The ingenuity of these comparisons takes away Miss Amy Lowell’s breath. Writing in The New Republic she uses the term “absolutely original.” And she tells us how well the first figure “makes us see those round, shining umbrella-tops,” while the second is “a marvel of exact description.” I dare say Miss Lowell is right. And yet the description, “The news was a dagger to his heart,” was just as original when it was written long, long ago, and is certainly as vivid and intense in its way as anything by Mr. Fletcher praised by Miss Amy Lowell.
Comparing the new with the old in this way, one may well inquire whether the new-fashioned Imagists differ so very much from the old-fashioned ones whom they seek to destroy. For my part, I have no hesitation in asserting that the subject of the old order of verse does not differ from that of the new order. If present-day Imagists are bringing a number of contemporary facts and incidents into figurative employment; if they cut their particular capers In a Tube, or in My Backgarden, or in a Bath, or at The Breakfast Table, or amid Slaps, or in Chicago, or in the Pine Trees’ Tops, or After the Retreat, they are doing precisely what the every-day Imagist has done with contemporary facts ever since the world began. So the truth is that subject for subject they are no nearer the Parnassian height than the mereset babbler of driveling verse. And if they are really mounting the peaks, if as they claim they are making an absolutely fresh start at poetry, they are being pushed there by expression or technique, not poetry. In their view the mere curling and combing of words is sufficient to elevate them above such common poets as Shakespeare and the rest, and to entitle them to a seal among the really elect in the poetry business. But, of course, the bare fact that the Imagists are out for a revolution in form does not prove that they are out to give us a taste of real poetry. It only proves they are out for a revolution in form. And if one examines their form carefully, I believe it will be found to prove that there are poets among us suffering rather severely from the modern cant disease of culture. They “know” so much rather than feel anything, and because they know so much one meets them in every nook and corner, talking incessantly about the necessity of other poets knowing what they know, and doing as they do. Indeed they regard the production and advertisement of their particular kind of goods, which have become a sort of cult among a large number of persons who believe in hard study and discipline, rather than in spontaneity and livingness, as the beginning and end of earthly existence. But if one come to the bottom of the whole business it really amounts to no more than this. Tennyson and Kipling turned their attention to verse-making. They did not write poetry. They wrote doggerel, because what they wrote was in doggerel form. The Imagists have turned their attention to verse-making. Perhaps it should be versicle-making. They do write poetry. They write poetry because what they write has a poetry form. In short, the difference between Tennyson, Kipling and the Imagists is one of form. If the former had used present-day Imagist form they would be supreme poets. There is nothing to prove that Tennyson and Kipling could not have cultivated Imagist form. Therefore Tennyson and Kipling could have written Imagist verse. They were potentially supreme poets. How anyone can reasonably pretend that mere form transforms a subject into poetry passes my understanding. How anyone, moreover, can suggest in cold print that such form is helping to make an absolutely new start in poetry is a point best left to the decision of mental experts. Still, on reflection, one finds it is all part of the modern “game” of confusing content with form. One must be grateful to the Imagists for one thing. For some time there has been a movement among poets of a certain school to shift the interest from poetry to themselves considered as deputies. The errors of the Imagists, who, apparently, are mistaken in their conception of poetry and the business of poetry, enables one to shift the interest from these poets to poetry itself. One can say to them, “We are not interested in you, but in poetry. To tell us that you are deputy receivers and recorders, to describe your aims and methods, to take us to museums and to invite us to study the fossilized remains of ancient literatures, is not to help us to enjoy your verse.” Poets do not get any nearer to poetry by setting up new rulers and standards. Poetry does not take us farther afield into speculating on form and technique, but farther from them. Poetry tends to shift the interest from the poet to itself, from the solid instrument of transmission to the world in solution. Indeed it tends to obliterate the poet in the physical sense. As I said it converts him into poetry. Now the reason why Imagism fails as poetry is precisely because it shifts the interest from the world in solution to a group of too, too solid poets. My conclusion is obvious. Before the Imagists can claim that they are making an absolutely new start in poetry, they must learn to obliterate their corporeal natures. The moment they do so obliterate themselves, that moment one can safely say “Now we are coming to poetry.”
I intended to show that one cannot write free-verse unless one is a free poet. I must return to the subject.
The New Idol
George Burman Foster
An old philosopher—Aristotle, of course—called man a political being. By this he meant that man was naturally endowed for society, and, further, that society could find its full fruition only in the state. To the old Greek, this political vocation of man seemed great and sublime. Only one will ruled in the state. This one will synthesized all the individual wills, no matter how powerful and diverse they were. And this one will made all the distributive wills strong, and demonstrated its superiority to the totality of all such wills. The one will wills more than it can do, on that account becomes a statesman, that is, widens out his will to a state-will. Thus, the one will wins a new and wider sphere for its abilities and activities.
But it was the modern—post mediaeval—state which was the first to set the thought of that impersonal, unemotional philosopher in its true light. The modern state has brought to consciousness the whole gigantic weight of the world’s political unfolding of force. The modern state is related to what the ancient Greeks called state, the Hellenic city-community, much as one of our mighty industrial machines is related to the primitive tool of a day-laborer, or a modern machine-gun to the sling and bow of an ancient warrior. Our states are indeed machines. All their parts fit into each other with the utmost precision, and work with astonishing accuracy. Our states are also huge weapons with numberless barrels, but employed by a single will, unloaded at the word of a single Commander.
It was the first chancellor of the German Empire who once asserted at a meeting of the Reichstag that politics ruined character! This of course put a damper on all the ardor that lauded to the skies the greatest invention of modern times, the new miracle of the state. This assertion clangs like a first elegiac note—like the intimation of an interior fatality, deep-seated already in the organism of the modern political and cultural life. This word utters no sentimental fanaticism which, with all sorts of romantic scruples and moral standards, observes the course of the immense evolution of folk life. This brave word comes from a man whom the whole world of his day celebrated as the foremost master of the art of politics. In his hands, the political machine underwent an unheard-of development of power. And what this statesman expressed only provisionally perhaps in an ill-humored, unguarded moment has been meanwhile developed by earnest men to a conscious, serious concern for men of a new and growing culture. These men have preached that men should turn aside from political life; they have seen in spirit a coming day in which state-less, unpolitical man shall have reached a purer higher stage of life than was at all possible under the banner of a political culture. Anarchists we today call these warriors against the state. What they fight, these warriors, is not this or that particular form of state, not this or that particular institution, but the state in every form, state in general. But because the word anarchism is ambiguous, because it is not simply an ancient theory, but occasionally signifies a quite tangible praxis, we must distinguish between the ideal, the spiritual champions of anarchism, and the preachers of a propaganda of bloody deed. While, at best, the latter would only drive out the devil by Beelzebub, the former would have a noble faith in the victorious power of the idea. Theirs is the high faith that the might of ideals is mightier than the might of force. They trust that humanity will overcome the political malady through spiritual development and inner strength, and will mature in the direction of an anarchistic culture. And in the rank of these idealistic anarchists, who contemplate the state as the most grievous hindrance to a noble and pure humanity—a Prince Kropotkin, a Count Tolstoi, a former German army officer von Egidy—Friedrich Nietzsche also belongs, aye, he leads the van of all the poets and thinkers who espy the future task of humanity in the negation, the overcoming, of the state.
Anarchism, even in its most ideal form, seems dismal enough to most men. Yet it is understandable—even a natural necessity—in the evolution of modern life. It is with the spiritual currents of life as it is with the vibrations of the pendulum. The stronger the movement toward the one side, the further the rebound toward the other. As a matter of fact, the political pendulum has been far removed from the line of equilibrium. The cultured peoples of Europe—and it was these, not the American people, which Nietzsche had in mind,—had worked themselves into a political debauch in which there scarcely seemed to be any other interest than that of politics. What the Church was to the mediaeval man the state became to the modern man—God manifest on earth! Men believed in this state as their Christ. All power in heaven and on earth seemed to be given to it, too. What was preached in the name of the state was a gospel to its believers. To these believers it even seemed a sin to doubt the wisdom of the state at all. It was blasphemy to contest the state’s claim to omnipotence. Once when it was said: Rome has spoken! all the rest of the world grew dumb in deferential silence. Later it was said: Paris, Petersburg, Berlin, has spoken! and a voice from heaven could not have been hearkened to more sacredly than did political souls take heed to such state edicts. Good? What is good if not that which benefits the state? Truth? But where is there truth apart from the word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the state? The political end sanctifies any means—makes anything good over which men would be otherwise enraged, stamps anything as true which would be otherwise branded a lie in the world.
Nietzsche hit the nail on the head when he stigmatized the state, in the sense of his time, as the new idol, and made it say in a Zarathustra discourse; “On earth there is nothing greater than I: it is I who am the regulative finger of God”—“everything will it give you, if ye worship it, the new idol.” And this culture of the state was brought into a system by the philosopher; it was preached in the pulpit; prayed at the altar. Numberless were the offerings which were brought to this new idol—of beings, of human happiness and of human life, aye, of human reason and human conscience! For whoever serves this idol, whoever would truly serve it, may no longer have regard for himself, may no longer consult his own judgment. He is the better fitted to be priest of this state, the less he is burdened with scruples of his own conscience. He is all the more serviceable a scribe, the more smoothly he can adapt his well-oiled theology to reasons of state. Truly, they were not the worst spirits who rebelled against such idolatry. They were prophets of a new culture who took martyrdom upon themselves, and no small martyrdom at that, to unhorse a belief in the omnipotence and omniscience of the state. For this belief oppressed men. Out of men with living souls, it made ciphers to be added to one so as to give that one worth. Politics needs masses, herds. The individual, the personality, who does not surrender himself to the masses, who does not think like an animal in a herd, is troublesome. Therefore, it passes as supreme wisdom of the state to uniformize all men, to discipline and drill men to whom the sight of a uniformized mass arouses the feeling of sublime beauty, to whom a thousand-throated hurrah sounds like the loveliest music. How much tender feeling, how much inner life, has been stifled in the day’s political alarum—who can tell? “Yea,” says Nietzsche, “a dying for many hath here been devised, which glorifieth itself as life: verily, a hearty service unto all preachers of death!