English Poetry Today

 

BY K. K. KAUL

 

I

 

Poetry has got itself into sad trouble. And we may blame Mr. I. A. Richards for the part he has played in that error–in forcing poetry to act the in the administration of municipal politics. He said that its aims and achievements were finally to the judged by their moral value and that the poet’s stature be assessed in terms of social normality.

 

This utilitarianism, this puritanism, this philistinism, raised its voice at a dangerous moment. The war-generation had said their say about the war and the world built out of its splinters and gummed with the peace-treaty. A new generation, horrified, and defrauded of opportunity for careers, has seen the only remedy in more and more politics. That was why Mr. Richards’ theories had such a vogue. Poets put themselves to school with the young Fabians, the Labour Party, and the Communist Party; and they turned their school-books into indignant verse. It was all a frightful responsibility. Being a poet was no joke. It meant delivering handbills, taking part in the miseries of the proletariat, and then to put those miseries into metre.

 

But the poor are always with us; and poetry, by becoming a district visitor, has been ineffectual in making a change. The poets have disproved Mr. Richards’ contention that a poet is sane and sober citizen raised to the “n-th” degree. In his sane and sober moments the poet is no saner or soberer than anybody else. It is only when he is a poet that he is different. Then he is indifferent. That is the paradox of art. When it sets out with a purpose, it usually fails. When it is mad, a-moral, irresponsible, it so excites humanity that they set up new standards of conduct, new social and political goals.

 

There is a great difference between the two activities. The just, the self-conscious one, is what results from utilitarian control. The second, the conscious one, is the articulation of a free fantasy leaping out of the ranks. It is out of fashion today. Poets who go on like that are either called to order, or ignored as mere escapists returning to the art-for-art’s-sake nineties.

 

Modern poetry became hard, with edges and structure, and with a bold, protruding skeleton of idea. The poet was no longer content to lull his listener; he would shock him, jolt him into attention; he would force him to use his mind as he read. Hence a diction which met with opposition because it was not “poetic diction”–the sort that had become customary. Hence a complicated syntax, technical terms, positively embarassing riches of concrete words, mysteries of the individual’s mind, excursion into ideas that were radical, a probing into conscious or sub-conscious byways of emotion, a generation of socialist poets, concern with the folkway up and down, also a commendable frankness about the art of love, the institution of marriage and the distribution of wealth.

 

For about ten to eighteen years English poetry was dominated by T. S. Eliot. It is so no longer. Eliot served both as  “fashioner” and “seer”, His “Prufrock” exploded in the literary world like a depth charge. His was the poetry of frustration, fitting a post-war attitude. The achievement of Eliot is that of a major poet (only when he writes in English and not French). He set poetry across the frontiers into country. He is sublimely shown the tragic state of man as “le nourrisson des grandes vulgarisations.” He faced the facts–and so Gravin Ewart wrote of him: –

 

He gave us a voice, strengthened each limb,

Set us a few mental exercises

And left us to our own devices.

 

But today the warble even of Sweeney’s nightingales is lost in the roar of nitroglycerine, and Charles Madge wrote: “A successful poem does not call a halt. It gives the order to march”–this is the expression of literary communism–a sufficient prelude to an “apologia” for the union of poetry and politics. Madge is too good a poet to be demagogue. In “New country” he invokes Lenin because of

 

“The cold voice

That spoke beyond Time’s passions, that expelled

All the half treasons of the mind in doubt.”

 

He is, in fact, the voice of the spiritual revolutionary. Stephen Spender has done a notable service by insisting that poetry must come before, and not after, politics. In the struggles of the proletariat, he finds magnificent material for poetry.

 

Oh young men, Oh young comrades

It is too late now to stay in those houses

Your fathers built where they built you to build to breed

money on money

 

Consider his life which was valueless

In terms of employment, hotel ledgers, news files:

Consider; only one bullet in ten thousand kills a man.

 

He has made “simple and direct satire possible again.”

 

Cecil Day Lewis has developed a contemporary metaphysic of rare suppleness. Mass- disturbances stir his imagination while threatening his cherished individualism, and hence a conflict which informs much of the poetry of today. It is from him and Auden that the temper of the revolutionary spirit is adopted. Spender’s virtue is lyrical simplicity, as Day Lewis’s poetical argument, and Auden’s “exciting ambiguity”.

 

See scandal praying with her sharp knees up,

And virtue stood at weeping cross,

And courage to his leaking ship appointed,

Slim Truth dismissed without a character,

And gaga Falsehood highly recommended.

–(Auden)

 

Louis MacNeice is too conscious, and has a belated sort of intensity;

 

Our freedom as free lances,

Advances towards its end;

The earth compels, upon it

Sonnets and birds, descend;

And soon, my friends,

We shall have no time for dances.

 

George Barkar has a sophisticated style and tends to cause a strained effect even when the theme is “The Death of Yeats.”

 

Give up the ghost that all men fear,

The spirit of life that gives meat the shivers,

O, my fine feathery friend, give me your hand.

I am the ghost of a ghost that was never here.

I know the place for those without lives.

 

He is self-consciously clever.

 

It is in W. H. Auden that we have a crystallisation of the spiritual anarchy of the war years, of the helpless apathy of the post-war decade. Others like Edgar Foxall, and W. Plomer, and Rex Warner are vital enough to escape the need for strained verbal effects. Still others like Derek Clifford and Whistler* have feeling that deepens into passion, and to perceptions beautifully expressed.

 

In this war, the “clear-cut partisanship” of Auden, Spender, Eliot and MacNeice, has become a practical impossibility. So the Apocalyptic Schools giving us “certain permanent clinical value for the human race.” They tend to derive from Pound, Eliot, Freud and the surrealists. So Dylan Thomas “is exercising our specific human function, which is to write poetry–” He rings a note which is highly original, a rare union of vigour and deftness, precision and flexibility, imaginative grasp and clarity of detail.

 

Writes Dylan Thomas:

 

Sigh long, day cold, lie shorn,

Cast high, stunned on gilled stone; sly scissors ground in frost

Clack through the thicket of strength, love hewn in pillars drops

With carved bird, Saint and Sun, the wrack-spiked maiden mouth

Lops, as a bush plumed with flames, the rant of the fierce eye,

Clips short the gesture of breath.

Die in red feathers when the flying heaven’s cut,

And roll with the knocked earth;

Lie dry, rest robbed, my breast,

You have kicked from a dark den, leaped up the whinnying light,

And dug your grave in my breast.

 

Such lines, the result of conquered inhibitions, have an astonishing facility compared, to the emotional values of the Auden group.

 

Other vigorous thinkers of this group are J. F. Hendry, Henry Treece** and Nicholas Moore.

 

J. F. Hendry writes

 

Now imagination floats, a weed, on waters vacancy.

Faces of women, lit with conscience past or future

Of men, gone ...................

Flowers have a girl’s irrelevance, and mind is no prescience.

and again:

Cast in a dice of bones I see the geese of Europe

Gabble in skeleton jigsaw, and their haltered anger

Scream a shark-teeth frost through splintering earth and lips.

 

And N. Moore;

 

“In a cortege from palace to cottage

The people carry the twisted branches,

And the conqueror blasts his fire and fury

Over the too hospitable heads of the dead;

From the yew I see your tears hang like a thread.

 

A lyrical undertone pervades their work and a dramatic touch intensifies them. They have an art of making even the most casual description an adventure in excitement. Others like Anne Ridler1, Herbert Read2, Richard Church3, James Forsith, David Gasoyne, Alun Lewis, Lurie Lee, Vernon Watkins4 and Micheal Roberts, show singleness of purpose seldom encountered in our fluid time. All of them are innocent of echo, with the uniqueness that comes of personal genius. The following illustrative extracts from these poets may be considered:

                         

                        Take the eye to the bud. Love

                        the spring fact, not the traditions of spring.

                        Take the eye to the spur-bud of the beech.

                        the green minutiae of birch.

                        the flopped fleur-de-lys of the chestnut tree;

                        and enrich the field of facts we have.

 

                        Take back this time of slowing the stopping clock.

                        The clock is stopped.

                        Take back your idle talk of peace

                        and work, war on disease, and work on the rock

–James Forsyth

 

                        Incomprehensible–

                        O Master–fate and mystery

                        And message and long-promised

                        Revelation! Murmur of the leaves

                        of  Life’s prolific tree in the dark haze

                        Uncomprehending. But to understand

                        Is to endure, withstand the withering blight

                        of  Winter night’s long desperation. War,

                        Confusion, till at the dense core

                        of this existence all the spirit’s force

                        Becomes acceptance of blind eyes

                        To see no more. Then they may see at last;

And all they see their vision sanctifies

–David Gascoyne

 

only to wake to the loneliness of the deserted and the agony

of silence and the mockery of my desire’s trembling mirage?

                        Oh my love!

Who like the sunlight

                        Can strike and blind and parch.

–All Lewis                   

                        This world, this comfortable meadow.

                        gay with surprise and treasure,

                        is common now with harvests of despair;

                        and mouths eager to sing,

                        to taste the many flowers of love,

                        open to tongues of bullets

                        and moan, their shattered palates on the ground.

–Laurie Lee     

                       

                        Power is built on fear and empty bellies;

                        Between the rough hills of gabbro and the cold sea

                        The gulls scream, squabbling for a poor harvest,

                        Between the factory hooter and the snub-nosed bullet,

                        Under the shadow of the guns, the corn ripens,

                        And folly cannot die, but cannot grow for ever              

–M. Roberts

 

II

 

            In America, the syncopated rhythms of Vachel Lindsay, broke with the mute tradition of the merely printed poem. He made a good deal of noise and is still notable for the success which his poetry achieves in the direction of vocalism. Vachel Lindsay writes:

 

                        What will you, trading frogs, do on a day

                        When Armageddon thunders thro the land;

                        When each sad patriot rises, mad with shame

                        His ballot or his musket in his hand?

 

                        I am unjust, but I can strive for justice.

                        My life’s unkind, but I can vote for kindness.

                        I, the unloving, say life should be lovely.

                        I, that am blind, cry out against my blindness.

                        Come, let us vote against our human nature,

                        Crying to God in all the polling places

                        To heal our everlasting sinfulness

                        And make us sages with transfigured faces.

 

            Carl Sandburg, known as “the Chicago Poet”, is the best representative of those who have dealt in lusty terms with butchers and steel workers the odour of a great city, and the sprawl of an appalling civilisation.

 

                        I speak of new cities and new people.

                        I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.

                        I  tell you yesterday is wind gone down, A sun dropped in the west

                        I tell you there is nothing in the world only an ocean of tomorrows,

                        A sky of tomorrows.

 

                        Lay me on an anvil, O God!

                        Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar

                        Let me pry loose old walls;

                        Let me lift and loosen old foundations.

                        Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through

blue nights into white stars. 

 

His other side is a delicate lyric side.

 

Give me hunger,

O, you gods, that sit and give

The world its orders.

Give me hunger, pain and want,

Shut me out with shame and failure

From your doors of gold and fame,

Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

 

The fog comes on little cat feet

It sits looking

Over harbour and city

On silent haunches and then moves on.

 

This exquisite and brutal poet, liberated poetry from the lisping tradition.

 

The tone of E. Lee Masters was critical. He was savage about society. He shows the bitterness and irony of civilisation. He writes: -

 

Out of me unworthy and unknown

The vibrations of deathless music;

With malice toward none, with charity for all.

Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,

And the beneficent face of a nation

Shining with justice and truth.

 

But what think you gnaws at my husband’s heart?

The face of what I was, the face of what he made me!

These are driving him to the place where I lie.

In death, therefore, I am avenged.

 

E. A. Rabinson used verse as a means of presenting character. He too, was radical in that he loaded his lines with ideas. He writes:

 

No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies

To rift the fiery night that is in your eyes:

But there, where western glooms are gathering,

The dark will end the dark, if anything;

God slays himself with every leaf that flies,

And hell is more than half of paradise,

 

A thousand golden sheaves were lying there,

Shining and still, but not for long to stay–

As if a thousand girls with golden hair

Might rise from where they slept and go away.

 

Robert Frost is more than “a local poet.” He showed a mystical gift like W. B. Yeats, with ability also in sombre employment of symbols, like “A. E.,” to express the most subtle ideas.

 

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

is what to make of a diminished thing.

 

“H. D.” worked mostly on Greek materials. Amy Lowell, like Hopkins, achieved a sense of magnitude and time that is amazing:

 

The white mares of the moon are all standing on their hind-legs

Pawing at the green porcelain doors of the remote heavens,

Fly, mares!

Strain your utmost

Scatter the milky dust of stars,

or the tiger sun will leap upon you and destroy you

with one lick of his vermilion tongue

 

Ezra Pound has individuality and vision, a balance not seen in contemporary poetry. His ‘Cantos’ tend to be archetypal–a prolonged present. His poetry will remain a “superior amusement”.

 

Beautiful, tragical faces-

Ye that were whole, and are so sunken;

And, O ye vile, ye that might have been loved,

That are so sodden and drunken, who hath forgotten you?

 

Tree you are,

Moss you are,

You are violets with wind above them,

A child–so high–you are,

And all this is folly to the world.

 

Then there are the restrained and finished lines, sometimes rhymed, of Edna Millay, Lola Ridge and Elinor Wylie:

 

The anguish of the world is on my tongue.

My bowl is filled to the brim with it; there is more than I can eat.

Happy are the toothless old and the toothless young,

that cannot rend this meat.                                            

–Edna St. V. Millay

 

I love those spirits

that men stand off and point at,

or shudder and. hood up their souls–

those ruined ones,

where liberty has lodged an hour

And passed like flame,

Bursting asunder the too small house.

–Lola Ridge

 

Better to see your cheek grown sallow

And your hair grown gray, so soon, so soon,

Than to forget to hallo, hallo,

After the milk-white hounds of the moon.

–Elinor Wylie

 

Sara Teasdale is a singer of exquisite music, dimmed by tinselly cleverness:

 

I am the pool of gold

When sunset burns and dies–

You are my deepening skies;

Give me your stars to hold.

 

Marianne Moore and E. E. Cummings play variations on “The Waste Land”  theme.

 

It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing

but you cannot stand in the middle of this:

the sea has nothing to give but a well-excavated grave.

 

The sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.

There are others beside you who have worn that look–

Whose expression is no longer a protest; the fish no longer investigate them

for their bones have not lasted.

–Marianne Moore

 

There is something revivifying, something restorative, in the work of Louise Driscoll and William Griffith. 5 The latter writes:

 

Somehow life leaves one stranded

on shores too near or far,

Hitching, for ever hitching,

Ships–shallops to a star.

 

John O’ Hara in Poems of Sappho showed a “positive triumph” as George Sterling said. Florence Wilkinson and J. Rillenhouse6 were an immense force in the onward march of poetry. A. Crapsey, after Emily Dickinson, was another tragedy in American poetry. The following is from Crapsey:


These be

Three silent things:

The falling snow–the hour

Before the dawn–the mouth of one

Just dead.

 

Just now,

out of the strange

Still dusk–as strange, as still–

A white moth flew. Why am I grown

So cold?

 

Louis Ulermeyer, W. Bynner7, G. H. Conkling8, J. Auslander9, G. Hazard, R. Jeffer10,  A. D. Ficke, O. Johns11, and J. Oppenheim–have Whitman sonority, a Biblical music and a new message of brotherhood.

 

You don’t sweat to struggle free,

Work in rags and rotting breeches–

Puppy, have a laugh at me

Digging in the ditches!

–L. Ulermeyer

 

They set the slave free, striking off his chains–

Then he was as much of a slave as ever,

His slavery was not in the chains,

But in himself–

They can only set free men free–

And there is no need of that:

Free men set themselves free.

–James Oppenheim

 

Poets like A. Kreymborg, H. Kemp, G. S. Viereck12 C. Wood and others like B. Deutsch, have all the freshness of the morning fields and the newly ploughed ground.

 

The following examples may be considered:

 

The Tree

 

I am four monkeys,

one hangs from a limb,

Tail-wise,

Chattering at the earth:

Another cramming his belly with coconut

The third is up in the top branches.

Quizzing the sky:

And the fourth–

He’s chasing another monkey.

How many monkeys are you?

–A. Kreymborg

 

For me wait other women,

For you wait other men–

But the ghosts of our old madness

Will rise and walk again.

–H. Kemp

 

White-fingered lord of wondrous events,

Well are you guarding what your father gained;

 –laborers, risen in defense

of liberty and life, lie charred and brained

About your mines, whose gutted hills are stained

With slaughter of-these newer innocents.

–C. Wood

 

A Girl

 

You also, laughing one,

Tosser of balls in the sun,

Will pillow your bright head

By the incurious dead.

–B. Deutsch

 

Out of the hundreds whose work appears in periodicals or has been collected into volumes, it has not been possible to mention more than a small number above. I append below brief notices of a few others who have done noteworthy work.

 

There is George Sterling. His poetry has a rush of motion, the flash of colour–the flux and flight of life, his singing words break about one like a sparkling spray:

 

In Babylon, dark Babylon,

Who take the wage of shame?

The scribe and singer, one by one,

That toil for gold and fame.

They grovel to their master’s mood

The blood upon the pen

Assigns their souls to servitude

Yea! and the souls of men!

 

Patrick MacGill is a poetess who registers a passionate protest against the injustice in our industrial system (like the poetry of W. V. Moody and J. Masefield), where one-tenth of the people own nine-tenths of the wealth.

 

To him was applied the scorpion lash, for him the glebe and goad–

The roughcast fool of our moral wash, the raucous wretch of the road.

Beggared and burst from the very first, he chooses the ditch to die–

–Go, pick the dead from the sloughy bed, and hide him from mortal eye. (From “Songs of the Dead End”).

 

C. P. Gilman, like H. L. Tranbel and Walt Whitman, has a vision, unfalteringly of a new order, and like the poetry of C. E. Scott, her protest is lifted above bald pulpiteering by flashes of poetry and prophet-like attack on social wrongs.

 

We are the wisest, strongest Race–

Lord may our praise be sung!

The only animal alive

That lives upon its young!

 

E. Markham writes poetry characterised by sudden meteors of thought–his lines flash upon our darkness a sudden light from the infinite.

 

The Man with the Hoe.

 

Time’s tragedy is in that aching stoop;

Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,

Plundered, profaned and disinherited,

Cries protest to the Judges of the world,

A protest that is also a prophecy.

 

The poetry of C. Wupperman, J. Fisher, C. H. Towne, H. G. Cone, F. Kipper Frank and E. D. Schoonmaker is a protest against injustice and an appeal for the rights of the toiling millions in the lower abyss of labour–poetry of social conscience, with keen logic, stinging sarcasm and loaded epigram. They are advocates of the higher socialism.

 

In sheer quantity of output, and in its diversity of appeal, the present age compares by no means unfavourably with any that has gone before. Indeed, owing to the modern conveniences like the existence of periodicals with huge circulation’s and a vastly higher level of literacy, the present century enjoys advantages not enjoyed previously in regard to those endowed with a gift and having the ambition of catching the ear of a large public. Poetry today has an intimacy with the furniture of this world, a sensuous appreciation of it. The vital essence of modern poetry is a hospitality of sympathy. The poets deal with common experience in the idiom of daily life. They ask these questions only:

 

The subject:– can it be narrated?

The plan:– can it be painted?

The design:– has it a purpose?

 

–and their style is but electric fluid. In short, art is to them an activity aiming at the production of the beautiful.

 

*  See Whistler’s book of poems, “Four walls.”

** See “Invitation and Washing” by Henry Treece.

1 For Anne Pidler see the Magazine, “Poetry” (London), and a pamphlet “The Fatal Landscape”.

2 For H. Read, see “Collected poems”–(1914-34)

3 For Richard Church, see “The Solitary Man” (I. M. Dent & Sons).

4 For Vernon Watkins, see “The Ballad of the Mari Lwyd” (Faher).

5 See his volumes like Candles is the Sun and Loves and Losses of Pierrot.

6 For J. Rillenhouse see, her The Lifted Cup and The Door of Dreams.

7 For W. Bynner, see Greenstone Poems.

8 For G. M. Conkling, see periodicals like The Tramp, Voices, The Lyric etc.

9 For Auslander, see his poems like Spilled Flame, Wings at Dawn etc.

10 For R. Jeffers, see his volumes like Roan Stallion, Tamar, and The Woman at Point Sur.

11 For O. Johns, see his volumes like Black Branches, Wild Plum and other Poems.

12 See his volumes like The Candle and the Flame, The House of the Vampire and

Nineveh and other poems.

 

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