Poetry and the Public World

I

THERE is a very good reason why the relation of poetry to political revolution should interest our generation. Poetry, to most people, stands for the intensely personal life of the individual spirit. Political revolution stands for the intensely public life of a society with which the individual spirit must, but must not, make its peace. The relation between the two implies a conflict our generation understands — the conflict between the personal life of one man and the impersonal life of many men.

But there is no very good reason why our generation should interest itself in the current political debate about the relation of poetry to political revolution. The believers in many men say that poetry should be part of political revolution. The believers in one man say that poetry should have no truck with political revolution. Neither position is interesting. The real question is not whether poetry should have to do with political revolution or whether it shouldn’t. The real question is whether poetry is of such a nature, and political revolution of such a nature, that poetry can have to do with political revolution. For it may be said that poetry should do this, or should not do that, only when it is meant that poetry can do this or cannot do that: poetry has no other laws than the laws of its own nature.

The only intelligent discussion of the question, therefore, is a discussion in terms of poetry, and of the nature of poetry. It is a discussion which should begin by asking what the nature of poetry is, and specifically whether poetry is, by its nature, an art or whether it is of some other nature. For if poetry is an art, then poetry can do whatever an art can do. But if poetry is not an art, then the limitations of poetry are of a different kind.

Much has been written on that subject and much said by men of many generations who have published books or talked in evenings or on roads walking or at other times. There are those on the one hand who say that poetry cannot be an art because it is something more than an art, being a kind of revelation of Truth or Beauty or Goodness. To these people it is clear that poetry can have no relation to political revolution, because political revolution is outside in the air and sky and not inside in the spirit where poetry can reveal it. There are those on the other hand who say that poetry cannot be an art because poetry is something less than an art, being nothing but another way of writing what can also be written in prose. To these people also poetry can have nothing to say about political revolution, because prose can say it better. There are, finally, those who say that poetry is neither something more than an art nor something less than an art, but simply an art. To these last, poetry has to do with political revolution if art has to do with political revolution: otherwise not.

But though there are three possible opinions, and though all three of these opinions are held by numerous and respectable people, all three are not of equal value. The opinion, for example, that poetry is something more than an art is an opinion widely taught in schools and broadly held among English-speaking people. But it is an opinion difficult for readers of poetry to credit, for it leads to definitions like the definition offered recently by an English poetess, that a poem is ‘an uncovering of truth of so fundamental and general a kind that no other name besides poetry is adequate except truth.’ Poetry, in other words, is not the poem itself, but some content the poem makes available, as a bank check makes available a sum of money. It is a truth which the poem reveals as the boy in the fairy story discovered the giant’s heart in the duck’s egg in the church well on the lake isle. The trouble with this definition of poetry is that it applies to certain poems only. There are poems in which ‘an uncovering of truth’ occurs. Some of them are good poems. Many of them are written by women. But not all poems are of this kind. In Homer, for example, there is not only ‘an uncovering of truth’: there are also descriptions of the shapes of men and animals and the color of water and the revengefulness of gods. And the greatest poems in all languages are remembered not for their messages but for themselves.

In the same way the opinion that poetry is something less than an art, being no more than a sort of conventionalized prose, is difficult to accept. Those who hold to this opinion believe that poetry is not different in kind from prose, but different only in verbal form: it is merely another way of saying the same thing. Thus there are old poets who say to young poets: ‘Never write in verse what you could write in prose.’ There are teachers who say to students: ‘This is prose because it is not poetry.’ There are critics who say to readers: ‘Poetry is dead. Prose is driving it out of our modern world.’

To say any of these things you must, of course, believe that poetry is merely another way of saying what prose can also say, a competing way of writing. You can only talk about prose driving poetry out of our modern world if you think of prose and poetry as competing ways of writing. You can only talk about not writing in verse what you could write in prose if you think of verse and prose as alternative methods of accomplishing the same thing. But anyone who has ever tried knows of his own knowledge that prose and poetry are not merely alternative ways of saying the same thing, but that they are different ways of saying different things. What can be said in one cannot be said in the other. The attempt to undo a poem into prose leaves nothing but a little silly heap of words like the dust into which the antiquities of tombs disintegrate at the touch of air. A poem is not a way in which something may be written, but the way in which something may be written. And the thing which may be written in this way is the poem.

It seems likely, therefore, that those people are right who believe that poetry is neither more than an art nor less than an art, but an art only, and that the relation between poetry and political revolution is a relation to be discussed in these terms. But in terms of art it is difficult to agree that poetry is of such a nature, and polit ical revolution of such a nature, that poetry can have no truck with political revolution.

II

Art is a method of dealing with our experience of this world, which makes that experience, as experience, recognizable to the spirit. There are other methods of dealing with our experience of this earth which translate it into intellectual terms or extract from it moral meanings. Art is not such a method. Art is not a technique for extracting truths, nor a system of signals for communicating explanations. Art is not a diver’s glass for seeing inward, nor a mathematic for arriving at an ultimate understanding of our lives. Art is an organization of experience in terms of experience, the purpose of which is the recognition of experience. It is an interpreter between ourselves and that which has happened to us, the purpose of which is to make legible what it is that has happened. It is an organization of water in terms of water, an organization of faces in terms of faces, an organization of streetcars and vermilion and death in terms of streetcars and vermilion and death. It is an organization of experience comprehensible not in terms of something else, but of itself; not in terms of significance, but of itself; not in terms of truth even, but of itself. The truth of a work of art is the truth of its organization. It has no other truth.

Art, therefore, is not selective. It is catholic. There are not certain experiences which are fit for art and certain other experiences which are not fit for art. Any experience, whether of violence or of contemplation or of sensuality or of wonder or of disgust, of which the spirit demands recognition may be brought to the labor of art. And if this is true of all art it is true also of that form of art which is poetry. There are not certain kinds of experience which are proper for poetry; nor, conversely, are the experiences which poetry makes recognizable experiences peculiar to poetry alone. The experience which poetry makes recognizable may be the experience of anything. It may be, as it has most frequently been in the practice of the art, the experience of love or of the idea of God or of death or of the beauty — the always and in each new generation newly astonishing beauty — of this world. But it may also be, as it has often been, a very different experience. It may be any experience whatever which requires for its intensity the intensity of the poetic line, the shock of the poetic association, the compression of the poetic statement, the incantation of the poetic word. It may be any experience of which the intensity is so great that only a corresponding intensity of order can give it shape, as the tension of flight gives form and beauty to the beating of wings.

Poetry is to violent emotion what the crystal is to the condensing salt or the equation to laborious thinking — release, identity, and rest. What words cannot do as words because they can only speak, what rhythm and sound cannot do as rhythm and sound because they have no speech, poetry can do because its sound and its speech are a single incantation. Only poetry can produce that absorption of the reasoning mind, that release of the listening nature, that solution of the deflections and distractions of the surfaces of sense, by which intense experience is admitted, recognized, and known. Only poetry can present the closest and therefore least visible experiences of men in such form that they, reading, may say: ‘Yes . . . Yes . . . It is like that. . . . That is what it is truly like.’

There is therefore, if poetry is an art, no religious rule, no critical dogma, which excludes from poetry the political experience of men. There is only a question. Is the political experience of our time an experience which requires for its intensity the intensity of poetry? Is the political experience of our time an experience personal and immediate and intense as are the experiences to which poetry, and poetry alone, can give shape and order and recognition?

Certainly there was a time in the lives of those of us who are now no longer young when political experience was neither close nor personal nor in any meaning of the word intense. Politics in the years before the war were external happenings which made no part of the personal lives of men but were rather like games or diversions or contests. A man lived in his house and his street and his friends, and politics were elsewhere. The public world was the public world and the private world was the private world. Poetry in that time concerned itself with the private world. When it dealt with the public world it dealt with it in private terms, presenting, for example, the public problem of the state in terms of the private mystery of kingship. Either that or it surrendered its rights as poetry and entered the political service of the government as did Kipling and the poets of the British Empire School.

But because it was true thirty years ago that the public world was the public world and the private werld the private world, and because it was true thirty years ago that poetry in its quality of poetry had very little traffic with the public world, it does not follow that either is true to-day. Indeed the evidence not only of our own eyes but of those who speak to us with authority tells us that what was true thirty years ago is now not true but the contrary of the truth. Thomas Mann says to us that whereas twenty years ago, at the time when he wrote his Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, he opposed political activity with all his power in the name of freedom and culture, he has now come to see ‘that the German bourgeoisie had erred in thinking that a man of culture could remain unpolitical . . . that the political and the social are parts of the human: they belong to the totality of human problems and must be drawn into the whole.’ We too have begun to see this. We too have begun to know that the public world is no longer on one side and the private world on the other.

Indeed the public world with us has become the private world, and the private world has become the public. We see our private individual lives in terms of the public and numerous lives of those who live beside us, and we see the lives of those who live beside us in terms of the lives we thought once were our own. We live, that is to say, in a revolutionary time in which the public life has washed in over the dikes of private existence as sea water breaks over into the fresh pools in the spring tides till everything is salt. The world of private experience has become the world of crowds and streets and towns and armies and mobs. The world of many men equaling man, of every man equaling men, has taken the place of the world of the lonely walker, the self-searcher, the single figure staring by night into mirrors, into stars. The single individual, whether he so wishes or not, has become a part of a world which contains also Austria and Czechoslovakia and China and Spain. The victories of tyrants and the resistance of peoples halfway round the world are as near to him as the ticking of the clock on the mantel. What happens in his morning paper happens in his blood all day, and Madrid, Nanking, Prague, arc names as close to him as the names by which he counts his dearest losses.

This we know to be true of our own knowledge. And since we know it to be true, we know also the answer to the question we have asked. If our life as members of society, which is to say our public life, which is to say our political life, has become a life which moves us to personal indignation, which fills us with personal fear, which suggests to us also private hopes, we have no choice but to say that our experiences of this life are experiences of intense and personal emotion. And if our experiences of this life are experiences of intense and personal emotion, then they are such experiences as poetry can make recognizable — such experiences as perhaps poetry alone can make recognizable.

III

But if we know this to be true, then the whole question of the relation of poetry to political revolution is a different question from the question commonly discussed. The real wonder is not the wonder which the literary dilettantes say they feel — the wonder that poetry should deal so much with a public world which concerns it so little. The real wonder is that poetry should deal so little with a public world which concerns it so much. What requires explanation is not the fact that a few contemporary poets have attempted to give poetic order to the political experience of our time, but the fact that no contemporary poet has yet succeeded in that effort — the fact that no contemporary poet has yet presented to us, in the personal and yet universal terms of poetry, our generation’s experience of the political world. Some of the greatest — Yeats most notably — have touched it. But not even Yeats has presented the contemporary experience of the political world as experience, in terms of experience — so related, in such words, with such implications both of meaning and of sense, that we have recognized it for what it is. Not even Yeats has done what poetry must do; what poetry has, in other periods, done.

In a valuable paper on ‘Hamlet and the Nature of Reality,’ Professor Theodore Spencer of Harvard has shown how the greatest of English poets reduced to poetic order and made recognizable the common experience of his age. He has shown how the conflict of appearance and reality which gives Hamlet its dramatic tension relates to the conflict of appearance and reality characteristic of the thinking of the time: the conflict between accepted Ptolomaic notions of cosmology on the one hand and Copernican ideas of the universe upon the other; between orthodox Aristotelian conceptions of the morality of rulers and Machiavelli’s theories of ‘realistic’ government; between Renaissance beliefs as to the position of man in nature and Montaigne’s views as to man’s total dependence upon the divine grace. Shakespeare’s play is such an organization of the moral confusion and intellectual anxiety of his contemporaries as a great poet can accomplish, and Hamlet remains to our day the one figure in which we recognize the experience of intellectual doubt at that extremest point where doubt is no longer possible and only belief can be supported. His words are the words in which we still speak to ourselves of the pain of believing that the true appearance may be only the apparent truth.

What is really remarkable about the experience of our generation is the fact that no comparable organization of the public yet private life of our time has been attempted by contemporary poetry. It is this fact, and not the fear that poetry may be misused for political purposes, which should trouble the lovers of poetry. They will not dispose of it by explaining mockingly that such a task requires a Shakespeare and that contemporary poetry has produced no Shakespeare.

It is true that the labor is difficult. Difficult at all times, the labor of poetic organization becomes almost unbearably difficult when the appearance to be mastered is an appearance private in its nearness, public in its form. Poetry, however some of its practitioners may talk of it, is not a magical art, and poets, like others, must understand before they can create understanding. They must themselves see the shape and meaning of experience before they can give it shape and meaning. And there are few among us of any occupation who know the shape and meaning of the time in which we live. The difference between the chaos of unordered perceptions and the order of the poetic perception is the difference of the poetic act; and the poetic act, however swift, however easy, however genial it may seem, is an act as laborious as any accomplished by men, for it is an act in which there are no aids, no tools, no implements, no mathematics, no sextants — an act in which one man alone struggles with an appearance which will not show its true and actual face until he forces it. The Greek myth of Proteus is the true myth of this labor. The poet’s struggle is to constrain the live thing in the net to leave its changing forms and take its actual form, which is the god’s form, and be known.

But though it is certain that the struggle to compel the false appearance to be true is peculiarly difficult in a time like ours, when the god to be forced is a god we have never seen and even the appearances are appearances with which we are unfamiliar, it is not the difficulty alone which stands in the way. Labor as difficult has been done before this, and not by Shakespeare only. The characteristic achievements of poetry are not reserved for the greatest poets alone, but appear also in the work of lesser men.

The true explanation of the failure of contemporary poetry to bring to poetic recognition the experience of our time is the nature of the influences which continue to dominate that poetry and the character of the models on which it is formed. More precisely, it is the fact that the poetry we call contemporary — the poetry, that is to say, to which we apply the word ‘modern’ — is not actually contemporary or modern, but belongs to a time earlier than our own and was formed by necessities which are not ours. It is a poetry which belongs, in its French originals, to Verlaine and Laforgue and the last decades of the last century; in its English derivations, to T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and the first two decades of this. It is a poetry formed not by the human and political necessities of our own world but by the literary necessities of the world before the war.

The poetry we call contemporary was originally, and still remains, a poetry of literary revolt. As such it is a poetry adapted not to the creation of new poetic organizations of experience, but to the destruction of old poetic organizations. As the common experience of men changes from one generation to the next, the organizations of experience in poetry must change also. But the new organizations are never new beginnings, new constructions, but always reconstructions. The physical materials of which they are made — the words, the accents of the words, the sounds of the words, the meaning, the syntax — have all been used before: they have all been built into work now standing. Before they can be used for new work they must first be knocked free of the old mortar, pried loose from the old nails. It is for this reason that the revolutions in poetry, as in other arts, are necessary and must take place. Whenever the experience of a new generation differs so widely from the experience of the previous generation that fhe organizations of experience which were previously useful are no longer useful, whenever a truly different organization of experience is demanded, the old organizations must first be dismantled and taken down.

IV

‘Modern’ poetry in English, like its French Symboliste prototype, is poetry of this kind. The French poets called Symbolistes had one thing in common and only one — a common hatred of the formal and rhetorical poetry of Parnasse ‘ avec sa perfection technique, ses vers sculpturaux, ses rimes opulentes, son archéologie hellénique, romaine et kindou.’ Their common purpose was, as Verlaine put it, to ‘ tordre le cou a l’Eloquence.'

Pound, the first of the American poets justly called ‘modern,’ was also a hater of rhetoric and a twister of tails. Pound was the great dismantles the great wrecker of brownstone fronts, the great tearer down of imitation French châteaux and imitation Gothic railroad stations. He was a wrecker to whom not merely the politely dead poetry of the generation immediately prior to his own, but the whole world which accepted that poetry, was an obsolescence, a solecism calling for the crowbar and the sledge. He was a dynamiter who hated not only the Georgian Anthology and the overstuffed verse of the years before the war, but the whole Edwardian organization of experience out of which all the experience and most of the poetry had long since leaked like the horsehair out of an old family sofa, leaving nothing but a stiff brittle shape which dogs avoided and even lovers would not use. He was, as he himself said of Laforgue, an exquisite poet, a deliverer of the nations, a Numa Pompilius, a father of light. His dreams at night were of words chipped clean of the rhetoric which staled them, words planed clean of the literary varnish which had tinted them to golden oak, words scraped back to the white pine with the white pine odor. He was, and he still is, one of the great clearers and cleansers of cluttered earth. If a new generation does not see him in these terms it is because a new generation does not know the architecture he has overthrown. These poems which are wall ornaments now that the old buildings have gone down were tools once — hooked iron crowbars and mallet-headed sledges and cold steel chisels of destruction.

Eliot also, who will perhaps be remembered for other reasons, was a wrecker of poetic forms at the time when he was writing the poems which have so influenced this generation. More effectively even than Pound, Eliot was then engaged in breaking down the existing combinations, the ‘poetic’ associations of words and images and sounds. He heaved the present-tense, commonplace modern world, with its suburban boredom, its Sunday-afternoon hopelessness, its park-bench despair, through the glass windows of academic poetry as Pound was never able to heave it. He was more destructive than Pound because he cared more than Pound; he had lived in the house himself. Eliot in his heart loved the academic traditions he attacked, and he did what he did in bitterness and a curious inward-turning revenge rather than in hope of a better poetry to follow. He worked, not as Pound did, to clear the earth and air for a different structure, but in a kind of passionate disgust with himself and his time, hating the necessity of destruction and destroying only to make its hatefulness more plain. The fact that it was his own time he hated, and not the poetic past with which his own time was at war, gives his work the cold, premeditated violence of the suicide.

Modern poetry is the poetry of these masters, and of the war and pre-war generations which formed them. It was, in its own time, a needed and cleansing poetry of literary revolt. But it was never a poetry capable of the new labor of construction which must now be done. Revolutionists are rarely successful rebuilders of the worlds they have brought down, and the continuation of the pretense of revolution beyond the victory of revolution produces a peculiar frustration and sterility with which we in our time are only too familiar. Contemporary poetry is in large part such a continuation of pretended revolution. The early attitudes and idioms of Eliot are imitated long after their relevance has vanished, not because a new relevance has been found for them, but because their flavor is delightful — irony is a speech which can be bold without responsibility, and rejection is an attitude which can be wise without risk. So too Pound’s early demands for innovation are still in fashion; not because the conditions of Pound’s demands still exist, but because innovation is a delightful criterion of accomplishment — it relieves the poet of all other duty.

It is this characteristic of contemporary poetry which explains its failure to make recognizable to us our experience of our time. To write in faith and credit of such experience as ours, and to bring it to recognition, requires the responsible and dangerous language of acceptance and belief. The responsible language of acceptance and belief is not possible to the poetry of literary revolt. The Hamlet of Shakespeare was the acceptance of a difficult age and the demonstration of the place, in that age, of poetry. The Hamlet of Laforgue, and after him of Eliot and after him of the contemporary generation, is the rejection of a difficult age and a contemptuous comment upon the hope of poetry to deal with it. Not until contemporary poetry ceases to be the ‘modern,’ which is to say pre-war, poetry of literary revolt, and not until contemporary poetry writes the Hamlet of Laforgue and Eliot out of its veins, will poetry occupy, and reduce to the order of recognition, the public-private world in which we live. When that happens, the true poetry of our own time will be written. There are already indications in the work of young poets, American as well as English, that the time is near.