Humanism and America

At the outset we encounter the Crocean view of all art, including poetry, as expression merely, and conversely of all expression as art. But leaving the confusions of Signor Croce to be dealt with by others,⁠[46] we are warranted in assuming, I think, that, generally and typically, the poet desires communication with other persons,—conceivably only one other person, or persons of the future, but at any rate communication and not merely self-expression. Otherwise, he wouldn’t publish or circulate or read his poems, as generally and typically poets do. The theory of Laura Riding and Robert Graves⁠[47] that the poet publishes (or “externalises”) only out of consideration for the rights of the poem, which, like physical offspring, has attained an independent status with a life of its own, is a naïve and superfluous bit of mystification, sufficiently answered by the query, “Why then sign one’s name?”—and I have not remarked any unusually wide return to the practice of anonymity. And one is led to wonder, as one turns the pages of our more advanced periodicals, what possible readers some of these poets are addressing. After a moderate success in comprehending, let us say, such diverse productions as those of the mediæval mystics, the wits of the Roman Empire and the Restoration, the English metaphysical poets, and the symbolist group in France, and after a period of conscientious schooling in the pronouncements of this newest movement, it is disconcerting to find oneself completely balked by the innocent-appearing contents of the latest anthology of verse.

Take, for instance, this poem of Mr. Wallace Stevens, which I select not as an example of that writer’s often delightful connoisseurship in verse, but as fairly representative of this decline in what has been called “communicative efficacy.”

Now the elements of this experience—the jar, its shape, colour, and quality, the hill in Tennessee where it is placed, the behaviour or appearance of the wilderness, the bird, the bush—stand doubtless in some kind of relation with each other in the poet’s mind, have possibly certain symbolic values. Since we have no clues to these relationships and values, our mind is free to do anything it pleases with the bare grey jar, the hill, and the wilderness. This freedom, however, and any pleasure we may take in the separate images, in the rhythms, or the placing of the words, are not sufficient compensation for the state of uncertainty and slight irritation in which we are left. Very likely the little poem is meant to suggest nothing more than the superiority, to an intensely civilised person, of the simplest bit of handicraft over any extent of unregulated “nature,” but it has been seriously interpreted to me, by devotees of recent poetry, as, respectively, an objet d’art, a sex-symbol, and a burial-urn containing the remains of a valued friend. And so it must remain, for me, not only like nothing else in Tennessee but like nothing else in the universe.

Considerable damage was done to this shallow affectation of knowingness of the last few years by Max Eastman’s witty article in the April (1929) Harper’s. A young intellectual from one of our well-known private schools told me that members of his group were observed to discontinue their perusal of transition⁠[49] upon the appearance of Mr. Eastman’s “The Cult of Unintelligibility.” But contemporary poetry is still afflicted by an acute attack of that extreme of Puritanism—separatism: it asserts the right not only of private judgment, but of a private symbolism,—which is, æsthetically, of much graver consequences. My point here, of course, has nothing to do with the values or qualities of the experience which the writer is presumably seeking to share. I am simply saying that, in the reading of the slightest as of the most profound poem, a sense of singleness or wholeness is the most essential part of the experience, and that this totality of effect cannot be achieved if all clues to the way the poem is organised are withheld or too casually indicated. The enigmatic character of Dr. William Carlos Williams’s poems, we are told, is due in part to his habit of jotting down free-verse impressions in the intervals between his professional visits to patients. I can only hope that in writing out his prescriptions he makes a greater allowance for the mental capacity of the pharmacist than he seems to make for mine.

By contrast, in the following lyric of Elinor Wylie, even though it is a repudiation of something accustomed, beautiful, and comforting, there is so clear and deft an employment of symbol, so perfect a fusion of mood with image, that the effect of totality is achieved; the peace denied to this orthodox landscape (or universe) is momentarily attained in the very denial of it, and thus one of the functions of poetry is discharged.

“The transport ... that the poet kindles in us,” observes Professor De Selincourt in his Inaugural Lecture at Oxford, “springs from our instinctive recognition that his form, a term that includes both rhythm and diction, is an entirely faithful rendering of his experience, so that we gain from it a sudden clear sense of fulfilment, such as we can hardly hope to gain outside the ideal world of art.” That may be a rather narrowly æsthetic interpretation of Longinus’s doctrine of the poetic “transport,” but certainly “a sudden clear sense of fulfilment” is an experience which it is easy to miss in the poetry of our contemporaries.

In fact, this “sense of fulfilment” is precisely what the typical modernist, experiencing nothing of the sort in life itself and disdaining an “ideal world” thus cut off from reality, avoids giving us. He would regard it as part of the old hocus-pocus of orthodoxy. Life being to him fragmentary, inchoate, he would say that his poetry, if it is to be “an entirely faithful rendering of his experience,” must itself produce an effect of inchoateness, fragmentariness.