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

This objection to the lyric as an encourager of subjective excitement, of egoistic introspection, like the other objections already stated, is one of old standing. Goethe remarked that the subjectivity of the smaller poets was of no significance, but that they were interested in nothing really objective. But though this indictment of over-individualism has often been drawn, our own times are a fresh proof of its validity. If the revelation of personality unites men, the stress upon mere individuality separates them, and there are countless poets of the day who glory in their eccentric individualism without remembering that it is only through a richly developed personality that poetry gains any universal values. “Nothing in literature is so perishable as eccentricity, with regard to which each generation has its own requirements and its own standard of taste; and the critic who urges contemporary poets to make their work as individual as possible is deliberately inviting them to build their structures on sand instead of rock.” [Footnote: Edmond Holmes, What is Poetry, p. 68.] Every reader of contemporary poetry is aware that along with its exhilarating freshness and force there has been a display of singularity and of silly nudity both of body and mind. Too intimate confidences have been betrayed in the lyric confessional. It is a fine thing to see a Varsity eight take their dip in the river at the end of an afternoon’s spin. Those boys strip well. But there are middle-aged poets who strip very badly. Nature never intended them to play the role of Narcissus. Dickens wrote great novels in a room so hung with mirrors that he could watch himself in the act of composition. But that is not the best sort of writing-room for lyric poets, particularly in a decade when acute self-consciousness, race-consciousness and even coterie-consciousness are exploited for commercial purposes, and the “lutanists of October” are duly photographed at their desks.

5. Mere Technique

There is one other count in the old indictment of the lyric which is sure to be emphasized whenever any generation, like our own, shows a new technical curiosity about lyric forms. It is this: that mere technique will “carry” a lyric, even though thought, passion and imagination be lacking. This charge will inevitably be made from time to time, and not merely by the persons who naturally tend to stress the content-value of poetry as compared with its form-value. It was Stedman, who was peculiarly susceptible to the charm of varied lyric form, who remarked of some of Poe’s lyrics, “The libretto (i.e. the sense) is nothing, the score is all in all.” And it must be admitted that the “libretto” of “Ulalume,” for instance, is nearly or quite meaningless to many lovers of poetry who value the “score” very highly. In a period marked by enthusiasm for new experiments in versification, new feats of technique, the borderland between real conquests of novel territory and sheer nonsense verse becomes very hazy. The Spectra hoax, perpetrated so cleverly in 1916 by Mr. Ficke and Mr. Witter Bynner, fooled many of the elect. [Footnote: See Untermeyer’s New Era, etc., pp. 320-23.] I have never believed that Emerson meant to decry Poe when he referred to him as “the jingle-man.” Emerson’s memory for names was faulty, and he was trying to indicate the author of the

“tintinnabulation of the bells.”

That Poe was a prestidigitator with verse, and may be regarded solely with a view to his professional expertness, is surely no ground for disparaging him as a poet. But it is the kind of penalty which extraordinary technical expertness has to pay in all the arts. Many persons remember Paganini only as the violinist who could play upon a single string. Every “amplificolor imperii“—every widener of the bounds of the empire of poetry, like Vachel Lindsay with his experiments in chanted verse, Robert Frost with his subtle renderings of the cadences of actual speech, Miss Amy Lowell with her doctrine of “curves” and “returns” and polyphony—runs the risk of being regarded for a while as a technician and nothing more. Ultimately a finer balance is struck between the claims of form and content: the ideas of a poet, his total vision of life, his contribution to the thought as well as to the craftsmanship of his generation, are thrown into the scale. Victor Hugo is now seen to be something far other than the mere amazing lyric virtuoso of the Odes et Ballades of 1826. Walt Whitman ultimately gets judged as Walt Whitman, and not merely as the inventor of a new type of free verse in 1855. A rough justice is done at last, no doubt, but for a long time the cleverest and most original manipulators of words and tunes are likely to be judged by their virtuosity alone.

6. The Lines of Defence

The objections to lyric poetry which have just been rehearsed are of varying degrees of validity. They have been mentioned here because they still affect, more or less, the judgment of the general public as it endeavors to estimate the value of the contemporary lyric. I have little confidence in the taste of professed admirers of poetry who can find no pleasure in contemporary verse, and still less confidence in the taste of our contemporaries whose delight in the “new era” has made them deaf to the great poetic voices of the past. I am sorry for the traditionalist who cannot enjoy Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson and Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg. He is, in my opinion, in a parlous state. But the state of the young rebel who cannot enjoy “Lycidas” and “The Progress of Poesy” and the “Ode to Dejection” is worse than parlous. It is hopeless.

It is not for him, therefore, that these final paragraphs are written, but rather for those lovers of poetry who recognize that it transcends all purely moralistic and utilitarian, as it does all historical and technical considerations,—that it lifts the reader into a serene air where beauty and truth abide, while the perplexed generations of men appear and disappear. Sidney and Campion and Daniel pleaded its cause for the Elizabethans, Coleridge and Wordsworth and Shelley defended it against the Georgian Philistines, Carlyle, Newman and Arnold championed it through every era of Victorian materialism. In the twentieth century, critics like Mackail and A. C. Bradley and Rhys, poets like Newbolt and Drinkwater and Masefield—to say nothing of living poets and critics among our own countrymen—have spoken out for poetry with a knowledge, a sympathy and an eloquence unsurpassed in any previous epoch. The direct “Defence of Poetry” may safely be left to such men as these.

I have chosen, rather, the line of indirect vindication of poetry, and particularly of the lyric, which has been attempted in this book. We have seen that the same laws are perpetually at work in poetry as in all the other arts; that we have to do with the transmission of a certain kind of feeling through a certain medium; that the imagination remoulds the material proffered by the senses, and brings into order the confused and broken thoughts of the mind, until it presents the eternal aspect of things through words that dance to music. We have seen that the study of poetry leads us back to the psychic life of primitive races, to the origins of language and of society, and to the underlying spirit of institutions and nationalities, so that even a fragment of surviving lyric verse may be recognized as a part of those unifying and dividing forces that make up the life of the world. We have found poetry, furthermore, to be the great personal mode of literary expression, a revelation of noble personality as well as base, and that this personal mode of expression has continued to hold its own in the modern world. The folk-epic is gone, the art-epic has been outstripped by prose fiction, and the drama needs a theatre. But the lyric needs only a poet, who can compose in any of its myriad forms. No one who knows contemporary literature will deny that the lyric is now interpreting the finer spirit of science, the drift of social progress, and above all, the instincts of personal emotion. Through it to-day, as never before in the history of civilization, the heart of a man can reach the heart of mankind. It is inconceivable that the lyric will not grow still more significant with time, freighted more and more deeply with thought and passion and touched with a richer and more magical beauty. Some appreciation of it, no matter how inadequate, should be a part of the spiritual possessions of every civilized man.’

“Die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen;

Dein Sinn ist zu, dein Herz ist todt!

Auf! bade, Sch�ler, unverdrossen

Die ird’sche Brust im Morgenrothl”

NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS

I add here some suggestions to teachers who may wish to use this book in the classroom. In connection with each chapter I have indicated the more important discussions of the special topic. There is also some additional illustrative material, and I have indicated a few hints for classroom exercises, following methods which have proved helpful in my own experience as a teacher.

I have tried to keep in mind the needs of two kinds of college courses in poetry. One of them is the general introductory course, which usually begins with the lyric rather than with the epic or the drama, and which utilizes some such collection as the Golden Treasury or the Oxford Book of English Verse. Any such collection of standard verse, or any of the anthologies of recent poetry, like those selected by Miss Jessie B. Rittenhouse or Mr. W. S. Braithwaite, should be constantly in use in the classroom as furnishing concrete illustration of the principles discussed in books like mine.

The other kind of course which I have had in mind is the one dealing with the works of a single poet. Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, are among the poets most frequently chosen for this sort of study. I have found it an advantage to carry on the discussion of the general principles of poetic imagination and expression in connection with the close textual study of the complete work of any one poet. It is hoped that this book may prove helpful for such a purpose.