Humanism and America

Here Archibald MacLeish, who stands somewhere between the centre and the extreme left wing in poetry, employs a traditional verse-form in a poem the theme of which is the absurdity of the spectacle of human antics in a cosmos without intelligibility or significance. He guards against any specious effect of “fulfilment” by the unexpected reiteration of the word nothing. Yet there remains the regrettable necessity of rounding out the sestet and capping the rhyme; and, more important, the method of presentation has imposed an adventitious kind of order on a scene which, in the poet’s apprehension of it, is an even wilder scramble and jumble of absurdities. And so the sonnet, thoroughly “modern” in spirit, is quite conservative in technique. The distinctiveness of this new poetry, indeed, is less a matter of measures, whether new or old, than of the principle of association by which it is governed. It aims at an organisation of images and a succession of rhythms which spring more immediately from the poet’s stream of consciousness.

In attempting to divert this stream through the reader’s mind, without spilling over or filtering, some recent poets have adopted startling innovations in typography, including punctuation, use of capitals and small letters, spacing, and line-division. The fashion is prompted in part by a spirit of mere impishness, but back of it also is a certain amount of genuine experimentation in the resources and the graphical representation of language, the object being to prod the reader out of the lethargy and complacency which, it is alleged, are fostered by the conventions of verse-form and page-arrangement. Undeniably, if one is willing to play this game and doesn’t mind having the rules made up as one goes along, some of the results are amusing. You will understand most readily what it is all about if you first take one of these poems down from some one’s dictation, then attempt to write it as you think the poet would do to bring out the subtler shadings and nuances, and finally compare your representation of the poem with his. Here, for instance, are the words (written as ordinary prose) of a poem by E. E. Cummings from a group called “Impressions.”

On the chance that at this point the reader may wish to try the experiment which has been suggested, I postpone to a later page Mr. Cummings’s original arrangement of the words. If you will compare his printing of the poem with that above, you will see how the tininess and the quick little repeated nibbles of the mouse at the grain-sack are suggested by the short, broken lines; how ingeniously the shooting-star is made to interrupt the poet’s revery; how the effect of flare, streaking, and slower fading is conveyed in the printing of “bursts”; and how the new simile of the alarm-clock impinges upon the retinal image of the meteor.⁠[53] But—“the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted.” After scrambling up a hundred or so of these typographical escarpments, I found that there was seldom a view from the summit commensurate with the discomforts of the climb, and my interest in the new sport began to flag. It is hard to imagine a mature artist interesting himself for long in this sort of preciosity.

Though each individual’s inner life is in a measure unique, the mere attempt to convey some fraction of it to others by written or printed words presupposes a certain shared and common ground of human experience. Freshness, piquancy, gusto, can be properly savoured only when they are delicately blended with “human nature’s daily food.” The importance of a common understanding upon essentials is clear in the sphere of our personal relationships, which become rich and satisfying only with the mutual recognition of things that may be taken for granted; oddities and varieties are most engaging in those with whom we already own a fundamental bond. Now the forms and conventions of poetry may be regarded as so many aids to the speedier establishment of such understanding between reader and poet,—the indispensable means by which an original experience is so shaped and clarified that it has significance for others. No one of these conventions, naturally, is absolutely fixed or static, and skilful manipulation of their elements is constantly yielding new and unsuspected possibilities of æsthetic pleasure, and even of social comprehension. For this reason we may look with a tolerant and not unfriendly eye upon such experimentation by some of our younger poets as I have described.⁠[54] Nevertheless, it is imperative that persons who wish to modify or to replace the accepted vehicles of poetic expression should have a clear understanding of what convention in literature or art is for.

Adequate treatment of this subject would require a separate book, and here I must content myself with a mere statement of faith: that some set of assumptions as to the experiences most valuable and important for mankind—in other words, of universals in the Aristotelian sense—is as necessary in the establishment or the maintenance of an æsthetic convention as in any purely social or political activity. Indeed, the most promising development in American poetry at the present time, I believe, is to be found, not in these centrifugal and eccentric movements, but in the considerable amount of genuine if less spectacular work which is being done upon the lines of a firmly rooted literary tradition.⁠[55]