A Study of Poetry

by Bliss Perry

THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE LYRIC

"And the same may be said of lust and anger and all the other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure which are held to be inseparable from every action—in all of them poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of withering and starving them; she lets them rule instead of ruling them as they ought to be ruled, with a view to the happiness and virtue of mankind." PLATO'S Republic, Book 10

"A man has no right to say to his own generation, turning quite away
from it, 'Be damned!' It is the whole Past and the whole Future, this
same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very
wretched generation of ours."
CARLYLE to EMERSON, August 29, 1842

Let us turn finally to some phases of the contemporary lyric. We shall not attempt the hazardous, not to say impossible venture of assessing the artistic value of living poets. "Poets are not to be ranked like collegians in a class list," wrote the wise John Morley long ago. Certainly they cannot be ranked until their work is finished. Nor is it possible within the limits of this chapter to attempt, upon a smaller scale, anything like the task which has been performed so interestingly by books like Miss Lowell's Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, Mr. Untermeyer's New Era in American Poetry, Miss Wilkinson's New Voices, and Mr. Lowes's Convention and Revolt. I wish rather to remind the reader, first, of the long-standing case against the lyric, a case which has been under trial in the court of critical opinion from Plato's day to our own; and then to indicate, even more briefly, the lines of defence. It will be clear, as we proceed, that contemporary verse in America and England is illustrating certain general tendencies which not only sharpen the point of the old attack, but also hearten the spirit of the defenders of lyric poetry.

1. Plato's Moralistic Objection

Nothing could be more timely, as a contribution to a critical battle which is just now being waged, [Footnote: See the Introduction and the closing chapter of Stuart P. Sherman's Contemporary Literature. Holt, 1917.] than the passage from Plato's Republic which furnishes the motto for the present chapter. It expresses one of those eternal verities which each generation must face as best it may: "Poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of withering and starving them; she lets them rule instead of ruling them." "Did we not imply," asks the Athenian Stranger in Plato's Laws, "that the poets are not always quite capable of knowing what is good or evil?" "There is also," says Socrates in the Phoedrus, "a third kind of madness, which is the possession of the Muses; this enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric and all other members." This Platonic notion of lyric "inspiration" and "possession" permeates the immortal passage of the Ion:

"For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful
poems not as works of art, but because they are inspired and possessed.
And as the Corybantian revellers when they dance are not in their right
mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are
composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of
music and metre they are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens
who draw milk and honey from the rivers, when they are under the
influence of Dionysus, but not when they are in their right mind. And
the soul of the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves tell us;
for they tell us that they gather their strains from honied fountains
out of the gardens and dells of the Muses; thither, like the bees, they
wing their way. And this is true. For the poet is a light and winged and
holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired
and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has
not attained to this state, he is powerless and is to utter his oracles.
Many are the noble words in which poets speak of actions like your own
Words about Homer; but they do not speak of them by any rules of art:
only when they make that to which the Muse impels them are their
inventions inspired; and then one of them will make dithyrambs, another
hymns of praise, another choral strains, another epic or iambic
verses—and he who is good at one is not good at any other kind of
verse: for not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine. Had he
learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak not of one
theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the minds of poets,
and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy
prophets, in order that we who hear them may know that they speak not of
themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of
unconsciousness, but that God is the speaker, and that through them he
is conversing with us."
[Footnote: Plato's Ion, Jowett's translation.]

The other Platonic notion about poetry being "imitation" colors the well-known section of the third book of the Republic, which warns against the influence of certain effeminate types of lyric harmony:

"I answered: Of the harmonies I know nothing, but I want to have one warlike, which will sound the word or note which a brave man utters in the hour of danger and stern resolve, or when his cause is failing and he is going to wounds or death or is overtaken by some other evil, and at every such crisis meets fortune with calmness and endurance; and another which may be used by him in times of peace and freedom of action, when there is no pressure of necessity—expressive of entreaty or persuasion, of prayer to God, or instruction of man, or again, of willingness to listen to persuasion or entreaty and advice; and which represents him when he has accomplished his aim, not carried away by success, but acting moderately and wisely, and acquiescing in the event. These two harmonies I ask you to leave; the strain of necessity and the strain of freedom, the strain of the unfortunate and the strain of the fortunate, the strain of courage, and the strain of temperance; these, I say, leave."

So runs the famous argument for "the natural rhythms of a manly life," and conversely, the contention that "the absence of grace and rhythm and harmony is closely allied to an evil character." While it is true that the basis for this argument has been modified by our abandonment of the Greek aesthetic theories of "inspiration" and "imitation," Plato's moralistic objection to lyric effeminacy and lyric naturalism is widely shared by many of our contemporaries. They do not find the "New Poetry," lovely as it often is, altogether "manly." They find on the contrary that some of it is what Plato calls "dissolute," i.e. dissolving or relaxing the fibres of the will, like certain Russian dance-music. I asked an American composer the other day: "Is there anything at all in the old distinction between secular and sacred music?" "Certainly," he replied; "secular music excites, sacred music exalts." If this distinction is sound, it is plain that much of the New Poetry aims at excitement of the senses for its own sake—or in Plato's words, at "letting them rule, instead of ruling them as they ought to be ruled." Or, to use the severe words of a contemporary critic: "They bid us be all eye, no mind; all sense, no thought; all chance, all confusion, no order, no organization, no fabric of the reason."