Humanism and America

Twenty-five years ago, when my generation were beginning to find their way around in the world of print and paint, a group of us used to meet occasionally to share each other’s discoveries in contemporary thought and literature. You may smile at the association of the date 1904 and contemporary literature, and confessedly some of the objects of our attention were fantastic enough—Elbert Hubbard, Edward Howard Griggs, and even “I, Mary MacLane.” The more daring among us were delving in Haeckel and Henry George; our conservatives, according to their bents, delighted in Kipling and Barrie, or a group of alluring Celts, or became expert in discriminations between the earlier and the later manner of Henry James. We all read, of course, William James and Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells and Chesterton. In poetry, to be sure, we had no such variegated menu as the contemporary road-house affords; I should say that our diet was easily digestible and a little saccharine. For the most part, as I recall, we followed along the vagabondia trail after Richard Hovey and Bliss Carman. In that old college town near the coast, we could still thrill to such verses as

Frost and Sandburg, Lindsay and Masefield, had not come into our world—much less Walter de la Mare or Aldous Huxley or Robinson Jeffers. But we were not so entirely neglected by the contemporary muse as you may suppose. We knew the early work of Yeats, and “The Hound of Heaven” of Francis Thompson; we had discovered the sonnets of Santayana; we could repeat a large part of A Shropshire Lad; and of course for our more cosmic moods we had Walt Whitman. Hundreds of other such groups must have existed, like ours callow, inexperienced, bumptious, but very inquisitive, very receptive. Not against us did the “new poetry” (no longer such) have to hurl its bolts.

And even in that distant, unreal decade of the nineteen-hundreds, before President Roosevelt, by a few kindly pages in the Outlook, put Edwin Arlington Robinson’s name into every one’s mouth, we knew the poet of “Tilbury Town” (only thirty miles from our own). There was one poem of his whose meaning used to be a great subject of dispute,—for we were than naïve enough to think that a poem must be susceptible of some rational explanation. It was entitled “Cortège,” and had appeared in the Captain Craig volume of 1902.⁠[45]

The half-benumbing, half-intensifying effect of the “crazy tune,” the curious way in which a mere pattern of words can usurp the mind, now stealing its attention from the very grief they point to, and now flashing upon it a new aspect of that grief—something like that, I suppose, accounts for the fascination the poem had for us. But a number of us were dissatisfied with an explanation so simple. No, we wanted to know, first, who and how many persons were being buried at four o’clock to-day, and their relationship to the poet (was it, for instance, a former sweetheart and her husband?), and whether “she” in the third stanza was one of the deceased, and in what sense it could be said that Love “made the grave so soon,” and what “half so soon” meant—was it any different from “twice as soon”? We even calculated that the burial must be taking place some fifteen hundred miles to the west, since otherwise, all (Protestant) funerals being held commonly at two o’clock, the poet’s time would be twelve noon instead of four afternoon. All, of course, very silly and irrelevant questions.

Only a few years ago, in a poetry course, I was recalling these old agitations of ours, as a warning, I feel sure, against such literalness of interpretation. But, as will happen with class-room instruction, my admonitions produced quite the opposite effect from that intended, for one member of the class was so intrigued by the problem, even as we had been twenty years before, that he evolved the staggering theory that the poem was not about a funeral at all, but about a marriage. This ingenious view having been communicated, in a circuitous way, to Mr. Robinson, he settled the matter quite simply with the following note to the inquirer:

Of course, it was not Mr. Robinson’s performance, but ours, which was reprehensible. We were treating an “experiment in sound and feeling” as we might have treated a deposition in court or an application for the payment of life-insurance; we were bringing to a poem an attitude of mind alien to its character as a poem. It was as if one should read Mr. Frost’s “The Thatch” and demand to know why he “would not go in till the light went out.” For “Cortège” in essential matters is not cryptic in the least; it is only irrelevant, external details that are left unexplained. And ultimately, I suppose, what we call a taste for poetry, of any except a very elementary sort, depends upon the possession of tact or intelligence to perceive just such a distinction.

I have used this personal recollection because much more frequently to-day and to a greater degree a somewhat similar feeling of puzzlement assails the reader of contemporary poetry. This simple instance of an obscurity gratuitously created by readers may lead to the consideration of a problem of poetic form more comprehensive than any question of mere technique (though technical elements of poetry are involved in it too), I mean the question of those necessities which are laid on poetry from its being a form of communication between mind and mind. For, I believe, from misapprehension and confusion in this matter, on the part now of poets and now of their readers, springs, to some extent, the unsatisfactory state of poetry at the present time. On the one side, there is reported a feeling of exasperation, by readers competent enough in other kinds of literature or in the older poetry, who “can make nothing of this modernist stuff,” and on the other side the modernists’ rejoinder that such readers are precisely in the position of my group of twenty-five years ago—lacking the intelligence to grasp what is essential and to disregard non-essentials. Surely a consideration of the nature and limits of that community of mind which must be assumed to subsist between the poet and his readers is not foreign to the subject of this book.