A Study of Poetry, Bliss Perry [books to read to improve english .txt] 📗

word or note which a brave man utters in

the hour of danger and stern resolve, or when his cause is failing and

he is going to wounds or death or is overtaken by some other evil, and

at every such crisis meets fortune with calmness and endurance; and

another which may be used by him in times of peace and freedom of

action, when there is no pressure of necessity—expressive of entreaty

or persuasion, of prayer to God, or instruction of man, or again, of

willingness to listen to persuasion or entreaty and advice; and which

represents him when he has accomplished his aim, not carried away by

success, but acting moderately and wisely, and acquiescing in the event.

These two harmonies I ask you to leave; the strain of necessity and the

strain of freedom, the strain of the unfortunate and the strain of the

fortunate, the strain of courage, and the strain of temperance; these,

I say, leave.”

So runs the famous argument for “the natural rhythms of a manly life,” and conversely, the contention that “the absence of grace and rhythm and harmony is closely allied to an evil character.” While it is true that the basis for this argument has been modified by our abandonment of the Greek aesthetic theories of “inspiration” and “imitation,” Plato’s moralistic objection to lyric effeminacy and lyric naturalism is widely shared by many of our contemporaries. They do not find the “New Poetry,” lovely as it often is, altogether “manly.” They find on the contrary that some of it is what Plato calls “dissolute,” i.e. dissolving or relaxing the fibres of the will, like certain Russian dance-music. I asked an American composer the other day: “Is there anything at all in the old distinction between secular and sacred music?” “Certainly,” he replied; “secular music excites, sacred music exalts.” If this distinction is sound, it is plain that much of the New Poetry aims at excitement of the senses for its own sake—or in Plato’s words, at “letting them rule, instead of ruling them as they ought to be ruled.” Or, to use the severe words of a contemporary critic: “They bid us be all eye, no mind; all sense, no thought; all chance, all confusion, no order, no organization, no fabric of the reason.”

However widely we may be inclined to differ with such moralistic judgments as these, it remains true that plenty of idealists hold them, and it is the idealists, rather than the followers of the senses, who have kept the love of poetry alive in our modern world.

 

2. A Rationalistic Objection

But the Philistines, as well as the Platonists, have an indictment to bring against modern verse, and particularly against the lyric. They find it useless and out of date. Macaulay’s essay on Milton (1825) is one of the classic expressions of “Caledonian” rationalism:

 

“We think that as civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily

declines…. Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his

purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive

and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms.

Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of

a half-civilized people is poetical…. In proportion as men know more

and think more, they look less at individuals, and more at classes. They

therefore make better theories and worse poems…. In an enlightened age

there will be much intelligence, much science, much philosophy,

abundance of just classification and subtle analysis, abundance of wit

and eloquence, abundance of verses and even of good ones, but little

poetry.” In the essay on Dryden (1828) Macaulay renews the charge:

“Poetry requires not an examining but a believing freedom of mind…. As

knowledge is extended and as the reason develops itself, the imitative

arts decay.”

Even Macaulay, however, is a less pungent and amusing advocate of rationalism than Thomas Love Peacock in The Four Ages of Poetry. [Footnote: Reprinted in A. S. Cook’s edition of Shelley’s Defense of Poetry. Boston, 1891.]

A few sentences must suffice:

 

“A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community. He

lives in the days that are past. His ideas, thoughts, feelings,

associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and

exploded superstitions. The march of his intellect is like that of a

crab, backward…. The highest inspirations of poetry are resolvable

into three ingredients: the rant of unregulated passion, the whining of

exaggerated feeling, and the cant of factitious sentiment; and can

therefore serve only to ripen a splendid lunatic like Alexander, a

puling driveler like Werter, or a morbid dreamer like Wordsworth. It can

never make a philosopher, nor a statesman, nor in any class of life a

useful or rational man. It cannot claim the slightest share in any one

of the comforts and utilities of life, of which we have witnessed so

many and so rapid advances…. We may easily conceive that the day is

not distant when the degraded state of every species of poetry will be

as generally recognized as that of dramatic poetry has long been; and

this not from any decrease either of intellectual power or intellectual

acquisition, but because intellectual power and intellectual acquisition

have turned themselves into other and better channels, and have

abandoned the cultivation and the fate of poetry to the degenerate fry

of modern rimesters, and their Olympic judges, the magazine critics, who

continue to debate and promulgate oracles about poetry as if it were

still what it was in the Homeric age, the all-in-all of intellectual

progression, and as if there were no such things in existence as

mathematicians, historians, politicians, and political economists, who

have built into the upper air of intelligence a pyramid, from the summit

of which they see the modern Parnassus far beneath them, and knowing how

small a place it occupies in the comprehensiveness of their prospect,

smile at the little ambition and the circumscribed perceptions with

which the drivelers and mountebanks upon it are contending for the

poetical palm and the critical chair.”

No one really knows whether Peacock was wholly serious in this diatribe, but inasmuch as it produced Shelley’s Defense of Poetry “as an antidote”—as Shelley said—we should be grateful for it. Both Peacock and Macaulay wrote nearly a century ago, but their statements as to the uselessness of poetry, as compared with the value of intellectual exertion in other fields, is wholly in the spirit of twentieth-century rationalism. Few readers of this book may hold that doctrine, but they will meet it on every side; and they will need all they can remember of Sidney and Shelley and George Woodberry “as an antidote.”

 

3. An Aesthetic Objection

In Aristotle’s well-known definition of Tragedy in the fifth section of the Poetics, there is one clause, and perhaps only one, which has been accepted without debate. “A Tragedy, then, is an artistic imitation of an action that is serious, complete in itself, and of an adequate magnitude.” Does a lyric possess “an adequate magnitude?” As the embodiment of a single aspect of feeling, and therefore necessarily brief, the lyric certainly lacks “mass.” As an object for aesthetic contemplation, is the average lyric too small to afford the highest and most permanent pleasure? “A long poem,” remarks A. C. Bradley in his Oxford Lectures on Poetry, [Footnote: London, 1909. The passage cited is from the chapter on “The Long Poem in the Age of Wordsworth.”] “requires imaginative powers superfluous in a short one, and it would be easy to show that it admits of strictly poetic effects of the highest value which the mere brevity of a short one excludes.” Surely the lyric, like the short story, cannot see life steadily and whole. It reflects, as we have seen, a single situation or desire. “Short swallow-flights of song”; piping “as the linnet sings”; have not the lyric poets themselves confessed this inherent shortcoming of their art in a thousand similes? Does not a book of lyrics often seem like a plantation of carefully tended little trees, rather than a forest? The most ardent collector of butterflies is aware that he is hunting only butterflies and not big game. Mr. John Gould Fletcher’s Japanese Prints is a collection of the daintiest lyric fragments, lovely as a butterfly’s wing. But do such lyrics lack “adequate magnitude”?

It seems to the present writer that this old objection is a real one, and that it is illustrated afresh by contemporary poetry, but that it is not so much an argument against the lyric as such, as it is an explanation of the ineffectiveness of certain lyric poems. This defect is not primarily that they lack “magnitude,” but rather that they lack an adequate basis in our emotional adjustment to the fact or situation upon which they turn. The reader is not prepared for the effect which they convey. The art of the drama was defined by the younger Dumas as the art of preparation. Now the lyrics which are most effective in primarily dramatic compositions, let us say the songs in “Pippa Passes” or Ariel’s songs in The Tempest, are those where the train of emotional association or contrast has been carefully laid and is waiting to be touched off. So it is with the markedly lyrical passages in narrative verse—say the close of “Sohrab and Rustum.” When a French actress sings the “Marseillaise” to a theatre audience in war-time, or Sir Harry Lauder, dressed in kilts, sings to a Scottish-born audience about “the bonny purple heather,” or a marching regiment strikes up “Dixie,” the actual song is only the release of a mood already stimulated. But when one comes upon an isolated lyric printed as a “filler” at the bottom of a magazine page, there is no train of emotional association whatever. There is no lyric mood waiting to respond to a “lyric cry.” To overcome this obstacle, Walter Page and other magazine editors, a score of years ago, made the experiment of printing all the verse together, instead of scattering it according to the exigencies of the “make-up.” Miss Monroe’s Poetry, Contemporary Verse, and the other periodicals devoted exclusively to poetry, easily avoid this handicap of intruding prose. One turns their pages as he turns leaves of music until he finds some composition in accordance with his mood of the moment. The long poem or the drama creates an undertone of feeling in which the lyrical mood may easily come to its own, based and reinforced as it is by the larger poetical structure. The isolated magazine lyric, on the other hand, is like one swallow trying to make a summer. Even the lyrics collected in anthologies are often “mutually repellent particles,” requiring through their very brevity and lack of relation with one another, a perpetual re-focussing of the attention, a constant re-creation of lyric atmosphere. These conditions have been emphasized, during the last decade, by that very variety of technical experimentation, that increased range and individualism of lyric effort, which have renewed the interest in American poetry.

 

4. Subjectivity as a Curse

I have often thought of a conversation with Samuel Asbury, a dozen years ago, about a friend of ours, a young Southern poet of distinct promise, who had just died. Like many Southern verse-writers of his generation, he had lived and written under the inspiration of Poe. Asbury surprised me by the almost bitter remark that Poe’s influence had been a blight upon the younger Southern poets, inasmuch as it had tended to over-subjectivity, to morbid sensibility, and to a preoccupation with purely personal emotions. He argued, as he has since done so courageously in his Texas Nativist, [Footnote: Published by the author at College Station, Texas.] that more objective forms of poetry, particularly epic and dramatic handling of local and historic American material, was far healthier stuff for a poet to work