Early Writings Page 23

  It is true that most people poetize more or less, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three. The emotions are new, and, to their possessor, interesting, and there is not much mind or personality to be moved. As the man, as his mind, becomes a heavier and heavier machine, a constantly more complicated structure, it requires a constantly greater voltage of emotional energy to set it in harmonious motion. It is certain that the emotions increase in vigour as a vigorous man matures. In the case of Guido we have his strongest work at fifty. Most important poetry has been written by men over thirty.

  ‘En l’an trentiesme de mon eage’, begins Villon and considering the nature of his life thirty would have seen him more spent than forty years of more orderly living.

  Aristotle will tell you that ‘The apt use of metaphor, being as it is, the swift perception of relations, is the true hall-mark of genius’. That abundance, that readiness of the figure is indeed one of the surest proofs that the mind is upborne upon the emotional surge.

  By ‘apt use’, I should say it were well to understand, a swiftness, almost a violence, and certainly a vividness. This does not mean elaboration and complication.

  There is another poignancy which I do not care to analyse into component parts, if, indeed, such vivisection is possible. It is not the formal phrasing of Flaubert much as such formality is desirable and noble. It is such phrasing as we find in

  Era gia l’ora che volge il disio

  Ai naviganti....

  Or the opening of the ballata which begins:

  Perch ’io non spero di tornar già mai

  Ballatetta, in Toscana.

  Or:

  S’ils n ’ayment fors que pour l’argent,

  On ne les ayme que pour l’heure.

  Or, in its context:

  The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs,

  or, in its so different setting,

  Ne maeg werigmod wryde withstondan

  ne se hreo hyge helpe gefremman:

  forthon domgeorne dreorigne oft

  in hyra breostcofan bindath faeste.

  These things have in them that passionate simplicity which is beyond the precisions of the intellect. Truly they are perfect as fine prose is perfect, but they are in some way different from the clear statements of the observer. They are in some way different from that so masterly ending of the Herodias: ‘Comme elle était très lourde ils la portaient alternativement’ or from the constatation in St. Julian Hospitalier: ‘Et l’idée lui vient d’employer son existence au service des autres.’

  The prose author has shown the triumph of his intellect and one knows that such triumph is not without its sufferings by the way, but by the verses one is brought upon the passionate moment. This moment has brought with it nothing that violates the prose simplicities. The intellect has not found it but the intellect has been moved.

  There is little but folly in seeking the lines of division, yet if the two arts must be divided we may as well use that line as any other. In the verse something has come upon the intelligence. In the prose the intelligence has found a subject for its observations. The poetic fact pre-exists.

  In a different way, of course, the subject of the prose pre-exists. Perhaps the difference is undemonstrable, perhaps it is not even communicable to any save those of good will. Yet I think this orderliness in the greatest poetic passages, this quiet statement that partakes of the nature of prose and is yet floated and tossed in the emotional surges, is perhaps as true a test as that mentioned by the Greek theorician.

  V

  La poésie, avec ses comparaisons obligées, sa mythologie que ne croit pas le poète, sa dignité de style à la Louis XIV, et tout l’attirail de ses ornements appelés poétiques, est bien audessous de la prose dès qu’il s’agit de donner une idée claire et precise des mouvements du coeur; or, dans ce genre, on n’émeut que par la clarté.

  —Stendhal

  And that is precisely why one employs oneself in seeking precisely the poetry that shall be without this flummery, this fustian à la Louis XIV, ‘farcie de comme’. The above critique of Stendhal’s does not apply to the Poema del Cid, nor to the parting of Odysseus and Calypso. In the writers of the duo-cento and early tre-cento we find a precise psychology, embedded in a now almost unintelligible jargon, but there nevertheless. If we cannot get back to these things; if the serious artist cannot attain this precision in verse, then he must either take to prose or give up his claim to being a serious artist.

  It is precisely because of this fustian that the Parnassiads5 and epics of the eighteenth century and most of the present-day works of most of our contemporary versifiers are pests and abominations.

  As the most efficient way to say nothing is to keep quiet, and as technique consists precisely in doing the thing that one sets out to do, in the most efficient manner, no man who takes three pages to say nothing can expect to be seriously considered as a technician. To take three pages to say nothing is not style, in the serious sense of that word.

  There are several kinds of honest work. There is the thing that will out. There is the conscientious formulation, a thing of infinitely greater labour, for the first is not labour at all, though the efficient doing of it may depend on a deal of labour foregoing.

  There is the ‘labour foregoing’, the patient testing of media, the patient experiment which shall avail perhaps the artist himself, but is as likely to avail some successor.

  The first sort of work may be poetry.

  The second sort, the conscientious formulation, is more than likely to be prose.

  The third sort of work savours of the laboratory, it concerns the specialist, and the dilettante, if that word retains any trace of its finer and original sense. A dilettante proper is a person who takes delight in the art, not a person who tries to interpose his inferior productions between masterwork and the public.

  I reject the term connoisseurship, for ‘connoisseurship’ is so associated in our minds with a desire for acquisition. The person possessed of connoisseurship is so apt to want to buy the rare at one price and sell it at another. I do not believe that a person with this spirit has ever seen a work of art. Let me restore the foppish term dilettante, the synonym for folly, to its place near the word diletto.

  The dilettante has no axe to grind for himself. If he be artist as well, he will be none the less eager to preserve the best precedent work. He will drag out ‘sources’ that prove him less original than his public would have him.

  As for Stendhal’s stricture, if we can have a poetry that comes as close as prose, pour donner une idée claire et précise, let us have it, ‘E di venire a ciò io studio quanto posso ... che la mia vita per alquanti anni duri.’ ... And if we cannot attain to such a poetry, noi altri poeti, for God’s sake let us shut up. Let us ‘Give up, go down’, etcetera; let us acknowledge that our art, like the art of dancing in armour, is out of date and out of fashion. Or let us go to our ignominious ends knowing that we have strained at the cords, that we have spent our strength in trying to pave the way for a new sort of poetic art—it is not a new sort but an old sort—but let us know that we have tried to make it more nearly possible for our successors to recapture this art. To write a poetry that can be carried as a communication between intelligent men.

  To this end io studio quanto posso. I have tried to establish a clear demarcation. I have been challenged on my use of the phrase ‘great art’ in an earlier article. It is about as useless to search for a definition of ‘great art’ as it is to search for a scientific definition of life. One knows fairly well what one means. One means something more or less proportionate to one’s experience. One means something quite different at different periods of one’s life.

  It is for some such reason that all criticism should be professedly personal criticism. In the end the critic can only say ‘I like it’, or ‘I am moved’, or something of that sort. When he has shown us himself we are able to understand him.

  Thus, in painting, I mean something or other vaguely
associated in my mind with work labelled Dürer, and Rembrandt, and Velasquez, etc., and with the painters whom I scarcely know, possibly of T’ang and Sung—though I dare say I’ve got the wrong labels—and with some Egyptian designs that should probably be thought of as sculpture.

  And in poetry I mean something or other associated in my mind with the names of a dozen or more writers.

  On closer analysis I find that I mean something like ‘maximum efficiency of expression’; I mean that the writer has expressed something interesting in such a way that one cannot re-say it more effectively. I also mean something associated with discovery. The artist must have discovered something—either of life itself or of the means of expression.

  Great art must of necessity be a part of good art. I attempted to define good art in an earlier chapter. It must bear true witness. Obviously great art must be an exceptional thing. It cannot be the sort of thing anyone can do after a few hours’ practice. It must be the result of some exceptional faculty, strength, or perception. It must almost be that strength of perception working with the connivance of fate, or chance, or whatever you choose to call it.

  And who is to judge? The critic, the receiver, however stupid or ignorant, must judge for himself. The only really vicious criticism is the academic criticism of those who make the grand abnegation, who refuse to say what they think, if they do think, and who quote accepted opinion; these men are the vermin, their treachery to the great work of the past is as great as that of the false artist to the present. If they do not care enough for the heritage to have a personal conviction then they have no licence to write.

  Every critic should give indication of the sources and limits of his knowledge. The criticism of English poetry by men who knew no language but English, or who knew little but English and school-classics, has been a marasmus.

  When we know to what extent each sort of expression has been driven, in, say, half a dozen great literatures, we begin to be able to tell whether a given work has the excess of great art. We would not think of letting a man judge pictures if he knew only English pictures, or music if he knew only English music—or only French or German music for that matter.

  The stupid or provincial judgment of art bases itself on the belief that great art must be like the art that it has been reared to respect.

  A RETROSPECTz

  There has been so much scribbling about a new fashion in poetry, that I may perhaps be pardoned this brief recapitulation and retrospect.

  In the spring or early summer of 1912, ‘H. D.’, Richard Aldington and myself decided that we were agreed upon the three principles following:1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective.

  2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

  3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

  Upon many points of taste and of predilection we differed, but agreeing upon these three positions we thought we had as much right to a group name, at least as much right, as a number of French ‘schools’ proclaimed by Mr Flint1 in the August number of Harold Monro’s magazine2 for 1911.

  This school has since been ‘joined’ or ‘followed’ by numerous people who, whatever their merits, do not show any signs of agreeing with the second specification. Indeed vers libre has become as prolix and as verbose as any of the flaccid varieties that preceded it. It has brought faults of its own. The actual language and phrasing is often as bad as that of our elders without even the excuse that the words are shovelled in to fill a metric pattern or to complete the noise of a rhyme-sound. Whether or no the phrases followed by the followers are musical must be left to the reader’s decision. At times I can find a marked metre in ‘vers libres’, as stale and hackneyed as any pseudo-Swinburnian, at times the writers seem to follow no musical structure whatever. But it is, on the whole, good that the field should be ploughed. Perhaps a few good poems have come from the new method, and if so it is justified.

  Criticism is not a circumscription or a set of prohibitions. It provides fixed points of departure. It may startle a dull reader into alertness. That little of it which is good is mostly in stray phrases; or if it be an older artist helping a younger it is in great measure but rules of thumb, cautions gained by experience.

  I set together a few phrases on practical working about the time the first remarks on imagisme were published. The first use of the word ‘Imagiste’ was in my note to T. E. Hulme’s five poems, printed at the end of my ‘Ripostes’ in the autumn of 1912. I reprint my cautions from Poetry for March, 1913.

  A FEW DON’TS

  An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. I use the term ‘complex’ rather in the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists, such as Hart, though we might not agree absolutely in our application.

  It is the presentation of such a ‘complex’ instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.

  It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.

  All this, however, some may consider open to debate. The immediate necessity is to tabulate A LIST OF DON’TS for those beginning to write verses. I can not put all of them into Mosaic negative.

  To begin with, consider the three propositions (demanding direct treatment, economy of words, and the sequence of the musical phrase), not as dogma—never consider anything as dogma—but as the result of long contemplation, which, even if it is some one else’s contemplation, may be worth consideration.

  Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work. Consider the discrepancies between the actual writing of the Greek poets and dramatists, and the theories of the Graeco-Roman grammarians, concocted to explain their metres.

  LANGUAGE

  Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something.

  Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim lands of peace’. It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.

  Go in fear of abstractions. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don’t think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.

  What the expert is tired of today the public will be tired of tomorrow.

  Don’t imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music.

  Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it.

  Don’t allow ‘influence’ to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets whom you happen to admire. A Turkish war correspondent was recently caught red-handed babbling in his despatches of ‘dove-grey’ hills, or else it was ‘pearl-pale’, I can not remember.

  Use either no ornament or good ornament.

  RHYTHM AND RHYME

  Let the candidate fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language,aa so that the meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his attention from the movement; e.g. Saxon charms, Hebridean Folk Songs, the verse of Dante, and the lyrics of Shakespeare—if he can dissociate the vocabulary from the cadence. Let him dissect the lyrics of Goethe coldly into their component sound values, syllables long and short, stressed and unstressed, into vowels and consonants.

  It is not necessary that a poem should rely on its music, but if it does rely on its music that music must be such as will delight the expert.


  Let the neophyte know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would expect to know harmony and counterpoint and all the minutiae of his craft. No time is too great to give to these matters or to any one of them, even if the artist seldom have need of them.

  Don’t imagine that a thing will ‘go’ in verse just because it’s too dull to go in prose.

  Don’t be ‘viewy’—leave that to the writers of pretty little philosophic essays. Don’t be descriptive; remember that the painter can describe a landscape much better than you can, and that he has to know a deal more about it.

  When Shakespeare talks of the ‘Dawn in russet mantle clad’ he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he presents.

  Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.

  The scientist does not expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until he has discovered something. He begins by learning what has been discovered already. He goes from that point onward. He does not bank on being a charming fellow personally. He does not expect his friends to applaud the results of his freshman class work. Freshmen in poetry are unfortunately not confined to a definite and recognizable class room. They are ‘all over the shop’. Is it any wonder ‘the public is indifferent to poetry?’

  Don’t chop your stuff into separate iambs. Don’t make each line stop dead at the end, and then begin every next line with a heave. Let the beginning of the next line catch the rise of the rhythm wave, unless you want a definite longish pause.