Poetry, we are often told, cannot be defined but—by way of consolation—can always be recognized. Unfortunately the latter half of that statement seems no longer true, especially of latter-day poetry. Fratricidal strife between makers of vers libre and formalists goes on merrily, while the people whose contribution to poetry is their appreciation of it—and purchase of it—are not unnaturally playing safe and buying Longfellow in padded ooze.
I always thought I could recognize authentic poetry on most themes and even flattered myself that I had some little understanding of the psychology of its production. Latterly two voices have come to me, one affirming that I was right in my prejudice that all durable verse should have content as well as form, should have meaning as well as sound—though in closest union with the sound,—that, in short, the poet should be a thinker as well as a craftsman; an emotional thinker, of course, if that term be permitted, but not a mere clairaudient wielder of words. And then I heard a voice which bid me forget all that and list to
Long breaths, in a green and yellow din.
Hastening to give credit where it is due, let me remind the readers of The Little Review that this is the last line of a poem by Maxwell Bodenheim in the last number of that periodical. I trust that Mr. Bodenheim will forgive me for using him to point a moral and adorn a critical article, especially as I shall have to compare him with Wordsworth before I get through, and shall have to ask him whether he is not carrying the Wordsworthian tradition just a little too far into the region of the individual and subjective, into the unknown territory of the most isolated thing in the world: the human mind in those regions of it which have not been socially disciplined into the categories which make communication possible between mind and mind.
The other voice which I have mentioned is that of Professor S. B. Gass, of the University of Nebraska, who writes on Literature as a Fine Art in The Mid-West Quarterly for July.
Professor Gass takes the very sane position that words are the socially-created tools—arbitrary symbols, he calls them—to give us “not the thing itself, but something about the thing—some relationship, some classification, some generalization, some cause, some effect, some attribute, something that goes on wholly in the mind and is not sensuously present in the thing itself.” And that work, he continues, is thought, and it proceeds by statement. But undoubtedly words have sensuous sounds and sensuous denotations and connotations. Professor Gass admits this, but regards their sensuous properties—and especially, I imagine he would insist, their sensuous sounds based on physiological accident—as secondary. Hence, to him, Imagism would be a use of words for purely secondary results. And that is decadence: “Decadence arises out of the primary pursuit of secondary functions.” Now Wordsworth and the romantic school generally used words in this way, and so, logically enough, Professor Gass classifies Wordsworth as a decadent. In doing so we fear he exhibits an intellect too prone to dichotomize. He cuts human psychology up into too many and too water-tight compartments. When he quotes Wordsworth’s
... I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.