A survey of modernist poetry

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:

Keats’ early richness was affected:

Tennyson’s early cunning was affected:

Browning’s early ruggedness was affected:

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 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:

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:

which is fine writing, immediately followed by:

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:

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

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:

or A.E.’s:

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:

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:

and

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

and the next

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

and

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:

How pale indeed is Keats beside him:

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:

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:

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

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):

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

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:

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:

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:

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

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: