-38_Comments on Examples of Twentieth-Century Poetry.htm

Our bending necks are steel,

Our mighty flanks swing all like bells,

Chiming together as we wheel . . .

By the way, I read the poem in that paper, The Limber Horses. It is evidently inspired from the vital world ―from a certain part of it which seems to be breaking out in much of today’s literature and art. All that comes from this source is full of a strange kind of force, but out of focus, misshaped in thought or vision or feeling, sometimes in the form too, ominous and perverse. For that matter, the adverse vital world is very much with us now, ―the War was the sign of its descent on the earth and the After-war bears its impress. But from another point of view that is not a cause for alarm or discouragement ―for it has always been predicted from occult sources that such a descent would be the precursor of the Divine Manifestation.

1931

W. H. Auden

I so often fail to detect the poetry in modern “poems” that the enclosed piece (by a quite young man), was a welcome exception ―also it hints at an unusual warmth of interest in England. But neither grammar nor sense is plain to me in the opening line and elsewhere.

O Love, the interest itself in thoughtless Heaven

Make simpler daily the beating of man’s heart; within

There in the ring where name and image meet

Inspire them with such a longing as will make his thought

Alive like patterns a murmuration of starlings

Rising in joy over wolds unwittingly weave;

Here too on our little reef display your power

This fortress perched on the edge of the Atlantic scarp

The mole between all Europe and the exile-crowded sea;

And make us as Newton was who in his garden watching

The apple falling towards England became aware

Between himself and her of an eternal tie.  

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. . . and Glamorgan hid a life

Grim as a tidal rock-pool’s in its glove-shaped valleys,

Is already retreating into her maternal shadow

Leaving the furnaces gasping in the impossible air . . .

The cluster of mounds like a midget golf-course, graves

Of some who created these intelligible dangerous marvels;

Affectionate people, but crude their sense of glory

Far-sighted as falcons, they looked down another future,

For the seed in their loins were hostile, though afraid of their pride,

And tall with a shadow now, inertly wait . . .

Consider the years of the measured world begun

The barren spiritual marriage of stone and water.

Yet, O, at this very moment of our hopeless sigh

When inland they are thinking their thoughts but are watching these islands . . .

Some dream, say yes, long coiled in the ammonite’s slumber

Is uncurling, prepared to lay on our talk and kindness

Its military silence, its surgeon’s idea of pain.

And called out of tideless peace by a living sun

As when Merlin, tamer of horses, and his lords to whom

Stonehenge was still a thought, the Pillars passed

And into the undared ocean swung north their prow,

Drives through the night and star-concealing dawn

For the virgin roadsteads of our hearts an unwavering keel.

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the same, there is a rhythm and there is a power of thought and poetic speech, rising to a climax in the nine or ten lines of the close. What seems most to contribute is the skilful and happy vowellation and consonantal assonances, ―the rhythmic form of the lines is not always so happy, ―and on the side of expression the concise power of much of the phrasing at once clear-cut in line and full in significance ―in spirit though not in manner akin to the Dantesque turn of phrase. I mean such lines and expressions as

(this is quite Dante; (3) also)

(and the two lines that follow)

(These two lines again very Dantesque)

It is a pity he did not take pains to raise the whole to the same or a similar equal level ―and more still that he did not think it worth while to make the underlying meaning of the whole as clear and powerfully precise as are in themselves these phrases.

15 September 1932  

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Stephen Spender

Here is a poem by Stephen Spender, one of the most promising of the young modernist poets, in The New Statesman and Nation of November 4, 1933:

Perhaps

the explosion of a bomb the

submarine ―a burst bubble filled with water ―

the chancellor clutching his shot arm (and that was Perhaps

a put-up job for their own photographers)

the parliament their own side set afire

& then our party forbidden

& the mine flooded, an accident I hope . . .

In his skidding car he wonders

when watching landscape attack him

“is it rushing? (I cannot grasp it) or is it

at rest with its own silence I cannot touch?”

Was that final when they shot him? did that war

lop our dead branches? are my new leaves splendid?

is it leviathan, that revolution

hugely nosing at edge of antarctic?

only Perhaps. Can be that we grow smaller

donnish and bony shut in our racing prison:

headlines are walls that shake and close

the dry dice rattled in their wooden box.

Can be deception of things only changing. Out there

perhaps growth of humanity above the plain

hangs: not the timed explosion, oh but Time

monstrous with stillness like the himalayan range.

Aren’t the emotion and the rhythm all in a rather subdued key ―but that appears to be universal among up-to-date poets?

It seems to me they are so subdued as hardly to be there except at places. A certain subdued force of statement getting less subdued  

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and more evidently powerful at the close ―this there is, but it is the only power there.

How did the poem impress you?

I am afraid it made no impression on me ―no poetical impression. I cannot persuade myself that this kind of writing has any chance of survival once the mode is over.

On consideration I should say that whatever merits there are in Perhaps lie in the last four stanzas. The first three seem to me distinguishable from a strong prose only by the compression of the language and the stiffness of the movement ―too stiff for prose, in quite another way too stiff for the fineness and plasticity there should be in poetic rhythm ―especially needed, it seems to me, in free verse. From the fourth line of the fourth stanza I begin to find what seems to me the real poetic touch. The fifth and seventh have the substance and diction of very fine poetry ―what I miss is the rhythm that would carry it home to the inner consciousness and leave it with its place permanently there. There seems to be in this technique an unwillingness to get too far away from the characteristic manner of prose rhythm, an unwillingness either to soar or run, as if either would be an unbecoming and too ostentatious action ―in three or four lines only the poet is just about to let himself go. Or perhaps there is the same tendency as in some modern painting and architecture, a demand for geometric severity and precision? But the result is the same. It may be that this kind of writing cuts into the intellect ―it touches only the surface of the vital, the life-spirit which after all has its rights in poetry, and does not get through into the soul. That at least is the final impression it leaves on me.

1933

W. J. Turner

The Word made Flesh?

How often does a man need to see a woman?

Once!

Once is enough, but a second time will confirm if it be she,  

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She who will be a fountain of everlasting mystery,

Whose glance escaping hither and thither

Returns to him who troubles her. . . .

No light travelling through space-time immeasurable

Has leapt so great a distance as their eyes;

Naked together their spirits commingling

Stir the seed in their genitals ―

Like a babe never to be born that leaps up crying,

A voice crying in the wilderness. . . .

The head of Satan is curled

Close, crisp, like the Gorgon;

They are the serpents of the spirit

Curled like the hair of the chaste body,

Emblem of the God who is not creative,

Who has not made the heavens and the earth,

Nor from an Adam of dust

Took that white bone, woman. . . .

This it is to be excluded from the bliss

Of the angels of God,

And of the men and women that He made in His image;

The joy of making images in the image of his maker is not his,

But his are the children of the spirit:

Sweeter and fairer are they than the children of the flesh,

But they are born solitary

And agony is their making-kiss.

Is there any justification for my impression that this was a ghost of the nineties (the meretricious “diabolism”, cult of the bizarre etc.) that had gone to a Fancy Dress Ball in the clothes of 1934? There seemed to be a certain slickness in achieving the fashionable formula of today ―and of course the inevitable sop to the anti-Victorian Cerberus, the introduction of something to offend the conventions of last century.

But I did not feel any inevitability behind it all. Some “modern” verse is perverse but powerful; these lines seemed just built up by an adroit mind that knows how to tickle the modern fancy.

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I think your criticism is very much to the point. The writer is a very clever manipulator of words, but he is dressing up an idea so as to catch the surface mind ―there is no sincerity and therefore no power or conviction or poetical suggestion. Such made-up stuff as

The head of Satan is curled

and the rest of it has no real significance and is therefore rhetorical, not poetic. The rest is no better ―there is no single line that carries conviction, not an image or a phrase or a movement of rhythm that is inevitable.

There is room for sex poetry if it is felt as truth and rendered either with beauty or power, but this crude braggadocio of the flesh is not telling nor attractive. The diabolism and cult of the bizarre in the nineties had a certain meaning, ―it was at least a revolt against false conventions and an attempt to escape from the furbished obviousness of much that had gone before. But now it has itself become the obvious and conventional ―not it exactly in its old form but the things it attempted to release and these are now trying to escape from their own obviousness by excess, the grotesque, the perverse. The writer brings in or brings back Satan (for whom there is no longer any need) to give, I suppose, a diabolical thrill to that excess ―but, as poetry at least, it is not successful. Satan and sexual realism (e.g. the “spirit stirring the genitals”) do not match together.

1934

Edwin Muir

Who curbed the lion long ago

And penned him in this towering field

And reared him wingless in the sky?

And quenched the dragon’s burning eye,

Chaining him here to make a show,

The faithful guardian of the shield?

A fabulous wave far back in time

Flung these calm trophies to this shore  

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That looks out on a different sea.

These relics of a buried war,

Empty as shape and cold as rhyme,

Gaze now on fabulous wars to be.

So well the storm must have fulfilled

Its work of perfect overthrow

That this new world to them must seem

Irrecognizably the same,

And looking from the flag and shield

They see the selfsame road they know.

Here now heraldic watch them ride

This path far up the mountainside

And backward never cast a look;

Ignorant that the dragon died

Long since and that the mountain shook

When the great lion was crucified.

Very good indeed ―admirable throughout. It is refreshing to read a poem with such a good form, build, depth of suggested meaning amidst so much that is so freakish and uncertain as to take away half the value of what is attempted. Here the writer has something to say and knows how to say it.

1934

Robert Frost, William Plomer, Roy Campbell

Something inspires the only cow of late

To make no more of a wall than an open gate,

And think no more of wall-builders than fools.

Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools

A cider syrup. Having tasted fruit

She scorns a pasture withering to the root.

She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten

The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.

She leaves them bitten when she has to fly.

She bellows on a knoll against the sky.

Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.

―Robert Frost  

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Now the edge of the jungle rustles. In a hush

The crowd parts. Nothing happens. Then

The dancers totter adroitly out on stilts,

Weirdly advancing, twice as high as men.

Sure as fate, strange as the mantis, cruel

As vengeance in a dream, four bodies hung

In cloaks of rasping grasses, turning

Their tiny heads, the masks besmeared with dung;

Each mops and mows, uttering no sound,

Each stately, awkward, giant marionette,

Each printed shadow frightful on the ground

Moving in small distorted silhouette. . . .

―Williams Plomer

Through the mixed tunnels of whose angry brain

Creeps the slow scolopendra of the Train!

―Roy Campbell

Have you seen the “Golden Cowboy and Others” in the New Statesman? Gives a good idea of modernist poetry, I think. Frost is a rather elaborate frost. Plomer is a “terrible” contortionist, but Roy Campbell is really amusing ―I like his “slow scolopendra” immensely. He has at least the courage of his images. Evidently poetry is following the same gallop into extravagance as painting. And yet there is an attempt behind it which looks like a seeking after the “Future Poetry” gone astray.

1937  

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