ANOTHER NOTE ON PAROXYSM IN POETRY

Rex Lampman, Portland, Oregon:

Quoting Mr. Edward J. O’Brien’s instructive article in The Little Review for January: “Paroxysm is the poetic expression of that modern spirit which finds its most notable expression in the sculpture of Meunier, the polyphonic music of Strauss, the philosophy of Bergson, and the American skyscraper.... It aims to attain and express, with the quick, keen vigor and strength of steel, the whirling, audacious, burning life of our epoch in all the paroxysm of the New Beauty.”

Quoting the dictionary, a paroxysm is “any sudden, violent and uncontrollable action or emotion; a convulsion or fit.”

The dictionary definition seems more nearly to apply to inspirational poetic effort, such as Poe had in mind when he advanced his theory that a long poem is an artistic impossibility; such an effort is as necessary to any truly poetic performance. Mr. O’Brien’s definition refers to a particular kind of poetic effort, which, to achieve its aims, also must be inspirational, and finds its inspiration in “modern industrial and mechanical effort,” rather than in all creation, free field for the poet of no prescribed and particular province.

I am totally unacquainted with the sculpture of Meunier, almost as innocent of knowledge of Strauss’s music, and of Bergson I know but a little, but I have seen the American skyscraper clutching its black steel fingers toward the blue, amid the rat-tat-tat-tat-tat of the pneumatic riveting hammers. Here in Portland the skyscraper is pre-empting one by one our views of the evergreen hills and the snowy mountains. Perhaps the other things Mr. O’Brien enumerates as paroxyst manifestations are shutting off our views of the eternal verities of life and the silent splendors of the soul—or rather, perhaps they symbolize the materialistic ideals that are walling us away from the things of the spirit.

If we accept these paroxyst manifestations as art, and keep our eyes fixed on them, surely the infinite horizon, with its never-conquered boundaries always beckoning out and on, is lost to us.

But do we accept them? Beyond the skyscrapers are the quiet hills, and however we throw ourselves into the vortices of cities, however often we go down among the red-mouthed, roaring furnaces, however we may acquiesce in, and even exult in and exalt, the materialistic horrors that multiply around us like monsters in a steamy primal fen, deep in ourselves we know that all these things are vain and vanishing, and that the actual and enduring lie outside and beyond, or within ourselves. The skyscraper is a monument to the Moloch of Rent. The furnaces are those of Baal, in which we give our souls as well as those of our children for sacrifice.

“The evolution of poetry is to be as rapid and terrible henceforth as material evolution,” says M. Nicholas Beauduin, as quoted by Mr. O’Brien. No, the gods will not forbid it, for it is their way to let things run their courses.

Doubtless there were singers, when Babylon was building, who insisted that a new poetry was necessary to celebrate the city, with its walls and towers and the efficient wonder of its sewer system, if it had one. Perhaps these poets, blinking in the glare of the furnaces and confused by the thunder of the shops whence issued the swords and spears and war-chariots, said to each other, “These are the supremest things, the worth-while things, and we must sing of them or be out of date.” And a paroxyst school was born.

But always the heart of man has yearned toward things other than the works of his hands. When the walls and towers and spears and chariots have returned to the earth from which they were fashioned, there still endured the love for those other things, and the joy in their artistic expression.

The springtime, banal as it is as a poetic subject, will remain forever more pleasing to the singer and his audience than can any paroxysm, of however “scientific technique,” proclaiming in “swift, hurtling, dynamic rhythms” the clamor and clangor of an armor-plate factory or the din and danger of a textile-mill. The earth is our mother, and hers are our deepest yearnings, first and last. “She waits for each and all.”

And if the paroxysts seek for power—for power that overcomes and subdues, that smites suddenly or conquers slowly, and recreates again the same—let them look aside from their banging machinery, from all materialistic illusion—from “the poetry contained in modern cities, locomotives, aeroplanes, dreadnoughts and submarines; in a stock exchange, a Wall street or a wheat pit—and behold the power and the marvel, beyond all “scientific marvels,” of Nature, singing slow or fast as suits her business, chanting her inevitable rhythms through the ages, taking back into her patient bosom all the marring excrescence that man for a little while has reared thereon. What is New York or Pittsburg but an itching pimple on the face of the earth? There is much outside incorporate limits, and beyond the sound of mill-whistles and the scream of trains. The earth is scarce disturbed as yet.

“My love is like a red, red rose”—the same song that sang the enraptured Solomon, or whoever it was that indited the Canticle—will, I believe, outlast any paroxysm which records a “cinematographic vision of modern life.” This is possibly the idea of the paroxysts themselves, they to sing anew as the occasion demands, and keep their product, like that of the movies, down-to-now. But though the words of the love-song perish, some man will sing it again, for joy at sight of his beloved, when springtime urges on the rose. Sappho sang of love, and men search the sea-floor for her fragments.

However, if the paroxysts wish to see their notions expressed in proper relation to all things else, let them read Walt Whitman, who had room for everything, as he lustily proclaimed, in his sturdy chants.

The New Beauty: is there any such thing? Why the adjective?

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Earth Triumphant
and Other Tales In Verse

BY CONRAD AIKEN

Opinions of the Leading Reviewers

“There are many volumes of poetry this season, Conrad Aiken’s ‘Earth Triumphant’ being given first place not only because of its excellence, but because it voices the spirit of the new world in sonorous tones.”—Los Angeles Graphic.

“The narrative poems in this book in hand are written by one whose thought has sounded further depths than the author of ‘The Everlasting Mercy’ has yet found. In particular is this true of ‘Youth,’ the second number in the book, a poem of greater daring, strength, and scope than has come from any singer of recent note.”—New York World.

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“The author’s manifestly accurate power of observation finds fullest scope in this (Earth Triumphant) the greatest of the poems.... There are descriptions of the effect of nature upon the man noticing its beauties for the first time which remind us of the younger Wordsworth; but there is in addition the fuller flood of tide of modern life which is always heard in these poems. The appeal of the earth and her relation to man are spoken of again and again in various poems, all of which give forth an atmosphere of keen, vibrant life, of largeness, and of the fuller music of reality in life.”—Boston Daily Advertiser.

“With genuine beauty they relate tales which reveal the heart of modern life in various phases of youth, and contain a reading of earth which differs in essentials from that of Meredith. The volume deserves a wider audience than the usual public which cares for poetry.”—Wm. S. Braithwaite, Anthology of Magazine Verse, 1914.

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Transcriber’s Notes

Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.

The table of contents on the title page was adjusted in order to reflect correctly the headings in this issue of The Little Review.

The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical errors were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here (before/after):