Back to Poetry

I

HAS poetry become too theory-ridden? Has it fallen too much into the hands of social theorists and demagogues, on the one side, of snobs and pedants and schoolmasters on the other?

It is a curious and interesting and perhaps disturbing fact that for the past decade, during which there has been a revival of excitement about poetry comparable to that of the decade 1912-1922, so much of this excitement has been theoretic and critical, so little of it in any ‘good’ sense popular, in any ‘popular’ sense creative. The shadow of theory, of dogma, of debate, has hung over it; and if the poetry has certainly been there, it has been there, all too often, as the building, or the steeple, is there behind the scaffold: one takes the steeple for granted, perhaps, but what one actually sees is the scaffolding. And we may be pardoned, in that situation, if we tend to find the steeple impressive in inverse ratio to the scaffolding’s elaborateness. Where there is so much supporting theory, so conspicuous and intricate an apparatus for care and repair, so much mere critical activity, in short, one not unnaturally begins to suspect there may be something wrong with the poetry.

Critical formulations, or crystallizations, tend to occur, it may be, at the ends of creative movements in the arts, rather than at their beginnings: with minor exceptions, they seem seldom to advance with them pari passu; and it might be argued that they almost invariably arise, therefore, when creative energies are low. The poem does not come out of the theory: the theory comes out of the poem. And the same Zeitgeist which has by degrees silenced or enfeebled the more vital and violent and generous elements in poetry, at a given moment, will afterwards govern, in the shape of dogma, the critical movement which follows. Common sense will probably be the cry — it almost always is. The theorist isn’t a poet, or is at best a poet manqué, and what he wants, of course, is a poetry without nonsense, a poetry which can be achieved by formula, a poetry which can be guaranteed not to offend. The emphasis will all be on technique, on dexterity, on decorum, on good taste: in fact, on all the negative and more arid virtues; and the resulting poetry will naturally be a poetry made safe for the intelligent but unimaginative. It will be quite nice and dry, and comparatively free from sentimentality; but it will also probably be either dull, or precious, or both.

And we have been witnessing, I think, in the past decade, an attempt of this sort to dragoon poetry out of its freedom, its natural wildness (and let us not forget that it has a natural wildness) into a dead level of mere conventional excellence and suitability. These poor young poets of our time — what a wretched novitiate we have given them! For first of all, in the mass of theory with which they were confronted, was the sociological question, the sociological demand. What about that social contract, into which they had entered, poor devils, in the mere act of getting themselves born? Would they be willing to take sides? Would they choose the right side, and lend their art to it in the shape of propaganda? Had they at all considered the social function of the poet, or come to any conclusion as to its precise psychological nature, or necessity? Was the poet, for example, essential, anyway? Or was he in fact already outmoded, a mere social luxury? Had they read Marx, Freud, Pfister, Jung, Rank? . . .

The pressure was great, both in England and in America; it came from all sides; it was unremitting. Textbooks of literary history were suddenly written (to be almost as suddenly out of date) from the viewpoint of class warfare; anthologies of ‘proletarian’ verse appeared; almost without exception, in the ‘left,’ and ‘little,’ and advanced magazines, the social problem was pushed forward, the æsthetic neglected or ignored. Small wonder, then, that these young poets were at first bewildered, and then hypnotized, by a social current so powerful and omnipresent, or that at last, fascinated by the reassuring pluralism of its motion, so many of them dived in. Besides, any motion or movement — according to Hegel — was simply a ‘manifestation of the dialectic,’ and dialectic was all the rage. All the bright critics, whether social or literary, were talking about it, weren’t they? Well, then! — And so they became sociological poets, poets with a New Outlook, a social consciousness, poets with a burden. And good heavens, how they kept reminding us of that precious burden! And how they seemed to say, by the very tone of their poetry, that it was indeed a very great deal they were doing for us, a great deal they were giving up!

For observe, almost everywhere in the poetry of this group, from early Auden and Spender and Macneice and Day Lewis down to the least and latest of their American imitators, the weary

valedictory and valetudinarian note, the seemingly offhand but careful flatness of the language — the voices are the voices of weary and excessively refined young men, anxious to avoid any overstatement, whether overt or implied; and anxious above all to avoid the ‘poetic,’ if only because to be poetic was somehow to be bourgeois. Says Mr. Auden: —

Or again: —

Or again: —

To which Mr. Macneice adds, as if in refrain: —

And further: —

From the tired elegiac note of these English poets it is only a step to Mr. John Crowe Ransom’s

Or Mr. Robert Penn Warren’s

Or Mr. Allen Tate’s

Or his

We are the eyelids of defeated caves.

And once more, in the work of Miss Muriel Rukeyser, we find the same elegiac note exactly: —

And the same flat ' social ‘ cataloguing: —

The unanimity of theme and tone, in fact, is astonishing; and the instances could easily be multiplied. Anything to avoid the poetic, anything to avoid the bourgeois! For these are really, one

would almost say, frightened young people: they have been frozen by fear into a kind of chattering abnegation of self, an abject abrogation of the rights of the individual. So fearful indeed have they become — it is hardly an exaggeration to say — of this shadow of social pressure, whether it take the form of war, revolution, change, order, or disorder, that they seem no longer to have either the will or the courage to look into themselves, calmly and steadily, in order that they may know and separate themselves; nor, conversely, have they the ability to see that social shadow any more clearly. Instead, alarmed, and as if electrolyzed by the powerful magnetic pluralisms that everywhere surround them, they appear only too hurriedly willing to give up, to give in, even to surrendering, in the interests of class and fashion, that passionate sense of identity which has always been the most preciously guarded possession of the poet — indeed, his birthright. For these poets no longer, alas, seem to have an ‘ I ‘ — that would be presuming too much. Instead, they have only, and with properly becoming modesty, the anonymously social and multicellular ’we.’ It is no longer ‘I, the person, did this, saw this, felt this, knew this’; it is now ‘we the people.’ . . . Yeats alone, among contemporary poets, dared to retain the firstpersonal pronoun; alone continued to give it dignity and significance.

II

And of course, one must say at once, such an attitude is tantamount to poetic suicide. For surely the basis of all poetic activity, its sine qua non, its very essence, lies in the individual’s ability, and need, to isolate for feeling and contemplation the relation ‘I: World.’ That, in fact, is the begin-all-end-all business of the poet’s life. It is the most private and precious, as it is also the most primitive, of adventures, the adventure which underlies all others: for until he knows himself, and his twinned worlds, the inner and outer, how can he possibly know the worlds, inner or outer, of another? No: uncorrupted by temporal or social or fashionable or ephemeral distractions and disguises, he must first of all keep steady and intense and pure the essentially lyric nature of his relation to his own world and moment. It is unquestionably, but inevitably and rightly, the extreme of individualism; but it is the individualism from which ultimately all other human values are derived. Nor is there anything forced or self-conscious about it, or deliberate. The great poets are naturally shameless fellows. They go, without ostentation, even without awareness of it as anything in the least unusual, beyond, above, and below, moral or social fashions, and arc quite simply indifferent to them. They see the world perpetually as both old and new at once: in its complexity they never forget its simplicity; they celebrate its universals, and are therefore dateless; and precisely because they are themselves the most private and individualist of people, by articulating this extreme privacy of awareness they become themselves universals. The proper logical sequence is not ‘we, the people’ — that is to invoke at once what Henry Adams called the ‘degradation of the democratic dogma’; it is, on the contrary, and dynamically, ‘I, the people.'

And it is this virtue, this all-nourishing taproot integrity, which the sociological poets, like all fashion-following poets, have blindly thrown away. Their positions are honest enough; and their statements are honest; but unfortunately neither position nor statement is poetically honest — they have compromised where compromise is both unforgivable and fatal, namely with poetry itself. The poet cannot write, of set purpose, for a group or movement: he can only write for himself, and for that possible group in the future of which he is himself perhaps the prototype. Otherwise, he finds himself, willy-nilly, confined to the writing of what is rightly called a ‘poetry of exclusion.’ Certain subjects will be taboo, certain others will be considered his proper material. In the case of the sociological poet, this will involve a rigid and sterile sentimentality about the ‘common’ man as against the bourgeois or privileged, with a natural selection of the appropriate or correct properties — which are usually in practice both dull and false. At all costs, he must avoid (I quote Mr. Geoffrey Grigson, editor of New Verse) ‘that poetic inflation, which follows when a poet mistakes the product of the conflicts in himself for the gift, inspired in him, mysteriously, by some outside agent.’ Was there ever so complete a psychological misunderstanding? Notice especially the emphasis on the ‘outside agent’: for these poets, nothing must come from inside — the subjective must be run from like the very devil; and the poor ego, with its conflicts — that actual fons et origo of everything, absolutely everything — is set up as a sort of anathema or antichrist. No, the poet must be driven ‘outward on to natural facts and forms’; he must be encouraged to ‘observe well’ and to be a ‘good reporter’; and above all, room must be left for the ‘reason’ and the ‘intellectual faculties.’ . . .

Obviously this insistence on the objective method, with the Augustan virtues of reason and common sense, and ‘room for the intellectual faculties,’would have pleased Dryden, as it would also have pleased Johnson. Obviously, too, the result, like the theory, is essentially antipoetic — for everywhere in this poetry the emphasis is on manipulatory dexterity, on ingenuity, on cerebral trick and clever word-play, on a dry manner, in short, which prefers the safer ambush of irony and satire to the more dangerous ‘open’ warfare which is involved when the poet faces the world more directly, more instinctively, more emotionally. And perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, the word ‘poetic’ has become, for these poets and critics, quite frankly a term of opprobrium. That a poem should be simple, sensuous, and passionate — passionate, above all things! — is for them not merely inconceivable, it is disgusting. To betray feelings in a poem, to run the risk of being charged with sentimentality — oh no, anything but that. And so a little cynicism must be injected; or a little irony, like so much precautionary iodine; and if the taste is bitter, that won’t matter, for at all events we shall have avoided vulgarity.

However, to be quite fair, it is not the sociological poets alone who are to blame for this curious and regrettable reversal: the pedant-poets, the poetcritics — and there has been, significantly, an extraordinary number of these in the past decade — are just as much at fault. These earnest theoreticians of poetry — these scholiasts — subtle eyebrow-combers of style, calligraphic textcombers — have worked just as zealously to bring about a ‘poetry of exclusion ‘; and if not for the same reasons, at any rate in pretty much the same direction. These are the intellectuals, the æsthetes, for whom a poem ‘should not mean, but be.’ The poem, it would seem, must be conceived of as a detached æsthetic object, hung in the void, which has been shaped quite without feeling, exists by itself, and makes no statement: no statement, that is, but an æsthetic one. But just how it is supposed to work, this epistemological miracle, this process of poetic ‘being’ without ‘meaning,’ and just how it is that the most supremely articulate statement of which man is capable (and that is what poetry is) can exist without meaning, are nowhere made clear. If poetry were a pure nonsense, or gibberish, that would be a different matter. But it is not a pure nonsense— though nonsense plays a valuable part in it, as Cammaerts and others have shown; it is, on the contrary, a supremely articulate statement; it is, in fact, and in essence, man’s language; and therefore one is driven inescapably to the conclusion that a poem cannot possibly be considered as a mere detached æsthetic object, but must, instead, be considered functionally and vitally as a psychological and æsthetic correlative. In the last analysis, it is nothing whatever but an objectification (by articulation) of feelings and beliefs. Its only being is in its meaning. And meaning, we may therefore say (by which we intend total meaning, with all the affective colorations and distortions), is its function. . . . Exactly, of course, as it is the function of language.

III

But if this is so; and if we can say, despite all these contemporary snobbisms, that the more meaning (affective as well as conceptual) poetry has, the healthier it will be; and if we can go still further and say that the greatest poetry has always been that which, whether formally perfect or not, has been deepest and widest, and most prodigal, in understanding: then it must follow that our present poetry is badly in need of liberation. What a juiceless and joyless and loveless thing it has become — poetry, too, the most generous and lovely of the arts of mankind! How labored in its careful flatnesses, its dry avoidances, its tuneless euphemisms, its frigid and gingerly decorums! How false and affected even in its occasional violences! Good heavens, what are we thinking of— are we going to let the critics bully us into this, into leaving the world out of our poetry, in exchange for a mere guarantee of good breeding, an assurance of good taste? And who are these arbiters of taste, anyway, and who gave them their yardsticks? Shall we listen to Mr. Cleanth Brooks, for example, when he tells us, in Modern Poetry and the Tradition, that the only poetry which achieves what Arnold called ‘high seriousness’ is the poetry of wit? Or when he tries to persuade us that in urging a deliberate return to the seventeenth-century ‘ metaphysical’ style Messrs. Tate, Ransom, and others, have brought about the third, and greatest, critical revolution in the history of English poetry? That is a schoolmaster’s vision, with a vengeance; and alas, it is all too typical of the ungenerous, because emotionally undernourished, theorizing of our school of scholiasts. And what it really represents — let us be bold enough to say it — is that sort of decay in taste which accompanies a decline in poetic energies, and which then organizes itself in defense, quite naturally, of the lesser and more arid virtues of poetry: the jejune precisions of artifice and formalism, the snug enclosures of wit and irony, the antiseptic caustics of satire. Let them call it by whatever names they like, or disguise it as they will, it will bring about again, as it has brought about before, a withering of the poet’s function; if only because the very concept of that function is so belittling.

The truth is that a wholehearted romantic revival is much overdue; and it is the poets who must themselves bring it to pass. They must throw the critics and schoolmasters out of the window, neck and crop, and the sociologists as well; and then themselves reëstablish poetry where it belongs — not in the margins of a textbook, but as coterminous with our awareness of the world. It is in the nature of English poetry to be romantic, — it has never at its best been anything else, — so let us again have it romantic. That need not prevent it from thinking — it never has. But for goodness’ sake let us have back as well a few blistering sunrises and peculiar sunsets, a few fierce loves and melodramatic despairs — our private loves and terrors, like the grass blade, the sun, and the unexploded atom, will still be in fashion when the social cleavages and surfaces of our day, with all their ephemeral lumber, will have been forgotten. Let us be reckless, lavish, generous, afraid of no extremes and no simplicities — surely it is better to be fervidly baroque, a Swinburne, for example, than to be a snob: the cult of carefulness has gone far enough. Is not poetry an affirmation, even when it is fullest of despair, or apparently most nihilistic — and then most of all when it is tragic? We need more of that taproot sort of affirmation, a blood-filled affirmation deeply rooted in the world — we need it now more than ever. Let the poet therefore first of all rediscover himself. If he will do this, the rest will follow. Already there are signs of what may be to come, in the brilliantly imaginative poems of Mr. Dylan Thomas, a young Englishman with a genius for wordmagic, a genuine and outrageous gift-ofthe-gab, and in the richly framed psychological delvings and shapings of a young American, Mr. Delmore Schwartz. Mr. Thomas is violent and vivid, as a poet should be; he is a chameleon for colors, a word-spout, full of mad nonsense and humors, prodigal of affects (sic) — if his meanings too often escape us, nevertheless he can be read with joy for the shape and shine alone. Here he is, from his new book, The World I Breathe: —

And again: —

And again: —

Mr. Schwartz is not so easy to quote from — he prefers to work in long form, he is a careful and accurate psychologist, and makes perhaps fewer concessions to the more obviously sensuous graces of poetry than he need; but for subtlety, richness, and brilliance his ‘ Coriolanus’ (In Dreams Begin Responsibilities) is the most exciting long poem in more than a decade. One must go back to The Waste Land, or Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Comedian as the Letter C,’ for anything comparable to it either in scope or in virtuosity. These two poets are a promise, as much as a fulfillment— they take us back to poetry again, and that is something to be grateful for. But we need more than this, and we need it of every sort — if necessary we must break down the categories and invent new ones. In short, what we want to see is the poet once more standing, as he did in the Elizabethan age, naturally and vigorously at the centre of the world.