
pairs. The only individual, then, whom it is safe to presume as a reader
for poetry is the poet himself. But if he is obliged to advertise his
poetry to himself, it is perhaps a sign that the poem is being asked to
stand for a poetic intelligence wanting in the poet in proportion to the
degree claimed for it in the poem: the poem is not self-determined, but
merely the poet's personal implement of self-determination.
Another form of survival possible to the poetic intelligence, and one
involving no definite break with the Zeitgeist (the family name of the
concrete intelligence), is for it to submit itself to a test of physical
endurance, that is, to produce a long poem. Contemporary efforts to make
the poetic absolute consist in sheer structural impressiveness have been
numerous. For example, Edith Sitwell's Sleeping Beauty, Aldous Huxley's
Leda, W. J. Turner's Paris and Helen, John Masefield's Reynard the Fox,
Alfred Noyes' The Torchbearers, Conrad Aiken's Pilgrimage of Festus, Roy
Campbell's The Flaming Terrapin, V. Sackville-West's The Land, William
Ellery Leonard's Two Lives or Edwin Arlington Robinson's Tristram can
account for their length in no other way.
Nature
Of the various escapes from the Zeitgeist open to poetry the
nature-escape offers the fewest obstacles. For, as to childhood, certain
privileges are granted to the nature-feeling, chiefly the privilege of
immaturity. Nature is that part of the universe which is at man's mercy
and is spared by him so long as it acknowledges his lordship. Man's
all-conquering mass-intelligence even permits nature to appear
humanized, to make the drama between innocence and intelligence more
vivid: nature is the world-as-universe's humorous indulgence of its own
contemporaneous childhood. For this reason the nature-mode arouses less
opposition in an environment hostile to poetry than other forms of
romantic escape. But innocence, of which nature is the quaint symbol,
presupposes that still quainter sophistication, irony. The irony of the
nature-mode in a latter-day atmosphere is the mature handwriting in
which innocence is written down; innocence cannot be put on record as
such without an intellectual bias in its favour. The nature-mode avows
intelligence even in forswearing intelligence: innocence is a conscious
means of direct escape from the Zeitgeist or of demure flattery of it,
of indirect escape.
The countryside element in late eighteenth-century poetry was inspired
by the panic into which certain poets were thrown when they suddenly
found poetry on its death-bed; they staggered to Nature's breast and,
giving her a philosophicodeistic piece to speak, begged her to use all
her eloquence to hold off the grim adversary. And though Goldsmith was
âignorantâ and Collins, Gray and Cowper only slightly more âreasonable,â
Johnson never damned them completely. They gave the age an opportunity
of justifying its intellectual refinements by comparison with a
contemporaneous infancyâthe nature of the countryside being the stupid
foil to the intelligence of the coffeehouse. The nature of
twentieth-century poetry is the mouse which the lion spares to show how
savage he really is.
But however demure and submissive the nature-mode may appear, it is, in
its affected innocence, closer to active rebellion than any other form
of poetic escape: it is capable at any moment of romantic controversy,
of becoming the weapon of a new Zeitgeist against the oldâa brief flush
of triumph, then dissolution, even at the hands of the new Zeitgeist.
Such, for instance, was the history of the late eighteenth-century
nature-movement that took off from Cooper's Hill and ended in myth, far
from home, among the Isles of Greece. It had had, or had seemed to have,
the choice of connecting itself retrospectively with a formal
uncontroversial nature-tradition or of converting nature into an
imagination which would be able to overthrow the autocratic, adult
regime of reason. In reality it had no choice but controversy. Close as
was the Cooper's Hill tradition, Sir John Denham was but an isolated
anachronism, a minor eighteenth-century nature-writer and moralist born
a century too soon. Milton was the closest classical figure who might
have constituted a literary inheritance, but his ânatureâ was a vulgar
conglomeration of bookish references. Besides these, all else was dim,
covered by the crooked shadow of the age of Pope. Pope himself made use
of the nature-mode, like many of his contemporaries, as a formalistic
reaction against the eccentric Elizabethan pastoral and its free
personal use of the classical pastoral, as by Spenser, Fletcher and
Browne; against the naturalness of the Elizabethan nature in general. In
the hands of writers like Pope and Ambrose Philips the pastoral became
an instrument of conformity with the Zeitgeist, a flattery of modernism:
though Pope professed Virgil as his model and Philips, Spenser, the
result was much the same in both. Their object was to stand Cooper's
Hill between the eighteenth century and the barbaric Elizabethans,
surmounted by the stern form of Milton (in the folds of whose robe were
concealed so many of the gems he had taken from these barbarians
because, presumably, they were too good for them). All that the literary
past could furnish, therefore, to the storm about to break was
provocation. Cooper's Hill may be regarded as the provocation to Keats'
little hill of nonsense, as Milton may be regarded as the provocation to
Blake's religious romanticism.
Militant romanticism is three parts defiance, one part constructive
innovation. Begun as a reaction against prevailing literary snobbisms,
it gives birth to new snobbisms, temporarily more tyrannical because
they are emotional rather than intellectual snobbisms: that is, they do
not merely conform to their Zeitgeist, they are part of it. It is
therefore destructive of literary traditions, having to break down some
to get at others which have been blockedâas Keats had to tear down two
whole centuries to get at the Elizabethan pastoral-writers; but socially
constructive, since the Zeitgeist is but a gigantic social movement; and
so eventually a constructive literary influence. For while the actual
productions of a romantic movement soon become absurd and lose literary
significance, it, in turn, through its social modernism, makes a great
many superannuated literary superstitions look absurd. The effect of the
Industrial Revolution, for instance, on romanticism was not only to
provide it with new subjects (literally so in the novel, as in Shirley,
Sybil and John Halifax, Gentleman), but also to create a new modern
feeling which the romantic movement helped to convey to literature.
Early nineteenth-century political humanitarianism, again, had a more
important influence on literature than the literary works of the
romantic movement itself. It replaced eighteenth-century social
definitions, which had existed in purely literary terms, with new social
definitions in political terms and thus temporarily deprived literature,
poetry in particular, of its social usefulness.
The amazing critical banalities of Wordsworth, the remote metaphysical
propositions of Coleridge, the socio-political doctrines of Shelley are
all part of an attempt to give poetry an eternal poetic usefulness. But
the contemporary man still overshadowed the poet who only happened to be
a contemporary man. The balance of influence was still with the
Zeitgeist. The difference, however, between the characteristic
eighteenth-century Zeitgeist and the characteristic early
nineteenth-century Zeitgeist is that one was a dead weight around the
neck of the poet, turning him into a literary drudge to society, the
other a form of mass-hypnotism in which the poet had at least the
illusion of freedom and voluntary participation in his time. Both were
immoral; the latter, however, had the merit of allowing the poet to
forget the mass-source of this hypnotism and to treat it as the
first-hand inspiration of the poetic intelligence. The only difference
that this made was, perhaps, in providing a less inhibited, if more
foolish race of poets. Keats, for example, was far more inhibited than
Shelley because he engaged consciously in literature and in literature
alone. He would undoubtedly have been more comfortable in the eighteenth
century: he was a better literary poet than Shelley (and than any other
poet of his time); though not a better poet.
The application of this history to the contemporary problem of the
nature-mode, to which it must return, may be slight. One thing appears
certain, that the nature-mode is not threatening to break loose into
militant romanticism. It flashes upon us that we are not the twentieth
century in the sense in which the eighteenth century, say, seemed to
have been the eighteenth century; that upon the assumption of a coherent
and peculiar Zeitgeist we have invented certain modes of escape from it,
and certain modes of coming to terms with it; and that the only result
is the increased vagueness of the Zeitgeist. Shall we give the
nature-mode a push in order to have, some time soon, a romantic movement
and a new modern feeling? Or shall we be classical in order to make the
Zeitgeist talk more clearly?
Oh, Zeitgeist, had we but a Borrow or a Melville to apostrophize thee in
the shameless manner of the 1840's! Thou art verily a sore weight and a
millstone about our necks, and we have not offended the little ones. As
a matter of fact, we are the little ones. Where art thou, Zeitgeist,
that we may hang the millstone about thy neck and cast thee into the
sea? The Zeitgeist is silent. Can it be possible that after all there is
no Zeitgeist?
IV: Poetic Reality and Critical Unreality
The critical problem, then, is not so much a matter of the proper
subjects or style-modes by which to ensure the integrity of poetry, as
the determining of where the true reality of the poem lies, whether in
the gross contemporary mind of which the poet is supposed to be
possessed, or in the non-contemporary poetic mindâfor poetic must mean
non-contemporary if contemporary is understood as anything more than a
historically descriptive phrase, if it is used, for example, to describe
the mind as shaped by contemporary influences. If the distinction
between these two minds is carefully drawn, it will be seen that, in
times when the poetic mind has been under the dictatorship of the
contemporary mind, the poem has had only contemporary reality; as in the
eighteenth century, when the poem had a false poetic reality because the
social dictatorship was disguised in the literary dictatorship, and as
in the Victorian period, when the poem had a more obvious contemporary
reality. In the early nineteenth century the poem had a mixed reality;
the contemporary mind, in its caprice and inventiveness, imitating the
poetic mind.
If we observe what happens when the poem is confined to one type of
reality, to that of the contemporary mind, as in the eighteenth-century
satire, or to that of the poetic mind, as in the romantic abuse of the
poetic absolute, it appears that both of these are but half-realities
and that the true reality of the poem must have a double force: a
positive truth, from its origin in the poetic mind, and a negative
truthfulness, from the fact that it is not made unreal when brought into
contact with the contemporary mind, that is, with contemporary
knowledge. When the contemporary mind, or the concrete intelligence, or
whatever we please to call it, is seen to be no more, no less, than
accumulated knowledge-material, it will be realized how grotesque it is
that this should supply the creative origin, and hence the first reality
of the poem, leaving to the poetic mind the secondary service of
interpretation.
But the slaves of this knowledge-material can imagine no state of
activity which shall not be dependent on it; they cannot understand that
the poet can have experience of it as an independent mind reducing
authoritative mass to unauthoritative ideas; that once the mass of
intelligent matter is recognized as a mass of ideas about matter, every
man is potentially his own scientist, though not his own poet, since
only the poet is fully capable, in this way, of being his own scientist.
Therefore, if the poet shows independence, if he is, indeed, not a mere
mouthpiece of the contemporary mind, it is assumed by the
knowledge-slaves that he cannot have an informed mind; and everything he
writes is taken with a grain of scientific salt. This snobbism, which
naturally appeals to criticism, because it seems another indulgence by
which poetry may manage to survive, in turn drives poets who stand in
fear of the knowledge-hierarchy to profess only the single reality of
the poetic mindâwhat we may call the apologetic absolute. The result is
poetry whose only subject is the psychology of the poet and whose final
value is scientific; which is as it should be, since the snobbism
responsible for it tries to treat poetry as if it were a science.
Poetry of this kind thus finally comes to justify itself by an analogy
with mechanical reality. France and America provide numerous examples of
it. In America industry itself may be said to have an imagination and so
to furnish an instructive parallel to the creative mind faced with the
problem of employing itself. If it cannot have poems which shall have a
place in the world, perhaps it can have poems which shall have a place
in themselves, which shall end where they begin; if it cannot have
poetry, perhaps it can have purity. The machine is a practical symbol of
automatism and may be said to create itself as the psychological poem
does, to be its own product. Instead of possessing a life, such a poem
possesses a mechanism, a fixed emotional routine that may be called
absolute because its effect never varies. In France the analogical
element is provided to poetry by the mechanical principle of other arts,
by painting, principally by music. The aesthetic purity of the poem is
made to consist in its behaving like a machine, in imitating its making
and in maintaining an absence of meaning except as a non-conscious cause
and instrument of a conscious effect. The history of this theory lies
between Poe, in whom it was an amateur's attempt to defend the
independence of the poem on the grounds of its mere pleasure-reality,
and Paul Valéry and other musico-poeticians, who further develop the
pleasure-reality theory by transferring the centre of the poem from its
origin in the poet to its conclusion in the reader. Invention is
converted into reaction, poetry into criticism. The pure poem is arrived
at by subtracting the poem from itself. Only its limits remain, its
points of origin and of communication. The rest is a time and space
necessity between them, the place, presumably, which the poetic mind
leaves to be filled in by the contemporary mind; the myth, once more,
which the contemporary mind is supposed to suggest to the poetic mind,
but now a blank myth, since the contemporary mind believes itself to
have arrived at the all-in-all, that what is not itself is merely its
shadow.
If, in spite of the present surquidry of the contemporary mind and the
accidie with which the poetic mind is afflicted, it were possible to
conceive of the production of a true poem, to what should we look for
evidences of its reality? To those inner circumstances which make up the
poetic mind and which the poem is the means of externalizing, as the
poetic mind is the means of externalizing the poem, which hitherto
existed only unto itself. In this mutuality lies the real clue to the
double reality of the poem, its truth as a poem, its truthfulness as a
demonstration of the poet's mind. For we have now come to the point
where it is permissible to talk of the poetic mind as the poet's mind,
and of the poet's mind as the only contemporary mind possible in the
poem, its incidental reality. The poem itself is supreme, above persons;
judging rather than judged; keeping criticism at a respectful distance;
it is even able to make a reader of its author. It comes to be because
an individual mind is clear enough to perceive it and then to become its
instrument. Criticism can only have authority over the poem if the
poet's mind was from the start not sufficiently clear, sufficiently free
of criticism; if it obeyed an existing, that is, a past order of
reality, rather than a present order of reality, that is, the order of
the things which do not yet exist. How shall this true poem be
recognized? By those tests of reality it imposes on the reader; perhaps,
then, only by the strength of the hostility it arises and the extent of
its unpopularity even with the minority cults, or by its modest
contentment with itself and the obscurity to which it is consigned.
False poems, as distinguished from weak poems, are those written to
respond to tests of reality imposed by the contemporary mind and are
therefore able to satisfy them better than any true one. The creative
history of the false poem is the age, the author sensible of the age and
the set of outer circumstances involved in his delicate adjustment to
the age at a particular moment, in a particular place. Nothing remains
beyond this, no life, no element, as in the true poem, untranslatable
except in the terms provided by the poem itself. In the true poem these
terms form a measurement that hitherto did not exist, and the test of
the poem's reality is: to what degree is it a new dimension of reality?
Indeed, in the true poem poetry is the science of reality, so-called
science, itself the mythâthe corpus of knowledge to which poetry has for
centuries been an inspired drudge, turning it into the sensible material
of a religious mysticism, a gross and flabby self-worship. Poetry, in
other words, has been the divine solvent converting knowledge into
truth, until knowledge, mad with its own modernity, declared itself the
sole source of truth. But if knowledge can dismiss poetry, can it
dismiss the poet? If the poetic mind was once the source of truth for
knowledge, does it cease to have truth because the corpus of knowledge
finds it no longer useful? In its primitive period of usefulness to
knowledge it was a superior knowing; itself truth, knowledge its
truthfulness: the true poem was at once truth and myth (truthfulness),
knowing and knowledge, reality and test of reality. But if knowledge is,
so to speak, composing its own monster-poem, has the poem as such
necessarily disappeared? Can minds and their perceptions be erased by a
piece of self-investigated india-rubber?
The word poem itself is an ever new meaning of an ever new combination
of doing and making as one act, with a third inference of being
perpetuating these in dynamic form. The only difference between a poem
and a person is that in a poem being is the final state, in a person the
preliminary state. These two kinds of realities, that of the person,
that of the poem, stand at one end and the other of the poet's mind,
which is but progressive experience made into a recurrent sequence
circulating between one kind of reality and the other without destroying
one reality in the other.
T. S. Eliot observed some time ago that âthe conditions which may be
considered to be unfavourable to the writing of good poetry are
unfavourable to the writing of good criticism.â^(=> #calibre_link-21 20
) This implies that the reality of poetry is externally, not internally
derived. But though âconditionsâ may be unfavourably disposed to good
poetry, they cannot affect the writing of good poetry if there are poets
who insist on writing it. They can, however, affect the writing of such
poetry as is actually created by external contemporary conditions;
poetry, in fact, that is not poetry at all but the by-product of a
period's spiritual indecision. But such poetry is not a manifestation of
the poetic mind but of certain unhappy formations in the contemporary
mind acting as individuals whose task it is to present the signs of the
times rather than poetry.
We have, then, in a period when the Zeitgeist, the Old Man of the Sea,
is working particular mischief, a number of Sinbads drifting at large
whose fate it is to be at the mercy of his humours. They may either be
washed astride a breakwater (when their balancing gestures are called
criticism) or dashed over the sea wall into the Sacred Grove, where they
try to feel at home in spite of the Old Man on their back (when their
balancing gestures are called poetry).
When such contemporary formations are converted into creative or
critical personalities by Zeitgeist humours, a subtle strangeness will,
of course, be perceived in them. First something scarcely discernible,
except for the feeling of embarrassment it conveysâa faint, but distinct
foreign accent; next that dissociation or snobbism which a newly
converted Catholic feels toward the born Catholic, or the cabinet-maker
who has learned his trade at a school toward one who has inherited it
from his father. It is the self-conscious earnestness of an alien doing
his best to become acclimatized to his adopted country. Without that
natural endowment which makes the creative faculty indifferent to moral
justifications of itself (its moral justification being best presented
in a work), the chief preoccupation of the factitious creative
personality is with the moral values, or the legitimacy, of literature.
A blend is thus made of the creative and critical operations, resulting
in much interesting self-revelation (âgood criticismâ), but in too much
dull self-concealment in poetry, which comes to be the martyrdom of
lack-of-confidence-in-self. Mr. Eliot's axiom, therefore, which was
composed long before he was completely floored by the Zeitgeist, must be
brought up-to-date in this way: âThe conditions which may be considered
favourable to the writing of good criticism may be considered favourable
to the writing of good criticism.â For in such language poetry is but an
incident of criticism. Mr. Eliot wrote several years ago: âEvery form of
genuine criticism is directed toward creation. The historical or the
philosophical critic of poetry is criticising poetry in order to create
a history or a philosophy; the poetic critic is criticising poetry in
order to create poetry.â^(=> #calibre_link-22 21
) In a review of two books by two distinguished contemporary
personalities, Mr. Herbert Read and M. Ramon Fernandez, in the October,
1926, issue of the New Criterion (a community of contemporary
personalities), Mr. Eliot goes still further: âThe significance of the
term critic has varied indefinitely; in our time the most vigorous
critical minds are philosophical minds, are, in short, creative of
values.â^(=> #calibre_link-23 22
)
Further characteristics of this snobbism, besides its preoccupations
with the moral values of literature, are its emphasis on personal
pedigree, learning and literary internationalism. The review referred to
above is so generous in examples of these that I cannot refrain from
using it as a text, nor indeed this entire number of the New Criterion,
which includes an essay by M. Fernandez himself beginning, âIt is
pleasant for a French critic to write for the cultivated public on the
other side of the Channelâ; a poem by Mr. Read himself, The Lament of
Saint Denis with a motto From the Institutes of Johann Lorenz von
Mosheim, translated by Archibald Maclaine (1764) and three foot-notes:
Inferno xxviii. 121â2, Paradiso: x. 94, and BoĂ«thius: De Consolatione,
II., vi., the learned if not the moral justifications for such lines as
And then a faint rumour in the night
An approaching murmur of enemies
Their hearts were suddenly loud in their still bodies
Fluttering wildly within those livid tunicles of flesh
(poor Mr. Read, likewise floored by the Zeitgeist, who in his less
contemporaneous days could write less ambitiously but more
authentically:
Judas was right
In a mental sort of way;
For he betrayed another and so
With purpose was self-justified.
But I delivered my body to fearâ
I was a bloodier fool than he.);^(=> #calibre_link-24 23
)
and a poem by Mr. Eliot himself, Fragment of a Prologue, with two
mottoes, one from the Choephoroi, the other from St. John of the Cross,
the poem itself being a kind of epilogue to Ulysses, or Ulysses in the
Waste Land.
But the review itself is even more illuminating, especially as to the
love of pedigree, learning and literary internationalism: âMr. Read and
M. Fernandez provide an excellent example of this invalidation of the
ancient classificationâ (critical and creative) because, the next
sentence continues, âThey are of the same generation, of the same order
of culture; their education is as nearly the same as that of men of
different race and nationality can be. . . . Both were primarily
students of literature, and animated by the desire to find a meaning and
justification for literature. Mr. Read has the advantage of being
European and English; M. Fernandez that of being European and American
(he was born in Mexico). . . . Both are critics with international
learning and international standards.â All this to prove the
invalidation of that âancientâ classification.
It is improper to advance that criticism and poetry spring from the same
kind of personal impulse, unless it is made equally clear that they must
diverge at an early stage toward their respective positions. Criticism
and creation do not face the same way, but face each other, criticism
forgoing creation in order to be able to describe it. This purpose
demands learning in criticism, because it is thus the author not of one
poem, let us say, but of the history of one poem and another and another
(since when face to face with one poem the critic sees many others as
well); but it does not mean that criticism may be substituted for
creation, as would follow if that âancient classificationâ were really
invalidated. The novel perhaps shows the danger of such a substitution
more clearly than any other kind of writing, being avowedly critical
rather than creative, historical rather than poetic: it is a description
of poetic reality by contemporary reality. Wherever the novel tries to
create poetic values, it becomes false art, as with Proust, Joyce,
Virginia Woolf and such American poetic novelists as Waldo Frank and
Sherwood Anderson. For, while the novel may suggest them or describe
them, it needs to be emphasized dogmatically that there are no true
creative values but poetic valuesâvalues which can be final without
reference to their contemporary setting. (This does not apply to the
poetical novel, to Borrow or Melville, poetical referring only to the
character of the style, not to the creative intention of the novel.) The
novel may be eminently true, or truthful, but it is not truth; and no
novelist who held his work in proper respect would claim it to be truth
except in this relative sense of truthful. If Mr. Eliot were not so
comfortably relaxing against the novel, âa capital point for every
contemporary mind (sic)â^(=> #calibre_link-25 24
) (to start from), evidently because it can be perverted to bring about
âthis invalidation of the ancient classification,â he would perhaps
reject Proust with Mr. Read and M. Fernandez not so much because Proust
was wanting in the moral element as because he falsified the
novelâcomposing it synthetically of those infinitesimal morsels of
poetic reality by which the connoisseur's palate has had to appear
uniformly stimulated throughout that long, long from-egg-to-apple
dinner.
Proust recalls the snobbism of literary inter-nationalism, which has
provided Charles Scott-Moncrieff, George Moore and Ezra Pound among
others, with continuous employment. Any serious indictment of it would
only assist in prolonging the sufferings of the silent populations whose
palates were long ago exhausted by foreign banqueting but who go on
because the connoisseurs go on, who go on because they are at the head
of the table and cannot escape. Excepting rare instances of personal
sympathy with a foreign language arising out of associations, of
circumstance or temperament; excepting also such a unique case of
internationalism as that of America and England, where one is but a
historical layer of the other; any persistent cultivation of a
contemporary foreign literature is a snobbism inspired, apart from its
association with a general programme of literary snobbism, by a romantic
purpose to find relief from one dull literary scene in anotherâa form of
literary pornography. Nothing could be more alien to Mr. Eliot's
temperament, for example, than the sentiment and temperament expressed
in: âla littĂ©rature est impossible. Il faut en sorterâ which he quotes
from Jean Cocteau's letter to Jacques Maritain on poetry and religion.
âInternational standardsâ of literature are a degraded critical
Esperanto and, like Esperanto, comprehensible only to Esperantists.
What unites littérateurs (the successors of the critics and creators of
âthe ancient classificationâ) in this generation is, in fact, not
standards of taste or positive intellectual sympathy, but the feeling of
panic occasioned by the setting adrift of literature by the
time-universe. The reason why contemporary critics are so interested in
inquiring into the nature of the function of literature is not, as Mr.
Eliot suggests, because they do not wish âto take for granted a whole
universe,â but because a whole universe has given literature its
dismissal papers.^(=> #calibre_link-26 25
) Naturally endowed creative writers may protect themselves from the
present Zeitgeist or remain entirely unaffected by it. But those
sensitive spots in the contemporary mind to be identified as
littérateurs can neither avoid nor revoke the Zeitgeist nor yet cancel
themselves, since they are so organically of the Zeitgeist; and are thus
obliged to make a religion of their own posthumousness, a religion so
serious that Mr. Eliot himself calls it âan athleticism, a training, of
the soul as severe and ascetic as the training of the body of a
runner.â^(=> #calibre_link-27 26
) The asceticism on which it is based is the deprivation of the universe
which science has forced on literature; and the moral values implied are
the coward's promise to keep up his courage though all is lost.
The most redeeming and yet most unfortunate characteristic of this
snob-criticism is its seriousness. Unfortunate because by contrast with
the complete frivolousness or inaneness of all other contemporary
critical writing it is the only criticism that demands any respect from
the independent writer; and in this way likely to make him, in spite of
his independence, ingenuously shy of it, and of expressing his normal
reactions to the awful gloom that it has cast over the whole literary
scene. Such is the science of overwhelming by pomp. Even the London
Mercury would not if it could quiz the New Criterion, but would on the
contrary feel flattered to be counted amongst its colleagues.
The final effect of this snobbism is the deliberate cultivation of a
modernity, a calculated and therefore more âclassicalâ quality (âWe
liveâ) than mere crude romantic contemporaneousness (âI'm glad I'm
aliveâ or âI'm sorry I'm aliveâ). âA poem which was never modern will
not pass into that curious state of suspended animation by means of
which the poems we call classic are preserved active to the palate,â
said Edgell Rickword, Editor of the Calendar of Modern Letters, lately
next to the New Criterion the most serious community of contemporary
personalities.^(=> #calibre_link-28 27
) Thus poetic modernism, advertised by its own uplift, reaches the
poetry societies of the provinces, who by now have used up all their war
and post-war subjects and are grateful for a change. âAt an evening of
the Bournemouth Poetry Society,â reports the Bournemouth Echo, âheld at
Eight Bells, Christchurch, poetry enthusiasts (one came all the way from
Broadstone) were well rewarded by a remarkably live and able paper by
Mrs. Leslie Goodwin on âFurther Aspects of Modern Poetry.â Mrs. Goodwin
called attention to the unappreciated importance of the Left Wing or
extreme Modernist Group, who have new ideas as to what is appropriate
and beautiful.â For the Old Man of the Sea must have his joke.
âModern,â however, is not a contemporary invention: it must not be
forgotten that the littérateurs of the characteristic eighteenth century
were likewise modernists and likewise invalidated âthe ancient
classification.â Their poetry and criticism, although not born of the
same impulse, were written from the same point of view, which gave them
a mutual consistency if not a reciprocal power. Criticism became, then
also, a moral measurement: arbitrary judgments for arbitrary poetic
practices. Poetry was a critical convenience, criticism a poetic
convenience; the offspring of this union between them had that inbred
half-reality which is characteristic of present-day manifestations of
the contemporary mind in criticism and poetry. The period was a
âliteraryâ period. It had been fitting, for example, for Milton some
time before, to dedicate Samson Agonistes to a campaign against what he
called the corrupt gratification of the people with âcomic stuff,â and
to a classical conception and treatment of tragedy. It was fitting for
Whitman, long after, to justify Leaves of Grass by an exactly contrary
critical attitude: âthat the real test applicable to a book is entirely
outside literary tests.â^(=> #calibre_link-29 28
) For, though both disregarded the meaning of poetic intention, one
accepted the authority of literature, the other that of life and
humanity. The authority of eighteenth-century literature was neither of
these, but a working compromise between them. Literature was the
rationalizing apparatus that added logic to morality; life, the literary
demonstration. This code expressed the temper of the age faithfully:
snobbism, or conformity of behaviour to a degree where nothing happened
at all, where important poetry was prevented from happening. Such
literary sterility caused a reaction in the next century, frenzied
fertility resulting in an unpedigreed stock. Although a fresh creative
basis was found, the preceding century furnished its literary ancestry,
which could be revolted against but not cast out of the blood. So poetry
was for a time a romantic misfit, until new critical values could be
found to match the new poetical values. In Keats we find many Pope-ish
echoes; as we find many nineteenth-century echoes in the poetry of Miss
Sitwell. Torn between her inherited Wordsworthianisms and
Tennysonianisms and her acquired Pope-isms, her poetry no less than
Keats' bears the marks of a conflict. Her nineteenth- century-isms (as
Keats' eighteenth-century-isms) it is possible to indulge because they
were inherited; likewise her Gallicisms, as a decorative relief to
these. But why should Miss Sitwell, with an abundantly endowed creative
faculty, find it necessary to praise The Rape of the Lock as a beautiful
example âof the fusion of subject matter and
styleâ?^(=> #calibre_link-30 29
) If not because prevailing critical snobbisms force the independent
creative faculty to strengthen its pedigree with artificial critical
values which, in turn, act as a kind of protective snobbism (as
Elizabethanisms did for Keats).
Nineteenth-century poetry, after a brief period of sentimental debate,
failed to develop any real critical values. Instead, it borrowed its
titles from the idea of progress, the philosophical demiurge of the
century, thus only changing one social god for another without the
disguise this time of a literary mask. The popular mode of mysticism
resulting from this religiosity was the intelligenceânot the intellect.
The reason why the intellect is held anti-religious is that it is an
individual property rather than a social one and is therefore less
likely to accept as final the generalizations of the prevailing
community system of faith. Contemporary criticism is endeavouring to
elevate the mass-intelligence by making it behave like an independent
intellect, the effect of which is to rob the term intellectual integrity
of all significance. While âcontemporaryâ eighteenth-century poetry
cannot be said to have had great intellectual integrity, it did make an
honest compromise between the general intelligence and the individual
intellect by postulating wit as the common raw material of literature.
However wit may be abused by being made to serve moral ends, it is in
itself an intellectual competence which is bound to protect itself in
some way against the uses to which it is put. Wit may indeed be called
the subject-matter of the best of eighteenth-century poetry, as human
wisdom forms the subject-matter of the worst of nineteenth-century
poetry.
In the earlier period there was at least wit to act as a basis, however
artificial, of critical values. In the later there was only a standard
of philosophical satisfaction demanding an unrestrained flattering of
every possible variety of human activity: poetry being the spiritual
sign of practical prosperity and advance, the personified muse of
optimism. For this later tendency Wordsworth's critical commonplaces
were principally responsible; which even modern writers find it
impossible to reject on the proper ground. Miss Sitwell, for example,
thinks that it is time to discard the Wordsworthian tradition, not
because it is fundamentally false, but only because it has grown dull in
the course of its development. It is time to leave âthe peasant and
words suitable to the peasant.â That is, what poetry needs is a general
correction of taste, not an independence in which creative values have a
lack of conformity according to the variety of poetic minds (the use of
poetic mind as a critical abstraction is likely to make us forget that
it is a rather than the poetic mind). It is a telling piece of
well-meaning literary snobbism to call Wordsworth a peasant poet.
Wordsworth, like Miss Sitwell, wanted to âinterest mankindâ in the
proper way, âto correct the present state of the public taste in this
country.â âHumble and rustic life was generally chosenâ because it made
a more fluid philosophical language for poetry: the peasant flavour is
only a literary manner, as that part of Miss Sitwell's own poetry which
is dedicated to taste is but the exploitation of a literary manner.
Wordsworth's poetry is no more fit for reading by peasants than Miss
Sitwell's is by princesses. Both have the view that poetry is a careful
annotation of life. To Wordsworth, poetry is âthe spontaneous overflow
of powerful feelingsâ; to Miss Sitwell, it brings ânew and heightened
consciousness to life.â^(=> #calibre_link-31 30
) Both have a purpose to deal with what she calls the âcommon movement
of life,â only âthe modern poet has a different stylisation.â
Wordsworth, under the false mask of taste, made moral enlargements on
trivial subjects. The modern poet who, like Miss Sitwell, is not
overwhelmed by the world or made an instrument of the Zeitgeist, but who
in spite of his contempt for its blustering demonstration of power
clings to it out of an inherited and old-fashioned sense of duty, wastes
himself on that sentimental, self-sacrificing office which Miss Sitwell
calls âshowing the world in all its triviality.â
So that present modernism is not even literary in the eighteenth-century
sense but a complex of pietist snobberies and sentimentalities.
V: Poetry and Progress
In spite of âthe invalidation of that ancient classificationâ (between
the critic and the creator), to quote T. S. Eliot once more,
contemporary criticism shows certain survivals of the humble advisory or
research functions of criticism in the past: it continues to make a few
naive medical recommendations. On the one hand, we find the new universe
of science, the successor of the old politico-philosophistical universe,
forcing literature to retire or to show good cause why it should not or
to temporize in elaborate leave-takings. On the other, we find science
hopefully recommended as a new poetical subject. Even so presumably
modern a type as the intelluptuous Aldous Huxley still clings to the
superstition of subject-matter and, while regretting âthe deplorable
traditionalism of subject-matter that weighs so heavily upon so much of
contemporary poetry,â reaffirms Wordsworthianism by suggesting new
subject-matter. Overlooking the fact that subject- matter has always
exhausted rather than nourished creative energy, he names science as the
proper modern subject for poetry and Laforgue as a poet who made real
poetry out of science, âscience's only lyrist.â^(=> #calibre_link-32 31
) Now Laforgue is, as a matter of fact, one of the most non-subject of
poets. He did, indeed, attempt to make poetry a discursive record of
pure sensationâcomme parlĂ©. His Complaintes are a series of satires on
subjects, an anthology of phraseologies; and science can only mean to
poetry one more phraseology. His intention was to give poetry complete
ideological freedom from subjects, to record sensation in its natural
sense-terms, in its immediate, or contemporary, associations, without
resorting to literary classification. Such poetry makes use of science
to help it invent special vocabularies, but it does not use science as a
subject. It would indeed be, in the scientist's opinion, romantically
unscientific. It is not âscientificâ to speak of the sun as white as
tap-room spittle, or to speak of the moon as having its ears stopped
with cotton. It is merely the effort of an intellectually
non-intellectual intellect to describe contemporary emotions with
contemporary sophistication but with a classical affectation of
innocence. Such is the Anti-Reason of Paul Valéry and such is that
vocabularistic whimsicality or quaintness by which poets like E. E.
Cummings and Edith Sitwell inoculate themselves against the Zeitgeistâa
protective measure against the practical mentalism of their period with
which poets are always afraid of becoming emotionally infected.
Expressionismâand all super-realist movements may be classified as
expressionisticâis another typical recommendation, a starvation diet as
a protest against the tyranny of the material universe, a denial of the
potency of inorganic matter. Technically, expressionism admits no
distinction between the word and the poetic mind. The word, not the
mind, becomes the centre of poetic life. It acts without memory, without
equipment; it is completely unqualified, capable of expressing anything
it chooses at the moment to express. This autonomous quality of words
may justify itself in the academic nursery prose of Gertrude Stein, but
it is futile in poetry because, though words must be pure in poetry,
they cannot be blank. Expressionism therefore may have been valuable as
a temporary rest-and-diet cure, but in general it resulted in creative
depression. For as it is difficult for an invalid to resist technical
preoccupation with himself, so expressionism encouraged morbid egotism
and imbecile healthiness. Instead of transferring the creative centre
from the poetic mind to words, it should have concentrated on the
rehabilitation of the poetic mind, with words as the physical incident
of this mind. Words in themselves are as false a distinction as is the
body in itself apart from the mind.
Expressionism was merely one complete illustration of this unholy
alliance in which the Zeitgeist kills and criticism cures. It passed,
and the Zeitgeist is still killing, criticism still curing. The
expressionist objected to the destruction of the personal self in a
world becoming more and more material and externalized. So he shut out
the visible world and invented an abstract self to replace that self
which is only a product of the external worldâthe Zeitgeist-self.
Expressionism, or some similar movement of âobjectiveâ subjectivity, is
therefore likely to flourish when the Zeitgeist is patently destructive
rather than constructive, as in war- and post-war Germany. But the
expressionist is one thing, expressionism is another. The expressionist
is a personal victim, expressionism a critical device of the Zeitgeist
for allowing its victim to extinguish itself.
The pragmatic reality of the Zeitgeist and its criticism must be
assumed, as must that of anything by which the weakness of one set of
minds prevails over the weakness of another. All that can be said for
critics who serve the Zeitgeist is that some, the most stupid, know not
what they do. The critics who know what they do never stoop to critical
recommendation but consecrate their intelligence to the complete service
of the Zeitgeist. Poetry must not be assisted, it must conform. If it
cannot conform it must cease to exist, since it can only exist by a
kindly dispensation from the Zeitgeist. Zeitgeist intelligence, as it is
possessed by criticism, thus returns poetry to its primitive ritualistic
function of community revelation. In other words, it is the generalized
voice of social sentiment: as an independent personal attribute it is,
in fact, non-existent. It ceases to employ subject-matter not because it
has renounced its job as an inspired research-worker on matter that
philosophy, history and science could take no further, but because it
has been denied subjectivity and once and for all universalized; given,
instead of subject-matter in various stages of indigestion, the whole
self-digested substance of contemporary learning and asked to humble
itself before it in reverent self-revilement. First of all, of course,
searching itself to see if it is sufficiently pure, that is, if it has
really acknowledged itself a worm in its god's sight: in which
purification criticism condescends to assist by what is called
discovering to literature its function.
Science, then, as a critical recommendation for poetry is as irrelevant
as an attack on science for impeding the progress of poetry. For science
as agent of a period's mass-vanity is one thing and science as a small
historical item is another; and most contemporary views of science
overlook the second sense in favour of the first. Only the first is,
indeed, apparent, since science cannot afford to allow the second to
appear: never has it been more reckless, more blind, more disorganized,
more meaningless than at the present moment, never, therefore, more in
need of being accepted as truth instead of as a small though
authoritative corner of human knowledge. The best way to hide confusion
and flippancy is to declare a new life or age, to proclaim a Zeitgeist.
Poetry as creative truth is thus made to apologize for itself because,
being a personal attribute, it seems irregular and behind the times. The
advance of time as a universal force superior to persons left the time
of the individual far behind long ago. Intelligence, the historical
fallacy, is the philosophical means by which the individual makes his
literal time catch up with the figurative synthetic time of the totality
of matter. Advanced contemporary poetry is thus breathless with
scholarshipâthe Waste Land, a poem of four hundred and thirty-three
lines, has one learned reference to every eight of these; but it is not
breathless with intellectâthere is no sign of intellect per se in the
Waste Land. For as soon as an independent mental act needs to
substantiate itself historically it ceases to be independent and it
ceases to be intellect. It is only rather evasively intelligent.
Such is the time-fear and such is the timidity of personal illusion
against gross illusion, or of common sense as individual wisdom against
the doctrinaire Common Sense of the knowledge-superstition. So does the
quantity of learning separate itself from its source and so does the
independence of the mind become the source of its own subjection. What
is being fed to poetry now is the dregs of what poetry itself has
produced, and produced long ago. Or, let us not say poetry, since it is
a word spoiled by self-abuse. More specifically: science or any similar
fetish of the concrete intelligence is a mere by-the-way of the
suggestive intelligence, or intellect, a digression that becomes more
and more irrelevant and wanting in meaning as it treats itself as a
whole instead of as an enlarged incident of the suggestive intelligence.
The nearer it seems to approach a whole, the more vain, the more blind
it will become, the nearer it is approaching collapse. Modern warfare is
only a small aspect of the decay of science, âscientificâ spiritualism
another. Sooner or later, sooner than expected, science will confound
itself with its own successes and remain only an old-fashioned household
word. Its present prestige is due chiefly to its imperfection: when
every cure has been found for everything and every device for doing
everything has been invented and all the Florence Nightingale-sentiment
showered on scientists has been used up, it will be clear how much
sidetracked poetry went into the making of science. And poetry, as the
suggestive intelligence, will probably then make some new suggestion for
human energy at a loss as to how to employ itself; and will be once more
put in its place until this digression, in turn, wears itself out.
Meanwhile, however, science and its accessories are the new life and
poetry is the old, which must either acknowledge itself as dead or
consent to have itself kept alive by gland extracts, Viennese
rejuvenation treatments and radium, as a testimony of the power and
grace of science. There have been isolated and faint protests from poets
against Zeitgeist superstition, but in the main poets and especially
critics have grasped the possibilities of contemporary success in
Zeitgeist vanity and dedicated poetry to a display of its own
helplessness and to a vulgar flattery of the contemporary god, learned
matter. But how low in spirits and how full of humility! The only
joy-in-life left to contemporary Zeitgeist poetry is a little
half-hearted obscenity; and even obscenity must apologize for itself
with learning.
To propose that contemporary learning retards the synthesis always
implicit in poetry, to point out that it is science which is slow, and
not poetry, would confess a view of the nature of poetry incompatible
with the selfâdeprecating sophistication of present Zeitgeist poetry and
criticism; and immediately ally one with that sentimental adoration of
poetry common to clergymen, poetry societies, editors of weekly literary
reviews, anthologists, anthology readers, university professors,
business men, doctors and modern lyrical poets. To say, with Francis
Thompson, that poetry is always a hundred years in advance of science
would seem equally trivial, because Francis Thompson is not a
respectable literary reference, although his extravagance in paying
homage to an ancient dogmatic institution was more dignified than the
extravagance of contemporary poetry and criticism in paying homage to an
ephemeral, dogmatic Zeitgeist.^(=> #calibre_link-33 32
) In truth, advance is an unfortunate word: poetry does not advance
except in the sense that other things, such as science, are behind it.
There is no progress of poetry any more than there is a progress of
time. There is a progress of matter, but this is a permanent progress of
corruption.
Indeed, any attempt to look to a personal rather than to an academic
dignity in poetry will be set down to critical romanticism. Why
any-thing is less true than otherwise if it can be set down to critical
romanticism must remain a mystery. For snob-critics make a practice of
annulling the value of any statement detrimental to them by giving it a
name which relieves them of the obligation of replying to it directly.
(The late T. E. Hulme tried to rescue the artist from historical
difficulties by combining art and philosophy into a dry theory of
historical objectivity. Instead of delivering him up to time he brought
time inside the bounds of the creative system that he outlined. He
advocated a discipline that would control both time and the creator
through the impersonal severity, the absoluteness, in which artistic
forms might be conceived. The product of this âobjectiveâ objectivity is
therefore pure, hard, non-sympathetic. It is not intelligent: that is,
it is not materialistically interpretative, but material. It is not
emotional: that is, it is not imaginatively imitative but
unimaginatively representational. It is a non-human object. But such a
system results only in criticism, not in works. It expresses an attitude
toward time, protests against extraneous elements which have crept into
art, states the conflict between art and civilization, between creative
isolation and vulgarized originality. It shows the creator defeated by
progress taking refuge in a petulant barbarism.)^(=> #calibre_link-34 33
)
Social sentiment is the general source, conscious or unconscious, of the
âsubjectsâ of poetry. Contemporary social interests may even, as at
present, deprive poetry of an old stock of subjects and, instead of
providing a new stock, require that the inspiration of poetry shall be
even its own poverty, its humble renouncement of worldliness after it
has been frustrated by worldliness. What causes a change, then, in the
official inspiration of poetry is usually not a revolt on the part of
poetry itself against the tyranny of social sentiment, but the
absorption of poetry by a new social sentiment, which uses it as an
aggressive weapon against the old. The extravagant modernism of poetry
at any particular moment is due not to its independent defiance of
superannuated social sentiment but to its excessive slavishness and
adaptability, by which it anticipates, and thus seems to invent, an
impending social sentiment about to make itself historically effective.
Literature, poetry in particular, is in this way an instrument for
dramatizing the historical conflict between an old social sentiment and
a new. It performs the work of transition which might otherwise be
accomplished with greater violence. Spiritual violence in poetry makes
the least tangible sort of wreckage, because the formal cathartic
process is considered natural to it and disintegrating forces in it
easily simulate catharsis; also because the superstition of form imposes
on it an artificial urbanity. It is difficult, besides, for the vanity
which so often goes with poetic powers to resist the occasions for
theatricality which the Zeitgeist drama provides.
So it is fitting that Mr. Edwin Muir should call a book dealing with the
work of characteristic writers of to-day
Transition,^(=> #calibre_link-35 34
) a descriptive term having to do with social sentiment rather than with
literary criticism; and that he should fail with those writers to whom
the Zeitgeist is not a literary clue, just where, in fact, literary
criticism is demanded. But the distinction between literary criticism
and social sentiment (Zeitgeist sentiment), between unconditioned poetry
and conditioned poetry, becomes vague when the snobbism of progress,
disguised as literary modernism, obscures the anarchic nature of
creative activity and tries to justify it to its time by showing that it
is an effect of history. In this normalizing and levelling of literature
to its age, any poet who does not seem to conform to the historical laws
of his age is rejected by social sentiment disguised as literary
criticism. Poetry is required to proceed not from an individual sense of
life but from a social sense of literature: it must emphasize the social
rather than the individual origin of creation. It must, that is, be a
vehicle of prophecy of the most brutally servile kind.
The revolt against nineteenth-century subjects was the sign that a new
social sentiment was preparing to displace the old, using literature as
a destroying agency, as it had been used as a constructive agency in the
beginnings of the Victorian period. (The sensitiveness of the creative
mind is thus seen as an accursed talent, since by it the poet may become
so open to influences that he ceases to create and is, instead, merely a
historical barometer; in periods of change the public-utility character
of creation is likely to overshadow completely its private character.)
The Victorian period consolidated a great many different sets of values
already loosely equatedâeconomic values, religious values, moral values,
aesthetic values, and so forth. Social values were the general mean of
all these. Then material development began to demand a more flexible
social sentiment, a more âbroad-mindedâ interpretation and
differentiation of values. Literature made the first efforts at formal
differentiation by attempting to separate moral values from aesthetic
values.
The effect of playing this historical role was to make literature
digress first into pure sociology, continuing in this century in such
anachronisms as Butler, Shaw, Wells, Galsworthy and finally D. H.
Lawrence (an instance of contemporary Rousseauism); then into an
anti-social orgy of third-rate decadenceâboth of these resulting from
the differentiation of moral and aesthetic values. The virtue, however,
of both literary sociology and literary decadence is that sooner or
later they must write themselves out. The former lasted longer because
it is more congenial to the Anglo-Saxon temperament, the latter died out
soon after it was contracted from French decadence. In the English
ânineties there was no decadence anywhere except in literature. In
France, on the other hand, there is always decadence, it is the great
national genius and source of life. The French have, indeed, a natural
aptitude for decadence; it is in them a sign of health. The underlying
theme of all French literature, romantic and classical alike, is
Decline, and all French writers of excellence must begin by falling in
love with Decline. This is why French criticism has no difficulty in
reconciling contradictory literary movements, since they are all in
agreement on at least one point.
So it is pitiful to think of Arthur Symons, a feeble English decadent,
making brotherly advances to such healthy French decadents as Baudelaire
and Laforgue. The sociologists, though here and there slightly infected
with decadence, were for the most part healthy, cheerful and good.
William Morris and Edward Carpenter were the early poetical writers of
the sociological movement, whose literature soon, however, lost its
poetical tinge and became propagandist, journalistic, scientific,
philosophical or witty. Doughty was perhaps the writer who paid least
attention to contemporary social sentiment. Even Hardy was contaminated,
on one side by historical mysticism, rural economy and the divorce laws,
on the other by the same decadent, sentimental suicidism which made
Barrie, because he was Scotch, simply a pretty writer. The decadents
were divided into two classes, the sad people, the bad people. Among the
sad people were Thomson, Dowson, Davidson, Middleton and O'Shaughnessy,
who may all be described in the adjective invented by Max Beerbohm for
Enoch Soames: dim. The bad people were the unmentionables who collapsed,
too weak for vice, at the feet of the Zeitgeist.
Though literary sociology survived literary decadence, it soon merged
with non-literary forces; and though literature continued as one of the
minor branches of social intelligence, poetry as idiosyncratic creation
officially disappeared. What literature did persist was unimportant, as
there was now no historical reason for its being otherwise. In the
Victorian period literature had been an instrument of hypocrisy. When a
more liberal rationalism succeeded Victorian rationalism, literature
became merely an instrument for confessing hypocrisy, especially poetic
hypocrisy. One doubtful result of this was that the quality of poetry
went into other kinds of writing and effected a great revival of wit in
the sophisticated novel and essay. Sentimental reactions to the passing
of poetry then occurred, without the attendance of criticism, in great
varietyâGeorgianism, Imagism, Vers Librism, lyricism, all too wanting in
originality or direction to survive their own enthusiasm. At last
criticism was awakened by the voice of the new Zeitgeist, which was one
in which the only social excuse that could be found for poetry was in
its renunciation of its non-tribal, personal attributes. But as the new
universe in which this perfunctory occupation had been found for poetry
had no real need even for a formal act of renunciation by it, criticism,
in evoking a new social sentiment, was asking for a hypocrisy in poetry
more inexcusable than Victorian hypocrisy, which was at least the result
of a real social need. Worse still, not only was poetry called upon to
exchange private poetic reality for public contemporary reality, but
even the contemporary reality of the time-universe was received
second-hand. For the time-universe having haughtily dismissed poetry,
criticism was obliged to invent an analogical universe, a sort of
scholastic image before which poetry could perform its prostrations.
As in any time there exist a number of unclassified minds capable of
much but wanting in personal differentiation, such an equivocal
definition of poetry opens up for them an unlimited opportunity for
converting want of person into ritualistic impersonality. In this manner
does the disintegration of poetry as a thing of poets make poets of
minds that had otherwise been nameless thought-mechanisms. The
mechanistic side of contemporary Zeitgeist poetry is shown in its
complete lack of form in any organic senseâthough it maintains an
automatic convention of formality. It is obliged to forswear all
personal reality (unless it can be classified as âpsychologicalâ), to
submerge itself in contemporary realism, to employ a learned ritual in
which contemporary data are left unpoetized, that is, as in their final
stage of truth. This definition of poetry is further observed by
reviving previous literary rites, though rejecting the various
historical realisms with which they were connected for the present
realism: uniting the historical past and the historical present in one
expanded social sentiment, an authoritative snobbism against creative
personal eccentricity. The official seriousness and dignity of this
sentiment acting as literary criticism is likely to obscure the fact
that it is but the old snobbism of non-poets (literary poets) against
poets (non-literary poets).
VI: The Higher Snobbism
The true relations between society and poetry are concealed by a number
of reciprocal snobbisms which maintain an armed peace between them. It
is the strength of snobbisms to be never at war with one another. The
original snobbism in these relations obviously came from society. The
poet was a man apart, foolish but tribally useful, and regarded with
that half-fear and half-contempt which the executive or active members
of a community tend always to have for the divining or reflective
members. If we imagine the poet in an extremely unsuspicious attitude
toward his official rĂŽle, we can see him as being probably without a
retaliative or protective snobbism. But as society comes to depend less
and less on the poet, as he is supplanted by patriotism, formal learning
and other instruments of community self-reliance, his official dignity
turns into a mere decorative social survival. Society loses fear of him,
retaining only tender contempt. And the poet himself therefore
emphasizes more and more the eccentric personal character of poetry and
sets up a counter-snobbism, a pride in weakness and eccentricity, which
plays on certain ancient superstitions about poetry that still survive.
The formal corpus of these superstitions by which poetry remains a minor
religion to society is criticism. Society represents practicality,
against which poetry protects itself by cultivating an atmosphere of
unpracticality. For society spares what is unpractical if it is made
poetical. And the poet keeps up his illusion of self-respect under a
cloak of salvaged history and legend, a Joseph's coat, a patchwork quilt
of fact and fancy that grows a little shabbier from generation to
generation, from age to age. Keats so fancied himself in the priestly
Joseph's coat that he sacrificed himself to ambition, writing according
to a layman's idea of how a poet should write, catering to society's
snobbism toward poetry and to poetry's protective snobbism toward
society. Many another independent genius has been led astray by the same
flamboyant appeal.
Here within the ranks of poetry itself a reaction occurs against its
increasing effeminacy and, without discarding their ancient
prerogatives, poets enter into friendly competition with society in the
manly arts. But this remains a subordinate snobbism, the signs of growth
of shame and of decay. The whole snobbism by which poetry first came to
terms with society is a gross snobbism still obtaining where poetry and
society have not yet caught up with the Zeitgeist, or sometimes even
continuing, from literary habit, where they have. Although the
knowledge-display in advanced contemporary poetry has other more
important explanations, it is to a small degree a survival of the
superstitious practice of allusion, the Golden Bough supplanting the
Historical Library of Diodorus Siculus, the Bestiaries, Ovid and so
forth.
The next step is the breaking away, from the professionalism of the
gross snobbism, of individual poets or groups of poets; whose
counter-snobbism to the gross snobbism is their amateurishness, and to
society a snobbism against its acquiescence in the gross snobbism. These
amateurs protect themselves by exquisiteness: Pre-Raphaelite
exquisiteness is a genuine example of non-professionalism in the
Victorian period, Pater-Ruskin exquisiteness (to be counted as poetry
because it was âpoeticalâ) a spurious one, being Victorianism in exotic
trappings. In the end the gross snobbism generally reabsorbs the amateur
snobbism by means of criticism.
Soon, however, society reaches a stage of such self-importance that it
feels it beneath its dignity to carry on any longer its tender play with
poetry. It abandons its snobbism of tolerance towards poetry and, except
that small portion of contemporary society which remains slightly in
arrear of the date, drops it out altogether. Poetry in the old sense
nevertheless continues to live, principally on memories, still wielding
its anachronistic gross snobbism against an imaginary snobbism of
society, still relying on criticism to make it socially effective.
In theory, poetry has officially passed. A new universe without poetry
might be expected. But instead a new criticism arises to proclaim poetry
because there is no poetry, a criticism which shares the new universe's
atavistic hunger for poetry. A poetry results that has a paradoxical
reality, the contemporary reality which denies poetry's rights to
existence, as having only a private personal reality or an official
unrealityâboth equally unreal when viewed historically. This new poetry,
born of the new criticism, attempts to placate the Zeitgeist by
abandoning all the superstitions by which the old poetry prolonged its
life, and by using against itself all the snobbisms that have ever been
held toward poetry, including the last conclusive one, that there is no
more poetryâall forming the higher snobbism, poetry's snobbishness
toward itself. For creation it substitutes a philosophical life in the
Zeitgeist; for inspiration, criticismâthe anti-poetic metaphysics of
this life. Criticism and creation thus at last become single in act and
in effect, immediately responding to social sentiment without
intervening reflections or ecstasies. We are returned once more to the
fitness of Mr. Eliot's observation on âthe invalidation of that ancient
classificationâ (between critic and creator).^(=> #calibre_link-36 35
)
But although poetry in the old sense has theoretically passed, the
personal idiosyncrasy that makes the poet cannot pass. Poetry
quantitatively viewed is a social product; and one kind of social
product may be superseded by another. But poetic power can only come
from individuals and can only be superseded by itself in individuals.
There are poets and there are authors of a social product, who are not
poets. Contemporary thought tends to make all contemporary poetry a mere
social product, handing over the task of invention to the higher
snobbism. It unclasses the poet proper because his work might or might
not form part of the social product. The ideal author of the social
product is a correct citizen of his age. If the poet proper happens to
have contemporary taste as well as poetic power he innocently becomes a
spokesman for the higher snobbism.
Miss Sitwell, for example, unconsciously explains what the higher
snobbism is really pining for: the respectable freedom of
eighteenth-century literary Whiggery, where poetry could refine social
sentiment without being forced to be poetry, where it could be
professional without allying itself to the gross snobbism of romantic
professionalism and where a minor criticism, at one with a minor poetry,
could act as a social check against the poetry of a vulgar major
criticism, against the gross snobbism. The higher snobbism is, in fact,
in agreement with the new anti-poetic universe only in that it wishes to
disconnect itself from the gross snobbism: even to disown poetry and
substitute letters, in which poetry and criticism may be united if the
contemporary intelligence is accepted as the philosophical life
inspiring both. The higher snobbism is even willing to recommence a
corrected poetic tradition, with the poet deprived of all those powers
and privileges which in the beginning laid the foundations of the gross
snobbism. If the poet is, it says, deprived of all the social importance
granted him for being a poet, he will lose vulgarity; he will be part of
a process, not a process in himself. He will not be a blustering,
despised genius but a haughty, respected mechanic of contemporary
thought.
Poetic power may even, as in Miss Sitwell's case, substitute taste for
itself in order to be protected from the higher snobbism; it transfers
itself from the tradition of personalities to the tradition of periods.
This unnatural emphasis on periods rather than on poets has the effect
of exaggerating the significance of poets who count for next to nothing
in the tradition of personalities. What real sympathy can exist between
the kangaroo Sitwell and the duck Beddoes? Yet Miss Sitwell is drawn to
him: he is as close as she can come in the nineteenth century to her
chosen literary past. He was one of the few eighteenth-century men of
the first half of the nineteenth century; that is, he got as close to
the eighteenth century as an early nineteenth-century character could.
The closest he could get to the eighteenth century was the late
Elizabethan drama, which he wrote like an eighteenth-century writer.
Like Miss Sitwell he saw the problem of poetry as a problem of taste
rather than of personality, the continuance of poetry as the continuance
of the right tradition. He therefore picked up the Elizabethan drama
where the eighteenth century left off with itâthe eighteenth century
never went much further in it than Shakespeare's lesser comedies and
histories. Miss Sitwell finds herself an associate of Beddoes in
literary heraldry; he is a fellow modernist carrying on with her, to
quote Miss Sitwell, âthe great tradition leading from the Elizabethansâ
in such lines as
Old Adam, the carrion crow,
The old crow of Cairo;
slightly misquoted (or modernized?) by Miss Sitwell as
Adam, that old carrion-crow
Of Cairo.^(=> #calibre_link-37 36
)
By thus naming herself with gentlemen rather than geniuses she puts
herself beyond the suspicion of the higher snobbism; she makes herself a
subject of the minor criticism, the criticism of breeding, rather than
of the major criticism, the criticism of personality. Personality, Miss
Sitwell would agree, is the glory of the commoner, and every charwoman a
subject of the major criticism. In the contemporary situation the poet
has to be either a Beddoes or an elevated charwoman: he boasts either a
sense of literature (of time) or a sense of lifeâif the latter, he is an
ostracized vulgarian of character.
The weakest point in the higher snobbism (and its criticism) is that in
attacking the gross snobbism (and its criticism) it loses all sense of
differentiation. Not only must a poet choose categorically between being
a higher snob or a gross snob, because the minor criticism makes only
these two large critical generations; but in its desire to destroy the
gross snobs of contemporary literature it condescends to excuse certain
poets of the past of gross snobbism, also certain contemporary poets who
profess the gross snobbism, but as in the pastâto excuse anyone, that
is, who may be used against contemporary gross snobbism.
The minor criticism can therefore tolerate Dr. Bridges and Mr. Kipling
better than it can some one who is a gross snob and a modern as well or
some one who is a modern and, though not a gross snob, still not a
higher one. It is only a matter of time until the higher snobbism adopts
Tennyson, to take him away, as everything it can lay its hands on, from
the gross snobbism. Thus Miss Sitwell, in attacking Mr. Alfred Noyes,
Mr. J. G. Squire and Mr. Edward Shanks and the whole Yellow Press of
poetry, falls back into the arms of Wordsworth. For she has, for the
moment, in her hatred of contemporary gross snobbism, forgotten or
forgiven it in the past. Because, as she learns from De Quincey,
Wordsworth âwas abominated and insulted until 1821, when he was
fifty-one years of age, and barely tolerated for another ten years,
until he was sixty-one,â Miss Sitwell for the moment sees him as one of
the higher snobs.^(=> #calibre_link-38 37
) He appears to her to have been a victim, a victim, she concludes, of
the gross snobbism and of the major criticism. This of the Wordsworth
who so hastily retracted his adolescent Jacobinism; that âpoly-hedric
Peterâ damned by Shelley, a higher snob in comparison with him, in all
his sides; who accepted homage from that London âWhere small talk dies
in agoniesâ; whose drift from the first was âTo be a kind of moral
eunuchâ; whom the Reviews
who heaped abuse
On Peter while he wrote for freedom,
So soon as in his song they spy
The folly which soothes tyranny,
Praise him, for those who feed âem.^(=> #calibre_link-39 38
)
(âPraise himââW.'s poetry cordially praised in Blackwood's, 1817); of
whom even Keats in 1818 dared to write: âIt may be said that we ought to
read our contemporaries. . . . But, for the sake of a few imaginative or
domestic passages, are we to be bullied into a certain philosophy
engendered in the whims of an Egotist?â; whom Keats disliked for his
great-poet snobbism toward him, his conservatism, his flattery of
influential persons, his dressing up to dine in a stiff collar âI am
sorry that Wordsworth has left a bad impression wherever he visited in
town by his egotism, vanity and bigotryâ; yet whom Keats continued to
consider a literary king; who in 1813 was appointed Stamp-Distributor
for Westmoreland by the Regent, in 1815 published his first collective
edition, by 1817 was taking part in âimmortal dinnersâ; who became J.P.
for Westmoreland in 1819 and was kindly entertained in 1820 at both
universities. All this occurred during a period in which Miss Sitwell
considers Wordsworth to have been âabominated and insulted,â apparently
by the Yellow Press of major criticism. The abomination, as a matter of
fact, came from Keats, Shelley, Coleridge and other exponents of the
gross snobbism in which, it appears, there are degrees of honour and of
sense of calling. In her anxiety to make her case against the Yellow
Press fool-proof Miss Sitwell mistook Wordsworth for her kind of snob,
which is doing a monstrous injustice both to herself and to the higher
snobbism.
Literature, whose authority lay in the special privileges granted it by
society, had nothing to fall back on when society, finding literature no
longer socially useful, withdrew these privileges. It had no separate
confidence, no sense of life as an individual resource: life had been
delivered to literature en masse in each age as contemporary philosophy.
Direct communication with life without the intervention of society had
been gradually disappearing since the Elizabethans, so that literature,
when it lost caste, could be neither disdainfully indifferent nor openly
aggressive; it had to agree and yet not agree, surrender and yet not
surrenderâto survive by brilliant equivocation. The poet who did not
wish to come to blows with the Zeitgeist had no other alternative than
to become a snob. The snob is one who defeats circumstances which are
against him by not committing himself; one who adopts a strategical
position which he does not have to defend because its strategy is so
obscure that it is not attacked.
If, then, in spite of everything, literature was to go on at all, it had
to be wilfully modern; it had to coincide with its age not by the
accidents of personal authorship but by a calculated critical method.
Aristotelianism brought up-to-date could therefore settle the problem of
contemporary reality for literature better than any new philosophical
solution. In revised Aristotelianism, or neo-realism, reality is the
final, determining cause and substance that invents all attitudes to it.
A poem, as expressing a quality of final reality, is thus little more
than automatic effect and the creative mind merely a post-event position
of reality. The author of a poem is consequently without personal
reality, or responsibilityâanother important article in snobbist belief.
In such an aesthetic the prevailing system of knowledge becomes the
self-knowing Reason. Science is the modernized Self of reality (T. S.
Eliot's thomistic God); not Baconian science, which was merely a human
method of knowledge, but science as sophisticated substance superior to
time and space qualifications, which are the marks of nonsensical,
poetical facetiousness in humanity. Advanced contemporary poetry is, as
may be verified, facetious, poetical and full of sophisticated nonsense:
poetic snobbism is directed chiefly against the humanity, the
infantilism, of the poetic mind. And poetry excuses itself by giving
itself this ironic title: âThe Private Life of the Atom, A Dream
Fantasy.â Poetry must, that is, be a joke at its own expense, a mature
exercise in juvenility. It must no longer live in the time when
Life went a-maying
With Nature, Hope and Poesy.^(=> #calibre_link-40 39
)
It must rather approach that informed but idiotic bird-wittedness which
is the chief charm of the nursery-rhyme. Mr. Eliot's Waste Land is the
great twentieth-century nursery rhyme. And, like the nursery rhyme, this
poetry dispenses with that burden of continuity and sentimental
intelligibility implied in an audience. The poet renounces his
citizenship in gross humanity and joins that dim social class which
lives in the genteel retirement of a few superior critical journals. The
only way out for a poet who does not wish to avail himself of the social
privileges of his calling, or yet abide in the public maytime
reservations still set aside for poets by the modern world out of an
inherited sentiment, or yet submerge himself mystically in gross
humanity, is to disguise himself as a buffoon; so that his contempt of
the complicated snobbisms which paralyse all normal poetic instincts and
his own casual cultivation of these instincts may pass for simpleness
and he be left to his own devices.
It is easy enough to show historically how such a snobbism has arisen.
It is not quite so obvious where the snobs come from, how they are
provided. Does the snobbism make the snobs, or the snobs the snobbism?
Are the snobs natural snobs or have they been converted to snobbism by
contemporary pressure? I think it may be safely ventured that the
snobbism was implicit in the Zeitgeist, but that it became an effective
snobbism because social development at the same time discharged a class
which found this snobbism a useful refuge from historical necessity. The
disintegration of the aristocracy left a great many human loose ends who
formerly would have been happy as patrons of literature or as gentle
amateurs. Deprived of class rank they are now able to keep class rank by
the practice of literature. Likewise the farm-boy who formerly achieved
gentility by becoming a priest or a scholar now achieves it by
practising the higher snobbism in poetry and criticism. The attraction
of the higher snobbism as a social aristocracy is naturally felt by the
poet who, living in an environment hostile to poetry, sees it also as an
intellectual aristocracy holding out to him the promise of freedom from
a vulgar age and of consolation in a congenial society. And so have many
spirits bold and true been led astray and driven to belie themselves.
For less than any-thing is the higher snobbism an atmosphere congenial
to poetry. It is, more than anything, the complete eighteenth century
increased in all its manners, most of all increased in Frenchness.
After Frenchness it is increased most of all in Classicism. These
arrivistes, by regarding the universe as completed in effect and by
covering it with a thin coat of historicity, have achieved an immediate
aesthetic absolute. If the end has been reached, then every act is
posthumous and has a posthumous finality; and it becomes the function of
literature to prolong this finality indefinitely. The age is
philosophically conclusion on the brink of conclusion. The serenity of
classicism has always derived from an underlying historical
posthumousness, as the turbulence of romanticism from an underlying
pre-natalism.
Only one thing stands in the way of perfect posthumousness, a slow and
irregular population-mass which is always arriving late, and so
interfering with the higher snobbism's complete view of finality, even
forcing the higher snobbism to make a few mistakes in calculation. If
everything could be classically classified as science, the literary
expression of finality would be simple enough, for science is so far
advanced into itself that it is already in its literary stage. But
unfortunately certain elements of contemporary life, such as politics,
remain backward and stubbornly human. It is just here that the higher
snobbism is likely to commit regrettable errors of judgment, being
equipped to interpret nothing but finality, and to be wholly unable to
make an intelligent choice between one relative fact and
anotherâbetween, say, Communism and Fascism. Yet for the most part, the
contemporary and snob succeeds in keeping himself away from the
population-mass, which is not the Zeitgeist but the dregs of many
Zeitgeists; from anything, in fact, which looks like sentimental
rescue-work of the floating wreckage of time. As far as possible he
wants to rid himself of the pathetic errors of personality and make the
creative operation a pure critical reflex, free of error. Now nothing
can be free of error unless it is entirely negative; Ulysses is in this
way a great snob-work because it is a synthesis of as many negative
forces as could be assembled in a given time-limit. In poetic form the
result of removing subjective determination is a minimum of originality
and a maximum of freakishness. A great quantity of false aesthetic
material may thus be disposed of and the values generally used to
animate such material permanently discredited. But when this snobbism,
this fear of error, has done its work, what is left? Does there remain
any ground for independent creative activity, for a positive poetic
life? In the modernized quantitative cosmos of the Western mind, in this
blight of perfection, where is there room for new errors? There is room
for nothing but an empty philosophical absolute, whose hypothetical
reality the negative, qualitative cosmos of criticism derives from the
quantitative cosmos.
This is the dreary situation which the higher snobbism has brought about
by expelling error from art. For with error went works in the sense of
personal authorship, since works were imperfect because of authorship;
and for works criticism had therefore to substitute philosophy.
Criticism is left with nothing to talk about but its prejudices; and so
it becomes more dogmatic, more formalistic, more obscure and more free
from error from day to day. Even the poetry written by the higher
snobbism can only be, by its very perfection, a form of criticism
composed by the whole snobbist machine, a philosophical but not an
aesthetic act. And even as criticism it must fail because it borrows its
aesthetic terms from philosophy, the logical enemy of any creative
principle, since it is opposed to any really real absolute. Philosophy
is the religion that fills the critical senses with illusions of
purified reality when ordinary human reality is, for one reason or
another, under a cloud. It is therefore the principal consolation of the
contemporary and snob and allies him with that long and aristocratic
line of literary defeatists who have always protected poetry from the
facts and errors of life by allowing criticism to substitute poetics for
persons. What the higher snobbism wants above all things is consistency.
Theoretically it can get consistency by conforming to the Zeitgeist,
which has in this age so separated itself from the human population-mass
and advanced so far beyond it that it is free of those imperfections
which spring up in any system when it begins to be humanly assimilated.
Never, in fact, has philosophical reality (for the Zeitgeist, or
contemporary reality, is only philosophical reality) been further
removed than at present from human reality, which for this reason seems
more inconsistent than ever. The more systematic philosophical reality
becomes, the greater the breach between it and human reality; the more
inconsistent, in fact, it becomes itself. The illusion of consistency in
philosophical reality is due to its inhumanity, and its perfection is
merely a proof of its irrelevance. To be humanly consistent and
philosophically consistent in a single stroke one would have to conform
to neither human nor philosophical reality; one would have to be, in
other words, an irregular genius capable of an act of creative
consistency from which both realities could be simultaneously derived.
This would mean the brutal victory of the person over numbers and their
abstraction. But the higher snobbism spurns victory; it considers the
person a sentimental vulgarity; and it does not want to have anything to
do with numbers except through the mediation of philosophy, which deals
only in perfected social abstractions of incomplete, sluggish humanity.
And here it rests.
The person in poetry began to lose standing because the poetic faculty
came to be identified with a set of poetical sensations which may be
summarized as sentimentality. So much of the private personal data
involved in the making of poetry had been vulgarized and divulged by the
influx of confused and high-strung democratic elements, that the
gentlemen of poetry disclaimed the poetic faculty in order to avoid
writing unladylike poetry: the ribaldry of Eliot, Cummings and Joyce are
instances of this conscientious effort on the part of gentlemen-authors
to avoid the temptations to sentimentality inherent in the poetic
faculty; this effort, that is, to be ladies. Suppressed ribaldry in
gentlemen-authors, as in Miss Marianne Moore and Miss Edith Sitwell,
generally means that the temptations to sentimentality have been yielded
to, though without vulgarity: in Miss Moore's poetry by putting
sentimental poetic subjects under a cold shower of prose-language and
prose-technique, in Miss Sitwell's by abducting sentimentality to that
strange still-life land of metallic fruits and decorous kitchen-gardens
in which it would be difficult for anything to be vulgar.
But not only did poetry reach a stage where it was impossible to write
with taste without observing a large number of critical taboos; the
language of criticism itself had become so vulgarized that its dearest,
most cherished property rights in its key-words, such as Imagination,
Beauty, Truth, Feeling, became meaningless. Criticism had therefore to
withdraw itself from this vulgarized poetry and this vulgarized language
of criticism, which had originally been taken over from philosophy.
Gentleman-criticism and gentleman-poetry now worked hand in hand,
criticism refreshing itself once more in the fount of philosophy, poetry
learning at the feet of criticism a new code of thoroughly censored
behaviour by which it became an impeccable though obscure intellectual
observance. The fount of philosophy at which criticism refreshed itself
was the Zeitgeist, the philosophical aggregate of the age. But the
Zeitgeist is never an exact historical equivalent of the age, in some
ages less so than in others; the less so as knowledge-material becomes
more and more systematized. The Zeitgeist of the early nineteenth
century was an approximate historical equivalent of its age because
contemporary knowledge-material was disorganized and therefore humanly
realistic. There was one whole fixed Zeitgeist throughout the Middle
Ages because of epistemological over-organization and rigidity; the
geographical succession of Renaissance Zeitgeists and their human
relevance was due to the breakdown of this very rigidity. There is as
much difference between the human relevance of the present Zeitgeist and
that of the Platonic Zeitgeist as between the distance of the Phaedrus,
let us say, from the average person of 360 B.C. and the distance of the
Theory of Relativity from the average person of 1927.
The present Zeitgeist is, indeed, a Renaissance Zeitgeist with an
abnormally low degree of human relevance as a philosophical aggregate.
Nor would it be pertinent to object that this cannot be so, since
philosophy as such has disappeared. Philosophy seems to have disappeared
only because knowledge has become more philosophical, more systematized:
the Zeitgeist is nearly entirely without human relevance. Its
irrelevance, in fact, means that in a human sense it is without system,
that it has a forced systematism to disguise its internal inconsistency.
Actually any system of knowledge at a given moment has as much
inconsistency as there is inconsistency in humanity at that moment;
which is just why a system of knowledge is a philosophical tyranny and a
historical falsehood. If, however, the Phaedrus and the Theory of
Relativity were treated as independent human acts, consistent in
themselves but of human inconsistency, then they could exercise no more
tyranny than could a fine, elaborate poem. Instead, because they are
presented as systems, neither Platonism nor modern science ever become
effectively real, as a poem can, but merely literary, as Platonism
survives in vague Truth-and-Beauty terminology, and as science, which
becomes literary very quickly, reaches humanity in electrical devices,
cancer cures and radio-entertainments, which are purely literary
manifestations of science.
What, then, is the code which contemporary criticism, bathing in the
perennial and ever-changing fount of philosophy, the Zeitgeist, delivers
for the benefit of that impeccable though obscure intellectual
observance? Can it be that the social backing of contemporary poetic
gentlemanliness is only, after all, a gloomy medley of scholastic
anthropology, spaded Freudianism, Baroque Baedeckerism, sentimental
anti-quarianism, slum-and-boudoir philology, mystical Bradleyanism,
tortoise-shell spectacled natural history, topee'd comparative religion
and Arrow-collared Aristotelianism?âAristotelianism first and last,
because it is the most dogmatic, tight-laced ethical system ever devised
outside of a tribal religion, and without the human passion and error of
a religion, a literary substitute for Christian asceticism; and because
romanticizations of it have never reached the vulgar population-mass, as
with Platonism?
As criticism has gone so far beyond erratic humanity and the perceptive
intelligence into pure, automatic Being and Knowing, it is natural that
the first article of that obscure intellectual observance should be a
renunciation of pathetic personality, a profession of lack of faith in
self and of distrust in the human mind. To this extreme was it necessary
to go to justify the expulsion of those words, subjects, attitudes and
sensations which had fallen into literary disrepute. Granted the
provocation, in what way, however, is the poetic faculty to be carried
safely through a Zeitgeist which not only denies the reality of poetry
but with which criticism allies itself as well in denying the reality of
the poet? Obviously the poetic faculty cannot get through the Zeitgeist
unless some poet or other carries it through on his back. But can he
carry it through if he makes a formal deposition of disbelief in the
human mind? Can he afford to disregard the Zeitgeist and carry the
poetic faculty through without making such a deposition, when to
withhold it means social disgrace, that is, critical ostracism? Can he
behave in a way not becoming to the Zeitgeist and get through the
Zeitgeist? Can he get through at all if he does behave in a becoming
way? A poet deficient in the poetic faculty may make as noble a
deposition of distrust in the human mind as one abundantly supplied with
it. Perhaps the only way to get through the Zeitgeist is to acknowledge
it and let it hurry on, leaving the poetic faculty behind to make
continuous refutations of poetic Adventism. To help pass away the time,
while this is happening, the poet with the poetic faculty strapped on
his back may play the buffoon, call criticism ânuncleâ and cajole it
into a historical accuracy in the dating of poetry, pointing out, with
his bladder-stick, that it must allow biographical corrections of the
Zeitgeist, as man is permitted to improve on Time, since if Time were
left to itself there would be no to-morrow.
Note
The preceding essay is a long-term view of the relations of the poet
with the world he lives in. The following essay is a short-term view of
a single generation of poetry by itself and of its internal problems and
tendencies. No close correlation has therefore been made between them,
and none should be; although they will be found to agree in their
general implications.
Jean Cocteau, âLettre Ă Jacques Maritain.ââAuthor
I
The most obvious thing about contemporary poetry is that it is
âdifficult.â It first of all appears difficult in the reading; so great
a distance separates the contemporary poet from the contemporary reader
that the only contemporary reader possible seems to be the poet himself.
It then appears that the difficulty is perhaps in the writing rather
than in the reading. The reader's difficulties are a reflection of those
which the contemporary poet has to face if he wishes to write as a
contemporaryâto be included in the generation to which, by birth and
personal sympathy, he historically belongs. They determine the external
character of the text because they belong to its internal
character.^(=> #calibre_link-43 1
)
Now in general date or time is an arbitrary convenience adopted to
distinguish in the memory one day, one hour from the other. To the
reader, the poet, or the night-watchman it is simply an artificial
system of classification. We do not feel different on waking up to-day,
because to-day is to-day, from what we felt on waking up yesterday. We
have to make the mental effort of registering in our waking
consciousness that to-day is to-day; it is indeed this mental effort
that increases our age. No one really feels older than he felt
yesterday; second-childhood, for instance, is merely the cessation of
the mental effort required to mark down sunrise and sunset as time.
As the poet, if a true poet, is one by nature and not by effort, he must
be seen as writing as unconsciously (in regard to time, at any rate) as
his ordinary reader lives. The relation of his poetry to Poetry and to
the time in which it is written is the problem of criticism; and if this
problem enters into the actual writing of his poetry it must do so by
being superimposed upon it. A new and even alien element is in this case
added to his poetryâthe historical effort. His reader must not only make
the effort demanded by the difference between his own way of existing
unconsciously and the poet's way of existing unconsciouslyâhe must not
only consciously compare his own unconsciousness with the poet's
unconsciousness; he must make the same historical effort that the poet
makes. He must make the poet's creative difficulties his own critical
difficulties. This is why, in a generation of poetry so significantly
marked by such a historical effort, the plain reader is inclined to be
more sympathetic with the poetry of a past period than with that of his
own period: by belonging to the past, past poetry makes the historical
effort for him.
If contemporary poetry is for various reasons written with this effort,
there is no escape for the reader but to make the effort himself;
otherwise he must be content to wait until contemporary poetry has
become history, until, presumably, his generation is dead. Or, if he has
sufficient receptivity and historical awareness of the present, he need
not make a special effort in his reading. He is a contemporary reader
before he reads. He is armed with his criticism.
Indeed, in some ways it seems more reasonable for the reader to make the
historical effort than for the poet, as it is more a part of the
consuming side of poetry than of the creative side. But the facts are
otherwise. Poetry has been the victim of increasing pressure and
isolation. It has been obliged to specialize and over-specialize in
itself. It has been narrowed down by the specialization of human
time-activities to a point where it seems only another human
time-activity, where it becomes, in other words, an art in the most
formal interpretation of the word. The poet therefore has forced upon
him the whole burden of the criticism of poetry. He has forced upon him
a historical consciousness far more acute than that, say, of the
travelling bard of the Beowulf period or of the professional poet of an
imperially or religiously phrased society. Such poets merely met certain
demands laid upon them by an environment in which they were generously
included. The modernist poet has no such easy social adjustment to make:
it is doubtful whether he is included at all in the complicated social
pattern. As a result he is more at the service of the public situation
of poetry, which is a perilous one, than of his private poetic
endowments. He may, in a few rare cases, by a sort of historical
absent-mindedness, happen to write by pure nature, without historical or
professional effort. But on the whole it is probable that he will be
affected, and forgivably affected, by the pressure and influence of a
commercial society on poetry. He will be too conscious of the forced
professionalization of poetry to resist the temptation to justify it
professionally. But if he admits that it is only one of the numerous
time-activities of its period, an activity parallel to music or
painting, as other time-activities, or to radiology, aerostatics, the
cinema, modern tennis or morbid psychology, he must see it in its
contemporary setting as a very small patch on the time-chart, a bare
dot. The only way that this dot, this poetry-patch, can be given depth
is by being given historical depth. Then its local reality and
significance can be made to lie not so much in its general importance as
an expression of this particular period or age (for obviously as an
expression of this age it is no more than a dot on a hysterically
overcrowded chart) as in its particular importance in the general
tradition of poetry.
The tradition of poetry, or, we had better now say, the tradition of the
art of poetry, is therefore the formal organization which the modernist
poet finds himself serving as an affiliated member. He must not only, if
he accepts this view of the situation of poetry (whether out of
conviction or necessity), have a personal capacity for poetryâthis is
merely his apprenticeship-certificate. He must have beyond this a
master's sense of the historical experience of poetry, of its functions,
its usefulness, its present fitness and possibilities. He must have a
science of the âvaluesâ of poetry; a scale of good and bad or true and
false or lasting and ephemeral; a theory of a tradition of poetry in
which successive period-poetries are subjected to historical judgment
either favourably or unfavourably, and in which his own period-poetry is
carefully adjusted to satisfy the values which the tradition is believed
to have evolved. Furthermore, since this tradition is supposed to
represent a logical historical development, its values, if observed, are
considered sufficient to produce the proper poetic expression of the
age. The adjustments which the poet has to make are no longer direct,
unconscious adjustments to his social environment, but critical
adjustments to a special tradition: his contact with his own period is
indirect, through the past, the past seen narrowly as the literature of
the past narrowing down to the literature, more particularly the poetry,
of the present.
So it comes about that the modernist poet tends to have an exaggerated,
even an abnormal preoccupation with criticism: largely forced upon him,
as has been noted, by the defensive position into which poetry is put by
modern life. A professional conscience dawns on the poet; as when the
prestige of any organization is curtailedâof the army, or the navy, for
exampleâa greater internal discipline, a stricter morality and a more
careful evaluation of tactics result. The organization becomes
self-critical, severe, sophisticated; strenuously up-to-date and of its
generation; the critic of itself in the past. In poetry the negative
side of this discipline shows itself in the avoidance of all the wrongly
conceived habits of the past. Poetry becomes so educated in itself that
it knows or seems to know at last how it should be written and written
at the very moment. The more its tradition is limited and purified of
elements like religion, science, psychology, philosophy or sociology,
which once existed in it as loose sentiments, the more technically
expert in them it grows; and in itself, by imitative sympathy. It looks
indeed as if the poetry of the period could be written by historical
effort alone; as if poetry has become so civilized, so all-aware, that
in its most advanced stage it is on the brink of a new primitive stage.
It seems about to begin again as from the beginning but drawing on the
experience of its tradition.
In practice, however, this new stage is only implied, not realized, in
contemporary poetry. True, there is more experimenting and greater
strictness in the construction of the poem, and a greater consciousness
of what a poem should not be. But so far this consciousness has remained
a negative influence: it is a professional, critical self-consciousness,
not a creative one. And how should it be creative? Creative
self-consciousness is a contradiction in terms; for it is clear that
poets do not begin to write by effort but by nature. It might seem,
however, that such an atmosphere, if it did not actually produce poets,
would at least make it easier for those who were poets by nature to
write well, by removing all temptations to write badly, and by creating
a feeling of tolerance toward a possible new poetry. But it is if
anything more difficult than usual to write either well or badly in an
atmosphere charged with discussion and self-consciousness about the
âvaluesâ of poetry and about how poetry should be written in conformity
with the period. Such an atmosphere forces the historical effort upon
the poet. It confounds the problems of criticism with the problems of
writing. It hampers the poet with the poetry of all poets who have ever
written, who may be writing at the moment, or who will ever write. It
inventsâand this is the most serious drawbackâa group poetic mind which
is at the elbow of the individual poet whenever he engages in
composition. This contemporary climate is as much responsible for the
âdifficultyâ of modernist poetry as the fact that well-written poetry is
always difficult and that the criticism responsible for this climate
demands that contemporary poetry should be well written. So the reasons
why there should be a new poetry prove to be the very ones why there is
not a new poetry but only a disturbed, a self-critical, a tightly
written, a strongly corrective poetry; why we shall probably find
ourselves to have had, after the novelties have been absorbed by
tradition, not a new age of poetry, in which new resources have been
opened up for the poetic mind, but merely another generation of poets, a
generation that has already begun to pass.
For however opposed this generation may have been to certain tendencies
in the poetic tradition, it has been bound over from the very beginning
to the idea of a tradition, and of a correct tradition. The passion for
correctness has led it to many strange caprices; to an admiration for
the eighteenth century in English poetry as the most correct literary
period of modern times; to a bias in favour of the most foppishly
correct classical writers; to such odd niceties and pains and punctilios
that it is not extravagant to suggest to the contemporary reader that
the poetry peculiar to his generation is perhaps the most correct poetry
that has ever been written in the English language. So intense has this
process been, so thorough and hurried at the same time, that it has made
poetry a narrower time-activity from within than it has been made, even,
from without. The generation is already over before its time, having
counted itself out and swallowed itself up by its very efficiencyâa true
âlost generation,â^(=> #calibre_link-44 2
) as Gertrude Stein has called it and as it is fond of calling itself.
Already its most correct writer, T. S. Eliot, has become a classic over
the heads of the plain reader. The plain reader who would now first read
the poetry of his time must read it as already passed into tradition.
Although he will find a high degree of application necessary for the
actual word-by-word reading of the various works, he is spared that more
elaborate effort of criticism which deals with works as potential
classics. The whole problem of taste, that is, has been taken care of
for him by the poets themselves, who have written their poems with such
precision and far-sightedness that âacceptanceâ as such has been made
superfluous. Creation and critical judgment being made one act, a work
has no future history with readers; it is ended when it is ended.
In practice, then, there is no such thing as a new poetry; only a short
and very concentrated period, already nearly over, of carefully
disciplined and self-conscious poetry. It is almost just to say that at
the present moment there is no poetry but rather an embarrassing pause
after an arduous and erudite stock-taking. The next stage is not clear.
But it is not impossible that when the embarrassment has passed there
will be a resumption of less foppish, less strained, more critically
unconscious poetic methods of writing, purified, however, by the period
of historical effort behind it. At any rate for the time being we have
nothing better than this pause and in it an opportunity of understanding
what has taken place. We might almost say that poetry temporarily turned
into philosophy, entangled itself in many introspective absurdities that
had nothing to do with poetry, became pretentiously scholastic and
dogmatic in its theory; but that all this was perhaps unfortunately
necessary before a position could be reached in which poetry might be
normal without being vulgar, and deal naturally with truth without being
trite.
Such an embarrassed lull having fallen in poetry, the result of minute
searching and conscientiousness, the abstract nature of poetry
eventually becomes more important to the poet than the immediate
personal workings of poetry in him. His introspectiveness, which up to a
certain technical point might make his poetry clearer and more careful,
when carried beyond this point makes the writing of poetry altogether
impossible by turning it into a pursuit of theory and the poet into a
scientific investigator. So the philosophical phase of poetic modernism
is a laboratory phase, a complex interrelation of metaphysics and
psychology blighting the creative processes wherever they become
involved in it. This can be well-illustrated by comparing the highly
organized nature of T. S. Eliot's criticism in its present stage with
the gradual disintegration of his poetry since the Waste
Land.^(=> #calibre_link-45 3
) The absolute sense of authorship has been lost and the poet finds
himself counting only as he can be related to the historical period to
which he accidentally belongs. The time-element is made the law of
composition and any work which cannot be readily interpreted in terms of
its period-significance cannot be said to have any critical valueâwhich
at the moment is the one admissible value by which poetry can become
current. The only good in this critical obsession is that, while it may
cause many temporary extravagances and suppressions, by stirring up a
historical consciousness of poetry it may make the world in general more
conscious of poetry in a specialized sense and more intimate with its
processes. In the end the emphasis on up-to-dateness and the
time-element in poetry may only mean a greater concentration in both the
reader and the poet on poetry as an ever immediate reality confirmed
afresh and independently in each new work rather than as a continuously
sustained tradition: confirmed personally rather than professionally.
II
There are discoverable reasons why the time-element came to have such
importance in contemporary poetry and criticism. Literature in the past
had been forced to recognize barbaric definitions of time which might be
foreign to the nature of literature but were imposed by local
convenience: the poet accepted authorized âideasâ of God or Immortality
or State and invented within these limits. He used, that is, the formal
human language of his time. The language and the time were barbaric
because they were gross dogmatic conventions resulting from the
fear-inspired consolidation of humanity. Humanity is a consolidation
against the terror of numbers, each unknown, which would reign if
humanity were not consolidated as humanity. When humanity is so
consolidated it becomes a stabilized and known mass, a weapon against
any non-human unknown. Of the various ways in which humanity may be
consolidatedâby some symbol of individual similarity, whether of
religious beliefs or government, or by the observance of common social
taboosâ contemporaneousness, the idea of the numbers sharing in one
time, is the most unifying sentiment. Poetry was obliged to acquiesce in
this sentiment because language is the most tangible sign of local
uniformity: the poet had to accept his medium from humanity at large, to
allow it, indeed, to invent his medium for him. If organic changes took
place in the language, they were not caused by any inventive caprice in
him or because he shifted, and his medium with him, in adjusting himself
to time. Humanity shifted, as a whole, perhaps, in making some slight
adjustment within itself, and language with it; and this might be called
a manifestation of barbaric time. But the poet had no particular
consciousness or responsibility of time. He was in this respect free of
the historical effort which is forced on the present-day poet. The
historical effort was assigned to all as a mass and to none in
particular.
The barbaric tendency expresses itself in mass, the civilized tendency
in specialization. When the necessity for consolidated mass passes, mass
breaks up into smaller units; it substitutes civilization for
consolidation. The tendency to consolidate does not necessarily,
however, antedate the tendency to specialize. The barbaric tendency
might reasonably be inculcated in an individualistic society, out of
common fear and compulsion. At all events, European barbarism comes
finally to be replaced by humanism: humanity viewed as a quality in the
individual rather than in the massâas personality. Instead of one gross
composite time we have as many times going on at once as there are
individual expressions of dissimilar personality going on at once. Or,
to look at it differently, time has become so relative that the
individual need not be necessarily conscious of it. The poet in a
barbaric period is free from historical effort because time is absolute,
he has no power over it; and he is free from historical effort in a
civilized period because time is so strictly personal a measurement that
he has complete power over it.
The disintegrating effect of civilization is not only felt in the
development of personality. As the abstract idea of humanity is broken
up into concrete personal existences and the conception of time changes
accordingly, so the categories developed by barbarism to express the
underlying principle of the solidarity of humanity are now used to
express the non-cohesiveness of humanity. The language that once served
the conformity of human interests now serves their diversity. Each
category becomes specialized into a study of itself and each discovers,
in terms appropriate to it, its own theory of the relativity of time.
Each category becomes a separate time-activity. In a barbaric society
religion does not occupy one mental compartment, philosophy another,
science another, painting another, poetry another, and so on. But
religion is everything and everything is religion, philosophy is
everything and everything is philosophy, and so on. In a civilized
society religion is a sentiment, philosophy a speculation, science a
pursuit of knowledge, painting and poetry arts.
The arts have the most difficult problem to face in a specializing
civilization because when converted into separate activities they retain
something of their original force. They continue to have to do
principally with being and making and being and making is everything and
everything is being and making. When, however, they try to treat
themselves as specialized departments of study and at the same time to
continue to be the subjects of their study, to remain the kind of
activity they have been from the beginning, an impossibility is struck
upon. And yet this impossibility is the basis of the civilized
conception of such activities as arts, art being apparently a term
applied to intellectual activities which are something more than studies
of themselves.
In an art, it seems, two powers are concerned, the original power which
is the subject of the artâthe being and makingâand the power to study
this power; both powers being presumably one and the same. In an
ordinary category like science, where there is nothing but the study,
all that is involved is a laborious registering of changes which are
continually taking place in the study. The study is the minute
observation of the tradition and the deriving from this observation of
the time or pace which is peculiar to this tradition. Religion is such
an observation of a tradition, a sensitive registering of the changes
which observation itself brings about in the study.
But in an art, in poetry let us say, there is the study, in which
changes are always taking place (else there could be no study, for this
is the meaning of study, which is not repetition), and there is the
other power, which is pure from the beginning and in which no changes
can take place without the destruction of the art as a category.
Science, though a single tradition, is a different thing in Einstein's
time from what it was in Archimedes' time; and the tradition permits of
its being this radically different thing. Poetry, however, is not a
different thing in T. S. Eliot's time from what it was in Euripides'
time; if it were, neither Euripides nor Eliot could be defined as poets
and the tradition would be non-existent. How, then, is the poetic
tradition to move in time and yet poetry itself to remain unchanged; and
how is this further impossibility to be overcome, that the study, which
is the continuousness of the tradition, or the object of the art, cannot
go on at the same time as the being and making which are the subject of
the art?
Up to a certain stage in its history as a civilized category, poetry
escapes from these impossibilities and maintains itself as an art by
formally dividing itself into a composing half and a studying half, the
former limited to workmanship, the latter to criticism. The poet as a
workman being naturally free from the time-sense and the historical
effort, criticism devotes itself to the cultivation of a poetic
time-sense and to its imposition on the poet. Poetry has a relative
civilized time, then, only while the pressure of criticism on the
workman-poet is so light that he has his own relative time and not that
of poetry as a whole. It is when poetry is forced to over-specialize and
professionalize itself as a category and workmanship and criticism are
narrowed down to a single process, that the falsity of the
categorization of poetry either in a barbaric or civilized sense becomes
plain. For when this happens poetry must get its consolidated time-sense
from criticism rather than from workmanship: workmanship is as various
and contradictory as the number of workmen. What Mr. Eliot calls âthe
invalidation of that ancient classification,â^(=> #calibre_link-46 4
) the disappearance, that is, of the distinction between critical and
creative, is in reality the domination of creation by criticism. If
creation were to dominate criticism, criticism would disappear. While
criticism and creation exist side by side with only a loose partnership
between them, creation is for the most part carefree, it has a general
but not disturbing intelligence of the tradition of poetry and tolerates
criticism as a harmless and even an occasionally useful parasite.
Underneath the bustle and clutter of historical interpretations,
underneath the disguise of a categoryâpoetry can be free to be what it
has always been, an entity which can lend itself to the absolute
entirety of barbaric humanity or to the relative entirety of civilized
personality, but which remains fundamentally independent of and
unaffected by historical changes; its purpose being not to express
history, humanity or personality, but itself.
When poetry reaches the stage in its history as a civilized category
where criticism, or the studying-half, dominates the workmanship-half,
and the unsuitability of poetry as a specialized art makes both
criticism and workmanship very difficult, it is actually in danger of
being destroyed as a tradition unless some time-sense is introduced into
it, by no matter how artificial an effort. No one seems to realize that
the destruction of poetry as a tradition would not destroy poetry
itself. Those who are not poets do not, because to see poetry as such an
independent force requires that one should be a poet. And those who are
poets are tempted to encourage the idea of the traditional
professionality of poetry because it confers a group-dignity and power
that protects their personal sensitiveness. Consequently there is no
debate about the necessity of preserving the tradition; and it is
criticism which assumes responsibility for the collective unity of the
art of poetry.
The time-sense by which such unity can be consciously maintained must
be, it is evident, a mass, or barbaric, time-sense and not a
personalized, or civilized, one. Thus when all other categories,
particularly those generally classified as scientific, are developing
minutely relative time-senses, poetry (and painting as well) attempts to
stabilize itself by evoking an absolute time-sense. This new
intellectual barbarism must, of course, differ from a natural historical
barbarism. In the latter, mass-time and mass-humanity are real and
automatically fixed and absolute, so that the poet is free of any
conscious effort to construe his time. In the former there is no
mass-time or mass-humanity, time and humanity are personal
sentimentalities; so that the concept of absoluteness by which poetry as
a whole may have some historical coherence must first be consciously
postulated before the poet can claim any meaning for his work. In
consequence the meaning and the making of a poem become two separate
elements. Meaning is the substance of criticism, and a general, common
problem. Making in its most limited sense is the substance of
workmanship and tends, as in most modernist poetry, to grow more and
more particularized and technical. Criticism now actually precedes
workmanship.
To support such a theory of barbaric absoluteness poetry must ally
itself with a special metaphysic of poetry. It must even, in
self-defence, believe that the new barbarism is a natural and not a
forced stage in the tradition, must even believe that, because a
conscious stage, it is a superior, in fact a final one. It must make the
present period not so much the next one of a series as a resume of
periods. Its obligatory concern with the general meanings of poetry and
the maintenance of a formal metaphysic of poetry tempt it to assume the
position formerly belonging to philosophy. In defining the poetic
absolute a hierarchy or graduated order of values is established,
converting poetry into a dogmatic science pledged to the refinement of
these values. The personal creative side of poetry is overshadowed by
the professional traditional side.
The effect of this scientific attitude may eventually be to give the
poem itself greater distinctness; in contemporary poetry there have been
many efforts to present the poem as a thing in itself, a definite object
produced by a conscientious craftsman. Its general immediate influence
has been to put an unnatural burden of faultlessness on the poem. The
modernist poem probably suffers more than it benefits from the attention
which contemporary criticism grants it. If on the one hand it has
acquired a new sort of conspicuousness, it has been forced, on the other
hand, to have a greater regularity than would otherwise have been
necessary.
An absolute which shall give the poem a regularity more certain than the
accidental regularity that it has in a civilized, more relatively stated
aspect of the tradition can at present be only an absolute in theoryâit
begins as an idea not a fact. It cannot be a virtual absolute because,
however regular the poem itself should be if the poet adheres to this
theory, the necessity of adhering to a theory remains an ineradicable
flaw. It is possible and interesting to observe that at such and such a
historic period an absolute conception of humanity, time and art
prevailed and that a peculiarly fixed kind of perfection in art, as in
Egyptian art, developed from this conception. Such a general observation
is history; if particularly applied, as to poetry, it is criticism. But
if criticism is made something more than observation, if it develops
such a preference for the barbaric absolute, say, that it attempts to
give this to poetry artificially, by historical effort, then it is
creating not poetry but history. Critically conceived poetry at the
present time is historical rather than poetic. Historical inventiveness
of this kind is, as we shall see, fundamentally
Bergsonian.^(=> #calibre_link-47 5
) It is as if all individual consciousnesses were expected to be able at
will to submerge themselves completely in a single race-consciousness
and for a protracted period evolve with great intensity and at great
strides, without variation, digression or error. All separate poetic
faculties, that is, are supposed to merge into a single professional
group-faculty of which each poet is separately possessed. The poetic
production as a whole, where such an effort is made, would have great
theoretical simplicity because criticism had conceived and directed it
as a whole; but equally, great practical complexity, since individual
poetic faculties cannot submerge themselves at will in an absolute
faculty except by such intricacies of theory as complicate the whole the
more theoretically simple it is.
It is not surprising, therefore, that poetry has for the moment assumed
the position formerly occupied by philosophy. Philosophy is pure history
and pure criticism. It observes, and from its observations it creates
something which pretends to be neither actual history nor actual poetry.
Its purpose is to generalize from particulars and to simplify its
generalities with the idea of discovering a code of perfection. The end
of all philosophies, however much they have seemed to contradict one
another, has been to define the absolute. Committed to a belief in the
reality of the generalities by which they arrived at this absolute, they
have, moreover, been bound to minimize the reality of variation,
digression or error. Caprice is never more than a foot-note subject in
any philosophy; its conclusions must obviously be only those which
humanity can arrive at as a single-minded, barbaric whole. This
systematic conformity of pure philosophy is, described in historical
language, classicism.
So it has happened that when the absolutist conception of humanity was
succeeded by the relativist conception of personality (humanism), pure
philosophy disappeared. Since the Renaissance caprice has governed the
forms which human thought and conduct have taken; and caprice is
romanticism. Not only this, but thought and conduct have found a common
ground in which they are united and of equal potencyâImagination; and
Imagination is romanticism. In classicism the distinctions between
thought and conduct are strictly drawn, and philosophy must observe
these distinctions in order to protect the idea of perfection: once they
are allowed to disappear, imperfection or error or caprice is admitted
as a fundamental generality. Since the Renaissance, then, formal
philosophy has grown more and more feeble, as Time, the generality
capable of most uniformity, has grown more and more diversified and
relative. Philosophy, when narrowed down by the large-scale
diversification of civilized humanity into a minor category or
time-activity, could obviously not develop itself as such, could not
acquiesce in its own relativity without contradicting itself.
The only chance of reviving its old authority was, if some category like
poetry, which originally had first-class, general significance in a
barbaric order, should in being civilized be weakened as a category;
should consequently need assistance in re-establishing its professional
standing. In an individualized time-combination, poetry or any
previously standardized tradition becomes, up to a certain point, more
and more non-professional. Then this very non-professionalism itself is
loosely professionalized. We have stereotyped individuality instead of
stereotyped uniformity, or the standardization of specialization. It is
in such circumstances that poetry feels tempted to take specialization
literally and to dignify itself by turning its haphazard professionalism
into a formal, authoritative professionalism. It accepts the specialized
denomination art, but within the limits set by this denomination it
enforces its own peculiar generalitiesâgeneralities which imply a system
of the absolute and therefore the entire machinery and vocabulary of
âpureâ philosophy.
III
The new poetic barbarism could be felt in poetry in a disorganized way
as an intellectual necessity and even conscientiously carried out as a
programme by individual poets, though in a still more disorganized way.
But it was important that it should have its philosopher and that he
should be, besides, a person disappointed in the course taken by
philosophy since the Renaissanceâin the decline of âpureâ philosophy.
The pressure exerted on poetry to interpret itself by a conscious
historical effort as a coherent tradition drove it to organize itself
temporally. Its sole contemporary object became an expression of the age
which would not only justify itself professionally but redefine time for
it in an absolute way. Thus a hunger was created in the generation on
which the pressure fell for some doctrinaire statement of this
philosophization of poetry, and a readiness to make a modern Aristotle
of the person who could do something toward satisfying the hunger. Such
a person was provided in the late T. E. Hulme, who died before he had
developed a well-defined system of aesthetics, but who left enough
fragments to be accepted by a generation starved for respectable
philosophico-literary dogma.^(=> #calibre_link-48 6
) It is significant that his philosophy was founded on a view of the
absolute which was more religious than philosophical, and more proper to
art than to religion. In searching for a way to purify philosophy, he
could find nothing better than the need which artâpainting or sculpture
or poetryâhad to be philosophically organized and corrected. All his
statements about the nature of pure philosophy will be found to apply
more accurately to art than to philosophy.
Hulme's absolute was a strictly barbaric concept: anti-humanism,
anti-Renaissance, anti-civilization. In his division of reality into its
prime zones or categories he derided any idea of relativity among them.
His absolute implied what he called a principle of discontinuity, and it
is amusing to find that he named these categories in such a way that no
communication could seem plausible between them. They were the inorganic
world, the organic world and the world of religious and ethical values.
It is clear how he arrived at them. For they are the categories into
which evolutionary time naturally falls if progressive historical
continuity is assumed: first the world of apparently final, static,
unformulated matter, then that of growing, or changing matter (the human
world), then the world of forms created by this growthâthe world, we
might say, of formulated matter, really final and static. Now let these
categories stand but remove the conception of time in process which
invented them and we have the same categories, their definition
unchanged, but discontinuous. All objectionable notions of time and
relativity will then appear to have proceeded from the second category.
In the first is a seeming absolute, the brutal absolute of mere
primitiveness, in the third is a true absolute possessing all those
attributes by cultivation which in the first belong by crudeness. Time
is absolute in the first because it is so completely absent as to be
uniform. In the third it is absolute because the uniformity is aesthetic
and creates the absoluteness of time. The two complementary factors in
this creation are the exercise and the submission of the will. Therefore
this third category, which is really the field of aesthetics, is called
the world of religious and ethical values. The second is not even
properly speaking a category, it is the whole imperfect and vacillating
human intelligence, a kind of freak of nature, which has the vanity to
attempt to find in itself a subjective mock-Divine. Nor is the first
category, properly speaking, a category, but only a rough unrealized
statement of the third. Only one true general category does, in fact,
exist, the single barbaric absolute in which religion, ethics, and art
combine to objectify and fix the temporal phases through which the human
intelligence, out of imperfection and caprice, passes.
Such a dogmatic interpretation of historyâ(I have only extended Hulme's
fundamental propositions)âfor it is an interpretation of history
although it does not adopt the conventionally historical viewâcan
obviously be of great value to a particular tradition which, like
poetry, has been placed in a position of self-defence and made to feel
the need of systematizing itself. It can be especially valuable because,
by discrediting the idea of history as necessary continuity of time in
which all human personalities or groups of personalities share variously
and freely, and by making it a discontinuous principle, it suggests that
there is an inevitable order in it to which the human intelligence may
be held generally responsible. The productions of an age cannot answer
for themselves by declaring âWe are these several productions and the
age exists through our variety and contemporaneity.â They are, on the
contrary, incidental to the age and a corroboration of it. The age is
not an expression of the relativity of the various activities going on
in it, but these activities express it and their relativity is due to
its absoluteness; it is not a short period or piece of time but all
timeâthe world indeed of religious and ethical valuesâattested to and
worshipped by a number of individual times. It is a curious fact that
whenever such barbaric ideology as this has prevailed the age has been
so compact that it has not had âperiods.â It has appeared final and
eternal and prolonged itself artificially and even destroyed itself by
prolonging itself. Mediaevalism, for example, was a protracted absolute
and unvaried throughout by minor periods or by any relative sense of
time.
Once poetry through its criticism becomes aware that the personal
authority of the poet in a relative, civilized time-scheme is reduced to
the small accidental share he has in it, then such a view of time as a
belief in an absolute affords must naturally appeal to poets as a
conscious contemporary body. It is beside the point that such a body
would be an artificial one, that poetry considered as a specialized
activity reduces to the poet, not to the co-ordinated production of
poets (while science does not reduce to the scientist). The fact is that
the appearance of inevitable co-ordination is forced upon poetry and
that it seems to lose authority unless it imposes co-ordination. Poetry
cannot be left to its fate with the poet, whose proportionate authority
is now as infinitesimal as the constituents of the atom. The only way to
give poetry formal authority is through some philosophical system like
the one that Hulme roughly suggested.
Hulme's ideas have by now been absorbed by sensitive contemporary
criticism and indeed inspire, however remotely, most contemporary poetry
consciously written as part of a co-ordinated period-production: âhe
appears as the forerunner of a new attitude of mind, which should be the
twentieth-century mind,â was the New Criterion's summary of his
significance.^(=> #calibre_link-49 7
) Hulme himself wrote a few poems, and it is interesting that they all
come vaguely under the period-classification popular in his time:
Imagism. But he adopted it only tentatively: it was just one possible
form. In painting and sculpture he saw more definite possibilities,
because they were historically freer. Neither of them had to face the
problem which literature faced in entering upon a new stage. There were
no such intrinsic changes wrought in colour and stone by decades of
humanism as were wrought in language. All that sculpture and painting
had to do was to escape from the works of humanism and revert to
preferred barbaric modes, creating modern forms as if in primitive
timesâforms primitive, obedient to the conventions they accepted,
therefore final, absolute, abstract. For poetry the problem was not so
simple. It could not, it seemed, submit itself so facilely to an as-if:
its expressive medium, language, had been intrinsically affected not
only by the works in which it had been used but also by all the
non-poetic uses of which language is capable.
This difference between poetry and the regular arts points to a variance
in poetry and suggests the probable falsity of such philosophical
generalizations on art as Hulme made. In his desire to coordinate and
correctly generalize, he fell into the familiar philosophical confusion,
the confusion of analogy. Art, for instance, is a philosophical term
invented for the convenience of classification, not a term that poetry
would naturally invent for itself, though painting and sculpture very
well might for themselves. To the philosopher, however, the most
accurate term is the most general rather than the most particular; and
so to Hulme a common co-ordination of the âartsâ seemed possible and
necessary. Analogy is always false, but it is the strongest
philosophical instrument of co-ordination. Since poetry as an art is not
sufficiently regular, not sufficiently professional, it is to be made so
by becoming more sculptural or more pictorial, by having grafted on it
the values and methods of more professional arts.
While, then, by the use of analogy and other philosophical
generalizations, a co-ordination and a simplification might be made in
poetic theory and a satisfactory understanding of the poetic absolute
and abstract poetic form reached, still language itself demanded
purification; and this was a most complicated and difficult problem. It
demanded first to be allowed to become disorganized until so loose
grammatically that it could be reorganized as if afresh, without regard
to how words and their combinations had been sympathetically affected by
usage. It had to be as instrumentally pure as colour or stone. Words
themselves would be reduced by this process to their least historical
value. They would be cleansed of stale associations in order that they
might be used primitively and abstractly. The purer they were the more
eternally immediate and present they would be. In this way they could
express the absolute at the same time as they were expressing the age.
Gertrude Stein's use of words may be looked on as such a purification.
Her language is primitive and abstract. It is so primitive, indeed, that
criticism has felt obliged to repudiate her work as a romantic vulgar
barbarism, an expression of the personal crudeness of a mechanical age
rather than a refined historical effort to restore a lost absolute to a
group of co-ordinated creators. T. S. Eliot has said of Miss Stein's
work that âit is not improving, it is not amusing, it is not
interesting, it is not good for one's mind. But its rhythms have a
peculiar hypnotic power not met with before. It has a kinship with the
saxophone. If this is the future, then the future is, as it very likely
is, of the barbarians. But this is the future in which we ought not to
be interested.â^(=> #calibre_link-50 8
) Mr. Eliot was for the moment speaking from the civilized viewpoint: it
seemed suddenly impossible to reconcile the crudities of any barbarism,
however new, with the advanced historical state of the poetic mind and
with the professional dignity of poetry which the new barbarism was
invented to restore. A sincere attempt to do so was at once vulgar and
obscure, like the work of Miss Stein. So except for such whole-hog
literalness as hers modernist poetry has lacked the co-ordination to
which modernist criticism subscribes; it has not had a controlling ism
or school. This want would have been welcome if it had not meant an
irreconcilability between criticism and workmanship which has made the
latter a wasted performance.
Although Hulme has been Aristotelianized by the generation of modernist
poets just passing, he arrived at art only through the failure of
philosophy, and his theories of art must be derived from his criticism
of philosophy. Philosophy had failed historically to keep âpure,â to be
âentirely objective and scientific.â Philosophy was corrupted by the
personal element. The personal element should have been carefully
separated from the scientific element. The philosopher is the scientist
of the absolute, but he unfortunately possesses an imperfect romancing
human intelligence which confounds his study of the absolute with crude
dreams and desiresâthe emotional, religious element. Philosophy can only
be kept pure by cutting away the second element and making it an object
of study, or rather of light philosophical curiosity. For it is this
same intelligence or personalized humanity which in art upsets the
absolute with caprice. The absolute is fixed; caprice is fictional.
Recognize that the activities of the human intelligence are fictional,
and fictional and relative become synonymous terms. How are we to
determine what belongs to the absolute category, âthe world of religious
and ethical values,â and what to the organic (the human, historical)
category? By the principle of discontinuity. Decide that humanity is
incapable of perfection, and perfection becomes dissociated from it, and
the absolute is then absolute because it is discontinuous with organic
humanity.
Now it might seem easier to enforce this distinction in philosophy than
in art. But since all philosophy considers itself âpureâ it is not
likely to recognize the corrupting humanistic element when it appears;
for this disguises itself in the same scientific language with which
philosophy defines the absolute. Art, on the other hand, has grown more
and more frankly humanistic and romanticâit rejoices in the fact that
its values are fictional. Art, therefore, would not, like philosophy,
resist the charge that it has allowed itself to be seduced by fictional
values. It might even, if it were made to feel that its integrity was in
danger, accept the formulas of a hypothetically pure philosophy in order
to make its fiction substantial. It might tie itself to an absolute in
order to make its fiction philosophically respectable. The fact that it
owned to a fiction would merely mean that it lacked the arrogance
natural to philosophy, which owns only to an absolute.
All this must have been felt by Hulme in his deprecation of the course
philosophy had taken since the Renaissance and in his restatement of the
absolute in terms of art rather than of philosophy. He did not, for
instance, attack romanticism from the philosophical but from the
literary point of view. The weaknesses of his generalizations are
consequently more obvious than they would have been had his statement
remained strictly philosophical. For philosophical statements are so
general that they exclude illustrations and thus remain uncontrovertible
until some one has the courage to challenge their consistency as
generalizations, without resorting to illustrations. Furthermore, the
literary statement never has the dogmatism of the philosophical
statement: the philosopher speaks as for the Cosmic, the critic for a
craft or himself or for those who may personally agree with him. Had
Hulme been speaking as a philosopher he would not have attacked
romanticism, he would have destroyed it, and he would have been
unanswerable. It would have been impossible to point out that the idea
of perfection dwelling in a non-human absolute is as romantic as the
ideal of its dwelling in variable humanity; or that, since he could not
admit perfection except in dissociation from humanity, he had merely
invented the principle of discontinuity in order to invent from it the
non-human absolute. By the way that philosophy defines itself it is
protected from being revealed as a fiction. Hulme did not make a
philosophy but a criticism of philosophy, and this was making a fiction.
It is fiction to say, as this criticism does, that if the human
intelligence recognizes an absolute and, of course, its own
imperfection, and so shuts out from its fictional activities the âhuman
plane,â it must realize that its fiction will have a wholly âtragic
significanceâ and will express the âfutility of existence.â It is
romantic to say, while denouncing as romantic the meanings which the
creative mind gives to its fictions, that these can only be valid if
they confess their meaninglessness. Is not a belief in the lack of
meaning in organic existence merely a new meaning that art is to adopt
for the sake of the prestige given it by the metaphysics from which it
is drawn?
Whether or not Hulme formally inaugurated the new barbarism in
contemporary criticism is a fine and irrelevant point of history.
Certainly a general degradation of the person was taking place in poetry
at the time that he was writingâthe first disorganized step toward
professionalization and co-ordination. Poetry felt forced to objectify
itself and to do this successfully it had to enter upon a philosophical
career. Hulme's ardent neo-realism, or anti-humanism, supplied the
doctrine necessary for this career. (His doctrine, a disappointment with
philosophy, was itself in need of being legitimized and made positive by
an application to practical aesthetics.) If poetry was to make its new
career barbarically uniform, it had first of all to set about
methodically exterminating the person. As there is nothing more absolute
than the person and as there are therefore as many absolutes as distinct
persons, the only way to get uniformity was to impose a single objective
absolute, an abstract, regularly waved sea defeating eccentric
individual configuration by the uninterrupted rhythm of its gross and
monotonous detail.
The philosophical side of poetry's new career was simple. It defined the
absolute, quoted the philosophers, dreamt of objectivity and spread its
lap for the golden apples of art which it hoped would now drop out of
its neo-realistic heaven. But no golden apples came, only glass marbles
for criticism to play with while waiting for golden apples. The golden
apples never came and criticism went on collecting more and more glass
marbles. The reason why there have been no golden apples is that
workmanship has not been able to take advantage of the serene privileges
of the absolute. It has had to keep busy degrading the person and
casting out from written and proposed verse all the romantic egotistical
absolutes with which the tradition of poetry has ever been decorated. So
literary criticism, as with Hulme, turns to admire other arts, such as
painting, which are technically more capable of professional formality
and period-uniformity.
The view that periods are or should be coherent time-lengths follows
from a belief in an invariable, inferred absolute. Humanity itself is
not absolute, but it has the privilege of dramatizing the absolute in
time. If it could be physically as well as ethically or religiously
(dramatically) uniform, it would have one single intact time-length.
Personal time would be absent and require the same effort to be
conceived as absolute time itself is by a physically variable humanity.
It would, indeed, not affect the inherent absoluteness of time, it would
merely make numerical repetitions of it. With a variable humanity,
however, conforming to an ethically absolute time, personal time is a
numerical variation, not a numerical repetition of it. And because
absolute time can only be dramatically executed through personal time,
it can be only relatively absolute: its absoluteness has to be inferred
by comparison.
When humanity or a co-ordinated representative portion of humanity
attempts to observe the absolute as strictly as possible in whatever
form it is officially recognized at the time, and to compare its own
relativeness with it continually, then we have a coherent time-length;
we have classicism. When humanity falls in love with its own
relativeness and ceases to compare its variability with an absolute,
then we have romanticism. An unexaggerated romantic period is a
collection of the remarkable and independent individuals who were alive
in that period and of âforcesâ so distinctly varied that they are nearly
recognizable as peopleâperhaps numerically representative of the less
remarkable and independent individuals of the period. An exaggerated
romantic period is one in which variation has assumed so great a
significance that the period seems composed by one or two dominant
personalities. The Napoleonic period was an exaggerated romantic period;
so much so that every highly specialized personality seemed
Napoleonicâthe shadow of Napoleonism fell, in Europe, across the entire
first half of the nineteenth century.
The antithesis of exaggerated romanticism is exaggerated classicism,
which opposes impersonal to personal uniformity. Contemporary literary
classicism is bent on enforcing a coherent time-length which shall rob
personal variations of significance, and on connecting this time-length
sympathetically with former classical periods, in order to make it as
relatively absolute as possible. So it dismisses the Renaissance and
joins itself directly to Mediaevalism; so it dismisses Darwinism as
having given romantic significance to biological variation.
What impresses one most in tracing the new barbarism from its
theoretical phase to its contact with actual creation is that here is a
complicated machinery which, when set in motion and concentrated on what
are its expressed ends, is capable of only the crudest mechanical
gestures. Its subtleties become pomposities, its contributions to the
cause that it has created, trivialities. Criticism has a great deal to
say about criticism, which means that it is highly philosophical. But as
it has very little that is relevant and helpful to say about poetry
itselfânot as a philosophical abstraction but as poemsâcriticism
becomes, in practice, highly philosophical nonsense. Although it objects
to the romantic disorganization in which there is not beauty but
âbeauties,â it has no absolute canon of beauty to offer to the poetry
which it is attempting to inspire but a primitive satire of beauties and
a counsel to suppress the obvious because the obvious is often
romantically (personally), therefore sentimentally beautiful. Although
it insists that a fixed dogmatic beauty leaves the poet more free to
achieve perfection, yet it has nothing better to offer than a few
elementary suggestions and clues such as that âgolden ladâ is a
beautiful classical phrase and âgolden youthâ a beautiful romantic
phrase (Hulme). âThe thing has got so bad now that a poem which is all
dry and hard, a properly classical poem, would not be considered poetry
at all. . . . They cannot see that accurate description is a legitimate
object of verse.â^(=> #calibre_link-51 9
) Hulme did not stop just here, but however far he went (and this was
not far) he could not get away from his battle with the past and help
the present, although the present was his professed objective. Nor did
he seem to realize the waste and absurdity of asking a forward-looking
twentieth-century generation to arm itself against an early
nineteenth-century bogey or against the Renaissance bogey itself.
We scarcely realize how crude a reference-word âclassicalâ really is. If
we consider its usage, even by an apparently careful writer like Hulme,
we find it is nothing more than a term to apply to works designed with
the intention that they shall become classics, and to those which have
succeeded in this intention. If, moreover, we examine this intention, we
discover that it is servilely concerned with technique and decency, but
little with meaning, personal intensity or experimentation. Many of the
difficulties of contemporary verse are indeed due to the attempt to
reconcile the classical desideratum âdry and hardâ with the necessity to
experiment in order to fix beauty as criticism seems unable to fix
itâexperiment of course leading to romanticism. Romanticism, on the
contrary, is not so concerned with technique or decency; it is more
freakish, more ambitious, more amateurish. Because it is amateurish it
is more serious: genuine amateurishness is a mixing of the making of a
thing with the significance of its making. In exaggerated romanticism
the significance of the making is more important than the problem of the
making itself; it is the object of each individual exercise. In
exaggerated classicism the professional sense is so dominant that the
significance of the making is considered settled for the craft as a
whole: there can be no making unless it is settled. Therefore in
exaggerated romanticism we find an abnormal emphasis on perspective as
in exaggerated classicism an abnormal absence of it. This abnormal
absence of it, this forced naivety, is obedience to a discipline whose
object is to prevent the use of form for speculation. The concentration
of form on form means in classical terminology âabstractâ or âpureâ
form. Speculation with form can also become, in romantic art, forced
naivetyâwhat Hulme wished to attack in Ruskinian seriousness.
The opposition is not, as Hulme cavalierly made it, of sophisticated
levity to idiot-headed seriousness, or of fancy to imagination, but of a
heavy, rigid, originally dull seriousness to a rather ingenuous,
sometimes successful, often droll, though perhaps eventually dull
seriousness. âWonder must cease to be wonder,â complained Hulme: but in
the beginning, while there is wonder, there is always the chance of a
surprise success in romanticism. In classicism, which sets out with a
formal, defined intention, there is never the chance of success in this
sense. If romantic freakishness generally quiets down to triteness and
is for this reason dull, classical freakishness, of which there are so
many contemporary specimens, is fixed and eternal from the outset and
thus eternally dull. It cannot even be undermined by the influence it
exercises because it is made with a kind of bigotry that immediately
imposes itself rather than influences. A romantic movement must have an
end, Hulme said, a discovery by a bigoted classicist full of
significance: âmovementâ meaning the history and influence of romantic
works, rather than the making of original romantic works themselves. A
classicist, it is to be remarked, in attacking romanticism always
attacks the end-products of a romantic movement, and the most feeble of
these; as Hulme chooses to attack romanticism through Ruskinian
seriousness rather than through the best of Keats, whom he admired; as
he attacks humanism and the Renaissance at points where they break down.
The conglomerativeness of romanticism makes it possible to attack it as
a whole in this way through an assailable part, while the romanticist
wishing to attack classicism must attack it as an integrated whole, with
the result that it generally remains unattacked because the task seems
too formidable.
Let me set down the most ingenuous expression of the romantic point of
view that I can at the moment find. It is by William Kiddier, from a
little book, one of a series, called âThe Profanity of
Paint.â^(=> #calibre_link-52 10
) First on colour, the medium of painting: âColour is the soul of
things! . . . I believe colour belongs to the fairies; it never comes
quite within our grasp. It is borne upon the air, its chariot is the
morning dew, and its paths the sunbeams. I have come to regard colour as
a spiritual thing changing for ever, as all spiritual things do.â Then
on what we might call âThe first principleâ: âEverything in the work
should, in some special degree, contribute to the first idea. Nothing
should be introduced for the sake of variety. . . . of a truth, trees
can only be painted by the sympathetic hand, one that can make a simple
group of all around him, selecting only those that, by their forms,
shall contribute to the artistic sense relation. . . . Time counts for
nothing. The trunk has been the work of centuries; and the season
present brings forth the shoot; yea! a thousand years have gone between
and both are in relation!â Now as this statement stands, we can say that
it illustrates certain general characteristics of romanticism. The
medium itself is related to a meaning, or spiritualized. Art is not the
definite formation of form but human aspiration working through form,
therefore tending to indefiniteness. Relation is apparently only an
ambitious word for perspective. Contribution to a first idea is only
romantic distortion of the elements of a picture to create a meaning. It
does not imply in the artist a reverence for the absolute; for then his
picture would have Meaning, but not a meaning in the human sense. If
time counts for nothing to Mr. Kiddier, it is because he believes in
continuity. It is eternal because human life to him is eternal, not
because a discontinuity exists between âlifeâ and the world of religious
and ethical values which makes the time of the latter absolute, of the
former relative.
Now let me set down the least ingenuous expression of the classical or
barbaric point of view that I can at the moment find. It is by Ezra
Pound, on the work of the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska. Mr. Pound admires
his work, we learn, because it is anti-Hellenic its chief formative
influences were from archaic Greek, the Oceanic, the Egyptian, the
Assyrian, the African, the Chineseâfrom strictly barbaric sources, in
other words. He says, speaking of Gaudier's âThe Dancerâ:
This is almost a thesis of his ideas upon the use of pure form. We have
the triangle and circle assented, labled almost, upon the face and right
breast. Into these so-called âabstractionsâ life flows, the circle moves
and elongates into the oval, it increases and takes volume in the
sphere, or hemisphere of the breast. The triangle moves toward organism,
it becomes a spherical triangle. . . . These two developed motifs work
as themes in a fugue. We have the whole series of spherical triangles,
as in the arm over the head, all combining and culminating in the great
sweep of the back of the shoulders, as fine as any surface in all
sculpture. The âabstractâ or mathematical bareness of the triangle and
circle are fully incarnate, made flesh, full of vitality and energy. The
whole form series ends, passes into stasis with the circular base or
platform.^(=> #calibre_link-53 11
)
Mr. Pound quotes Gaudier-Brzeska himself: âSculptural feeling is the
appreciation of masses in relation. Sculptural ability is the defining
of these masses by planes.â Mr. Pound continues: âThe sculptor must add
to the power of imagining form-combination the physical energy required
to cut this into the unyielding medium. He must have vividness of
perception, he must have this untiringness, he must beyond that be able
to retain his main idea unwaveringly during the time (weeks or months)
of the carving.â This statement may likewise be taken as a
characteristic expression of classicism. We have an emphasis on the
medium as material. The âmain ideaâ is the proper and painstaking
adjustment of the material to itself, its gradual assumption of definite
form. The artist could not have the concentration necessary for this
task, it is implied, if he did not exlude from it meaning in the human,
relative sense. His work has an absolute quality, an âabstractness,â to
the degree to which he can exclude a meaning, to the degree to which his
work exists in the world of religious and ethical value rather than in
the world of biological striving. His forms would lack finality if they
strove. There is no talk of spirituality, of everness, of sunbeams or of
seasons bringing forth shoot. There is undoubtedly a fundamental first
principle, but this is apparently so fundamental and so fixed that it is
unnecessary and even forbidden to introduce it as the subject of a work.
It is the point from which the artist begins rather than the one at
which he aims.
Such seems to be the irreconcilability of these two statements as the
expressions of two opposed ways of interpreting and applying the
creative capacities. If, however, we examine them as two statements
showing a difference of personal temperament in their authors, this hard
and fast irreconcilability between romanticism and classicism
disappears, and we see them both as somewhat arbitrary distinctions
based on the temperamental variations likely to occur in people dealing
with what is virtually the same process. Both temperaments may even be
found to exist side by side in the same period. Mr. Kiddier is
historically a modest contemporary of Mr. Pound's; and what, after all,
does Mr. Kiddier say that Mr. Pound does not? He says that colour is the
important thing in painting and that it is a very difficult and subtle
medium. To say that it belongs to the fairies is only an extravagant and
harmless way of saying that man has trouble in mastering it. To call
colour a spiritual thing is merely an extravagant way of saying that, to
use it properly, the artist must have high qualities, such as âinsight,
poignancy, retentiveness, plus the energyââMr. Pound's own list of the
essentials in the âmaking of permanent sculpture.â If Mr. Kiddier
insists on a first idea, Mr. Pound insists on a main one. The artistic
sense relation which for the former should show in the association of
trees in a picture is, true enough, defined as a kind of emotional
sympathy in the artist rather than as a necessary relationship between
the âmotifsâ employed. But is this not merely a tenderer, more ingenuous
version of Mr. Pound's own ingenuous enough remarks about the âcomplete
thesis of principlesâ which the perfect statue apparently attains? Mr.
Kiddier, when he comes to Time, obviously lets his extravagance get
control of him; there is a lack of respectability of a sort in this,
unredeemed by any uniqueness of thought or expression. But it should not
be overlooked, in Mr. Kiddier's defence, that it is part of his
ingenuousness to pretend neither to respectability nor uniqueness; while
Mr. Pound makes the uniqueness of his views respectable by quoting half
a dozen barbarisms as his authorities, and his respectability unique by
the use of a very limited language supposed to express literally the
concrete problems of the artist. Romantic language such as Mr. Kiddier's
soon becomes trite after the surprise of its first use wears off;
language such as Mr. Pound uses (Id do not wish, of course, to suggest
that either Mr. Kiddier or Mr. Pound invented their language) soon
becomes jargon, which means not only trite but senselessâfor it is so
limited that when it loses its literal sense its metaphorical sense
(such as the application to poetry of terms invented for sculpture)
becomes purely academic. We shall grow weary (if we have not already) of
talk of circles, triangles, spheres, form, planes, stasis and masses
sooner than talk of trees put in motion by the wind, fairies, sunbeams,
seasons and the passing of centuries.
Shorn of its jargon, is there anything that Mr. Pound says which is not
in Mr. Kiddier's philosophy? He says that the artist makes the
mechanical exercises of his art breathe out life, that everything must
be in relation (Mr. Kiddier's word), that the sculptor can make flesh
out of stone as the colour-artist gets significant vibrations out of
paint. His elaborate explanation of the technical merit of âThe Dancerâ
is really a pedantic evasion of such words as âspiritualityâ about which
Mr. Kiddier, if asked describe this statue, would in his ingenuousness
not be squeamish. âThe whole form-series ends, passes into statis with
the circular base or platformâ is merely the basic âsamenessâ or
peacefulness of Mr. Kiddier's philosophy of art into which variety shall
not be introduced for its own sake.^(=> #calibre_link-54 12
) A romanticist would paraphrase Gaudier-Brzeska: âThe sculptor must
feel his subject as a whole and understand it minutely in its parts
without allowing its soul to escape. More than this, he must be able to
feel and understand with stone as well as with his heart and
mind.â^(=> #calibre_link-55 13
) Whatever conviction this definition loses by its sentimentality, it
gains by its applicability to more than one kind of sculptureâthe
romantic definition is always less strictly romantic than it would be if
romanticism were a âmovementâ in the sense generally ascribed to it.
That the language of classicism cannot be so easily applied to romantic
works as that of romanticism to classical works would seem to show that
it is classicism indeed which is always a movement doomed to have an
end, and romanticism a vague name, sentimentally used on both sides, to
describe the general human movement of art; if derogatively, to attack
the vulgarity and incompetence in this movement.
The differences between the classical attitude and the romantic
attitude, when considered as temperamental reactions to the same thing,
seem to centre in the question of extravagance. The romanticist is not
afraid of extravagance. He is so earnest that the danger of excess does
not occur to him. The classicist is most of all afraid of extravagance.
He has a self-conscious lack of confidence which prevents him from being
earnest because he is aware of the danger of excess. This earnestness in
the romanticist easily leads to vulgarity, this self-consciousness in
the classicist, to snobbery. The reason why Hulme opposed fancy to the
imagination was that he had a snobbish feeling against the imagination
from its being associated with many vulgarities, not from any real
objection to imagination itself: for fancy to him was merely an
improved, more technical, narrower imagination. âAbstractâ is another
âclassicalâ word that has come to have a thoroughly snobbish
connotation. It generally means: lacking in sentimental allusions to
fairies, trees, spirituality, time, spring. Likewise âmathematicalâ and
âgeometricâ prove themselves to mean lacking in vulgar humanity, having
non-vital realism. The classical artist is a snob against himself. He
therefore separates his art from his nature and thus art from nature.
This is the history of discontinuity and the abstraction of art. Art, in
Hulme's words, is created to satisfy a desire. The desire appears to be,
in theory, the desire for art itself; to create a discontinuity in man
by isolating art from nature. So art is not the creation of a fiction,
but a very gloomy feeling in man about his own nature. Why this is not a
romantic attitudeâfor the romantic includes some very gloomy feelings,
indeed, about the nature of manâis that the romantic gloomy feelings do
not seem to be gloomy or pessimistic enough. Romantic gloom, of course,
can be extravagantly depressing or hysterical. But gloom for the
classicist is not final, abstract or mathematical unless it is just
gloom, without being either depressing or hysterical. Absolute gloom is
so gloomy that it does not have to be gloomy: if gloom is gloomy it
becomes vulgarized. Classical art is therefore created to satisfy a
desire for gloom which is really, however, a snobbish feeling about
romantic gloom.
IV
It has been seen that contemporary criticism, the philosophical portion
of contemporary poetic activity, has attempted to bring about some order
in the views commonly held about poetry. By doing this it has hoped to
bring about an order in the actual writing of poetry. The only order
there has been in poetry for the last hundred and thirty-five years has
been a superficial uniformity due to a confused sympathy of sentiment
and imagery in the language in which it was written. But there has been
no fundamental professional sense of the eighteenth-century sort. The
mental background has been anarchic and amateurish. When contemporary
criticism expresses its respect for the eighteenth century it is, of
course, praising its professional sense. It is impossible to believe
that it is praising eighteenth-century poetry as such, in which the
sentiment of professional uniformity lacked the energy that might have
been supplied to it by anarchy and amateurishness.
The problem of the present-day poet, therefore, who feels himself
responsible to the problem raised by criticism, is a very difficult one.
He must react against the unprofessional and superficial uniformity
which romanticism brought aboutâhe must maintain a professional
independence of sentiment and imageryâand at the same time avoid anarchy
and amateurishness. He must resign from the emotional brotherhood which
poetry formed from a loose romantic social sense and attach himself to
the organized metaphysics of poetry professionalized in the narrowest
possible social sense as an art-and-craft.
We may say that the problem will be to a large extent solved by the
poet's originality and the discipline that should go with it if it is to
be effective originality. And it is true that the successes in
contemporary poetry have been those which have been able to combine
originality and discipline. But in general the burden of responsibility
has been with originality; discipline has been distorted, teased and
distracted by the lack, in criticism, of immediate suggestiveness, a
failure which is aggravated by the dogmatic character of its theorizing.
Criticism assumes all the prerogatives which belong to creation without
assuming any of its concrete responsibilities. It limits its share in
these responsibilities to a negative and irresponsible taste and
envelops itself in a forbidding cloud of snobbery.
Criticism says: âArt refers to an absolute. It must recognize a first
principle. Every work must imply this first principle.â âWhat,â is the
creative question, âis the first principle? A work cannot imply it by
interrogation; that would be romantic.â But the first principle is not
stated. It seems part of the consistency of the system that it shall not
be stated. It must be derived from the system in such a way that its
finality shall not be impaired by its relation to contemporary history.
The age itself must invent a provisional first principle, the corporeal
representative of the absolute. The absolute cannot be absolute and
appear in person. Art is ideal action. It does not so much create
âthingsâ as reveal âthingsâ with the things it creates. Its purpose is
âto pierce through the veil placed between us and realityâ (Hulme) with
the work, not to lodge reality in the work
itself.^(=> #calibre_link-56 14
) The work is a kind of beautiful behaviour, but the beauty of this
behaviour must not be made to inhere in the work, for this would mean a
confusion of standards. Beauty must be inferred, its sameness verified.
Variety is in the instrumentality of art, not in its meaning. Its
meaning is so same that it can only be âexpressed,â it cannot be
immediately present. The belief in the possibility of its being
immediately present is a perverted romantic notion.
Thus the absolute, beauty, the first principle, remain persistently
elusive unless supplied by the âage.â The critical energy of the poet is
supposed to be more concretely responsible than the creative energy of
criticism: half the energy of the poet, if not more, is to be consumed
in making the age yield its version of the first principle. This version
is known as a âtheme.â If the theme is absent it is through the combined
fault of the poet and the age. The poet should have the power of
identifying himself with the temporal extent of his age, of realizing
his proper theme; and the age should lend itself to this identification.
If this happy union is not effected, criticism takes the attitude that
it is very significant that it has not been effected, that it is indeed
too bad and that the poet will have to do the next best thing, that is,
write about this very significant and deplorable handicap. âThe
dissociationâ (of vision and subject), says Allen Tate in his Foreword
to a volume of poems by Hart Crane, âappears decisively for the first
time in Baudelaire.â^(=> #calibre_link-57 15
) Theme-ishness, Mr. Tate wishes to suggest, wore itself out. This is
not to be interpreted as a reflection on the theme-ishness of the
absolute, but apparently on history, which has not been able to sustain
the succession of themes, and on poets, who have, because of history,
been forced to desert this succession. Nor does it contradict the
unexpressed first principle or the theoretical necessity for a theme.
âFor while Mr. Eliot might have written a more ambitiously unified
poem,â Mr. Tate further says, âthe unity would have been false;
tradition as unity is not contemporary.â Tradition, he means, is unity,
and contemporary criticism is busy saying this; but contemporary poetry
is not unity because it is busy proving how distressing the absence of
unity is and also paying the penalty for the sins of romanticism, which
disregarded tradition as unity and so in its anarchic enthusiasm
developed no unity but a feeble universalization of poetic language.
âFor,â he goes on to say in a few sentences, âthe comprehensiveness and
lucidity of any poetry, the capacity for poetry being assumed as proved,
are in direct proportion to the availability of a comprehensive and
perfectly articulated given theme.â This theme being temporarily absent
(Mr. Tate does not say who should have articulated the theme. Not the
poet, since the theme is given? Nor history, since this would imply a
critical function which Mr. Tate would surely not admit in history? The
only deduction possible is that criticism, for no discoverable reason,
has decided to be coy), âthe important contemporary poet has the rapidly
diminishing privilege of reorganizing the subjects of the past,â Mr.
Tate concludes.
T. S. Eliot composed such a résumé in The Waste Land. James Joyce
attempted the same sort of thing in a more destructive way in his long
progressive use of period literary styles in Ulysses. Gertrude Stein,
lacking the sophistication of either of these, refused to be baffled by
criticism's haughty coyness and, taking the absolute and beauty and the
first principle quite literally, saw no reason, all these things being
so, why we should not have a theme, why indeed we cannot assume âa
perfectly articulated given theme.â If everybody assumed this perfectly
articulated given theme (and no one has yet shown satisfactorily why,
fortified by such a criticism, we should not), everybody would
understand Gertrude Stein. By combining the functions of critic and poet
and taking everything around her very literally and many things for
granted which others have not been naive enough to take so, she has done
what every one else has been ashamed to do. No one but Miss Stein has
been willing to be as ordinary as simple, as primitive, as stupid, as
barbaric as successful barbarism demands.
Does no one but Miss Stein realize that to be abstract, mathematical,
thematic, anti-Hellenic, anti-Renaissancist, anti-romantic, we must be
barbaric? What has happened? We have had enough triangles, circles,
spheres and hemispheres to satisfy any barbaric geometric craving, and
yet it is certain that triangles, circles, spheres, and hemispheres have
passed: the London Times recently criticized a young artist's work which
was of a geometric type as âold-fashioned.â If the geometric type (which
Hulme opposed to the vital type) has passed (as it has) it must be
because it was romantic (a romantic movement must have an end) and
because it was surprised and defeated by its own romanticism.
We have seen how near the surface romanticism lurked in Mr. Pound's
philosophy. We discover Hulme's absolute, too, to have been a
pessimist's deification of pessimism, a sentimental abstraction of
despair. Hulme's romanticism is finally and completely confessed in his
attachment to Bergson. Bergson's attraction is that in rescuing the
fundamentally romantic idea of evolution from its idealization,
evolutionary progress, he invented an elaborate, pleasurable and dreamy
way for the modern classicist to be barbaric. By interpreting evolution
as an intensive instead of an extensive process he kept the movement and
variations of evolution but eliminated the objectionable enlargement of
significance with which humanity generally accompanies its movement and
variations. By calling the true intelligence of this process intuitive
rather than intellectual he discredited the civilized personality of the
human mind: he made intelligence a principle instead of a faculty. By
defining the time-world as an absolute duration which continuously
interpenetrated itself and thus continuously produced new forms, he
suggested a movement in the absolute without attacking its absoluteness;
he made romanticism seem classical, and, above all, kept an important
place for originality in this system without displacing discipline.
The devotion of the modern classicist to originality is the most serious
flaw in his metaphysical technique. As a result of his romantic weakness
for it, discipline is perverted. Yet he cannot abandon originality,
however it perverts discipline, because he despises and wishes to
suppress the vulgar undisciplined originality of ordinary humanity. So
his classicism is designed to represent ordinary humanity only
theoretically, which means that it really represents those who have
extraordinary power or superiority over ordinary humanity. This flaw was
very obvious in Hulme's idea of the nature of the artist's vision. To
Hulme, the artist saw something that no one else saw, he directly
communicated âindividuality and the freshness of thingsâ: the only
suggestion of classicism in this being the peculiar emphasis on
âthings.â^(=> #calibre_link-58 16
) Speaking again of the artist, he said: âIt is because he realizes the
inadequacy of the usual that he is obliged to invent.â Direct
communication, it is further implied, is hindered by the long romantic
history of society: democratic communism of speech has destroyed the
priesthood of the artist to the absolute. The modern classicist, to
believe in the absolute, must believe in communism, but in autocratic
communism: communism permitting of originality in the autocrat. The
representative authority of the artist comes, it appears, from his
superiority: he is the autocrat of originality.
A discrepancy multiplies. How is originality to remain consistent with
the classicism of the new barbarism when every increase in originality
seems, as in modernist poetry, a movement in the direction of
romanticism, a widening of the breach between criticism and workmanship?
âThe artist must discover,â criticism would reply, âclassical
originality: he must invent an original type.â For a time it seemed as
if the geometric type was the sought-for original type. But it failed as
an experiment in original classicism because it was only a sophisticated
imitation, or rather caricature, of perhaps the most ordinary type of
art in the past. And it is hard to see, indeed, how the pursuit of an
original type can get any farther than a caricature of the ordinary. The
possibilities might seem greater in literature, where it has been
permissible for human personality to contribute to this desired
combination of originality and conventionality. But here, too, the
creative limit seems to be reached in caricature; in Joyce's Leopold
Blum and in Eliot's Prufrock and other âlow types,â originality proves
to be, after all, only an attack on a degenerated ordinary. Ordinary and
original therefore cannot be used by classicism as reconcilable terms;
or rather their use as such reveals the contradiction in their use.
The âdirect communicationâ by which originality is to be transmitted
contains a further contradiction. Directness of communication means
immediate ideal intelligibility. But since language has been degraded by
its experiences, much of the originality will have to be employed in
attacking the ordinary language of communication: direct communication,
like the original type, will be able to go no farther than an obscure
caricature of ordinary language, as in the dialogue in Mr. Eliot's
Fragment of a Prologue.^(=> #calibre_link-59 17
) And caricature is indirect, erratic, romantic. The poetry of Edith
Sitwell is but one instance in contemporary poetry of the romantic
caricature of language which contemporary classicism has fostered.
Another aspect of the same general flaw is the incompatibility of the
âthingsâ which are supposed to be revealed in the direct communication
(âthingsâ in which apparently the first principle inheres) with the
talent of the artist to see things âas no one else sees them.â The
barbaric absolute, the divine source of âthings,â wherever it has
prevailed naturally, has always been marked by a penetrating
obviousness. The Pyramids are penetratingly obvious: they nearly make
absoluteness synonymous with obviousness.
Creative originality can only be consistent with barbaric communism if
it is not superior creative originality. The only kind of originality
which can see âthingsâ âas no one else sees themâ for barbaric
mass-humanity, for human ordinariness, is mass-originality: some
mystical, large-scale process in which the artist is chosen as a seeing
instrument without his ordinariness being destroyed. He may be regarded
by his tribe as divinely inspired to communicate directly, but inspired
in ordinariness. The ideal barbaric artist is superior in ordinariness
rather than in originality. For a long time the new barbarism has been
wasting itself on disguised romantics while Gertrude Stein quietly has
gone on practising a coherent barbarism under its very nose without
encouragement or recognition. Her only crime has been that she has
followed directions and disciplined away discrepancies. She has been
able to do this because she is completely without originality. Everybody
is unable to understand her and thinks that this is because she is too
original or is trying too hard to be original. But she is only divinely
inspired in ordinariness. She uses language automatically to record
pure, ultimate obviousness. She makes it capable of direct communication
not by caricaturing language in its present stage-attacking decadence
with decadenceâbut by purging it of its discredited experiences. None of
the words Miss Stein uses have ever had any experience. They are no
older than her use of them, and she is herself no older than her age
conceived barbarically.
Put it there in there there where they have it
Put it there in there there and they halve it
Put it there in there there and they have it
Put it there in there there and they halve it^(=> #calibre_link-60 18
)
None of these words, it can be seen, has ever had any history before
this. The design that Miss Stein makes of them is literally abstract and
mathematical because they are etymologically transparent and
commonplace, mechanical but not eccentric. If they possess originality
it is the originality of gross automatism. Their author is a large-scale
mystic, she is the darling priest of cultured infantilism to her ageâif
her age but knew it.
Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen, and
that makes a composition.^(=> #calibre_link-61 19
)
Her admission that there are generations does not contradict her belief
in an unvarying first principle. Times does not vary, only the sense of
time.
Automatically with the acceptance of the time-sense comes the
recognition of the beauty and once the beauty is accepted the beauty
never fails anyone.^(=> #calibre_link-62 20
)
Beauty has no history, time has no history; only the time-sense has
history. When the time-sense acclaims a beauty which was not at first
recognized, the finality of this beauty is at once established, it is as
though it had never been denied. All beauty is equally final. The reason
why the time-sense if realized reveals the finality or classicalness of
beauty is that it is the feeling of beginning, of primitiveness and
freshness which is each age's or generation's version of time.
Beginning again and again and again explaining composition and time is a
natural thing.
It is understood by this time that everything is the same except
composition and time, composition and the time of the composition and
the time in the composition.^(=> #calibre_link-63 21
)
Originality of vision, then, is invented not by the artist but by the
collective time-sense. The artist does not see âthingsâ âas no one else
sees them.â He sees those objective âthingsâ in which the absolute is
repeatedly verified, personalized and represented by the age. He sees
concretely and expressively what every one else who is possessed of the
time-sense has an unexpressed intuition of: the time-sense may not be
generally and particularly universal; but this does not make the
artist's vision, even his originality of vision, less collective or less
universal.
The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they
are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time
they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living.
It is that that makes living a thing they are doing. Nothing else is
different, of that almost any one can be certain. The time when and the
time of and the time in that composition is the natural phenomena of
that composition and of that perhaps every one can be
certain.^(=> #calibre_link-64 22
)
All this Gertrude Stein has understood and executed logically because of
the perfect simplicity of her mind. Believing implicitly in an absolute,
she has not been bothered to doubt the bodily presence of a first
principle in her own time. Since she is alive and everybody around her
seems to be alive, why of course there is an acting first principle,
there is composition. This acting first principle provides a âperfectly
articulated given themeâ because there is time, and everybody, and the
beginning again and again and again, and composition. In her primitive
good-humour she does not find it necessary to trouble to define the
theme. The theme is to be inferred from the composition. The composition
is clear because the language means nothing but what it means in her
using of it. The composition is final because it is âa more and more
continuous present including more and more using of everything and
continuing more and more beginning and beginning and
beginning.â^(=> #calibre_link-65 23
) She creates this atmosphere of continuousness principally by her
progressive use of the tenses of verbs, by an intense and unflagging
repetitiousness and by an artificially assumed and regulated
child-mentality: the child's time-sense is so vivid that an occurrence
is always consecutive to itself, it goes on and on, it has been going on
and on, it will be going on and on; a child does perhaps feel the
passage of time, does to a certain extent feel itself older than it was
yesterday because yesterday was already to-morrow even while it was
being yesterday.
Alfred as I was saying was in Gossols when he was a very young one and
when he was a little older than a young one. Sometimes then later he saw
a little sometimes of Olga the sister of the first governess the
Herslands had had in their Gossols living staying with them. Sometimes
the Wyman fairily made up to him. This is the way he had all these in
him this that I am now beginning describing. This is now beginning to be
a history of him, a history of Alfred Hersland of all the being and all
the living in him.^(=> #calibre_link-66 24
)
This is how Gertrude Stein wrote in 1906 and this is how she was still
writing in 1926. Writing by always beginning again and again and again
keeps everything different and everything the same. It creates duration
but makes it absolute by preventing anything from happening in the
duration.
And after that what changes what changes after that, after that what
changes and what changes after that and after that and what changes and
after that and what changes after that.^(=> #calibre_link-67 25
)
The composition has a theme because it has no theme. The words are a
self-pursuing, tail-swallowing series and are therefore thoroughly
abstract. They achieve what Hulme called, but could not properly
envisage, a âperpendicular,â an escape from the human horizontal
plane.^(=> #calibre_link-68 26
) They contain no references, no meanings, no caricatures, no jokes, no
despairs. They are so automatic that it is even inexact to speak of Miss
Stein as their author: they create one another. The only possible
explanation of lines like the following is that one word or combination
of words creates the next.
As long as head as short as said as short as said as long as
head.^(=> #calibre_link-69 27
)
. . . . .
A little away
And a little away.
Everything away.
Everything and away.
Everything and away.
Away everything away.^(=> #calibre_link-70 28
)
This is repetition and continuousness and beginning again and again and
again.
Nothing that has been said here should be understood as disrespectful to
Gertrude Stein. What has been said has been said in praise and not in
contempt. She has courage, clarity, sincerity, simplicity. She has
created a human mean in language, a mathematical equation of
ordinariness, which leaves one with a tender respect for that changing
and unchanging slowness that is humanity and Gertrude Stein.
Humanityâone learns this from Gertrude Stein but not from contemporary
poetryâis fundamentally a nice person; and so is Gertrude Stein.
Having, in her recent essay Composition As Explanation, explained
composition and composed explanation and made language serve critical
and creative aims at the same time, she then proceeds to speak of
romanticism as no other contemporary critic with a classical bias has
been able to do; she speaks of it as a role which composition may play
when it is being the same thing that it is when it plays the rĂŽle of
classicism.
Everything is the same except composition and as the composition is
different and always going to be different everything is not the
same.^(=> #calibre_link-71 29
)
We may draw from this a definition of classicism: it is the sameness of
the differentness of composition. The definition of romanticism means
only a shift of emphasis, and Miss Stein does this for us.
Romanticism is then when everything being alike everything is naturally
simply different, and romanticism.^(=> #calibre_link-72 30
)
Romanticism is the differentness of the sameness of composition.
After all this, there is that, there has been that that there is a
composition and that nothing changes except composition the composition
and the time of and the time in the composition.^(=> #calibre_link-73 31
)
The time in the composition is its sameness and its differentness, its
classicism and its romanticism. If the composition is to have
lastingness it must return to the sameness. If the composition is to
have life it must begin again and again and again with the
differentness. Such seems to be Miss Stein's philosophy of history in
art. But as the composition is something which goes on and on in a
continuous present and using of everything and beginning again and again
and again, it does not seem to matter which comes first, romanticism or
classicism, or whether a work or attitude is attributed to one or to the
other or whether, indeed, it is ever necessary to refer to either.
Both, however, have a certain strategical usefulness. Classicism is a
historical formula invented by criticism for any period of history whose
art can be looked on as a whole. It is very strictly a term for the past
and for the past only. However good a work may seem, it cannot be
properly called classical unless it can be associated with other things
called classical. The word classical carries with it the weight of all
works that have ever been called classical. The impressiveness of a
âclassicâ is in the implication that it belongs in the company of other
great works and, regardless of its time, really dates from long ago,
from the time when the past was so solid that everything was classical.
Everything up to a certain point in history, the Renaissance say, was
classical, even the Hellenic, which has really only lost respectability
because of its Renaissance and post-Renaissance influence. This is the
ironical force of âa modern classic.â Classicism is what Miss Stein
means by âdistribution and equilibration.â
But when âdistribution and equilibrationâ is urged or attempted while
the composition is in process, when criticism recommends a
contemporaneous classicism, then it is really being the criticism of the
future, looking back on its own period (since classicism can only refer
to the past) and attempting to order its own period backwards. This is
why a division between modernist composition and modernist criticism is
inevitable. The criticism is talking backwards. The composition, because
its time is a continuous present, is talking forwards. Criticism drops a
perpendicular at the point where the continuous horizontal of
composition begins again with the contemporary time-sense. The point
where the perpendicular meets the horizontal is unreal in the
perpendicular, because past and therefore refuted by the presentness of
the point on the horizontal.
Romanticism has a broader usefulness. Referring to differentness rather
than sameness, it is a word for the present rather than for the past:
the farther works are in the past the more same they seem, the nearer to
the present, the more different. Romanticism is more useful if only by
the greater of number of works to which it may refer, also because it
characterizes without definitely classifyingââromanticism, which was not
a confusion but an extricationâ as Gertrude Stein says. Afterwards comes
the distribution and equilibration, âthere must be time that is
distributed and equilibrated.â Thus every period afterwards is in a way
classical. But, while the composition is going on, it is not same, it is
different, it is âan extrication.â Contemporary composition which may be
in sympathy with the classicism of contemporary criticism must
nevertheless in practice react against it; composition cannot go on if
it tries to be self-consciously same. It must be different if only
because it must have different authors. Gertrude Stein, an ideal âsameâ
author for a classical period, is nevertheless many different authors in
one. She might seem more intelligible if it were possible to read her as
many authors.
Poe stock goes up and up; and what with Close-up's and Appreciations and
Gups, Tips, Hints, Revelations, Communications, Studies, Essays,
Beauties, Congratulations, Intimations, Discoveries, Embroideries,
Theories, Comparisons, Editions, Diapasons, literary criticism has now
another yard of rope with which to hang itself. Poe has come to be, at
first slowly, then with increasing rapidity, one of the âgood names.â He
may be evoked by advanced criticism when references run down; there is
an alliance of reciprocal favours between Poe and advanced criticism.
There is an alliance between Poe and less advanced criticism because he
has passed the required exhumation period and may be personally
reclaimed through those poems and tales by which he has always been dear
to the hearts of parlour reciters and editors of short-story classics.
He has been found to rhyme with Rimbaud. He has been found to yield a
thesis subject. He has added to the vocabulary and the voraciousness of
amateur psychologists of the abnormal. He is an example of persecuted
genius, wayward genius, practical genius, supreme artifice in art,
supreme art in artifice, narcotics, metaphysics, dream-life, love-life,
and fate. Much of the stimulus for this enthusiasm has been furnished by
the publication of hitherto unaccessible documents. Contemporary
criticism, however, is very little interested in correcting and
stabilizing the Poe legend. The popularity of Poe is due rather to his
usefulness to criticism than to criticism's usefulness to him. There is
an arrogance, a restlessness, a high pitch in the name which gives an
air of irrefutability to critical jargon. Nor does literal
investigation, when it occurs, yield anything more than the theory of
the investigator, since the subject, being cloudy but shallow, does not
complicate its usefulness as a laboratory specimen by unsuspected depth
or richness.^(=> #calibre_link-348 1
)
For Poe was too much of a mystery-man to himself to remain a mystery-man
to others. His life, like his poems, had an immediate journalistic
communicability, a mean public confidentialness. It gives little cause
for speculation on motives, misconstructions, secreciesâPoe is a
biographical failure if for no other reason than that he is too obvious.
A Poe cult can have no science, it can have only sentiment, and is
therefore completely humourless, as humourless indeed as Poe was
himself. A few trivial instances of this sentiment from âa monograph now
in preparationâ and printed in one of the many Poe articles to be found
in the index of any current American (or English or French) periodical
will perhaps suggest the extent to which the cheap-jack figure of Poe
has hypnotized the good sense of contemporary letters. âPoe later became
estranged from Hirst when that worthy parodied two lines of âThe Haunted
Palaceâ thus:
Never nigger shook a shin-bone
In a dance-house half so fair.
Poe was particularly sensitive to such breaches of good taste.â The
lines parodied will be found to read:
Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair!^(=> #calibre_link-349 2
)
It is easy to understand that Poe was sensitive in the matter of parody;
but it seems impossible that the worst good taste could have resisted
the invitation to parody in these foolish lines. Again, the same writer
excuses Poe's irascible nerves on the ground that âpoor Poe,â as âa
reviewer of current books, could not escape reading what came from the
press, and the literary output of that day was in most instances
unconscionably trashy.â Very true. But it did not occur to the author of
this article that some of this unconscionable trash was contributed by
the pen of Edgar Allan Poe. If âPoe must have gasped at such figures as:
My love, good night! let slumber steep
In poppy juice those melting eyes . . .
may we not be permitted to gasp at such figures as:
The very roses' odours
Died in the arms of the adoring airs.^(=> #calibre_link-350 3
)
âStrangely enough,â says the same writer, âit is quite impossible to
determine whether it was friendship or fear which held Poe in restraint
whenever he noticed publicly the occasional writings of Mr. English.â He
defends Poe by advancing the theory that Poe wrote âtongue in cheek,
keeping, however, always within a safe limit, so as not openly to offend
one who seems to have had some strange control over him.â Poe himself
says that he always wrote of English in âthe most unmistakable irony.â
But if it is recalled that Poe over and over again found beauties in
verse not better than English's, and often worseâespecially in the work
of contemporary poetesses, likewise that Poe had at his command only the
bluntest, heaviest kind of sarcasm, it will be seen that Poe was neither
behaving strangely nor âwriting tongue in cheekââa performance of which
Poe was constitutionally incapable. He was merely exercising his usual
critical policy, a form of lively, self-protective opportunism. Most of
the illustrations in Poe's critical writings are from the works of
fellow-editors and fellow-journalists, most of them absurd, as absurd as
the verse of that absurd period so consistently wasâincluding Poe's. A
real perspective of Poe's âverseâ can be had only by considering it in
relation to its contemporaneous fellow-verse, in emulation of which it
was writtenâthe verse, say, of Neal, Pinkney, Willis, Longfellow. It was
not better, it was only more flashy. By his vulgar capacity for
measuring the limits of âpopular tasteâ (his favourite slogan) he soon
outclassed Longfellow, a more genuine if more tame talent specializing
in the same effects as himself. Contrary to the impression given by
Poe's numerous defenders, his reputation has never been neglected. Poe
never neglected it himself during his lifetime. With the mystery tales,
which naturally reached âpopular tasteâ sooner, as a background, and the
melancholy autobiographical tone of the name as a literary headline, it
has never been neglected since.
Looking over the history of his reputation to the opening of the
twentieth century, we find him favourably and fully represented in the
major anthologies published during that time: for example, in Griswold's
Poets and Poetry of America published during his lifetime; in Dana's
Household Book of Poetry, published eight years after his death; in
Bryant's Library of Poetry and Song, published in 1870; and in Stedman's
1900 American Anthology in which the editor says, âHe gave a saving
grace of melody and illusion to French classicism, to English didactics,
to the romance of Europe from Italy to Scandinavia.â He was a schoolroom
classic long before he became one of the watchwords of advanced
criticism; and the romantic ill-fame of his personal life, wholly out of
proportion to the facts, which read neither wickedly nor impressively,
increased, if anything, the legend which Poe himself seems to have
invented.
The typical publisher's notice of a new Poe volume generally reads as
follows:
A Publication of Startling Content
EDGAR ALLAN POEâTHE MAN
With a Foreword by . . . known as the âgreatest living authority on Poeâ
NOW THE TRUTH IS KNOWN
Since Poe's death, seventy-seven years ago, a sympathetic following has
had to accept statements of Poe's indulgences. This monumental work is a
defence, substantiated by conclusive evidence, of the character of
America's greatest literary genius.
More than Sixty-Five Per Cent. New Material, letters, records, documents
and illustrations are here published for the first time. Poe, the man of
mystery, is revealed in a standard, final biography, the only complete,
illustrated life of him âwhose imperishable fame is in all lands.â
Two Volumes. 1,649 Pages. 500 Illustrations.
Even more than as âAmerica's greatest literary geniusâ Poe stands as a
symbol of âthe American grainâ (to use a phrase of Dr. William Carlos
Williams') to those to whom Americanism means not precisely patriotism,
but a certain dashing intellectual concept.^(=> #calibre_link-351 4
) Mr. H. L. Mencken, for example, who, like Dr. Williams, is an exemplar
of Americanism in the large and luxurious sense, is not exactly
patriotic; but a worshipper of Poe. Poe to Dr. Williams is not, as he
must be to some extent to Mr. Mencken and as he was to the Reverend
Rufus Wilmot Griswold, the descendant, however wayward, of a respectable
Baltimore family; he is âa new De Soto,â an American pioneer clearing
away old-world clutter by âthe plainness of his reasoning upon
elementary grammatical, syntactical and prosodic
grounds.â^(=> #calibre_link-352 5
) Some of the old-world clutter Poe thought worthy of preserving from
destruction and immortalizing along with new-world clutter that he did
not have the courage to clear away (the poetry of Mr. Cranch, Mrs.
Welby, Mr. Pinkney, etc.) was the poetry of Lord Byron, Thomas Moore,
Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hood, etc. He even patronized Longfellow, Bryant
and Lowell until he began to feel that he was being snubbed by them.
Then Longfellow became Professor Longfellow and Mr. L. is challenged to
a sparring match. It is difficult not to sympathize with Lowell, who
wrote:
Here comes Poe with his Raven, like Barnaby Rudge
Three fifths of him genius, and two fifth sheer fudge;
Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters;
In a way to make all men of common sense damn meters;
Who has written some things for the best of their kind;
But somehow the heart seems squeezed out by the
mind.^(=> #calibre_link-353 6
)
Indeed, Mr. L. has shown himself, if anything, too tolerant.
Three-fifths of him sheer fudge and two-fifths sheer fudge would have
been more accurate. But Mr. L. was a contemporary and a gentleman.
Another element of Poe's âoriginality,â according to Dr. Williams, is
his ânative vigour,â his rejection of âcolonial imitation.â Poe said, on
this subject: âBecause it suited us to construct an engine in the first
instance, it has been denied that we could compose an epic in the
second. . . . But this is purest insanity.â And again âWe have snapped
asunder the leading-strings of our British Grandmama, and, better still,
we have survived the first hours of our novel freedom, the first
licentious hours of hobbledehoy braggadocio and swagger.â The only
hobbledehoy braggadocio and swagger to be found in early
nineteenth-century American literature is in Poe; and then it is not
anti-British, but anti-Mr. Lowell, anti-Professor Longfellow, anti-Mr.
English or anti-anyone who could be construed in any sense as anti-Poe.
Dr. Williams, moreover, is not apparently aware that literary
independence was the favourite polite topic of the American Victorian
essayist. Even the objectionable Mr. Lowell, in his essay On a Certain
Condescension in Foreigners, wrote:
But whatever we might do or leave undone, we were not genteel, and it
was uncomfortable to be continually reminded that, though we should
boast that we were the great West till we were black in the face, it did
not bring us an inch nearer to the world's West-End. That sacred
enclosure of respectability was tabooed to us. The Holy Alliance did not
inscribe us on its visiting list. The Old World of wigs and orders and
liveries would shop with us, but we must ring at the area-bell and not
venture to awaken the more august clamors of the knocker. Our manners,
it must be granted, had none of those graces that stamp the caste of
Vere de Vere, in whatever museum of British antiquities they may be
hidden. In short, we were vulgar.^(=> #calibre_link-354 7
)
Dr. Williams might be enlightened by similar passages in Emerson and
other Victorians. âLowell and Bryant,â continues Dr. Williams, âwere
concerned with literature, Poe with the soul.â This of the Poe whose
energy was consumed before its due time in journalistic pettifoggery,
what Dr. Williams calls Poe's âslaughter of banality.â Poe's banal
slaughter of banality. Dr. Williams reaches the climax of his enthusiasm
in finding in him a foreshadowing of Gertrude Stein: âSometimes he used
words so playfully his sentences seem to fly away from sense.â
Now Doubtânow Pain
Come never again,
For her soul gives me sigh for sigh,
And all day long
Shines, bright and strong,
Astarte within the sky,
While ever to her dear Eulalie upturns her matron eyeâ
While ever to her young Eulalie upturns her violet
eye.^(=> #calibre_link-355 8
)
No, this is Poe, not Miss Stein. But Dr. Williams is perhaps referring
to Poe's prose?
It was in no placid temper, I say, that the metaphysician drew up his
chair to its customary station by the hearth. Many circumstances of a
perplexing nature had occurred during the day to disturb the serenity of
his meditations. In attempting des Ćeufs Ă la Princesse, he had
unfortunately perpetrated an omelette Ă la Reine; the discovery of a
principle of ethics had been frustrated by the overturning of a stew;
and last, not least, he had been thwarted in one of those admirable
bargains which he at all times took such special delight in bringing to
a successful termination. But in the chafing of his mind at these
unaccountable vicissitudes, there did not fail to be mingled some degree
of that nervous anxiety which the fury of a boisterous night is so well
calculated to produce. Whistling to his more immediate vicinity the
large water-dog we have spoken of before, and settling himself uneasily
in his chair, he could not help casting a wary and unquiet eye toward
those distant recesses of the apartment whose inexorable shadows not
even the red fire-light itself could more than partially succeed in
overcoming. Having completed a scrutiny whose exact purpose was perhaps
unintelligible to himself, he drew close to his seat a small table
covered with books and papers, and soon became absorbed in the task of
retouching a voluminous manuscript, intended for publication on the
morrow.^(=> #calibre_link-356 9
)
Or
And it is the greater number of spondees in the Greek than in the
Englishâin the ancient than in the modern tongueâwhich has caused it to
fall out that while these eminent scholars were groping for a Greek
hexameter, which is a spondaic rhythm varied now and then by dactyls,
they merely stumbled, to the lasting scandal of scholarship, over
something which, on account of its long-leggedness, we may as well term
a Feltonian hexameter, and which is a dactylic rhythm, interrupted,
rarely, by artificial spondees which are no spondees at all, and which
are curiously thrown in by the heels at all kinds of improper and
impertinent points.^(=> #calibre_link-357 10
)
âSuch is the language (to disregard the inaccuracy of the content of the
second quotation) which, to Dr. Williams (and others), seems âto fall
back continuously to a bare surface exhausted by having reached no perch
in tradition.â^(=> #calibre_link-358 11
)ââSeldom a long or sensuous sentence. . . . Thought, thought, mass . .
. âââThere is nothing offensively âlearnedâ there, nothing contemptuous,
even in the witty tricks with bogus Latin which he plays on his
illiterate public, which by its power, in turn, permits him an
originality, allows him, even when he is satiric, an authenticityâsince
he is not seeking to destroy but to assert, candidly, and to defend his
own.âââHis greatness is in that he turned his back and faced inland, to
originality, with the identical gesture of a Boone.âââAnd for that
reason he is unrecognized.â For what reason, and by whom? By his
illiterate public, and because he tried to palm off bogus Latin on them?
Poe stayed against the thin edge, driven to be heard by the battering
racket about him to a distant screamingâthe pure essence of his
locality.
The best poem is To One in Paradise.
A few lines of this poem should be reproduced:
For, alas! alas! with me
The light of Life is o'er!
âNo moreâno moreâno moreââ
(Such language holds the solemn sea
To the sands upon the shore)
Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree
Or the stricken eagle soar!^(=> #calibre_link-359 12
)
An inhibition composed of uneven parts of snobbism and loyalty generally
inspires modern Poe enthusiasts to quote Poe in his less famous
achievements. In Dr. Williams it is three parts loyalty to prefer To One
in Paradise, one of the worst of Poe's poems, to the Raven, the best of
the worst (and all were worst); and the lesser tales to the âpopular,
perfectâ Gold-Bug and the Murders in the Rue Morgue, which are
undoubtedly the best. T. S. Eliot's singling out of the Assignation
should, in justice to Mr. Eliot, be assigned to the three parts
snobbism.^(=> #calibre_link-360 13
)
Concerning âthe pure essence of his localityââit is gratifying to find
Poe avoiding the temptation to exploit theatrical American subjects. But
what is âthe sullen, volcanic inevitability of the placeâ to be found in
Poe? Presumably the essence of this locality should permeate his poems.
What is, then, the locality âso coldly nebulousâ in his essays, that
âluminosity that comes of a dissociation from anything else than the
thought and ideals? America's first originality of place in literature
was, it seems, of Guy de Vere's and Israfel's, of Lenore's and Annabel's
in worlds of moon, in haunted palaces, of Eulalies and other girls with
eyes of purple tints and pearls, of chambers where the embers were
glittering and shining like the cushion's velvet lining, like the velvet
violet lining, of filmy Thules where an Eidolon covered green isles and
the lakes of Eden and uncovered the drowsy hells in the dells, dells,
dells, dells, dells, dells, dells.
About Poe there is
No supernatural mystery-
No extraordinary eccentricity of fateâ^(=> #calibre_link-361 14
)
One must agree with Dr. Williams in his conclusions. There is no
supernatural mystery because Poe was plain and significantâsignificant
becauseâand this is the only amendment to be made to Dr. Williams'
generalizationâhe was plainly insignificant.
Many apologies may be made for Poe on the ground that, if his sins are
the sins of journalism, he was, however, forced into journalism by
economic necessity. But Poe never behaved like a man forced into
journalism; rather like a man born to journalism and to the least
competent and least dignified aspects of journalism. The spirit of
journalism vitiated his poems, his formal criticism. It even marred his
prose fiction, whose nature admitted of the exercise of a journalistic
sense. For Poe was a slipshod, insincere detective: the spring of
imaginative invention in him was not disinterested, accurate curiosity,
but a desire to produce a certain kind of effect in a reader estimated
as having the mean intelligence of the masses. If the sole object of a
work is to produce a predetermined effect, then it is bound to be
attended by vagueness rather than by particularity. The false atmosphere
of Poe's poems are caused by the same devotion to effect as is displayed
in the tales. They are both literary rush-orders.
Casting aside all inhibitions of either snobbism or loyalty let us see
how Poe, in his two most âpopular, perfectâ tales, conspicuously betrays
himself by revealing this vagueness to be not so much a conscious
creative device as a deficiency in mental quality, in fineness. Both of
these, indeedâthey are the Gold-Bug and the Murders in the Rue
Morgueâaffect and seem to demand an effect of great accuracy. But as it
is only the effect of accuracy which is demanded and not accuracy
itself, inaccuracies and discrepancies appear, covered only by the haste
of composition and the indulgence of the unexacting reader, who is taken
for granted. Can it be thought that these inaccuracies and discrepancies
were purposely introduced as an aid to the effect of accuracy? There
might be some reason for believing this if Poe had not repeatedly
represented himself as a connoisseur of detail. Poe addressed the
popular taste; but he defended himself against a hypothetical enquiring
criticism.
The main point on which the Rue Morgue mystery hangs is that it was
impossible to discover how the murderer (the ape) got in and out of the
room, which was on the fourth story of an old house. The neighbours were
at the door and the only ways out were two windows and a chimney. The
chimney was too narrow and both windows were closed. Poe tells us that
what happened was that the ape came in at one of the two windows by
climbing up a lightning-rod. The window was open, yet a large unwieldy
bedstead obscured the lower portion, pressed close against it. The only
way to open the window from the inside was to stand on the bed and slide
the hand down behind the head-board, there pressing a secret spring; a
spring so secret that the police had not observed its counterpart in the
other window of the room (which was, however, securely shut by a nail
hammered through the window-frame). A most improbable arrangement, all
round, especially as concerns the existence of such a mechanism in an
old, shabby house and on the fourth story. The ape reached the window
from the lightning-rod, which was five and a half feet away, by a
shutter three and a half feet broad which could shut like a door to
cover the whole window and was now lying flat against the wall. He
grasped the âtrellis-workâ on the upper part of the shutter and swung
himself into the room, landing unobserved directly on the head of the
bed. This is impossible. Poe at one point suggests that it was a
double-sashed window: he speaks of the âlower sash.â But does not say,
whether only the lower sash moved, or both sashes, or whether the two
sashes were really one single piece. If only the lower sash moved, then
the ape, grasping the shutter and kicking himself backwards (frontways
is impossible) into the room, would have been obstructed by the upper
half of the window from landing directly on the head of the bed, which
was pressed close against the window. If only the lower half moved, then
it was only the lower half that was open. If, however, the upper sash
moved too, the ape, on climbing out and shutting the window behind him,
as he is said to have done, could not have fastened this upper sash by
the secret âcatchâ which was at the bottom of the window and therefore
controlling the lower sash. The window would have remained open.
At another point Poe describes âthe windowâ as âdropping upon his exitâ
and becoming fastened automatically by the catch. This suggests that the
window may have been in one piece, hinged at the top with the catch at
the bottom, opening upwards and outwards (not inwards because of the bed
being in the way). In this case the shutters could not have swung beyond
halfway; they would have collided with the window, and again the ape
could not have got in. The exact constitution of the window, one of the
leading elements of the mystery, remains obscure. There are numerous
other falsities in this story: the failure of anyone to find the
sailor's pigtail ribbon lying beside the corpse until the detective
picked it up a day or so later; the subsequent movements of the ape,
which was not seen by anyone in Paris throughout the excitement; the
time-factor of the murders.
The Gold-Bug similarly does not work out in many points. If the
difference of two and a half inches between the two eye-holes of the
skull, through one of which the weighted line was to be dropped, made a
difference of âseveral yardsâ in the final calculation of the buried
treasure's position, how was it that the main branch forking from the
tree âat a height of some sixty or seventy feetâ had not grown enough in
the hundred and thirty odd years that had elapsed since the death of
Captain Kidd to throw out the measurement by a quarter of a mile? Poe
carefully makes the limb growing from the branch dead in order to
obscure this: but even supposing the bough to have died the year that
the skull was nailed to it, and to have hung dead for all that time,
would the branch have stopped growing too? And what natural historic
monstrosity was this gold bug, anyhow, of a species totally new, alive
and excessively heavy? What part has it in a supposedly rationalistic
story?
Such are the methods generally used by Poe, the covering of one
obscurity with another, the heaping of aggressive scorn on his puppet
police or on his puppet critics and the establishment of a forced
confidence in himself by his knowledge of the workings of trick
mechanisms and by superfluous quotations from Latin and French. The work
and the person of Edgar Allan Poe did not need a sentimental revival or
the publication of new material in order to be seen in their proper
light. He has been no mystery and nothing pertinent to an understanding
of Poe has ever been suppressed, because Poe himself suppressed nothing.
He published more than enough to reveal the quality of his mind and of
his personality; and he was never obscure. The mystery is not Poe, but
how Poe, with all the evidence we have had from the beginning, ever came
to be a legitimate literary subject at all with serious readers and
still more serious critics. The only solution to be advanced is that the
readers are serious and the critics still more serious, but that they
cannot have read Poe. The only explanation, indeed, for Poe is that
nobody has ever read him. Otherwise it is inconceivable that even the
most serious reader and the still more serious critic should be taken in
by him.
The steps, however, by which Poe came to occupy this singular position
are not difficult to trace. First, that national vanity and academic
snobbism in French literary criticism which assumes the burden of making
writers of other nations popular to these nations; the constant need in
French poetry for new theory by which to live; and the character of
Poe's literary criticism, which was not a mature, applied criticism (a
mature criticism is never any good to any poetry but its own) but an
irrational, noisy rhetoric well suited to bolster up weak literary
theorizing. Next, that the uplift of Poe was in another respect
accomplished outside the limits of English literary criticism: by
students of abnormal psychology to whom Poe furnished an example of
eccentric genius rather by his reputed personal habits than by the
character of his poetry or of his criticism. Finally, from critical
cowardice, came the adoption of Poe by professional criticism itself and
by all camps of this criticism. It is another question, who has ever
read Poe; that he has managed, as everybody's darling, to pass through
the ranks and, arriving in a new day, to raise the standard of Al Aaraaf
side by side with that of The Waste Land is at least incontestable.
It is first of all important to remove the diĂŠresis from Poe's name and
at the same time the sentimental diĂŠresis that dots Poe's life in the
eyes of those critics to whom criticism is a form of biographical
sympathy. It is certain from the tone of all of Poe's comments on his
life, if from nothing else, that his secret and unsatisfied ambition was
to be a great autobiographer. Tear away the romance with which the
French have surrounded the spelling of his name and the facts of his
life; the romantic origin traceable to his Celtic background, where Poe
is likewise Poë (and who has not a romantic origin hidden away in his
blood somewhere?); and there is left a mediocre but vulgar talent,
placed in the less immediate foreground of public attention, seeking to
distinguish itself through affected refinements. His morbid
preoccupation with autobiographical melodrama prevented Poe from
enjoying a serene success even in the minor literary fields for which he
was perhaps fitted.
Of his apparently uneventful childish school life in England Poe later
wrote in an artificial vein of De Quincey melancholia (âthe sad
experience of my schoolboy daysâ); he was never at any time without a
Mme de Warens. And whether or not he invented an opportunity for helping
the Greeks against âtheir Turkish tyrants,â he was at any rate guilty of
many personal Byronisms,^(=> #calibre_link-362 15
) such as Byron collars, an overbearing manner and his swim âfrom
Ludlam's wharf to Warwick (six miles) in a hot June sun, against one of
the strongest tides ever known in the river.â (âThe writer,â he says in
a letter, âseems to compare my swim with that of Lord Byron. . . . Any
swimmer âin the fallsâ in my days would have swum the Hellespont, and
thought nothing of the matter.â) The Goethe-Rousseau-Byron-De Quincey
autobiographical romanticism with which he later scented his early life
was mainly retrospective fiction. He had a dutiful though indifferent
foster-father, a sentimental, doting foster-mother, child-loves,
early-loves, education, an allowance he considered illiberal and a
desire to run awayâin other words an exceedingly normal and comfortable
early history as early histories go. But partly from inherited dramatic
instinctsâboth his parents had been actorsâand partly from the
intoxication of authorship in a febrile brain, he was pleased to invent
for himself a heroism and a pathos. The pathos carried him through life,
the heroism through literature. His life, from his own lips, conveyed
passion in conflict with the enemies of passion, mysterious destiny and
that atmosphere of spiritual brooding which makes ambition forgivable as
the whimsical tail of genius. Unfortunately for Poe, English is a poor
language for atmosphere, it is too plain, too suspicious: as a Rimbaud
or a Verlaine he was only sham French. Even as a Byron he lacked the
easy swagger and generosity of mood proper to truly elevated vulgarity.
His literary ambitiousness suggests comparison with Keats. But Keats did
not calculate success. He had a haughty enthusiasm for himself,
something just a degree beyond vanity, that prevented him from aiming.
Poe aimed. He conducted his career like a business-man, he invested in
himself. Otherwise miscalculations of taste and sense need not
necessarily have meant failure. As it was, one false move would lose
him. And as he was all false moves, he had to spend his energy in making
them seem consistent with one another, and so to come out right.
Undoubtedly every poet, or every person who has ever written poems, has
at some time thought of himself as a candidate for fame and thus caused
temporary exaggerations in his person and work. Where such exaggerations
are due to innocent enthusiasm, they are merely romantic lapses and do
not permanently damage the respect, or personal virtue, which should
attach to character that is to be remembered. But Poe was consistent and
crafty in his exaggerations and therefore unforgivable There is an
unclean taint in his personal relationships, which were intense but not
serious; in the astuteness with which he devoted himself to athletics,
adventure, soldiering and being unhappyâan astuteness without rapture;
in the pity with which he always spoke of himself; in the swollen
self-consciousness of his prefaces and of the Marginalia. It was not
even a monstrous taint, but a small, comtemptible, paranoic one. Poe has
been a popular subject of psychological criticism, which is fond of
denning genius in terms of abnormality. It is true he had an abnormal
passion for greatness, but for greatness of reputation, not greatness of
work.
Paranoia, then, was not an unconscious element of Poe's poetic genius,
but a wilfully created fiction of persecution and a publicity method.
Mr. Allan was an ideal poet's guardian. At the worst, his attitude to
Poe may be called âsensible.â His idea of his duty to him was to provide
him with stable âfuture prospects.â Considering the sentimental intimacy
existing between Poe and his wife, he can be forgiven for wanting in
affection for him, even for reacting against him if this intimacy was as
effusive as all Poe's future ones with women. The illusion of
persecution, it may be said, has been common in poetsâin Shelley, for
example. But in the first place Shelley's family was actively hostile to
him; in the second place Shelley had a genuine sense of universal
persecution, the obsession of mankind in pain. The weakness of Poe's
romantic pessimism is that it concerned no one but himself, and himself
in small matters. The difficulties of his life are those of a pushing
talent, not of a tragic genius.
With women, especially with older women, Poe's favourite rĂŽle was that
of the unhappy and persecuted youth of genius. This inclination for
older rather than younger women was a persistent one. It was undoubtedly
on Mrs. Clemm's account that he married Virginia: Mrs. Clemm informally
succeeded Mr. Allan as guardian when the latter's interest and sense of
duty to Poe weakened and when, finally, he entirely neglected him in his
will. So Poe combined sentiment and patronage. The fact is, Poe did not
like men and did not get on with them. He needed the companionship of
women because they pitied him and because their pity did no damage to
his dignityâit was merely their tribute to his nobility. Virginia, who
as a little girl had carried his love letters, as his wife never
interfered with any of Poe's sentimental romances. To her they were
âpoetical episodes in which the impassioned romance of his temperament
impelled him to indulge.â Unfortunately most of the objects of Poe's
âimpassioned romancesâ did not make suitable heroines of Sentiment; they
were respectable women, on too small a scale for the grande passion,
exercising their maternal instinct and their poetical female fancy on an
affected and rather ridiculous young man. However sympathique Poe may
have been to his poetesses and early and late loves, it is impossible to
see him otherwise than as a vain and foolish aspirant, whose real
misfortunes, even, seem unreal because he sympathized too much with
himself.
Two years after he left West Point Poe won a prize given by The Saturday
Morning Visiter for the best short story submitted in a competition.
Through the publicity gained by this success he made many influential
friends and connections with current magazines. In two years he became
the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. Before he was
twenty-three Poe had published three volumes of poems, the first when he
was eighteen. In the preface to this he claims most of them to have been
written before the completion of his fourteenth year; and its style
reveals, indeed, the self-appointed child of genius making his first
disdainful bow to the public.
They were not of course intended for publication; why they are now
published concerns no one but himself. . . . In âTamerlaneâ he has
endeavoured to expose the folly of even risking the best feelings of the
heart at the shrine of Ambition. . . . There are many faults . . . which
he flatters himself he could, with little trouble, have corrected, but
unlike many of his predecessors, has been too fond of his early
productions to amend them in his old age.
He will not say that he is indifferent to the success of these Poemsâit
might stimulate him to other attemptsâbut he can safely say that failure
will not influence him in a resolution already adopted. This is
challenging criticismâlet it be so. âNos haec novimus esse
nihil.â^(=> #calibre_link-363 16
)
The theme of nearly all of these early poems of Poe's is thwarted Power.
The âcold reality of waking lifeâ Poe knew before he had awakened, by
temperamental premonition: he was born saying âI have been happy, Tho'
in a dream.â Tamerlane is his Childe Harold. In the 1829 edition he
shortened the poem, but made it, if anything, even more unabashed than
the excited but rather ingenuous original.
An examination of Byron's first literary confession, his preface to
Hours of Idleness, will best show the class into which Poe's adolescent
snobbery falls. This preface is preceded by quotations from Horace,
Homer and Dryden and continues as follows:
TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
FREDERICK, EARL OF CARLISLE
KNIGHT OF THE GARTER ETC. ETC.,
THE SECOND EDITION OF THESE POEMS IS INSCRIBED
BY HIS
OBLIGED AND AFFECTIONATE KINSMAN
THE AUTHOR
In submitting to the public eye the following collection, I have not
only to combat the difficulties writers of verse generally encounter,
but may incur the charge of presumption for obtruding myself on the
world, when, without doubt, I might be, at my age, more usefully
employed.
These productions are the fruits of the lighter hours of a young man who
has lately completed his nineteenth year. As they bear the internal
evidence of a boyish mind, this is perhaps unnecessary information. . .
. I am sensible that the partial and frequently injudicial admiration of
a social circle is not the criterion by which poetical genius is to be
estimated. . . . Poetry, however, is not my primary vocation; to divert
the dull moments of indisposition, or the monotony of a vacant hour,
urged me âto this sinâ: little can be expected of so unpromising a muse.
[Here follows a sardonic reference to the âgenuineâ bards.]
With slight hopes, and some fears, I publish this first and last
attempt. . . . The opinion of Dr. Johnson, on the Poems of a noble
relation of mine,
âthat when a man of rank appeared in the character of an author, he
deserved to have his merit handsomely allowed,â can have little weight
with verbal, and still less with periodical censors; but were it
otherwise, I should be loth to avail myself of the privilege, and would
rather incur the bitterest censure of anonymous criticism, than triumph
in honours granted solely to a title.^(=> #calibre_link-365 17
)
Poe's second publication of poems owned the conspicuously suppressed
authorship of the first âBy a Bostonianâ and offered the gratuitous
information that this was âsuppressed through circumstances of a private
nature.â The first was without dedication, the second bore two
dedications, a formal literary dedication
Who drinks the deepest?âhere's to him.â
Cleveland;
and a personal dedication of Tamerlane to John Neal, Editor of the
Yankee, the first of the long suite of editors and persons of literary
influences whom Poe so frantically pursued during his whole lifetime. To
the theme of the first volume, thwarted power, this volume added the
minor vein of renunciatory solitude.
Poe's third volume, formally dedicated to the U.S. Corps of Cadets, was
published in the same year that he obtained his dismissal from the West
Point Military Academy. The literary quotation on the title page this
time reads âTout le monde a Raison.âRochefoucault.â It is accompanied by
an elaborate preface in the form of a letter to Mr.â. It includes an
ingenious defence of a poet's good opinion of his own work; an
impassioned refutation of the Lake School as making poetry so removed
from popular understanding as to rob it of pleasure; a special trouncing
of Wordsworth; a partial pleading for Coleridge; and a formal definition
of poetry in reference to science, romance, music and prose. This is a
specimen of Poe's prefatorial manner: âThink of poetry, dear BâThink of
poetry and then think ofâDr. Samuel Johnson! Think of all that is airy
and fairy-like, and then of all that is hideous and unwieldy: think of
his huge bulk, the Elephant! and thenâand then think of the Tempestâthe
Midsummer Night's DreamâProsperoâOberonâand Titania!â It is clear from
these early writings that Poe's professional arrogance and violence must
not be laid to alcoholism. The more we learn about Poe, the more
grateful we are for his alcoholism. It was apparently the one thing that
could restrain Poe from himself: the idea of a sober Poe is intolerable.
The impression to be got from everything written by Poe is that it was
meant to be read immediately, that its design was a spontaneous and
gratifying effect; that is, his creative direction was always
journalistic. Indeed Poe wasted the best part of his energy in editing
and writing for magazines and in trying to found one of his own. It is
Poe's passion for journalism that prevented him from ever reaching
maturity in his art and in his criticism; and the literary uses to which
he put journalism that prevented him from attaining any dignity as a
journalist.
The constant agitation in which Poe is found, his unashamed solicitation
of approval, his rash exercise of critical vanity in place of critical
judgment, all this makes the picture of an Effort conniving at too great
an Aim and therefore driven to practice certain violences and delusions
on itself. The intensity of Poe's campaign for greatness is shown by the
way in which a portion of posterity has succumbed to it. Poe had a
terrible suspicion of success in others; everywhere he looked he seemed
to see a need for self-justification. The result was the pompous and
childish disdain with which he wrote of the Literati: âSome honest
opinions about authorial merits and demerits, with occasional words of
Personalityâ; and the note of false ease and self-confidence in which he
couched his more regular compositions.
The Marginalia in particular (originally newspaper book-chat) give
evidence of Poe's nervousness, his desire to achieve a natural manner
through journalism. In these, by writing as casually as he knew how, he
hoped to prove himself at home in literature. The futile sarcasm of
these notes, their showiness in strained and overworked literary
references, expose his greatest weakness, his inability to be off-hand.
His desire in them was to exercise wit and opinion without the restraint
imposed by more formal journalistic channels, to enjoy in public the
privilege of private ranting. They are full of examples of the
perversion of taste by journalism: his attachment to journalism itself
(âI will not be sure that men at present think more profoundly than half
a century ago, but beyond question they think with more rapidity, with
more skill, with more tact, with more of method and less of excrescence
in the thought. Besides all this they have a vast increase in the
thinking material, they have more facts, more to think about. For this
reason they are disposed to put the greatest amount of thought in the
smallest compass and disperse it with the utmost attainable rapidity.
Hence the journalism of the age; hence, in especial, magazines. Too many
we cannot have, as a general proposition.â); his tribute to Thomas Moore
(this was just before Moore had âgone outâ) and Tennyson, âthe greatest
of poetsâ; his disproportionate interest in Dickens and the criticism of
Dickens; technical appreciations of Longfellow; an ill-tempered and
uneasy weakness for Ossian, echoing his condemnation of Wordsworth, in
an early preface, for his âabsurdityâ in attempting to prove the
worthlessness of these poems (âBut worse still:ââto quote from this
prefaceââthat he [Wordsworth] may beat down every argument in favour of
these poems, he triumphantly drags forward a passage, in his abomination
of which he expects the reader to sympathize. It is the beginning of the
epic poem âTemora.â âThe blue waves of Ullin roll in light; the green
hills are covered with day; trees shake their dusky heads in the
breeze.â And thisâthis gorgeous, yet simple imageryâwhere all is alive
and panting with immortalityâthan which earth has nothing more grand,
nor paradise more beautifulâthis William Wordsworth, the author of
âPeter Bell,â has selected to dignify with his supreme contemptâ).
Much of Poe's critical irritability was undoubtedly due to his private
awareness of his errors of taste. Obviously sentiment and taste were in
conflict in him and he formed his judgments by allowing sentiment to
rule taste; without, however, being willing to admit the total defeat of
taste. The truth is that Poe had an equal capacity for the right and the
wrong in literature, but a morbid perversity by which he could not
resist the temptation to his pride to go wrong. And in defending his
errors Poe defended his sentiment, never his taste. He is never at rest,
he is continually visualizing himself as the protagonist of a drama in
which he is the defender of an unpopular but noble sentiment, or
inventing âgood ideas for a Magazine paper,â whether it is to show how
âa modest young gentlemanâ gets the better in an argument of âa flippant
pretender to universal acquirementâ or how a particular poem attained
its ultimate point of completion. âWhy such a paper has never been given
to the world, I am much at a loss to sayâbut perhaps the authorial
vanity has more to do with the omission than any one other cause.â And
so Poe sets about to write such a paper on the construction of The Raven
to flout popular superstitions about authorial vanity and the
mysteriousness with which the processes of creation are supposed to be
surrounded, describing a poetic method for The Raven most likely to
antagonize popular superstition.^(=> #calibre_link-366 18
) This mechanical recipe-method, by the way, is apparently contrary to
the actual facts of the case. For according to the two stories of its
composition circulated by unprejudiced personal gossip, more acceptable
than Poe's too neat, too glib mathematical scheme for the poem (unless
Poe meant his own story to be understood as a critical joke, which is
unlikely), the poem was either âdashed offâ one evening after a long
walk at Poe's most gloomy period, when Virginia was on her deathbed and
the family starving, or its composition covered a longer period, being
written in instalments, passed round among his friends over and over
again for criticism, altered, rewritten, juggled into shape: whichever
of these two may be true, nevertheless constructed along any but
systematic lines.
Poe's egotism was so extremely sensitive that it was always expressed as
a defence of his offensiveness, not of his greatness: he had a
superstitious faith in opposition and therefore a martyr's love of
insult. When accused of madness he could make no definite reply but a
categorical defence of madness: âThe question is not yet settled whether
madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence, whether much that is
glorious, whether all that is profound, does not spring from diseases of
thoughtâfrom moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general
intellect.â In this manner Poe laid the foundations for the myth of
genius via abnormality by which he was subsequently ennobled in literary
history. âWhy, to be frank,â he says in the Gold-Bug, âI felt somewhat
annoyed by your evident suspicions touching my sanity, and so resolved
to punish you quietly, in my own way, by a little bit of sober
mystification.â In the preface of the 1845 edition of his poems,
dedicated to Elizabeth Barrett Barret, âthe noblest of her sex,â appears
just such another scornful statement of a principle he knew would be
inacceptable to the critical public. In defending himself from this
public he removes all possibility of critical sympathy by defining his
poetry as a passion, not as a purpose (a way of stating his indifference
âto the paltry commendations of mankindâ calculated to prove most
obnoxious to mankind), and by concluding with the sweeping
generalization that âthe passions must be held in reverence.â He behaved
as if, his case being hopeless with criticism, he was free to yield to
his temperament and use the manner of a private diary.
But Poe's personal arrogance about his work is one matter and the work
another and his critical writing still another. The private diarist is
protecting himself from failure by haughtily anticipating failure. The
author of the work is protecting himself from failure by making neat
calculations on the side in the science of popular taste. The critic is
protecting himself from the possible vulgar success of the author by
trying to establish that vulgar success can also be literary success. So
the critic and the private diarist are reconciled, since the failure of
the diarist meant, of course, only vulgar failure. The vulgar success of
Poe's poems was elevated into formal literary success in two ways. They
have obviously that lack of distinction and that facility of sentiment
which are the two requirements for acceptable magazine verseâpoetry,
that is, which neither has nor desires a passport to criticism. But
since these magazine successes, these little recitation classics, are
the result of a design, a journalist's careful measurement of how far
surface-emotions of the reader may be taken, the design in itself is
criticism. Poe thus made criticism of his poems and poems of his
criticism, and they have conferred on each other a mutual distinction,
in both cases an acquired one. The second formal corroboration of the
vulgar success of Poe's poems is of an accidental nature: that by their
technical musicalness and sense-combining effects they happen to appeal
to those pianoforte experimentalists in French poetry who are always
trying to achieve the surface purity which music and painting, for
example, are thought to have. Perhaps more than half of Poe's literary
respectability is just such back-door respectability.
His criticism, indeed, cannot be estimated except as part of his
personal system. It is constantly cancelling itself in anti-climaxes; as
the generalities of ambition in Poe's temperament are never matched by
particular potentialities. His campaign against the long poem, for
example, is really only a denunciation of its commercial unreadableness.
The interest-value of the poem is at the bottom of all of Poe's critical
writing. The contemporary success of a poem is its selling-power; and in
his criticism he could discuss this interest-value without violating the
professed indifference to success of the private diarist. All of his
suppressed anxiety to please comes out in his essays in the guise of
critical theory. And as music is the art which concerns itself most with
the problem of co-ordinating its technique with the impressionability of
the audience, it becomes the analogy on which his construction of the
poem is based. His poetic absolute, thereforeââthe poem written solely
for the poem's sakeââreveals itself as the duty of a poem to give
nothing but pleasure; pleasure being further qualified as the âthrillâ
which poetry communicates by the taint of sadness, the finger-mark of
Beauty. Beauty was exemplified in the works of Willis, Longfellow,
Bryant, Edward C. Pinkney, Byron, Thomas Moore (who not so far back had
visited America and condoled with those Americans who were moved by his
pity to confide in him their disappointment
that the powerful stream
Of America's empire should pass like a dream,
Without leaving one relic of genius . . . ),^(=> #calibre_link-367 19
)
Thomas Hood, Tennyson.
We can get a truer picture of Poe as a critical mind by comparing him
with Shelley, another sentimental theorist, rather than by looking at
him through the eyes of that advanced criticism which, perhaps because
of its subservience to French literary tastes, has condescendingly
opened the pearly gates to him. Both Poe and Shelley fixed on Love as
the underlying human principle of poetic Beauty. Shelley's explanation
of this principle is:
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes
familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces all that
it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand
thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as
memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over
all thoughts and actions with which it coexists. The great secret of
morals is love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification of
ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person,
not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and
comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many
others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The
great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry ministers
to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the
circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of
ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to
their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and
interstices whose void forever craves fresh
food.^(=> #calibre_link-368 20
)
And Poe's:
âLoveâthe true, the divine Erosâthe Uranian, as distinguished from the
Dionaean Venusâis unquestionably the purest and truest of all poetic
themes . . . we shall reach, however, more immediately a distinct
conception of what true Poetry is, by mere reference to a few of the
simple elements which induce in the Poet himself the true poetical
effect. He recognizes the ambrosia which nourishes his soul, in the
bright orbs that shine in Heavenâin the volutes of the flowerâin the
clustering of low shrubberiesâin the waving of the grain-fieldsâin the
slanting of tall Eastern treesâin the blue distance of mountainsâin the
grouping of cloudsâin the twinkling of half-hidden brooksâin the
gleaming of silver riversâin the repose of sequestered lakesâin the
star-mirroring depths of lonely wells. He perceives it in the songs of
birdsâin the harp of Aeolusâin the sighing of the night-windâin the
repining voice of the forestâin the surf that complains to the shoreâin
the fresh breath of the woodsâin the scent of the violet-in the
voluptuous perfume of the hyacinthâin the suggestive odour that comes to
him, at eventide, from far-distant, undiscovered islands, over dim
oceans, illimitable and unexplored. He owns it in all noble thoughtsâin
all unworldly motivesâin all holy impulsesâin all chivalrous, generous,
and self-sacrificing deeds. He feels it in the beauty of womanâin the
grace of her stepâin the lustre of her eyeâin her sighâin the harmony of
the rustling of her robes. He deeply feels it in her winning
endearmentsâin her burning enthusiasmsâin her gentle charitiesâin her
meek and devotional endurancesâbut above allâah, far above allâhe kneels
to itâhe worships it in the faith, in the purity, in the strength, in
the altogether divine majestyâof her love.^(=> #calibre_link-369 21
)
The essay from which this is taken closes with a mock-antique poem in
illustration of this principle, âThe Song of the Cavalierâ by William
Motherwell, who was Editor of the Paisley Advertiser and later of the
Glasgow Courier, a fellow-journalist.
Then mounte! then mounte, brave gallants, all, And don your helms
amaine!â etc.^(=> #calibre_link-370 22
)
Let the advanced critic now, to whom Poe is a tribal watchword and
Shelley an outcast because he was not literary, swallow this and see
whether he can keep it down. Shelley had too earnest a social sense and
his poetry suffers from his sympathies. But it is not difficult to keep
Shelley down: he does harm to no advocate's dignity. If Shelley had not
been over-affected by the ugliness of human society he would have been
greatâShelley was momently too unhappy to be great. And perhaps this is
as it should be, if he meant to preserve a sort of non-literary human
integrity: there is always a certain meanness in greatness. Whatever may
have happened to Shelley's poetry, Shelley himself remained true; while
Keats, of whom Poe is a cheaper edition, grew too literary to be true.
Poe, that is, is cockney, though he never realized this, masquerading as
true because he thought himself unhappyâPoe always had a tear in his
pocket, as Keats a sigh in his handkerchief. They are both, however,
seen as upholders of a Taste which Shelley is thought to have violated,
because neither of them had power to do more than put forward their
personal claims to fame.
âI prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect,â boasts Poe,
having once decided that âaâ poem must be written which shall âsuit at
once the popular and the critical tasteââwe are given no clue as to
which is which.^(=> #calibre_link-371 23
) Deeply conscious of the fact that his own limitations forced him to
oppose virtuosity to genius, Poe was always brazenly on the defensive in
discussing poetic technique. Real poetry (poetry that was a passion not
a purpose!), he convinced himself, was always written by rhythm and
rote. Indeed an âinteresting magazine paper might be written by any
author who would . . . â etc. It was a shame-complex that drove Poe to
the exhibitionism of his analysis of the Ravenâof which he was probably,
because of its history, most ashamed. The recipe for the ideal poem to
be deduced from this analysis is:
1. A one-sitting length (about 100 lines).
2. Elevation and excitement.
3. Universal appeal.
4. Beauty (not Truth or Passion)ââTruth demands a precision, and Passion
a homeliness, which are absolutely antagonistic to that Beauty which, I
maintain, is the excitement, or pleasurable elevation, of the soul.â
5. MelancholyââMelancholy is the most legitimate of all poetical tones.â
6. âArtistic poignancyâââpoints, in the theatrical senseââin the Raven
the refrain, in various combinations, performs this function.
7. Finding the refrainâtake o and r and it is âabsolutely impossible to
overlook the word âNevermoreââ!
8. Now find âa pretextâ for using the refrain. âA parrotâ? No, âa
Ravenâit is infinitely more in keeping with the tone.â
9. Choosing the subjectâââOf all melancholy topics, what, according to
the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?â
Deathâwas the obvious reply.â
10. Getting together the sceneryâââAnd when,â I said, âis this most
melancholy of topics most poetical? When it most closely allies itself
to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the
most poetical topic in the worldâand equally is it beyond doubt that the
lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.ââ
With these few simple precautions, the rest is easy, âthe ominous
reputation of the fowlâ will carry it through. Of course, write the
first stanza last, and work backward until the hundred (or hundred and
eight) lines are used up, âenfeeblingâ them as the beginning is neared
to preserve the âclimacteric effectâ of the last. And of course, a
little originality in rhythm and metre. Then put the lover in a room, âa
close circumscription of spaceâ to make all cosy, and let in the fowl,
who alights on a bust of Pallas, âchosen, first, as most in keeping with
the scholarship of the lover, and, secondly, for the sonorousness of the
word Pallas itself. With an âindulgence, to the extreme, of
self-tortureâ and an eye to the âartistical eyeâ and a few minor
considerations having chiefly to do with sauce, the poem is done to a
turn.
Such is the philosophy of composition and such the theorist who has
contributed so much to the science of modern French verse. Recently
Valéry's translator, Mr. Malcolm Cowley, quoted from his translation of
Variété the following:
What critics call a realization, or a successful rendering, is really a
problem of efficiency . . . in which the only factors are the nature of
the material and the mentality of the public. Edgar Allan Poe . . . has
clearly established his appeal to the reader on the basis of psychology
and probable effect.
The most important ingredient of literary composition is the idea of the
most probable reader. . . . The change of century, which means a change
of reader, is comparable to an alteration in the text
itself.^(=> #calibre_link-372 24
)
Adding himself the never-failing analogy: âThe poem is conceivably, the
pearl certainly, the result of an unhealthy condition. But this has
nothing whatever to do with their own effects.â The poem, by excessive
analogyâcriticism's last resortâwith pictures, symphonies, pearls and
other consumable products, ceases to be production. What Valéry calls
âthe problem of efficiencyâ is the elimination of production.
Consumption is production. Demand is supply. Poet is public. Poet is a
dud.
Even Mr. Eliot sandwiches Poe between Donne and Mallarmé as a
metaphysical poet, treating the problem of Poe's effects and his methods
of achieving them with apparent seriousness.^(=> #calibre_link-373 25
) (Poe is to be tolerated in this position if only to separate Donne
from Mallarmé.) Yet Poe's contributions to the theory of verse amounted
to no more than a bombastic attack on the prosodists, to prove that the
alternation of syllables in verse was not regular; a theory that all
life began with the spondee; and all that false technical association of
verse with music (âverse, an inferior or less capable
musicâ^(=> #calibre_link-374 26
)) which is found to be of service and self-gratification to criticism
when the life-blood of poetry has run low and criticism is looking for a
âscienceâ by which it may be restored.
And who are Poe's references or authorities in his indignant rationale
of verse? Mr. N. P. Willis, author of âsuch linesâ as
That binds him to a woman's delicate loveâ
âbut one of the innumerable instances he has given of keen sensibility
in all those matters of taste which may be classed under the general
head of fanciful embellishment; Mr. Horne (of England), the author of
âOrion,â one of the noblest epics in any languageâ; Edgar Allan Poe, in
âAl Aaraaf, a boyish poem written by myself when a boyâ in which occur
âtwo consecutive equivalent feetâââI cannot say I have ever known the
adventure madeâ (except here)âequivalent, âthat is to say, feet the sum
of whose syllabic time is equal to the sum of the syllabic times of the
distinctive feetâ; âone of the finest poets, Mr. Christopher Pease
Branch,^(=> #calibre_link-375 27
) who begins a very beautiful poem thusâ:
Many are the thoughts that come to me
In my lonely musing:
Mrs. Welby, author of âa little poem of great beautyâ containing a
âvariable footâ:
I have a little stepson of only three years old.
Miss Mary A. S. Aldrich, author of âquite a pretty specimen of verseâ:
The water lily sleeps in pride
Down in the depths of the azure lake.
One would like to pity Poe, if possible, as he wished, but his appeals
for pity were so undignified that it is scarcely dignified to pity him.
One would like to sympathize with him in his outspoken and fierce
attacks on contemporary criticism and pedantryâthere is no doubt Poe
lived in one of the worst of times for literature. But they have a bad
grace and an overweeningness that harm the attacker rather than the
attacked. His wit was warped and thinned out by petty ambitioning; and
whatever our feelings may be about the North American Review as it was
in Poe's time, we are not amused when Poe suggests that it be thrown to
the pigs.
Poe was only satiric when he lost his temper, and as he was continually
losing his temper he could not be satiric with much conviction. He was
always losing his temper because he was always looking for the ideal
public. The ideal public was one which could immediately appreciate his
work, which was ideal for the ideal public. He knew what the ideal
public was, but it was apparently as slow as it was ideal. It was not
the false sales public, nor the clique public. It was, it seems, that
ânot-too-acute reader,â as he called him in his review of Barnaby Rudge,
that âexcitable, undisciplined and childlike popular mind which most
keenly feels the original,â as he called him in his review of Twice Told
Tales. The fault, indeed, he had to find with Hawthorne was that he was
not original, only âpeculiar,â that is, he did not make use of that
technique of which effect is the sole object and in which new and
âpleasurableâ emotions are aroused through the mechanism of mystery.
Poe, in his praise of originality, excluded those who âlimited the
literary to the metaphysical originality.â (How does this tally with Mr.
Eliot's classification of Poe as metaphysical?) Metaphysical
originality, Poe claimed, offended the masses because, by seeking
absolute novelty of combination, it resembled instruction.ââTrue
originality . . . combines with the pleasurable effect of apparent
novelty, a real egotistic delight.â Hawthorne, by his charm and
fancifulness, shared in this true originality, but in a lesser degree,
not so much because his allegory was false as because it was âremoved
from the popular intellect, from the popular sentiment, and from the
popular taste.â Allegory was too close to truthfulnessâit cannot be too
strongly emphasized that to Poe the essence of composition was
fictitiousness designed to produce an effect. This is why he evoked
music in support and this is why he glorified the mystery-story and the
mystery-poemâthe petty journalist's contribution to the problem of
reconciling the rough reading masses to the fine writers. The poem and
the tale were to him the two complementary acts of creation, the poem
being obliged to use âartificialitiesâ of rhythm to bring out âthe idea
of the Beautifulâ which were âan inseparable barâ to âTruth,â the tale
being able to make use of elements â(the ratiocinative, the sarcastic or
the humorous) which are not only antagonistical to the nature of the
poem, but absolutely forbidden by one of its most peculiar and
indispensable adjuncts; we allude, of course, to rhythm.â
It is a sad picture, a gloomy and sentimental hack, seeing plagiarism of
himself everywhere because his own poor capacities for melodrama
naturally produced the same results as other poor capacities; plotting
mystery tales, plotting mystery poems, solving conjuror's tricks;
constructing feeble ladyships and creaking phantoms; triumphantly
checking the plot errors in long, dull Victorian serial stories;
thinking up âgood ideasâ for Magazine articles. The solution seems to be
to leave him to the romantic esteem of the French, who are so eminently
qualified to sympathize with (ah!) âles beaux cris de passion sincĂšre,
les beaux Ă©lans d'amour,â^(=> #calibre_link-376 28
) as his French translator, M. Gabriel Mourey, calls them; to receive in
tender immortality the many who were Poe's only loves and to place him
among the candidates for pity in whom their own literary history is so
rich. âBaudelaire, MallarmĂ©, Hennequin, Rollinat, vous-mĂȘme d'autres
encore . . . â^(=> #calibre_link-377 29
) (Rimbaud and Verlaine we might add) âon a tant fait en France pour y
acclimater Edgar Poe que ses compatriotes affirment que l'auteur du
Corbeau Ă©tait francais,â wrote John H. Ingram, Poe's most inspired
advocate to Poe's French translator.^(=> #calibre_link-378 30
) One leading clue to Poe's French reputation seems to be that âPoe
aimait la France et son admirable littérature et ne parlait qu'avec
respect des chefs-d'Ćuvre qu'elle a produits; jamais sa plume caustique
ne serait essayer Ă diminuer sa gloire.â^(=> #calibre_link-379 31
) Another is that by the antagonism his personality left behind him, he
could be used as an effective scourge against the âphilistins.â Poe's
chief adaptability to the French temper, however, must lie in the
infinite advantage any inferior work has when translated into French, a
language whose large sonorousness and refined daintiness supplies to
Poe's poems just that element of musical âfugitivenessâ which the
English language is more strict in refusing to yield.
âProphĂšteâ dis-je, âcrĂ©ature du mal!âProphĂšte cependant, oiseau ou
dĂ©mon !â
Soit le Tentateur t'ait mandĂ© ou soit que la TempĂȘte t'ait rejetĂ© sur ce
rivage,
Désolé, mais indompté, sur cette terre déserte enchantée.
Sur ce foyer hautĂ© par l'Horreurâdis-moi, vraiment, je t'imploreâ
Y a-t-il, -y a-t-il un baume dans Galaad? Dis-moiâdis-mois, je
t'implore!â
Fit le Corbeau: âJamais plus.â^(=> #calibre_link-380 32
)
A few internal rhymes may, of course, be lost in the translation, but
Poe would undoubtedly have remedied this deficiency if he had written
the poem originally in French himself.
One mystery remains, the popularity of Poe with that portion of critical
opinion which should, by all sense and taste, disregard him most. Why,
indeed, should Mr. Eliot share with the French their particular
admiration for the tale called the Assignation? Because of the poetical
motto from Henry King's (Bishop of Chichester) Exequy On The Death Of
His Wife, and because Mr. Eliot has more than a weakness for poetical
mottoes? Because of the Venetian setting and because Venice is
romantically situated in the international cosmography of Mr. Eliot's
mind? Because of the literary references to Socrates, Michelangelo,
Chapman and others included in a tale often and a half pages, and
because Mr. Eliot has more than a weakness for literary references? He
cannot surely be serious in advancing that Poe makes the most artificial
melodrama seem real, with this tale in particularâone of the most
nonsensicalâas evidence? Is it to be suggested that this partiality for
Poe is a confession of that love of âmagnificent meditation,â that
morbid taste for desolation and ill-fatedness which is more appropriate
to the boyish, melodramatic enthusiasm of the penny dreadfuls than to
advanced contemporary poetry and criticismâunless these are willing to
confess to internal melodrama, as they apparently are not?
Frederick Howard, fifth Earl of Carlisle, author of fugitive pieces and
two tragedies, was born 1748, and died in 1826.âAuthor
Chapter 1 Poetry and the Literary Universe
. The opening chapter of Contemporaries and Snobs presents the main
argument of the book, and was never published elsewhere. Riding likely
wrote much of it in 1926 and 1927, in response to a few works of recent
criticism, including Edith Sitwell's Poetry and Criticism (London:
Hogarth Press, 1925); Edwin Muir's Transition: Essays on Contemporary
Literature (London: Hogarth Press, 1926); the October 1926 issue of
Eliot's journal, the New Criterion; and Allen Tate's âPoetry and the
Absolute,â which Riding read in draft form [Laura (Riding) Jackson and
Schuyler B. Jackson collection, #4608, Division of Rare and Manuscript
Collections, Cornell University Library, Series IX, Box 100, folder 3]
though it later appeared in the January 1927 issue of The Sewanee
Review. After Leonard and Virginia Woolf declined to publish
Contemporaries at Hogarth Press, Riding offered this opening essay to
Wyndham Lewis for publication in his journal, The Enemy, but Lewis also
turned it down [Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace: The Life of
Laura Riding Jackson (New York: Persea, 2005), 114â116].
. Arthur Rimbaud, letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871. In this letter
appears the famous statement, âCar je est un autreâ (âI is an other/I am
an otherâ). The impact of this statement on the development of modernist
impersonality cannot be underestimated. Rimbaud attempts to explain how
the poet distances himself from the subject, how language takes
precedence over ego:
Je dis qu'il faut ĂȘtre voyant, se faire voyant.
Le PoÚte se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérÚglement de
tous les sens. Tous les formes d'amour, de souffrance, de folie; il
cherche lui-mĂȘme, il Ă©puise en lui tous les poisons, pour n'en garder
que les quintessences. Ineffable torture oĂč il a besoin de toute la foi,
de toute la force surhumaine, ou il devient entre tous le grand malade,
le grand criminel, le grand mauditâet le suprĂȘme Savant!
I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer.
The Poet makes himself a seer by an immense, slow, and intentional
disordering of all the senses. All the forms of love, suffering, and
insanity; he searches himself, he rids himself of all poisons and keeps
only the quintessence. An ineffable and torturous process for which he
needs complete faith, superhuman strength, and from it he becomes the
diseased, the criminal, the damnedâand the supreme scholar!
. Percy Bysshe Shelley, âA Defense of Poetryâ (1821).
. Albert Einstein's Relativity: The Special and General Theory was first
published in German in 1916 and translated into English by Robert W.
Lawson in 1920 (New York: Henry Holt).
. T. S. Eliot, âGerontionâ (1920).
. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922). These lines of the poem borrow
from Charles Baudelaire's âThe Seven Old Men,â from Les Fleurs du Mal
(1857).
. See Edwin Muir, Transition: Essays on Contemporary Literature (London:
Hogarth Press, 1926), particularly âIntroductory: The Zeit Geistâ and
the chapters on T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, and Robert Graves, and Edwin
Muir's Chorus of the Newly Dead (London: Hogarth Press, 1926).
. Riding is perhaps misremembering Dryden's claim, in the introduction
to Annus Mirabilis (1667) that âthe composition of all poems is, or
ought to be, of wit.â
. John Lyly, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578). The full sentence
reads, âEnglishmen desire to heare finer speech than the language will
allow.â
. Samuel Johnson, âThe Life of Cowley,â Lives of the Poets (1779â81).
. âThe Life of Cowley.â The full sentence reads, âBut Pope's account of
wit is undoubtedly erroneous: he depresses it below its natural dignity,
and reduces it from strength of thought to happiness of language.â
. Riding came to know Ransom when she was a member of the Fugitive group
in the early 1920s. By the time Contemporaries was published, Ransom had
published three volumes of poetry: Poems about God (1919), Chills and
Fever (1924), and Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927).
. Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden (1791).
. Riding likely drew her title for this section from Allen Tate's
âPoetry and the Absolute.â Tate sent Riding this essay in typescript
[Laura (Riding) Jackson and Schuyler B. Jackson collection, #4608,
Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library,
Series IX, Box 100, folder 3], and it later appeared in The Sewanee
Review 35.1 (January 1927): 41â52. In âThe Poetic Absolute,â Riding
argues against Tate's attempt to provide a philosophical basis for a
poetic âabsolute.â
. Riding met and befriended Hart Crane in New York in 1925. She
ceaselessly championed his poetry; her review of Crane's White Buildings
appeared in transition in January 1928 (âA Note on White Buildings,â
transition 10, 139â141).
. Arthur Rimbaud, letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871. See note 2.
. Paul Valéry, Variété II (Paris: Gallimard, 1929), 28. The full passage
reads:
L'homme des foules est poĂšte, conteur, ou quelque ivrogne de l'esprit.
Il se noie dans la quantité des ùmes ambulantes; il s'enivre d'absorber
un nombre inépuisable de visages et de regards, et de ressentir au fil
de la rue fluide le vertige du passage de l'infinité des individus.
The man of the crowd is a poet, a storyteller, or a kind of drunken
spirit. He drowns himself in a sea of restless souls; he becomes drunk
soaking in an unending sea of faces and looks and, in the wake of the
moving streets, experiences vertigo from becoming part of this infinity
of individuals.
. Jean Cocteau, âLettre Ă Jacques Maritain.â See Jacques and RaĂŻssa
Maritain, Oeuvres complĂštes, Volume 3 (Atlanta: International Book
Center of Atlanta, 1985), 692. The full passage reads:
J'apprendrai que le besoin de changer en art n'est pas autre chose que
celui de chercher une place fraĂźche sur l'oreiller. Posez la main sure
une fraĂźcheur, elle cesse vite de l'ĂȘtre; le neuf est une fraĂźcher. Le
besoin de neuf est le besoin de fraĂźcheur. Dieu est la seule fraĂźcheur
qui ne se rechauffe pas.
J'apprendrai Ă fabriquer les poĂšmes (le mot est de La Fontaine) et pour
le reste Ă laisser faire Dieu.
I will learn that, in art, the need to change is nothing other than the
desire to find a cool place on the pillow to rest one's head. Place the
hand on this cool spot, and it quickly ceases to be so; newness is this
coolness and freshness. The need to be new is the need for this
freshness. God is the only cool spot that never warms to the touch.
I will learn to make poems (the word is from La Fontaine) and leave the
rest to God.
. Cocteau, âLettre Ă Jacques Maritain.â The quote reads: âImagine, my
dear Jacques, the joy of a language free from Rimbaud (right now more
cumbersome than Hugo) and from the superstition of Maldoror. All youth
could breathe again.â
. âA Brief Treatise on the Criticism of Poetry,â Chapbook 2.9 (March
1920): 1.
. âA Brief Treatise on the Criticism of Poetry,â Chapbook 2.9 (March
1920): 3.
. âBooks of the Quarterâ [review of Herbert Read, Reason and
Romanticism: Essays in Literary Criticism (Faber & Gwyer) and Ramon
Fernandez, Messages (Paris: Gallimard)] New Criterion 4.4 (October
1926): 751.
. Naked Warriors (London: Art and Letters, 1919). The lines read, âJudas
no doubt was right / In a mental sort of way: / For he betrayed another
and so / With purpose was self-justified.â
. âBooks of the Quarter,â 751.
. âBooks of the Quarter,â 751. The full quotation reads: âBoth [Herbert
Read and Ramon Fernandez], instead of taking for granted the place and
function of literatureâand therefore taking for granted a whole
universeâare occupied with the inquiry into this function, and therefore
with the inquiry into the whole moral world, fundamentally, with
entities and values.â
. âBooks of the Quarter,â 751â2. Eliot writes that âwe have from these
two writers [Herbert Read and Ramon Fernandez] almost incorrigible
testimony to the actual lack of value of Proust, or more exactly, to his
value simply as a milestone, as a point of demarcation between a
generation for whom the dissolution of value had in itself a positive
value, and the generation for which the recognition of value is of
utmost importance, a generation which is beginning to turn its attention
to an athleticism, a training, of the soul as severe and ascetic as the
training of the body of a runner.â
. C. H. Rickword, âScrutinies (5): Bernard Shaw,â Calendar of Modern
Letters 1.6 (September 1925): 50â54.
. âFinal ConfessionsâLiterary Tests,â Specimen Days (1892).
. Poetry and Criticism (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), 16. Interestingly,
Sitwell draws on the concept of âtextureâ elaborated by âmy friend Mr.
Robert Gravesâ to praise Pope's The Rape of the Lock (15).
. Poetry and Criticism, 17.
. âThe Subject-Matter of Poetry,â The Chapbook, 9 (March 1920): 11â16.
. Riding is perhaps thinking here of the following lines from Francis
Thompson's Shelley: An Essay (1909): âIt is this gift of not merely
embodying but apprehending everything in figure which co-operates
towards creating his rarest characteristics, so almost preternaturally
developed in no other poet, namely, his well-known power to condense the
most hydrogenic abstraction. Science can now educe threads of such
exquisite tenuity that only the feet of the tiniest infant-spiders can
ascend them; but up the filmiest insubstantiality Shelley runs with
agile ease. To him, in truth, nothing is abstract.â
. Riding's parenthetical on Hulme here prefigures her broader treatment
of Hulme in Chapter 2. (See chap. 2, n. 6.)
. Transition: Essays on Contemporary Literature (London: Hogarth Press,
1926). See also note 7.
. âBooks of the Quarter,â 751.
. Poetry and Criticism, 23. For Sitwell, Beddoes' âSongâ (1851)
represents the ânearest approachâ to âmaking abstract poems in words as
the modernist poet has.â
. Poetry and Criticism, 7â9.
. Percy Bysshe Shelley, âPeter Bell the Thirdâ (written 1819, published
1839).
. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, âYouth and Ageâ (1828).
Chapter 2 T. E. Hulme, the New Barbarism, and Gertrude Stein
. Riding most likely composed this chapter in response to T. S. Eliot's
1927 review, titled âCharleston, Hey! Hey!,â in which he deemed Gertrude
Stein's writing an âominousâ harbinger of a âbarbarianâ future (see n. 8
below). An earlier (and shorter) version of this chapter appeared under
the same title in transition 3 (June 1927): 153â168. Robert Graves and
Riding also reworked some of this material as the âConclusionâ to A
Survey of Modernist Poetry (London: William Heinemann, 1927).
. This phrase became widely known after the publication of Ernest
Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926). In that volume, Hemingway credits
Stein with the phrase.
. After the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, Eliot published The
Hollow Men (1925), âDoris's Dream Songs, IâIIIâ (parts of which were
reprinted in Poems 1909â1935), and parts of what would later become
Sweeney Agonistes (1932).
. âBooks of the Quarter,â New Criterion 4.4 (October 1926), 751.
. Riding joins Wyndham Lewis in denouncing modernist poetry as
Bergsonian. In Time and Western Man (1927), Lewis outlines the
âpsychology of the time-snobâ modernist, who glorifies
âlife-in-the-moment, with no reference . . . to absolute or universal
value.â Lewis also discusses modernists' desire to âreturn to the Past,â
in the form of the child or the primitive. Riding's critical terms are
similar to Lewis's, but she reverses his dismissal of Gertrude Stein's
Composition as Explanation. See Wyndham Lewis, Time & Western Man [1927]
(Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993), 11, 14, 35, 59â63.
. Most of T. E. Hulme's essays on poetry, sculpture, painting,
philosophy, and politics initially appeared in The New Age journal
during the years before and during World War I. After Hulme's death in
the war, Herbert Read collected selections from his writings and
notebooks and published them as Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the
Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner
& Co., 1924).
. Eliot, âCommentary,â Criterion II (April 1924): 231.
. âCharleston, Hey! Hey!,â Nation & Athenaeum, 40:17 (29 January 1927):
595.
. âRomanticism and Classicism,â Speculations, 126.
. The Profanity of Paint (London: A. C. Fifield, 1916).
. Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (London: John Lane, 1916), 137â138.
. Gaudier-Brzeska, 138.
. This quotation represents Riding's translation of two lines from
Gaudier-Brzeska's manifesto into William Kiddier's non-objectifying
prose. The lines from Gaudier-Brzeska's manifestoâwhich originally
appeared in the first issue of BLAST (1914)âread, âSculptural feeling is
the appreciation of masses in relation. Sculptural ability is the
defining of these masses by planes.â Gaudier-Brzeska, 138.
. âBergson's Theory of Art,â in Speculations, 147.
. White Buildings (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926). In his
introduction to White Buildings, Allen Tate suggests that the
âseparation of vision and subjectâ in modern poetry arises because âthe
poet no longer apprehends his world as a Wholeâ (xi).
. âBergson's Theory of Art,â 163.
. Eliot's âFragment of a Prologueââwhich later became the first part of
Sweeney Agonistes (1932)âappeared in the Criterion 4.4 (October 1926):
713.
. See Gertrude Stein's 1926 portrait âJean Cocteauâ in Portraits and
Prayers (New York: Random House, 1934), 81.
. See Gertrude Stein, Composition As Explanation in A Stein Reader, ed.
Ulla Dydo (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1993), 495. In the section that
follows, Riding cites repeatedly from Stein's Composition as
Explanation, which was first published in Dial 81, no. 4 (October 1926),
then delivered as a lecture at Oxford University in June 1926, and
finally published in book form by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth
Press in November of the same year. Riding relies on Stein's sense of
the continuous present throughout Chapter 2 of Contemporaries,
particularly when describing the âtime senseâ in contemporary poetry,
and as she attempts to explain Stein's âbarbarismâ in terms of her
radical deconstruction of language, best demonstrated in Composition As
Explanation.
. Composition As Explanation, 497.
. Composition As Explanation, 499â500.
. Composition As Explanation, 497.
. Composition As Explanation, 501.
. Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (Dijon: Contact Editions,
1925). Though Stein began writing The Making of Americans as early as
1903, and finished the manuscript in 1911, it did not appear in print
until 1925 and was reviewed by Edith Sitwell for The Criterion in 1926,
a review Riding certainly would have read.
. Composition As Explanation, 499.
. Herbert Read, ed., Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy
of Art (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1924), 34.
. Stein, What Are Masterpieces? (Los Angeles: Conference Press, 1940),
57.
. Stein, âJean Cocteau,â 84.
. Composition As Explanation, 500.
. Composition As Explanation, 501.
. Composition As Explanation, 502.
Chapter 3 The Facts in the Case of Monsieur Poe
. âThe Facts in the Case of Monsieur Poeâ likewise appeared in altered
form previous to its inclusion in Contemporaries, first as a lecture
before the Oxford English Club in March of 1927, then as an essay
entitled âJamais Plusâ that appeared in the October 1927 issue of
transition (139â56). Elizabeth Friedmann indicates that Riding's lecture
at Oxford was presented as a preview of a chapter from Contemporaries,
âin which she explained how the myth of Edgar Allan Poe's genius became
so widely held and long maintained. She portrayed the icon of the French
symbolists not as America's greatest literary genius but as a
self-publicizing hack journalist who wrote âliterary rush ordersâ to
produce a predetermined effect.â See A Mannered Grace: The Life of Laura
(Riding) Jackson, 103.
. Riding draws these unattributed quotations from Yale Professor Carl
Schrieber's article âA Close-Up of Poeâ that appeared in the Saturday
Review of Literature 3.11 (October 9, 1926): 165â67.
. Edgar Allan Poe, âTo Helenâ (1831).
. âEdgar Allan Poe,â In the American Grain (New York: New Directions,
1956 [1925]), 216â34.
. âEdgar Allan Poe,â 216.
. James Russell Lowell, âFable for Criticsâ (1848).
. On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners (1914).
. Poe, âEulalieâ (1845).
. Poe, Bon-Bon (1850).
. Poe, âThe Rationale of Verseâ (1848).
. âEdgar Allan Poe,â 216â34.
. Poe, âTo One in Paradiseâ (1834).
. Riding most likely refers to Eliot's âNote sur MallarmĂ© et Poe,â La
Nouvelle RĂ©vue Française 14 (November 1, 1926), 524â26.
. âEdgar Allan Poe,â 222.
. Riding cites a letter from Poe to T. W. White, April 30, 1835. The
full sentence reads: âI noticed the allusion in the Doom. The writer
seems to compare my swim with that of Lord Byron, whereas there can be
no comparison between them.â
. From the preface to Poe's Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827).
. From the preface to (George Gordon) Lord Byron's Hours of Idleness
(1807), his first collection of poems.
. Riding refers to Poe's 1846 essay, âThe Philosophy of Composition,â
which elaborates a strict formula for poetic composition, using âThe
Ravenâ as an ideal example.
. Thomas Moore, âTo the Boston Frigate, On Leaving Halifax for Englandâ
(1804).
. A Defense of Poetry (1821).
. The Poetic Principle (1850).
. William Motherwell, âThe Cavalier's Songâ (1841).
. âThe Philosophy of Compositionâ (1846).
. See Malcolm Cowley's preface to his translation of Paul Valéry's
Variété (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1927).
. âNote sur MallarmĂ© et Poe,â 524â26.
. âThe Philosophy of Compositionâ (1846).
. A typographical errorâRiding refers here to American writer and
artist, Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813â1892).
. âThe beautiful cries of real passion, the elegance of love . . . â
comes from the preface to Edgar Allan Poe, Poésies ComplÚtes, trans.
Gabriel Mourey (Paris: Mercure de France, 1910), 1.
. âBaudelaire, MallarmĂ©, Hennequin, Rollinat, yourself and others. . . .
â PoĂ©sies ComplĂštes, 5.
. âWe have done so much in France to acclimate Edgar Poe that his
compatriots insist that the author of âThe Ravenâ was French.â John H.
Ingram, letter to Gabriel Mourey, as quoted in the preface to Mourey's
translation of Poe. Poésies ComplÚtes, 5.
. âPoe loved France and its admirable literature and only spoke with
respect of the masterpieces that it produced; his caustic pen would
never try to diminish its glory.â PoĂ©sies ComplĂštes, 6.
. From Mourey's 1910 French translation of Edgar Allan Poe's âThe Ravenâ
(1845). Poésies ComplÚtes, 21. The stanza in English reads:
âProphet!â said I, âthing of evil!âprophet still, if bird or devil!
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate, yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchantedâ
On this home by Horror haunted,âtell me truly, I imploreâ
Is thereâis there balm in Giliad?âtell meâtell me, I implore!â
Quoth the Raven, âNevermore.â
As Laura Riding
The Close Chaplet. London: Hogarth Press, 1926.
[with Robert Graves]. A Survery of Modernist Poetry. London: Heinemann,
1927. Reprint, New York: Haskell House, 1969. Reprint, Manchester:
Carcanet, 2002.
Voltaire: A Biographical Fantasy. London: Hogarth Press, 1927.
Anarchism Is Not Enough. London: Jonathan Cape, 1928. Reprint, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001.
Contemporaries and Snobs. New York: Doubleday, Duran, & Co., 1928.
Reprint, St. Clair Shore: Scholarly Press, 1971.
A Pamphlet Against Anthologies. New York: Doubleday, Duran, & Co., 1928.
Reprint, New York: AMS, 1970. Reprint, Manchester: Carcanet, 2002.
Experts Are Puzzled. London: Jonathan Cape, 1930.
Four Unposted Letters to Catherine. Paris: Hours, 1930. Reprint, New
York: Persea, 1993.
Poems: A Joking Word. London: Jonathan Cape, 1930.
Though Gently. Deya: Seizin Press, 1930.
Twenty Poems Less. Paris: Hours, 1930.
Laura and Francisca. Deya: Seizin Press, 1931.
Everybody's Letters. London: Barker, 1933.
The Life of the Dead. London: Barker, 1933.
Poet: A Lying Word. London: Barker, 1933.
Americans. Los Angeles: Primavera, 1934.
[with George Ellidge]. 14A. London: Barker, 1934.
Progress of Stories. London: Constable, 1935. Reprint, New York: Dial,
1982. Reprint, New York: Persea, 1994.
The Second Leaf (broadside). Deya: Seizin Press, 1935.
[Madeleine Vara, pseud.] Convalescent Conversations. Deya: Seizen Press,
1936.
[Edited with Robert Graves.] Epilogue I. London: Constable, 1936.
âââ. Epilogue II. London: Constable, 1936.
âââ. Epilogue III. London: Constable, 1937.
A Trojan Ending. London: Constable, 1937. Reprint, Manchester: Carcanet,
1984.
Collected Poems. London: Cassell; New York: Random House, 1938.
The Covenant of Literal Morality. London: Seizin Press, 1938.
The World and Ourselves. London: Chatto & Windus, 1938.
Lives of Wives. New York: Random House, 1939. Reprint, Los Angeles: Sun
and Moon, 1995. Reprint, Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 2000.
Selected Poems in Five Sets. New York: Persea, 1993.
As Laura (Riding) Jackson
The Telling. London: Athlowe, 1972; New York: Harper & Row, 1973.
Reprint, Manchester: Fyfield Books, 2005.
âWhat, If Not a Poem, Poems?â Denver Quarterly 9.2 (1974): 1â13.
âDr. Grove and the Future of the English Dictionaries.â Denver Quarterly
10.1 (spring 1975). Reprinted in Rational Meaning.
âOn Ambiguity.â Modern Language Quarterly 36.1 (March 1975): 102â106.
Reprinted in Rational Meaning.
âBertrand Russell, and Others: The Idea of the Master-Mind.â Antaeus
21/22 (springâsummer 1976): 125â35.
âIt Has Taken Too Long: From the Writings of Laura (Riding) Jackson.â
Chelsea 35 (1976): entire issue.
Description of Life. New York: Oliphant, 1980.
The Poems of Laura Riding: A New Edition of the 1938 Collection. New
York: Persea, 1980.
Some Communications of Broad Reference. Northridge: Lord John, 1983.
âEngaging the Impossible.â Sulfur 10 (1984): 4â35.
âAs to a Certain Poem & Poetryâ (âLamenting the Terms of Modern
Praiseâ). Chelsea 47 (1988): 3â5.
First Awakenings: The Early Poems of Laura Riding. New York: Persea,
1992.
The Word âWomanâ and Other Related Writings. Edited by Elizabeth
Friedmann and Alan J. Clark. New York: Persea, 1993.
âAbout the Fugitives and Myself.â The Carolina Quarterly 47.3 (summer
1995): 73â87.
âThe Promise of Words.â London Review of Books 7 (September 1995):
23â24.
[with Schuyler B. Jackson]. Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the
Definition of Words. Edited by William Harmon. Introduction by Charles
Bernstein. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997.
The Sufficient Difference: A Centenary Celebration of Laura (Riding)
Jackson. Edited by Elizabeth Friedmann. New York: Chelsea Associates,
2000.
[with Robert Graves]. Essays from Epilogue 1935â1937. Manchester:
Carcanet, 2001.
The Poems of Laura Riding: A Newly Revised Edition of the 1938/1980
Collection. New York: Persea, 2001.
Laura Riding, Gertrude Stein, Jane Bowles. Warsaw: Wydaje Biblioteka
Narodowa, 2003.
âLiterature and the Right.â Delmar 10 (2004): 69-81.
Under the Mind's Watch: Concerning Issues of Language, Literature, Life
of Contemporary Bearing. Edited by John Nolan and Alan J. Clark. Bern:
Peter Lang, 2004.
The Laura (Riding) Jackson Reader. Edited by Elizabeth Freidmann. New
York: Persea, 2005.
The Failure of Poetry, the Promise of Language (Poets on Poetry). Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.
On the Continuing of the Continuing. London: Wyeswood Press, 2008.
[with Jan Erik Bouman]. As Many Questions As Answers. Den Haag: Bureau
Claxon, 2010.
The Person I Am: The Literary Memoirs of Laura (Riding) Jackson, Volume
One. Edited by John Nolan and Carol Ann Friedmann. Nottingham: Trent
Editions, 2011.
The Person I Am: The Literary Memoirs of Laura (Riding) Jackson, Volume
Two. Edited by John Nolan and Carol Ann Friedmann. Nottingham: Trent
Editions, 2011.
Aiken, Conrad,
Aldrich, Mary A. S.,
Allan, John,
Anderson, Sherwood,
Archimedes,
Aristotle,
,
,
,
Barrett, Elizabeth Barrett (Elizabeth Barrett Browning),
Barrie, J. M.,
Baudelaire,
(cited in Waste Land)
,
,
,
,
Beddoes, Thomas Lovell,
,
Beerbohm, Max,
Beowulf,
Bergson, Henri,
,
Blake, William,
Bonaparte, Napoleon,
Boone, Daniel,
Borrow, George,
,
Bradley, F. H.,
Branch, Christopher Pease,
,
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Bridges, Robert,
Brontë, Charlotte,
Browne, Thomas,
Bryant, William Cullen,
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Byron, George Gordon Lord,
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â
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Cowley, Abraham,
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Cranch, Christopher Pearse,
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Crane, Hart,
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Cummings, E. E.,
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Dana, Charles A.,
Darwin, Erasmus,
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Davidson, John,
Denham, Sir John,
DeQuincey, Thomas,
,
â
Dickens, Charles,
,
Diodorus Siculus,
Disraeli, Benjamin,
Donne, John,
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Doughty, Charles Montagu,
Dowson, Ernest,
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Freud, Sigmund,
Galsworthy, John,
Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri,
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Goldsmith, Oliver,
Goodwin, Leslie,
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Gray, Thomas,
Greene, Robert,
Griswold, Rufus Wilmot (Reverend),
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Hardy, Thomas,
Hawthorne, Nathaniel,
Hennequin, Ămile,
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Hood, Thomas,
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Howard, Frederick,
Hulme, T. E.,
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Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth,
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Lowell, James Russell,
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Melville, Herman,
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Michelangelo,
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Milton, John,
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Moore, Marianne,
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Moore, Thomas,
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Morris, William,
Motherwell, William
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Mourey, Gabriel,
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Muir, Edwin,
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Neal, John,
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Nightingale, Florence,
Noyes, Alfred,
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Philips, Ambrose,
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