Dionysus in Dismay STANLEY P. CHASE

Twenty-five years ago, when my generation were beginning to find their way around in the world of print and paint, a group of us used to meet occasionally to share each other’s discoveries in contemporary thought and literature. You may smile at the association of the date 1904 and contemporary literature, and confessedly some of the objects of our attention were fantastic enough—Elbert Hubbard, Edward Howard Griggs, and even “I, Mary MacLane.” The more daring among us were delving in Haeckel and Henry George; our conservatives, according to their bents, delighted in Kipling and Barrie, or a group of alluring Celts, or became expert in discriminations between the earlier and the later manner of Henry James. We all read, of course, William James and Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells and Chesterton. In poetry, to be sure, we had no such variegated menu as the contemporary road-house affords; I should say that our diet was easily digestible and a little saccharine. For the most part, as I recall, we followed along the vagabondia trail after Richard Hovey and Bliss Carman. In that old college town near the coast, we could still thrill to such verses as

Frost and Sandburg, Lindsay and Masefield, had not come into our world—much less Walter de la Mare or Aldous Huxley or Robinson Jeffers. But we were not so entirely neglected by the contemporary muse as you may suppose. We knew the early work of Yeats, and “The Hound of Heaven” of Francis Thompson; we had discovered the sonnets of Santayana; we could repeat a large part of A Shropshire Lad; and of course for our more cosmic moods we had Walt Whitman. Hundreds of other such groups must have existed, like ours callow, inexperienced, bumptious, but very inquisitive, very receptive. Not against us did the “new poetry” (no longer such) have to hurl its bolts.

And even in that distant, unreal decade of the nineteen-hundreds, before President Roosevelt, by a few kindly pages in the Outlook, put Edwin Arlington Robinson’s name into every one’s mouth, we knew the poet of “Tilbury Town” (only thirty miles from our own). There was one poem of his whose meaning used to be a great subject of dispute,—for we were than naïve enough to think that a poem must be susceptible of some rational explanation. It was entitled “Cortège,” and had appeared in the Captain Craig volume of 1902.⁠[45]

The half-benumbing, half-intensifying effect of the “crazy tune,” the curious way in which a mere pattern of words can usurp the mind, now stealing its attention from the very grief they point to, and now flashing upon it a new aspect of that grief—something like that, I suppose, accounts for the fascination the poem had for us. But a number of us were dissatisfied with an explanation so simple. No, we wanted to know, first, who and how many persons were being buried at four o’clock to-day, and their relationship to the poet (was it, for instance, a former sweetheart and her husband?), and whether “she” in the third stanza was one of the deceased, and in what sense it could be said that Love “made the grave so soon,” and what “half so soon” meant—was it any different from “twice as soon”? We even calculated that the burial must be taking place some fifteen hundred miles to the west, since otherwise, all (Protestant) funerals being held commonly at two o’clock, the poet’s time would be twelve noon instead of four afternoon. All, of course, very silly and irrelevant questions.

Only a few years ago, in a poetry course, I was recalling these old agitations of ours, as a warning, I feel sure, against such literalness of interpretation. But, as will happen with class-room instruction, my admonitions produced quite the opposite effect from that intended, for one member of the class was so intrigued by the problem, even as we had been twenty years before, that he evolved the staggering theory that the poem was not about a funeral at all, but about a marriage. This ingenious view having been communicated, in a circuitous way, to Mr. Robinson, he settled the matter quite simply with the following note to the inquirer:

“I have long given up attempting to interpret my own poetry, but in this instance, would go so far as to suggest a funeral rather than a marriage. I remember this poem chiefly as a more or less reprehensible experiment in sound and feeling—a performance more pardonable thirty years ago—perhaps—than it would be to-day.”

Of course, it was not Mr. Robinson’s performance, but ours, which was reprehensible. We were treating an “experiment in sound and feeling” as we might have treated a deposition in court or an application for the payment of life-insurance; we were bringing to a poem an attitude of mind alien to its character as a poem. It was as if one should read Mr. Frost’s “The Thatch” and demand to know why he “would not go in till the light went out.” For “Cortège” in essential matters is not cryptic in the least; it is only irrelevant, external details that are left unexplained. And ultimately, I suppose, what we call a taste for poetry, of any except a very elementary sort, depends upon the possession of tact or intelligence to perceive just such a distinction.

I have used this personal recollection because much more frequently to-day and to a greater degree a somewhat similar feeling of puzzlement assails the reader of contemporary poetry. This simple instance of an obscurity gratuitously created by readers may lead to the consideration of a problem of poetic form more comprehensive than any question of mere technique (though technical elements of poetry are involved in it too), I mean the question of those necessities which are laid on poetry from its being a form of communication between mind and mind. For, I believe, from misapprehension and confusion in this matter, on the part now of poets and now of their readers, springs, to some extent, the unsatisfactory state of poetry at the present time. On the one side, there is reported a feeling of exasperation, by readers competent enough in other kinds of literature or in the older poetry, who “can make nothing of this modernist stuff,” and on the other side the modernists’ rejoinder that such readers are precisely in the position of my group of twenty-five years ago—lacking the intelligence to grasp what is essential and to disregard non-essentials. Surely a consideration of the nature and limits of that community of mind which must be assumed to subsist between the poet and his readers is not foreign to the subject of this book.

I

At the outset we encounter the Crocean view of all art, including poetry, as expression merely, and conversely of all expression as art. But leaving the confusions of Signor Croce to be dealt with by others,⁠[46] we are warranted in assuming, I think, that, generally and typically, the poet desires communication with other persons,—conceivably only one other person, or persons of the future, but at any rate communication and not merely self-expression. Otherwise, he wouldn’t publish or circulate or read his poems, as generally and typically poets do. The theory of Laura Riding and Robert Graves⁠[47] that the poet publishes (or “externalises”) only out of consideration for the rights of the poem, which, like physical offspring, has attained an independent status with a life of its own, is a naïve and superfluous bit of mystification, sufficiently answered by the query, “Why then sign one’s name?”—and I have not remarked any unusually wide return to the practice of anonymity. And one is led to wonder, as one turns the pages of our more advanced periodicals, what possible readers some of these poets are addressing. After a moderate success in comprehending, let us say, such diverse productions as those of the mediæval mystics, the wits of the Roman Empire and the Restoration, the English metaphysical poets, and the symbolist group in France, and after a period of conscientious schooling in the pronouncements of this newest movement, it is disconcerting to find oneself completely balked by the innocent-appearing contents of the latest anthology of verse. Among the ten possible but improbable interpretations of some poem, it seems somehow less than a sporting chance that the one you finally choose as the least implausible will be what was intended.

Take, for instance, this poem of Mr. Wallace Stevens, which I select not as an example of that writer’s often delightful connoisseurship in verse, but as fairly representative of this decline in what has been called “communicative efficacy.”

Now the elements of this experience—the jar, its shape, colour, and quality, the hill in Tennessee where it is placed, the behaviour or appearance of the wilderness, the bird, the bush—stand doubtless in some kind of relation with each other in the poet’s mind, have possibly certain symbolic values. Since we have no clues to these relationships and values, our mind is free to do anything it pleases with the bare grey jar, the hill, and the wilderness. This freedom, however, and any pleasure we may take in the separate images, in the rhythms, or the placing of the words, are not sufficient compensation for the state of uncertainty and slight irritation in which we are left. Very likely the little poem is meant to suggest nothing more than the superiority, to an intensely civilised person, of the simplest bit of handicraft over any extent of unregulated “nature,” but it has been seriously interpreted to me, by devotees of recent poetry, as, respectively, an objet d’art, a sex-symbol, and a burial-urn containing the remains of a valued friend. And so it must remain, for me, not only like nothing else in Tennessee but like nothing else in the universe.

Considerable damage was done to this shallow affectation of knowingness of the last few years by Max Eastman’s witty article in the April (1929) Harper’s. A young intellectual from one of our well-known private schools told me that members of his group were observed to discontinue their perusal of transition⁠[49] upon the appearance of Mr. Eastman’s “The Cult of Unintelligibility.” But contemporary poetry is still afflicted by an acute attack of that extreme of Puritanism—separatism: it asserts the right not only of private judgment, but of a private symbolism,—which is, æsthetically, of much graver consequences. My point here, of course, has nothing to do with the values or qualities of the experience which the writer is presumably seeking to share. I am simply saying that, in the reading of the slightest as of the most profound poem, a sense of singleness or wholeness is the most essential part of the experience, and that this totality of effect cannot be achieved if all clues to the way the poem is organised are withheld or too casually indicated. The enigmatic character of Dr. William Carlos Williams’s poems, we are told, is due in part to his habit of jotting down free-verse impressions in the intervals between his professional visits to patients. I can only hope that in writing out his prescriptions he makes a greater allowance for the mental capacity of the pharmacist than he seems to make for mine. To speak bluntly, the difficulty of reading much “modernist” verse is due less to the superior sophistication or cleverness of these writers than to their essential lack of art.

By contrast, in the following lyric of Elinor Wylie, even though it is a repudiation of something accustomed, beautiful, and comforting, there is so clear and deft an employment of symbol, so perfect a fusion of mood with image, that the effect of totality is achieved; the peace denied to this orthodox landscape (or universe) is momentarily attained in the very denial of it, and thus one of the functions of poetry is discharged.

“The transport ... that the poet kindles in us,” observes Professor De Selincourt in his Inaugural Lecture at Oxford, “springs from our instinctive recognition that his form, a term that includes both rhythm and diction, is an entirely faithful rendering of his experience, so that we gain from it a sudden clear sense of fulfilment, such as we can hardly hope to gain outside the ideal world of art.” That may be a rather narrowly æsthetic interpretation of Longinus’s doctrine of the poetic “transport,” but certainly “a sudden clear sense of fulfilment” is an experience which it is easy to miss in the poetry of our contemporaries.

In fact, this “sense of fulfilment” is precisely what the typical modernist, experiencing nothing of the sort in life itself and disdaining an “ideal world” thus cut off from reality, avoids giving us. He would regard it as part of the old hocus-pocus of orthodoxy. Life being to him fragmentary, inchoate, he would say that his poetry, if it is to be “an entirely faithful rendering of his experience,” must itself produce an effect of inchoateness, fragmentariness.

Here Archibald MacLeish, who stands somewhere between the centre and the extreme left wing in poetry, employs a traditional verse-form in a poem the theme of which is the absurdity of the spectacle of human antics in a cosmos without intelligibility or significance. He guards against any specious effect of “fulfilment” by the unexpected reiteration of the word nothing. Yet there remains the regrettable necessity of rounding out the sestet and capping the rhyme; and, more important, the method of presentation has imposed an adventitious kind of order on a scene which, in the poet’s apprehension of it, is an even wilder scramble and jumble of absurdities. And so the sonnet, thoroughly “modern” in spirit, is quite conservative in technique. The distinctiveness of this new poetry, indeed, is less a matter of measures, whether new or old, than of the principle of association by which it is governed. It aims at an organisation of images and a succession of rhythms which spring more immediately from the poet’s stream of consciousness.

In attempting to divert this stream through the reader’s mind, without spilling over or filtering, some recent poets have adopted startling innovations in typography, including punctuation, use of capitals and small letters, spacing, and line-division. The fashion is prompted in part by a spirit of mere impishness, but back of it also is a certain amount of genuine experimentation in the resources and the graphical representation of language, the object being to prod the reader out of the lethargy and complacency which, it is alleged, are fostered by the conventions of verse-form and page-arrangement. Undeniably, if one is willing to play this game and doesn’t mind having the rules made up as one goes along, some of the results are amusing. You will understand most readily what it is all about if you first take one of these poems down from some one’s dictation, then attempt to write it as you think the poet would do to bring out the subtler shadings and nuances, and finally compare your representation of the poem with his. Here, for instance, are the words (written as ordinary prose) of a poem by E. E. Cummings from a group called “Impressions.”

“I was considering how, within night’s loose sack, a star’s nibbling infinitesimally devours darkness, the hungry star, which will eventually jiggle the bait of dawn and be jerked into eternity, when over my head a shooting-star burst into a stale shriek like an alarm-clock.”⁠[52]

On the chance that at this point the reader may wish to try the experiment which has been suggested, I postpone to a later page Mr. Cummings’s original arrangement of the words. If you will compare his printing of the poem with that above, you will see how the tininess and the quick little repeated nibbles of the mouse at the grain-sack are suggested by the short, broken lines; how ingeniously the shooting-star is made to interrupt the poet’s revery; how the effect of flare, streaking, and slower fading is conveyed in the printing of “bursts”; and how the new simile of the alarm-clock impinges upon the retinal image of the meteor.⁠[53] But—“the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted.” After scrambling up a hundred or so of these typographical escarpments, I found that there was seldom a view from the summit commensurate with the discomforts of the climb, and my interest in the new sport began to flag. It is hard to imagine a mature artist interesting himself for long in this sort of preciosity.

Though each individual’s inner life is in a measure unique, the mere attempt to convey some fraction of it to others by written or printed words presupposes a certain shared and common ground of human experience. Freshness, piquancy, gusto, can be properly savoured only when they are delicately blended with “human nature’s daily food.” The importance of a common understanding upon essentials is clear in the sphere of our personal relationships, which become rich and satisfying only with the mutual recognition of things that may be taken for granted; oddities and varieties are most engaging in those with whom we already own a fundamental bond. Now the forms and conventions of poetry may be regarded as so many aids to the speedier establishment of such understanding between reader and poet,—the indispensable means by which an original experience is so shaped and clarified that it has significance for others. No one of these conventions, naturally, is absolutely fixed or static, and skilful manipulation of their elements is constantly yielding new and unsuspected possibilities of æsthetic pleasure, and even of social comprehension. For this reason we may look with a tolerant and not unfriendly eye upon such experimentation by some of our younger poets as I have described.⁠[54] Nevertheless, it is imperative that persons who wish to modify or to replace the accepted vehicles of poetic expression should have a clear understanding of what convention in literature or art is for. Adequate treatment of this subject would require a separate book, and here I must content myself with a mere statement of faith: that some set of assumptions as to the experiences most valuable and important for mankind—in other words, of universals in the Aristotelian sense—is as necessary in the establishment or the maintenance of an æsthetic convention as in any purely social or political activity. Indeed, the most promising development in American poetry at the present time, I believe, is to be found, not in these centrifugal and eccentric movements, but in the considerable amount of genuine if less spectacular work which is being done upon the lines of a firmly rooted literary tradition.⁠[55]

II

In the last few paragraphs, though concerned primarily with the aspect of communicability, I have been skirting the topic which lies at the centre of all movements of thought and feeling in our day, and with which I shall be concerned through the rest of this essay. I refer to the prevalent spirit of disillusionment, a state of mind which in America has made itself felt, acutely and widely, only within the last three or four years.

Certainly the mood of the younger generation of poets (the men and women now in their twenties or early thirties) is very different from the poetic temper of fifteen years ago—those exciting, strained, exalted, painful years that witnessed, among other things, the rise of the “new poetry” in England and America and, somewhat later, the beginning of the war. Any comprehensive view of the stream of poetry warns us not to make too much of these twists and turns between one decade and the next; yet there is some reason to think that we have now reached or are approaching one of the major bends in the course. The “poetic renascence” of 1912–1917 was, it is true, in reaction against certain nineteenth-century attitudes,—against its Puritan code in morals and its tradition of gentility in belles-lettres; as some one has said, it delighted in hurling bricks at the silk hat of Hamilton W. Mabie; but to the most characteristic force of nineteenth-century thought and life—namely, an expansive philosophy of naturalism, embraced with enthusiasm and glorified by a romantic imagination—it merely gave a fresh impetus.

These lines by John Hall Wheelock epitomise the thought that had been the main inspiration of the nineteenth century. Despite their regular metrical form, with its reminiscence of Emerson, we recognise in them the ecstatic evolutionary naturalism of Walt Whitman.

Indeed, it was the spirit of Whitman, more than any other, that presided over our “poetic renascence.” Not, of course, that all the poets who made their appearance in those years were akin to him. Frost, for instance, was hardly more like Whitman than he was like Pope; consciously, in his living and in his poetry, he was facing and he has continued to move in just the opposite direction. Nor perhaps in the work of Masters or of Robinson⁠[57] is the relation to Whitman at once apparent, for superficially neither the Spoon River Anthology, that sardonic record of stunted human growths, nor Robinson’s sombre studies of the thwarted lives of his New Englanders suggest the tolerance, the breadth and human warmth of the older poet’s sympathies. But the analysis of these unfortunate victims of a repressive and unhumane morality (for such is the way the poetry of both writers was commonly described, and such, in one aspect, it is) was really in line with Whitman’s gospel of emotional emancipation, as well as with the new direction given to psychology by Freud and Jung. In the work of Lindsay and Sandburg, and notably in that of the far less original Oppenheim (whose disappearance from current collections is itself significant of the change that has taken place), the influence of Whitman was patent. All the spokesmen and contemporary critics of the movement, from Amy Lowell (1917) to Bruce Weirick (1924), with varying degrees of emphasis, stress Whitman’s primacy in American literature. He had had his lovers and disciples before, but now for the first time a group of American poets could give him whole-hearted welcome with no inner abashment to overcome. Throughout the earlier productions of the movement, even in the poems of the Imagists, whose theory and practice of verse were so different from his own, is diffused the vibrant spirit of Walt Whitman. It is experienced as a certain buoyancy and expectancy of mood, and most characteristically as an underlying trust in a life-force which is felt to be working here in America to high, unforeseen ends.

It would be an over-simplification, but somewhere near the heart of the matter, to say that the presence we are most aware of in the poetry of to-day is not Walt Whitman, but Thomas Hardy—his desolating irony, at least, if not his artistic and personal elevation. These younger poets accept, but coldly and without enthusiasm, the account which contemporary science offers of the universe and of the human make-up, and they are as hostile to the glowing affirmations of the great romantics as they are to the evasions and tepidity of the Victorians. Perhaps this is but an inversion, a different guise, of that restless and changeable temper which we call romanticism, but to me at least its emergence seems to be more significant than were any of the varied energies released by the last poetic movement. This new spirit is not more characteristic of poetry, of course, than of other expressions of the age. To some extent, though less here than abroad, it is an after-effect of the war—the inability of nervous organisations overstrained by the excitements of those years to respond to normal stimuli. It may be briefly described as a despair of achieving any reading of life in its totality which will be tolerable in the light of all we know and feel. “In the course of a few centuries,” writes Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch in The Modern Temper, “[man’s] knowledge, and hence the universe of which he finds himself an inhabitant, has been completely revolutionised, but his instincts and his emotions have remained, relatively at least, unchanged. He is still, as he always was, adjusted to the orderly, purposeful, humanised world which all peoples unburdened by experience have figured to themselves, but that world no longer exists.” This modern sense of frustration differs from states of disillusion or pessimism experienced in the past in two respects. It is, for one thing, more widespread, producing a considerable body of poetry of sheer negation, turning some writers to mere elaboration of surfaces and appearances, and making itself felt as an undercurrent, now cynical, now passionate, in much writing which seems superficially to be almost free of philosophical implications. And secondly, this spirit of denial is a more positive and uncompromising thing than we have known in the past. Not only is it unable to effect any synthesis of its intelligence and its emotional promptings; it has come to believe that such a synthesis is in the nature of things impossible. It grows “more and more likely,” continues Mr. Krutch, “that [man] must remain an ethical animal in a universe which contains no ethical element.” His dilemma is that he cannot either feel as his intelligence bids him or think as his emotions would have him. Even the highest of the personal emotions, love itself, which had somehow eluded the cold touch of nineteenth-century science, has not been able to withstand the psycho-analysis of the twentieth. “Have you not heard,” asks the lady in Cavender’s House,

Specifically, a feeling is abroad that poetry is at some kind of crisis or turning-point, and there are even predictions that poetry of a sort that the past would recognise as such cannot continue much longer to be produced.

The poetry of T. S. Eliot has been praised for its seizing of just this aspect of the modern situation, the sense of frustration, of insignificance. “The passions which swept through the once major poets,” writes Mr. Krutch, “no longer awaken any profound response, and only in the bleak, tortuous complexities of a T. S. Eliot does [the present age] find its moods given adequate expression.” Love-making carried on with an accompanying sense of its futility and ridiculousness, an acquaintance with art and poetry which serves only to confirm misgivings as to their relevancy for us to-day, the employment of religious symbols to arouse a poor mirthless mockery—in such experiences our young intellectuals find mirrored the age and body of their time. The cryptic character of the writing, the sometimes arbitrary connection between one image and the next, the casual allusions to one person’s recondite reading, are all indications of the contemporary sense of the individual’s isolation. The broken rhythms, the fragmentariness of the scenes or movements, the deliberate foregoing of any rational principle of organisation, reflect the feeling of the fragmentariness of life itself, the modern inability to effect any kind of integration of experience. And this, we are told by some, is the only kind of poetry which an honest and sensitive mind in an age like ours can be expected to produce.

Mr. Eliot, though no longer belonging even nominally to American literature, is worth attention because of his present high reputation in intellectual circles. He has written literary criticism of a kind especially needed at the present time, based as it is on a wide knowledge of literature, informed by a delicate taste, and guided by severe yet humane standards. And in his poetry he has shown himself capable of finding a comedy of the mind in these hesitations and inhibitions of modernity,—as in the early “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” By the haunting, individual rhythms of his poems alone, we are apprised of an exceptional poetic endowment. Yet Mr. Eliot’s literary output, poetry and prose, constitutes, to my mind, one of the most arresting paradoxes of this paradoxical age: an advocate of the sterner disciplines of the past (“classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion”), who gives to these causes all the organising power of a firm intelligence, and is content to let his poetry express chiefly the states of confusion, doubt, faintness, with which the positive principles of his thought have had to wrestle.

In a recent essay Mr. Eliot has ventured the opinion that a great event in the intellectual world would be the conversion of Professor Irving Babbitt to Roman or Anglo-Catholicism, but, he concludes regretfully, such a consummation, though devoutly to be wished, is hardly likely, for Mr. Babbitt “knows too much.” Perhaps an even more salutary conversion, in its immediate effects upon other poets, would be Mr. Eliot’s compassing, in his creative work, of those genuinely classical values of which, in his critical writing, he shows such fine apprehension. For a transformation of that kind, one need not fear that any man of letters knows too much. One may at least entertain the hope that Mr. Eliot’s permanent reputation as a poet is not going to lie in the fact that he has voiced, more completely than any one else in verse, the confusion and disillusionment of this post-war generation.

The humanist is aware that poetry, like mythology, possesses no power of conferring immediate revelation of truth; he knows that its scenes and personages, its thoughts and passions, from the earthiest to the most ethereal, belong to the world of unsubstantiality, of illusion—of dreams, if you will. He will go further: this element of illusion, this impassable gulf between reality and our comprehension or representation of reality, is not confined to poetry and mythology; it is part of all our conscious life; it baffles us even in our attempt to comprehend that nearest thing of all—ourself. “... beneath the surface of all we see and feel, beneath the very act of seeing and feeling, lies the unredeemed chaos of desires and impressions, unlimited, unmeaning, unfathomable, incalculable, formless, dark. Life is but appearance, and this personality we call by our name is but illusion within illusion.”⁠[58] But working within the illusion is also a power to control and order these impulses, to check them or to bring them into a harmonious co-operation, yielding a serenity and a sense of stability which, of all human experiences, seems freest of illusion. It was the characteristic error of much nineteenth-century poetry (of Browning’s in England, of Whitman’s in America) to limit personality to the mere welter of desires and feelings, to find there its central “urge” (the favourite word of romantic criticism), and to erect upon such foundations a philosophy of the “ideal.” But the hollowness of this illusion (the philosophy which found an immediacy of truth in natural instincts, impulses, and feelings) has to-day become all too apparent; and when its former adherents ask where then certainty can be found, they are bidden to direct their gaze to the abstract world of the physicist and the mathematician. Here, in the words of Mr. I. A. Richards, “intellectual certainty is, almost for the first time, available, and on an unlimited scale.”⁠[59] But even if this were so,—and one hears of developments in these fields that appear to make the certainty considerably less than absolute,—it would still be a certainty about matters that have no particular relation to the behaviour and feelings of human beings, and that give no support for poetry. The beguiling mirage of an Absolute fostered by romantic poetry has disappeared, only to be replaced by the mirage of another Absolute, terrifying though incomprehensible. And so we have come to the impasse already described.

From the point of view of the humanist, what has so suddenly collapsed is the towering structure of nineteenth-century romanticism, not any dwelling necessary to the continued life of poetry. For he has long recognised those metaphysical limitations with which contemporary physics is so deeply entangled; and he has been unwilling to trust metaphysics, any more completely than natural science, with the whole determination of a philosophy of life. Instead of asserting that intellectual certainty in the field of science is available now almost for the first time on an unlimited scale, he would postulate a large degree of what amounts to practical certainty, in all that concerns us most nearly as ethical beings, available now, as it has been for centuries. This assurance is embodied, for him, in the dualism of the great historic religions, in the teachings of Socrates and of Jesus, and in the most persistent traditions of European literature. But its final sanctions are not found in any “great tradition,” however imposing; they are arrived at empirically and experimentally by any one who, divesting his mind of shibboleths and catch-words, will honestly examine his own impulses and springs of action. In his own soul he will find the cleavage, the dualism, which runs through human nature. This opposition of forces, by whatever names he calls them, by whatever symbols he represents them, may never be resolved; but in his mysterious power of intervention in their unending conflict lies, for him, the ultimate reality within the illusion. To the reading of poetry, then, he will bring the same habit of discrimination that serves him in the conduct of life, mindful that it is still a world communicating with ours by the gate of horn and the gate of ivory, and that the phantasms which issue therefrom may light our way a few steps nearer truth, or may deepen for us the shadows of the dark, chaotic flux.

To the consciousness of intellectual defeat and spiritual dismay, evidenced so widely in contemporary literature, it is not to be expected that poetry will for the present make any very direct or explicit answer. For we do not look to poetry for polemics, for the formulation of ethical or metaphysical ideas; and when poetry tries to assume a burden that belongs rather to criticism and philosophy, the result may have literary interest and excellence, as does Pope’s Essay on Man, but is more likely to be merely dull and forced, like the later work of Wordsworth or Browning. In either case some fulness of life belonging to poetry when confident in its own right is missing. No, what we look for in the poet is some more pervasive or implicit evidence of his scale of values, some intuitive, and for that reason more certain, indication of the quality of his response to life, felt as unmistakably in his imagery, his diction, and his rhythms as in those more ponderable elements of style which the eighteenth century called “fable” and “sentiments.” Thus, in two stanzas⁠[60] of A. E. Housman—

—something that belongs to his deepest intuition (his acceptance, without evasion and without reconciliation, of life’s transitoriness) is caught in the very movement of the lines and the simplicity of the words:

This pervasive sense of things chiefly valued and most deeply felt, which every great poet’s work gives us, is surely not determined altogether by forces external to him. The poet is something more than a highly sensitised receiving-set for remote, scattered goings-on in the world at large. What we prize in every poet we come to know intimately is some irreducible, given quality of the personality. We shall not easily accept, therefore, the current argument that, in an age like ours of dissolving faiths, the only genuine kind of poetry must be one which has cut itself off from belief of any kind.⁠[61] The history of English literature is not lacking in instances of poets who have withstood the pressure of their age: to recall only the greatest, the poems of Milton, from Lycidas to Samson Agonistes, are triumphant testimonies against the idea that poetry need be so utterly subject to contemporaneous disintegrating influences. But if we claim for poetry a certain power of immunity from such forces, neither, by the same course of reasoning, should we expect too much from the direct effect upon it of those forces which we think salutary, such as humanism.

I do not mean to suggest here the notion of poetry’s having a life of its own in any transcendental sense, or to imply that poets possess mysterious astral powers. My thought is simply that the new humanism, before it is given any large imaginative expression in American poetry, must expect to prove its worth by responding to broadly human, and not alone specifically poetic needs. It will do this by its power of bringing harmony into lives which are ordered in accordance with its insight, of establishing in society “a current of fresh and true ideas,” and of creating thus “a quickening and sustaining atmosphere” which poetry can breathe. I feel no need of apologising for my use of these well-worn phrases of Matthew Arnold; not only was he the best representative of the spirit of humanism in nineteenth-century England or America, but also, in his realisation of the hopeless disparity between natural processes and human aims, he anticipated the very pattern of our own dilemma. The paralysis which came over Arnold’s poetic powers in later life is sometimes attributed to the steady growth of his humanistic interests, requiring the ampler medium of prose. However that may be, I believe it certain that his humanism—his sense, that is, of the worth and fruitfulness of human powers when wisely exercised and his acceptance of the limitations which such a view imposes—gave to his poetry nearly all that power of invigoration and refreshment for which we chiefly value it. A contemporary critic, R. H. Hutton, observed how frequently Arnold closes a poem on the burdensomeness of existence by some seemingly unconnected figure or story, such as the simile of the Tyrian trader in “The Scholar Gipsy,” instinct with the pride and buoyancy of old world enterprise. “‘The problem is insoluble,’ he seems to say, ‘but insoluble or not, let us recall the pristine strength of the human spirit, and not forget that we have access to great resources still.’”⁠[62] In such ways to-day, indirectly and obliquely, humanism may make itself felt as one influence among many upon contemporary poetry: by rendering accessible and operative, for the poets as for the rest of us, some of these moral energies from times of more robust faith and higher intellectual vitality than our own.

FOOTNOTES