52/ The Dark Horse/Summer1997 PERSPECTIVES an occasional series Peter Dale was for many years a co-editor of Agenda, a literary magazine with an international reputation, founded by William Cookson. Following Dale s resignation from the position last year, we asked him to write an essay about the principles behind the magazine, and his own development as a writer. PETER DALE The State of Modernism What we have been talking about as the literature of the twenties, with its grasp of the irrational, its techniques of trouble, and its irregular metaphysics with its fear of syntax, its resort to arbitrary orders, and its infinite sensuality may very well turn out to have been an aberration, a mere intermittence in the great heart of literature. R.P. Blackmur: Contemplation, Library of Congress, January 12, 1956. Published in Literary Lectures, Library of Congress, 1973. Randall Jarrell, if I remember right, remarked that Robert Lowell became a Catholic because he wanted a stick to beat the Protestants. When I was a young writer, it felt as if some stick were needed with which to belabour both the Dylan Thomasites and the Movementeers. The bardic emotional flatulence of Thomas offered no real way forward that could be appropriated and developed. On the other hand, the Movement, over-cautious and ironic in its own reaction to Thomas, had thrown out most of the poetry and settled for a kind of reflective, essayistic coterie verse by academic amateurs. The so-called Group how protectively vague the monikers were turned to a kind of sensationalist, disposable journalese. If you wanted to write lyrical poems drawn from lived experience some of the modernist ideas seemed open enough to offer alternatives. Pound, in particular, with his insistence on a more international tradition, on craft, rather than a doggedly rule-based swat on alternate syllables, with his demand that it, whatever it was, should be made new, and with his lively way of writing on these issues in his earlier work, had a magnetic attractiveness. Outspoken, vivid, and convinced, he showed the importance, as we then thought, of genuine poems. It was certainly invigorating at that time to read in The Serious Artist : The touchstone of an art is its precision ; and, in A Retrospect, No man ever writes very much poetry that matters. It was good to read that only emotion endures if only you could get the poem right. Pound s lack of respect for reputations unquestioningly received was also a useful precedent as was Grigson s for a more direct criticism; it was refreshing to hear of Blake referred to as dippy William and of Housman s metric parodied in The wind-blown seas have wet my bum / But here the beer is free. Consequently several emerging names received short shrift
Peter Dale Summer 1997/ The Dark Horse /53 in some of the reviewing in Agenda. But, best of all, the old imagist principles offered us a whole besom with which to sweep away the padding stuffed into the verse all around us. These principles still have a validity. To use no superfluous word cannot be a principle patented for imagists alone. The natural object as the always adequate symbol is a useful counsel of perfection. The fear of abstraction, particularly in multiples, again is a good rule of thumb for budding poets. To write in cadence and supple verse is often better than following the metronome. Yet the fact that these guide-lines are frequently pushed in the ubiquitous workshops indicates their limitation when you see what usually results. The imagist anthologies should have been a warning. A fairly cursory examination showed that, like all so-called movements, the principles were frequently better than their product and that some imagists who were there to make up the numbers might even be better than the official bunch. These books were also the first biggish promotion job on poetry and launched a train of publicity-seeking with which poetry has been bedevilled ever since. But imagism was useful to us then. William Cookson s interests at that time, however, as the founding editor of Agenda, went far beyond imagism. His life-long obsession with the ruined Chinese wall of The Cantos made him gravitate towards the more epic pretensions of the modernist movement and huge special issues were done on such figures as Pound repeatedly, on MacDiarmid, David Jones, Bunting, Eliot, and H.D. My own fascination, however, for modern techniques of rhyme led me to an interest in Wilfred Owen, Hopkins, Edward Thomas (for an uneasy rhymer strangely experimental), Yeats, MacNeice, Auden. I was aware of a possible alternate tradition broken off more by the First World War than by the incursions of modernism and, again, disrupted by the animosities raised by Auden s departure for the States at the outbreak of World War Two. These techniques, added to the basis of imagism, suggested that there might still be life, via Hopkins, in the old rhythms and a route to develop that might avoid the excesses of fully-fledged modernism. Imagism in its transmogrification into the so-called ideogrammatic method was unviable even, in the last analysis, for Pound. Two things came from this interest. First, the idea that everyone has that imagistically concise writing can only be extended to larger issues by the development of the sequence as may be found in the work of Geoffrey Hill. (Some of the dangers are shown in the fortuitous form of sequences like Berryman s Dream Songs and Lowell s History.) Secondly, it drew me to translate some of the founding texts or sacred cows of modernism: Villon, Laforgue, Corbière, and Dante, so that monoglots might make some sort of an investigation for themselves without some of the browbeatings of modernism. Pound and Eliot, for example, made only sporadic use of Laforgue s extensions to rhyming techniques and on a deeper level more or less ignored his concern for the role and status of women.
54/ The Dark Horse/Summer1997 Peter Dale But for better or worse, Agenda, through its founding editor and its associated translators and poets, has investigated and continues to investigate most aspects of an Eliot/Poundian modernism. Imagism and the lyric were one thing, however; full-flight modernism another, or rather several others for its was by no means a unified approach on the part of its adherents. Some of the more abstracted principles of modernism were extreme and have had ultimately deleterious effects on poetry in obscure, insidious ways as well as openly and politically in flirtation with and support of totalitarian views in both directions. Repercussions of this are all around us still. Excluding politics, three modernist views, maybe handy at the time, did ultimate damage to the reception of poetry: the idea of impersonality ; the demand and penchant for difficulty in poetry; the notion of a total break-down in rhythmic traditions. I can only touch briefly on them here. First and worst was the contentment with, even relish for, deliberate obscurity. Coleridge warned of the danger of confusing obscurity of expression with expression of obscurity. This is certainly what happens too often in The Cantos, Finnegans Wake and to a lesser extent in The Waste Land and the Ash-Wednesday poems of Eliot. Even such an enthusiast for Pound as Kenner remarked in The Pound Era: But Pound managed to sound like a crank professor... always the long way round to get home. These views ultimately led to the loss of an audience and to the handing over of poetry to the academy. The second notion, the insistence on an impersonal art was, as the first, not so much a response to a dramatic change in society but a private preference of some of the protagonists. There is a sense in which it may be true: successful poems do break free of the author; personality, in a sense, comes out of a good poem rather than being put into it. But, whichever way it happens, the modernists were not impersonal in their art in this best sense. Now that the biographical details are emerging it is becoming clear how much personal material was used openly and covertly in their work. The Pisan Cantos demonstrate this if nothing else does. Eliot later called The Waste Land a piece of rhythmical grumbling whereas it was once considered a deep criticism of the vacuity of existence in the new materialistic world. These two ideas of difficulty and impersonality were probably partly an unconscious non-poetic reaction to that modern materialistic world. Pound and Eliot had both lost academic careers at university in the pursuance of their art. This led to a wish to gather an arcane corpus of knowledge related to poetry so that the creative artist could lay claim to a specialism that gave the status and repute of an expert who could not be gainsaid in his given field. They wanted to be freelance academics. (This desire may also have been influenced by their wish to console their families about their decision to leave the safe occupation
Peter Dale Summer 1997/ The Dark Horse /55 of a university post for the socially and financially dodgy career of poet.) At the same time, they, and professors of the humanities, were feeling the encroaching importance of science in the universities so there was an increased pressure to create in self-defence a similar set of objective criteria and a corpus of complex knowledge and material relating to the creative arts. In this way, a status parallel to all-powerful science could be pieced together for the arts. The upshot of both these ideas was first the development of creative writing posts in university for which Pound was one of the earliest advocates. Secondly, schools of comparative literature developed along lines that Pound would have found exceedingly counter-productive. Thirdly, it led to the writing of acres of tedious criticism and self-conscious verse. It s also apparent from the biographical detail now emerging that although they were using such material in their work they did not want it to be pinned down to them rather than to the current state of European culture, a much more grandiose theme for major poets and rivals to professors of languages and sciences. The third notion was that the modern world had somehow left traditional rhythms incapable of development. In some of their early prose polemics both Pound and Eliot display a deliberate obtuseness of understanding in reference to the pentameter which they present as a decasyllabic line with an exaggeration of stress on the even-numbered syllables. They seemed to ignore the idea of degrees of stress that could give the line its sinew and variety of musculature. Nor did they seem to be aware of the variety that could be caused in its rhythm by the flexible use of end-stopping, over-running and the caesura. Add to this even so limited an idea of rhythmic substitution as Saintsbury explained his work was more readily available than Corbière s and Laforgue s for those who wanted to look and you do not have the pentameter but a system accommodating enough to contain Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Browning, Tennyson, Yeats, Stevens, Auden, Lowell, Larkin, Hill. On the other hand, the actual stresses Eliot intended in some of his lines are still open to doubt, while Pound with his wonderful ear has written tracts of unreadable typewriter verse. This obtuseness was used to unsettle the native run-of-the-mill poets; the French were a better stick to beat the British bourgeois. The death of metric was a personal requirement for their own space and style, not a reaction to cataclysmic changes in society and language. Thus this third notion also leads back to the idea of personality in art. As Kenner reveals, there was even a personal input at the back of William Carlos Williams unintelligible metric of the tripartite line. After a stroke, the good doctor had developed his system to make reading and finding his place more easy since he had been left able to read normal text only with great deliberation. If Asphodel, That Greeny Flower is, in parts, one of his most convincing pieces, it demonstrates that poetry frequently springs from chance rather than system. But there is a broader issue. It s a curious thing how modernist poets have to invent their own personal prosodic system and splatter it across the
56/ The Dark Horse/Summer1997 Peter Dale page in their own eccentric manner so that their lay-out alone screams their personality at you. The argument for the twentieth century s need for a new rhythmic basis for poetry was clearly spurious. If the motor-car changed our sense of rhythm irrevocably, as Eliot contended, what did the locomotive do to it a hundred years before? (My English teacher thought southern electric trains inescapably anapestic.) If sensibility had changed so drastically that these old rhythms no longer carry conviction, how come that the poets of the canon still sell more than most living authors and can still be read with feeling? Shakespeare s dramatic rhythms are still compelling it didn t need Eliot to tell us that some of the lines have fewer than five strong stresses. It may be small comfort to some but Housman has never been out of print. To conclude these points, the final intrusion of personality lies in the modernist insistence that you must mug up their own personal reading list in the sequence and emphasis which they place on it in order to master their works personality, difficulty and arrogance in the extreme. What Pound presents as citations from years of reading and research are frequently merely quotations from acquaintances turning up over the years. The notion that time and chance accidentally presented him with exactly the right books and authors for the ills of the age is absurd. The effect of all this has led fairly directly to a so-called post-modernism which is the old modernism writ large and massively more counter-productive to genuine poetry. The attempt to build up an arcane corpus of material for literature has led in the universities to the overwhelming of the genuine appreciation of literature, even of reading, by the study of so-called method and theory in the criticism and comparison of texts. The elaboration of structuralism and deconstruction leads from the impersonality of the artist to culminate in the death of the author. The obscurity of modern works has given the scholarly exegetes a field-day and probably security of tenure for ever. Not what was intended in Williams slogan no ideas but in things. Similarly, the establishment of creative writing posts and courses in almost all universities means that most poets are living in academic ghettos and have to ensure that their creative work is frequent and acceptable enough to maintain them at their posts. Hence, no youngish university-based poet wishes to chip away other people s and ultimately his own livelihood by any genuine criticism. In England, this operates somewhat differently since most professional bards are on the gad round readings, workshops and festivals, so that general recommendations of poets on a tit-for-tat basis is the rule of thumb by which the circuits maintain their circus. Besides, if all texts are merely texts then all bards are equal and any criticism is irrelevant. Ironically, Pound s modernism has led to the exact opposite of its aims, creating an out-of-touch academic poetry where he wanted something living and necessary to life. And performance poetry that toadies to the uncritical crowd is hardly the antidote. Modernism created the demise of the audience; post-modernism seeks
Peter Dale Summer 1997/ The Dark Horse /57 the death of the author. What is to be left? Computer shall speak peace unto computer. Poets may well die within the academy but there s a twitch of life outside. To resuscitate the general reader/listener is now the impossible dogged task of the poet. I suspect it may more easily happen if the reader/listener can be made to feel the sort of confidence that used to derive from the old contract of agreement with the poet that the old formal principles offered. Unfortunately poetry now needs the people more than the people need poetry. The ultimate failure of modernism and its succeeding -isms was the insistence of the poet s demands on the attentions of the readers as paramount over the reader s rights. Poetry does not derive from -isms; they usually derive from a poet and contemporaries, and successors need to do otherwise. But Collingwood s warning must be borne in mind by anyone seeking a readership: whoever tries to write a foolproof book is choosing fools for readers. Still, poetry, as Auden points out in his The Cave of Making, is not necessarily limited by these external restraints. Keats in his letter to James Hessey (9th October 1818) remarks: The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man: It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation & watchfulness in itself. That which is creative must create itself. That s how it has always been: Blake selling fifty or so copies in his life-time; Hopkins, unheard of, virtually, in his day; Ella Wheeler Wilcox selling thousands and bound in leather. I have not forgotten the men I knew in the 101st Airborne Division.... What was I to think of the new breed of university professors, structuralists, poststructuralists, deconstructionists, who taught that experience had no meaning, that the only reality was language, one word referring to another, one sign to another, with no stop in any kind of truth? Who put the word truth in quotes? Louis Simpson, from Soldier s Heart, The Hudson Review, Winter 1997