Contemporay Poetry: Critique

Author(s): Elder Olson

Source: Chicago Review, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Spring, 1948), pp. 156-159
Published by: Chicago Review
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25292819
Accessed: 30-09-2015 19:34 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Chicago Review is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Chicago Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 186.206.255.189 on Wed, 30 Sep 2015 19:34:09 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
elder olson

con temporay poetry:

crntique

The reader who, though intelligent and informed, is not absolutely a connoisseur of
contemporary poetry tends to complain of its avoidance of emotion and its unintelligibility;
and his complaint is not without foundation. A very great deal of the poetry of our time
if we mean the mine-run of it rather than the works of genius-is certainly upon such morally
and emotionally indifferent subjects as figure in the common English theme. One can almost
read the assignment on the blackboard at times: "Describe vividly and briefly a) a railroad
terminal, b) an airport, c) a working-man." And certainly, also a good deal of our poetry is
written in a style which is odd rather than clear.
How came so many writers of undoubted talent to take so strange a turn? The literary
historian, likely as not, will tend to answer that question with a single favorite word: Revolt.
The poets have revolted. We are all immediately pleased with this; it seems just the thing a
poet should do. Set him down anywhere, in any circumstances, and he revolts. Unfortun
ately, the pleasing answer is not always a true one. The poet does not always revolt; indeed,
he quite generally tends to follow his predecessors. That, in fact, is how the poetic arts
chiefly develop, and that is why you find such curious unity in whole schools of poetry. The
serious poet willingly leaves a tradition in, I think, two circumstances only: (1) when that
tradition is too undeveloped, or too remote from his poetic intentions, or (2) when it is over
developed, when the materials and devices associated with it are worn out. The first circum
stance does not lead to revolt at all. There is no revolt involved, for instance, when poets
abandon tragedy for comedy. Nor does the second circumstance invariably lead to revolt.
It leads either to revolt or to the exchange of one tradition for another. Even if revolt is in
volved, it has its positive as its negative side; the poet not only refuses to write one kind of
poetry, he also chooses to write another kind. Otherwise he simply ceases to write poetry.
What happened in English and American poetry some twenty-five years ago was not
so much a revolt as an exchange of the English tradition for the French; and the men who
first effected the exchange-men of genius, like Eliot and Pound-did not so much exchange
traditions as supplement one tradition with another.
In every art there are two strong things, conventions and principles. The conventions
are ephemeral; the principles are not. Revolt against conventions, and you produce new art.
Revolt against the principles, and you do not produce art at all. A Beethoven does not revolt
against the principles of music; he revolts against "symphonic form", which is not form at
all, but a convention. Critics who cannot distinguish between convention and principles are
offended by this, since they think their principles are in question. Artists who cannot make
this distinction proceed to revolt against everything.
The French poetic art brought over into English was a highly developed and therefore
extremely subtle art. All arts, as they develop, tend to,leave more and more to inference. They
do less and less, and it means more and more. Reuault's paintings of the three judges, for in
stance, actually depicts only about one and one-quarter judges. The rest is left to inference.
When an art is highly developed, its audience and its imitators must be capable of considerable
inferential powers. Mr. Eliot, Mr. Pound, Mr. Stevens, and some others were; most others
were not. The inferences demaned by art often require long and rich experience with its
traditions. The imitators did not have it. They saw Mr. Eliot putting quotations together,
omitting transitional expressions, juxtaposing apparently incongruous styles, alternating prose
with verse, and otherwise playing fast and loose with poetic conventions; they did not see that
The Waste Land, for instance, was a poem the same as Lycidas or the Elegy in a Country
Churchyard. They thought The Waste Land a kind of inspired insanity; they did not see that
Eliot was simply representing, in a remarkably orderly fashion, the delibrations of a certain
kind of character, not by stating the rational process in the form of an argument, as older

156

This content downloaded from 186.206.255.189 on Wed, 30 Sep 2015 19:34:09 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
poets generally did, but by exhibiting only the mental associations which attended that pro
cess. They thought he was altering form, whereas he was only altering technique. The critics
professed complete comprehension, clung desperately to Eliot's notes on the poem and were
otherwise exceedingly vague. Mr. Eliot said little or nothing. He was writing poetry.
When we do not comprehend a form of art, we see only its material, the matter, the de
vices employed; we do not know how the matter is used or how the devices are employed.
Eliot, like the other innovators of genius who have influenced contemporary poetry, seemed
to the inexperienced to be cdoing two things: straining language to the limit, and avoiding
emotion. This last point interested them, not only because Eliot and others were apparently
writing good poetry by avoiding emotion, but also because most of the bad poetry of the period
immediately proceeding had been frantically emotional. They began therefore, to revo
lutionize diction and to avoid emotion in their own poetry. The step forward had been too
sudden and had gone too far for them to comprehend the innovations as extentions of the
English tradition. They were therefore, in effect, deprived of thier tradition and of all models
except these late developments which they did not understand.
Had a well-developed criticism been ready to hand, many of their difficulties might have
been averted. These were lyric poets, and lyric poetry has always been the most slighted de
partment of literary criticism. But there was a further difficulty. Not only was there no
well-developed theory, but there were a great number of critics who pretended to talk about
poetry, although they really discussed matters of psychology, sociology, politics, ethics, meta
physics, linguistics, and semantics. Doubtless these critics had the best of intentions, and
achieved remarkable results in their own fields; but none of them, so far as I am aware, ever
uttered one proposition of the slightest use to the poet in the making of his poem. I will go
farther than that. I think that they confused the poet entirely.
Let us leave these distressing questions and go on to talk about what lyric poetry ought
to be, and what lines contemporary innovation ought to take.
A person who knows nothing else about poetry sees that it ismade of words. The words
are what you see upon the page if you read, what you hear if you listen. The consequence
is that nowadays when the nature of poetry has become so uncertain that everyone is trying
to define it, definitions usually begin "Poetry is words which or language wihch or discourse
which" and so forth. As a matter of fact it is nothing of the kind. Just as we should not
define a chair as wood which has such and such characteristics-for a chair is not a kind of
wood but a kind of furniture-so we ought not to define poetry as words. The chair is not
wood but wooden; poetry is not words but verbal. In one sense, of course, the words are of
the utmost importance; if we do not grasp them, we do not graps the poem. In another sense,
they are the least important element of the poem; for they do not determine the character
of anything else in the poem; on the contrary, they are determined by everything else. They
are the only things you see or hear; yet they are governed by imperceptible things which are
inferred from them. And when you are moved by poetry, you are moved by the things that the
words stand for.
What are these things back of the words, which we cannot perceive but can only infer,
and which are of such importance to the effect? If you think about artistic media for a mo
ment, you will see that nothing can be represented in a certain artistic medium unless that
medium either possesses the qualities which are signs of the qualities of the thing, i.e., which
permit their inference. You cannot draw a face with musical tones, and you cannot paint a
thought-process, because this correlation between the medium and the object to be repre
sented is absent. On the other hand, you can paint a red apple because you have red pigment;
and you can paint a defile of trees or houses because, while surface does not have a third
dimension, it can have characteristics which are the signs of a third dimension: that is, since
distance brings perspective, the diminution, paling, obscuring of objects, etc., youi can represent
distance by showing the diminution, paling, obscuring, etc., of the objects.
Now poetry does not use words merely; it uses speech; and speech is either human action
or a sign of character, thought, and passion. Those words you see in the poem are not just
words; they are the speech of someone, and that speech is either an action, like a threat or a
command or a persuasion, or it exhibits the character, thought, or passion of the speaker. We
know, now, what poetry is about. It is about men and women and their situations, their pas
sions, their fortunes and misfortunes. It is by these that we are moved; to these we react.
And we can see now the real difficulty of contemporary poetry. It has dehumanized poetry,
either by leaving men and women out entirely,-giving us purely "objective" depictions of
train-terminals and air-ports-or by failing to represent them in interesting and intelligible
situations.
It is not every human situation or experience which is interesting to us. Any bore who
tells you his autobiography can quickly convince you of that. What is uninteresting and un

157

This content downloaded from 186.206.255.189 on Wed, 30 Sep 2015 19:34:09 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
moving? States of indifference, states of emotion or reflection the causes of which are unin
telligible to us or insufficient to produce similar effects in us, things of no human conse
quence. What is interesting and moving? Fortunes and misfortunes of those to whom we
are well or ill disposed because of their character; character itself as potential of good or
evil; and any passion or emotion when the cause is in the object and when we vividly con
ceive the object, or when at any rate the passion is not peculiar to the person feeling it.
When a poet writes about a Colt .45 and tells us that if he pulls the trigger he may kill
someone-possibly even himself if he is careless-but that, if he doesn't take care of the gun,
itmay rust, he seems to us in a completely indifferent state; he ismerely setting down random
impressions; and, guessing at no past or future event of importance, we are quite unmoved.
It is not we who restrict his subject; it is the art of poetry, founded upon human nature,
which restricts it. He may not write about the British Museum and divers and express trains;
but he may write about people reacting in some humanly interesting way to anything in the
world. Shakespeare's "When icicles hang on the wall" is not about winter or Dick the shep
herd or Tom who bears logs; it is about the emotion of the speaker, although he merely
states the things which cause his emotion, so that we are also affected at once.Nor does the char
acter need to state the cause of his emotion, even, provided that he exhibits the signs of that
emotion; so delicate is human sympathy that we respond merely to the indications of emo
tion. It is only when the cause seems inadequate or improper, or the character unlike hu
manity, that our sympathy is withheld.
This does not mean that the characters are always to be seen in the throes of emotion,
and heard uttering passionate cries. They ought to utter passionate cries, certainly, when
that will most move us; but we are frequently moved when the character is not moved at all,
provided that we surmise, for example, some horror past or some horror yet to come; or when
that indifference is themnark of a character fundamentally detestable to us, like Duke in "My
Last Duchess", or the mark of extraordinary nobility.1
But let us have men and women always at the core; let them be represented to us in the
fashion which will set them most vividly and clearly before us; and let the words be such as
they would utter in their circumstances, rather than any machine-made style, made up in
advance of the poem. In these matters the lyric poet is no different from the writer of drama
or fiction, except that he must choose actions which can be set briefly before us and can still
exert their power, whereas writers in the longer forms may avail themselves of the advantages
of extended action. This humanity is common to, and principal in, all the arts of poetry; no
poet can revolt against it and write poetry. Epigrams and occasional pieces and versified
English themes he may indeed write, but not poetry. The innovations in style of many con
temporary poets are not poetic innovations, simply because the poets are not employing lan
guage as a poetic medium; they are not writing poems. One cannot innovate in an art running
counter to the art.
Do we wish to achieve modernity? We have only to avail ourselves of the art as it has
been built up over the centruies, and to extend it. The peculiar characteristics of our age will
of themselves find their way into what we do, and will set us off from other periods. Inven
tions of plots and incidents, invention of character and thought, invention of devices by which
these may be represented, and invention of language suitable to these will replenish and
fructify the art. Innovation is not always the development of a new device; it is as frequently
a new use of the old. Nothing seemed more outworn in our day than the pastoral convention;
yet MacNeice, for example, has used it with novelty and power.
The instrument that through its deficiencies betrayed the poets may still be of the greatest
serivce to them. I mean criticism and poetic theory; but sound criticism and theory, which
actually deal with poetry, and with such problems as the practicing poet himself must consider.
We generally think that theory does not influence practic too much; what we forget is that,
whereas opinion, whether false or true, does not in the least affect the forms and processes
of nature, it is the reverse in art; what the artist thinks, he makes. Nature does not build in
accordance with our conceptions, but certainly we do. In normal circumstances the poet
need not be critically aware, in the sense of possessing a theoretical knowledge of poetics;
it is however one thing for him to be unware, and another for him to be confused, and at
present he is confused. Criticism in a sense he must exercise from the beginning to the end
of the poetic process; he will be safer if he knows in terms of what he is criticising.
Coupled with sound criticism, the manifold talents of this age may produce incredible
splendors. Bound to a dogmatism which is no less dogmatic and tyrannical because it is
11 have considered here only lyric poetry of a dramatic order, in which the character to which
we are reacting is the speaker. Lyric poetry may also approximate narration; the protagonistic character,
so to speak, may be set before us indirectly through the speech of another, who through his indifference,
hostility, etc., may sharpen our sense of the events which he recounts; or the narrator may be the
character himself after the event, as in "Porphyria's Lover," where the calm satisfaction of the lover
after the murder of his mistress augments the horror.

158
lJO

This content downloaded from 186.206.255.189 on Wed, 30 Sep 2015 19:34:09 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 tacit, because it is a habit that proceeds from critical error and ignorance, these talents will
produce only further preciosities, except for the occasional lights of genius which owe their
being neither to tradition nor to criticism, but to nature.
Thus far we have proceeded on the supposition that the poetic arts have as their ends
certain pleasures, produced by their play upon emotions. Certainly these are the ends of art,
and suich as any consideration of art must embrace; but to suppose that art has no further
effects, and that it may have no further ends relative to these, is vastly to underestimate the
powers of art. It exercises, for example, a compelling influence upon human action, individual,
social, or political; for among the causes of the misdirection of human action are the failure
to conceive vividly and the failure to conceive apart from self-interest; and these are failures
which art above all other things is potent to avert, since it vivifies, and since in art we must
view man on his merits and not in relation to our private interests. It is not that art teaches
by precept, as older generations thought, nor that it moves to action; but clearly it inculates
moral attitudes; it determined our feeling toward characters of a certain kind for no other
reason than that they are such characters. The ethical function of art, therefore, is never in
opposition to the purely artistic end; on the contrary, it is best achieved when the artistic
end has been best accomplished, for it is only a further consequence of the powers of art. The
same thing is true of any political or social ends of art, providing that the state be a good
state, or the society a moral society.
To reflect on these things is to realize the importance and value of art, which, excellent
in itself, becomes ever more excellent as we view it in ever more general relations; but to reflect
thus on its value is also to realize that when an art falls short of its proper nature, it is not
the art alone which suffers, but also whatever of human activity and condition is affected by
art. When humanity is excluded from art, human passions can no longer be evoked by it;
nothing is left but the manipulations of the medium, which are of interest only to the
connoisseur. When, on the contrary, the arts have their proper objects, they are generally
intelligible and delightful to all, and particularly so to the expert.
We may offer the poet and the critic these themes for consideration.

reviews
"Little David"-a hrief critique of our allies
Now that the "little magazine" has become a fit subject for doctor's theses and learned
critical essays, there is a tendency to look back nostalgically to the days when "Ulysses" was
being serialized in Margaret Anderson's Little Review, and such writers as Hemingway and
T. S. Eliot were beginning. Little magazines today suffer somewhat unfairly from this attitude.
First, it is hard to judge whether the present writers being introduced in the pages of little
magazines are the future Eliots and Joyces. Most of them certainly aren't. But it is a fact
that some of our best and most important writing is appearing in these magazines. Besides
this, they are almost the only place where the latest works of our leading established literary
men appear. A cursory glance at a few of the better known magazines which have published
since the beginning of the year presents us a tableau of remarkable creative energy.
Horizon, the English publication which is most generally known on this side of the Atlantic,
has so far this year published three remarkable issues. The January issue contains three
noteworthy items: seven new poems by E. E. Cummings, an essay, Sin, by Bertrand Russell,
and Memories of Franz Kafka by J. P. Hodin, subtitled " Notes for a definite biography, to
gether with reflections on the problem of decadence." This last includes two interviews, one
with a painter, F. Feigel, who was a very good friend of Kafka's, and one with Mrs. Dora
Dymant, who was Kafka's mistress during his sojourn in Berlin. Many will be grateful to
Mr. Hodin for the very human picture of Kafka he has succeeded in giving. The February
issue is entirely taken up by a new novel by Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One. This appearance
of the novel before the regular publication should make this issue of the magazine a small
collector's item. The novel is vaguely allied to Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
by its subject matter: burial rites and cemeteries in Southern California. The March issue
gives us two interesting articles, Monsieur Verdoux by Jacques P. Brunius, and the fourth in
a series called Studies of Genius, Hafiz by Ann K. S. Lambton.
The Sring number of Perspective, a fairly recent arrival in
the little magazine field, suffers
from that familiar malady, a surfeit of moderately bad poetry, but has to recommend it an
article on Picasso by Wallace Fowlie whose critical acumen manages to make of this article an
invaluable introduction to Picasso, even for those who might already know a good deal about
the painter. There are also two articles, one on Lionel Trilling by Lilliam Beresnack, and
one on Dylan Thomas by Jacob Korg.

159
This content downloaded from 186.206.255.189 on Wed, 30 Sep 2015 19:34:09 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions