Definitions: Essays in Contemporary Criticism [First Series]

by Henry Seidel Canby

V

PHILISTINES AND DILETTANTE

POETRY FOR THE UNPOETICAL

I have looked through more essays upon poetry than I care to remember without finding anywhere a discussion of poetry for the unpoetical. A recent writer, it is true, has done much to show that the general reader daily indulges in poetry of a kind without knowing it. But the voluminous literature of poetics is well-nigh all special. It is written for students of rhythm, for instinctive lovers of poetry, for writers of verse, for critics. It does not treat of the value of poetry for the average, the unpoetical man— it says little of his curious distaste for all that is not prose, or of the share in all good poetry that belongs to him.

By the average man, let me hasten to say, I mean in this instance the average intelligent reader, who has passed through the usual formal education in literature, who reads books as well as newspapers and magazines, who, without calling himself a litterateur, would be willing to assert that he was fairly well read and reasonably fond of good reading. Your doctor, your lawyer, the president of your bank, and any educated business man who has not turned his brain into a machine, will fit my case.

Among such excellent Americans, I find that there exists a double standard as regards all literature, but especially poetry. Just as the newspapers always write of clean politics with reverence— whatever may be the private opinions and practices of their editorial writers—so intelligent, though unpoetic, readers are accustomed to speak of poetry with very considerable respect. It is not proper to say, "I hate poetry," even if one thinks it. To admit ignorance of Tennyson or Milton or Shakespeare is bad form, even if one skimmed through them in college and has never disturbed the dust upon their covers since. I have heard a whispered, sneering remark after dinner, "I don't believe he ever heard of Browning," by one who had penetrated about as far into Browning's inner consciousness as a fly into the hickory-nut it crawls over. I well remember seeing a lady of highly respectable culture hold up her hands in horror before a college graduate who did not know who Beowulf was. Neither did she, in any true sense of knowing. But her code taught her that the "Beowulf," like other "good poetry," should be upon one's list of acquaintances.

What these Americans really think is a very different matter. The man in the trolley-car, the woman in the rocking-chair, the clerk, the doctor, the manufacturer, most lawyers, and some ministers would, if their hearts were opened, give simply a categorical negative. They do not like poetry, or they think they do not like it; in either case with the same result. The rhythm annoys them (little wonder, since they usually read it as prose), the rhyme seems needless, the inversions, the compressions perplex their minds to no valuable end. Speaking honestly, they do not like poetry. And if their reason is the old one,

I do not like you, Dr. Fell;
The reason why I cannot tell,

it is none the less effective.

But the positive answers are no more reassuring. Here in America especially, when we like poetry, we like it none too good. The "old favorites" are almost all platitudinous in thought and monotonous in rhythm. We prefer sentiment, and have a weakness for slush. Pathos seems to us better than tragedy, anecdote than wit. Longfellow was and is, except in metropolitan centres, our favorite "classical" poet; the poetical corner and the daily poem of the newspapers represent what most of us like when we do go in for verse. The truth is that many of the intelligent in our population skip poetry in their reading just because it is poetry. They read no poetry, or they read bad poetry occasionally, or they read good poetry badly.

This sorry state of affairs does not trouble the literary critic. His usual comment is that either one loves poetry or one does not, and that is all there is to be said about it. If the general reader neglects poetry, why then he belongs to the Lost Tribes and signifies nothing for Israel.

I am sure that he is wrong. His assertion is based on the theory that every man worthy of literary salvation must at all times love and desire the best literature, which is poetry—and this is a fallacy. It is as absurd as if he should ask most of us to dwell in religious exaltation incessantly, or to live exclusively upon mountain peaks, or to cultivate rapture during sixteen hours of the twenty-four. The saints, the martyrs, the seers, the seekers, and enthusiasts have profited nobly by such a regime, but not we of common clay. To assume in advocating the reading of poetry that one should substitute Pope for the daily paper, Francis Thompson for the illustrated weekly, The Ring and the Book for a magazine, and read "The Golden Treasury" through instead of a novel, needs only to be stated to be disproved. And yet this is the implication of much literary criticism.

But the sin of the general reader who refuses all poetry is much more deadly, for it is due not to enthusiasm, but to ignorance. It is true that the literary diet recommended by an aesthetic critic would choke a healthy business man; but it is equally true that for all men whose emotions are still alive within them, and whose intelligence permits the reading of verse, poetry is quite as valuable as fresh air and exercise. We do not need fresh air and exercise constantly. We can get along very comfortably without them. But if they are not essential commodities, they are important ones, and so is poetry—a truth of which modern readers seem to be as ignorant as was primitive man of fire until he burned his hand in a blazing bush.

I do not mean for an instant to propose that every one should read poetry. The man whose imagination has never taken fire from literature of any kind, whose brain is literal and dislikes any embroidery upon the surface of plain fact, who is deaf to music, unresponsive to ideas, and limited in his emotions—such a man in my opinion is unfortunate, although he is often an excellent citizen, lives happily, makes a good husband, and may save the state. But he should not (no danger that he will) read poetry. And for another class there is nothing in poetry. The emotionally dying or dead; the men who have sunk themselves, their personalities, their hopes, their happiness, in business or scholarship or politics or sport—they, too, are often useful citizens, and usually highly prosperous; but they would waste their time upon literature of any variety, and especially upon poetry.

There are a dozen good arguments, however, to prove that the reading of poetry is good for the right kind of general reader, who is neither defective nor dead in his emotions; and this means, after all, a very large percentage of all readers. If I had space I should use them all, for I realize that the convention we have adopted for poetry makes us skip, in our magazines, as naturally from story to story over the verse between as from stone to stone across the brook. However, I choose only two, which seem to me as convincing for the unpoetical reader (the dead and defective excepted) as the ethical grandeur of poetry, let us say, for the moralist, its beauty for the aesthete, its packed knowledge for the scholar.

The first has often been urged before and far more often overlooked. We everyday folk plod year after year through routine, through fairly good or fairly bad, never quite realizing what we are experiencing, never seeing life as a whole, or any part of it, perhaps, in complete unity. Words, acts, sights, pass through our experience hazily, suggesting meanings which we never fully grasp. Grief and love, the most intense, perhaps, of sensations, we seldom understand except by comparison with what has been said of the grief and love of others. Happiness remains at best a diffused emotion—felt, but not comprehended. Thought, if in some moment of intense clarity it grasps our relationship to the stream of life, in the next shreds into trivialities. Is this true? Test it by any experience that is still fresh in memory. See how dull, by comparison with the vivid colors of the scene itself, are even now your ideas of what it meant to you, how obscure its relations to your later life. The moment you fell in love, the hour after your child had died, the instant when you reached the peak, the quarrel that began a misunderstanding not yet ended, the subtle household strain that pulls apart untiringly though it never sunders two who love each other—all these I challenge you to define, to explain, to lift into the light above the turbid sea of complex currents which is life.

And this, of course, is what good poetry does. It seizes the moment, the situation, the thought; drags it palpitating from life and flings it, quivering with its own rhythmic movement, into expression. The thing cannot be done in mere prose, for there is more than explanation to the process. The words themselves, in their color and suggestiveness, the rhythms that carry them, contribute to the sense, even as overtones help to make the music.

All this may sound a little exalted to the comfortable general reader, who does not often deal in such intense commodities as death and love. And yet I have mentioned nothing that does not at one time or another, and frequently rather than the opposite, come into his life, and need, not constant, certainly, but at least occasional, interpretation. Death and love, and also friendship, jealousy, courage, self-sacrifice, hate—these cannot be avoided. We must experience them. So do the animals, who gain from their experiences blind, instinctive repulsions or unreasoning likes and distrusts. There are many ways of escaping from such a bovine acquiescence, content to have felt, not desirous to grasp and know and relate. Poetry, which clears and intensifies like a glass held upon a distant snowpeak, is one of the best.

But there is another service that poetry, among all writing, best renders to the general reader, when he needs it; a service less obvious, but sometimes, I think, more important. Poetry insures an extension of youth.

Men and women vary in their emotional susceptibility. Some go through life always clouded, always dull, like a piece of glass cut in semblance of a gem, that refracts no colors and is empty of light. Others are vivid, impressionable, reacting to every experience. Some of us are most aroused by contact with one another. Interest awakens at the sound of a voice; we are most alive when most with our kind. Others, like Thoreau, respond best in solitude. The very thrush singing dimly in the hemlocks at twilight moves them more powerfully than a cheer. A deep meadow awave with headed grass, a solemn hill shouldering the sky, a clear blue air washing over the pasture slopes and down among the tree-tops of the valley, thrills them more than all the men in all the streets of the world. It makes no difference. To every one, dull and vivid, social and solitary, age brings its changes. We may understand better, but the vividness is less, the emotions are tamer. They do not fully respond, as the bell in the deserted house only half tinkles to our pulling.

Si jeunesse savait,
Si vielliesse pouvait.

But to be able comes before to know. We must react to experiences before it is worth while to comprehend them. And after one is well enmeshed in the routine of plodding life, after the freshness of the emotions (and this is a definition of youth) is gone, it is difficult to react. I can travel now, if I wish, to the coral islands or the Spanish Main, but it is too late.

Few willingly part with the fresh impressionability of youth. Sometimes, as I have already suggested, the faculties of sensation become atrophied, if indeed they ever existed. I know no more dismal spectacle than a man talking shop on a moonlit hill in August, a woman gossipping by the rail of a steamer plunging through the sapphire of the Gulf Stream, or a couple perusing advertisements throughout a Beethoven symphony. I will not advance as typical a drummer I once saw read a cheap magazine from cover to cover in the finest stretch of the Canadian Rockies. He was not a man, but a sample-fed, word-emitting machine. These people, emotionally speaking, are senile. They should not try to read poetry.

But most of us—even those who are outwardly commonplace, practical, unenthusiastic, "solid," and not "sensitive"—lose our youthful keenness with regret. And that is why poetry, except for the hopelessly sodden, is a tonic worthy of a great price. For the right poetry at the right time has the indubitable power to stir the emotions that experience is no longer able to arouse. I cannot give satisfactory instances, for the reaction is highly personal. What with me stirs a brain cell long dormant to action will leave another unmoved, and vice versa. However, to make clear my meaning, let us take Romance, the kind that one capitalizes, that belongs to Youth, also capitalized, and dwells in Granada or Sicily or the Spanish Main. The middle-aged gentleman on a winter cruise for his jaded nerves cannot expect a thrill from sights alone. If it is not lost for him utterly, it is only because Keats has kept it, in—

… Magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn, q and Nashe in—

Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair.

Or consider the joy of travel renewed in Kipling's—

Then home, get her home, where the drunken rollers comb,
And the shouting seas drive by,
And the engines stamp and ring, and the wet bows reel and
swing,
And the Southern Cross rides high!
Yes, the old lost stars wheel back, dear lass,
That blaze in the velvet blue.

Or the multitudinous experiences of vivid life that crowd the pages of men like Shakespeare, or Chaucer, who thanked God that he had known his world as in his time. Even in these shopworn quotations the power still remains.

Somewhere in poetry, and best in poetry because there most concentrated and most penetrative, lies crystallized experience at hand for all who need it. It is not difficult to find, although no one can find it for you. It is not necessarily exalted, romantic, passionate; it may be comfortable, homely, gentle or hearty, vigorous and cheerful; it may be anything but commonplace, for no true emotion is ever commonplace. I have known men of one poet; and yet that poet gave them the satisfaction they required. I know others whose occasional dip into poetry leads to no rapture of beauty, no throbbing vision into eternity; and yet without poetry they would be less alive, their minds would be less young. As children, most of us would have flushed before the beauty of a sunrise on a tropic ocean, felt dimly if profoundly—and forgotten. The poet—like the painter—has caught, has interpreted, has preserved the experience, so that, like music, it may be renewed. And he can perform that miracle for greater things than sunrises. This, perhaps, is the best of all reasons why every one except the emotionally senile should sometimes read poetry.

I know at least one honest Philistine who, unlike many Philistines, has traveled through the Promised Land—and does not like it. When his emotional friends talk sentimentalism and call it literature, or his aesthetic acquaintances erect affectations and call them art, he has the proper word of irony that brings them back to food, money, and other verities. His voice haunts me now, suggesting that, in spite of the reasons I have advanced, the general reader can scarcely be expected to read modern poetry, and that therefore his habit of skipping must continue. He would say that most modern poetry is unreadable, at least by the average man. He would say that if the infinitely complex study of emotional mind-states that lies behind the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, or the eerie otherworldliness of Yeats, or the harsh virility of Sandburg is to be regarded as an intensification and clarification of experience, he begs to be excused. He would say that if the lyrics of subtle and passionate emotion and the drab stories of sex experience that make up so many pages of modern anthologies represent a renewal and extension of youth, it was not his youth. He prefers to be sanely old rather than erotically young. He will stick to the daily paper and flat prose.

Well, it is easy to answer him by ruling out modern poetry from the argument. There was more good poetry, neither complex, nor erotic, nor esoteric, written before our generation than even a maker of anthologies is likely to read. But I am not willing to dodge the issue so readily. There is modern poetry for every reader who is competent to read poetry at all. If there is none too much of it, that is his own fault. If there is much that makes no appeal to him, that is as it should be.

It is true that a very large proportion of contemporary poetry is well-nigh unintelligible to the gentleman whose reading, like his experience, does not often venture beyond the primitive emotions. Why should it not be? The modern lyric is untroubled by the social conscience. It is highly individual, for it is written by men of intense individuality for readers whose imaginations require an intimate appeal. Such minds demand poetry prevailingly, just as the average reader demands prose prevailingly. They profit by prose now and then, just as, occasionally, he profits by poetry. We talk so much of the enormous growth of the mass of average readers in recent years that we forget the corresponding growth in the number of individualities that are not average. Much modern poetry is written for such readers, for men and women whose minds are sensitive to intricate emotional experience, who can and do respond to otherworldliness, to the subtly romantic, the finely aesthetic, and the intricately ideal. They deserve whatever poetry they may desire.

The important point to note is that they do not get it. It is they—far more than the Philistines—who complain that modern poetry is insufficient for their needs. The highly personal lyric is probably more perfected, more abundant, and more poignant in its appeal to living minds now than ever before in the history of our civilization. But it occupies only one province of poetry. A lover of poetry desires, far more keenly than the general reader, to have verse of his own day that is more Shakespearian, more Miltonic, more Sophoclean than this. He wants poetry that lifts spacious times into spacious verse, poetry that "enlumynes," like Petrarch's "rhetorike sweete," a race and a civilization. He desires, in addition to what he is already getting, precisely that poetry so universal in its subject-matter and its appeal, which the general reader thinks he would read if he found it instead of "lyrical subtleties" in his pages.

Well, they do not get it very abundantly to-day, let us admit the fact freely. But the fault is not altogether the poets'. The fault is in the intractable mediocrity of the age, which resists transference into poetry as stiff clay resists the hoe of the cultivator. The fault lies in the general reader himself, whose very opposition to poetry because it is poetry makes him a difficult person to write for. Commercialized minds, given over to convention, denying their sentiment and idealism, or wasting them upon cheap and meretricious literature, do not make a good audience. Our few poets in English who have possessed some universality of appeal have had to make concessions. Kipling has been the most popular among good English poets in our time; but he has had to put journalism into much of his poetry in order to succeed. And Kipling is not read so much as a certain American writer who discovered that by writing verse in prose form he could make the public forget their prejudice against poetry and indulge their natural pleasure in rhythm and rime.

A striking proof of all that I have been writing is to be found in so-called magazine verse. Sneers at magazine poetry are unjust because they are unintelligent. It is quite true that most of it consists of the highly individualistic lyric of which I have spoken above. But in comparison with the imaginative prose of the typical popular magazine, it presents a most instructive contrast. The prose is too frequently sensational or sentimental, vulgar or smart. The verse, even though narrow in its appeal, and sometimes slight, is at least excellent in art, admirable in execution, and vigorous and unsentimental in tone. Regarded as literature, it is very much more satisfactory than the bulk of magazine prose. Indeed, there is less difference between the best and the worst of our magazines than between the verse and the prose in any one of them.

And if this verse is too special in its subject-matter to be altogether satisfactory, if so little of it appeals to the general reader, is it not his fault? He neglects the poetry from habit rather than from conviction based on experience. Because he skips it, and has skipped it until habit has become a convention, much of it has become by natural adaptation of supply to demand too literary, too narrow, too subtle and complex for him now. The vicious circle is complete.

This circle may soon be broken. A ferment, which in the 'nineties stirred in journalism, and a decade later transformed our drama, is working now in verse. The poetical revival now upon us may be richer so far in promise than in great poetry, but it is very significant. For one thing, it is advertising poetry, and since poetry is precisely what Shakespeare called it, caviare to the general—a special commodity for occasional use—a little advertising will be good for it. Again, the verse that has sprung from the movement is much of it thoroughly interesting. Some of it is as bizarre as the new art of the futurists and the vorticists; some is merely vulgar, some merely affected, some hopelessly obscure; but other poems, without convincing us of their greatness, seem as original and creative as were Browning and Whitman in their day. Probably, like the new painting, the movement is more significant than the movers.

Nevertheless, if one is willing to put aside prejudice, suspend judgment, and look ahead, vers libre, even when more libre than vers, is full of meaning—poetic realism, even when more real than poetry, charged with possibility. For with all its imperfections much of this new poetry is trying to mean more than ever before to the general reader. I am not sure that the democracy can be interpreted for him in noble poetry and remain the democracy he knows. And yet I think, and I believe, that, in his sub-consciousness at least, he feels an intense longing to find the everyday life in which we all live—so thrilling beneath the surface—interpreted, swung into that rhythmic significance that will make it part of the vast and flowing stream of all life. I can tolerate many short, rough words in poetry, and much that we have been accustomed to regard as prose, on the way to such a goal.

For I honestly believe that it is better to read fantastic poetry, coarse poetry, prosaic poetry—anything but vulgar and sentimental poetry—than no poetry at all. To be susceptible to no revival of the vivid emotions of youth, to be touched by no thoughts more intense than our own, to be accessible to no imaginative interpretation of the life we lead—this seems to me to be a heavy misfortune. But to possess, as most of us do, our share of all these qualities, and then at no time, in no fitting mood or proffered opportunity, to read poetry—this can only be regarded as deafness by habit and blindness from choice.