The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century

by William Lyon Phelps

Mr. Yeats, like Browning, writes both lyrical poems and dramas; but he is at the opposite remove from Browning in everything except the gift of song. Browning was so devoted to the dramatic aspect of art, that he carried the drama even into its seemingly contradictory form, the lyric. Every lyric is a little one-act play, and he called them dramatic lyrics. Mr. Yeats, on the other hand, is so essentially a lyric poet, that instead of writing dramatic lyrics, he writes lyric dramas. Even his stage-plays are primarily lyrical.

Those who are interested in Mr. Yeats's theory of speaking, reciting, or chanting poetry to the psaltery should read his book, Ideas of Good and Evil, which contains some of his most significant articles of faith, written in shining prose. Mr. Yeats cannot write on any subject without illuminating it by the light of his own imagination; and I find his essays in criticism full of original thought—the result of years of brooding reflection. In these short pieces his genius is as clear as it is in his poems.

He is, in fact, a master of English. His latest work, with its musical title, Per Amica Silentia Lunae(1918), has both in spirit and form something of the ecstasy and quaint beauty of Sir Thomas Browne. I had supposed that such a style as that displayed in Urn-Burial was a lost art; but Mr. Yeats comes near to possessing its secret. This book is like a deep pool in its limpidity and mystery; no man without genius could have written it. I mean to read it many times, for there are pages that I am not sure that I understand. One looks into its depths of suggestion as one looks into a clear but very deep lake; one can see far down, but not to the bottom of it, which remains mysterious. He invites his own soul, but there is no loafing. Indeed his mind seems preternaturally active, as in a combination of dream and cerebration.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders. I think, too, that no fine poet, no matter how disordered his life, has ever, even in his mere life, had pleasure for his end…. The other self, the anti-self or antithetical self, as one may choose to name it, comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is reality. The sentimentalists are practical men who believe in money, in position, in a marriage bell, and whose understanding of happiness is to be so busy whether at work or at play, that all is forgotten but the momentary aim. They will find their pleasure in a cup that is filled from Lethe's wharf, and for the awakening, for the vision, for the revelation of reality, tradition offers us a different word—ecstasy…. We must not make a false faith by hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest achievement of the human intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and therefore it must be offered in sincerity. Neither must we create, by hiding ugliness, a false beauty as our offering to the world. He only can create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable pangs, for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be rewarded by that dazzling unforeseen wing-footed wanderer.

I admire his devotion to the art of poetry. He will not turn Pegasus into a dray-horse, and make him haul cart-loads of political or moral propaganda. In his fine apologia, The Cutting of an Agate, he states and restates his creed: "Literature decays when it no longer makes more beautiful, or more vivid, the language which unites it to all life, and when one finds the criticism of the student, and the purpose of the reformer, and the logic of the man of science, where there should have been the reveries of the common heart, ennobled into some raving Lear or unabashed Don Quixote…. I have been reading through a bundle of German plays, and have found everywhere a desire not to express hopes and alarms common to every man that ever came into the world, but politics or social passion, a veiled or open propaganda…. If Homer were alive today, he would only resist, after a deliberate struggle, the temptation to find his subject not in Helen's beauty, that every man has desired, nor in the wisdom and endurance of Odysseus that has been the desire of every woman that has come into the world, but in what somebody would describe, perhaps, as 'the inevitable contest,' arising out of economic causes, between the country-places and small towns on the one hand, and, upon the other, the great city of Troy, representing one knows not what 'tendency to centralization.'"

In other words, if I understand him correctly, Mr. Yeats believes that in writing pure rather than applied poetry, he is not turning his back on great issues to do filigree work, but is merely turning aside from questions of temporary import to that which is fixed and eternal, life itself.

John Millington Synge was born near Dublin on the sixteenth of April, 1871, and died in Dublin on the twenty-fourth of March, 1909. It is a curious thing that the three great Irishmen of the Celtic renaissance—the only men who were truly inspired by genius—originally studied another form of art than literature. Mr. Yeats studied painting for years; A. E. is a painter of distinction; Synge an accomplished musician before he became a of letters. There is not the slightest doubt the effect of these sister arts upon the literary work of the Great Three is pervasive and powerful. The books of Mr. Yeats and Mr. Russell are full of word-pictures; and the rhythm of Synge's strange prose, which Mr. Ernest Boyd ingeniously compares with Dr. Hyde's translations, is full of harmonies.

Dr. Hyde has not only witnessed a new and wonderful literary revival in his country, but he has the satisfaction of knowing that he is vitally connected with its birth and bloom.

Synge had the greatest mental endowment of all the Irish writers of his time. He had an amazingly powerful mind. At Trinity College he took prizes in Hebrew and in Irish, and at the same time gained a scholarship in harmony and counterpoint at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. As a boy, "he knew the note and plumage of every bird, and when and where they were to be found." As a man, he could easily have mastered the note of every human being, as in addition to his knowledge of ancient languages, he seems to have become proficient in German, French, and Italian with singular speed and ease. He was an excellent performer on the piano, flute, and violin, did conjuring tricks, and delighted the natives of the Aran Islands with his penny whistle. He must have had a positive genius for concentration, obtaining a command over anything to which he cared to devote his attention. Mr. Yeats found him in that ramshackle old Hotel Corneille in the Latin Quarter, busily writing literary criticism in French and English, and told him as an inspired messenger to go to the primitive folk in Ireland and become a creative artist. He went; and in a few years reached the summit of dramatic achievement.

Synge was a terrible person, as terrible in his way as Swift. When Carlyle saw Daniel Webster, he said, "I should hate to be that man's nigger." I do not envy any of the men or women who, for whatever reason, incurred the wrath of Synge. He was never noisy or explosive, like a dog whose barks are discounted, to whom one soon ceases to pay any attention; we all know the futile and petty irascibility of the shallow-minded. Synge was like a mastiff who bites without warning. Irony was the common chord in his composition. He studied life and hated death; hated the gossip of the world, which seemed to him the gabble of fools. Physically he was a sick man, and felt his tether. He thought it frightful that he should have to die, while so many idiots lived long. He never forgave men and women for their folly, and the only reason why he did not forgive God was because he was not sure of His existence. The lady addressed in the following "poem" must have read it with queasy emotion, and have unwillingly learned it by heart. A photograph of her face immediately after its perusal would look like futurist art; but who knows the expression on the face of the poet while preparing this poison?