Poets Versus Readers

by PETER VIERECK

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THE spirit of revolt is over, the revolt against poetic forms and disciplines which began just before the First World War and reached its height in the 1920’s and early 1930’s. The themes and techniques of the new books of 1946-47 prove it is over. Needed yet never popularly respected, it was a revolt which had scared the general reader completely away from poetry, for he had seen only the gibberish, the exhibitionist stunts, the prosaic “free verse.” Today the same general reader is still inclined, on the basis of such halfknowledge, to dismiss all Modern Stuff as a snore and an allusion.

Actually the uprising was less against form than against formalism, against the romantic clichés and adjectival imprecisions of the Georgians and Victorians. It is regrettable that the rebels often let their zeal carry them against form itself and into sloppiness of metrics and into originality-via-eccentricity. Yet their real foe, to put it in one word, was what they would have called “cornyness,” had they possessed the resources of our current slang. Thereby they served a conservative and traditionalist function: sweeping away — by a temporary esthetic chaos — the misuses of form, they paved the way for the present return to more rigorous and exacting forms.

This return began long before World War II. Auden, the incorruptible Robespierre purging literature of every imaginable convention, became his own Thermidor Reaction by turning out the neatest heroic couplets, sestinas, sonnets, and canzones of our day. Still earlier, in 1927, Eliot had announced almost casually that he was now “Anglo-Catholic in religion, royalist in politics, and classicist in literature”; and even in 1917 he had concluded that free verse had gone too far and that the time had come to return to strict forms.

The same process continued while the crises of the 1930’s were culminating in a second war. Though e. e. cummings (our purest lyricist) may still sing his defiant Marseillaise and dream of the heady days when Greenwich Village sans-culottes were storming the Bastilles of typography and decapitating all those royal capital letters, yet the Bourbon Restoration is already a fact.

The struggle of our time, as Eliot said, has been “ to renew our association with traditional wisdom”; and revolt in the arts (to the surprise of artists as well as public) has turned out to be the means to this end. Poetry has returned from the dazzling and esoteric to its traditional concern with the mystery of mortality. But it has returned with a difference. It has been purged of an all too finite rhetoric about infinite stars and an all too wooden “impulse from the vernal wood.” Instead, there is a fruitfully obsessive search for the path from our dinginess and glibness to regeneration. This is the path that leads the reader from Eliot’s Waste Land to Ash Wednesday.

The return to a problem shared by both reader and poet involves a return to the common language they had ceased to share; and communication is now being steadily restored. In the last twenty years a whole body of incantatory poems has grown up about the regeneration theme, treated magically yet humanly, not in terms of superhuman titanism, nor of sentimental rhetoric about living on in Mother Nature or in halls of fame. That rarest and sweetest of nuances is attained: the reader is consoled without being lied to. Exalted without being exhorted, he escapes without escapism. Struggling against inner and outer mediocrity and mechanization, he finds in the arts, and not in the sciences, his exuberant ally.

He may detest the word “esthete” as heartily as the esthetes do. He may ignore utterly the indispensable pioneering of the Little Magazines. Yet he will find himself turning away unsatisfied from the banal rhymed editorials of his high school poetry courses, his Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life" and Kipling’s “If,” as he discovers the Christian exaltation of Eliot’s Rock choruses and Ash Wednesday and the heathen exaltation of Yeats’s “Crazy Jane” and “Wild Old Wicked Man.”

Other such extraordinary modern examples of poetry-as-incantation are Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning”; the flesh-clad abstractions of Auden’s epilogue to The Double Man; Hart Crane’s “Repose of Rivers”; Allen Tate’s “Mediterranean”; John Crowe Ransom’s “Painting; A Head”; Theodore Spencer’s symbolic “Phoenix”; Stephen Spender’s “I think continually of those who are truly great”; the Hellenic hush of Robert Graves’s “Instructions to the Orphic Adept”; the tragic doubt-lacerated hopefulness of Robert Lowell in “The Holy Innocents” and in “As a Plane Tree”; and the simple terrestrial gladness of Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill.” Poems like these rebuke the reader’s prejudices against twentieth-century verse and hint the direction it is really taking. The last four of these poems are included in the new books of Graves, Lowell, and Thomas, each published in 1946. Stevens and Spender, whose above poems are from far earlier works, have each published new poems in 1947. This year Spender has also published, with an analytical preface, his apt selections from the romantic poets, which throw light on the moods of his own early writings.

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FOR me, the four best younger poets appearing in 1945-47 are Robert Lowell (Lord Weary’s Castle, winner of the Pulitzer Prize), Dylan Thomas (The Selected Writings, with a beautifully written and indispensable preface by John L. Sweeney), Randall Jarrell (Little Friend, Little Friend, with its flawless mating of form and content), and Howard Nemerov (The Image and the Law, proving it is possible to be subtly intellectual without losing the ability to sing).

Lowell’s book is crammed with blazing metaphors and condensed imagery. While Keats ad vised Shelley to fill his rifts with ore, the reader wishes Lowell would fill his solid ore with rifts; the images follow each other too thick and fast for such short poems, so that we sometimes have too much of a good thing. But a very good thing it is despite that, perhaps a great thing. Too many reviewers have overlooked his amazing esthetic merits for the sake of debating his apparent theological fervor; it has become a cliché to classify him (how convenient classifications can be to reviewers!) with the Catholic poets of our literature, with Gerard Manley Hopkins and Francis Thompson. But Lowell is not a Catholic poet in the sense of Hopkins and Thompson and the newly published Trappist monk, Thomas Merton. These men are deeply and impressively Catholic as a positive attitude. Lowell’s poems reveal his Catholicism as a position taken for negative reasons, as a convulsive reaction against commercialism, against Boston, and against his own Brahmin Protestant heritage.

Robert Lowell is really the extreme of Protestant individualism, a typically New England and typically Puritan introspectiveness which carries integrity so far that it turns against itself. But our true religious poets, like Hopkins, are Catholic out of love for God and not out of hate for godlessness; their faith is a salvation and not a suicide. Once Lowell resolves, one way or another, this paradox which makes too many of his poems Janus-faced and implausible, he may become — and here I venture on a prophecy — the great American poet of the 1950’s. For he seems the best qualified to restore to our literature its sense of the tragic and the lofty.

If Lowell promises more for the future, Dylan Thomas, the supposed mouthpiece of an eerie Welsh peasant-romanticism, is the smoother poet for the present, for his book is well-integrated and without contradictions in form or content. Since his first verses appeared in England in 1934, when he was twenty, his critics have kept parroting the word “imagination" as summarizing his strongest quality. Rightly so; for he has written some of the most imaginative single lines of our day, such as “honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns” or his metaphor for the heart: “my nest of mercies in the rude, red tree.” Yet his admirable zest for rhetoric and fancy will be less appealing to those whose credo includes the neo-classicism of Pope. They might even he tempted to recall what Byron said in 1821 in an essay defending Pope against the romantic school: —

“It is the fashion of the day to lay great stress upon what they call ‘imagination’ and ‘invention,’ the two commonest of qualities. An Irish peasant, with a little whiskey in his head, will imagine . . . more than would furnish forth a modern poem.”

But such classicist objections to romantic imagination do not ultimately apply to Dylan Thomas; they miss his unromantic sense of form and discipline. Though no modern poet can exceed him in lurid extravagances, he is a well-groomed Wild Man for all that. What justifies him as major artist is that his imagination is shaped by a neat technical control, which even Pope would have envied, in such a poem as “Vision and Prayer.”

Outstanding among the two dozen other younger poets published in the past year are Sidney Keyes (Collected Poems, published posthumously), Thomas Merton (A Man in the Divided Sea), Howard Moss (The Wound and the Weather), John Nims (Iron Pastoral), Dunstan Thompson (Lament for the Sleepwalker), Byron Vazakis (Transfigured Night), and Reed Whittemore (Heroes and Heroines). At this writing, the books of William Abrahams and Richard Wilbur are scheduled for early publication; if we may judge by what they have published in the literary quarterlies, their books will prove particularly rewarding.

The above names are listed not as mere also-rans to Lowell, nor as men of “future promise” (most patronizing and avuncular of phrases), but as good reading here and now. It is fitting that revolt has been superseded by a new formalism, but it is also fitting that the revolt has left its indelible brand on this formalism. The careful diction of these writers of today (especially Jarrell, whose taste is sensitively right) is a post-mortem vindication of the literary revolts which began with the Imagists. Without the lessons learned from those past experiments, the phrase “young poet ” would still mean, as in the nineteenth century, an endless embarrassment of yearning vagueness, tremulous adjectives, and runaway exclamation marks.

For straw-in-the-wind purposes, I am concentrating upon these younger poets. Yet it is instructive to note briefly how large a number of older or long-established poets are also publishing new books in 1946—47. Besides the eagerly awaited new books by Auden and Shapiro, these include: —

Elizabeth Bishop’s North and South, an almost ruthless wisdom, sugar-coated by charm and by an attractive tiredness; e. e. cummings’s Santa Claus, a thought-provoking allegory, as fascinating as everything by this beautiful and exasperating craftsman, fanciful and with a whim of iron; Robert Frost’s Steeple Bush, with his famous complex simplicities and overwhelming understatements; Robert Graves’s Poems, 1938-1945, full of such wonderful situations and opening lines as “Sir John addressed the Snake God in his temple”; Janet Lewis’s The Earth-Bound, a delight to ear and mind, unobtrusively masterly manipulations of vowel music such as the line “Now tell me how did Mary know”; Theodore Spencer’s collected poems, lyrical and philosophical, which will appear later this year (he can combine musical overtones and religious undertones in the same startling metaphor, such as “Five ladies dancing in a strict quartet ”); Stephen Spender’s Poems of Dedication, featured by his quietly rhythmical “Elegy for Margaret and by his calculated abstention from the technical tricks of the pre-Thermidor Auden-MacNeiceLewis-Spcnder days at Oxford; Wallace Stevens’s Transport to Summer, in which he carries still further the subtlety of Ideas of Order and Parts of A World, polishing nouns and similes to the vanishing point, yet with many a sudden stinging insight among his artifices like a living bee on a glass flower; Mark Van Doren’s The Country Year, delightful finger exercises, too trivial in theme to give a fair picture of so fine a poet; Oscar Williams s Selected Poems, constantly transforming the deadliness of urban life into such lively metaphors as “the train zoomed, a zipper closing up swiftly the seam of time”; and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, first installment of a most impressive long philosophical poem.

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FAR from complete, these two lists ot distinguished writing justify two generalizations about AngloAmerican literature: (1) there have often been larger numbers of great poets than today; (2) there has rarely been a year in which more good poets have been published than 1946—47. This undoes Herbert Read’s famous prophecy that “it is almost impossible to be a poet in an industrial age.” In practice, industrialism has not shooed away the Muses, but has goaded young poets like Karl Shapiro and Robert Lowell and Dylan Thomas into a reaffirmation of their ideals, on the grand old analogy of the sand-grain irritating the oyster into pearl production.

Almost half the names listed above are men under thirty-five publishing their first books. Far more than half the names, both old poets and new, illustrate poetry’s return to strictness of form and craftsmanship and to lucidity. Yes, lucidity — though this statement counters the universal popular prejudice, almost a persecution complex, that all modern verse is maliciously and neurotically obscure and is designed deliberately to bewilder and enrage the worthy burgher.

Aside from the difficult but decipherable poets, there do flourish the gibberers, the phony-profound. But this merely reminds us of the never ending need of distinguishing the craftsman from the charlatan, a need that has existed equally in every age and is not a specifically modern problem. Few modern poets are more obscure or allusive than the Metaphysical Poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The word “modern" has become a heavy-caliber weapon, both pro and con. But when all is said and done, there remain two kinds of poetry, good poetry and bad poetry, and value judgment cuts across chronology.

How explain the popular distrust of poetry, which almost makes us forget the sorcerous and compulsive role of poetry in certain past societies? As an answer, the overworked concept of “ philistinism — middle-class philistinism or the philistinism of the masses, according to your social philosophy — seems pretty thin. (How philistine to go around wasting time by shocking Philistia! — nothing so much resembles Main Street as Bohemia.) A complete answer would make us deviate from literature into the problem of the values of Western civilization as a whole; they know not literature who only literature know. But an important partial explanation, locally American, lies in a cultural lag of both readers and writers: a lag from their outworn feud of the rebel twenties.

The end of this vendetta is presaged by the present revival of public interest in verse. This interest is manifested not merely by pious applause but also by good solid impious dollars spent on poetry books — still not much, still not enough, but much more than in earlier years. Publishers are surprised to find they are now making money on Auden, Karl Shapiro, Lowell, and others.

These sales are on legitimate grounds; that is, grounds of literary merit (if literary snobbism enters, thank God it’s that kind of snobbism). None of these authors are either demagogues or Edgar Guests; nor do they receive free advertising by being denounced for immorality. Yet they do sell, thereby refuting the old high-brow assumption that Americans will buy nothing in rhyme better than folksy quatrains for Mother’s Day or All the Best Dog Poems.

At the risk of naive or premature optimism, I see an abating of America’s anti-intellectualism which had so distressed the Paris-ward émigrés of yore. Consider the revival of so line-spun a novelist as Henry James. Consider Robert Lowell’s deserved acclaim: a serious and difficult poet who guards the highest esthetic standards and never, never writes down. His creative-writing fellowship, his present sales, his Pulitzer Prize, and the $1000 award from the American Academy speak for themselves. These seem to palliate materially, if not always spiritually, the sting of Lowell’s title quotation: —

Consider the two valuable anthologies, of modern poetry (1946) and of great poetry (1947), compiled by the poet Oscar Williams. They prove it. is possible to combine popular success not solely with Hollywood blandness but sometimes with difficult experimental verse. His Little Treasury of Modern Poetry Has already 40,000 copies in print in America. Taking it together with Elizabeth Drew’s clear and intelligent Directions in Modern Poetry, the general reader will have just the sort of practical guides he needs for the mazes of modernity.

Does the 1947 non-aggression pact between poet and public mean that our culture ceases to be materialistic and commercialized or that sincere artists should cease criticizing it as such? Certainly not; nor has there been any Canossa or sudden conversion on either side. Mr. Business-forthe-sake-of-business has not said, “ Peccavi, pater,” (as in Walter Pater) to Mr. Art-for-art’s-sake. What it does mean is that, with the return to form and clarity, there can now be a disarmament conference between reader and poet, the former dropping his persecution complex about the willful perversity of Long-Haired Coteries, and the latter dropping his persecution complex about the Sordid Vulgarians refusing to shell out hard cash or soft sympathy for Higher Values.

Best example of how the poet-versus-reader feud of the 1920’s can still re-erupt today is Robert Graves’s preface to his new book of poems: —

I write poems for poets. . . . For people in general I write prose and am content that they should be unaware that I do anything else. To write poems for other than poets is wasteful. The moral of the Scilly Islanders, who earned a precarious livelihood by taking in one another’s washing, is . . . that nowhere in the Western Hemisphere was washing so well done.

This hermetic attitude on the part of one of England’s best living poets is no rootless affectation. It has a long and respectable literary ancestry. My objection to it is pragmatic rather than absolute: ivory towers are not equipped with air-raid shelters. Culture is not a self-sufficient island separated from some safely distant mainland but is infinitely vulnerable and infinitely responsive to outside stimuli. The Scilly Islanders of Robert Graves’s metaphor are very silly islanders. Or have we forgotten the war so soon? For it never did hurt a free culture to try to broaden its base.