The Health of Modern Poetry
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.
Knopf. 534 pp. $7.50.
The Shield of Achilles.
by W. H. Auden.
Random House. 84 pp. $3.00.
Selected Poems.
by Randall Jarrell.
Knopf. 205 pp. $4.00.
Poems: 1923-1954.
by E. E. Cummings.
Harcourt, Brace. 468 pp. $6.75.
With so many poems to consider in so little space, I want to take a deliberately partial view and see what can be done with an idea that virtually begs for discussion, in the aftermath of what we already begin to speak of nostalgically as one of the great eras of “English” poetry. “Modern” poetry, most of us know by now, has been a great deal stronger, more influential, closer to our habitual view of things, in a word better, than any general description of it has so far allowed. In spite of Edmund Wilson’s funerary pronouncements some years ago to the effect that poetry was doomed to cede its position to the novel, and in spite of the complaints of such eminently discriminating writers as Lionel Trilling to the effect that “we,” the consensus of anti-totalitarian liberals, cannot help feeling a bit queasy in the presence of so much apparent reaction, so much heraldic glitter and mannered violence, so many eagles and apocalyptic fires, so many Crazy Janes and so many bishops—in spite of these cries from the heart of the Humanities, we know our poetry has been at least the equal in “health,” and in brilliance, of anything written during the same period.
The master example, of course, is Yeats. Sad, indeed, is the case of anyone who still can read his collected poems without discovering their humanity, gaiety, and profound peacefulness.
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.
Yeats is the master because he had the luck and the genius to experience more keenly than anyone else the “bitter furies of complexity” and to transform them into poetry of a uniquely sustained strength and excitement. Yeats—the poet himself, his success in creating an effective public personality out of seemingly chaotic instincts—dwindles into relative insignificance beside the poetry; for we know that he spent a good deal of random energy against insignificant enemies, that he did flirt with a sort of amateur and private fascism, and that the poetry has a wholeness and sanity the poet never achieved, nor really intended to achieve, elsewhere.
The answer, I think, to the deepening mystery of the difference between a writer’s “own” opinions, as they are gleaned from diaries, letters, essays, and memoirs—or merely, as in the case of that fabulous insurance executive, Wallace Stevens, taken for granted—and the world we find in their work, lies in the increasing obliquity that circumstances have forced on modern poets; not something new, but an intensification of a quality that all but a very little great poetry has always had. We recognize the grave sweetness of Virgil’s mind, but we find his Aeneas something of a prig. The poetry rather than the hero composes and disposes the turbulence. The strength Virgil communicates is not merely the sum of his avowed opinions. We find a wisdom in Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Lear, and Anthony and Cleopatra far in excess of any moral excellence the characters can show. Of the latter play, Auden has written: “The key word in this play is: World. We see the glory of things as truly glorious. Even at her death the queen puts on her robe and crown. Seen in a certain light, the world can be this way. And Shakespeare does not want us to forget it.” The healing idea of a World has never been more attractive to poets than it is now, but it is a shrunken world for poets as it is for novelists. When our energies are increasingly wasted in ideological rancor, the authority of a radically peaceable mind is harder than ever to assert. Richard Wilbur has imagined the poet as a kind of beneficent vulture:
. . . Then you’ll see
That no more beautiful bird is in heaven’s
height,
No wider more placid wings, no watchfuller
flight,
He shoulders nature there, the frightfully free,
The naked-headed one. Pardon him, you
Who dart in the orchard aisles, for it is he
Devours death, mocks mutability,
Has heart to make an end, keeps nature new.
But if the poet were no more than a soarer and hoverer, he might never be seen. What we do usually notice first of all in the modern poets is the violence, the grotesquerie, the exotic paraphernalia on the fringes of the poet’s vision: what we usually understand last of all is that to reach deeper the poet must also reach further, that the more beguilingly oblique he can manage to be in the bulk of his poetry, the more movingly direct can be his controlling vision. To escape the dead hand of ideology; to write about kings and not promote imperialism; to write about simple people without condescension; to make a real world out of all the lesser warring realities: these are no mean accomplishments for a group of poets who individually were forced into ideological battles merely to become self-respecting citizens of whatever worlds seemed to offer them bread and butter.
This obliquity of subject and manner, consciously practiced, has been a strength as well as an impoverishment. The Victorian poets could rarely distinguish between the visionary and the real. They were innocently impaled on their own prophetic majesty, compelled by the cosy absolutism and reaction of the Victorian mind to be either, like Tennyson, First Lord of the Tea Table, or like Byron and Shelley, insensate romantic devils and infernal atheists. The “modern” poet, by contrast, has lost prestige and gained self-possession. He is often more European than the Victorians, more civilized and liberal in the classic sense of the words.
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None of the poets have been more splendidly self-possessed than Wallace Stevens. His themes have been as constant as his poetry has been various.
The era of the idea of man, the cloak
And speech of Virgil dropped, that’s where he
walks,
That’s where his hymns come crowding, hero-
hymns,
Chorals for mountain voices and the moral
chant,
Happy rather than holy but happy-high,
Day hymns instead of constellated rhymes,
Hymns of the struggle of the idea of god
And the idea of man, the mystic garden and
The middling beast . . . .
The greater poems are about modern man, his relation to his present and past; the lesser poems are about the imagination and poetry itself. When Stevens apostrophizes Santayana, in “To an Old Philosopher in Rome”:
Things dark on the horizons of perception,
Become accompaniments of fortune, but
Of the fortune of the spirit, beyond the eye,
Not of its sphere, and yet not far beyond,The human end in the spirit’s greatest reach,
The extreme of the known in the presence of
the extreme
Of the unknown . . .
we have an admirable description of his own method and genius. Stevens’s range is extraordinary; from the sublimely facetious doodling of “He held the world upon his nose/ And this-a-way he gave a fling./ His robes and symbols, ai-yi-yi—/ And that-a-way he twirled the thing.” to “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” “Sunday Morning,” “Esthétique du Mal,” and “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction”—poems, as Randall Jarrell describes them, “magnanimous, compassionate, but calmly exact, grandly plain.” This, for instance, from “Esthétique du Mal”:
Life is a bitter aspic. We are not
At the center of a diamond. At dawn
The paratroopers fall and as they fall
They mow the lawn. A vessel sinks in waves
Of people, as big bell-billows from its bell
Bell-bellow in the village steeple. Violets,
Great tufts, spring up from buried houses
Of poor dishonest people, for whom the steeple,
Long since rang out farewell, farewell, farewell.Natives of poverty, children of malheur,
The gaiety of language is our seigneur.
Passion and exuberance, frivolity and sincerity mixed, on a level where we no longer need to distinguish between them—this is poetry of a high order and as little invidious in its mannerisms as could well be imagined. Stevens does not touch us as closely as does Yeats; his “moral chant” is never quite as compelling; but like Yeats he leads us to “peaks outsoaring possible adjectives,” to a realm where possibility can become a reality more recognizable than our own.
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The other poets I mean to treat in what seems to me roughly the order of their skill in wearing the tragi-comic mask of the oblique. Auden has had roughly three marked phases: the enfant terrible of the Oxford-trained left; the professionally anxious prophet of liberal humanitarianism (“a Mann by more than marriage”); and his recent avatar, the Man of Reason, Sage of Cornelia Street, with echoes from previous incarnations and a benignly elusive religious piety, a fine, cheerful, witty facetiousness, a seasoned worldliness. The earliest phase was the most oblique and I think also the most memorable. Poems like “In Father’s Footsteps” (“Our hunting fathers told us. . . .”) or “What is that sound that so thrills the ear?” (“Ballad”) have an ominously self-contained beauty, a security and sustained elevation of tone that he had to leave behind him as he became more reflective and conventionally “good.” The middle phase, for all its occasional beauties, is probably the least happy. A painful schizophrenia develops between the tea-time terrorist who cries “Whoops, boys, someone has just pulled the plug. Here we go down the drain!” and the Rational Uncle who says, “There, there! Things are pretty awful, but they might be worse. Let’s try to love one another and see what happens.” It was Auden’s time of adjustment to a new role and a new continent, a time of uncertain humor and sudden atavisms, of wild swings between the solemn and the silly, of a rather too fluent specialization in the modes of anxiety. After the war, however, a new evenness of tone appeared. Nones and now The Shield of Achilles (which contains the title poem of the preceding book) are clearly the work of the man one sees on the lecture platforms, looking and sounding like a cross between a beau of Bath and a successful rugger captain from the Midlands. The poems are often facetious, but the facetiousness is under control. They are witty without display and benign without fatuity. Whatever one may feel about Auden’s seriousness or the lack of it, this transformation is all to the good and highly promising for the future. The new poems have a firmer grip on things than the poems of the middle period, a confidence that sufficient unto the poem is the subject thereof—and the subject may be nothing more world-shaking than “Plains,” “Lakes,” “Mountains,” or “Streams” (“Just reeling off their names is ever so comfy”).
Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever,
And do not listen to those critics ever
Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books
Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks,
As though the Muse preferred her half-wit sons;
Good poets have a weakness for bad puns.
The title poem, “A Shield for Achilles,” is one of the best things he has done; in sixty-seven lines it accomplishes more than The Age of Anxiety ever quite accomplished in several hundred.
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To turn to Randall Jarrell’s Selected Poems is first to acknowledge a debt to his criticism; no poet has been more intelligently aware of what his colleagues were up to. Jarrell’s poetry is both extremely oblique and extremely dense. It guards its monotony with a fine Baudelairean passion. The texture of the poems is strikingly even; within the topical groupings he gives them—“Lives,” “Dream-work,” “The Wide Prospect,” “Once Upon a Time,” “The World is Everything that is the Case,” etc.—poems tend to blur into one another.
Like Auden, Jarrell is fond of personified abstractions like “Strife,” “Reason,” or the soul. His affections stretch back through the 19th century to the 18th. One enjoys an old-fashioned discursiveness, a pleasure in the harmlessly queer, a sensitive and amused ear for speech and idiom. Like Auden, Jarrell is a liberal born, though somewhat less playful in his gloom. He knows the worst and intends that we know it too. Evil in Jarrell is suffering, and suffering is radical. As Karl Shapiro has written: “The Märchen, the tales, the fables, the dreams, as well as the American girl drowsing in her college library, and the little English boy deranged by death and air raids: these materializations come at us with a relentlessness which is just short of unbearable. We bear them because we instinctively recognize the situations and because the poetry is so good we cannot turn away.” But this side of Jarrell is only half of his range. There is also an immense, quiet, humorous relish, a broodingly dispassionate wit, both at their best in that charming historical Marionettenspiel, “An English Garden in Austria.”
. . . It was not thus that you sang, Farinellil
By graver stages, up a sterner way,
You won to those fields the candelabra lit,
Paused there; sang, as no man since has sung—
A present and apparent deity—the pure
Impossible airs of Arcady: and the calm
Horsehair-wigged shepherds, God of that Ar-
cadian
Academy, wept inextinguishable tears.
The constant theme of Jarrell’s criticism is the poet’s need for a real world, a world not patched out of earlier poems. This need, in spite of fifty and more uses each in this book, of “dream” and “star” (and their relatives and cognates), perhaps even because of them, he has succeeded in filling for himself—a world as remote from our own as Germany, the Air Force, the public library, and the minds of extremely dreamy little girls can make it; but a very satisfactory world nonetheless.
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About the collected e.e. cummings I can only say no poet ought to be as invulnerable as he has tried to make himself, so much in love with so few words (“love,” “spring,” “April,” and about two dozen adjectives and adverbs), or so metaphysically fixed on so few subjects. Cummings is an intensely cerebral poet in the good old New England tradition; and every black on Brattle Street is white on Washington Square. Like most New Englanders (of which I am one), he is full of uninfectious enthusiasms and ritual boisterousness. Unlike Stevens, it must be regretfully said, he has never learned the art of writing deliberately low-keyed poems that bear reading in the mass and deepen our sense of his subject. Many of his poems are not merely verbal doodles (which would be tolerable) but typographical doodles as well, all displaying the same horrid ingenuity and all rather scarily portentous in (heir air of hidden profundities that remain stubbornly hidden. But there is also a kind of poetic justice in the difficulties Cummings makes for himself, for he is a minor poet of genius and might become angry if anyone and everyone found it out. The Anglo-Saxon taste for cheerful grotesquerie was never better displayed than in his sequence, “Five Americans” (subtitled, respectively, “Liz,” “Mame,” “Gert,” “Marj,” and “Fran”). These and a few of his other “portraits” have a spirit he must have caught from that other and greater professional exile, Tristan Corbière. Some of his “metaphysical” lyrics, among them “My father moved through dooms of love. . . .” are successful. Much of the genuinely racy, satirical Cummings—the part that breaks free of coyness—deserves to be enshrined in anthologies, as does the frail, Pre-Raphaelite music of such poems as the following:
perhaps it is to feel strike
the silver fish of her nakedness
with fins sharply pleasant, myyouth has travelled towards her these years
or to snare the timid like
of her mind to my mind that i
am come by little countries to the yesof her youth.
And if somebody hears
what i say—let him be pitiful:
because I’ve travelled all alone
through the forest of wonderful,
and that my feet have surely known
the furious ways and the peaceful.and because she is beautiful.
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