CHAPTER VIII

VARIETY IN MODERNIST POETRY

THE plain reader whose introduction to poetry is generally not through personal compulsion or curiosity but through the systematic requirements of his education, naturally associates it with the utilitarian point of view, which must dominate any formal educational process. If the school-system has happened to be old-fashioned and has used poetry merely as a means of teaching grammar, or as so many lines to be learned by heart as a disciplinary task or penalty, the reaction to poetry is negative: the reader either discounts poetry for ever as a dreary pedagogical invention or he can perhaps rediscover it as something so different from the classroom exercise as to be unaffected by the unpleasant associations attached to it as such. A ‘liberal school-system’ does not however leave alone poetry as poetry. It attempts to interest the child in the ‘values’ of poetry; the child’s reaction to this method will therefore be a positive one: he will subscribe to these values and accept poetry through them, or he will not subscribe to these values but reject poetry through them. ‘Beauty’ is the term of approval which the schoolmaster applies to the ‘values’ of poetry; character-formation is their expressed practical end, or if not character-formation, at least a wholesome relief from its ardours.

The elder system, which on the whole was preferable, has been generally superseded by the new both in England and America: the official report on “The Teaching of English in England” (1919) lays great stress on the folly of the teacher in ‘throwing away’ an important ‘weapon’, if he refuses to win his pupils over to him by making the literature lesson interesting, particularly through poetry. Particularly through Shakespeare. The report, in reply to an objection that “Shakespeare is over the heads of the children”, approves a professor-witness who replied “He is over all our heads”; as though that made it any better. One of the stock essay-subjects in the schools is “The Uses of Poetry”; and when the essays come up to be “corrected” and the humanistic teacher prepares a composite specimen-essay on the subject, the ‘uses’ are found to be as follows:

1. Poetry gives the reader joy.

2. Poetry gives relief to sorrow, pain or weariness.

3. Poetry teaches the reader to love the Good.

4. Poetry is the concentrated wisdom of former ages.

5. Poetry teaches other-worldliness.

and so on until to the final summing-up:

Poetry’s uses may be expressed in a single phrase: Spiritual Elevation.

All poetry, that is, tends toward the same general tone and the same general purpose.

Now it is unimportant to decide whether education since the time of Aristotle has been responsible for the spread of this view of poetry; or whether it is the great numerical predominance of poets who have professed it from a policy of self-protection, and have written most of their poetry to support it, over poets who have either dissented or refused to commit themselves, that has been responsible. The fact remains that this has been the officially accepted academic view and the view of orthodox criticisms: even a self-proclaimed dissenter like Poe defined the end of poetry as spiritual elevation. Poetry in every Classical period has been formed according to this principle. The mass-impressiveness of Classical poetry is, indeed, largely due to its uniformity. And though we know from historical reconstructions that even between romantics like Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge and Shelley there was about as much personal dissimilarity as could possibly be found between contemporary poets, yet the lip-service that each of these paid to this creed of the uses of poetry induced for the most part a corresponding pen-service. The emphasis that the educational system lays on personal and literary similarities in poets makes it still more difficult to appraise them separately. Here are descriptive passages by six more or less contemporary writers, typical classroom passages:

the hoar And aery Alps towards the North appeared Through mist, an heaven-sustaining bulwark reared Between the East and West, and half the sky Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry Dark purple at the Zenith, which still grew Down the steep West into a wondrous hue Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent Among the many folded hills....

It was no marvel--from my very birth My soul was drunk with love--which did pervade And mingle with whate’er I saw on earth. Of objects all inanimate I made Idols, and out of wild and lonely flowers And rocks, whereby they grew, a paradise.

Woodlark may sink from sandy fern--the Sun may hear his lay; Runnels may kiss the grass on shelves and shallows clear, But their low voices are not heard, though come on travels drear; Blood-red the Sun may set behind black mountain peaks; Blue tides may sluice and drench their time in caves and weedy creeks.

Mournfully breaks the north wave on thy shore, Silent Iona, and the mocking blast Sweeps sternly o’er thy relics of the past, The stricken cross, the desecrated tomb Of abbots and barbarian kings of yore....

Since risen from ocean, ocean to defy Appeared the Crag of Ailsa, ne’er did morn With gleaming lights more gracefully adorn His sides, or wreathe with mist his forehead high Now, faintly darkening with the sun’s eclipse, Still is he seen, in lone sublimity.

I stood on Brocken’s sovran height, and saw Woods crowding upon woods, hills over hills, A surging scene, and only limited By the blue distance. Heavily my way Downward I dragged through fir groves evermore.

Actually these pieces are by Shelley, Byron, Keats, Tupper, Wordsworth and Coleridge, in that order: but what reader could offhand ascribe them correctly? Who would not give the first to Keats, the second to Wordsworth and stumble over the last four?

This extraordinary sameness in poets of such entirely different personal character is due principally to the limitations which ‘spiritual elevation’ in the academic sense imposes: these poets only wrote authentic poetry when off their guard. The sameness is accentuated by the nationalistic element: every poet wrote as an Englishman first, bound by his very use of the language to a policy of increasing the national heritage of song rather than to the development of a strictly personal idiom. He also wrote as a member of a class, the governing class. One of the last surviving rewards of the poet as a privileged member of the community was that, whatever his birth, by writing acceptable poetry he became a gentleman; even in the narrowly aristocratic eighteenth century this tradition obtained. (Even to-day, when literary culture is the only gentility possible to affect.)

Stephen Duck, the “Thresher Poet”, whose works pleased George II.’s Queen, was officially confirmed in his gentility by being presented with a country-living as a clergyman. Burns was, for a while at least, given the freedom of smart Edinburgh society and allowed to write familiar epistles to members of the aristocracy. Poetical ideas and poetical technique--the substance of poetical education, in fact--have always been class-institutions, and poets born from the labouring or shop-keeping classes have with very few exceptions tried to elevate themselves by borrowing ideas and techniques to the enjoyment of which they were not born. Even revolutionary ideas are, by a paradox, upper-class ideas, a rebound from excesses of poetical refinement. Burns’ romantic sympathy with the French Revolution in its earlier stages could be read as a sign of natural breeding, the gentlemanly radicalism of the literary _jeunesse_. The social gap between the crofters and the gentry was, moreover, not so wide a one in Scotland as in England; and Burns soon learned the trick of drawing-room writing. Keats, not being, like Burns or John Clare, an obvious example of peasant genius, or an aristocrat like Shelley, always had difficulty in discovering his temperamental biases. The son of a tradesman, he could not afford to be politically as radical as those inferior and superior to him in class; though he went with Leigh Hunt as far as he thought it safe. Blake was also a radical: one of the few Englishmen who dared walk about in London wearing a cap of Liberty. But he is a very rare instance of a poet who could afford not to affect a class-technique: for he was on intimate terms with the angels and wrote like an angel rather than like a gentleman. His radicalism was part of his religion and not a sentimentality as Wordsworth’s early radicalism was. If a man has complete identity with his convictions, then he is tough about them, he is not sentimental; if not, then his convictions are a sentimental weakness however strongly he feels about them. The Romantic Revivalists were all spoiled as revolutionaries by their gentility. Blake was in no sense a Romantic Revivalist. He was a seer, or a poet. He despised the gentry in religion, literature and painting equally. That is why there is little or nothing of Blake’s mature work that could be confused with that of any contemporary or previous writer. He did not forfeit his personality by submitting to any conventional medium; and he did not complain of the neglect of his poems by the greater reading public.

The sameness of poetry is likewise accentuated rather than diminished by the spirit of competition. Once there is a tacit or written critical agreement as to the historical form proper to the poetry of any period, all the poets of fashion or ‘taste’ vie with each other in approximating to the perfect period manner. In the eighteenth century such major poets as Pope and Shenstone were only to be distinguished from such minor ones as Ambrose Philips and Richard Graves by being more willing to polish away every vestige of personal eccentricity from their work. Period-monotony is further increased by imitation of the most successful ‘period’ poets. In the last century there were successively dozens of imitation Moores, Byrons, Wordsworths, Tennysons, Brownings, Swinburnes and Wildes; and dozens more who tried to synthesize the methods of these several inventors of slightly different styles. Among these, as we have seen, the several inventors themselves, who were all in search of a single period style.

All such monotony sprang from the necessity of having socially secure convictions. Poetry was to poets of the school-room tradition the instrument, the illustration of their convictions, whether (to take examples only from the nineteenth century) patriotic as with Campbell, moral as with Tupper, religious as with Aubrey de Vere, ‘philosophical’ as with Wordsworth and Whitman, social as with Moore, ‘artistic’ as with Poe and the pre-Raphaelites. Even the decadents at the end of last century were decadent from conviction rather than from wilfulness or inertia. Decadence introduced no variety. It merely substituted self-satisfied pessimism for self-satisfied optimism; and one nationalism for another by moving the poetical centre from London to Paris.

When Decadence decayed and was succeeded by the spurious healthiness of the country-rambler, the beer-drinker and the earlier patriotic soldier-poet, and this in turn broke down, the spirit of scepticism began seriously to invade poetry. It had found expression before in the poems of Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman; but with certain important conservative reservations in the former, while in the latter it was confused with the shy or aggressive anti-religiousness of the eighteen-nineties. Modern scepticism was of a different order. The conscious bravado of anti-social or anti-idealistic writing disappeared. The poet did not feel cut off from his fellow-men by the loss of his more bigoted convictions, for he could assume that an increasingly large section of the educated classes was in agreement with him. At the time of the Romantic Revival, though the debaucheries of Byron could be sympathetically discounted because of his rank, a confessed atheist like Shelley was not admitted into polite society: it was assumed that every reader at least professed allegiance to Christianity, however lax his private life. The modernist poet assumes that his readers owe no trite emotional allegiance to any religious or social or national institution, even that they have emerged from the combative stages of mere ‘doubt’ or ‘naughtiness’ and are organizing their lives more intellectually; that to them the consistent and humane atheism of Shelley, or the consistent and humane saintliness of Traherne or Blake is preferable to the vulgarly incongruous lives of Byron and Wilde, as reflected in their poetry. The school-room may still remain the citadel of convictions; and Byron and Wilde may be morally whitewashed because their poetry abounds in old-fashioned convictions. But the modernist poet does not write for the school-room: if for anything at all, for the university.

This refinement of conviction, this maturing of social purposiveness, contributes more than any other cause to the raising of the barriers of poetical monotony. The poet may admit spiritual elevation as one possible personal ‘tone’ of poetry and spiritual depression as another; or an evenness of spiritual temper or a rapid alternation between depression and exaltation--the poeticizing of bathos and anticlimax--as further alternatives. But poetry ceases to be the maintenance of a single idealistic tone; it has a less obvious, a more complicated consistency. It is a broader intellectual exercise than before; even at its most pedantic it is still an intellectual exercise.

The old world of poetry, however, is going on at the same time; the old institutions are still officially and indeed numerically predominant; though it is not too much to say that no single poet of any real distinction since the death of Charles Doughty believes fervently in them or even pays them homage. The lack of narrow school-room purposiveness shown by modernist poets is actually as offensive to the survivors of the aggressively ungodly school and their followers as to the true believers: the anthologies and poets’ corners in public periodicals are strictly censored both against abstruseness of conviction and against ungodliness. The public that enjoys the simple ruralities of W. H. Davies’:

A Rainbow and a Cuckoo! Lord! How rich and great the times are now!

is unaware that he has written even such naughty lines as:

Lord, I say nothing; I profess No faith in thee nor Christ thy Son:

in which he mildly idealizes Christ the Man, as opposed to Christ the God; still less of his modernism, which is a genuine modernism, though of rare occurrence in his recent work, as in the poem beginning:

I took my oath I would enquire Without affection, hate or wrath Into the death of Ada Wright. So help me God, I took that oath

and describing without reticence or sentimentality how the coroner’s jury condoned a child-murder, how the mother gave evidence:

It was a love-child, she explained, And laughed for our intelligence.

and how the emaciated corpse, that had but one eye shut and the other half-open, “seemed a knowing little child”. Though Mr. Davies consented to omit this poem from his _Collected Poems_, he wrote it, nevertheless; a poem that could not possibly have been written even at the end of last century.

The raising of the barriers of monotony by modernism has encouraged imitative or feeble poets, who in the eighteenth century would have been happy in formal submission to them, to adventure into all the new fields now opened to them with great audacity of subject and form. Some of these-poets are more self-confident than others, and hence call more attention to themselves; and the confusion of the modern poetic scene is increased by the failure of even the specialized poetry-reading public to distinguish genuine poetry like a not inconsiderable part of Messrs. Eliot, Cummings and Miss Sitwell from the spurious individuality of, say, Dr. William Carlos Williams. It is possible at once to recognize a writer like Mr. Harold Acton as a Sitwellite by his borrowed stage-properties, or Miss Cunard as an Eliotite in the same way. But Dr. Carlos Williams is not quite so clumsy. This is from a poem, _Struggle of Wings_:

... the string from the windowshade has a noose at the bottom, a noose? or a ring--bound with white cord, knotted around the circumference designedly in a design And all there is is won

And it is Inness on the meadows and fruit is yellow ripening in windows every minute growing brighter in the bulblight by the cabbages and spuds-- And all there is is won

What are black 4 A.M’s after all but black 4 A.M’s like anything else: a tree, a fork, a leaf, a pane of glass--? And all there is is won

A relic of old decency; a very personal friend And all there is is won

_Envoi_

Pic, your crows feed at your windowsill Asso, try and get near mine.... And all there is is won

This is obvious charlatanry: a synthetic modernist poetry composed of ingredients plainly imitative of those that go to make up the poems of more genuine writers, and yet not too closely resembling them. There is a mystic refrain such as T. S. Eliot has used, typographic nonconformity as in E. E. Cummings, a reference to modern painting--the divided word _Picasso_, which also suggests the verbal disintegration which appears more completely in James Joyce. Possibly the crows occur in an actual picture: possibly they refer to the black 4 A.M.’s. There is also the up-to-date mannerism of marking the poem “Incomplete” and publishing it with lacunae shown by dots enclosed in parentheses. There is a passing satiric reference to Philosophy in “Inness on the meadows”, called attention to by the modernist diction of “bulblight” and “spuds”. The pretended subject is the random thoughts that occur to a poet half awake and half asleep at 4 A.M. The realistic window cord gives the reader a false confidence that “And all there is is won” has some sense; whereas it is an unrelated phrase suggesting those that occur without discoverable sense in dreams. The poem continues:

Out of such drab trash as this by a metamorphosis bright as wallpaper or crayon or where the sun casts ray on ray on flowers in a dish, weave, weave for Poesy a gaudy sleeve a scarf, a cap and find him gloves white as the backs of Turtledoves....

This last, dangerously near enough to Edith Sitwell in the third line and in the last three lines, is an assumption of poetic awareness within the poem of the poem itself--another modernist mannerism. The ‘drab trash’ is carefully collected--in imitation of T. S. Eliot--to set off the ‘fine writing’ that follows. Not only Edith Sitwell but, in the rest of the poem, Milton’s nativity hymn, a popular song and a reference to oleochromes contribute. Dr. Williams’ early poetic travels are outlined on the dust-cover of his _Sour Grapes_:

The surer and sounder but not the less unusual handling of free verse by a contributor to the original Imagist anthology and a later member of the so-called “Others” school, who has already made a distinct place for himself in contemporary poetry.

his more recent ones in the first paragraph of a chapter of his _In the American Grain_:

Picasso (turning to look back, with a smile), Brague (brown cotton), Gertrude Stein (opening the doors of a cabinet of MSS.), Tzara (grinning), André Germain (blocking the door), Van der Pyl (speaking of St. Cloud) ... the Prince of Dahomi, Clive Bell (dressed); ... James and Nora Joyce (in a taxi at the Place de l’Étoile); McAlmon, Antheil Bryher, H.D. and dear Ezra (Pound) who took me to talk with Léger; and finally Adrienne Monnier--these were my six weeks in Paris.

To such a poetry and such an atmosphere who would not prefer an unassuming authentic piece of contemporary writing no more ‘new’ than ‘old’? Say, Mr. Prewett’s:

Seeing my love but lately come And unexpecting she should be found I trembled, I was dumb And fell upon the ground; Her only thus in distance to see Was to me pain so profound I fell down in an agony....

Free-lance modernists do not make ‘individuality’ their object: their object is to write each poem in the most fitting way. But the sum of their work has individuality because of their natural variousness; like the individuality of the handwriting of all independent-minded men or women, however clearly and conventionally they form their actual letters. The only legitimate use of the word ‘style’ in poetry is as the personal handwriting in which it is written; if it can be easily imitated or defined as a formula it should be immediately suspect to the poets themselves. To professional modernists individuality is the earnest of a varied social purposiveness. To pseudo-modernists individuality is the earnest of a narrow literary purposiveness. In this they are not dissimilar from those eighteenth-century poets whose sole object was to write correctly, to conform to the manner of the period. In practice this conforming individualism means an imitation, studiously concealed, merely of the eccentricities of poetry that is really individual.

‘Groups’ may spring up in the old style around any poet; but in general the free-lance modernist who had by accident become popular or notorious and still retained a sense of personal dignity would shrink from being made a ‘_cher maître_’ as a grotesque position for him to occupy in a literary scene that he can only take casually. Indeed, as soon as any imitation is made of his work, and his style by imitation becomes a formula of mannerisms, he may be even inclined to change them to preserve his integrity. It is not, as Mr. Philip Guedalla suggests, that there is no English equivalent for ‘_cher maître_’, but merely that the modern English poet good enough to be one does not take his poetry like that. A certain sifting and grading of personalities and groups, however, does occur where modernism is a professional conscience rather than a personal trait: the modernist poetry-producing world has the look of a complicated hierarchy. The complication is increased by the efforts of professional modernists to enrol free-lance modernists in their socially purposive movement, and of pseudo-modernists to enrol themselves in it by literary forgery.

In every modernist group the members are aware who is the Queen Bee and who are the drones of the _schwärmerei_. Eventually the parasitical members ambitious to become Queen Bees will desert to other hives and to other modes. They make a quick-change from one group to another, acquiring as they go a patchwork synthetic style that they hope to impose on general readers and critics as a large-scale exercise of originality, a contemporary grand manner. The aspirant has a much more difficult problem to face in the new poetic order than in the old. In the old it was sufficient for him to write well. Now he must not only write well, he must be original. A desperate hunt for originality ensues in which aspirants are driven for inspiration to foreign literatures, to old French, to eighteenth century quaintness, to Spanish, to Demotic Greek, to mediaeval Latin, to Chinese or Javanese or Aztec; to various low dialects--Bowery, Whitechapel, Chicago, journalese; to ancient religious writers, particularly the Early Fathers and Buddhists, and so on.

The contemporary poetic scene, then, appears to the interested but perplexed reader a chaotic conglomerate of free-lance originality or group originality; a restless multitude of types, imitation of types, antithesis and synthesis of types. Variety is the most characteristic general feature of contemporary poetry, and variety means quantity: it not only encourages poets themselves to experiment freely, it encourages a great many people who are not poets in literary competition. Although it was comparatively easier in periods where a single poetical type prevailed for people who were not poets to write poetry, there are undoubtedly more people who are not poets writing poetry at the present time than ever before, though proportionately fewer find publishers. Even when one has cut out of critical consideration the quantities of backward verse directly imitative of Keats or Tennyson or Oscar Wilde or Swinburne or Francis Thompson or Whitman; of ordinary adolescent verse of distinguishable male and female varieties; there still remains an enormous quantity of miscellaneous verse to be sorted. Criticism (even advanced criticism), reared for centuries on the faith of the technical and philosophical consistency of poetry (a faith continuously derived and revised from Aristotle), cannot cope with poetry in quantity; as it could a hundred years ago, when the possible varieties of poetical composition were countable on the fingers and the most daring were either imitations of Chaucer, Ossian or Spenser, or affectations of country simplicity or of childishness. Criticism in the simplest literary scenes has never been able to recognize who are the authentic contemporary poets and how much of each poet is authentic. To-day, having either fallen in arrear of its age or dashed ahead of its age into vague philosophical formulas, it is not even as sure as it once was who are the innovators of any particular type, and who are the copyists, or to what extent striking resemblances are attributable to unconscious contemporary sympathy; or, in the case of imitations of the Chinese or Japanese or American Indian, how close these imitations are to their originals.

The following are lines from the work of two poets, Donald Davidson and John Crowe Ransom, between whom a fairly conscious contemporary sympathy exists, without callow imitation on either side.

Here’s one Phineas Out for a walk, Tired of skulls And bones that talk....

There’s a palimpsest In a puff of spring, But Phineas looks At the blossoming, Transfigures road Into new corpuscles, Elucidates bush With a bound of muscles.

and

Now what can he want, The vagrant, the lout, Who leers in the parson’s face, Lolls with tongue out?

Nothing that you have, Men with a motor car; God keep you your high hats And fine things you are!

With a knot in his bosom And a bee in his brains, He goes full of pictures Around the flat lanes.

Even supposing a reader or a critic were able to make a just valuation of an existent sympathy between two particular contemporary poets: how is he to make a satisfactory definition of the relation between the work of either of these two poets, or both, and that of a poet in an entirely different walk of modernism, the work, for example, of Mr. Osbert Sitwell? The following is from Mr. Sitwell’s _English Gothic_:

The souls of bishops, shut in stone By masons, rest in quietude As flies in amber. They atone Each buzzing long-dead platitude.

Above, where flutter angel-wings Caught in the organ’s rolling loom, Hang in the air, like jugglers’ rings, Dim quatrefoils of coloured gloom.

Tall arches rise to imitate The jaws of Jonah’s whale. Up flows The chant. Thin spinsters sibilate Beneath a full-blown Gothic rose.

Could the reader or critic be expected to have the courage or presence of mind to say that mere contemporaneousness was an insufficient basis for making critical comparisons between poets; that Mr. Sitwell and Mr. Ransom or Mr. Sitwell and Mr. Davidson were so separated by locality, nationality and formative tradition as to belong, so to speak, to entirely different ‘periods’? Suppose that, the problem of Mr. Sitwell, Mr. Ransom and Mr. Davidson having been settled, a new element of confusion were introduced by quoting from Mr. T. S. Eliot’s ‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Service’ the following lines as being perplexingly similar to Mr. Sitwell’s _English Gothic_:

A painter of the Umbrian school Designed upon a gesso ground The nimbus of the Baptized God. The wilderness is cracked and browned

But through the water pale and thin Still shine the unoffending feet And there above the painter set The Father and the Paraclete

The sable presbyters approach The avenue of penitence; The young are red and pustular Clutching piaculative pence.

Suppose, it being possible to determine from the date of publication of the volumes in which these poems appeared the date of their writing and the degrees of intimacy between these two poets at the time of their respective writings--suppose these poems are set down as an example of contemporary sympathy? Especially as Mr. Eliot is a transplanted American now for a long time acclimatized to literary England? What, however, is to be said when we come upon lines in Mr. Eliot’s work which do not show him writing in a certain way out of contemporary sympathy with Mr. Osbert Sitwell, but writing simply and originally as Mr. Eliot? As in the following lines:

Webster was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin; And breastless creatures underground Leaned backward with a lipless grin ...

Donne, I suppose, was such another Who found no substitute for sense; To seize and clutch and penetrate, Expert beyond experience ...

Suppose we say, then, that Mr. Eliot is himself. He may, as a transplanted American, have moments of contemporary sympathy with modernist English poets, but he is, in the main, uniquely himself. But what if we are suddenly confronted, in the work of an American poet, Allen Tate, who has not been transplanted, with lines like the following from a poem called “Non Omnis Moriar”:

I ask you: Has the Singer sung The drear quintessence of the Song? John Ford knew more than I of death-- John Ford to death has passed along.

I ask you: Has the Singer said Wherefore his spirit is not dust? Marlowe went muttering to death When he had done with song and lust.

As the volume in which Mr. Eliot’s poem appeared was published in 1920 and as Mr. Tate’s poem was not printed until 1922 and then in a magazine, Mr. Eliot must be accorded priority rights in the manner in which both poems are written. Yet we know directly from Mr. Tate that he was writing in this manner long before he was aware that Mr. Eliot was also writing in this manner. Since to an American poet who has not been transplanted an American poet transplanted to England is as good as an English poet, the complicated situation now reads something like this: between Mr. Osbert Sitwell, an English poet and Mr. T. S. Eliot, an American poet transplanted to England, there exists a contemporary sympathy, stronger on Mr. Eliot’s side because he is the transplanted one; but Mr. Eliot’s contemporary sympathies with modernist English poets, shall we say, are only incidental in his work--he is, in the main, inimitably himself; yet not entirely so, for other poets have contemporary sympathies with him, which he cannot help, but which nevertheless detract from his inimitability; in fact, at least one American poet has had a contemporary sympathy with him as a modernist English poet (of whom he was not, at a time when the sympathy was strong, aware), not as a transplanted American poet or a resident American poet with whom a contemporary sympathy might have existed without detracting from the inimitability of either; finally, the situation is further complicated by the fact that a certain contemporary sympathy did exist at the time of the poem “Non Omnis Moriar”, between Mr. Tate and Mr. Davidson and Mr. Ransom, without, as it later appeared, detracting from the inimitability of any one of these in relation to any other--which makes an unconscious accidental contemporary sympathy more significant than a sympathy derived from conscious personal association. So the circle is tied, and so it might be tied over and over again in contemporary poetry without making the situation read more clearly.

It might, however, be made clearer than it is if bigoted inefficiency of criticism were replaced by an intelligent policy of laissez-faire; which would allow that a variety of modes may exist side by side in a period, having strong or slight dissimilarities and strong or slight correspondences with one another; that sometimes the dissimilarities can be explained as conscious disaffections or as the unconscious result of dissimilar personal background; that sometimes the correspondences can be explained as conscious affections or affectations or as the unconscious results of similar personal associations, a personal association being at times nothing more definite than a certain literary slant two poets may have caught from some common source of infection--Mr. Tate, without having read Wordsworth or his imitators, might as easily have caught the Wordsworth germ as the Eliot germ, had he happened to be constitutionally subject to infection from it.

The situation would be clearer still if many dissimilarities were left as unexplainable, except as facts of absolute personal eccentricity; and if many correspondences were left as unexplainable, except as facts of mysterious personal coincidence not to be accounted for in terms of causality or of excessive openness to infection from without. Some obvious correspondences must be explained, if only because they are easily explained, and because poetry in which too obvious correspondences occur is part of the clutter in the poetry of any time that can be immediately cleared away. The following complete poems are all by different authors:

The beech-leaves are silver For lack of the tree’s blood.

At your kiss my lips Become like the autumn beech-leaves.

An old willow with hollow branches Slowly swayed his few high bright tendrils And sang:

Love is a young green willow Shimmering at the bare wood’s edge.

As cool as the pale wet leaves of lily-of-the-valley She lay beside me in the dawn.

Among twenty snowy mountains The only moving thing Was the eye of the black bird

Richard Aldington, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens are the so-called authors of these poems. These might pass as legitimate instances of correspondence and not be suspect as parasitical inter-imitativeness, were any of the poems in themselves of separate poetic importance; were not all of these poems, and many more like them, closely dependent on one another--were they private individuals and not members of an institution; and were not the Imagist school, to which all of these poets at one time or another belonged, a notoriously self-advertising institution. These things being so, we are provoked to ask questions that we need not ask in the case of legitimate instances of correspondence. Such as: who was the inventor of the style of the first two pieces, Mr. Aldington or Mr. Williams? or yet H.D. or F. S. Flint? Is not Mr. Williams at least suspect for his later obvious imitation of T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Edith Sitwell? Is not Mr. Aldington at least suspect as the husband of H.D.? In the two last pieces who is responsible for the form? Who first thought of imitating the Japanese _hokku_ form? Or rather who first thought of imitating the French imitations of the _hokku_ form? Did Mr. Aldington suggest a slightly shorter poem to Mr. Stevens or Mr. Pound or did Mr. Pound suggest a slightly longer poem to Mr. Aldington, etc., or did Mr. Pound and Mr. Stevens and Mr. Aldington and Mr. Williams decide, as mutual pairs, to work as a school team, or did Mr. Williams and Mr. Stevens and Mr. Aldington and Mr. Pound pair off, as being by nationality more pairable--Mr. Pound, a transplanted American, counting as either English or French, as the need may be?... These are questions to concern the curious dustman, but not the plain reader, least of all the critic. The reader, even the critic, does not have to trouble to plot out a literary chart, to develop a carefully graded technical vocabulary. All that either of them needs is a simple and instinctive recognition of the real, which is easily discovered if all other personal or critical questions are brushed aside as irrelevant.

When modernist poetry or what, not so long ago, passed for modernist poetry, can reach the stage where the following:

PAPYRUS

Spring ... Too long ... Gongula ...

is seriously offered as a poem, there is some justification for the plain reader and orthodox critic who are frightened away from anything which may be labelled ‘modernist’ either in terms of condemnation or approbation. Who or what is Gongula? Is it a name of a person? of a town? of a musical instrument? Or is it the obsolete botanical word meaning ‘spores’? Or is it a mistake for Gongora, the Spanish poet from whom the word ‘gongorism’ is formed, meaning “an affected elegance of style, also called ‘cultism’?” And why “Papyrus”? Is the poem a fragment from a real papyrus? Or from an imaginary one? Or is it the poet’s thoughts about either a real or imaginary fragment? Or about spring too long because of the gongula of the papyrus-reeds? Rather than answer any of these questions and be driven to the shame-faced bluff of making much out of little, the common-sense reader retires to surer ground. Better, he thinks, presumably, that ten authentic poets should be left for posterity to discover than that one charlatan should be allowed to steal into the Temple of Fame. The plain reader objects to the idea of charlatanry in poetry more than he objects to the idea of stupidity, excess of learnedness, or honest inferiority: charlatanry being dishonest superiority. As the usual type of unorthodox critic is generally so superior himself that he either tolerates charlatanry because it is superior or snubs it because it is not superior enough; and as the usual type of orthodox critic is more equipped with prejudices than the plain reader, if only because his position forces him to know quantitatively more, and as he therefore has a less reliable instinct than the plain reader for determining what is genuine and what is not; the plain reader bears the full burden of challenging and unmasking charlatanry. The critic, of whatever type, is always over-cautious because his professional vanity is at stake in his judgement. The plain reader, because he is of a disorganized, unprofessional and unassisted majority, and therefore more easily imposed upon if too ingenuous, is only over-suspicious.

So cautious and suspicious, in fact, is the whole reading population, the critics and the readers, that a poet like Isaac Rosenberg, for instance, a young English Jew who was killed in France and whose poems were posthumously published, can pass them by altogether. Isaac Rosenberg was one of the few poets who might have served as a fair challenge to sham modernism. He had, one would say, everything to recommend him. His verse was irregular but not too irregular; his meaning was difficult but not too difficult; his references were not far-fetched; he knew his Bible well--a great recommendation to any public; and he died young and in battle. But he was not celebrated and for this reason: that the two editors of his posthumous volume, Mr. Bottomley and Mr. Binyon, both ‘safe’ poets, introduced him merely as a poet of promise killed in defence of his country: “the immaturities of style and taste are apparent on the surface”. The critics in England by 1922 had ceased to blow the trumpet over young poets of promise killed in the War--the reaction against war-poetry had set in. In America, however, because he was a Jew he was used as a pawn in literary politics; but his vogue was short-lived. The real reason why he was generally overlooked was that, in spite of falling into the friendship of the early Georgian Group and accepting their criticism of his work through loneliness, he was not classifiable as a member of a group, or yet, because of his quietness, as a sensational individual type. The following is a passage from his play _Moses_. A young Hebrew is speaking of Moses himself:

Yesterday as I lay nigh dead with toil Underneath the hurtling crane oiled with our blood Thinking to end all and let the crane crush me He came by and bore me into the shade: O, what a furnace roaring in his blood Thawed my congealed sinews and tingled my own Raging through me like a strong cordial. He spoke! Since yesterday Am I not larger grown? I’ve seen men hugely shapen in soul, Of such unhuman shaggy male turbulence They tower in foam miles from our neck-strained sight, And to their shop only heroes come; But all were cripples to this speed Constrained to the stables of flesh. I say there is a famine in ripe harvest When hungry giants come as guests: Come knead the hills and ocean into food, There is none for him. The streaming vigours of his blood erupting From his halt tongue are like an anger thrust Out of a madman’s piteous craving for A monstrous baulked perfection.

Such work as this had to pass as ‘promise’; work better than this will undoubtedly have to pass for a time entirely unnoticed; because variety itself, especially when it becomes a social programme, tends to harden into defined types, or groups, of variety. For an individual poet to achieve the smallest popular reputation to-day he must, indeed, have a certain ‘groupish’ quality, or, to put it differently, he must suggest a style capable of being imitated; or he must be a brilliant group-member or imitator. Otherwise he is likely, as one of the consequences of the diversification of poetic activity, to be lost to the literary news-sheets of every critical colour and not even to occur as a subject of the plain reader’s suspicion or of the critic’s caution: to exist, in fact, only unto himself. Which is not, if the poet appreciates the privilege of privacy, so bad a fate as it sounds. Never, indeed, has it been possible for a poet to remain unknown with so little discredit and dishonour as at the present time. The prima donna reputation acquired by Mr. Humbert Wolfe with work of the most crudely histrionic and imitative brilliance (his original comma-effects in _Kensington Gardens_ began it) should not only comfort the obscure poet but drive him further into his obscurity.