The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century Part 1

The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century.

by William Lyon Phelps.

PREFACE

The material in this volume originally appeared in _The Bookman_, 1917-1918. It is now published with much addition and revision.

The Great War has had a stimulating effect on the production of poetry. Professional poets have been spokesmen for the inarticulate, and a host of hitherto unknown writers have acquired reputation. An immense amount of verse has been written by soldiers in active service. The Allies are fighting for human liberty, and this Idea is an inspiration. It is comforting to know that some who have made the supreme sacrifice will be remembered through their printed poems, and it is a pleasure to aid in giving them public recognition.

Furthermore, the war, undertaken by Germany to dominate the world by crus.h.i.+ng the power of Great Britain, has united all English-speaking people as nothing else could have done. In this book, all poetry written in the English language is considered as belonging to English literature.

It should be apparent that I am not a sectarian in art, but am thankful for poetry wherever I find it. I have endeavored to make clear the artistic, intellectual, and spiritual significance of many of our contemporary English-writing poets. The difficulties of such an undertaking are obvious; but there are two standards of measure. One is the literature of the past, the other is the life of today. I judge every new poet by these.

THE ADVANCE OF ENGLISH POETRY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

CHAPTER I

SOME CONTRASTS--HENLEY, THOMPSON, HARDY, KIPLING

Meaning of the word "advance"--the present widespread interest in poetry--the spiritual warfare--Henley and Thompson--Thomas Hardy a prophet in literature--_The Dynasts_--his atheism--his lyrical power--Kipling the Victorian--his future possibilities--Robert Bridges--Robert W. Service.

Although English poetry of the twentieth century seems inferior to the poetry of the Victorian epoch, for in England there is no one equal to Tennyson or Browning, and in America no one equal to Poe, Emerson, or Whitman, still it may fairly be said that we can discern an advance in English poetry not wholly to be measured either by the calendar and the clock, or by sheer beauty of expression. I should not like to say that Joseph Conrad is a greater writer than Walter Scott; and yet in _The n.i.g.g.e.r of the Narcissus_ there is an intellectual sincerity, a profound psychological a.n.a.lysis, a resolute intention to discover and to reveal the final truth concerning the children of the sea, that one would hardly expect to find in the works of the wonderful Wizard.

Shakespeare was surely a greater poet than Wordsworth; but the man of the Lakes, with the rich inheritance of two centuries, had a capital of thought unpossessed by the great dramatist, which, invested by his own genius, enabled him to draw returns from nature undreamed of by his mighty predecessor. Wordsworth was not great enough to have written _King Lear_; and Shakespeare was not late enough to have written _Tintern Abbey_. Every poet lives in his own time, has a share in its scientific and philosophical advance, and his individuality is coloured by his experience. Even if he take a Greek myth for a subject, he will regard it and treat it in the light of the day when he sits down at his desk, and addresses himself to the task of composition. It is absurd to call the Victorians old-fas.h.i.+oned or out of date; they were as intensely modern as we, only their modernity is naturally not ours.

A great work of art is never old-fas.h.i.+oned; because it expresses in final form some truth about human nature, and human nature never changes--in comparison with its primal elements, the mountains are ephemeral. A drama dealing with the impalpable human soul is more likely to stay true than a treatise on geology. This is the notable advantage that works of art have over works of science, the advantage of being and remaining true. No matter how important the contribution of scientific books, they are alloyed with inevitable error, and after the death of their authors must be constantly revised by lesser men, improved by smaller minds; whereas the masterpieces of poetry, drama and fiction cannot be revised, because they are always true. The latest edition of a work of science is the most valuable; of literature, the earliest.

Apart from the natural and inevitable advance in poetry that every year witnesses, we are living in an age characterized both in England and in America by a remarkable advance in poetry as a vital influence.

Earth's oldest inhabitants probably cannot remember a time when there were so many poets in activity, when so many books of poems were not only read, but bought and sold, when poets were held in such high esteem, when so much was written and published about poetry, when the mere forms of verse were the theme of such hot debate. There are thousands of minor poets, but poetry has ceased to be a minor subject.

Any one mentally alive cannot escape it. Poetry is in the air, and everybody is catching it. Some American magazines are exclusively devoted to the printing of contemporary poems; anthologies are multiplying, not "Keepsakes" and "Books of Gems," but thick volumes representing the b.u.mper crop of the year. Many poets are reciting their poems to big, eager, enthusiastic audiences, and the atmosphere is charged with the melodies of ubiquitous minstrelsy.

The time is ripe for the appearance of a great poet. A vast audience is gazing expectantly at a stage crowded with subordinate actors, waiting or the Master to appear. The Greek dramatists were sure of their public; so were the Russian novelists; so were the German musicians. The "conditions" for poetry are intensified by reason of the Great War. We have got everything except the Genius. And the paradox is that although the Genius may arise out of right conditions, he may not; he may come like a thief in the night. The contrast between public interest in poetry in 1918 and in 1830, for an ill.u.s.tration, is unescapable. At that time the critics and the magazine writers a.s.sured the world that "poetry is dead." Ambitious young authors were gravely advised not to attempt anything in verse--as though youth ever listened to advice! Many critics went so far as to insist that the temper of the age was not "adapted" to poetry, that not only was there no interest in it, but that even if the Man should appear, he would find it impossible to sing in such a time and to such a coldly indifferent audience. And yet at that precise moment, Tennyson launched his "chiefly lyrical" volume, and Browning was speedily to follow.

Man is ever made humble by the facts of life; and even literary critics cannot altogether ignore them. Let us not then make the mistake of being too sure of the immediate future; nor the mistake of overestimating our contemporary poets; nor the mistake of despising the giant Victorians. Let us devoutly thank G.o.d that poetry has come into its own; that the modern poet, in public estimation, is a Hero; that no one has to apologize either for reading or for writing verse.

An age that loves poetry with the pa.s.sion characteristic of the twentieth century is not a flat or materialistic age. We are not disobedient unto the heavenly vision.

In the world of thought and spirit this is essentially a fighting age.

The old battle between the body and the soul, between Paganism and Christianity, was never so hot as now, and those who take refuge in neutrality receive contempt. Pan and Jesus Christ have never had so many enthusiastic followers. We Christians believe our Leader rose from the dead, and the followers of Pan say their G.o.d never died at all. It is significant that at the beginning of the twentieth century two English poets wrote side by side, each of whom unconsciously waged an irreconcilable conflict with the other, and each of whom speaks from the grave today to a concourse of followers. These two poets did not "flourish" in the twentieth century, because the disciple of the bodily Pan was a cripple, and the disciple of the spiritual Christ was a gutter-snipe; but they both lived, lived abundantly, and wrote real poetry. I refer to William Ernest Henley, who died in 1903, and to Francis Thompson, who died in 1907.

Both Henley and Thompson loved the crowded streets of London, but they saw different visions there. Henley felt in the dust and din of the city the irresistible urge of spring, the invasion of the smell of distant meadows; the hurly-burly bearing witness to the annual conquest of Pan.

Here in this radiant and immortal street Lavishly and omnipotently as ever In the open hills, the undissembling dales, The laughing-places of the juvenile earth.

For lo! the wills of man and woman meet, Meet and are moved, each unto each endeared As once in Eden's prodigal bowers befel, To share his shameless, elemental mirth In one great act of faith, while deep and strong, Incomparably nerved and cheered, The enormous heart of London joys to beat To the measures of his rough, majestic song: The lewd, perennial, overmastering spell That keeps the rolling universe ensphered And life and all for which life lives to long Wanton and wondrous and for ever well.

The _London Voluntaries_ of Henley, from which the above is a fair example, may have suggested something to Vachel Lindsay both in their irregular singing quality and in the direction, borrowed from notation, which accompanies each one, _Andante con moto, Scherzando, Largo e mesto, Allegro maestoso._ Henley's Pagan resistance to Puritan morality and convention, constantly exhibited positively in his verse, and negatively in his defiant Introduction to the Works of Burns and in the famous paper on R. L. S., is the main characteristic of his mind and temperament. He was by nature a rebel--a rebel against the Anglican G.o.d and against English social conventions. He loved all fighting rebels, and one of his most spirited poems deals affectionately with our Southern Confederate soldiers, in the last days of their hopeless struggle. His most famous lyric is an a.s.sertion of the indomitable human will in the presence of adverse destiny. This trumpet blast has awakened sympathetic echoes from all sorts and conditions of men, although that creedless Christian, James Whitcomb Riley, regarded it with genial contempt, thinking that the philosophy it represented was not only futile, but dangerous, in that it ignored the deepest facts of human life. He once asked to have the poem read aloud to him, as he had forgotten its exact words, and when the reader finished impressively

I am the Master of my fate: I am the Captain of my soul--

"The _h.e.l.l_ you are," said Riley with a laugh.

Henley is, of course, interesting not merely because of his paganism, and robust worldliness; he had the poet's imagination and gift of expression. He loved to take a familiar idea fixed in a familiar phrase, and write a lovely musical variation on the theme. I do not think he ever wrote anything more beautiful than his setting of the phrase "Over the hills and far away," which appealed to his memory much as the three words "Far-far-away" affected Tennyson. No one can read this little masterpiece without that wonderful sense of melody lingering in the mind after the voice of the singer is silent.

Where forlorn sunsets flare and fade On desolate sea and lonely sand, Out of the silence and the shade What is the voice of strange command Calling you still, as friend calls friend With love that cannot brook delay, To rise and follow the ways that wend Over the hills and far away?

Hark in the city, street on street A roaring reach of death and life, Of vortices that clash and fleet And ruin in appointed strife, Hark to it calling, calling clear, Calling until you cannot stay From dearer things than your own most dear Over the hills and far away.

Out of the sound of ebb and flow, Out of the sight of lamp and star, It calls you where the good winds blow, And the unchanging meadows are: From faded hopes and hopes agleam, It calls you, calls you night and day Beyond the dark into the dream Over the hills and far away.

In temperament Henley was an Elizabethan. Ben Jonson might have irritated him, but he would have got along very well with Kit Marlowe.

He was an Elizabethan in the s.p.a.ciousness of his mind, in his robust salt-water breeziness, in his hearty, spontaneous singing, and in his deification of the human will. The English novelist, Miss Willc.o.c.ks, a child of the twentieth century, has remarked, "It is by their will that we recognize the Elizabethans, by the will that drove them over the seas of pa.s.sion, as well as over the seas that ebb and flow with the salt tides.... For, from a sensitive correspondence with environment our race has pa.s.sed into another stage; it is marked now by a pa.s.sionate desire for the mastery of life--a desire, spiritualized in the highest lives, materialized in the lowest, so to mould environment that the lives to come may be shaped to our will. It is this which accounts for the curious likeness in our today with that of the Elizabethans."

As Henley was an Elizabethan, so his brilliant contemporary, Francis Thompson, was a "metaphysical," a man of the seventeenth century. Like Emerson, he is closer in both form and spirit to the mystical poets that followed the age of Shakespeare than he is to any other group or school. One has only to read Donne, Crashaw, and Vaughan to recognize the kins.h.i.+p. Like these three men of genius, Thompson was not only profoundly spiritual--he was aflame with religious pa.s.sion. He was exalted in a mystical ecstasy, all a wonder and a wild desire. He was an inspired poet, careless of method, careless of form, careless of thought-sequences. The zeal for G.o.d's house had eaten him up. His poetry is like the burning bush, revealing G.o.d in the fire. His strange figures of speech, the molten metal of his language, the sincerity of his faith, have given to his poems a persuasive influence which is beginning to be felt far and wide, and which, I believe, will never die. One critic complains that the young men of Oxford and Cambridge have forsaken Tennyson, and now read only Francis Thompson.

He need not be alarmed; these young men will all come back to Tennyson, for sooner or later, everybody comes back to Tennyson. It is rather a matter of joy that Thompson's religious poetry can make the hearts of young men burn within them. Young men are right in hating conventional, empty phrases, words that have lost all hitting power, hollow forms and bloodless ceremonies. Thompson's lips were touched with a live coal from the altar.

Francis Thompson walked with G.o.d. Instead of seeking G.o.d, as so many high-minded folk have done in vain, Thompson had the real and overpowering sensation that G.o.d was seeking him. The Hound of Heaven was everlastingly after him, pursuing him with the certainty of capture. In trying to escape, he found torment; in surrender, the peace that pa.s.ses all understanding. That extraordinary poem, which thrillingly describes the eager, searching love of G.o.d, like a father looking for a lost child and determined to find him, might be taken as a modern version of the one hundred and thirty-ninth psalm, perhaps the most marvellous of all religious masterpieces.

Thou compa.s.sest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.

Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me.

Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there; if I make my bed in h.e.l.l, behold, thou art there.

If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

The highest spiritual poetry is not that which portrays soul-hunger, the bitterness of the weary search for G.o.d; it is that which reveals an intense consciousness of the all-enveloping Divine Presence.

Children do not seek the love of their parents; they can not escape its searching, eager, protecting power. We know how Dr. Johnson was affected by the lines

Quaerens me sedisti la.s.sus Redemisti crucem pa.s.sus Tantus labor non sit pa.s.sus.

Francis Thompson's long walks by day and by night had magnificent company. In the country, in the streets of London, he was attended by seraphim and cherubim. The heavenly visions were more real to him than London Bridge. Just as when we travel far from those we love, we are brightly aware of their presence, and know that their affection is a greater reality than the scenery from the train window, so Thompson would have it that the angels were all about us. They do not live in some distant Paradise, the only gate to which is death--they are here now, and their element is the familiar atmosphere of earth.

Shortly after he died, there was found among

His papers a bit of ma.n.u.script verse, called "In No Strange Land." Whether it was a first draft which he meant to revise, or whether he intended it for publication, we cannot tell; but despite the roughnesses of rhythm--which take us back to some of Donne's s.h.a.ggy and splendid verse--the thought is complete. It is one of the great poems of the twentieth century, and expresses the essence of Thompson's religion.

"IN NO STRANGE LAND"

O world invisible, we view thee: O world intangible, we touch thee: O world unknowable, we know thee: Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

Does the fish soar to find the ocean, The eagle plunge to find the air, That we ask of the stars in motion If they have rumour of thee there?

Not where the wheeling systems darken, And our benumbed conceiving soars: The drift of pinions, would we harken, Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

The angels keep their ancient places-- Turn but a stone, and start a wing!

'Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces That miss the many-splendoured thing.