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The converse of the proposition stated at the beginning of this section, namely that every one who has the sort of family history mentioned above and is not the prey of inhibitions, will become a poet, is certainly not intended. Poetry is only one outlet for peculiar individual expression; there are also the other arts, with politics, generalship, philosophy, and imaginative business; or merely rhetoric, fantastic jokes and original swearing—
X
THE DEAD END AND THE MAN OF ONE POEM
THE question of why Poets suddenly seem to come to a dead end and stop writing true Poetry, is one that has always perplexed literary critics, and the poets themselves still more. The explanation will probably be found in two causes.
In the first case the poet’s preoccupation with the clash of his emotions has been transmuted into a calmer state of meditation on philosophic paradox: but poetry being, by accepted definition, sensuous and passionate is no vehicle of expression for this state. Impersonal concepts can perhaps be expressed in intellectual music, but in poetry the musical rhythm and word-texture are linked with a sensuous imagery too gross for the plane of philosophic thought. Thus dithyramb, by which I mean the essentially musical treatment of poetry in defiance of the sense of the words used, is hardly a more satisfactory medium than metaphysical verse: in which even a lyrical sugar-coating to the pill cannot induce the childish mood of poetry to accept philosophic statements removed beyond the plane of pictorial allegory.
In the second case the conflict of the poet’s subpersonalities has been finally settled, by some satisfaction of desire or removal of a cause of fear, in the complete rout of the opposing parties, and the victors dictate their own laws, uncontradicted, in legal prose or (from habit) in verse.
Distinction ought to be drawn between the poet and the man who has written poetry. There are certainly men of only one poem, a James Clarence Mangan, a Christopher Smart, a Julian Grenfell (these are instances more convenient than accurate) who may be explained either as born poets, tortured with a lifelong mental conflict, though able perhaps only once in their life to “go under” to their own self-hypnotism, or as not naturally poets at all but men who write to express a sudden intolerable clamour in their brain; this is when circumstances have momentarily alienated the usually happy members of their mental family, but once the expression has brought reconciliation, there is no further need of poetry, and the poet born out of due time, ceases to be.
This temporary writing of poetry by normal single-track minds is most common in youth when the sudden realization of sex, its powers and its limited opportunities for satisfactory expression, turns the world upside down for any sensitive boy or girl. Wartime has the same sort of effect. I have definite evidence for saying that much of the trench-poetry written during the late war was the work of men not otherwise poetically inclined, and that it was very frequently due to an insupportable conflict between suppressed instincts of love and fear; the officer’s actual love which he could never openly show, for the boys he commanded, and the fear, also hidden under a forced gaiety, of the horrible death that threatened them all.
XI
SPENSER’S CUFFS
THE poet’s quarrelsome lesser personalities to which I have referred are divided into camps by the distinction of sex. But in a poet the dominant spirit is male and though usually a feminist in sympathy, cannot afford to favour the women at the expense of his own sex. This amplifies my distrust of poets with floppy hats, long hair, extravagant clothes and inverted tendencies. Apollo never to my knowledge appears in Greek art as a Hermaphrodite, and the Greeks understood such problems far better than we do. I know it is usual to defend these extravagances of dress by glorifying the Elizabethan age; but let it be remembered that Edmund Spenser himself wore “short hair, little bands and little cuffs.”