Modernists, Imagists, And Futurists

Said il Magnifico
Pulling a fico–
With a stoccado
And a gambado;
Making a wry
Face: "This corraceous
Round orchidaceous
Laceous porraceous
Fruit is a lie!
It is my friend King Pharaoh's head
That nodding blew out of the Pyramid . . ."

Poetry is the flower of magic, not of logic, says Edith Sitwell, and writes the above lines. They are intended to tell us that the Soldan screwed his face, swaggered, and said that a particular fruit was a lie; and the rest is fun and nonsense. This fact is woven into a web of magic. The Soldan is magnified into il Magnifico. His swagger is a fico, stoccado, gambado. The fruit is corraceous, orchidaceous, laceous, porraceous. King Pharaoh and his Pyramid are brought in. All of her poetry shares this fundamental unreason, for with her mastery of music, rhythm, and texture, she traffics with queen Mab and Mother Earth, and would make of her poetry a kind of black magic, and mix it with incantations and dance. She would always use a logical form; she would increase the consciousness of Man; speak through a second sense if one sense fails, or through a centralised sense which controls all the senses; for, poetry to her is "neither conceived in the wits alone, nor in the soul alone; it is a matter, also, of the blood, of the surface of the skin as well as of the heart and pulses." Jane is tall as crane. Light creaks, or brays like an ass. The Sun is a cannibal; the Moon is foolish; and the Stars are like quaking-grass. The fire is furry as a bear; and the flames purr. She etches her emotions with "rhythmic mesmerism" in one unceasing song, and gives us a melodious chiaroscuro or a singing caricature, and dazzles us with her veils of glamour and music-bells. It is because her theories have worked well that she succeeds in her experiments with new poetic facts and verse-textures; and sometimes cynical and sometimes cloistered, bucolic or Baudelairean, she is the prima donna of England's donna poets, soexquisite, deep, Donnish, all poppy and mandragora and syrups.

Edith Sitwell belongs only to the right wing of the Modernists. The Modernist movement in English poetry, which is now the poetry of a language and not of a country, may have achieved much, or may be an imposture that is not yet found out; it is on its trial and cannot be summed up. But it has succeeded as a reaction against the clap-trap of the Romantic, Pre-Raphaelite, and Yellow Book poetry, the translucencies and mythologies of the early Yeats and his imitators, "the chilblained mittened musings" of Matthew Arnold, and Swinburne's boring Beethoven symphonies. When Rossetti wrote that the Blessed Damozel had three lilies in her hand and the stars in her hair were seven, the statement was much appreciated and imitated, though we doubt it would have received attention if the lilies were not lilies and the stars were not stars. The tendency was then, as always, for poetic diction to become standardised with hackneyed themes, worn-out figures, dead metaphors and similes; and Yeats has made his protest:

"I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old Mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As tho' they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For ther's more enterprise
In walking naked."

The dreamy, moon-struck, "crocus-crowded" stuff was discredited and dying; Cynara and the passion for her were becoming as insincere as lips that are rouged and red. Kipling with his rub-a-dub and Housman with his dreamy pessimism gave new blood to poetry; but Kipling soon became the drummer-boy of the British Empire and Housman created no new craze. Masefield, so heretical in the pre-War days, is tame beside the truculence of the modern poets. Hardy had pottered with Wessex clay and given us pieces of rugged grandeur, figures in stucco, but he eatablished no school. The War released men's emotions. Young blood went crying for action and with a contempt for words, but after four years of hell, came shattered, lost and Sassooning War-satires. The old world was dead, and the new world was powerless to be born. Among the major achievements of poetry in the traditional manner were the ariel-music of De la Mare, the bucolics of Blunden, and the spontaneous bird-song of W. H. Davies. Poetry was disintegrating; it was organised like puzzles and conundrums, flying sideways, upwards, downwards; running into algebraical patterns and astral symphonies. Much of it is allusive-allegorical-romantic-classical-pictorial-symbolical. It touches the sub-conscious and the unconscious. It makes strange noises. To say that such poetry requires literary midwives and damn it is not the proper attitude. It does not detract from the worth of the poet's emotion, experience, or expression; it is only condemning the technique which in itself is of minor importance. Such poets are avowedly high-brow, and take their chances with the literary public. Their poetry is not decadent; it is not derivative; it is not popular. We cannot ignore it, if we care for poetry; we may wonder and wonder at it, as we wonder at the cheek of Ezra Pound when he writes on a cake of soap:

"Lo, how it gleams and glistens in the sun
Like the cheek of a Chesterton."

Our world may be a world that is disintegrating or progressing; but it is a world that is building sky-scrapers, speeding up motion, splitting the atom, communing with spirits, growing familiar with stars, and thinking of the multiverse in terms of Matter-Spirit and Space-Time. It is spinning in circles and dangerous curves; it has imprinted new rhythms in the blood of man. It is not difficult now for man to feel the pains of rhythm, though proper rhythm requires the heart of a poet and the ear of a musician; it is where all art coincides, and all artists are at bottom the same. The modernist rhythm is usually the jazz rhythm. The modernist vision is a futuristic four-dimensional vision. The modernist mythologies are Matter-Spirit, Space-Time, and Sex. Sex is the most important. The modernists consecrate the body as the temple of the senses. They offer it incense and song, and glory in it as the only proof of our being. It is not spiritual to ignore the impulse that kindles our bodies. The late D. H. Lawrence who worshipped the sex-impulse and reveled in the glories of the flesh, was the high-priest of the senses and animal-spirits; for, he had resigned his self for salvation through the flesh alone. He might seem to suffer from sex-neurosis or jaguar spirits to people who do not like his grotesque and sensual imageries. But there is something wild in his hope, something tender in his despair, something sensitive in tone; some sunshine in his clouds and flowers in his crudest clay; and that makes him god-like in his self-torment, self-pity, and barbarism. He has his innocences and child-like moments, and then he has the song in him, and sings like a child of the gorgons. We might sublimate the energies of our being, but sex is the very fire of our blood. It is sex that is the seed of happiness and misery, sex that is working out the destinies of our race, and sex that lights the very dreams of man. Our world is a world obsessed with sex. Huxley's Fifth Philosopher has realised it when he muses:

"A million million spermatozoa
All of them alive:
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
Dare hope to survive."

and the same inspiration gives:

"Darling, will you become a part
Of my poor physiology?
And, my beloved, may I have
The latch-key of your history?
And while the corpse is what it is,
Dear, we must share geographies.’

or this modernist love-piece:

"Diaphenia, drunk with sleep,
Drunk with pleasure, drunk with fatigue,
Feels her Corydon's fingers creep–
Ring-finger, middle finger, index, thumb–
Strummingly over the smooth sleek drum
Of her thorax.

All this may be an obsession; it may be that poetry, a fine art, is becoming a pornographic art; but we must get familiar with it to understand the art of some, who have made literature and added to its significance and beauty. The modern poet meets life at many points, and has extended the subject-matter of poetry. Byron could write about Don Juan or the dark blue ocean. The modern poet can write about adultery or the Absolute, about Diaphenia's thorax or the cheek of a Chesterton. He has made even animals heroes of his poems. Davidson canonized the runnable stag; Masefield humanized Reynord, the Fox; Chesterton consecrated the donkey as the beast that carried Jesus into Jerusalem. And others have found beauty in a rhinoceros.

We are metaphysicals without our Donne, says Aldous Huxley and that is the truth. Huxley himself might be the Donne of our age, for every part of his being is supersensitive, his knowledge is marvellous, and his writings, at their best, are miracles of expression. But it is not easy to compete with Donne, who, a master of satire and passion, could make an art of both; who was the one poet that could check the boredom of Spenserian sweetness; who imparted a rapture to the most intricate of his rhythms and a spiritual glow to the mortality of the flesh; as in the well-known lines:

"Her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks and so distinctly wrought.
That one might almost say her body thought–"

or in the little-known lines:

"So to engraft our hands as yet
Was all our means to make us one,
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation."

It is truer to say that we are on the top of a new Scholasticism, which cries for its Dante. Whether our age will throw up its Donne or Dante, it has thrown up Mr. T. S. Eliot, the most scholastic of poets and critics. It is not easy to deal with him as he is one of those who, if asked to debate, would insist on definitions first. He has studied old masters to good purpose, and writes of them with subdued gusto and suspected depths; but with all his intellectual and imaginative insight he is irritating when, in his criticism, he contradicts himself with all the airs of the Absolute, or when, in his poetry, he annotates himself. The Sacred Wood has already become the Bible of critics who follow him, while The Waste Land is one of the great poems of the world, a poem which in its temper and expression has, like Huxley's Leda, shown the weariness, the fever, and the fret of the post-War world. We may take it as a symphony of despair or a spirit-symphony; and in its discords, its weird music, its undying images, and the hush hush hush of its silences, it suggests the very stir of stars, the rustle of planets, and the crash of worlds:

"This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper,"

Some may find beauty and others sheer noise in the following exchanges:

"Goonight Bill, Goonight Lou. Goonight Goonight May,
Tata. Goonight. Goonight.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night."

But Mr. Eliot is clear and pure in his bursts of song:

"Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we round the prickly pear
At five O'clock in the morning."

and sometimes thin and spectral ending in a welter of words. Listen to this music:

"I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plains behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poit s’ a’cose nel foco chegli affina
Quando fiam cere chelidon….O swallow, swallow
Le Prince d’ Aquitaine a’ la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
ShAntih shantih shantih."

This is a case for a literary mid-wife; for Mr. Eliot himself has the cheek to tell us that we should refer to Purgatorio, Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, the Upanishads, and so on. "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality," says the modernist Eliot, though we must hope that the escape from emotion and personality is not meant to be an escape into moonshine. It is doubtful if the cleverest prisoner can escape from the whole of his personality, if Eliot himself can escape from his; and it is no disparagement to him to say that he attempts an eclecticism and achieves a dialect, though he gives real pleasure to those who know his dialect. He has given a dangerous lead, for the method will not die with him. His pose is the pose of a scholar, his passion the passion of a scholar on thorns and tenterhooks; and with his boldness and individuality he inspires awe and seems eccentric. It is not only that he is more a pandit than a poet, that his content is often dry thought and parched emotion, but that his poetry proceeds always Minerva-like from the head. That is why he is an inadequate Dante, as Huxley is an undeveloped Donne. But The Waste Land is a great poem and is authentic when all the echoes of the one voice, clear, spectral, haunting, are gathered up like a cry from the waste lands of our being. It is impossible not to think of Poe when we consider Mr. Eliot and his contemporaries; for, it was Poe who made the music of the waste lands and influenced Rimbaud, Mallarme, and Valery, the French poets whose works have affected modernist English poetry to a great extent. It was Poe that showed the way of creating a particular pattern of music to express a particular mood; and, though he gave us often more sound than sense, he symbolized all his moodiness into grim and grisly shapes, and wrought out of old words and new names a kind of moody music, which in its intensity is as terrible as the haunting, brooding speech of ghouls.

Mr. E. E. Cummings is even more drastic than Mr. Eliot, and more difficult to understand. A poem in his case is a being with a will and movement of its own. It is the poet's creature; but is independent of his will and personality. Mr. Cummings is only the medium who voices the spiritual self that is the content of the poem. His clairvoyant powers are as keen as those of Mr. Eliot and he has, in addition, the confusions of his psychic syntheses, and a typography which baffles the pandit and the tyro. His poetry is not so much pictorial or musical as pictorial-musical-architectural; and has the shapes of puzzles, conundrums, and algebra:

"Scorchbend ingthem
–selves—U
pcurv E, into:"

is supposed to be ‘scorch-bending themselves, upcurve into’–into anguish or something; and ‘jerkily rushes’ becomes

"jerk.
ilyr, ushes."

That is supposed to express the jerk that you get in a modern train. Does Mr. Cummings, in the words of that mystagogue, Mr. Eliot, "dislocate language into meaning"? Robert Graves and Laura Riding tell us that he does dislocate language into new meanings and symbols; and in the light of their annotations we have to believe that Mr. Cummings is one of the greatest poets of all ages, though it is hard to understand how even the most objective of writers could escape the least tinge of subjectivity. His poems compete with "elephants and EI Greco." But apart from these puzzle-pictures he can write "thy mouth is a chord of crimson music", or:

"lady through whose profound and fragile lips
the sweet small clumpsy feet of April came
into the ragged meadow of my soul."

Mr. Cummings, no doubt, is a genuine poet; he is only too subtle, and does away with conventional punctuation, for punctuation varies from age to age whereas he wants to create powerful psychic beings that will last through time. Apart from the obscurity of typography and symbolism, he is as deep as anyone in insight and feeling, and uses words with such medium-like incoherence that a word might be as sweet as a sonata and silence as harsh as thunder.

The Imagists replaced the old heraldries of poetry with new heraldries. The camera had caught the surfaces of Nature with much exactness; and when the artists wanted to surpass it they discarded multi-coloured images and gave us dull and drab monochromes; but the camera in its turn has imitated the artist and even made photography a subsidiary art. The Imagists have given us hieroglyphics; they have beaten the symbolists of all countries in tortuousness of thought and obscurity of expression. But they did not deserve so much of boosting or censure. They have given us some good poems and much buckram, but buckram embalmed as exquisite mummies. Amy Lowell was the high-priestess, and Richard Aldington the oracle of the movement. H.D. is the finest flower of all those pains for she is the one poet among them of sincerity and splendid spiritual passion, and has given us images, hard, gem-like, marmoreal; but she too is sometimes tortuous and obscure. Some write of the sea as though they suffered from sea-sickness; she sees it with "pointed pines" and asks it to "cover us with your pools of fir." Amy Lowell is flat. Aldington works up a permanent catharsis; he is full of the bitterness of desire and doubt; the body seems to break, the spirit creaks, and life's taper seems to snap out:

"Do I live for copulation?
Do I live for ham or wine?
O my parrot raven-hearted,
O my parrot, not yet mine.
Snap loud, parrot."

The Imagist poetry is rarely lyrical; it is not winged and cannot fly, for its passion is crystallized into pictures; it is static and waits till it creates an image out of an emotion or thought; it lies like quiet little pools of words reflecting images. The weakness of Imagism was that it concentrated too much on the technique of poetry; but its insistence on clearness of outline, concrete images, and concentration did much to check the vagueness and the fluid, florid gusto of the Georgians; for we have poets and poets, the conscientious poet who thinks that rhyming is a duty, not a right, or, the consumptive poet who believes in revealing himself to the utmost and puts his consumption in his poetry.

The form of English poetry has undergone a renaissance. We cannot think of great poetry in terms of form and substance, but we have to consider them with regard to the work of all but the greatest poets. It is because of this complete fusion of form and substance in Gitanjali and other translations that Tagore attains a grand and sublime simplicity, for though he is not regular in his rhythm, he has the art of making rhythm beat through stops, silences, and spaces till whole areas hum, and words dance about and sing. Rhythm is the life-blood of the greatest prose or verse; for, rhythm is the very beat of our blood; and while in prose it is various, in verse it is regular. Our rhythms are broken or shattered because our pulses are broken or shattered; and the bustle, the hurry, the sickliness and the giddiness, the fever and the grotesque flutter of our verbal rhythms are the rhythms of modern life translated into words. Modern poets have to make magnificent noise. Lindsay with his passion for community-singing gives us the music of the hurdy-gurdy and drums in the boom-boom-boom of his lines, and the rattle of rhymes:

"This is the order of the music of the morning:-
First, from the far east comes but a crooning;
The crooning turns to a sunrise singing.
Hark to the calm-horn, balm-horn, psalm-horn;
Hark to the faint-horn, quaint-horn, saint-horn."

It is regular honking. Chesterton hides the, mysticism of ages in roars of Rabelaisian laughter. We have subtler rhythms when Edith Sitwell gives us a fox-trot or sonata; or, when Belloc in his Tarantella gives us the ting-tang-tang of the guitar. The verse librists of the present day take to Free Verse because they either feel slowly or irregularly. They do not recreate or recollect in the hurried accents of metre but write as they feel. There has been much loose thinking about Free Verse, which, is a contradiction in terms; but the loose thinking is only with people who forget Einstein and Relativity; for, nothing is absolutely free; and Free Verse is not anything free but verse that is freer than traditional verse with a technique and history of its own, though the mountebank has often taken to it as the cheapest trappings for his trash. As Robert Graves says: "The claim of Free Verse is that actually each line, not only each stanza or passage, may be subject to a new musical change." Free Verse is more than mere prose-poetry or polyphonic prose with its broken up; it must grow out of itself and attain an organic form with life and movement, like the living song-bird, not a pot of clay. The tendency of all arts is to aspire to the condition of music, said Pater. Painting had exhausted itself in its impressionism and dots that revealed heavens, and been imitating architectural patterns, which has resulted in the cubism of Picasso and others. Poetry, on one side, has become more imitative and on the other less. Some poets have ceased to imitate Nature or anything. But there is a tendency among others to imitate Nature more closely; and so a poem about an elephant should lug and lag and lumber on, one about a stag should be antlered and swift, and one about mud should be muddy. Here is an imitation of a similar kind in a boxing-poem:

"The bell hammered
Staccato,
Swift.
The announcer's arm began to lift.
He bellowed,
Mouth wide:
Turning from side to side:
‘LA–A–DE–EES–AN’
Gents. . . .
LA–A–DE–EES–AN'
Gents. . . .’’

Here is one of the Dadaists, who produce impressions not by words but by letters, punctuation marks, numbers, dots and dashes:

La–di–da–da-
-di-da-da-
-da-da-
dum:
"Why do Frenchmen
woo a woman
as if women
never resisted?"

Dadaism, like Vorticism, was one of those short-lived movements which were the aftermath of the War. Serious critics have not even attacked it; though many would seem to think that these poets of punctuation marks are less intolerable than others, who are mere makers of noise and singers of nonsense.

We are bursting our horizons, breaking up frontiers. Journalism is twin with literature and not merely cousin-german. History has the charm of romance; it is re-written with Straheyish irony. Biographies are autobiographical; novels go winding like epics; dramas are lyrical and full of dance. Prose has gone into and mixed with Poetry and nobody knows where Prose ends and Poetry begins. Mr. Eliot with all his classicism is romantic, and Mr. Murry adventurously romantic is rigid as a classicist. The ancients and their advocates might say we suffer from literary epilepsy or elephantiasis. The retort is easy. There are no such certitudes now. The ancient believed that the earth was the centre of the universe with the sun and stars mooning round, that he himself was the centre of that earth. We are not sure, but are sceptical on the top of a New Scholasticism which we have to study, and, if necessary, accept. The modernist poet is egotistic and exuberant, or, like Mr. Cummings, a Maker letting loose powerful psychic beings. He writes with garrulous gusto or with the brevity of the Japanese hokku. Modernist poetry is not soul-stirring but it wakes up consciousness; it is not gnomic or divine; it has either much sound and fury or sense and sensibility. It is all cameos and silhouettes or all dots and dashes. It is not only an ironic criticism of life but a criticism of the poetry that has gone before. "Poetry is something that gives me a strange sensation in the of the neck or down the spine, or a funny feeling in the pit of the stomach," says Mr. Housman; and this, as a definition of poetry, may give a funny feeling but not satisfaction. Poetry in all countries at the present day is not what it was before. The poet is no more like Shelley's skylark; his art is neither premeditated nor unpremeditated. Poetry has been in the bone of man through the centuries and has become a sort of second nature in him. It is a part of his consciousness; and that is why he is either unconscious or subconscious when he produces it. He expresses himself and it is this theory of self-expression that is the defence of all kinds of poetry. It is not for the critic to ask the poet to fit his apparatus; for, the humblest poet is greater than the greatest critic. He must be understood from his centre or let alone; especially in these days when there is a standard for everyone and not one universal standard. The aesthetic criticism of centuries has been groping for a centre but has converged nowhere. Others may carp at the poet who is a law unto himself but he lives in the glory of his vision. He does not care whether others read him though he publishes his poetry to release it from his personality. He does not write for money though he might be able to make it. He imitates none, not even Nature; for, he is a part of the consciousness of Nature, and poetry is a part of him. If he is sincere, and not merely decadent or derivative, he will have justified his existence and title, whether he is popular or unpopular, known or unknown. Sincerity is the one mark of his authenticity, and nothing else matters; for, in this he is independent of time though the public may have its changing tastes and idols. Inevitability has become the basis of our art. We are artistic just as we cannot help breathing, just as the flower cannot help giving scent. Nobody need babble much about the origin or end of Art. "Art for Art's sake" is dead. "Art for Life's sake" is dead. "Art for God's sake" too is dead. All the old parrots and their cries are dead.

What is the end? Is there an end? When was the beginning? One must be impressed by this crowd, this bustle, this hurry; this world of letters living on itself, producing itself like Bergson's elan vital, finite yet unbounded like Einstein's universe. Monarchy is dead; oligarchy is dead,–in letters too. The days of a few masters or a few leaders are numbered. The truth is that the number of great men and great writers is increasing though the truth is unpalatable to some and flattering to others. It is the same in all literatures. The world of English Letters is demonstrating it day by day. Genius like a disease is spreading and the sooner we recognize it the better. If you do not read me I will not read you; and as for the question of making money on the basis of capital this too cannot go on for ever. The day when everybody will not only be a philosopher and a king but a poet also is nearer, perhaps, than we imagine. Writers can then express themselves in any language or mixture of languages they like. There are already writers who stray from the norm of living speech and are intelligible only to themselves. Critics may tap their sybilline leaves in vain for sound or sense. But it does not take away from the intrinsic worth of the poet's experience; and as for his future, it is bound up with the future of poetry itself, if he has had the joy of self-expression or making. Poetry, as we know it, has no future; but poetry as the highest form of expression in words is bound to live till the dissolution of Man. It might be all anarchy, or an organised art, or, worse, a subsidiary art; and the definition of poetry will have to vary from time to time, as it has varied in the past. There are no dark ages in literature, wrote Prof. Ker; but the dark ages for literature are ahead of us, if the prophecies of Science will be fulfilled, for a time will come of the brave new world, when man will be manufactured in the laboratory and live a synthetic life, eat synthetic food, listen to synthetic music, and will not die but merely float away out of the body into time and space amidst flutter of music and dreams. It will more probably be a case of individualism with poets expressing their highly individualised experiences in highly individualised dictions and rhythms. Instead of the old wandering minstrels, we might have a minstrel broadcasting an Odyssey of Space-Time or an Iliad of the stars. For Art will be the life-blood of man throughout the ages, and the poets will always stare at Life and its Medusa-splendour. The world must outgrow the fever of its present before it can cast away its shell of glamour. That time is yet far off; and till then, the stars and earth and man will have to spin dizzily in a whirl of incense, charms, cadences, dances, phrases, incantations, and hosannas of song.