Poetry Insurgent and Resurgent

BY O. W. FIRKINS

HENRY JAMES, the beloved recreant, became an English citizen for the sake of the right to say ‘we’ after a victory. Without copying his bold step or war-like motive, I shall use ‘we’ in this essay to comprise both Englishmen and Americans, and what is said of the English applies largely, though not strictly or evenly, to my own countrymen.

Some weeks ago, I remarked in conversation that the English tongue, like the English mind, in its daily use and wont, was unpoetical, and that this circumstance was a hardship and a drawback to our poetry. My friend observed that with Spanish, his mothertongue, this was not the case: Spanish in daily use is half-poetry, even as certain voices, in common speech, are halfmusic. In English two evils result: we have to go twice as far to get our poetry, and our poetry, when reached, is twice as far from our hearts, our habits, our simple ease and cheer. A dilemma ensues: either our verse, obedient to the ideals of poetry, maintains a high, unbroken level of ornament and distinction, at the cost of a troubling estrangement; or, obedient to the temper of the language, it achieves ease and fellowship at the price of marked inequalities, frequent descents, and a liberal inclusion of the rugged and commonplace.

My thesis is that, during the last two centuries, English poetry has accepted a principle which is Spanish or Italian rather than English—the principle of uninterrupted beauty and distinction; that, while we still want poetry, we do not want that kind of poetry; and that the unrest, the discontent, and the revolt which have unsettled the poetical composition of the last fifty years are aimed at the replacement of English poetry on its primitive and rightful English basis. The law which governs our poetry today is the acquired and alien law of constancy in beauty with variations and inequalities in life; the ancient and native Iaw for English verse is constancy in vitality with interruptions or disparities in charm.

The principle is not confined to Britain: it is the basis of primitive poetry everywhere; we may surmise that the Greeks, conforming to a like expectation, found in Homer a vivid and spirited novelist, in the Iliad a sublimated Treasure Island, in the Odyssey a glorified Robinson Crusoe. But the mark of the tendency is clear on our earlier and larger poets. Chaucer, with his ingratiating ease and his cheerful shedding of responsibility, flutters from grave to gay, from plainness to ornament, with the unconcern of a bird for whom the ownership of wings has made the world a plane. Shakespeare recalls his own Prince Hal in his adaptation to all levels. He can say in one place, —

and, thirty lines farther on, can talk in this fashion: —

This is no shift from scene to scene or from mouth to mouth; it is the same mouth in the same scene, and the instance is not untypical either of Shakespeare or of his brother Elizabethans. Even Spenser, though a sumptuous and opulent writer, is the opposite of finical.

The evil began, I think, with Milton. That studious and meditative mind, in the bright seclusion of its youthful scholarship and the dark seclusion of its uncherished age, found leisure to perfect and mature its English until every word took on the potency and pregnancy that words possess in an oath or a spell. Later on, in the mideighteenth century, came those literary illuminators of missals, Collins and Gray. Then came that tender effulgence of the Georgian awakening, the dearest, though not the highest, moment in our literature, when English became for a few years almost a Romance tongue, and when, in Shelley and Keats at least, spontaneity became for once, not the adversary, but the associate and ally, of the principle of undeviating beauty.

In this world the exquisite is the momentary. The shades of the prisonhouse closed around that heaven in which the infancy of the nineteenth century had found a Wordsworthian cradle. And then came Tennyson, to whose diversity my concision is unjust — Tennyson the gifted, the regal, to whose magic and whose sovereignty we may perhaps largely refer the impasse in which English poetry at this crucial moment finds itself. He took up the work of Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley: of their outcry he made his ritual; of their impulse he made his law. The belt of style was tightened round the shapely figure of the gasping but submissive Muse. Matthew Arnold, a man of high poetical ideals, with which his practice occasionally caught up, wrote a verse which on the whole confirms the æsthetic stringency of Tennyson. The tendency was prolonged, if not augmented, in the mingled nectar and narcotic of Rossetti, and in Swinburne’s unearthly effect of league on league of dancing phosphorescence. How strongly the influence survives may be proved by a reference to such Americans as George Sterling, William Rose Benét, Brian Hooker, Alexander Percy, Grace Hazard Conkling, Olive Tilford Dargan, and Josephine Peabody Marks.

Meanwhile the race and its poetry drift apart. Books of verse find authors, publishers, critics: the reader alone is coy. This reluctance transcends the proletariat or bourgeoisie of letters; it attacks the educated, the cultivated, the lovers of beauty, the lovers of literature, in a sense the lovers of poetry itself. I love poetry if the proneness of lines to burrow and nest in my memory be an index of that love; yet for my own will or weal I would not read one twentieth, one fiftieth, part of the matter which I consume in the penance of reviewership. I would not willingly read even the poetry that I respect and applaud. If this be set down to the peevishness of satiety, let me ask any reader if, in that baptism in Castaly with which no man of culture would dispense, he would not in all candor prefer sprinkling to immersion. The reason is not dark. The dean of American letters has hinted, in words which I paraphrase, that poetry is an interspersion, even an aspersion, in the normal life of man. Perusal means unbroken poetical sensation. Why should I, who doubt if actual living ever yielded me five minutes of unqualified and consecutive poetical experience, demand that sensation by the hour, when the vehicle is literature? For me poetry dots life; I could wish that it dotted literature also.

I cannot read poetry long with comfort unless it be mixed with other elements. I adapt myself to the Shakespearean drama, because Shakespeare, good fcllow that he was and is, allows me so often to forget the poetry. But modern verse-drama is scantily read, in spite of the premium offered by the presence of a story in action. In this favored field, where drama might have expected to preside at the resurrection of poetry, poetry officiates at the interment of drama. ' ’T is a very excellent piece of work,’ said that incisive judge of arts and letters, Christopher Sly; ‘would ’t were done.’ Even narrative poetry is respectfully forsaken. Our lads are unresponsive to Scott, and the poetic treasure of Paradise Lost is deposited in a safe of which posterity has mislaid the combination.

How far this incapacity is peculiar to our race, I have no leisure to discuss. It is not improbable that the intensity of our labor, the insalubrity of our climate, the opacity of our senses, the terrible omnipresence of that deathin-life which is known as organization, may have sapped our power of continuous receptivity. Nor shall I ask how far the defect is confined to our era. It seems probable enough that the vast expansion of business and of science, two forces which in their ripeness and complexity are churlish to that poetry with which their infancy was sociable, may have impaired a sensibility which brightened life for our ancestors. It is probably true, as Lowell suggested, that the language has lost its docility to the tutelage of verse. Words lose their poetic values in daily speech, and the restoration of this forfeit virtue in the hour of demand becomes increasingly difficult. Types of English unfriendly to poetry leave their finger-marks on the words that poetry must use — newspaper English with its resonant vacuity, technical English with the Libyan monotony of its waterless and featureless expanse, statutory English, the legal sentence, symbolic in its length and dreariness of that other object of the same name to which its contents so often warningly point. The outcome is natural enough; the poet is tempted to recast the refractory language, and in the recast it becomes a foreign tongue.

But even while the coil was tightening round poetry, protest and revolt could not be quieted. There is one not inconsiderable section of poetry, comprising the dialect poem, the humorous poem, the military poem, and the adventure poem, which has remained intractable to the æsthetic yoke. This type, which reverts to the mediæval ballads, if not to Beowulf, has been possibly the lustiest and healthiest section of English poetry since the departure of Shakespeare and the advent of Milton. ‘Horatius’, of bridge-keeping fame, is neither so high nor so fine as ‘A Dream of Fair Women,’ but it is firmer-pulsed and warmer-blooded. ‘Danny Deever’ is less refined but more racial than ‘Lamia’ or ‘Isabella’ or even the ‘Ode to Melancholy.’ The debt we owe to sheer dialect for the maintenance of robuster ideals of poetry is considerable. Burns was a loosening, if not a liberating, influence. The Muse, who had grown ladylike with Gray and Collins, in her scamperings over gorse and heather with Robert Burns put on freckles, which her resumption of veil and parasol in the ensuing century never quite removed from her expressive face.

The Biglow Papers, published in the crucial forties and sixties in our own country, proved the capacity of dialect to set forth lofty purpose and vigorous thought, and to skim lightly up and down the long scale that divides the grotesque from the sublime. That problem of rising, sinking, and rising again with ease, which is well-nigh insoluble for Miltonic and Tennysonian verse, is solved by dialect with curious deftness and dispatch. Dialect can entertain that rudeness which is often a half-virtue without falling into that cheapness which is universally a sin. Its part in poetry is that of an elevator in a building, which, keeping its headquarters in the basement, makes itself in succession contiguous to all levels. If it be asked why its universal adoption should not lead us out of all our difficulties, the answer is simply that the virtue of dialect is occasional; on becoming standard it would lose its freedom. You cannot keep house in an elevator.

Many things in our day have exalted the muscular and manly lyric, the lyric of furrow, shaft, and trench. There were Bret Harte’s Californian narratives, to which Eugene Field’s later experiments were related as treble to baritone; there were John Hay’s few but widely read Pike County Ballads; there was the fiery onset of Mr. Kipling’s troopers before which the routed public made way in unconditional surrender; and, still later, the thronging arrows that sang and glinted in Mr. Chesterton’s battle-shaken verse. But, useful as these poems were in keeping alive the tradition of an unshackled and adventurous poetry, they could not solve the major problem. They constituted an enclosure, a bounded plot of verse, subject to its peculiar customs, and the freedom of their methods influenced the stricter poetry hardly more than the waiving of the dress-suit in the entertainments of the Bronx impairs its obligation on Fifth Avenue. The higher and prouder verse had to reform itself from within, and I ask you to follow with me a few steps in its self-renovation.

The first place in the record belongs to Wordsworth’s plea, enforced by precept and example, for a poetic diction which should reflect the language of actual men when that language was swayed by emotion. The theory had its infirmities, and Wordsworth, in whom, as everybody knows, the genius and the prophet made common house with the simpleton and the prig, was clumsy both as exponent and illustrator of its virtues. His specimens sometimes justified, more often caricatured, his theory, and new methods in his later poems impeached the soundness of his earlier doctrine. An enemy or satirist, wanting my own reverence for Wordsworth, might declare that the brayings of his ponderous and Latinized maturity were intended to drown out the bleatings of his youth. I content myself with the remark that his retreat had all the poignancy of retractation.

Wordsworth, with his great name and sound intent, accomplished little for the cause; far more was achieved by the headstrong impulse of that dauntless gladiator, Robert Browning. The service did not come from the eccentric and acrobatic Browning, and it found no sustenance in his crabbedness, his obscurities, his verbosities, and his circumlocutions. It was the sane and normal Browning, the Browning of ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘Andrea Del Sarto,’ who served us stoutly by the demonstration that poetry, without abandoning its final reserves of elevation and distinction, might be generously inclusive, both in the range of its topic and allusion and the varied graduation of its tone. This was true help, and simplified the problem.

The next person to be dealt with is Whitman. That curious being was a sort of Krishna, — or perhaps only a Krishna Mulvaney, — and the homage which one element of our public pays to his godship may be correlated with that devotion which a less lettered section offers on the shrine of Mrs. Eddy. Some injustice was done him in his lifetime, and a compunctious posterity has been increasingly liberal of expiations. In the conflict between himself and public opinion, Whitman incurred rather than achieved a victory, and we have complied with military usage by paying him indemnity ever since. In my judgment Whitman’s positive contribution to the movement has been meagre. No doubt his peculiarities and his reputation, acting in concert, have been negatively helpful in giving a powerful jolt or concussion to the old narrowly limited and stubbornly intrenched conception of poetry. But we must bear in mind that Whitman’s innovations are referable less to the breakdown of the tradition before his powers and demands than to the breakdown of his capacities before the strength of its requirements. Whitman went barefoot, if the metaphor be forgivable, not from that conscientious and deliberate preference for bare feet which is the index of self-respecting boyhood in America, but because he could not get his foot into the shoe. He shirked metre, and the shirker cannot help us. I grant him scattered inspirations, but no competence; and no man can strike a new and lasting balance between inspiration and skill who is not at the same time skillful and inspired. Whitman’s bulkiness, his prattle, his laxity, the piling-up of formless lists, like family furniture in the mover’s van (the least reputable and seemly objects in the ménage putting on a dismaying prominence in the portentous load), all these things are signs of an inaptness for leadership in a literary reform.

Thomas Hardy’s recklessness in the support of freedom took half the value from his courage. A born artist, in a mood of recalcitrancy toward art, at the very moment that he vivified his poetry with energy and passion, he allowed it to become almost churlish in its refusal of amenities. In our advanced epoch poetry admits rawnesses that careful prose would hardly tolerate, as advanced women listen composedly to utterances that are rather disconcerting to men. Mr. Hardy’s verse repoints the lesson that poetry, in doffing the purple, need not and should not put on the wolfskin.

George Meredith, with his rich poetical endowment, his fearlessness, and his serene command of the impossible, might have seemed the destined renovator of our verse; but unluckily he outran the tradition in the very points of diction and ornament in which the tradition itself was peccant. By contrast with his remoteness our Tennysons and Rossettis grew neighborly and familiar, as a European impresses us like a compatriot when we meet him in the presence of an Asiatic.

Meredith, then, hardly figures in the return to Lebanon, and Hardy’s aid is checkered if not dubious. A third Englishman, Mr. John Masefield, their fellow in scorn of convention and plenitude of temperament, outdid them in efficiency of service. I do not include in this service the violent and ribald diction which supplied his early narratives with a flaring advertisement for which he atoned In the double penalty of narrow blame and shallow praise. This was an incidental error. He was right in his perception that the specific for our poetic ills is the shift of emphasis from beauty to life, — I would personally add without effacement of beauty, — and a man of his origins must not be too roughly chidden if he put the headquarters of vitality in the bar-room and the prize-ring. He helped us by showing that the sorry and homely face of common life is to be ameliorated, not by the application of salves or unguents to the surface, but by the lighting-up of its rude features through the infusion of new bloodwarmth from the heart. I add in frankness that my approval of the tendency does not embrace all its illustrations.

To recross the Atlantic (I regret in these critical times to expose the civilian reader so often in a single hour to the risks of ocean travel; I can only say that the fragile bottom in which they sail contains, so far as the skipper knows, no explosives, and nothing, he fears, which rigorous German standards would classify as food-stuffs), — to recross the Atlantic, two American poets, so unlike that their names are probably now coupled for the first time, have done strange and daring things with the most patrician of English measures — blank verse. They have stripped that august metre of its trappings and its trammels; they have warped and wrung its feet; they have replaced its ancient oratorio harmonies with a rude and hearty music not unrefreshing to the pampered ear; they have pared diction, in an emphatic sense, to the quick, and have shown how the language of poetry can largely recover, through passion, the dignity it has lost through homeliness. The first of the two men is our foremost academician, W. D. Howells, whose recent blank-verse dialogues, like ‘The Father and Mother’ and ‘The Mother,’ were offered to the half-reluctance of a drowsy public, incredulous of the possibility that a man who wrote placid verse in his twenties and thirties should make his seventies vibrant by original and moving poetry. The second is Mr. Robert Frost, a younger writer, with more drama and more incisiveness, who in his remarkable North, of Boston, undertook, not without success, the surgery of our inflated literature. In his latest volume, Mountain Interval, he has sometimes reminded us that the surgeon is related to the executioner.

From Spoon River, on the other hand, with its institution of a postmortem on a civic scale, I think we draw no solid help. I do not complain of Mr. Masters for serving poetry to me in an earthen jug; my complaint is that in Spoon River at least, in pouring the precious liquid from the Venetian chalice into the earthen jug, he has spilled the poetry. I would not deny to Mr. Masters the honor of enrollment in the great uprising which tends to renovate the conduct and the aims of poetry; and the free-verse people in general must be credited with enlistment, if not with achievement, in the cause. Their post on the battle-front has been unhappily chosen. They are a sort of Roumania, cleaving to the right side, as sides go, in their late entrance into the enlarging conflict, but unwise in the choice of an antagonist, and likely to incur humiliations which may prove to be a stumbling-block to their allies.

While I would on no account deter any man from writing any kind of verse which he can make agreeable to other men, I do not think that metre has been a prime offender in the transactions which subject poetry to attack. The prime offenders are diction, tone, and subject. Metre in English is a good creature, a decent body, exempt from aristocratic predilections; the very existence of the word ‘doggerel’ connotes its friendly openness to all kinds of homespun and hearty affiliations.

The career of free verse has been marked by a diverting irony. Adopted in France as the fine extremity of a long process of refined æsthetic evolution, and transmitted with due solemnity to elect recipients in England and America, it was acclaimed in our simple-minded country as a release from artistic toil and a signal to expectant myriads. We hailed the tardy fulfilment of the Biblical prediction, ‘Then shall the lame man [the man limping in his prosodic feet] leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing.’ Everyone could now write verse, and Parnassus was safe for democracy. We surpassed our redoubtable precursor, Molière’s M. Jourdain, in the discovery that we had all been talking poetry all our lives.

I shall not linger on the various follies which grimace and chuckle on the edges of the particolored movement. In revolutionary or rebellious times the fools are perennially active; they want another chance. The leaders are of another class, and my main point is that even efforts which are puerile as outputs are respectable as symptoms. They afford an illustration of the reach and scope of the movement for the restoration of our displaced poetry to its proper basis.

Let me sum up the situation briefly. During the last two centuries a gap has arisen between the poetry that we want and need and the poetry that is supplied by our artists. The true English note in verse is heartiness, lustihood, marrow; the note of our recent poetry has been fineness, rarity, distinction. I would not say that our masters of finish have actually wanted life, but they have so far embosomed and secreted that life as to place it beyond instant and general reach. The watch has continued to tick, but the massiveness of the gold casing has made its beats barely audible to the quick ear. Now, the return from cunning to nature is by no means infrequent in literature, but the movement was embarrassed in our case by the fact that the daily speech, perhaps the hourly thought, of a stock inherently poetic, was leaning more and more toward the pedestrian. We found ourselves in the dilemma of a man obliged to choose between a costly and luxurious habit which cramped his breath and impeded his movements, and a plain workingsuit too homely to be presentable. The public attitude bred a further complication. Reform could be final only when the changing practice of poets was met half-way by the changing taste of readers. A division had grown up between the taste of the public and its appetite, and our tongues hankered for piquancies which we felt to be innutritious to our systems.

These points are aggravations of a problem which at this hour is not fully solved or even assured of solution. Its mere existence, however, testifies to the strength and soundness of the enduring English instinct, and imparts to the history of poetry in our day that dramatic vigor which its solution may hand on to the poetry itself.