The Education of a Poet

by PETER VIERECK

I

THE new readers and writers and students of today are revolting against too much revolt; against the irresponsible cult of obfuscating for the sake of obfuscating and of shocking merely for the sake of shocking, whether in art or ethics or polities. Not that any poet can ever hold a brief for the other extreme either. By other extreme, I mean the original Mr. G. Babbitt of Zenith whose banality threatened art a generation ago, until the crash of 1929 permanently deflated his smugness. But today’s threat to art no longer comes only from him. He merely hated art. Today’s nevv-style Philistine, instead of disparaging art, hugs it to death.

This new-style Babbitt has changed his mask; he has gone avant-garde. He tries to talk knowingly about Gertrude Stein and never even realizes how old-fashioned such modernity has become. Because he confuses culture with jargon and art with artiness, he considers himself an advanced thinker. He never realizes he is the same old Babbitt, who has merely changed his address to the Left Bank. Philistinism, now-style or old, means sacrificing imagination and originality to fashionable stereotypes. A genuinely sensitive poet rejects equally the old Babbitt, who derides good poetry because it is modern and difficult, and the new Babbitt who praises bad poetry because it is modernistic and obscure.

Since 1913, new esthetic movements have been outmoding each other so fast, that nobody can be sure whether he is radical or reactionary . The rapid turnover makes writers both homesick and selfconscious, Thereby it also increases their historical sense. Each new movement classifies and studies historically all the preceding movements, like an orphan hunting for his origins.

Never before has the historical sense been keener, and never before has history moved quicker. Some poets tend to pass through a new literary movement with every new book. For example, the ever fascinating Auden creates a new mode of writing each time his imitators — ever one jump behind — have caught up with his preceding mode. Both he and Yeats, among many others, have at different stages evolved styles so different that in any age but ours these styles could only have been movements a full century apart.

In an old-fashioned London edition of the Greek Anthology, the editor describes as follows the three beverages accompanying the three phases of man on the ancient Greek island of Ceos: “Pure youths and maidens, until after marriage, drank only water"; next came wine, in the phase of passion and intoxication; finally, when “naught remained but a dreary vista of grey hairs and burdensome feebleness, the old men and women would assemble together at a banquet, pledging one another in cups of poisoned wine.”These drinking customs of the sixth century B.C. are for me symbols of the three phases of poetry in the last three centuries. Poetry’s phase of clear water was the rationalism and the neoclassieism of the eighteenth century, when (to cpiote the heroic couplet of a trembling-cared admirer of Pope)

Poetry’s passionate phase of heady wine was the romantic nineteenth century, typified by such lines as Dowson’s “I cried for madder music and for stronger wine.” Poetry’s phase of poison-sipping “ageing eagles” is certainly the last thirty years, in which several hundred volumes of modern verse are summed up in a single line from The Waste Land: “My nerves are bad to-night.”

If as recently as World War II anyone had asked, “What is the dominant revolt in poetry;” the answer would have been: the many-sided movement beginning around 1913 with the Imagist revolt, soon passing under the control of Pound and Eliot, and then overlapping with the New Critics. But in 1950 the answer to the same question would be: today’s revolt is the insurrection of younger writers against precisely these schools of Pound, Eliot, and the New Critics. (Not that these schools don’t differ among themselves also.) The very word “school” — the fact that today college students talk less of the New Critics than of the “school of New Criticism” — proves that the revolt has already frozen into an established institution, transforming the New Criticism into one more old criticism.

Only time will tell, but perhaps today’s conservative revolt is not one more ephemeral fashion of a decade but part of a deeper and longer movement, comparable in extent to the two earlier ground swells of eighteenth-century neoclassicism and nincteenth-century romanticism. The new mid-century ground swell could be called “Manhattan classicism.” An urban, machine-age classicism must not be afraid to build its small, quiet perfection right inside the largest, noisiest but also most vital -industrial center of the world. Better a quixotic attempt at actually living the spirit of Graeco-Roman classicism inside uncouth New York than safely worshiping its dead letter in a charming Old World museum.

Romanticism does harm only in polities. In poetry its emotionalism is a needed ingredient. The struggle between romanticism and rationalist neoclassieism is not always necessary in poetry, as both elements are needed lo create beauty. A car needs both brakes and gas; romanticism lacks the former, neoclassicism the latter. The mid-century revolt against revolt combines two kinds of return: (1) a return to classic clarity and communication and ethical responsibility (such modern poetry as Pound’s Pisan Cantos utterly lacks this); (2) a return to romantic wildness of music and lyrical passion, which modern poetry had lost likewise.

The movement now supreme is destroying itself by forgetting about communication. Its poets are no longer poetic; its ideal poet is neither the writer for the general reader nor the “poet’s poet “ but that sterile third category, the critic’s poet. The New Critics have produced many subtle and most illuminating textual analyses. They have also produced as many pretentious, snobbish, and humorless analyses. The famous “New Critic method of analysis” treats a poem by itself, like a self-created object outside of time and space. By discarding a poem’s irrelevant historical and psychological (and “moralizing”) encrustations, they have splendidly taught us to read the text itself. By also discarding the relevant historical and psychological (and ethical) aspects, they are often misreading the text itself. Little they know of poetry who only poetry know.

The New Critics have done much to cultivate in a select few readers a proper sensibility for a select few poets. They have done equally much to alienate the general educated public from poetry. And think only of the heavy, heavy funlessness of their criticpoet disciples. One is reminded of Roy Campbell’s famous quatrain: —

Consider only the vocabulary of these secondgeneration imitators of what had once (under its creative first-generation leaders like Eliot and Ransom) been an exciting new movement. The poetry-murdering vocabulary of those sterilesecondgoneration epigones is enshrined forever in the “Glossary of the New Criticism" published by Poetry magazine (1948 1949). This “Glossary.”with its earnest, pedantic definitions of needlessly pretentious lingo, strikes you at first as a diabolically clever parody. Alas, it is meant in dead earnest.

All I say in criticism of the school of Eliot, Pound, and the New Criticism is said on the assumption that its good, at least among its first generation, has outweighed its harm. If anyone doubts that my assumption is correct, let him reread the dull and sloppy verse of most Georgians of the early 1900s. For ridding us of those banalities. we owe gratitude to the subtleties of Pound and Eliot and to the critical rigors of Richards and Ransom. Therefore, while rejecting undue Eliotine or New Critic domination of English departments and Little Magazines, we must also prevent the healthy mid-century revolt against such mandarinism from going too far and becoming the wrong the indiscriminate kind oi revolt, like certain demagogic baitings of Pound and obscurity. Extreme pendulum-swings inject bigotry, narrow cubism, and personal rivalries. But art thrives in a tolerant atmosphere where different schools learn and plagiarize vigorously from each other instead of excluding each other fanatically.

When I keep advocating so insistently a return to simplicity In poetry, I mean the hard-won simplicity that resolves spiritual tensions and literary complexities; not the easy simplicity that means the absence of tensions and complexities. The former is best exemplified by Robert Frost, the latter by Edgar Guest. Hard-won simplicity is the tragic communication that follows the dark night of the soul, not the crass and jovial communication that precedes it.

2

FORMALISM, which means form for its own sake, is not the same as form. The mid-century revolt is returning to more exacting forms and more traditional metrics but is not returning to formalism.

The formalism and technical virtuosity of the thirties and early forties stressed poetic form at the expense of content. The content often failed to deal with the anxieties that really matter. Idle new generation, writing in 1950. were forced in fact, thrown — by war service into a willy-nilly preoccupation with the content of the realities around them. No wonder that we of this new generation, while returning to form, use it not for its own sake but as a means to enhance the content, including the intellectual and moral values implied by the content and the lucid communication of these values.

To be sure, art suffers when its ideas and its moral center are dulled into explicit sermonizing or schoolma amish eighteenth-century didacticism. But in such contemporary poets as Christopher Fry, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Roy Fuller, Elliot Coleman, and Louis Simpson, the moral fervor is nondidactic and does not conflict with their esthetic merit ; no, it enhances that merit and inspires its lire.

It is fitting that the last remnants of the freeverse revolt against forms are now followed by a conservative revolt, returning to forms without New Critic formalism. His equally fitting that the various revolts, including free verse and the very different New Criticism, have indelibly influenced the new mid-century conservatism by leaving it the heritage of a more precise diction.

If poetry’s return to an important content can be matched with a clarity of communication that present poets lack, then it will be possible to end the schism between poets and readers. To the anxieties that really matter, materialism and the most brilliant sciences can give the reader no answer, while religion’s answer strikes very many readers as too dogmatic and too future-centered. Here and now, in this present existence, the reader will again find in the arts, and not in the practical world, his ally against inner and outer mechanization. Being both to blame, hermetic poets and lazy readers of the 1950s must make equal efforts to create a netr community of artistic understanding. Only then will the tragedy of a savage atomic age be understood as all spiritual tragedy must be understood: in terms of its beauty and ugliness and in terms of its human ethics and human dignity and indignity, instead of exclusively in either material utilitarian terms or religious supernatural terms.

What if communication is not restored, if our mid-century revolt against revolt fails in its most urgent aim? In that case, there will still be plenty of communication going on, but it will not be by the good writers; it will continue to be left to the bad writers, the demagogues of literature. The default of the good pools in communicating their spiritual values to their readers creates a moral vacuum filled by such tawdry pseudospiritual bestsellers as Kahlil Gibran.

The success of such books — and of astrology, Rosicrucianism, and the rest owes its hard-boiled commercial triumph to its noncommercial idealistic opposite: an unsatisfied nonmaterial thirst in the modern reader. For our unread and uncommunicating serious artists, it is a danger signal that millions are reading such worthless but communicative pseudo poetry as Gibran’s Prophet. Men not only need moral refreshment but will shop around till they get it. If they cannot get it from their legitimate dealer in intellect, the serious artist, then they will get it adulterated in some bootleg half-pint of soul. Either the true Pierian spring or Southern California.

To sum up: I have tried to show the respective contributions made by various schools to the mid-cenlury synthesis—the Manhattan classicism of tomorrow. I have also tried to show the dangers of each of these, the stifling of poetry that takes place if any school becomes a dictatorship and turns out epigones. Whatever may be the arguments against free individualism in economics, free individualism &emdsah; uncoiledivized, untotalitarian — still remains the most auspicious ism for the world republic of letters. As befits an individualistic democracy, the mid-century poets will learn not by having some new pontificator to replace the old but by freely groping for themselves and, above all, by making mistakes.

And when we have made enough mistakes, and when revolt and counterrevolt and the revolt against counterrevolt are all behind us and turn out to be but different mirror-images of the same homesick, urban, twentieth-century face, then we will learn the honorable humility of these words by the poet William Morris: —

Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat; and when it comes, turns out to be not what they meant; and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.

And when we have not merely recited these words but have lived them, then at last we shall have reached the end of the very first beginning of the education of a poet.