THE NEW POETRY
English and French literature have stood in constant need of each other, and it is interesting to note, as concurrent but in no way dependent upon the present alliance, a new French vitality among our younger writers of poetry. As some of these latter are too new to presuppose the reader's familiarity with them, I quote a few poems before venturing to open a discussion. T.S. Eliot is the most finished, the most composed of these poets; let us observe his poem "The Hippopotamus," as it appears in The Little Review.
THE HIPPOPOTAMUS
The broad backed hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Although he seems so firm to us....
Yet he is merely flesh and blood.
Flesh-and-blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.
The hippo's feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends,
While the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends.
The potamus can never reach
The mango on the mango-tree,
But fruits of pomegranate and peach
Refresh the Church from over sea.
At mating time the hippo's voice
Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,
But every week we hear rejoice
The Church, at being one with God.
The hippopotamus's day
Is past in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way—
The Church can sleep and feed at once
I saw the potamus take wing
Ascending from the damp savannas,
And quiring angels round him sing
The praise of God, in loud hosannas.
Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean
And him shall heavenly arms enfold,
Among the saints he shall be seen
Performing on a harp of gold.
He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr'd virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.
This cold sardonic statement is definitely of the school of Théophile Gautier; as definitely as Eliot's "Conversation Galante" is in the manner of Jules Laforgue. There is a great deal in the rest of Mr. Eliot's poetry which is personal, and in no wise derivative either from the French or from Webster and Tourneur; just as there is in "The Hippopotamus" a great deal which is not Théophile Gautier. I quote the two present poems simply to emphasize a certain lineage and certain French virtues and qualities, which are, to put it most mildly, a great and blessed relief after the official dullness and Wordsworthian lignification of the "Georgian" Anthologies and their descendants and derivatives as upheld by The New Statesman, that nadir of the planet of hebetude, that apogee of the kulturesque.
CONVERSATION GALANTE[8]
I observe: "Our sentimental friend the moon!
Or possibly (fantastic, I confess)
It may be Prester John's balloon
Or an old battered lantern hung aloft
To light poor travelers to their distress."
She then: "How you digress!"
And I then: "Some one frames upon the keys
That exquisite nocturne, with which we explain
The night and moonshine, music which we seize
To body forth our own vacuity."
She then: "Does this refer to me?"
"Oh no, it is I who am inane."
"You, madam, are the eternal humorist,
The eternal enemy of the absolute,
Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist!
With your air indifferent and imperious
At a stroke our mad poetics to confute:—"
And—: "Are we then so serious?"
Laforgue's influence or Ghil's or some kindred tendency is present in the whimsicalities of Marianne Moore, and of Mina Loy. A verbalism less finished than Eliot's appears in Miss Moore's verses called—
PEDANTIC LITERALIST
Prince Rupert's drop, paper muslin ghost,
White torch "with power to say unkind
Things with kindness and the most
Irritating things in the midst of love and
Tears," you invite destruction.
You are like the meditative man
With the perfunctory heart; its
Carved cordiality ran
To and fro at first, like an inlaid and royal
Immutable production;
Then afterward "neglected to be
Painful" and "deluded him with
Loitering formality,
Doing its duty as if it did not,"
Presenting an obstruction
To the motive that it served. What stood
Erect in you has withered. A
Little "palmtree of turned wood"
Informs your once spontaneous core in its
Immutable reduction.
The reader accustomed only to glutinous imitations of Keats, diaphanous dilutations of Shelley, woolly Wordsworthian paraphrases, or swish ful Swinburniania will doubtless dart back appalled by Miss Moore's departures from custom; custom, that is, as the male or female devotee of Palgravian insularity understands that highly elastic term. The Palgravian will then with disappointment discover that his favorite and conventional whine is inapplicable. Miss Moore "rhymes in places." Her versification does not fit in with preconceived notions of vers libre. It possesses a strophic structure. The elderly Newboltian groans. The all-wool unbleached Georgian sighs ominously. Another author has been reading French poets, and using words for the communication of thought. Alas, times will not stay anchored.
Mina Loy has been equally subject to something like international influence; there are lines in her "Ineffectual Marriage" perhaps better written than anything I have found in Miss Moore, as, for example:—