A Note on Paroxysm in Poetry
Reading edition
Edward J. O’Brien
Paroxysm is the poetic expression of that modern spirit which finds its most notable expression in other arts in the sculpture of Meunier, the polyphonic music of Strauss, the philosophy of Bergson, and the American skyscraper. It is the application of dynamics to poetry. It stands midway between romanticism, which is an escape into the past, and futurism, which is a flight into the future. Paroxysm is deep-rooted in to-day.
M. Nicolas Beauduin, its most noteworthy French exemplar, has many noteworthy disciples in France and Germany, and paroxysm is a well-known force in every literature except that of America, where its unconscious expression in life has been most remarkable. Students will find its philosophy set forth and its current phases in literature duly chronicled in M. Beauduin’s quarterly review, La Vie des Lettres. It is only possible here to offer a few very brief hints as to its literary aims and materials:
It aims to be a synthesis of modern industrial and mechanical effort.
It repudiates the ivory tower.
It handles the materials of modern life directly, not in symbols.
It responds to the roar of factories and trains.
The poet is to be “an active lyric,” representing his age.
The poet’s vision is the cinematograph of modern life with its continual mechanical transfiguration.
It is not sentimental.
To art for art’s sake, and art for truth’s sake, it opposes art for life’s sake.
It discards personal sensation; it is not ashamed to be “cosmic.”
The evolution of poetry is to be as rapid and terrible henceforth as material evolution.
It will sing the new man, the man-machine, the multiplied man, the Man-Bird.
It exalts motion and repudiates equilibrium.
It is social.
It feels the need for violent motives of faith, and finds them in the passion of the cities.
It cultivates a scientific technique.
It does not reject any words in forming a vocabulary.
It seeks swift, hurtling, dynamic rhythms.
It is based on “dynamic notions of qualitative duration, of heterogeneous continuity, of multiple and mobile states of consciousness.”
It perceives the elements of poetry contained in modern cities, locomotives, aëroplanes, dreadnoughts, and submarines; in a stock exchange, a Wall Street, or a wheat pit; and in every scientific marvel and in the sonorous song of factories and railways.
It emphasizes their dynamic consciousness.
To sum up: It aims to attain and express with the quick, keen vigor and strength of steel, the whirling, audacious, burning life of our epoch in all the paroxysm of the New Beauty.
When M. Beauduin’s new volume, La Cité des Hommes, is translated and published in America, it will be less difficult to estimate the success with which paroxyst poetry may be achieved.