CHAPTER VII

MODERNIST POETRY AND CIVILIZATION

THE vulgar meaning of modernism, especially when the word is employed as a term of critical condemnation or by poets themselves as a literary affectation, is modern-ness, a keeping-up in poetry with the pace of civilization and intellectual history. It is thus used by the reader or critic who makes a sentimental association of poetry with the past, and perhaps with a particular period of the past, as an epithet for ‘new’ poetry which seems irreverent of the general tradition; and, in the other extreme, it is deliberately adopted by individual poets and movements as a contemporary programme. Poetry in this light becomes a matter of temperamental politics, with a conservative flank opposed to a radical flank; and an imaginary battle ensues in which the main issue is lost sight of: may a poet write as a poet or must he write as a period? For modernism, in this perverted sense, likewise becomes a critical tyranny, increasing contemporary mannerisms in poetry instead of freeing the poet of obligation to conform to any particular set of literary theories. There is, indeed, a genuine modernism, which is not a part of a ‘modernist’ programme but a natural personal manner and attitude in the poet to his work, and which accepts the denomination ‘modernist’ because it prefers this to other denominations; also because there is a conspicuous force operating at great odds to free the _poem_ of many of the traditional habits which prevented it from achieving its full significance. Keeping in mind this conspicuous force, more excuse can be found for ‘modernist’ as applied to the poem than to the poet; as _poems_ is a more accurate, less prejudiced term for _poetry_ (a vague and sentimental idea in relation to which _poet_ is a more vague and sentimental idea still). But even into this more genuine aspect of poetic modernism creep some of the prejudices of perverted modernism--into its criticism especially. It has, for example, an intolerance toward contemporary poetry which confesses no programme, a suspicion, more properly, of poetry which does not seem to profess a literary cause; and a self-protective sympathy for manifestations of modernism in the past--the present vogue of eighteenth-century poetry is largely inspired by its quaintness, which, however affected, was in its day an up-to-dateness.

For no matter how restrained, how impersonal a literary attitude may be, it is difficult for it to resist the temptation to convert and to receive converts; and modernist poetry, whatever its purity, is especially in danger of succumbing to this temptation to convert, because it is much attacked, and to receive converts, because there are always literary loose-ends anxious to acquire character and standing by attaching themselves to a cause.

The sense of modernism is further perverted by the existence of a middle position between the conservative flank and the radical flank--the intelligent, plain-man point of view. This middle view, this middle population, we might say, is the prop and advocate of civilization; and the idea of civilization as a steady human progress does not exclude the idea of a modernist, _historically_ forward poetry. A possible rapprochement exists, therefore, between this middle population, to whom poetry is just one of the many instruments of progress, and that type of contemporary poetical writing which advertises itself by its historical progressiveness. It is difficult, in attempting to make clear some of the aspects of genuine poetic modernism, to avoid appealing to the progressiveness of this middle population, that is, making poetry a historical branch of civilization, and to avoid likewise the appearance of condoning that perverted modernism which takes advantage of a false idea of ‘advance’ to justify feeble eccentricity. The real task is, in fact, not to explain modernism in poetry but to separate false modernism, or faith in history, from genuine modernism, or faith in the immediate, the _new_ doings of poems (or poets or poetry) as not necessarily derived from history. Modernist poetry as such should mean no more than fresh poetry, more poetry, poetry based on honest invention rather than on conscientious imitation of the time-spirit.

But honest invention and affectation of originality can both be confused in the single term ‘modernism’. Francis Thompson, in his essay on Coleridge, complained that “the charge of affectation has been hurled in turn at the outset of their careers against Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson and Browning. Wordsworth wrote simple diction and his simplicity was termed affected; Shelley gorgeous diction and his gorgeousness was affected; Keats rich diction and his richness was affected; Tennyson cunning diction and his cunning was affected; Browning rugged diction and his ruggedness was affected. Why Coleridge was called affected passes the wit of man, except it be that he did not write like Pope or the elegant Mr. Rogers--or, indeed, that all critical tradition would be outraged if a mere recent poet were not labelled with the epithetic made and provided for him by wise critical precedent.” Now Thompson, who was writing to defend his own poems against the charge, was a somewhat affected writer himself, and it suited him to hint that the very fact that a poet is called ‘affected’ or ‘modernist’ is a proof of his genuineness; he did not, therefore, stop to enquire how many of these charges of affectation were justified at the outset of the careers of the poets concerned. As a matter of fact, Shelley is the only one of them who can be fairly exculpated of the charge, because the only one who was free of the authorship ambition: his political and philosophical enthusiasms, which were, however, real, absorbed what professional literary enthusiasm he may have had to begin with. Wordsworth’s early simplicity _was_ affected:

A simple child, dear brother Jim, That lightly draws its breath And feels its life in every limb, What should it know of death?

I met a little cottage Girl; She was eight years old, she said; Her hair was thick with many a curl That clustered round her head.

Keats’ early richness _was_ affected:

here is cream Deepening to richness from a snowy gleam; Sweeter than that nurse Amalthea skimmed For the boy Jupiter; and here, undimmed By any touch, a bunch of blooming plums Ready to melt between an infant’s gums, And here is manna pick’d from Syrian trees, In starlight, by the three Hesperides.

Tennyson’s early cunning _was_ affected:

The streams through many a lilied row Down-carolling to the crisped sea, Low tinkled with a bell-like flow Atween the blossoms ‘We are free’.

Browning’s early ruggedness _was_ affected:

And on that young round cheek of thine I make them recognise the tinge, As when of the costly scarlet wine They drip so much as will impinge And spread in a thinnest scale afloat One thick gold drop from the olive’s coat Over a silver plate whose sheen Still through the mixture shall be seen.

The history of these affectations is the history of the various social requirements made of poetry by the middle position, by the intelligent plain man who is religiously devoted to the idea of human uplift; and of the conforming by poets themselves to popular notions held about the place of poetry in this uplift. Poetry is seen first of all as supplying an elegance and refinement which must of necessity be neglected in practical experience. Common affairs are not genteel; and so poetry has generally been expected to feed an upper class hunger in man for nobility: poetry is the high polish of civilization. The next general demand thus made on poetry is that it should be romantically imbued with progressiveness, that it should act as a superior touter for civilization. To this demand Tennyson devoted his maturity in the _Princess_ and other verse tracts. This particular, assigned function of poetry is only a development of the old idea of the poet as the regular tribal prophet; that Tennyson could foresee air warfare in ‘navies grappling in the central blue’ and the League of Nations in ‘The Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World’ undoubtedly contributed to his success with the middle reader. Following this is the demand for poetry as a sign of intellectual advancement, as distinct from social or political advancement: poetry as deep and deeper thinking. Browning is an excellent example of the poet who appreciated the popular weakness for profundity. He fed this vanity successfully, without bringing it low; seeming to be profound without really being profound, keeping the necessary illusion by various technical devices such as unnecessarily protracted sentences and an over-clipped grammar.

Poetry, consequently, is made into a constantly expanding institution, embodying from period to period all the rapidly developing specialized forms of knowledge, enlarging itself by broadening the definition of poetry to include psychology, applied theories of music and painting, philosophy, physical science and so on. The poet himself feels obliged to appear as a sage; as Tennyson, when he became Poet Laureate, conscientiously sent himself to school again and made and kept to a weekly curriculum of studies, including science, foreign languages, mathematics, philosophy. Not only is the nature of the poet, in this view, expected to change in a scheme of constant and minute adjustment to history, but the nature of poetry itself is supposed to undergo historical evolution: keeping up with the times is a sign of its good behaviour and its worthiness to be incorporated among the material evidences of progress.

Such an opinion of poetry is based on a view of civilization as modernist, as continuously developing in the direction of an absolute and perfect end--which it obviously is not. The poet who considers himself a modernist because he is successfully keeping up with his date is, however unaware he is of so being and whatever his antagonism to Tennyson, merely an earnest Tennysonian. A strong distinction must be drawn between poetry as something developing through civilization and as something developing organically by itself--not a minor branch of human endeavour but a complete and separate form of energy which is neither more nor less in the twentieth century A.D. than in the tenth century B.C., nor a different kind of energy now from what it was in Homeric times, but merely lodged in different, or _other_, persons. Civilization develops only in the sense that one thing follows another, not in the sense that things get progressively better or more harmonious because they follow. Poetry does develop in the sense that it is contemporaneous with civilization; but for this reason it has even to protect itself from civilization, to resist, to a certain extent, contemporaneous influences, since there is no merit in modernism for the sake of modernism, and since civilization must, in self-defence, believe in modernism for the sake of modernism. It is therefore always important to distinguish between what is historically new in poetry because the poet is contemporary with a civilization of a certain kind, and what is intrinsically new in poetry because the poet is a new and original individual, something more than a mere servant and interpreter of civilization.

A great deal of poetry written to-day, in fact, must be understood as a reaction against the demands made on it by civilized society, an unfortunate waste of energy in defiance that is often trivial and insincere. Reaction against civilization in a dogmatic sense is found in nearly all modernist poets, from affected modernists to more or less genuine modernists. It has, indeed, been one of the refinements of contemporary poetry to react against the refinements of civilization which poetry has generally been expected to cultivate. Even such a sentimentalist as Rupert Brooke mentioned love and sea-sickness in the same breath:

The damned ship lurched and slithered. Quiet and quick My cold gorge rose; the long sea rolled; I knew I must think hard of something, or be sick; And could think hard of only one thing--_you_! ... Do I forget you? Retchings twist and tie me, Old meat, good meals, brown gobbets, up I throw. Do I remember? Acrid return and slimy, The sobs and slobber of a last year’s woe....

The War provoked in poetry both genuine and affected examples of reaction against heroics. These lines of Wilfred Owen’s describe with painful literalness a man dying from poison-gas:

... If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin, If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs Bitten as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues....

Or we find close juxtapositions of elegance and vulgarity in the same poem, the poet’s low-brow satire of his own elegance. This is a familiar device in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, as:

The hot water at ten. And if it rains, a closed car at four. And we shall play a game of chess, Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

which is fine writing, immediately followed by:

When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said-- I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself, HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart. He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you To get yourself some teeth.

To the demand for romantic progressiveness there is a reaction of utterly hopeless and unpurposed pessimism, as in Miss Nancy Cunard’s _Parallax_, an imitation of T. S. Eliot:

In the rooms A sombre carpet broods, stagnates beneath deliberate steps. Here drag a foot, there a foot, drop sighs, look round for nothing, shiver. Sunday creeps in silence Under suspended smoke And curdles defiant in unreal sleep. The gas-fire puffs, consumes, ticks out its minor chords-- And at the door I guess the arrested knuckles of the one-time friend One foot on the stair delaying, that turns again.

To the demand for deep thinking the reaction is a frivolousness like Mr. Wallace Stevens’:

La--la! The cat is in the violets And the awnings are let down. The cat should not be where she is And the awnings are too brown, Emphatically so.

The reaction to the demand that poetry shall combine all arts and sciences into a master-art is an excuse for poetry devoted to the praise of either silliness or simpleness, as in Mr. Witter Bynner’s:

I’m a-building my house On a mountain so high, A good place to wait For my love to come by.

Go ’way now, all of you, Leave me alone On the peacefullest mountain Ever was known.

or A.E.’s:

Cloistered amid these austere rocks, A brooding seer, I watched an hour Close to the earth, lost to all else, The marvel of a tiny flower.

To all of these demands and to this last demand particularly, there exists also a more complex reaction. Much contemporary poetry not only snaps its fingers at civilization; it further elaborates its superior attitude toward it by proving that it can not only keep up with civilization but even get ahead of it. For civilization grows so vain that it does, in effect, tell poetry that it cannot keep up with it, that it must disappear in the old sense of an interpretation and mirror of life. Cock-a-hoop scientists like Mr. J. B. S. Haldane write that “not until our poets are once more drawn from the educated classes (I speak as a scientist), will they appeal to the average man by showing him the beauty in his own life”. There are poets who take this challenge seriously and even resume Tennyson’s curriculum where he left off. Alfred Noyes, although neither mature nor serious, has written a long narrative poem _The Torch Bearers_ to celebrate the progress of science from its beginnings to its present days. Patronizing of modern musical theory appears in the poetry of W. J. Turner, of modern painting theory in that of Edith Sitwell and Sacheverell Sitwell, of psychological theory in that of Herbert Read and Archibald Macleish, of modern sex-engrossment in that of D. H. Lawrence, of philosophical theory in that of Conrad Aiken and T. S. Eliot, of encyclopedic learning in that of Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot--and so on and so on. This reaction inspires not only an emulative display of modernist learning and subjects, but also a cultivation of fine-writing to prove that this generation can beat the most cunning Elizabethan, Romantic Revivalist or Victorian at his own game. The task it sets itself is to be advanced and yet elegant: mere low-browness being considered too primitive a reaction. The following is an example of Sacheverell Sitwell’s fine-writing. He is doing what John Fletcher might be doing were he alive now: taking liberties with blank verse and imagery under the influence of modern painting and music, while still remaining recognizably a late-Elizabethan dramatist:

Who can have trod, before, this field of fire The huge floor of ocean, unfoamed, shining, Lit with loud stars and mellow harvest moon? The sea-nymphs swimming by the galleon’s side Have never shone, golden, in its wake before: Like winds they play among the corn’s gold tide Loosing those windy locks, or down they dive Through amber furrows lifted by the keel, Past starlight, crackling to the sad shell note Of scalèd Tritons in deep water depths.

Mr. Sitwell’s modernism appears in such lines as the second and fifth, which the Elizabethans or Jacobeans, great as were the liberties they took with blank verse (far greater than those taken by the eighteenth century or the Victorians) could not have written for a gentle lyrical passage. They would have put instead:

The húgy flóor of ócean foámless shíning

and

Have ne’ér shone gólden ín its wáke befóre.

The first of these lines of Mr. Sitwell’s must be read:

The húge flóor of ócean (pause) unfoámed (pause) shíning

and the next

Have néver shóne (pause) gólden (pause) in its wáke béfóre.

Here the influence of modern music reveals itself in the readiness with which the monotony of the metrical pattern is varied. It is rarely, indeed, in a poem of modernist blank verse that so few variations are introduced as in this passage. The pictorial element is also modern. ‘The loud stars’, ‘the corn’s gold tide’, the nymphs diving ‘crackling’ down, are not Elizabethan conceits but verbal equivalents for a modern picture in which the size and shape of the stars, the cornfield aspect of the sea, the sharpness of the water-flurry where the nymphs dive would be anti-realistically represented to suggest just these figures. Fletcher would have written ‘bright stars’ and

Like winds that wanton in the yellow corn, So do they wanton in this golden tide

and

shivering the sad shell note

and so on.

These lines of T. S. Eliot’s further illustrate the tendency in contemporary poetry to outdo the past in elaborate and elegant writing; that is, to flout conservative literary elegance rather than elegance in general. They are an improvement on all previous treatments of a favourite refined topic--perfumes:

In vials of ivory and coloured glass Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes, Unguent, powdered or liquid--troubled, confused And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air That freshened from the window, these ascended In fattening the prolonged candle-flames, Flung their smoke into the laquearia, Stirring the pattern on the coppered ceiling. Huge sea-wood fed with copper Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam.

How pale indeed is Keats beside him:

Of wealthy lustre was the banquet-room Fill’d with pervading brilliance and perfume: Before each lucid pannel fuming stood A censer fed with myrrh and spiced wood, Each by a sacred tripod held aloft, Whose slender feet wide-swerved upon the soft Wool-woofèd carpets: fifty wreaths of smoke From fifty censers their light voyage took To the high roof, still mimick’d as they rose Along the mirror’d walls by twin-clouds odourous.

(from _Lamia_).

The combined pressure of romantic progressiveness, intellectual advancement, knowledge-expansion and change-processes against which contemporary poetry has tried to protect itself by showing that it can bear this pressure and still survive, has driven it to make a tremendous and sometimes a strained effort at over-matching its age. In many instances, loaded with learned vanities and sophistications, it does not, it must be confessed, succeed in keeping its head above water. Much of this enlargement has been accomplished by incorporating in poetry the modern science of anthropology, which is really a new synthetic mythology composed of many mythologies. Not content with Tritons and Galleons and neo-Keatsian or neo-Elizabethan writing, many, as Mr. Eliot, for instance, have borrowed extensively from Sir James Frazer’s comparative study of primitive myths. When Sacheverell Sitwell writes of Alexander:

He is dreaming what he planned and never conquered: Time, that summer afternoon, burns slow, And one more chance is given him On a battlefield, or warm, slow bank of flowers, While a reaper on the hillside kills his fair-haired prisoners....

the reference to fair-haired prisoners is not only to the cutting down of the yellow grain but also to the ancient harvest-field custom, related by Sir James Frazer, of binding fair-haired or red-haired men in the corn-straw and killing them ritually as representatives of the corn-god.

Literary internationalism--the incorporation of foreign tongues and atmospheres--is still another method of civilizing and enlarging poetry. French is perhaps the most common language introduced to this end, with Italian and Spanish closely following. Mr. Eliot not only makes free use of French side by side with English; he has written poems entirely in French. An even greater enlargement is made by an abnormal cultivation of the classics, especially of the more remote classics. Some poets are able to maintain a sense of balance and dignity in this cultivation, if only because they are good scholars. But it can easily become absurd, as in the poetry of Mr. Ezra Pound. In a single volume of his, _Lustra_, occur literary references to Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, Provençale and Chinese literature--some of these incorrectly given. Mr. Eliot, who is a more serious scholar, has references in _The Waste Land_ to Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, German and Sanskrit. The English classics quoted or referred to are not now the stock-classics to which Victorian and post-Victorian poets paid tribute, not Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, but others known only to the cognoscenti--Peele, Kyd, Lyly, the less familiar Shakespeare, Webster, Marvell, Dryden, Swift, Darley, Beddoes; making the succession of English poetry wear a more varied look. The same enlargement is made with the Greek, Latin, Italian and French poets.

Sympathy with low life and the use of the vocabulary of low life in modernist poetry, besides their simpler burlesque rôle, are both an earnest of romantic progressiveness and of literary refinement. For, if it would put aside previous literary affectations and yet not turn into a crude instrument of reaction, it must have elegances of its own; and among the few unexploited elegances left to poetry is an affectation of the vocabulary of low life. Wordsworth’s theories on the use of the language of simple men were, in a conservative way, a similar counter-elegance. Modernist poets, however, surpass Wordsworth in literary slumming. Whereas Wordsworth wrote:

And now the same strong voice more near Said cordially, “My Friend, what cheer? Rough doings these! as God’s my judge, The sky owes somebody a grudge! We’ve had in half an hour or less A twelve month’s terror and distress!”

T. S. Eliot writes, as already shown, unexpurgated and unsentimentalized cockney, and E. E. Cummings:

.... some guys talk big about Lundun Burlin an gay Paree an some guys claims der never was nutn like Nooer Leans Shikahgo Sain Looey Noo York an San Fran dictaphones wireless subways vacuum cleaners pianolas funnygraphs skyscrapers an safety razors

sall right in its way kiddo but as fer I gimme de good ole daze....

In this way much modernist poetry, in attempting to justify itself to civilization, which is always the civilization of the average intelligent person, succeeds so well that it is rejected by him as _too_ advanced; when it turns to a smaller audience or to no audience at all, consoling itself with its advancement. For as the average intelligent person has no real sympathy with low life except from vague humanitarian principles, so he is only interested in civilization as a sentimental idea; he does not want to think harder or work harder; he does not want to advance, but to be flatteringly reminded that he belongs to the twentieth century. Nor does he have, or want to have, new or different feelings. The poet formally devoted to modernism, on the other hand, generally has or affects historically new feelings about things. And so the space between the general reader and the poet who is responding to the demands of this imaginary client becomes wider and wider.

Take, as a single instance of this breach, the conception of Destiny. To the Greek dramatists it was the strongest of the gods, the dark power behind the thrones of Olympus. To the poets of the Romantic Revival it was the greatest and blindest motive power; it transcended Love, Religion and Knowledge. But Miss Sitwell can write to-day (or perhaps yesterday):

Now from the countrysides where people know That Destiny is wingless and bemired With feathers dirty as a hen’s too tired To fly--

Then follows a reference to Darkness, one of the grandest of traditionally poetical concepts:

--where old pig-snouted Darkness grovels For life’s mired rags among the broken hovels--

The general reader, however, will be out of sympathy with this: Destiny to him is not as oppressive as it was to Euripides or Byron, but it is still a force to be reckoned with, though he only calls it “Luck” or “Joss”; and Darkness is still respected in spite of the electric illuminations of Science.

Of some contemporary poets ‘modernist’ is used merely to describe a certain independence in them, without definitely associating them with modernism as a literary cause: though content to stay in the main stream of poetry, they make judicious splashes to show that they are aware of the date. This has been the tactical position adopted by some poets whose modernism consists in an aloof moderateness or sensibleness in all directions--a studied inaction--and by others who have had neither the courage nor the capacity to go the whole way with modernism and yet have not wished to be left behind. In the first class belong such poets as Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Frost. Mr. Frost’s nature-poems are unaffected nature-poems and, with the exception of a few of Frank Prewett’s, perhaps the only real, that is, unliterary, ones since Clare’s. (Edmund Blunden’s show accurate observation but grow more and more literary.) The following is from Mr. Frost’s _Runaway_, describing a foal afraid of his first sight of snow. The faint modernism of this poem consists in its complete casualness and matter-of-factness:

Once when the snow of the year was beginning to fall We stopped by a mountain pasture to say “Whose colt?” A little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall, The other curled at his breast. He dipped his head And snorted at us. And then he had to bolt.... And now he comes again with a clatter of stone And mounts the wall again with whited eyes And all his tail that isn’t hair up straight. He shudders his coat as if to throw off flies....

Mr. Sassoon, who has, like Mr. Frost, never troubled to keep up with literary fashions and who, when he occasionally yields to the temptation of poeticalness, adopts the manner of a generation ago, writes as follows about a Founder’s Feast held in one of the greater Colleges at Cambridge University shortly after the War ended. The poem carries on the indignation of his war-poems against the General Staff. Modernism in Mr. Sassoon is an intelligent, satiric reaction to contemporary political and social Bluffs; it is not a literary policy--which is why, in fact, professed literary modernists patronize him:

.... Gowns, rose and scarlet in flamingo ranks, Adorned the dais that shone with ancient silver; And guests of honour gazed far down the Hall With precognition of returning thanks. There beamed the urbanest Law-lord on the Bench, Debating with the Provost (ceremonious In flushed degrees of vintage scholarship) The politics of Plato--and the French

But on the Provost’s left, in gold and blue Sat ... O my God! ... great Major-General Bluff Enough enough enough enough enough!

In the second class belong poets like Mr. Yeats who, observing that his old poetical robes have worn rather shabby, acquires a new outfit. But the old romantic weaknesses are not so easily discarded: even when he writes of ‘Lois Fuller’s Chinese Dancers’--a high-brow Vaudeville turn--instead of Eire and the ancient ways, And the Red Rose upon the Rood of Time.

Such are the shifts to which poets have been driven in trying to cope with civilization and in rejecting or keeping up with, from an imagined necessity of action, the social requirements that seem to be laid upon poetry. In the resulting confusion one thing at least is clear, that in modernist poetry, however it has been weakened or perverted by its race with civilization, is to be found the best and undoubtedly the most enduring contemporary poetry. This is not because historical modernism is in itself an excellence, but because the best poets happen to be modernists: whether they are deliberately so or not, they can be called modernist if only because they are good, and because what is good always seems advanced.

_Modernist_, indeed, should describe a quality in poetry which has nothing to do with the date or with responding to civilization. Poetry to which _modernist_ in this sense could be fully applied would derive its excellence neither from its reacting against civilization, by satiric or actual primitivism; nor from its proved ability to keep up with or keep ahead of civilization. It would not, however, ignore its contemporaneous universe, for the reason that it would not be stupid and that it would have a sense of humour--the most intelligent attitude toward history is not to take one’s own date too seriously. There would occur evidences of time in such poetry; but always its modernism would lie in its independence, in its relying on none of the traditional devices of poetry-making in the past nor on any of the artificial effects to be got by using the atmosphere of contemporary life and knowledge to startle or to give reality. If, in such poetry, a topical institution or person or object should occur, it would be only because it made an image more accurately suited to the particular requirements of the poem than another less recent one. Most of all, such poetry would be characterized by a lack of strain, by an intelligent ease. Not only would its references have a simplicity and naturalness no matter how difficult, that is, no matter how highly developed aside from references, such poetry was--not only would it not have to rely on references; it would not, either, have to rely on modern short-story material, such as Mr. Pound, for example, has incorporated in one of his poems:

Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens, And she is dying piece-meal of a sort of emotional anaemia

It would not have to rely on such material because it would have something to say that had nothing to do with reporting contemporary life or with vying with the progress of intelligence.

And even poetry that is _modernist_ only in the historical sense--even Ezra Pound’s or Vachel Lindsay’s--accomplishes at least this: by its enlarging process it has widened the limits of reference, diction and construction in poetry; by extending the poet’s curriculum it has also extended his acceptable scope. So that poetry that is modernist only in the personal sense has some chance of attention, its frowardness being taken for historical modernism.

Many common symbols of civilization, in any case, are bound to be absorbed naturally by poetry, although at the beginning they cannot but be used with self-consciousness. The naturalness with which some new invention or scientific discovery may be uttered in poetry depends on its recentness. There is even a definite time-limit before such a ‘new’ thing becomes a common object and before which it is affected to write of it in poetry except rarely and then with deliberate affectation. This time-limit varies, of course, with the nature of the oddity--with the train, for example, the period was about seventy years. During this period of human acclimatization the oddity gradually loses the capital letter and the italics with which it was perhaps originally written; its name comes to be pronounced without any sense of strangeness or second-thought. It gradually approaches a stage, in fact, when it is nearly quaint; and it is just in this stage when it is most natural.

The train has passed from a stage of complete strangeness to one of complete familiarity. Wordsworth was one of the first poets to notice the train, but as a curiosity rather than as a common object and on the theory that poetry should take recognition of modern scientific development. Although his view was that poetry was conferring favour on the scientists in recognizing their products, it will be seen from the following lines that he admitted minutely and specifically the various requirements which civilization puts upon poetry: material progressiveness, literal prophecy, intellectual advancements, ‘future change’, and, finally, elegance, which he achieves by calling Steamboats, Viaducts, Railways otherwise than by their own names (‘Motions and Means’, ‘Nature’s lawful offspring’). But he mentions them in the title:

STEAMBOATS, VIADUCTS, AND RAILWAYS

Motions and Means, on land and sea at war With old poetic feeling, not for this Shall ye, by Poets even, be judged amiss! Nor shall your presence, howsoe’er it mar The loveliness of Nature, prove a bar To the Mind’s gaining that prophetic sense Of future change, that point of vision, whence May be discovered what in soul ye are.

In spite of all that beauty may disown In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace Her lawful offspring in Man’s art; and Time, Pleased with your triumphs o’er his brother Space, Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime.

Tennyson was forced to accept the train, but he handled it gingerly. _Lady Godiva_ has this short prelude to show his broadmindedness; but it is only a foil to the romantic story:

I waited for the train at Coventry; I hung with grooms and porters on the bridge, To watch the three tall spires; and there I shaped The city’s ancient legend into this:--

In “_Mechanophilus_--in the time of the first railways” he frankly romanticizes:

Now first we stand and understand, And sunder false from true, And handle boldly with the hand, And see and shape and do.

Dash back that ocean with a pier, Strow yonder mountain flat, A railway there, a tunnel here, Mix we this Zone with that....

As we surpass our fathers’ skill, Our sons will shame our own; A thousand things are hidden still And not a hundred known....

Browning was rather more courageous; he first introduced the train as a commonplace into poetry, but through the back door, in what was known as serio-comic verse. The lines are from _Christmas-Eve and Easter-day_:

A tune was born in my head last week Out of the thump-thump and shriek-shriek Of the train, as I came by it, up from Manchester; And when, next week, I take it back again, My head will sing to the engine’s clack again While it only makes my neighbour’s haunches stir.

By the use of rhymes like ‘back again’ and ‘engines clack again’, ‘Manchester’ and ‘haunches stir’, he is saying in effect that a train is no proper subject for true poetical feelings; that as it is a part of modern life we must include it in our poems but in the low style proper to it. Emily Dickinson was perhaps the first to confess to a feeling of personal affection for the train as such:

I love to see it lap the miles, And lick the valleys up, And pause to feed itself at tanks; And then prodigious, step Around a pile of mountains And, supercilious, peer In shanties by the sides of roads....

And neigh like Boanerges; Then, punctual as a star, Stop--docile and omnipotent-- At its own stable door.

To John Davidson it was an appealing creature, too, although more terrible; in no way comic. His _Song of the Train_ begins:

A monster taught To come to hand Amain, As swift as thought Across the land The train. ... O’er bosky dens By marsh and mead, Forest and fens Embodied speed Is clanked and hurled....

In a poem of Mr. Robert Nichols we find the train treated with more modern nonchalance. _The Express: Hereford to London_ begins:

On sways the tilting train: We feel the carriage bluffly sideways blown, We see the chill shower brighten on the pane, We hear the high wind through the lantern moan, We three borne ever through the wind and rain, We three who meet here not to meet again, We three poor faring fools who sit alone.

But toward the end there is a romantic lapse to excuse the liberties taken:

But the giant Train begins a confident song “Why be so meek, so proud, when both are wrong.”

Sacheverell Sitwell can write even more casually of the train. For romantic lapses like the following in _At Breakfast_:

A railway engine ran across the field Galloping like a swift horse down the rails. As it came quicker the window-panes rattled, The roof shook side to side: all its beams trembled, Thundering hoofs were upon us--glass chariots.

are not even real lapses like Mr. Nichols’ but a half-satiric “Look: modernist though I am, I can still be romantic about old-fashioned romantic subjects like the railway train.” It is now not a ‘monster’ but a charming early-Victorian _objet de vertu_ under a glass dome. We find Miss Marianne Moore describing expanding bookcases and books printed on india-paper in a serious poem, without self-consciousness:

the vast indestructible necropolis of composite Yawman-Erbe separable units; the steel, the oak, the glass, the Poor Richard publications containing the public secrets of efficiency on “paper so thin that one thousand four hundred and twenty pages make one inch.”

Without self-consciousness? Perhaps that is too much to say when so short a space of years separate poetry of this sort from the once-advanced poetry of, say, Richard Le Gallienne, a ‘decadent’ of the ’nineties still alive and at present living in the same city as Miss Moore, like her a literary critic; a city where there must be large backward sections of the reading public to whom Mr. Le Gallienne is still an advanced writer because he has, perhaps, written familiarly of the Devil and the sweets of sin.

But is it necessary for the poet to come to the point, after a long history of gradually acclimatizing his verse to what were once considered unpoetical subjects, where he can, with Miss Moore, bring himself to insert fourteen unrevised and consecutive words straight from a newspaper advertisement into his poem, and put them into quotation marks as well? Though a feat of poetic self-martyrdom, doubtless, and perhaps the logical conclusion of giving civilization what it wants--verse actually interpretative of what is called ‘the poetry of modern business’--it is bad for both poetry and business: the quotation would have been much more effective left in the original setting to compose the daily synthetic advertisement-poem of the morning newspaper.

True modernist poetry can appear equally at all stages of historical development from Wordsworth to Miss Moore. And it does appear when the poet forgets what is the correct literary conduct demanded of him in relation to contemporary institutions (with civilization speaking through criticism) and can write a poem having the power of survival in spite of its disregarding these demands; a poem of purity--of a certain old-fashionedness even, but not an old-fashionedness of reaction against the time to archaism, or of retreat to nature and the primitive passions. All poetry that deserves to endure is at once old-fashioned and modernist. How much of modernist poetry is merely up-to-date conduct-poetry, the poetry of conversion to the last-minute salvationism of civilization, and how much is poetry in need of no conversion, but working out its own salvation by itself, is a difficult question to settle offhand. The proportions vary with individuals. With Mr. Pound the former sort predominates greatly, one would say; with Cummings, though he is more ‘daring’ than Mr. Pound, there is much less of this than at first sight appears; with Mr. Archibald Macleish, an ambitious imitator of Cummings, much more.

The great danger in any discussion of modernist poetry which may reach the plain reader is that in pointing out how many of its qualities are inspired by necessity, sincerity or truthfulness, these qualities may endear themselves to him not because of necessity, sincerity or truthfulness but only because he can understand them as up-to-date; the danger, in fact, that the plain reader may fall in love with the up-to-dateness of this poetry. In this case, with modernist poetry seen and applauded as a part of the movement of civilization, the demands made upon it as such would become intensified. A world of plain readers hungering for up-to-date poetry would turn poetry into one of the gross industries. There is such a great gap between Victorian poetry and the poetry of just before the War, and again between this poetry and advanced modern poetry, that the converted plain reader might fail to see that the theories of 1860 or 1910 or 1927 have nothing to do with the essential goodness of poetry, though much to do with its up-to-dateness. Would not, it may be asked, a hunger for essential goodness in poetry also turn it into one of the gross industries? Perhaps; on the other hand perhaps not, since the reader’s capacity for essential goodness is to his capacity for up-to-dateness as the capacity for writing essentially good poetry to the capacity for writing up-to-date poetry.