‘Try to find out why the FitzGerald Rubaiyat has gone into so many editions after having lain unnoticed until Rossetti found a pile of remaindered copies on a second-hand bookstall.’ This is one of the exercises recommended by Ezra Pound in the ABC of Reading. I suppose Pound’s answer would adduce FitzGerald’s importance as a prosodist, since he includes him in a list of twenty-four poets ‘through whom the metamorphosis of English verse may be traced’—among the others, it may be recalled, are Villon, Mark Alex. Boyd, Samuel Butler, Crabbe, Whitman and Corbière.
FitzGerald was certainly an accomplished ‘maker.’ He could write blank verse, as some of his Calderon translations and the more resonant bits of his Agamemnon show. The rhymed pentameters of the Persian Bird Parliament, and the lyric stanzas scattered through the other Persian translations, testify to skill, accuracy and taste—qualities which were tested by his experiments with the Omar stanza, which he adapted to English with much subtlety. Pound would have a soft spot for a man who could do that, and who also saw that there was an art of mistranslation, and that a live sparrow is better than a stuffed eagle. His Agamemnon, as FitzGerald himself remarks, is a ‘per-version’ —but he was right in thinking that it proved his ‘faculty of making some things readable which others have hitherto left unreadable.’ There is a modern version of the Agamemnon which I have long kept in mind as a touchstone—I mean, as a way of finding merit in other translations which show themselves to be, at any rate, not as bad. FitzGerald comes out of this very well:
is, without being wonderful, better than
A due tithe of his corded bales
From no parsimonious winch
The pious master to the deep devotes.
Nobody will get a scholar’s idea of Aeschylus or Calderon (with whom FitzGerald is very free) or of Jámi from Fitz-Gerald’s allusions to them; you can see why he might be held to have given rise to Pound.
For all that, the true answer to Pound’s question is quite different. The Rubaiyat didn’t lie unread for long. The first edition was published in 1859, the second in 1868; by 1872 the book was widely sought for, and Quaritch was asking the modestly anonymous author for a third edition. Its admirers included Ruskin, Swinburne, Burne-Jones, Morris and Rossetti. Charles Eliot Norton had started an American vogue. And surely it fits well enough with a Morrisian view of leisure, of a decorativeness that refreshes amid the nastiness of the real world in the 1860s? The book came out in the year of The Origin of Species and Smiles’s Self-Help; it reached popularity in the decade of Culture and Anarchy. These are G. M. Young’s ‘years of division,’ the frontier between two Victorian ages; and the Rubaiyat belong to the hither, nastier side, which is, nevertheless, the side of Pater and Swinburne and Whistler and The Earthly Paradise. More and more people were in the mood for a Persian garden. ‘Omar’s Epicurean Audacity of Thought and Speech,’ which hindered his reputation in Persia, did not, as the translator’s learned friend Cowell feared, upset the English, who are quick to domesticate the exotic. Worse things are heard in the Palm Court, as in the more vigorously antinomian moments of The Vagabond King. Besides, Omar, for all his subtlety, is often open to the comment ‘How true!’ I think I first heard the lines about the moving finger from a Methodist pulpit—not Calvinistic Methodist either—so that the word ‘piety’ spoilt the relevance, and might have given rise to doctrinal frissons if anybody had been listening; but nobody was. Omar Khayyam simply joins the list of approved burgher escape-myths. The fame of his accomplished translator is an enormous accident.
Miss Joanna Richardson has compiled a FitzGerald anthology1 with the first and fourth version of Omar, and specimens of his Spanish, Greek, Latin, Italian, and other Persian translations, notably the brilliant Bird Parliament. She includes also the youthful dialogue Euphranor, and about three hundred pages of letters. There is material, in this carefully prepared selection, for speculation as to what kind of a man it was to whom the accident of Omar happened. Miss Richardson makes rather large claims for the letters, comparing FitzGerald oddly with Keats, and calling him ‘disarming’ and ‘childlike’—this second epithet is certainly odd. He was excessively complicated, it seems to me.
Despite his father’s mining speculations, FitzGerald had a good income and a very grand mother, whose house in Portland Place he visited as little as possible. He never took his friends there. Although these were frequently well-known men— Thackeray, Tennyson, Carlyle—FitzGerald had known them at school or at Cambridge or in some context that had nothing to do with their fame. Although he liked the opera and the galleries, he chose to live in Suffolk with a parrot and a housekeeper and—as everybody knows from Gerontion—a boy to read to him. This, he said, was the life for him: ‘a pirated copy of the peace of God.’ He had, he wrote, ‘a talent for dulness which no situation nor intercourse could much improve…. I really do like to sit in this doleful place with a good fire, a cat and dog on the rug, and an old woman in the kitchen.’ He wrote letters and translations, walked and sailed, saw something of his literate neighbours, and had a deep affection for a fisherman called Posh Fletcher. He wasn’t, obviously, guilty of any great degree of self-deception. ‘You think I live in Epicurean ease,’ he says to a correspondent:
but this happens to be a jolly day. One isn’t always well, or tolerably good; the weather is not always clear, nor nightingales singing, nor Tacitus full of pleasant atrocity. But such as life is, I believe I have got hold of a good end of it.
The biggest disturbance of his life was marriage, at nearly fifty and sorely against his nature, to the daughter of a dead friend. This union ended almost at once. The success of Omar meant very little to him. He cared deeply for his friends, and quarrelled little; it was a consequence of an editorial inadvertency that Browning was mortally offended by his facetious remark about being glad Mrs Browning was dead, and that was years after FitzGerald’s own death.
Such a life is treated, not surprisingly, with affectionate mildness by commentators. The standard Life, Terhune’s, is a long and thorough book, but the whole work conveys less suggestion of unease than a modern reader might get from knowing the source of the opening of Gerontion. Yet surely there is unease? Consider FitzGerald’s fear of travel, which was almost farcical. At 33 he found the prospect of a journey to Italy delightful but far too alarming. In his fifties he risked a voyage to Holland to see the pictures, found the Hague gallery closed, but could not wait, and after two days sailed back: ‘Oh my Delight when I heard them call out “Orford Lights!” as the boat was plunging over the Swell … it is the last foreign Travel I shall ever undertake.’ How curious that a man so much in favour of art and activity should behave so! For, under his modesty, his air of dolce far niente, FitzGerald wasn’t at all the usual English learned recluse. His views on education, for instance, as set forth in Euphranor, are Gordonstounian: gentlemen should be active and practical and in ‘good animal Condition.’ He argued that Tennyson might not have gone off had he ‘lived an active Life, as Scott and Shakespeare; or even ridden, shot, drunk, and played the Devil, as Byron.’ He never ceased to blame his friend Spedding for devoting his time to the unworthy task of editing Bacon. Yet he himself led a deliberately lowering existence: from early days he experimented with a reduced diet, drank little, moved little, confined his literary activity to what he thought of as marginal work. Under the mask of kind old Fitz there must have been a very different face.
If more were known of his relation with his mother it might be easier to make guesses about the marriage and the pointless self-denial. But even his verse is part of the mask—all translation, all from an alien mouth. The Omar translation followed immediately on his breach with his wife. He might, behind that mask, have spoken out; but he seldom does so, and when he does foist an opinion into the Persian, it is the Housmanian
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken’d, Man’s forgiveness give—and take.
Perhaps FitzGerald is a type, after all; the name of Housman suggests it, and as I write it occurs to me that E. H. W. Meyer-stein, as we know from John Wain’s superb memoir, had some of the same characteristics, only in a more tragic mode.
If celibacy and solitariness were a way of suffering, they also provided some of the means of creating. FitzGerald’s exceptional taste alone makes him somewhat solitary. He anticipated the Pre-Raphaelite love for Blake, and possessed a Job. He was expert in Constable. Once he amused himself by buying an Opie for £4, and repainting it. He played the piano well. His literary taste was idiosyncratic. He respected Carlyle, but thought his depth a matter of seeming, not of reality, and disliked the prose: ‘no repose, nor equable movement … one labours through it as vessels do through what is called a short sea.’ Tennyson, one of his greatest friends, he thought to have wasted his gift. He admired Wordsworth without love. The ‘Gurgoyle school’—Hugo and Browning—he detested for its ugly modernity. He thought Jane Austen trivial beside Thackeray, and most admired Scott, largely for his gentlemanly dash or sprezzatura. Such a catalogue fails to convey that Spedding was not entirely wrong when he said that his friend’s ‘judgments on matters of art,’ though ‘very strange and wayward,’ were original, profound and luminous. ‘I pretend to no Genius, but to Taste,’ he said, ‘which is the feminine of Genius.’ In a letter to Cowell we find him wondering whether in 1847 poets can possibly compete with scientists in the creation of wonder, finding Lyell’s observations on Niagara ‘more wonderful than all the conceptions of Dante and Milton.’ In Memoriam, which tried to get some of this in, he disliked. The age was closing in on poetry; it seemed harder for art to possess that quality he admired above everything and called ‘Go.’
‘Go’ is what he lacked himself; in the midst of the Omar translation he told Cowell ‘My “Go” (such as it was) is gone, and it becomes Work.’ He certainly laboured over the Rubaiyat. Another man might have hoped that they had, as some scholars thought, a mystical meaning to make the labour worth while; for FitzGerald, rightly as it seems, ‘the Wine Omar celebrates is simply the Juice of the Grape.’ The mystical allegories of Persian poetry—we see them in other translations of FitzGerald’s—are not so alien to us as they might have been if English poetry had not undergone so many attacks of platonism; but they might well have interfered with the establishment of the Persian garden myth that has kept the poem popular.
Anyway, the Work of FitzGerald was of a closer, more scholarly kind than guessing at allegory. We learn from Professor Arberry how he tackled the Persian verses, patching and stitching, developing and omitting. Where Omar asks for a loaf, a jug of wine, a sheep’s thigh and a pretty boy, FitzGerald omits the meat, substitutes a ‘Thou,’ and introduces a poetry book (which no Persian scholar would need) and a Bough, which is not a property of Persian wildernesses. When we see that the translator’s first prose shot said ‘a bit of mutton and a moderate bottle of wine,’ we become aware that, having left Persian poetry out, FitzGerald was putting English poetry in, and his changes obscurely touch the heart of a people which rarely reads verses and rarely drinks wine. He is exotic without being foreign.
For all his work, FitzGerald didn’t know enough Persian to avoid slips; his ‘Angel shape bearing a vessel on his shoulder’ should be an old man rolling out of a pub. And what he loses is suggested by Ar berry’s excellent analysis of the opening quatrain: it is the complex of submerged senses in the original. Yet, as Arberry shows, FitzGerald replaces this by an independent development of the figures, itself of considerable ingenuity and power. The poem is an allusion to the Rubaiyat, a product of FitzGerald’s good mid-Victorian talent under Persian stimulus. That is why it could eventually satisfy a public indifferent to the finesse of so foreign a poet as Omar.
(1962)
Modern interest in the ’Nineties (Mauve, White, Naughty) is largely a matter of gossip, except when, as occasionally happens, somebody notices in them some forgotten but relevant aspect. Thus the well-known fin de siècle mood becomes a matter of interest when Mr Bergonzi relates it to a myth of fin du globe. This is an old notion, and perhaps because early apocalyptic numerology made the year 1000 such hell for everybody, it flourished at the ends of centuries. Certainly it did so at the end of the 19th in England, partly because there was natural worry about progress, and also a sense that the reign had gone on as long as it could or ought. But the idea that a saeculum is ending can occur at other times; Pope felt he lived at such a time, 1666 was a key year; and there is evidently some feeling at present that the age is too absurd to last, and that a new series of times will henceforth begin, with luck.
Half a century hence someone will put an authoritative finger on the names of the thinkers who shaped our fin de siècle myth; for the late 19th century this can be done easily, and among the principal figures are Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Nordau (‘there is a sound of rending in every tradition … things as they are totter and plunge’). As to Schopenhauer, he has suffered a cumulative misrepresentation, and even in the ’Nineties was doubtless more often cited than read, as he is even now. Patrick Gardiner’s substantial new introduction1 is for that reason unusually welcome—not only does it clear away many surviving misconceptions, such as the confusion between Schopenhauer’s Will and Nietzsche’s will to power, but it also offers a forceful account of what this ‘systematic half-thinker’ actually wrote. There is a long and admirably lucid chapter on the philosopher’s theory of art, central to his own thought and also extremely influential. This theory, and his slightly depressing views on sex, were together the parts of Schopenhauer which interested artists at the end of the century, and Mr Gardiner relates them so firmly to the whole body of his thought that merely literary people have lost their excuse for casual misunderstanding. Mr Gardiner emphasises the importance of Schopenhauer to Proust, but Proust inherited his interest from the previous generation of decadents. Anyway, Mr Gardiner’s moderate claim that Schopenhauer’s part in the establishment of modern thought is greater than many suppose seems justified.
Nordau, on the other hand, deserved what he got in the way of censure and neglect, though his linking sexual and literary decadence must have seemed plausible at the time; the notion of decadence, though of philological origin, easily shaded over into something like degeneracy, and some people may have cultivated, in the manner of the admired Verlaine, an almost deliberately self-destructive way of life. And then they could be written up to make them fit the myth even more exactly. Ernest Dowson is an obvious instance; and even if everybody gave up reading him he would still have this kind of importance, and remain in the picture of the period with far better writers like Wilde and Lionel Johnson.
His life was exceedingly wretched. In his youth the family property, a dry dock at Limehouse, was already going down because of the size of the new ships using the river, and as a patrimony it was hardly more useful to him than the predisposition to tuberculosis he seems to have inherited as well. His father, a man of taste, grew melancholy and died from an overdose of chloral; his mother hanged herself. Dowson as a child had travelled a good deal, but his education—up to his unsuccessful years at Oxford—was apparently random; and although he worked harder than the myth allows, translating for Smithers, writing Jamesian novels and stories, he remained unwilling to know things. This is a bad trait in a poet, partly disguised in this case by the Latin titles and the allusions to Propertius. Plarr, in his genial memoir, says Dowson was under the impression that Red Indians outnumbered white men in the United States. He lived much in France and translated from French, but according to Plarr his own French was ‘dim’. Even in literature he was ‘curiously incurious.’
However, he read Schopenhauer and Stendhal, Webster (not Shakespeare), De Quincey, Poe, Hawthorne, James, Verlaine, Murger, Swinburne and Pater. These are roughly the authors you would make him read if you were inventing him. Spending so much time with Lionel Johnson, he must have heard a lot about theology (Yeats remembers that Johnson lectured him on chastity out of the Fathers) but his conversion to Rome seems to have been an unintellectual affair, and he said that what Johnson and he had in common was a passion for Catullus and Battersea enamel. He deliberately avoided ideas. One’s opinion of Johnson rises when one reads, for example, his critique of Symons (‘… “we had champagne, and the rest was an ecstasy of shame.” That is Symons’); but although Dowson once showed himself capable of enlightened comment by calling Symons ‘a silly bugger,’ he seems uninterested in criticism. Thanks to Plarr, we know about his annotations of Olive Schreiner’s An African Farm, done as part of a literary joke, but in Dowson’s case quite seriously. Miss Schreiner’s account of life as ‘a striving and an ending in nothing’ he calls ‘the conclusion of the whole matter.’ ‘Self-contempt is respectable,’ he notes. On women he simply quotes Schopenhauer. He often expressed his abhorrence of growth and maturity, and even wrote an essay on ‘The Cult of the Child.’ He admired this aphorism of Stendhal, no doubt applying it as much to himself as to his century: ‘Se sacrificier à ses passions passe. Mais à des passions qu’on n’a pas! Triste XIXe siècle!’ Even as a boy he saw he was part of a myth.
Dowson’s biographers have naturally tried to sort out his life from the fables attached to it. He didn’t take to drugs at Oxford. He wasn’t, for most of his life, a drunk (Plarr says so, but his standards were admittedly robust, since he took ‘drunk’ to mean ‘lying in the gutter on one’s back’). Later he did drink, not only in the Crown and Henekey’s, but in the Limehouse pothouses, where ‘the poisonous liquors’ of Symons’s fancy were, as somebody has pointed out, supplied by the same brewers as catered for the West End pubs. He also drank a lot of absinthe, the subject of one of his best prose poems. As to Adelaide Foltinowicz, the little Polish girl whom he cultivated, he was no Humbert Humbert: his desires and delusions had a Dickensian purity. He wasn’t, like Johnson, impotent, but his taste for harlots was probably less depraved than Yeats suggests. So the myth is modified; but he clearly did a lot towards killing himself. At 30 he could speak of being in old age, and his appearance—toothless, scarred by drunken fighting, racked by coughing—made him more than ever ‘a demoralised Keats.’ He died at 32, of tuberculosis.
The myth began, as Plarr says, at the graveside if not before. Symons, who had started the process while Dowson was still alive, wrote a long obituary which, despite its show of moderation, types the dead poet firmly as maudit: a drunk, a drug-taker, a lover of squalor, all sensibility and no intellect, like Yvor Winters’s description of Pound. Like some chartered accountant of the soul, Symons finds that Dowson spent too much suffering achieving too small a return of poetry; he could have done what he did ‘at much less expense of spirit.’ But it is with Yeats that the myth achieves historical importance. Yeats preferred Johnson, and is not very accurate about Dowson, but what he says counts because he was the single poet of stature who survived the Tragic Generation and made it part of a modern poet’s material. He tells good stories about Dowson, including the funny one about his escapade with Wilde at Dieppe; but the whole temper of The Trembling of the Veil (a study in fin du globe, as its title suggests) prepares us for the solemn use of Dowson in A Vision as an example of the man of the 13th Phase (the others are Baudelaire and Beardsley, who incidentally thought little of Dowson). While such men may be self-absorbed, morbid, corrupted by enforced love, this is a good Phase for poets, provided they can cultivate a passion for truth. But Yeats, though he says he envied Dowson his debauched life, could not have envied him his mind. The poems he liked so well that he set on foot the Book of the Rhymers’ Club to get them into print pleased him by their delicate rhythms, and lack of ideas—they are as near romances sans paroles as can be got. This is their merit, inside and outside the myth.
It is possible, by an effort, to recover something of the mood they pleased. A good number of readers, one supposes, can do so; hence this new edition by Mark Longaker,1 who also wrote the standard biography in 1944. It is a handsome but somewhat strange book. All the pieces in Dowson’s two books of poetry, Verses and Decorations, are included, and so is The Pierrot of the Minute, a Keatsian playlet marked by little deliberate lapses into the ludicrous which remind one that Dowson really did live in a tough world, and worked for Smithers.2 These we expect; but where are the 50 pages of uncollected poetry given in Desmond Flower’s edition of 1934?3 These derived mostly from the Flower Notebook, and included the ‘Sonnets to a little Girl’ and ‘Against my Lady Burton,’ all of which should be in even a selection of Dowson. Mr Longaker refers to them in his introduction and notes, without ever explaining why he has not reprinted them. More curiously still, this edition is biblio-graphically almost a twin of the Flower edition, the texts and the layout virtually identical. The notes are different: Flower gives variants, which Longaker withholds, on the grounds that collation ‘is neither practicable nor necessary,’ and that the variants are mostly in pointing, a matter, he admits, to which ‘Dowson attached a great deal of importance.’ The new notes are critical and biographical, but Flower attends to these needs also.
As to the poems themselves, they will doubtless seem to many the record of a somewhat nerveless struggle between a genuine talent for purity of diction and an almost involuntary dandysme. The long Latin titles, and the in-group dedications of Verses, were deliberately provoking; and The Times reviewer, mentioning ‘Extreme Unction: for Lionel Johnson,’ and ‘A Requiem: for John Gray,’ felt he must assure his readers that ‘there is no reason to believe that the gentlemen in question are anything but alive and well.’ Many of the poems deal with golden hair, young girls and death, sometimes with dead young golden-haired girls, and express an affected chastity of suffering appropriate to the author described by Symons as ‘a fastidious amateur of grief.’ Much of Dowson’s best work was done early, in the years of the Rhymer’s Club; it is not all in the mood of the Schreiner annotations, and there are a few wan jeux d’esprit, but the mood is reasonably summed up in the line ‘Labour and longing and despair the long day brings.’ A touch of sad wit provides an occasional streak of colour, and Dowson is doubtless the nearest thing in English to Verlaine. In fact his translations of Verlaine strike me as extraordinarily good.
Dowson’s positive virtues as a poet are a rhythmic subtlety which is well exemplified in the anthology-piece ‘Non sum qualis eram’—a poem also serviceable as an example of what Mr Longaker calls the ‘sin poems.’ There is an epigram which Yeats would have been glad enough to have written 10 years after Dowson’s death:
Because I am idolatrous and have besought,
With grievous supplication and consuming prayer,
The admirable image that my dreams have wrought
Out of her swan’s neck and her dark, abundant hair:
The jealous gods, who brook no worship save their own,
Turned my live idol marble and her heart to stone.
What in the end tires us is the repeated use of period epithets (‘dim,’ ‘enchanted,’ ‘dream-like’ etc.) and the traces of Dowson’s disastrous theory that you can’t use the letter v too often: ‘viols,’ ‘violets,’ ‘vines.’ The new flexibility of rhythm was the important thing, but these trimmings often take over and make the poetry look like feeble attitudinising. This was Yeats’s struggle too, and he was aware that he had to outlive the companions of the Cheshire Cheese to win it.
Yet Dowson passes into modern poetry not only as a myth, but as poetry. Pound admired him, and his rhythms, and his Propertius, whom he modernised. It may not be too fanciful to find traces of him in the poetry of those ‘who walked between the violet and the violet. … In ignorance and in knowledge of eternal dolour.’ Stevens, in such poems as ‘Cy est pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et les Unze Mille Vierges,’ adapts the decadent title and ironises the decadent language. For such reasons it is worth undergoing the somewhat lowering experience of reading through Dowson’s poems. One might add to them the story called ‘The Dying of Francis Donne’ and Plarr’s memoir. Thus do the ’Nineties survive.
(1963)
In the middle ’Thirties, emerging from my remote provincial background (but we wrote poems and asked whether Browning didn’t sometimes go beyond bounds), I at last discovered Yeats and Eliot; and in that bewilderment one truth seemed worth steering by, which was that these men were remaking poetry. Although this recognition had very little to do with knowledge, and one waited years before being granted any real notion of the character of such poetry, it was nevertheless, as I still believe, a genuine insight. As one came to know the other great works of the wonderful years, one also came with increasing certainty to see that the imperative of modernism was ‘make it new’: a difficult but in the end satisfactory formula.
These were the years of Auden, of a poetry oscillating between an inaccessible private mythology and public exhortation, an in-group apocalypse and a call for commitment to ‘the struggle.’ It was going to be our war; we were committed whether or not we wanted to be; and there were many poems of Auden especially which have by now disappeared from the canon, but not from the memories of men in their forties. Meanwhile, as the war approached, the indisputably great, the men of the wonderful years, were still at work. What were they doing? Their commitment they consigned, mostly, to the cooler element of prose; but we could hardly suppose they were with any part of their minds on our side. ‘Making it new’ seemed to be a process which had disagreeable consequences in the political sphere. I forget how we explained this to ourselves, but somehow we preserved the certainty that the older poets who behaved so strangely, seemed so harshly to absent themselves from our world—to hold in the age of the Bristol Bomber opinions which were appropriate to the penny-farthing—were nevertheless the men on whom all depended.
The death of Yeats in January, 1939, therefore seemed to us an event of catastrophic importance. The news of Eliot’s death immediately brought to mind, in surprising detail, the events and feelings of that dark, cold day nearly twenty-six years earlier. These were the men who had counted most, yet had seemed to have so little in common with us. Yet on the face of it the two events seemed to have little similarity beyond what is obvious. In the months preceding Yeats’s death there had been an extraordinary outpouring of poetry—how impatiently one awaited the next issue of the London Mercury, and, later, the publication in the spring of 1940 of Last Poems and Plays! And that wasn’t all: there was the poet himself, masked as a wild old man or a dangerous sage; there was the samurai posturing, the learned, more than half-fascist, shouting about eugenics and war, and this at a moment when we were beginning to understand that the enemy would soon be imposing both these disciplines on Europe. But one didn’t hate the poet for what he thought he knew, remembering that he had always held strange opinions without damaging his verse. ‘Man can embody truth but he cannot know it,’ he said in his last letter; and years before, in a line which gives modern poetry its motto, ‘In dreams begin responsibilities.’ He made no order, but showed that our real lives begin when we have been shown that order ends: it is for the dreams, the intuitions of irregularity and chaos, of the tragic rag-and-bone shop, that we value him, and not for his ‘system’ or his ‘thought.’ The time of his death seemed appropriate to the dream; in a few months the towns lay beaten flat.
History did not collaborate in the same way to remind us of the responsibilities begun in Eliot’s dream. His farewell to poetry was taken only a couple of years after Yeats’s. It was no deathbed ‘Cuchulain Comforted’; it was ‘Little Gidding.’ Perhaps the Dantesque section of that poem grew in part from Yeats’s strange poem; certainly Yeats predominates over the others who make up the ‘familiar compound ghost.’ The famous lines tell us what we ought to make of our great poetry and of our great poets:
‘… I am not eager to rehearse
My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten.
These things have served their purpose: let them be.
So with your own… .’
So much for the using up of a poet’s thought. As a man he continues to suffer and without reward:
‘Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense….
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly… .
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been… .’
So the ghost speaks of a Yeatsian guilt, remorse, and purgation. The man who suffers is now truly distinct from the mind that creates poems that have to be, as Picasso said of paintings, ‘hordes of destructions.’
It is customary now to speak of a ‘tradition of the new’ in American painting, and it may even be possible to do the same of American poetry. There is no such tradition in English poetry. That our contemporaries on the whole avoid Eliot’s influence is probably not important; perhaps it is the case, as Auden said in his obituary notice, that Eliot cannot be imitated, only parodied. But it is important, I think, that his insistence on making it new, on treating every attempt as a wholly new start, is now discounted. It may be true, as is sometimes said, that this wholly exhausting doctrine is on cultural grounds more likely to be successful in the United States than in England; certainly much of the evidence points that way. But that does not entitle us to ignore the doctrine. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? The lesson was that the craft of poetry can no longer be a matter of perpetuating dialects and imitating what was well made; it lies in an act of radical analysis, a return to the brute elements, to the matter which may have a potentiality of form; but last year’s words will not find it. In consequence, the writing of major poetry seems more than ever before a ruinous and exhausting undertaking, and no poet deserves blame for modestly refusing to take it on, or even for coming to think of Eliot and his peers as Chinese walls across their literature.
This, of course, is to apply to Eliot the damaging epigram he devised for Milton. Sir Herbert Read tells me that the English poet for whom Eliot felt a conscious affinity, and upon whom he perhaps in some degree modelled himself, was Johnson. All the same it seems to me that the more we see of the hidden side of Eliot the more he seems to resemble Milton, though he thought of Milton as a polar opposite. As we look at all the contraries reconciled in Eliot—his schismatic traditionalism, his romantic classicism, his highly personal impersonality—we are prepared for the surprise (which Eliot himself seems in some measure to have experienced) of finding in the dissenting Whig regicide a hazy mirror-image of the Anglo-Catholic royalist. Each, having prepared himself carefully for poetry, saw that he must also, living in such times, explore prose, the cooler element. From a consciously archaic standpoint each must characterise the activities of the sons of Belial. Each saw that fidelity to tradition is ensured by revolutionary action. (Eliot would hardly have dissented from the proposition that ‘a man may be a heretic in the truth.’) Each knew the difficulty of finding ‘answerable style’ in an age too late. With the Commonwealth an evident failure, Milton wrote one last book to restore it, and as the élites crumbled and reformed Eliot wrote his Notes. If Milton killed a king, Eliot attacked vulgar democracy and shared with the ‘men of 1914’ and with Yeats some extreme authoritarian opinions.
Milton had his apocalyptic delusions, but settled down in aristocratic patience to wait for the failure of the anti-Christian experiment, ‘meanwhile,’ as Eliot said in the conclusion of ‘Thoughts after Lambeth,’ ‘redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us.’ In the end, they thought, the elect, however shorn of power, will bring down the Philistine temple; and the self-begotten bird will return. As poets, they wrote with voluptuousness of youth, and with unmatched force of the lacerations of age. And each of them lived on into a time when it seemed there was little for them to say to their compatriots, God’s Englishmen. Eliot can scarcely have failed to see this left-handed image of himself in a poet who made a new language for his poetry and who transformed what he took from a venerable tradition:
Our effort is not only to explore the frontiers of the spirit, but as much to regain, under very different conditions, what was known to men writing at remote times and in alien languages.
This is truly Miltonic; but Eliot at first moved away and pretended to find his reflection in the strong and lucid Dryden, deceiving many into supposing that he resembled that poet more than the lonely, fiercer maker of the new, of whom he said that it was ‘something of a problem’ to decide in what his greatness consisted.
However, a great poet need not always understand another; there may be good reasons why he should not. And Eliot certainly has the marks of a modern kind of greatness, those beneficial intuitions of irregularity and chaos, the truth of the foul rag-and-bone shop. Yet we remember him as celebrating order. Over the years he explored the implications of his attitudes to order, and it is doubtful whether many people capable of understanding him now have much sympathy with his views. His greatness will rest on the fruitful recognition of disorder, though the theories will have their interest as theories held by a great man.
Many of the doctrines are the product of a seductive thesis and its stern antithesis. The objective correlative, a term probably developed from the ‘object correlative’ of Santayana,1 is an attempt to depersonalise what remains essentially the image of romantic poetry, and to purge it of any taint of simple expressiveness or rational communication. Its propriety is limited to Eliot’s own earlier verse, which is deeply personal but made inexplicably so by the arbitrariness of its logical relations, its elaborate remoteness from the personal, and its position within a context which provides a sort of model of an impersonal ‘tradition’—the fragments shored against our ruin. It is neither a matter of ‘the logic of concepts’ nor something that welled up from an a-logical unconscious; insofar as it has ‘meaning,’ it has it in order to keep the intellect happy while the poem does its work, and insofar as it has not, it has not in order to distinguish it from poems that ‘make you conscious of having been written by somebody.’1 The ‘dissociation of sensibility’ is an historical theory to explain the dearth of objective correlatives in a time when the artist, alienated from his environment, l’immonde cité, is working at the beginning of a dark age ‘under conditions that seem unpropitious,’ in an ever-worsening climate of imagination.
Such theories, we now see, are highly personal versions of stock themes in the history of ideas of the period. They have been subtly developed and are now increasingly subject to criticism. The most persistent and influential of them, no doubt, is the theory of tradition. In a sense it is Cubist historiography, unlearning the trick of perspective and ordering history as a system of perpetually varying spatial alignments. Tradition is always unexpected, hard to find, easily confused with worthless custom; and it is emblematic that a father of modernism should call himself Anglican, for the early Anglicans upset the whole idea of tradition in much this way.
He also called himself royalist, and this is an aspect of a larger and even more surprising traditionalism; for Eliot, in a weirdly pure sense, was an imperialist. This may seem at odds with certain aspects of his thought—his nostalgia for closed societies, his support for American agrarianism; but in the end, although he suppressed After Strange Gods, they grow from the same root. The essay on Dante, which is one of the true masterpieces of modern criticism, has been called a projection on to the medieval poet of Eliot’s own theories of diction and imagery; but it has an undercurrent of imperialism, and can usefully be read with the studies of Virgil and Kipling.
This imperialistic Eliot is the poet of the urbs aeterna, of the transmitted but corrupted dignity of Rome. Hence his veneration not only for Baudelaire (where his Symbolist predecessors would have agreed) but for Virgil (where they would not). The other side of this city is the Babylon of Apocalypse, and when the imperium is threadbare and the end approaches of that which Virgil called endless, this is the city we see. It is the Blick ins Chaos.
The merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies… . And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and live deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning… . And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her … saying, Alas, alas that great city, that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls! For in one hour so great riches is come to naught. And every shipmaster, and the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off, and cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying What city is like unto this great city!
Here is the imagery of sea and imperial city, the city which is the whore and the mother of harlots, with Mystery on her forehead —Mme Sosostris and the bejewelled lady of the game of chess— diminished as the sailors and merchants have dwindled to Phlebas, the sea swallowing his concern for profit and loss, and to Mr Eugenides, his pocket full of currants (base Levantine trade) and his heart set on metropolitan whoring. This is the London of The Waste Land, the City by the sea with its remaining flashes of inexplicable imperial splendor: the Unreal City, the urbs aeterna declined into l’immonde cité.
In another mood, complementary to this of Babylon, Eliot still imagined the Empire as without end, and Virgil, its prophet, became the central classic, l’altissimo poeta, as Dante called him. In him originated the imperial tradition. To ignore the ‘consciousness of Rome’ as Virgil crystallised it is simply to be provincial. It is to be out of the historical current which bears the imperial dignity. In this way Eliot deepened for himself the Arnoldian meanings of the word provincial. The European destiny, as prophesied by Virgil, was imperial; the Empire became the secular body of the Church. The fact that it split is reflected in The Waste Land, where the hooded Eastern hordes swarm over their plains, and the towers of the City fall. And as the dignity of empire was split among the nations, the task of the chosen, which is to defeat the proud and be merciful to the subject, was increasingly identified with Babylonian motives of profit—a situation in which Kipling’s relevance is obvious. Eliot speaks of his ‘imperial imagination’; and, given a view of history as having a kind of perspectiveless unity, Virgil, Dante, Baudelaire, and Kipling can exist within the same plane, like Babylon and the urbs aeterna, or like the inter-related motifs of The Waste Land. Thus does the poet-historian redeem the time. His is a period of waiting such as occurs before the apocalypse of collapsing cities. But behind the temporal disaster of Babylon he knows that the timeless pattern of the eternal city must survive.
Some such imagery of disaster and continuity—‘that the wheel may turn and still/Be forever still’—lies under The Waste Land and is reflected also in Eliot’s cults of continuity and renovation ‘under conditions/That seem unpropitious.’ Yet when we think of the great poem, we think of it as an image of imperial catastrophe, of the disaster and not of the pattern. For that pattern suggests a commitment, a religion; and the poet retreats to it. But the poem is a great poem because it will not force us to follow him. It makes us wiser without committing us. Here I play on the title of William Bartley’s recent book, Retreat to Commitment; but one remembers that Eliot himself is aware of these distinctions. Art may lead one to a point where something else must take over, as Virgil led Dante; it ‘may be affirmed to serve ends beyond itself,’ as Eliot himself remarked; but it ‘is not required to be aware of these ends’—an objective correlative has enough to do existing out there without joining a church. It joins the mix of our own minds, but it does not tell us what to believe. Whereas Mr Bartley’s theologians sometimes feel uneasily that they should defend the rationality of what they are saying, the poets in their rival fictions do not. One of the really distinctive features of the literature of the modernist anni mirabiles was that variously and subtly committed writers blocked the retreat to commitment in their poems. Eliot ridiculed the critics who found in The Waste Land an image of the age’s despair, but he might equally have rejected the more recent Christian interpretations. The poem resists an imposed order; it is a part of its greatness, and the greatness of its epoch, that it can do so. ‘To find, Not to impose,’ as Wallace Stevens said with a desperate wisdom, ‘It is possible, possible, possible.’ We must hope so.
No one has better stated the chief characteristics of that epoch than the late R. P. Blackmur in a little book of lectures, Anni Mirabiles 1921-1925; though it contains some of the best of his later work, it seems to be not much read. We live, wrote Blackmur, in the first age that has been ‘fully self-conscious of its fictions’—in a way, Nietzsche has sunk in at last; and in these conditions we are more than ever dependent on what he calls, perhaps not quite satisfactorily, ‘bourgeois humanism’—‘the residue of reason in relation to the madness of the senses.’ Without it we cannot have ‘creation in honesty,’ only ‘assertion in desperation.’ But in its operation this residual humanism can only deny the validity of our frames of reference and make ‘an irregular metaphysic for the control of man’s irrational powers.’ So this kind art is a new kind of creation, harsh, medicinal, remaking reality ‘in rivalry with our own wishes,’ denying us the consolations of predictable form but showing us the forces of our world, which we may have to control by other means. And the great works in this new and necessary manner were the product of the ‘wonderful years’—in English, two notable examples are Ulysses and The Waste Land.
The function of such a work, one has to see, is what Simone Weil called decreation; Stevens, whose profound contribution to the subject nobody seems to have noticed, picked the word out of La Pesanteur et la Grâce. Simone Weil explains the difference from destruction: decreation is not a change from the created to nothingness, but from the created to the uncreated. ‘Modern reality,’ commented Stevens, ‘is a reality of decreation, in which our revelations are not the revelations of belief; though he adds that he can say this ‘without in any way asserting that they are the sole sources.’
This seems to me a useful instrument for the discrimination of modernisms. The form in which Simone Weil expresses it is rather obscure, though she is quite clear that ‘destruction’ is ‘a blameworthy substitute for decreation.’ The latter depends upon an act of renunciation, considered as a creative act like that of God. ‘God could create only by hiding himself. Otherwise there would be nothing but himself.’ She means that decreation, for men, implies the deliberate repudiation (not simply the destruction) of the naturally human and so naturally false ‘set’ of the world: ‘we participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.’ Now the poets of the anni mirabiles also desired to create a world by decreating the self in suffering; to purge what, in being merely natural and human, was also false. It is a point often made, though in different language, by Eliot. This is what Stevens called clearing the world of ‘its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set.’ In another way it is what attracted Hulme and Eliot to Worringer, who related societies purged of the messily human to a radical abstract art.
Decreation, as practised by poets, has its disadvantages. In this very article I myself have, without much consideration for the hazards, provided a man-locked set for The Waste Land. But we can see that when Eliot pushed his objective correlative out into the neutral air—‘seeming a beast disgorged, unlike,/ Wanned by a desperate milk’—he expected it, liberated from his own fictions, to be caught up in the fictions of others, those explanations we find for all the creations. In the world Black-mur is writing about, the elements of a true poem are precisely such nuclei, disgorged, unlike, purged of the suffering self; they become that around which a possible new world may accrete.
It would be too much to say that no one now practises this poetry of decreation; but much English poetry of these days is neither decreative nor destructive, expressing a modest selfishness which escapes both the purgative effort and the blame. America has, I think, its destructive poetry, which tends to be a poetry of manifesto; and in Lowell it seems to have a decreative poet. One way to tell them is by a certain ambiguity in your own response. The Waste Land, and also Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, can strike you in certain moments as emperors without clothes; discrete poems cobbled into a sequence which is always inviting the censure of pretentiousness. It is with your own proper fictive covering that you hide their nakedness and make them wise. Perhaps there is in Life Studies an ambivalence of the same sort. Certainly to have Eliot’s great poem in one’s life involves an irrevocable but repeated act of love. This is not called for by merely schismatic poetry, the poetry of destruction.
This is why our most lively sense of what it means to be alive in poetry continues to stem from the ‘modern’ of forty years ago. Deeply conditioned by the original experience of decreation, we may find it hard to understand that without it poetry had no future we can now seriously conceive of. It is true that the exhortations which accompanied Eliot’s nuclear achievement are of only secondary interest. What survives is a habit of mind that looks for analysis, analysis by controlled unreason. This habit can be vulgarised: analysis of the most severe kind degenerates into chatter about breakdown and dissociation. The Waste Land has been used thus, as a myth of decadence, a facile evasion. Eliot is in his capacity as thinker partly to blame for this. Arnold complained that Carlyle ‘led us out into the wilderness and left us there.’ So did Eliot, despite his conviction that he knew the way; even before the ‘conversion’ he had a vision of a future dominated by Bradley, Frazer, and Henry James. We need not complain, so long as the response to the wilderness is authentic; but often it is a comfortable unfelt acceptance of tragedy. The Waste Land is in one light an imperial epic; but such comforts as it can offer are not compatible with any illusions, past, present, or future.
This is not the way the poem is usually read nowadays; but most people who know about poetry will still admit that it is a very difficult poem, though it invites glib or simplified interpretation. As I said, one can think of it as a mere arbitrary sequence upon which we have been persuaded to impose an order. But the true order, I think, is there to be found, unique, unrepeated, resistant to synthesis. The Four Quartets seem by comparison isolated in their eminence, tragic, often crystalline in the presentation of the temporal agony, but personal; and closer sometimes to commentary than to the thing itself. When the Quartets speak of a pattern of timeless moments, of the point of intersection, they speak about that pattern and that point; the true image of them is The Waste Land. There the dreams cross, the dreams in which begin responsibilities.
(1965-6)
The early letters and journals1 of Stevens show a most private man, a self-cramped man or a man who gave everything time to mature. Long-breathed speculation preceded decisions: whether to become ‘a money-making lawyer,’ to marry, or to write poems. He decided, he says, that fact must be met with fact; if ‘life is worth living under certain conditions,’ these conditions involved the postponement of poetry. As it happened, business success and poetry came together, as if providence were ready to comply with such planning. There is nothing in the letters to explain how Stevens, who wrote no poetry worth preserving before he was thirty, should suddenly have written ‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’ and ‘Sunday Morning.’ One can only guess: among the things he wanted most were a home (where he could cackle in the Stevens environment, as ‘toucans in the place of toucans’) and ‘an authentic fluent speech.’ Hartford became the place of this toucan’s cackling; but any other one place, if well-protected, might have done. Later, as he reasoned of these things ‘with a later reason,’ Stevens called the ‘place dependent on ourselves’ Catawba. It was the mind and reality who married there, and ‘they married well because the marriage-place was what they loved.’ Catawba might be New Haven on an ordinary evening or Hartford in a purple light or the Tennessee in which he invested nothing but a jar; a place where the mind matches the world on equal ground. Catawba ‘was neither heaven nor hell,’ but it was a good place to start the war or marriage between the mind and sky.
Seen from the outside, Stevens is quietly absurd. The poet of gaudiness, of pungent colour and exotic shape, was a sort of Hartford Des Esseintes. Des Esseintes’ trip to London ended with a bottle of stout on a foggy night at Calais. For Stevens, Europe was a daydream about Paris, a postcard from Basel; and China a box of tea or a packet of jasmine solicited from travellers. His ephebes were exotic youths: a Korean poet, a Cuban scholar. He looked forward especially to the letters of Thomas McGreevy, with whom he could share his distaste for ‘Ireland’s neighbour,’ and of Leonard C. van Geyzel, an Englishman expatriate in Ceylon, who might not only feed one’s daydreams but supply ‘the very best tea procurable.’ The plum survives its poems, as Stevens remarked; but whether he, as poet, could have withstood the abrasions of genuine travel without losing his bloom is a question. The world’s gaudy Cockaigne for him was Florida, with Cuba and the banana-islands over the horizon. His sense of place—the Rome of the Santayana poem, the Florence of the dead Englishman—have the same reality as Haddam, where the thin men live, or New Haven, or Oklahoma where the firecat bristled and Bonnie and Josie danced round a stump—his sense of place has an acccuracy in respect of the imagination only. While his rich friends the Churches divided their year between New York and Paris, he sat it out in Hartford, working through the summer, dictating insurance letters and philosophical poems, lunching at the Canoe Club, and walking home in the evening to whatever might be ‘the combination of the moment,’ for example Berlioz and roses. After that, whatever books he might choose to read (he says he has time to read whatever he wants) and letters to and from, say, a Paris bookseller, or a Yale student writing an explication of ‘Sea Surface Full of Clouds.’ It might take such a man to see that the final truth about poetry is the fictiveness of the entire world; save for a mythic core of ‘reality the world is poetry, and there to be discovered, as desperate and virginal in Hartford or New Haven as any where else.
Lawrence once wrote remarkably about the umbrella of fictions with which we keep out the intolerable hot diversity of chaos. For him the original artist was the one who tore holes in the umbrella, so that human life and chaos were for a moment in contact; but the rent was soon mended with another more comfortable fiction, and the need is for a succession of umbrella-tearers who will not let us dismiss all that inhuman fortuity from our lives. Stevens is the poet of that umbrella, but also of the Blick ins Chaos, to remember which is to be aware of poetry. (The man who so dreaded poverty in its more physical form had an acute apprehension of the more metaphysical poverty which is our lot without poetry: ‘money,’ he once wrote, ‘is a kind of poetry.’) In the ’Thirties the ‘pressure of reality’ was particularly hard on the umbrella, and Stevens’ attempt to meet it in the political form it then took was Owl’s Clover, a self-confessed failure. The letters of the succeeding period, especially in the war years, silently celebrate the increase in reality’s pressure by a steady concentration on the theory of poetry. ‘The theory of poetry is the theory of life.’ These are only apparently hermit musings, and it is not really surprising that Stevens reached his most authentic and fluent speech in poetry at such a moment; Notes toward a Supreme Fiction belongs to 1942. The subject is what human beings must add to the plain sense of things, in order to make of the world something that suffices. The more desperate the world’s poverty, the harder and the more private the poet’s job. A man who does such a job well might be represented as a rabbi or a soldier, or simply as major man; but what he makes is a kind of poetry, and so, not necessarily but actually, the task falls to poets, and poetry is the supreme fiction, major man is a poet. Poetry is as pure and as impure as life, as reasonable and as unreasonable. Whatever is well said about poetry is well said about life. So, in his entirely solitary way, proceeding at his own slow pace towards the truth about human fiction, Stevens earned the right to regard any meditation, any half-worked out ‘and yet’ or ‘as if,’ as a contribution to the great subject, the human meaning of an ordinary evening in Connecticut when beyond the mental umbrella there is chaos, the sun is meaningless except by our gift, and all the gods are dead. The subject matter of poetry is ‘the aspects of the world and of men and women that have been added to them by poetry’: everything that is human or humanised.
This gives him a right to his arbitrary musing, and as rabbi (both learned and understanding poverty) he arrogates the further right to be aloofly allegorical and to go on with his thinking just so long as he chooses, without regard to the unschooled who may not follow. If you were puzzled by the Arabian in Notes:
At night an Arabian in my room,
With his damned hoobla-hoobla-hoobla-how,
Inscribes a primitive astronomy
Across the unscrawled fores the future casts
And throws his stars around the floor—
you could write to Mr Stevens, and he would write back and tell you that the Arabian is the moon, adding that ‘the reader could not possibly know this. However, I did not think it necessary for him to know.’ On the other hand, he thinks that when he uses the word ‘tanks’ in a context suggesting Ceylon, the reader should know exactly what he means without being told. Extremely obliging in his response to letters of enquiry, he often remarks that his correspondents are mistaken not only in thinking that his poetry is plainer to him than to them but also, and habitually, in thinking that what integrates a poem is ideas. ‘A poem must have a peculiarity, as if it were the momentarily complete idiom of that which prompts it.’ Newton Stallknecht very neatly called Stevens’ poetry ‘a poetry of philosophical intention’—not, that is, of philosophical execution. It is useless to seek in it a simple bonding of ideas. ‘One can do nothing in art by being reasonable … it is also true that one can do nothing by being unreasonable.’ Hence that range of uniquely philosophical poetry—a different thing, as Coleridge noted, from philosophy and also from poetry simply considered—in which he ranges from a kind of intense meditative mumble to a declarative candour which also, on examination, defies paraphrase. Only thus can one do the work of the dead gods, and create the ‘Extraordinary Actuality.’
It is unlikely that Stevens ever really felt the criticism that all this is wildly out of touch with what most people have in mind when, ‘in the metaphysical streets of the physical town,’ they hear ‘the actual horns of baker and butcher.’ He wanted to be the consort of the Queen of Fact. When Church was still thinking about founding a Chair of Poetry at Princeton, Stevens advised him that the right man to fill it would be someone who could deal with actuality without referring to poetry at all. Such a man, he said, was Hemingway—‘a poet … and I should say off hand, the most significant of living poets, so far as the subject of Extraordinary Actuality is concerned.’ A Hemingway hero must have seemed a much better image of metaphysical poverty than an Appalachian farmer or an Abyssinian ‘coon.’
After the ’Thirties Stevens gave up the attempt to compete with other theories of poverty and reality; he simply went on with his own. That is why the letters of 1942 ignore the reality that was going on in Germany, in Russia and in the Pacific, even the warships clustered at New London on his own Connecticut River. He writes instead about ‘the order of the spirit’ which ‘is the only music of the spheres: or rather, the only music’; about how a private press should print his book (‘Light tan linen or buckram cover’); about his Dutch ancestors. Just as ‘poverty’ became for him a purely metaphysical concept, so did war. His was the primal war ‘between the mind and sky’; his soldier was simply another figure of the youth as a virile poet. Even his ‘fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night’ is, he explains, the earth, ‘what the politicians are calling the globe,’ and what he thinks of as the irreducible reality where all poetry (all humanity) begins. Stevens commits himself to the biggest of all as-ifs; he behaves as if poetry and the imagination are everything that is humanly important (and therefore everything that is at all important). Consequently he felt himself to be dealing incessantly with the real.
The philosophy of this was not for him to work out, only to brood over. Though he says that ‘supreme poetry can be produced only at the highest level of the cognitive,’ he also holds that the kind of thinking it required is distinct from that required by philosophising because it is ‘a creation not of meaning but of points,’ welcoming fortuity and logical imprecision, devoted not to clarity of expression (‘what I intended is nothing’) but to the blooding of abstractions. It adds to the vulgate of experience an ‘and yet.’ So does metaphysics; but he insists that his work has ‘no serious contact with philosophy.’ Stevens acknowledged an interest in Santayana, James, and Bergson, but his reading was patchy and never deep. He knew about Heidegger but not, apparently, even about Wittgenstein. When Paul Weiss asked him why he didn’t take on a full-sized philosopher he replied with his usual epistolary calm, quite untouched by the criticism. Philosophy, like many other things, was his business only when it suited him to make it so. It became a part of his authentic and fluent speech, but it isn’t surprising that when he sent his ‘Collect of Philosophy’ to a learned journal it was rejected.
Many of these letters are written as part of the para-philosophical game. The correspondents are not, as a rule, confidants; there is a certain reserve even with old friends, though the old gaudiness so personal to Stevens flashes out in letters to the young, and there is an occasional letter, like the one to Harvey Breit about the Dutch Church at Kingston which has an uncovenanted and dazzling philosophical wit. Often he is just thinking on paper, as in some poems. The long letter to a congenial correspondent, and the long poem, suited his mental style. ‘Some people always know exactly what they think. I am afraid that I am not one of those people. The same thing keeps active in my mind and rarely becomes fixed.’ As letters these are not obliged to be agreeable or self-consistent; but for anybody who knows the poetry they are very revealing, they do enhance one’s familiarity with the drift of Stevens’ meditation—its hidden structure of seasons, fictions, human fear, its bursts of gratuitous and generous happiness, as when a Norwegian girl poet calls at Hartford. They even suggest a queer kind of heroism, as if the refusal to condone poverty, to care for men in the mass, were a necessary aspect of that attempt to identify poetry and humanity, to be ‘major man.’
In the long run, I think, these letters will stand as classic specimens of the preoccupations of modern poetry for such reasons as these, rather than for the direct light they throw upon actual poems. When one comes first to the book, the most obviously exciting letters are those in which Stevens, with extraordinary good humour and candour, and against the whole bent of modern practitioners, gives his own interpretations of certain poems; most remarkably there are many pages on Notes toward a Supreme Fiction. The interest of these is of course exceptional, and yet the comments are not, in the end, very helpful. Where the language of a poem is extraordinary, arbitrary, Stevens simply incorporates it into his paraphrases, ‘practising mere repetitions,’ or he says he can’t remember, perhaps never knew. There are certainly hints on how to read the poems, but surprisingly little help with detail.
‘The object, of course,’ he says of ‘An Ordinary Evening,’ ‘is to purge oneselfof anything false.’ He wanted to get out of the poem and himself all the left-overs of past imagining. In this sense he was tremendously modern; he was not interested in poetry as ‘an aspect of history’ butas a conjunction, appropriate to its moment, of the mind and its place, a world essentially indifferent. If theb gods die, and statues grow rigid, what can be Hoped for poems? But against this self-destructive emphasis on the ephemerality of the modern poem he built up his own world, in which there are to be found relations to some extent proof against time. Everything was implicit in Harmonium, and he saw it as a programme, wanting to call it The Grand Poem: Preliminary Minutiae. When he finally consented to a collected edition he did so only when he felt something had been completed, and he wanted to call it The Whole of Harmonium. Having felt a bit chilly towards Harmonium in the years after its publication in 1923, he came to admire again in his late years its unpredictable certainties, its strange Tightnesses, the way it confirmed later poems. The Collected Poems do make a ‘total edifice’ and an enduring meditation. There is a lot of squiggling, marginalia, meta-metaphysical muttering, pointlessness, wantonness, the tedium of small private sub-jokes and sub-thoughts, and these will serve to defend Stevens’ thesis of necessary obsolescence, the inevitable decline of imaginative objects into absurdity. But for all its fortuity and decay The Whole of Harmonium looks pretty permanent, indeed ‘a shining exemplum of human dignity,’ to borrow Allen Tate’s word for the poetry of Hart Crane—from ‘Plowing on Sunday’ to ‘The Rock.’ An exile from most of the world, and from most of the people about him who would have been equal to his imaginative demands, he showed that exile, if necessary, may be had without departures, without fuss. The letters often show one how the polite hermit kept out the world, hoarded the passions and the poet’s scholarship that a more orthodox life such as Crane’s had to dissipate. Of course Stevens is not the great modern poet anybody could have predicted, but great poetry has often been surprising in its time. To undervalue him because he seems so wantonly not to fit the milieu or the moment is still a common error, just as it is to overvalue him because he thinks. Rightly seen he is, in his shy, egotistical remoteness, very central to the whole idea of modern poetry.
* * *
How are we to see him rightly? The signs are, I should say, that the vogue is ending, and the enormous effort to explain Stevens has failed. It is a characteristic failure of our graduate schools.
There is already a considerable number of books about Stevens, and I have not read them all, though to make up for this I have read some that remained unpublished, and have written one of them myself. Although one learns something now and again from the Stevens literature, it is on the whole dispiriting. ‘I must have been terribly wrong,’ one thinks, ‘ever to have supposed that Stevens was any good.’ He emerges as a tiresome doodler with a vast but not profoundly interesting body of Thought, which he has never quite got round to articulating. The disentangling of this Thought from camp titles and periphrases is the self-appointed task of critics. Now and again there is a confluence of comment on some particularly mysterious poem, like ‘The Emperor of Ice Cream,’ but the ordinary practice has been to ignore the fact that Stevens wrote a great many discrete poems and treat the whole oeuvre as one poem from which one takes one’s illustrations, usually with a reference to a page number in the Collected Poems rather than an individual work.
Here is a passage, chosen almost at random, and written by a professionally competent commentator on Stevens.
The giant of nothingness is referred to elsewhere, most explicitly in ‘Asides on the Oboe,’ as ‘the glass man,’ glass in that he is ‘the transparence of the place in which/He is.’ Since the place is the mind and the mind is characterised by its will to change only a substance whose nature could change with the changes of its environment— change in the light directed upon them, as glass, crystal or diamond— would be logical for the abstraction of the hero. Yet if the man of glass ‘in a million diamonds sums us up,’ he is also ‘without external reference’—just as the mind itself is at once transparent and without external reference. ‘Sea Surface Full of Clouds’ is an early poem describing the response of the mind to changing light on a seascape— that is, as a transparence of the place in which it is. On the other hand, as we have seen, the mind is ‘eccentric,’—a sensibility that is a thing-in-itself characterised by a will to order and a will to change, paradoxical characteristics that reflect a paradoxical reality. The glass hero in a crystal world (the poet’s ‘fluent mundo’) is thus the first idea of mankind in the natural world—a ‘human acceleration that seems inhuman,’ and, one might add, an acceleration of nature that seems unnatural.
(L. S. Dembo, Concepts of Reality in Modern American Poetry, 1966, pp. 104–5.)
Now if this is not the way to do it, and I am sure it is not, it remains true that this passage is not flagrantly inaccurate or silly. What it does is to take the meta-metaphysical mutter of Stevens and make it explicit. Nowadays the advice of Coleridge (and Eliot) to the effect that poetry can appeal strongly when imperfectly understood—advice Stevens took as a basis for his writing—is considered beneath the dignity of scholarship. What the Stevens glass man ‘dewily cries’ comes out as if treated by electronic recording engineers to take the dewiness out of it, and we hear such things as the man-monster never uttered, in tones remote from his. Where the harmonics of Stevens are heard they are inappropriate; as when a proof-text—‘human acceleration that seems inhuman’—is adorned by a piece of pulpit oratory (and, one might add …’) which is actually an imitation of the rhetoric the poet himself went in for in the Adagia and the essays.
It is as if the Stevens mundo had been stripped and reassembled, not quite in the same order. Worse still, it gives a strong impression, as I mentioned before, that here is a poet we had best not dabble with, since he is so solemnly foolish. The next paragraph is designed, almost, to confirm this rejection. ‘Finally, the “auroral creature musing in the mind” is described as “the naked man” who paradoxically becomes the “plus gaudiest vir,” a man constantly rejuvenated by “cataracts of facts”… .’ Who could possibly care?
Who could possibly care? It is the easy comment of our enemies. Our business is to see that people care. Yet there is, of course, some justification for this kind of commentary. Stevens didn’t altogether disown the element of puzzle in his work, and he did sometimes think of his entire œuvre as an attempt at a Grand Poem. But we are surely in a difficult position when our attempts to make a number of discrete poems into a whole harmonium simply discredit our author, and this is what happens. What one ends up with is an argument, more or less convincing, supported by proof-texts that suggest that the original under discussion is unworthy of discussion. The effect is of the deadlier kind of tract, the brainlessly minute column of Migne. Somehow the worst of Stevens is often the most useful for illustration. Stevens’ solar chariot is made up of a good quantity of junk; we shall need eventually to admit that. But some commentators reduce it all to junk.
Harmonium has little junk and is hardest to traduce. Even when a poem contains a metaphysical plot Stevens is usually content to let be the obliquity of most trouvailles. When there is some sort of argument in process one is never bothered to do more than keep in the right general direction. I note in Mr Nassar’s recent book the most useful explanation I have yet read of Le Monocle de mon Oncle, including a note by Arthur Mizener on the lines
‘In your hair’ means ‘with your hair hanging freely and naturally’ like a colonial virgin at marriage. It is good to know this. Mr Nasser goes on to explain that the whole poem is a sort of love-ode to the Interior Paramour. ‘From a sleep of dreams the imagination emerges with fictions that belie any absolutist’s (“studious ghosts”) formulation of reality, and declare true but irrelevant Swift’s satirical description that all pleasing images are deception.’ Leaving out Swift, who seems to have no business here, we can say that Mr Nasser is sort of right but that it is not especially good to know that. I cared greatly for this poem before I knew anything about the Interior Paramour. What mattered was the absolutely personal assurance, the sense of one poem as able to bear the strain of so many relations, so many trouvailles all in tension with each other, a tension of wit and magniloquence, of notions made significant only because they occurred in one spot, Catawba or Hartford, New Haven or Tennessee or Oklahoma or Key West. Stevens’ is a poetry that makes its landscape. Elsewhere it is the poetry of hats, of cocks, of angels, of statues; here it is a poetry of hair. ‘Le Monocle’ is this, and the crickets, and ‘If men at forty will be painting lakes’; it is the red bird, the damsel heightened with eternal bloom; it is the accuracy of grotesque:
Last night we sat beside a pool of pink,
Clippered with lilies scudding the bright chromes,
Keen to the point of starlight, while a frog
Boomed from his very belly odious chords.
The gap between ‘Le Monocle’ and what can be said about it in commentaries is wide; indeed this gap is always very wide in Stevens. No commentators will say of his own efforts what Stevens said, commenting on one of his poems: ‘This is just an explanation.’ And few remember this saying: ‘A poem must have a peculiarity, as if it were the momentarily complete idiom of that which prompts it.’ He used philosophy, and any other kind of thinking, just as it prompted him. This is equally true of his prose. To take a short and splendid instance, his address at Bard College in 1948, in which he speaks of reality as the poet’s ‘inescapable and ever-present difficulty and inamorata.’ He has said that the imagination is false, and then he says that it progresses by particulars, and that this makes the poet ‘like a man who can see what he wants to see and touch what he wants to touch. In all his poems with all their enchantments for the poet himself, there is the final enchantment that they are true.’ And after this solemn and animated play with the great abstractions that always haunted his mind, he ends by calling the poetic act ‘an illumination of the surface, the movement of a self in the rock.’ It might be from a poem, rather than from an address of thanks. Certainly it has a kind of argument. The thoughts and images cross, and what gives them their true relation is not argument:
One’s sense of a single spot
Is what one knows of the universe
means less and more than Whitehead’s ‘every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.’
Stevens accepted Wahl’s assertion that no idea is poetic, or ‘that the poetic nature of any idea depends on the mind through which it passes.’ On the other hand—and this is where the trouble starts—Stevens also believed, as I have said earlier, that ‘supreme poetry can only be produced at the highest level of the cognitive’—or, as he puts it in the Collect of Philosophy, that the ‘poem of poems’ would have a philosophic theme. This idea is at once made richer and harder by a figure: ‘That the wing of poetry should also be the rushing wing of meaning seems to be an extreme aesthetic good … it is very easy to imagine a poetry of ideas in which the particulars of reality would be shadows among the poem’s disclosures.’
Further he argues that doing philosophy has aspects analogous to doing poetry; a passage from Whitehead proceeds ‘from a level where everything is poetic,’ and in another Samuel Alexander strains after exactness just as a poet does. (‘Je tâche, en restant exact, d’être poète,’—a paradox Stevens found in Jean Wahl.) But ‘the probing of the philosopher is deliberate’ and ‘the probing of the poet is fortuitous.’ He might have said that the philosopher invents and the poet discovers. ‘When we want to pay final tribute to Planck we say that his thought on causality had poetic nuances.’ He might have said this of Wittgenstein, had he read Wittgenstein. Two truths emerge, anyway. One is that Stevens found philosophical thinking akin to poetry, and exciting. The second is that he was not under the impression that his thinking was ‘doing philosophy.’ He might very well feel about his systematic critics what the poet Morris said of a reciter who read his verses for the sense alone: ‘it took me a long time to get that into verse and this damned fellow takes it out again.’ If the poem is finding what suffices, we should remember that the examples given are ‘a woman dancing, a woman combing’— sudden rightnesses, not deliberate probing; ‘a movement of self in the rock.’
The particular problem, then, for his expositors, is this element of cognitive thought. The solitariness of Stevens makes this very complicated: solitariness, literal devotion to the single spot which is oneself, is admittedly an American tradition, but it calls for great critical resource. It asks for a solitary critic. There is probably no way to talk about the ‘Metaphors of a Magnifico’ without being a little public, a little philosophical. But the point to remember is that when we have read it together we must read it alone: once for the plot, once for the movement of a self in a rock. And yet even this formula won’t suffice. Even in Harmonium Stevens is at his thinking: in, say, ‘The Doctor of Geneva’ or ‘Another Weeping Woman’ or ‘Explanation,’ in ‘Valley Candle,’ just as much a philosophical allegory as ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’:
My candle burned alone in an immense valley.
Beams of the huge night converged upon it,
Until the wind blew.
Then beams of the huge night
Converged upon its image,
Until the wind blew.
The kind of explanation ordinarily given simply destroys this poem’s selfhood. How much harder things become when more and more comment, more and more ideas, shadow the poem’s ‘particulars of reality’!
After Harmonium the meditation becomes more continuous; there are more long poems and more trivial annotations on the commentary in the form of short ones. The flash fades, the voice mutters metaphysically: ‘The theory of description matters most…. It is a world of words to the end of it.’ All this is rich in proof-texts. ‘Chocorua to its Neighbor,’ its magniloquence qualified by joky nonce-words and bloodless finicking dandyism, is a great source of proof-texts. This is Augustinian speech not as ‘direct transference’ not of thought but of reverie. But we come in the end to those poems where a movement of a self in the rock requires that, in order for the idiom to be complete, the meditation, the metaphysical or meta-metaphysical mutter, shall be there, in tension with the particulars, as in ‘Credences of Summer’ the hayfields of Oley are the limits of reality. The culmination of this is Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, where we could not have had the passionate thinking of the climax without many testimonies of the imagination’s truth and mercy: the chattering birds and the sexual blossoms, the ephebe suffering at his window, the lasting visage in the lasting bush, the true weather of the poem. Or, if it is not there, the culmination is in the earned, unfaltering meditation of the great final poems, whether long, like ‘The Rock’ or the poem for Santayana, or brief, like ‘The Planet on the Table’ and ‘As you leave the Room.’ The marriage of flesh and air in a particular poet at a particular spot is mentioned in these words about his poems, from ‘The Planet on the Table’:
It was not important that they survive,
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament of character,
Some affluence, if only half-perceived …
Of the planet of which they were part.
I have said little of how, as commentators on this poet, we are to get out of our dilemma. Always, from the beginning, he teases us into thought; and later he forces thought upon us, or, at his best, uses it as he used colour in his early poems (‘before the colours deepened and grew small’), as among the points which make the uniqueness of a poem. He tells us not to think of him as philosophical, but also that if he could write anything approaching the ‘poem of poems’ he would be philosophical. The only answer I can give (and the fact that the question is difficult doesn’t make it unimportant) the only answer is to bear down upon the particularity of the poems themselves, the movement of a solitary self in their rock, and its relation to the particularity of their presiding personality. It is better to grasp ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ as a single unique occurrence, an invitation to one’s own imagination, than to see it as part of a para-philosophical structure. It is better to feel the peculiar lines of force that dominate Notes than to fit it into a philosophy founded on all the other poems. But the best thing of all is to know the point where all these forces cross, the unique Catawba in which the mumblings are the local speech, the human focus of all this physical and metaphysical fortuity. That cannot be done by exploding the whole harmonium into fragments, and reassembling it into an inclusive commentary on its ideas. There are some key issues that, for pedagogical reasons, may have to be talked about discursively: but if you understand what Stevens meant by ‘poverty’ you know almost enough; if you can see why Notes toward a Supreme Fiction was to Stevens a kind of war poem you are nearly there. Then the thinking has to be muted, seen as an aspect of the ventriloquial powers of this great poet. Like all the others he celebrates the marriage of flesh and air, but in a dialect intensely local, like Bonnie’s and Josey’s.
We first see Stevens not in perspective, in a long tradition, but flat, like one of his early poems, arbitrary relations of colour and shape. Of course Stevens has his traditional elements, the re-incarnated blank verse for example; and the pose of the atomic isolation of his poetry, which is in a sense traditional for America. And if we complain that Stevens was given to smothering simple meanings in grave or fantastic clothing, we should reflect upon the remark: ‘Poetry is like anything else, it cannot be made suddenly to drop all its rags and stand out naked, fully disclosed. Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.’
(1966-7)
Whoever wishes to know what Allen Tate thinks his criticism is like may find out from his Prefaces, which explain that it is ‘toplofty’ in tone, aggressive because the only other course is to cringe. He looks back over his essays as he might over poems (for he tells us that poets can only thus discover what they think) and he abstracts certain articles of faith. There is ‘a deep illness in the modern mind,’ it affects poetry, which, denied any ‘large field of imaginative reference,’ tends to be complex, difficult, and important. But this must not persuade us to treat poetry as something else; it cannot explain the human predicament; rather it apprehends it ‘in the mysterious limitations of form.’ This is what it does; what it is is something else, and here at any rate it resembles, as Cowley noticed in Of Wit, that ‘power divine’ which ‘we only can by negatives define.’ R. F. Foster has recently commented on Tate’s habitual negativity in this matter, but one could say that the ‘tension’ theory is the same kind of hard-won positive that Cowley reached at the climax of his poem: ‘In a true piece of Wit all things must be, Yet all must there agree.’ Much of the simple gist of Tate’s criticism is in the prefaces.
He has also, in a virtually unique essay, told us what he makes of one of his poems, the ‘Ode to the Confederate Dead’; and by the standards of modern poets this is a generous allowance of self-explication. So the author of a book on Tate finds some of the work done. Of course, Mr Tate qualifies carefully; in discussing the essays and the poem he is applying a doubtfully licit hindsight. There is not much point in distinguishing here between essays and poetry, for the best of the former, which come near to being the best of all modern critical essays, are in a way works of fiction, composed by the author of The Fathers; subtly elicited, formally constructed, ironical in a sense he and his friends taught us to recognise. Mr Foster argues, very sympathetically, that the New Criticism comes in the end to be best not as a strictly methodical kind of enquiry but as a risky, insight-conferring semi-poetry; he thinks first of Mr Blackmur in this connection, seduced, it may be, by the more intense local splendours. Yet Tate’s greatest essays are finally more remarkable; they share with the poems a visionary mode, and a tough latinate vocabulary with controlled colloquial interventions—a style learnt from a despair of aristocracy.
Of course he can speak plainly, as in ‘The Present Function of Criticism’ and ‘Literature as Knowledge’; his analyses of Morris and the early Richards are conducted with much precision. He often makes specific representations, concerning say graduate schools or literary quarterlies. And certainly on these occasions he is mindful of a deeper and more personal issue— his defence of the contemplative against the methodical. But neither these pieces, effective as they have been, nor others which owe their permanent interest to their radical relation with the author’s practice as poet, are the really great ones. In that class one thinks of ‘The Hovering Fly’ with its urbane progression d’effets, the remote passion of its Fordian climax; and of the pieces in The Forlorn Demon, where contemplation is not a topic but a mode, and most of the rest of us (whether or no we would write like that if we had the talent) must feel like the political poets whom Tate consigns to childish voyages in Percy Shelley’s paper boats. In this volume may be found the famous distinction between the symbolic and the angelic imaginations, the second characterising an extreme humanist presumption, the hubris accompanying a desire to liberate poetry from its human limitations; I have wondered whether Tate here silently recalled the greatest of all Stevens’ poetry, the passage on the angel in the last section of Notes toward a Supreme Fiction. Certainly to read the two together is to effect a sublime modern confrontation. In these beautiful and difficult essays Tate finds his full critical voice. Whether or no, as Miss Koch argued, the verse romanticises itself as it goes on, the prose surely moves triumphantly towards the idiosyncratic Thomism of these later essays, and they provide a proof of that communicability of insight asserted in the essay on Longinus.
The mode is contemplative: witness those acts of rapt attention to a few lines of Dante, or to the last scene of The Idiot. And Tate knows that most critics, including his own, are likely to be methodical, not contemplative. In the essay on Yeats, which so successfully relieves the poems of the burden of the System, he prophesied that ‘the study of Yeats in the coming generation is likely to overdo the scholarly procedure, and the result will be the occultation of a poetry … nearer the centre of our major traditions than the poetry of Eliot and Pound.’ (It might be remarked, in passing, that critics—apart from Mr Nemerov— have strangely neglected the power of Yeats over Tate as a poet.) The prophecy has, to our cost, been fulfilled, and Yeats is now almost buried under the detritus of methodical investigation. In certain cases the poetry is valued only in so far as it can be perversely said to embody what is called ‘the tradition,’ a nonsensical occultist jumble which is now being used to justify other poets as well, among them Keats. The practitioners of this perversion are the victims of that ‘positivism’ against which Tate conducted his ‘toplofty’ attacks; but theirs is the cringing defence, they abduct poetry, hide it in some grubby cell, and make it serve as a kind of Tarot pack. In practice, of course, these critics have just that ignorant passion for Method that Tate abhors; they savage Yeats with scholarly procedures divorced from all insight, and honour the gloss above the text.
This prelude is a way of saying that the man who sets out to write a book on Tate faces many difficulties. The extractable gist of the criticism, for instance, is already extracted in the Prefaces, and there will be a temptation to take the whole of the ‘thought’ methodically apart and set it up again, as if it were meccano; for who, constructing a thesis, can allow for the quasi-poetic mode and for the difference between contemplation and method? The matter is made more difficult in that the admiring critic may want to make of the ‘thought’ something acceptable to himself. (The best writer on Tate might be somebody who thought the ‘thought’ all nonsense but liked the poems.) There is another special danger in the essay ‘Narcissus as Narcissus,’ where Tate himself (though the essay is very fine) sets his critics a bad example. He dislikes allegory and has not, I think, tried to get on terms with Spenser; but his study of the Ode is allegorical. The examples for his practice are distinguished though not, in this area, very successful: Dante and St John of the Cross. But the commentary on the ‘Ode’ virtually authorises explication by free allegory, an easy approach to the poems which Tate’s mind, in a more characteristic phase, resists, if only because the approach is methodical. Such explications invite vulgar disaster in another way, by applying the casually conceited language of the graduate school to linguistic constructs of notable precision (you might say this is caused by a professional ‘hunger breeding calculation and fixed triumphs’). As to the essays, they can be torn apart, their delicate internal stresses disregarded; the parts reassembled will make theories, and contemplation will be reduced to method.
Mr Meiners1 is an able and informed enquirer, and his book is generally intelligent and useful. He is aware of many of the difficulties mentioned above, affirming for instance that you must, in Tate’s phrase, ‘discuss the literary object in terms of its specific form.’ Unhappily this merely tends to sharpen his preoccupation with method, and—what is much worse—his pleasure in discussing and demonstrating it. Mr Meiners is not a particularly bad case of this methodological obsession, but one notices how prevalent it is in the criticism of a new generation. (I assume, I hope not offensively, that Mr Meiners is young.) My immediate objections to it are not subtle, like Tate’s, but perfectly simple. It gets in the way of the works treated; method in criticism is good in so far as it approximates, like the horn on an absey, to transparency. Methodological problems have a real power to excite the serious mind, which plaits the solutions into a sort of fence; then the critic contemplates the fence—all his own work—and not the field beyond. Mr Meiners begins by wondering where he should begin, quoting Alice. At the opening of Chapter 3, on Tate’s poetic theories, he has some admirable remarks on the dangers and difficulties of what he is doing, remembering ‘Tate’s objection to the obsessive neatness of method.’ But he does nothing about this, and I would agree that by such standards any book of this kind needs to be a little treacherous, since it has its own readers to consider, and must be tolerably shapely, not merely a discontinuous and repetitive commentary. A certain amount of ‘faking’ is inevitable. Thus one excuses Mr Meiners for this degree of betrayal. Harder to forgive are the transgressions against the simpler principle of methodological transparency, as in the passage which offers a brief history of explication de texte and leads up to a credo: the author believes in something like Wimsatt’s ‘explicative holism.’ He could have let us observe him being explicatively holist and omitted this somewhat self-regarding preamble.
In fact, what follows isn’t always explicative or wholesome. Mr Meiners, the holist exegete, is not immune from the familiar afflictions of the justified explicator. For example, he says of the word ‘green’ in the third stanza of ‘Summer’ in Seasons of the Soul, that it ‘has overtones of death—witness Sir Gawain’s experience. … France is here viewed as not only dynamically alive, but, paradoxically, as barely vegetative.’ Such are the ways in which explicators can demonstrate their ingenuity in the detection of meanings: ‘paradoxically’ admits contradictory senses without further resolution, and a familiarity with the English School syllabus does the rest. What shocks me more (perhaps unreasonably) is a mistake in this same passage, where Meiners misdates the German invasion of France. ‘1939’ here rings so absurd to anybody who knows how ‘1940’ feels that one can hardly avoid thinking the point of this poem has been lost on its explicator. I hope I am not merely exhibiting the graduate supervisor’s routine insistence on accuracy in such details. The poem has to do with a particular paralysing moment; the mistake is not a year but an epoch of feeling. It seems therefore exceptionally intrusive, like the vast tact of such remarks as ‘I have some recollection that Christ once said “I bring not peace but a sword”,’ and ‘I mention ambiguity and I do not wish to be understood,’ and ‘When dealing with the Goddess of Love in her Greek role we have an extremely tricky situation and I will not attempt any complete statement of it.’
What I complain of in short, is not merely egotistical intrusion, not merely ‘methodological’ opacity. It is a matter of tone. There should not be so great a discrepancy between text and comment without some good rhetorical reason. In Mr Meiners’ book with its flashing of tools, its repeated claims to originality and dismissals of earlier critics, this discrepancy certainly exists. Perhaps this is why he does least well with the poems. They are certainly difficult to write about, but it is possible to multiply problems. The Ode is surely on any reasonable view an important and central poem, but Mr Meiners says very little about it; he assumes, rightly of course, that anybody who reads his book will know the Ode pretty well already, but by outflanking it he omits to attack the most irreducible of the problems Tate sets his readers. For it not only incarnates that contemplated past, but does so in the form of an ambiguous romantic vision which would obviously be patient of a great many different prose reductions. Meiners’ assertion that The Fathers shares such characteristics is a good one; but the difference is that the novel finds, or improves out of Ford, a technical means clearly correlative to its intelligible purpose. The difference is between a fictional device one can be rational about, and a poetic device which is arbitrary and self-justifying. The Ode is the crucial instance of something that often happens in Tate’s poetry—defiantly abrupt modulation into dream, and so, for interpretation, into allegory. There is a notably audacious instance at the beginning of ‘Autumn’ in The Seasons of the Soul, where the bathos is presumably intended or allowed for.
These effects Mr Meiners does little to describe, though I do not know that anyone else has done more. They are what would justify one’s calling Ash Wednesday Eliot’s most Tate-like poem, and the Tate’s essay of 1931 on Eliot an important veiled pronouncement on his own poetry. He disputes Eliot’s distinction of dreams into high and low, and for special purposes prefers what the other would call low ones; but he presumably agrees (or did so; these are hints of ‘angelic’ imagination) with Eliot’s remarks in the essay on St-John Perse, when he says that the reader must be one who can feel the force of obscure relations rather than seek logical transitions, that he must sense rather than understand in any ordinary fashion the collocations of vision and wit. Incidentally, a very good example of Tate’s power to give such collocations firm intellectual structure is the short poem called ‘Pastoral,’ which Meiners mentions only to chide somebody for liking it. It seems to me a very good poem, though I see that its ironies might be called Fugitive; it presents the ancient and well-endorsed desires of the locus amoenus in collocation with another sanctified theme—‘love’s not time’s fool’—witty inverted. The potently suggested aphrodisiac (‘She, her head back, waited/Barbarous the stalking tide’) is in counterpoint with the ‘deep hurrying mirror’ of the stream, and the poem is resolved by the account of the lover at her ‘wandering side’—not ‘wondering,’ though she must in fact be wondering what has gone wrong, but ‘wandering’ because she cannot get anywhere she wants to be without him, and he is lost and impotent, ‘plunged into the wide/Area of mental ire,’ and far from the conventionally sympathetic fields where lovemaking could happily occur. It isn’t, of course, impossible to relate this little poem to those areas of concern towards which allegorisation of Tate always points: dissociation, disintegration, considered as characteristically modern and contrasted with a better-built scheme of things. But this, if we allow it, merely strengthens the wit: ‘Such meditations as beguile/Courage when love grows tall’ is both a glance at Hamlet and a perfectly just nonce-revival of the Chaucerian sense of ‘courage.’ This is a very tense poem, inescapably a dream poem, inescapably witty, an invert’ Extasy.’
Donne lies behind Tate’s witty dreams, though Tate is no less different from Donne than are his other modern admirers. I do not think he, any more than Eliot, has written well on Donne; but they have both, clearly, felt well about him; and Donne is a poet who might well be in a man’s mind when he says ‘in poetry all things are possible if you are man enough.’ As to Tate’s own work, I suppose this boldness is greatest in Seasons of the Soul, the poem Meiners singles out for specially full treatment. This blend of wit with dreaming wilder than Shelley’s sets Mr Meiners great problems: he might well have said, as he considered it, ‘anything is possible in explication of poetry if you are man enough.’ With a good deal of his elaborate exposition of the poem I see no reason to agree, though it may well be that nobody else could do much better. Having called his predecessors on ‘Winter’ both ‘wonderfully suggestive’ and ‘pathetically inadequate,’ he labours long over Venus and the Hanged God and the aeternum volnus amoris of Lucretius; but merely to do so creates a somewhat false impression, and whoever needs elementary help on these points is not likely to get far with the poem anyway. I should have liked more (what there is is quite good, though) on the enormously inflated sea-conceit; the occasionally dandyish diction (‘sea-conceited scop’); the faintly Swinburnian deliquescence of ‘living’ into ‘livid’; the growth in the poem of the surrealist coral with its Dantesque tree; above all on the Freudian beast who ‘slicks his slithering wiles/To turn the venereal awl/In the livid wound of love.’ Is there a difference between this and what Tate calls modern katachresis masquerading as metaphor? I doubt it; but the phrase is compelling enough, and has to do with the theme of the sexual wasteland discussed by Tate in the essay on Eliot I mentioned earlier. ‘Venereal awl’ sounds like baroque slang for the colloquial ‘tool’—a calculated and sinister joke. These questions do not seem to be the kind that interest Mr Meiners. The explicator has a trade which grew up with modern poetry; yet a poem which so well illustrates Tate’s prose points—a walking of the rope over an abyss of error and nonsense, learning as one goes where the next step must fall—yields very little to him. The poem-dream as ‘specific’ form, as the model for that knowledge which, except as analogue, is merely knowledge of itself, is essential to Tate; one may contrast the wonderful dreams of Donne, so subordinate to an external logic and rhetoric. Tate’s explicator has to interpret dreams: so Mr Meiners can say ‘On one level the “tossed, anonymous, shuddering sea” is a visual description; on another it is a value judgment and a behavioral description of modern life.’ And it must be admitted that Mr Tate led him into this temptation, though he did not teach him this language.
Mr Meiners, one repeats, shows himself aware of the problem; one of his best observations is that Mr Tate’s poetry ‘depends upon a peculiarly intense vision in which objects and scenes, originally abstract, are forced to exist in a particular perception, a concrete detail, a specific sensation’—a perception none the worse for being approximately upside-down. He sees that the failures in Tate’s poetry are usually related to this fact, whichever way you look at it. My only genuine complaint against Meiners is that occasionally, as in the chapter of Seasons of the Soul, he is swept away by his explicative fury into practices which imply neglect of this insight and others.
It is time to add that in discussions of general issues arising from the prose and the poetry Mr Meiners is thorough and often perceptive. On ‘formalism,’ on the saving doctrine of poetry as analogy, on the problem of a poet in a society lacking ‘an objective system of truth,’ on the myth of the ante-bellum South, and on the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ in all its aspects, he does a good and lively job of exposition. As an Englishman who came late to the knowledge (and love) of the man and his books, I am grateful to Mr Meiners for some expansion of my understanding of Tate, and regretful only that the demon Method has in some ways distorted the images of the great poems, the essays and the novel.
(1964)
1 Selected Works. The Reynard Library. Hart-Davis.
1 Schopenhauer. Penguin.
1 The Poems of Ernest Dowson. University of Pennsylvania Press.
2 Smithers in fact treated Dowson very well. For information on their friendship, and much more detail on Adelaide Foltinowicz, see the excellently edited Letters of Ernest Dowson, edited by Desmond Flower and Henry Maas and published in the centenary year (1967) by Cassell.
3 Re-issued by Cassell in 1967.
1 In a letter to Mr Nimai Chatterji in 1955, Eliot says he thought he ‘coined’ the expression, but discovered that it had been used by Washington Allston. Eliot adds characteristically that he is not ‘quite sure of what I meant 35 years ago’ (Letter in New Statesman, 5 March, 1965, p. 361). Allston’s usage is in fact quite different.
1 This is from an early essay on Pound (Athenaeum, 24 October, 1919) quoted by C. K. Stead in his interesting book The New Poetic (1964), p. 132.
1 Letters of Wallace Stevens. Selected and edited by Holly Stevens. Faber, Knopf.
1 The Last Alternatives: A Study of the Works of Allen Tate. Alan Swallow. Denver.