14
Modernism. It’s one of those grand, strutting terms that sound exciting but, when stopped in the street and questioned, aren’t quite what you’d hoped. But it’s useful and established; and it does describe something real. Around the time of the First World War there was a widespread rethinking across Europe and America of many of the old truths and artistic habits. In Britain we had, apart from the loss of so many people killed and wounded in the war: the Irish civil war; mass strikes and unemployment; a political class which, from David Lloyd George down, seemed corrupt, old and incompetent; and the social turbulence caused by assaults on old attitudes to marriage and the proper place of women. Some or all of these aspects of crisis and malaise are described in British poetry of the time. Almost all of the important poets eventually responded politically – veering off to communism, fascism or nationalism. The nature of British poetry changed. Whether it’s the American imports Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, or Yeats in his late maturity, or Scotland’s Hugh MacDiarmid, many of the poems written at this time look and sound like nothing that came before. They don’t, apparently, hark back to the Edwardians, or the Victorians, or the Romantics.
Why is that? We come back to that slippery customer, Modernism. It has many faces – it’s more urban than previous movements, it’s less religious and moralistic, it’s more difficult. Essentially, however, it tries to answer the following question: if the times have changed so much, if there is a revolution in the air and the old order seems to be tottering, shouldn’t the arts change dramatically too? Shouldn’t there be a new verbal order for these new times?
Easier said than done. It was clear that many old forms were exhausted – finely made, delicate oil paintings of well-manicured countryside; lush and soothing concertos; metrical, musical poems about the problems of love, or the troops of the Empire. To the Modernists, young and angry, these all seemed merely the higher ornamentation. The old world of amorous shepherds, hearty verses and morally uplifting Poet Laureates had to be swept from the mantelpiece in one violent, angry gesture, till it was all smashed: Ezra Pound ordered his followers to ‘Make it new.’
The problem was this: the old ways included tactics and techniques, from poetic metre to naturalistic brushstrokes, which had been painfully evolved over centuries, and which by and large did their job well in conveying meaning. Get rid of them, and what did you have left to get your message over with?
Make it new – but how, and with what? And here’s the odd answer that Modernism provides: you go back, you are deeply reactionary, and you delve into stories and forms much older than the ones you are reacting against. Thus, in Paris, Picasso starts drawing bathing women caricatured from classical times, and sketches like Ingres. In Moscow the Modernist and Bolshevist Kasimir Malevich turns to the oldest Russian icons of all, with their stark, geometric forms, for his inspiration. In Dublin and Paris, James Joyce remakes the novel by using the story of Ulysses as his structuring device. And it’s the same in poetry. Ezra Pound himself turns to the poetry of the Provençal troubadours, the Anglo-Saxons and the classical Chinese to find new ways of writing. Yeats uses images from Byzantium and Irish mythology. T.S. Eliot becomes fascinated by the metaphysical poets, Dante and early Christian verse, as he manipulates his new poetry of many voices. Hugh MacDiarmid launches a Scottish literary renaissance by turning back to the great medieval poets, under the slogan ‘Not Burns, but Dunbar!’
Put together, their work is successful in its first aim. It does disconcert and unsettle the middle-class audience that was traditionally available for poetry. We can see this in the flood of newspaper and magazine jokes, cartoons and irate editorials mocking the ‘incomprehensible’ and foreign-seeming painters and poets of the 1920s. As we’ll see, this kind of Modernist revolution doesn’t last long, and in poetry in particular there was a major backlash already evident by the end of the decade. But its early energy is impressive and, even now, a kind of tonic.
In Britain, two important aspects of Modernism were sex and Europe. The theories of Sigmund Freud and, more generally, a growing belief that sexual urges were deeper than morality, underpin much of the writing of this period – above all, of course, that of D.H. Lawrence. Also, in the period just before, and certainly just after the First World War, British culture was more open to European influences than it had been for a long time: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and the Bloomsbury group looked to Paris, to Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Matisse, Stravinsky and others for leadership. James Joyce found he could only get published in Paris. Key exhibitions of Continental Post-Impressionist painting, championed by Roger Fry in London, completely changed the way a new generation of British painters worked. Pound’s horror of the war was triggered by the death of his friend Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the French-Polish sculptor. Pound and Wyndham Lewis, that wicked and brilliant figure, learned much of their ‘Vorticism’ from Italians such as Marinetti.
So a good place to start, when considering British Modernism, is Mina Loy. Born in London in 1882 to an English mother and a Hungarian-Jewish father, she had made her way to Munich in her late teens and absorbed a lot of the new European thinking – Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche – before returning to study painting. Like a number of the poets we’ve been discussing, she was a painter before she was a writer. In 1903 she moved to Paris, and then to Florence. Her circle included Gertrude Stein, Apollinaire and Picasso, and she had a love affair with the leader of Futurism, Filippo Marinetti. During the war she worked as a nurse, publishing poetry and a feminist manifesto. From 1916 onwards she bounced between Manhattan and Europe, always at the centre of a group of radical Modernists. You could argue that Mina Loy was barely British at all; but that’s part of the point. This is a period when ‘cosmopolitan culture’ spreads networks across European capitals, including London, and becomes virtually dominant. And if you’re talking cosmopolitan, Mina Loy is as good as it gets. T.S. Eliot admired her, and looking at her Futurist-inspired poem ‘Human Cylinders’, one can see why:
The human cylinders
Revolving in the enervating dusk
That wraps each closer in the mystery
Of singularity
Among the litter of a sunless afternoon
Having eaten without tasting
Talked without communion
And at least two of us
Loved a very little
Without seeking
To know if our two miseries
In the lucid rush-together of automatons
Could form one opulent wellbeing
Simplifications of men
In the enervating dusk
Your indistinctness
Serves me the core of the kernel of you
When in the frenzied reaching out of intellect to intellect
Leaning brow to brow communicative
Over the abyss of the potential
Concordance of respiration
Shames
Absence of corresponding between the verbal sensory
And reciprocity
Of conception
And expression
Where each extrudes beyond the tangible
One thin pale trail of speculation
From among us we have sent out
Into the enervating dusk
One little whining beast
Whose longing
Is to slink back to antediluvian burrow
And one elastic tentacle of intuition
To quiver among the stars …
It’s new. It’s what Ezra Pound had called for. And yet it’s only partially successful – all those jabbing, hectoring polysyllables, and free verse that feels loose rather than taut and inevitable. Pound directly confronted the problem of how to write in these lines from ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’:
For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain ‘the sublime’
In the old scene. Wrong from the start –
No, hardly, but seeing he had been born
In a half-savage country, out of date …
Turning to classical Latin, French and Chinese stories for his answer, Pound took the dramatic monologue form pioneered by Robert Browning, trying to create something fresh and pure which could stand by itself. Here’s an extract from ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’ which captures Pound’s curious blend of the Yankee and the fusty:
There will be a crowd of young women doing homage to my palaver,
Though my house is not propped up by Taenarian
columns from Laconia (associated with Neptune and Cerberus),
Though it is not stretched upon gilded beams;
My orchards do not lie level and wide
as the forests of Phaecia,
the luxurious and Ionian,
Nor are my caverns stuffed stiff with a Marcian vintage,
My cellar does not date from Numa Pompilius,
Nor bristle with wine jars,
Nor is it equipped with a frigidaire patent;
Yet the companions of the Muses
will keep their collective nose in my books,
And weary with historical data, they will turn to my dance tune.
Happy who are mentioned in my pamphlets,
the songs shall be a fine tomb-stone over their beauty.
Does Ezra Pound belong here at all? Apart from the Anglo-Saxons, he wasn’t a huge enthusiast for the British traditions of poetry. An American, he spent a long time in Paris before throwing in his lot with Mussolini’s Italy, for which he was a willing propagandist. After serving time in a mental asylum after the Second World War, he holed up once more in Venice. Yet he is part of the British story. He cut his teeth with British poets in London, and his great project was to change English verse forever. Further, his great trauma, which provoked his increasingly obsessive hatred of the financial system, and then of the Jews, and his anti-Semitic fascism, was the First World War and its ‘old men’s lies’:
These fought in any case,
and some believing
pro domo, in any case …
Died some, pro patria,
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.
Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks, and fine bodies;
fortitude as never before
frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.
That’s the same anger and despair that drove Hugh MacDiarmid into the arms of Lenin and Stalin, and provoked a general air of hysteria in the poetry of the 1920s. Pound’s great lifelong work, full of beautiful things but marred by his vicious anti-Semitism and his generally batty politics, is The Cantos. This is from ‘Canto XIII’, dealing with Confucius, and therefore the proper ordering of society, is distinctly un-mad. Also, to my ear at least, it still sounds fresh, crisp and modern:
Kung walked
by the dynastic temple
and into the cedar grove,
and then out by the lower river,
And with him Khieu Tchi
and Tian the low speaking
And ‘we are unknown,’ said Kung,
‘You will take up charioteering?
‘Then you will become known,
‘Or perhaps I should take up charioteering, or archery?
‘Or the practice of public speaking?’
And Tseu-lou said, ‘I would put the defences in order,’
And Khieu said, ‘If I were lord of a province
‘I would put it in better order than this is.’
And Tchi said, ‘I would prefer a small mountain temple,
‘With order in the observances,
with a suitable performance of the ritual,’
And Tian said, with his hand on the strings of his lute
The low sounds continuing
after his hand left the strings,
And the sound went up like smoke, under the leaves,
And he looked after the sound:
‘The old swimming hole,
‘And the boys flopping off the planks,
‘Or sitting in the underbrush playing mandolins.’
And Kung smiled upon all of them equally.
And Thseng-sie desired to know:
‘Which had answered correctly?’
And Kung said, ‘They have all answered correctly,
‘That is to say, each in his nature.’
And Kung raised his cane against Yuan Jang,
Yuan Jang being his elder,
For Yuan Jang sat by the roadside pretending to
be receiving wisdom.
And Kung said
‘You old fool, come out of it,
‘Get up and do something useful.’
T.S. Eliot, who regarded Pound as the greater poet, at least technically, was another American immigrant, but he took a very different path, ending up more English than most of the English. As Pound turned to fascism, Eliot, who had anti-Semitic skeletons of his own, turned to the Church of England and the great traditions of English poetry for salvation. The former banker ended up as a rather grand figure, writing religious dramas; but his earlier Modernist work was shocking at the time, and still puzzles first-time readers greatly. ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, published in 1915, is perhaps the key text for early British Modernism. In it, Eliot immediately establishes his unmistakable tone, somehow both conversationally relaxed and classical, as his anti-hero – useless or unnecessary men were a staple of the Modernist worldview – wanders through a recognisably Edwardian London:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair –
(They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin –
(They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
‘Prufrock’ is not a particularly difficult poem. It shows Eliot’s great versatility and metrical skill, which allowed him to be such an excellent writer of light verse in later life – Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats being the deathless example. But it caused outrage at the time. It was just so … different. Eliot followed with further salvos, tightly rhymed and rhythmic poetry that continued to shock with its subject matter. But the big event, part of the reason 1922 is such an important year in the story of art and Modernism, was The Waste Land, a titanic poem which changed British poetry as radically as had Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads. Modernist artists such as Picasso, Braque and Kurt Schwitters had long used collage – scraps of newspaper, torn fragments of advertisements, commercial products of all kinds – to rough up the surfaces of their paintings. Now Eliot did the same thing with poetry, crashing together overheard fragments of conversations, monologues suddenly broken off and eerie choruses apparently full of ancient wisdom. The overall theme of the poem is the deadly aridity of Western culture, and the search for some new way forward, which is only tentatively offered right at the end, and appears to be semi-Christian. It doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. Yet the poet’s verbal exuberance, his deep understanding of the history of English verse and his uncanny gift for rhythm keep us reading and transfixed. This is from part of the first section, ‘The Burial of the Dead’, in which Eliot, working for Lloyds Bank in the City, confronts contemporary London:
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: ‘Stetson!
‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae
‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
‘O keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
‘You! hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, – mon frère!’
The poem really demands to be read in full, but it’s too long to reprint here. The second section, ‘A Game of Chess’, provides my next extract. In it Eliot collides the disembodied, warning chorus, fragments of conversation, jazz music and the plight of working-class women waiting for their demobilised husbands – oh yes, and a pub on the edge of closing.
‘My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
‘Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
‘What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
‘I never know what you are thinking. Think.’
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
‘What is that noise?’
The wind under the door.
‘What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?’
Nothing again nothing.
‘Do
You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
Nothing?’
I remember
Those pearls that were his eyes.
‘Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?’
But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag –
It’s so elegant
So intelligent
‘What shall I do now? What shall I do?
I shall rush out as I am, walk the street
With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow?
What shall we ever do?’
The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.
When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said –
I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you.
And no more can’t I, I said, and think of poor Albert,
He’s been in the army for four years, he wants a good time
And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said.
Oh is there, she said. Something o’ that, I said.
Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
This is almost completely successful Modernist poetry: its underlying menace and despair reflect a Britain rocked and shaken by the past decade; it seems to describe the voices of real Londoners in 1922, and their preoccupations; and there is something sinister which fits well with a Britain whose prime minister was deeply corrupt, and conniving with the conman and possible murderer Maundy Gregory to sell honours. Eliot, even if his heart was still in Boston, ‘gets’ the Britain of the day better than any native. For contrast, a final excerpt from this remarkable poem comprises the fourth section, ‘Death by Water’. Earlier, I pointed out how, searching for a stronger pulse, Modernists turned radically backwards. Here is a particularly beautiful example, with its echoes of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
We will return to Eliot later. His work was so powerful and so influential that old anthologies of British poetry from the 1920s and 30s are cluttered with bad mimicry of him by lesser poets. Because Modernism was a break with so much, requiring real bravery, in order to be interesting every Modernist had to do it differently. There is nothing more boring than a derivative literary revolutionary.
If he understood nothing else, Hugh MacDiarmid understood that. The name is a nom de plume, or rather a nom de guerre, for a working-class postman’s son, Christopher Murray Grieve, who was born in the Scottish Borders and served in the First World War, during which he closely observed the tension between Scottish and Irish soldiers and their English, public-schooled officers. Grieve went on to become a journalist and polemicist, whose overwhelming belief was that Scotland had to free itself from the British Empire and adopt radical socialism. Notoriously, he was thrown out of the Scottish National Party for his communism, and then thrown out of the Communist Party for his Scottish nationalism. He promised to be always ‘where extremes meet’, a promise he largely kept.
While T.S. Eliot looked back to earlier Christian poetry as a foundation for his Modernism, and Pound turned to Chinese, Provençal and Anglo-Saxon writing, MacDiarmid was determined to smash up literary English itself, and replace it with a Scots which he pillaged from old dictionaries. His idea was that the old, lost words of the Scottish dialect contained within them different ways of thinking and seeing the world which needed to be recaptured and re-presented to a modern Scottish audience. As with so many radical Modernist ideas, it seems completely impossible – even barking mad – and yet, for much of the time, MacDiarmid gets away with it triumphantly. He certainly writes the best Scottish poetry since Robert Burns. More than that, he provoked and inspired a whole movement of poets who followed his lead, while writing very different poetry themselves, so that Scotland became a centre for poetry in a way it hadn’t been since the late 1400s. Here’s his early poem ‘The Watergaw’, or rainbow. To translate it is to lose its music, but it’s tough, so my very rough version would go as follows: ‘One wet evening on a cold July day [“yow-trummle” is ewe-tremble – the sheared sheep are shivering], I saw an eerie sight – a rainbow with its shivering light beyond the approaching storm. And I thought of the last wild look you gave before you died. There was no smoke in the nightingale’s house that night, and none in mine [in other words, perhaps, no flood of poetic inspiration], but I have thought ever since of that strange light, and I think that perhaps at last I understand what your look meant then.’ Now, here’s the real thing:
Ae weet forenicht i’ the yow-trummle
I saw yon antrin thing,
A watergaw wi’ its chitterin’ licht
Ayont the on-ding;
An’ I thocht o’ the last wild look ye gied
Afore ye deed!
There was nae reek i’ the laverock’s hoose
That nicht – an’ nane i’ mine;
But I hae thocht o’ that foolish licht
Ever sin’ syne;
An’ I think that mebbe at last I ken
What your look meant then.
There are many short poems by MacDiarmid which are at least as good as that, if not better. He was doing, in his way, what W.B. Yeats was trying to do in the Irish literary revival of the 1890s – but far more successfully. T.S. Eliot, who as a conservative Anglo-Catholic can have agreed with almost nothing that Hugh MacDiarmid stood for, nonetheless got the point and championed his work, so that his great early long poem ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’ was successfully published in 1926. It’s a meditation on the state of Scotland by a boozed-up amateur philosopher, adrift after a session in the pub and worried about what his wife is going to say when he gets home. MacDiarmid’s view of Scottish culture was as bleak as Eliot’s of English culture a few years earlier, and chimes with what Yeats felt about the newly independent Ireland at much the same time. ‘A Drunk Man’ rambles from topic to topic, embracing philosophy, bitter political satire and self-hatred. It can be shocking in places, and then very funny. The opening stanzas introduce the exhausted speaker, whose elbow, shoulder and throat can no longer cope with the fast whisky-drinking his friends expect. Anyway, it’s probably not real whisky these days – just as the country called Scotland isn’t the real Scotland:
I amna’ fou sae muckle as tired – deid dune
It’s gey and hard wark coupin’ gless for gless
Wi’ Cruvie and Gilsanquar and the like,
And I’m no juist as bauld as aince I wes.
The elbuck fankles in the coorse o’ time,
The sheckle’s no’ sae souple, and the thrapple
Grows deef and dour: nae langer up and doun
Gleg as a squirrel speils the Adam’s apple.
Forbye, the stuffie’s no’ the real MacKay.
The sun’s sel’ aince, as sune as ye began it,
Riz in your vera saul: but what keeks in
Noo is in truth the vilest ‘saxpenny planet’.
And as the worth’s gane doun the cost has risen.
Yin canna thow the cockles o yin’s hert
Wi-oot haen cauld feet noo, jalousin what
The wife’ll say [I dinna blame her fur’t].
It’s robbin Peter to pey Paul at least …
And aa that’s Scotch aboot it is the name,
Like aa thing else caad Scottish nooadays
– Aa destitute o speerit juist the same.
Unlike many other Modernists, MacDiarmid had two cracks at reshaping the language. Influenced by John Davidson’s use of science in his poetry, and a lifelong enthusiast for the new perspectives twentieth-century science was opening up, he went on from his use of Scots to a kind of scientific English which is, to most people, at first sight completely incomprehensible, but which has a glorious music of its own – and if you take the trouble to translate it, makes perfect sense. As with the Scottish poetry, it couldn’t really have been written any other way – the meanings are encoded in the unfamiliar words. This is the opening to ‘On a Raised Beach’, MacDiarmid’s poem of stoical defiance written in the 1930s when he was destitute, living on a remote Shetland island, and under surveillance as a dangerous radical by MI5:
All is lithogenesis – or lochia,
Carpolite fruit of the forbidden tree,
Stones blacker than any in the Caaba,
Cream-coloured caen-stone, chatoyant pieces,
Celadon and corbeau, bistre and beige,
Glaucous, hoar, enfouldered, cyathiform,
Making mere faculae of the sun and moon,
I study you glout and gloss, but have
No cadrans to adjust you with, and turn again
From optik to haptik and like a blind man run
My fingers over you, arris by arris, burr by burr,
Slickensides, truité, rugas, foveoles,
Bringing my aesthesis in vain to bear,
An angle-titch to all your corrugations and coigns,
Hatched foraminous cavo-rilievo of the world,
Deictic, fiducial stones. Chiliad by chiliad
What bricole piled you here, stupendous cairn?
What artist poses the Earth écorché thus,
Pillar of creation engouled in me?
What eburnation augments you with men’s bones,
Every energumen an Endymion yet?
All the other stones are in this haecceity it seems,
But where is the Christophanic rock that moved?
What Cabirian song from this catasta comes?
Phew. But try reading it out loud. After all that comes something which sounds almost like an apology:
Deep conviction or preference can seldom
Find direct terms in which to express itself.
At different times of his life, MacDiarmid would indeed find direct terms, writing immediately comprehensible, almost propagandistic poetry about the condition of Scotland, the rise of fascism, and so on. He found Modernism was not appropriate to every situation as, during the 1930s, the world looked increasingly dark and dangerous. As we shall see, he was hardly alone in that.
Before we leave the Modernists there’s one other poet, very unlike MacDiarmid, we can’t ignore. David Herbert Lawrence was also a working-class boy, in his case from a Nottinghamshire mining family. Best known these days for his novels, he was also a fine poet and a less fine painter. Formally, as a novelist and a painter, he can barely be called Modernist: while James Joyce is breaking down and reshaping the language and Virginia Woolf is experimenting with stream of consciousness, D.H. Lawrence’s novels are sturdily and traditionally made, no more radical in form, really, than those of Thomas Hardy. His paintings, likewise, are traditionally representative, if somewhat clumsily so. What makes his work modern is its subject: the frankness about sex in the novels, and the sexual nudity in the paintings. The new sexual and moral world revealed by Freud and his followers isn’t really central to Eliot, Pound or MacDiarmid – they are all more political – but it is for Lawrence.
He too felt the post-war culture was rotten and corrupt, but instead of looking outwards for religious or political answers he turned inward, searching for an emotional, sexual authenticity that might liberate him. His poetry is, to this extent, at one with his novels and paintings, though it’s more intense than the former, and generally less explicit than the latter. A Modernist poet doesn’t have to be Modernist about everything – Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘Drunk Man’ uses traditional rhymes and quatrains; its Modernism is in its language and ideas. Linguistically, Lawrence’s poems are highly conventional, though he uses something like free verse much of the time. What’s unconventional about them is the subject matter. The tone is less sexual, and certainly less pornographic, than earthily sensual. In particular he identifies with the plant and animal world, in ways that are new in English poetry. ‘Bavarian Gentians’ is one of his best-loved poems. Without poems like this, it’s hard to imagine the poetry of Ted Hughes or indeed Sylvia Plath. Lawrence is celebrating a sensuality that earlier generations of Britons would have regarded as something to be ashamed of:
Not every man has gentians in his house
in Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas.
Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking blueness of Pluto’s gloom,
ribbed and torchlike, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto’s dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter’s pale lamps give off light,
lead me then, lead me the way.
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness
down the way Persephone goes, just now, in first-frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is married to dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice, as a bride
a gloom invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms of Pluto as he ravishes her once again
and pierces her once more with his passion of the utter dark
among the splendour of black-blue torches, shedding
fathomless darkness on the nuptials.
Bavarian gentians, tall and dark, but dark
darkening the daytime torch-like with the smoking blueness of Pluto’s gloom,
ribbed hellish flowers erect, with their blaze of darkness spread blue,
blown flat into points, by the heavy white draught of the day.
It’s classical. It’s about some blueish flowers. But it’s ravishing – and it’s about ravishing. Another of his famous poems, ‘Snake’, has much more explicit sexual imagery running through it. Again, people in England may have thought this way before, but they had never written this way. It’s an almost matter-of-fact encounter between the poet and a thirsty snake, but Lawrence challenges the reader to engage fully with it; to acknowledge truths we all share but rarely talk about:
A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.
He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of
the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.
Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.
He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.
And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.
But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?
Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.
And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!
And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,
But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.
He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.
And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.
I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.
I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.
And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.
And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.
For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.
And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.
None of the poets I have discussed in this chapter, apart from Hugh MacDiarmid, actually saw action in the First World War, but they were changed by it, and its demoralising effect on Western civilisation. They all dealt with their despair differently. T.S. Eliot virtually ignored the war, and embraced both Englishness and Anglicanism with fervour – not that he did fervour very convincingly – while Pound, Loy and Lawrence all sought exile, to fascist Italy, New Mexico, Manhattan, anywhere but Britain. MacDiarmid alone stayed and tried to build a political response. That wasn’t a Modernist thing to do, but it became the most popular response of the next generation, the political poets of the 1930s, to whom we turn now.