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Hatc4.
CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
CONVENTION AND
REVOLT IN POETRY
BY
JOHN LIVINGSTON LOWES
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Professor of English in Harvard University
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BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
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COPYRIGHT, Igrg, BY JOHN LIVINGSTON LOWEs
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
SIXTH IMPRESSION, SEPTEMBER, Ig26
PREFACE
THE chapters which constitute this volume were
delivered as lectures at the Lowell Institute in
Boston during January, 1918. Except for some
slight shifts in the order of treatment in the
fourth chapter, they are printed as they were
given. The last lecture, in part, grew out of
what was then the One dominating and unes-
capable influence on all our thinking. It has been
allowed to stand, as the apologia pro vita sua of
such a book at such a time.
J. L. L.
January, IQI9.
II.
III.
IV.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
CONTENTS
. THE ROOTS OF CONVENTION 1
THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS 47
ORIGINALITY AND THE MoULDING OF CON-
VENTIONS 93
THE HARDENING OF CONVENTIONS, AND
REVOLT 134
THE DICTION OF POETRY VERSUS POETIC
DICTION 180
RHYME, METRE, AND VERS LIBRE 226
THE INCURSIONS OF PROSE AND THE WoduE
OF THE FRAGMENTARY 269
THE ANGLO-SAXON TRADITION 311
CONVENTION AND
REVOLT IN POETRY
I
THE ROOTS OF CONVENTION
THE subject immediately before us is the roots of
convention in poetry, not its beginnings. I have
no intention of scrutinizing the dark backward
and abysm of time for the dancing throng, or of
disquieting the spirits of the ancient bards to
bring them up. The origins of convention chro-
nologically considered will not concern us here.
There is, to be sure, keen zest in retracing the
vestiges of primitive poetry, and in reconstruct-
ing, ea pede Herculem, primitive poetry itself.
To build up Hercules from his foot, when every-
thing above the ankle is your own creation, is
an alluring exercise, and I confess its fascination,
and yield to no one in my recognition of its fruit-
fulness. But I shall take another way. The phe-
nomena of which I wish to speak spring from
the very nature of poetry. In a word, it is be-
cause poetry is what it is that its conventions
2 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
are what they are. And my task at the moment
is the scrutiny of poetry itself. In the face of
that enterprise I feel with Keats in one of his
letters: “The Cliff of Poesy towers above me,
[and] I am one that “gathers Samphire, dreadful
trade.’” ,
We may deal summarily with the definition of
convention. I am speaking to you now. And I am
using sounds which have not the remotest logical
connection with the things for which they stand.
They mean what they mean solely because we
accept them as meaning it. “Horse” has no more
connection with the animal it names than Ҽr-
Tros,” or “equus,” or “cheval,” or “Pferd.” The
varying sounds convey the idea of the creature to
their respective users simply because, through
immemorial consent, they are so understood.
That is one element in convention — acceptance.
There is another. An artist sets to work to paint
a landscape. But the landscape has three dimen-
sions, the flat surface before him has but two.
Out of the limitations of his medium he must
construct a set of symbols that will give to a
plane the appearance of depth. He does it, and
we accept it, and see depth where it is not. A
dramatist writes a play. The action covers days,
weeks, perhaps months, or even years. The play-
THE ROOTS OF CONVENTION 3
wright has at his disposal a brief three hours.
Out of the limitations of his medium he must
somehow bring it about that stage time shall pro-
duce the impression of real time. We know that
hours and months do not synchronize, yet we
accept them as coincident; we know that a sur-
face has only two dimensions, yet we accept it
as representing three. The major conventions of
art, in other words, involve not only acceptance,
but acceptance of illusion.
We are dealing, then, with the communication
of ideas, perceptions, feelings, impressions. That
involves a medium. The medium and the thing
communicated do not correspond: stage time is
not real time, a surface has not depth, words are
not things. There are differences between the re-
lations in each case, of course, but in all one fun-
damental fact appears: we accept as One thing
something which is another and a different thing.
Convention, therefore, so far as art is con-
cerned, represents concurrence in certain ac-
cepted methods of communication. And the
fundamental conventions of every art grow out
of the nature of its medium. Conventions beget
conventions, to be sure, and their ramifications
and permutations are endless. But that, for the
moment, is another story. Our business now is
4 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
with the roots of conventions in poetry. What is
the problem that the poet has to solve?
Here, on the one hand, is what William James
once called “the blooming welter” — everything
from a sea-shell to Chicago, from a restless gos-
Samer to the Swing of the planets, from my lady’s
eyebrow to the stuff of “Lear.” And here is the
poet who feels it all and strives to catch and fix
it — to catch it and fix it in words. How shall he
do it? Let me quote a part of Goethe’s famous
answer to those inquiring spirits who kept ask-
ing what idea he sought to embody in “Faust”:
It was nºt, on the whole, my way, as a poet, to strive
after the embodiment of something abstract. I received
within myself impressions — impressions of a hundred
sorts, sensuous, lively, lovely, many-hued — as an alert
imaginative energy presented them. And I had as a poet
nothing else to do but mould and fashion within me
such observations and impressions, and through a vivid
representation to bring it about that others should re-
ceive the same impression, when what I had written
was read or heard.
There we have it again in a nutshell: the phan-
tasmagoria of the concrete world; the poet’s
mind like a sensitized film, alive to impressions;
the impulse to give to these impressions form,
and to communicate. But, once more, how?
Since it is a poet of whom we’re talking, his only
THE ROOTS OF CONVENTION 5
medium is words. What happens? Let us assume
a CâS6.
I lie on the sand by the seashore. And there
pour in on me a throng of physical sensations:
light — gleaming and sparkling on the Sea, shat-
tered into fragments of a rainbow in the spin-
drift, glinting from the Sand, glancing along the
waving beach grass, luminous in the air; color—
the infinite purples of the sea, a phantom ship
shell-pink, the white flash of a gull; line — the
pure, sharp line where sea meets sky, the curve
of the beach, the exquisite pattern left by the
receding waves; sound — the slow, recurrent,
rhythmic thunder of the sea, the wind through
the grass and in my ears, like Dante’s voice
within a voice; touch — the texture of the sand
as I sift it through my fingers, the wind, soft and
flowing across my body, the warmth of the sun
felt beneath the wind; taste and smell — the
fresh, salty tang of the Sea. And those are but a
moiety of the sum.
Now clearly there are two things to be reckoned
with — I, and the surging mass of impressions.
But what for the moment I call “I,” is no less
complex than what I’ve just sketched. I may, as
I lie on the sand, be happy, dejected, in vacant
or in pensive mood, alone and glad to be, alone
6 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY .
and wishing that I were n’t, in company that
harmonizes, in company that jars. I may be see-
ing the ocean for the first time, returning to it
after a long absence, renewing a daily pilgrimage.
I may be steeped in all that the poets have ever
sung about the sea, or my mind may be to it a
tabula rasa. I may be caught by the sea’s mys-
tery, oppressed by its vastness, stirred by thema-
jestic “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further;
and here shall thy proud waves be stayed.” The
I who see am as manifold as what I see, and what
I see takes form and color, proportion and em-
phasis, from what I feel. It is obviously a prob-
lem of two worlds with which we have to deal.
Heaven forbid that I should psychologize or
metaphysicize. Call the two worlds, if you like,
the subjective and the objective, the microcosm
and the macrocosm — or any tag-words that will
ticket them. What I want to make clear is a sit-
uation — a protean and multiform ego (I pay
that homage to the psychologists) over against a
rich and thronging world of Sensible things. And
out of that situation there arise (to use again
words from a letter of Keats) “the innumerable
compositions and decompositions which take
place between the intellect and its thousand
materials before it arrives at that trembling, del-
THE ROOTS OF CONVENTION 7
icate, and snail-horn perception of beauty,”
which emerges from the labyrinth.
But let us go one step further. Suppose I am a
poet, with the artist’s imperious instinct to eac-
press. Two more elements enter in, my audience
and my medium. The audience is a bridge which
we shall cross when we come to it. And for a
poet, the sole medium is words. And there’s the
rub. -
For what we are concerned with is the com-
munication of what is seen, felt, heard, tasted,
smelled. And once more the medium is speech.
But words cannot give the things in themselves.
Color can give color, line line, but the relation
between words and things is not and cannot be
direct. Words are not warm or luminous, they
have not line or color, they are not salt, they are
odorless. Sound and movement they have, in
common with what I hear and See, and that is all.
But even so, the Sound and movement are not
the same. I cannot give the things directly; I
must transfer and translate. If I say the sea is
blue, the sea has a thousand blues. And the blue
off Nantucket is not the miracle of luminous,
translucent color off Sardinia. Once more, I can-
not paint it; what do I do? I fall back upon its
relations to things that are like, yet different —
8 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
more fixed than it, less fluctuating, indetermi-
nate, evanescent. “A . . . breeze, ruffling up the
larkspur-blue Sea, breaking the tops of the waves
into egg-white foam, shoving ripple after ripple
of pale jade-green over the shoals of Aboukir
Bay”; “Blue as the tip of a deep blue salvia
blossom, the inverted cup of the sky arches over
the sea.” Those are from a prose poem published
a few months ago by the most modern of the
modernists. We have not advanced a step (nor
can we), so far as the inexorable limitations of
the medium are concerned, beyond the “wine-
dark Sea” of Homer. ,
We are shut up, then, in our expression of the
actual world as it impinges upon us, to indirec-
tions. “What does it look like, Sound like, feel
like, taste like, Smell like?” — that formula is
the very sea-mark of our utmost sail. Come back
for a moment to our supposititious poet on the
beach. How does he, in point of fact, translate
his world of sea and sky? The flash and sparkle of
the sunlit waves become Æschylus’ “innumer-
able laughter” of Shakespeare’s “multitudinous
sea.” The breakers “dart their hissing tongues
high up the Sand”; “the hard sand breaks, And
the grains of it Are clear like wine”; “the low
wind whispers near”; out on the ship, “the sails
THE ROOTS OF CONVENTION 9
do sigh like sedge”; nearer, “the mighty Being is
awake, And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder everlastingly”; and by and
by night “smokes about the burning crest Of the
old, feeble, and day-wearied sun.” We even turn
the thing about:
And through the music of the languid hours,
They hear like ocean on a western beach
The surge and thunder of the Odyssey.
I know I am talking of a trite and threadbare
theme — namely, figures of speech. But the trite
we fight shy of because it is trite, is sometimes
more shining than the upstart new, if we will but
brush off the dust. And we are apt to forget, in
our boredom with the eternal truisms about
similes and metaphors as poetical embellish-
ments, the pregnant fact of the inevitability of
imagery — an inevitability rooted and grounded
as deeply in the nature of the poet’s medium,
language, as stage time is inherent in the neces-
sities of the dramatic medium, or perspective in
the restrictions of a flat surface. And the poet,
strive as he may, cannot escape the limitations.
Dorothy Wordsworth wrote in her “Journal”
in 1802: “William tired himself with seeking
an epithet for the cuckoo.” And he tired himself,
at intervals, for just forty-three years in the
10 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
attempt to express directly what cannot be
expressed directly — the Sound of the cuckoo’s
“wandering voice.” Read especially the second
stanza of “To the Cuckoo,” written in 1804, as
Wordsworth came back and back to it in 1807,
1815, 1820, 1827, and 1845, and struggled be-
tween fact and seeming. Yet the final triumph
of the poem — a triumph unsurpassed in its
kind in English poetry — lies primarily in its
translation of the cuckoo's literal voice into
terms of inner experience.
Nor is the inevitability of imagery, of course,
confined to verse. It belongs to every attempt to
give in words our impression of things. Dorothy
Wordsworth was, I suspect, a far more keen and
exquisite observer than her brother. She puts in
her “Journal” one day her favorite birch tree.
How does she make us see what she sees? “The
Sun shone upon it, and it gleamed in the wind
like a flying, sunshing shower. It was a tree in
shape, with stem and branches, but it was like
a spirit of water.” Fitzgerald, like our hypotheti-
cal poet, is basking in the Sun: “Here is a glori-
ous Sunshiny day; all the morning I read about
Nero in Tacitus, lying at full length on a bench
in a garden; a nightingale singing, and some red
anemones eyeing the sun manfully not far off.”
THE ROOTS OF CONVENTION 11
“A funny mixture all this,” he goes on: “Nero
and the delicacy of Spring . . . nightingales sing-
ing, [and] Tacitus full of pleasant atrocity.”
Well, the blooming welter is a funny mixture,
in which, please observe, Fitzgerald himself is
an essential element! And that brings us back
from the world perceived to the other element
in our complex: namely, the percipient poet —
to me (who am obligingly playing the part),
with my permanent bents, my transient emo-
tions, my passing moods. For what I strive to
give is, again, not the things themselves but my
impression of things — things, that is, as they
affect me, as I feel them.
But can I express even my feelings directly? I
can say: “I am sad.” But “sad” tells no more
than “blue” before. There are as many sad-
nesses as there are shifting aspects of the sea. I
can say: “I hate.” But is it the hatred of Shylock
for Antonio, or of Płegan and Goneril for Cor-
delia, or of St. Paul for sin, or of Germany for
England? I can say: “I love”; but the grada-
tions and degrees of love are infinite. Is it the
love of John, Peter, Paul, Martha, Mary, St.
Francis, or St. Theresa, “with all her brim-filled
bowls of fierce desire”? Is it the love of Launce-
lot, Tristan, Romeo, Anthony, Abelard, Dante,
12 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
Goethe, or of this one or that of all the infinitely
diverse men and women who have ever lived and
loved, “even as you and I.”? “I love,” for telling
all, is like saying, “the sea sounds.”
I have, to be sure, a means of expressing my
feelings directly. There are cries, tears, gestures,
Shining eyes, quivering nostrils, compressed lips.
And the painters and sculptors can give us
that—witness Dürer's Melancolia, Leonardo’s
Mona Lisa, Michelangelo's figures in the Chapel
of the Medici. But these are not words. The in-
finite variety of pleasure and pain can no more
be expressed directly by words than the endless
play of light and color on the sea. Words do not
love, hate, suffer, enjoy, any more than they
taste, or smell, or are soft or cool; they have not
in themselves passion, as they have not solidity
or line. Yet, again, if I am a poet, they are my
only medium. What is my way out? I must trans-
late once more:
O Spartan dog,
More fell than anguish, hunger, or the sea!
Surprised by joy, impatient as the wind.
We watch'd her breathing thro’ the night,
Her breathing soft and low,
As in her breast the wave of life
Kept heaving to and fro.
THE ROOTS OF CONVENTION 13
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising —
Haply I think on thee: and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at Heaven’s gate.
To put my feelings into words, no less than to
record my impressions of sensuous things, I must
relate them to something else.
The basic convention of imagery, then, has its-
roots in the essential limitations of the poet's
medium; in the fact that language itself stands
in no immediate relation to the objects which
it represents, but is a congeries of conventional
symbols — of symbols which themselves, as it
happens, owe alike their origin and growth to in-
numerable similar transfers. For the substance of
poetry is also the very stuff of words. And in its
larger Sense as well, the language of poetry is
made up inevitably of symbols— of symbols for
things in terms of other things, for things in
terms of feelings, for feelings in terms of things.
It is a language not of objects, but of the complex
relations of objects. And the agency that moulds
it is the ceaselessly active power that is special to
poetry only in degree — imagination, that fuses
the familiar and the strange, the thing I feel and
the thing I see, the world within and the world
without, into a tertium quid that interprets both.
Open Shakespeare anywhere:

14 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
Thou are not conquer’d: beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And death’s pale flag is not advanced there.
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain.
Put out the light, and then put out the light.
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me; but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat,
That can thy light relume. When I have pluck’d
the rose
I cannot give it vital growth again,
It needs must wither.
There are the two worlds — on the one hand,
thought and affliction, passion, hell itself; on
the other, what we have heard, what we have
seen with our eyes, what we have looked upon,
and our hands have handled — each incomplete
without the other; each, in a true Sense, non-
existent without the other. And poetry mediates
between the two; or rather, it brings the two to-
gether into one. And this is not rhapsody, but
sober truth.
“Life, and Emotion, and I.” — so Matthew
Arnold once summed up the poet’s triad. I should
put it somewhat differently. There are two vivid
THE ROOTS OF CONVENTION 15
sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney, the first and the
fifteenth in “Astrophel and Stella,” which deal
with the exigencies of the poet’s problem. Their
endings will help me to what I mean:
Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless
in my throes;
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:
“Fool!” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart,
and write!”
So the first. “But if,” says the second,
But if (both for your love and skill) your name
You seek to nurse at fullest breasts of Fame;
Stella behold! and then begin to endite.
“Look in your heart and write”; “Stella behold
and write”: there, in summary form, is the eter-
nal triangle of the poet’s art — what you feel,
what you see, what you say: emotion, an object,
and speech. And speech, like a shuttle, plays
back and forth between the other two — the
feeling and the thing — weaving a fabric from
both, that is yet neither.
For we must come at once to a second funda-
mental attribute of poetry which follows from
the first. I have tried to make clear how the con-
vention of imagery grows out of the essential
character of the poetic medium. But imagery, or
rather the basic necessity that lies behind it, car-
16 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
ries with it as a corollary a mass of conventions
which we may sum up broadly as the World of
Illusion. And that means — what?
Here we are at once on ticklish ground. I ea-
gerly desire to steer clear of metaphysics, the
perilous edge of which I am circumspectly skirt-
ing. For I am compelled to speak of appearance,
and reality, and fact, and truth, and by instinct
I shy at the terms. Let us, however, make the
plunge, holding firmly to the concrete as a life
line.
I have said that poetry builds up a fabric out
of the relations of things different, yet alike. It
does not deal with objects per se, but with ob-
jects as they appear to us. It must paint the
thing as it sees it — not, alas! for the god of
things as they are, who presumably sees them as
they are, but for us mortals, who see them not at
all as they are, but simply as they seem. And the
poet’s business is with appearances, not facts.
That is a hard saying. Instead of dogmatizing, let
us go to the fountain-head, to poetry itself. In 1833
Tennyson wrote, in “The Miller's Daughter”:
Remember you that pleasant day
When, after roaming in the woods,
(‘T was April then), I came and lay
Beneath those gummy chestnut buds
That glistened in the April blue.
THE ROOTS OF CONVENTION 17
The Quarterly paid its respects with alacrity
to the chestnut buds, and with some reason.
Gummy they indubitably were, but what under
Heaven had that incontrovertible fact of nature
to do with what the lover saw? He was n’t at
the moment climbing trees in the Hesperides to
finger fruit; he was looking at a shining object.
And in 1842 the offending lines became:
. . . I came and sat
Below the chestnuts, when their buds
Were glistening to the breezy blue.
That gives the truth of appearance; the truth
of fact (to wit, stickiness) is at the moment
sheer impertinence. Take a somewhat different
case. In the “Ancient Mariner,” as printed in the
“Lyrical Ballads,” occurred the familiar lines:
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free.
Later, in “Sibylline Leaves,” the second line was
printed thus:
The furrow stream'd off free.
And Coleridge appended to the revised line a
note:
In the former editions the line was, “The furrow fol-
1owed free.” But I had not been long on board a ship,
before I perceived that this was the image as seen by
18 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
a spectator from the shore, or from another vessel.
From the ship itself the Wake appears like a brook
flowing off from the stern.
Perfectly true, and truth of appearance at that.
But supererogatory truth of fact lurks behind
the change, none the less. For the Mariner, as
Coleridge’s intellect, hunting alone, perceived,
was on the ship, not off it, and so should see the
furrow streaming away, not following. But to
obtrude that fact is to snap the spell — to take
the Ancient Mariner from the mystery of his
silent sea and set him, an old sailor, at the stern
of a boat. A line that is as inevitable as the near-
ing of the spectre-bark itself was marred by a
meticulous observance of irrelevant truth of fact.
And eleven years later, with his unruly intellect
in its place again, Coleridge restored the original
reading.
It is unnecessary to labor the point. Poetry,
both the old and the newest of the new, is com-
pact of what seems, not of what is; of what, if
taken literally, never was, on sea or land. Ponder
the following statements, regarded as matters
of fact:
Lie still and deep,
Sad soul, until the sea-wave washes
The rim o' the sun.
THE ROOTS OF CONVENTION 19
All in the hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.
Large and smoky red the sun’s cold disk drops,
Clipped by naked hills, on violet shaded Snow.
I wept as I remember'd how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
Part of a moon was falling down the west,
Dragging the whole sky with it to the hills.
Like a four-sided wedge
The Custom House Tower
Pokes at the low, flat sky,
Pushing it farther and farther up.
Not one of these statements is literal fact; every
one of them is true, as a transcript of appearance.
And all of them, and ten thousand others, grow
out of the fundamental necessities of art, and
directly out of the initial situation that I have
tried to sketch. º
For art deals in illusion. Literal accuracy, even
when possible, is art’s undoing. A tree painted
with sedulous exactness as a tree, would never
give the tree at all; painted as Corot paints it,
or Rembrandt etches it, it’s more a tree than if
it were a tree. The tension sensed behind the
thirty-one lines, that take less than two minutes
20 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
to repeat, between “”T is now struck twelve”
and “the bell then beating one,” in the first scene
of “Hamlet,” is, to all intents and purposes, an
hour; sixty literal minutes of intervening talk on
the stage would drag it to eternity. These are
truisms. But it is the essence of art that its cre-
ations seem more true than if they were true —
as Hamlet is truer than John Jones. Consider,
for a moment, the titanic grandeur of Shake-
speare’s later heroes — that something colossal,
like Michelangelo's figures, of which Professor
Bradley speaks. Othello, Macbeth, Lear, Corio-
lanus, Anthony, are not transcripts of reality.
They are truer than if they were. And it is be-
cause they can’t be actual that they can be true
— precisely as it is because Rembrandt’s me-
dium can’t emulate a camera, that he can paint
the Night Watch; precisely as a medium that
can’t present directly actual space becomes
thereby capable of suggesting the depths beyond
depths through which the eye is carried in some
great landscapes. It is the fact that words are
not and cannot be attached to things, that leaves
them free, so that out of the very limitations of
the medium comes liberty. And it is again no
rhapsody, but sober, even scientific truth, to say
that it is because Keats could not reproduce in
THE ROOTS OF CONVENTION 21
words a window, that he could give us “magic
casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas
in faëry lands forlorn.” If the artistic medium, of
whatever sort, were capable of actual reproduc-
tion, there would be no art. For the “effects of
grandeur,” to use a pregnant phrase of Mere-
dith’s, “are wrought out through a series of illu-
sions, that are illusions to the sense within us only
when divorced from the groundwork of the real.”
But it is that divorce which true art never makes.
For true illusion (if the paradox may be per-
mitted), though it may be a dome in air, springs
from the ground. It exists, because the law is
ineluctable that the actual must be translated.
But it is, on the other hand, the actual that rouses
the poet’s inner vision, and sets it assorting and
weaving its thousand materials. Keats wrote to
Reynolds from Winchester:
I never liked stubblefields so much as now — Aye
better than the chilly green of the Spring. Somehow, a
stubblefield looks warm — in the same way that some
pictures look warm. This struck me so much in my
Sunday’s walk that I composed upon it.
There is reality — a stubblefield. There, too, is
the bald statement of the impression of a stub-
blefield on Keats: “[I like] stubblefields better
than the chilly green of Spring . . . Somehow a
22 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
stubblefield looks warm.” And here is the trans-
lation of the impression into art, in the “Ode to
Autumn”:
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinëd flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.
There are the stubblefields, and the spirit that
haunts them! Actual? No. True? Yes — if there
be any virtue and if there be any truth. Two days
earlier, after a delectable description of Winches-
ter with its “excessively maiden-lady-like side
streets” and its “staid and serious knockers,”
Keats wrote to George and Georgiana Keats:
Some time since I began a poem . . . quite in the
spirit of town quietude. I think I will give you the
sensation of walking about an old country town in a coolish
evening.
And what he enclosed was the fragment of the
THE ROOTS OF CONVENTION 23
“Eve of St. Mark.” Read it again, in the light of
Keats's remark, and try your own hand at giv-
ing, in literal terms for actual things, “the spirit
of town quietude”! And then ponder on the
function of illusion. Poetry starts from the actual
and ends in the true — as Coleridge started
from the account of “the Citie Xandu,” on the
eightieth page of Purchas’s Third Part, and
ended in the vision of the stately pleasure-dome
— shattered, alas! by the intrusion of another
actuality in the guise of the “person on business
from Porlock.” Reality serves the artist, in
Keats's own phrase, “as a starting-post towards
all ‘the two-and-thirty Palaces.” For the poet
is like Saul the Son of Kish, who started out to
find his father’s asses — in a stubblefield, for
aught I know — and found a kingdom.
Let me pause for a moment, to insist with the
utmost explicitness that not one word that I have
said runs counter to the demands of delicate and
penetrating accuracy of observation, or of scrup-
ulous fidelity to fact as it appears. Exactness of
observation and illusion do not conflict. Some of
the most significant recent verse, in particular,
is compact of both. But that I wish to reserve for
fuller discussion another time. Meanwhile let us
proceed with our analysis.
24 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
The poet’s truth which is presented through
illusion is also truth tinged with emotion. There
it differs fundamentally from that other aspect
of truth which the scientist strives to catch and
fix. And because the object of poetry, in the
words of Wordsworth’s famous pronouncement,
is “truth . . . carried alive into the heart by
passion,” one element of poetic illusion is a
heightening of actual fact. For emotion enhances
reality, and truth of feeling, which is as veracious
in its own sphere as truth of intellect, must be
reckoned with as another object of the illusion of
art. Take one brief line: “The desire of the moth
for the star.” The moth does not desire the star.
The flame of the candle it may, and does, desire.
But the magnificent and daring heightening in
that one word has lifted the line from a.state-
ment of a fact of entomology into a poignant and
unforgettable expression of one of the deepest
truths of human life. “Poetry should surprise by
a fine excess,” wrote Keats, and that excess is
at the heart of the illusion that exalts without
deceiving.
Tiger, Tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night.
There is not a shred of fact about that. Yet it is
truth at white heat — the truth of terror and
THE ROOTS OF CONVENTION 25
mystery and baleful beauty, fused into one
flaming impression. And that is the very stuff
of poetry.
Take, O take those lips away,
That so sweetly were forsworn;
And those eyes, the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn!
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like
the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life’s common way.
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep.
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry:
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the Sun.
Do we believe these things? In the answer to that
question we come from another angle back to the
heart of the matter.
For what we may call the language of poetry
in the larger sense — and that includes illusion
— exists under precisely the same conditions as
words themselves. And words mean what we
mean them to mean, and what we accept them
as meaning, and nothing else. It is concurrence
alone, not logic, that determines their signifi-
26 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
cance. If I say that blackberries are red when
they are green, I mean what you take me to
mean, not the kaleidoscopic sequence of contra-
diction that logic finds in my remark. Consent
is the be-all and end-all of speech. Now illusion
also means what it is meant to mean, and what
we accept it as meaning. It’s a glorified “Let’s
play,” if you will, in the sense that, like children
“pretending” (Stevenson’s “Lantern Bearers,”
say), we see through it, and yet believe. Amiel
was right when he spoke of “that poetical and
artistic illusion which does not aim at being con-
founded with reality itself.” It neither aims at it,
nor do we understand it so, and to see that, is to
clear our minds of endless confusion. John Dry-
den’s robust common Sense is at one with Amiel’s
critical acumen: “For a play,” says he, “is still
an imitation of nature; we know we are to be de-
ceived, and we desire to be so.” And we do not
balk at the sea-wave washing the rim of the sun,
which we know it does not do, any more than we
boggle at blackberries that are red when they
are green, although we know the colors as colors
to be mutually exclusive. We simply exercise
“that willing suspension of disbelief for the mo-
ment, which,” as Coleridge says, “constitutes
poetic faith.” In a word, illusion is a convention
THE ROOTS OF CONVENTION 27
— a convention which poetry shares with the
other arts. And its roots, on the one hand, are in
the nature of the poetic medium itself, and on
the other, in that common consent which under-
lies the possibility of all communication what-
SOeVer.
Now, granted this presupposition (and it is axi-
omatic), it follows that the sole criterion of the
truth of illusion is its inner congruity. Let me
make that clear, first from some instances of the
poets’ striving to attain it, and then by a few
examples of how it is broken in upon.
There is no more illuminating commentary on
the art of poetry than the poets’ own revision of
their work. And that revision is constantly di-
rected towards keeping the illusion true. I have
already used a passage from “The Miller's
Daughter” to point another moral. The first line
of the stanza which immediately succeeds the
one which immortalized the “gummy chestnut
buds,” begins as follows:
A water-rat from off the bank
Plunged in the stream.
Upon that, too, the Quarterly poured out the
vials of its scorn, and once more with reason.
Not, let me hasten to protest, because a water-
rat is unpoetical. Mice and rats and such small
28 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
deer are perfectly in place in poetry, when they
are in place. They are triumphantly at home
in “The Jolly Beggars,” when
. . . staggering, and Swaggering,
He roar'd this ditty up . . .
While frighted rattons backward leuk
And seek the benmost bore.
But the associations that cluster about rats clash
as sharply with the other associations that Ten-
nyson happens to be evoking in his picture, as
those same associations accord with the magnifi-
cent Hogarthianism of “The Jolly Beggars.” It
is not of the slightest moment whether, in point
of fact, a water-rat jumped, or an otter, or a
turtle, or a frog. Tennyson is not rehearsing
facts of natural history; he is striving for con-
sistency of impression. And in 1842 the water-rat
disappeared forever, and instead:
Then leapt a trout. In lazy mood
I watch'd the little circles die.
Let me be extremely explicit again: the point is
not that a trout is more poetic than a water-rat,
It is simply that the one destroys, the other helps
create, the particular illusion that Tennyson at
the moment was seeking to create.
That is a rather obvious example, from a poem
where the creative energy was working (I think
THE ROOTS OF CONVENTION 29
it must be said) at low tension. Take another,
this time of the highest imaginative quality. Here
are the first ten lines of “Hyperion,” as they now
stand.
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,
Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung about his head -
Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer’s day
Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
There, if it ever was secured, is absolute truth of
illusion, and flawless consistency of the imagery
that creates it: “eve’s one star,” “quiet as a
stone,” “still as the silence,” “forest on forest”
hanging motionless “like cloud on cloud” — the
landscape and its one Titanic central figure per-
meated with utter stillness, remoteness, silence,
majesty. But Keats wrote first — to take two
lines only:
Not so much life as a young vulture’s wing
Would spread upon a field of green-ear'd corn —
on second thought deleting the vulture in favor
of an eagle. What has happened? A world that
is motionless as death and hueless as despair, is
30 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
broken in upon by a vulture’s flight, and the
vivid freshness of the summer’s green. The whole
key is changed. And so Keats cancelled the lines,
and wrote in the margin of the manuscript:
Not so much life as on a summer’s day
Płobs not at all the dandelion’s fleece.
But fleece or no fleece, the dandelion’s blithe and
sunny gold snaps utterly the spell. And at last,
in the proof-sheets, the elusive harmony was
captured once for all:
Not so much life as on a summer’s day
Robs not one light seed from the feathered grass.
And the landscape is now motionless and hueless
from hanging cloud to fallen leaf. It is the stuff
that dreams are made on, to be sure, not fact.
But it has the supreme truth of poetry, which is
inviolate consistency with itself.
I resolutely resist the temptation to illustrate
further, even though there beckons me Words-
worth’s substitution of “the whistling rustic
tending his plough” for “the rural milk-maid
by her cow,” in the Toussaint L’Ouverture son-
net, and a score of other alluring possibilities.
For I want a moment for that other shattering
of illusion which comes by way of the intrusion
of fact. And since Wordsworth at his best is in-
THE ROOTS OF CONVENTION 31
fallible in his touch, and as unerring as a shaft of
light, we may take him without scruple at his
worst, if only to justify the airy charm he works
when he inherits Prospero’s staff and book. Con-
sider, accordingly, a stanza from “The Thorn.”
Wordsworth tells us himself that the poem arose
out of his observing “on the ridge of Quantock
Hill, on a stormy day, a thorn which [he] had
often past, in calm and bright weather, without
noticing it.” “I said to myself,” he continues,
“‘Cannot I by some invention do as much to
make this Thorn, permanently an impressive
object as the storm has made it to my eyes at
this moment?’ I began the poem accordingly.”
That, you will observe, is very like Keats and
his stubblefield — except that Keats did not say
to himself: “Go to; let us make a stubblefield
impressive.” At all events, no one ever set him-
self more doggedly than Wordsworth in this
instance, to create the fabric of illusion out of
the raw material of reality. I shall take but one
Stanza:
High on a mountain's highest ridge,
Where oft the stormy winter gale
Cuts like a scythe, while through the clouds
It sweeps from vale to vale —
So far we are on the heights (even if not very
32 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
near the summit), fairly safe in the airy citadel
of poetry. But the stanza remorselessly proceeds:
Not five yards from the mountain path,
This Thorn you on your left espy;
And to the left, three yards beyond,
You see a little muddy pond
Of water — never dry,
Though but of compass small, and bare
To thirsty Suns and parching air.
The illusion is precipitated; the spell is snapt
again, “as the fractured point of a Prince
Rupert’s tear reduces the crystal globule to
sand.” For poetic truth and literal fact are like
the Franklin’s love and lordship:
Love wol nat ben constreyned by maistrye;
Whan maistrie comth, the god of love anon
Beteth his wings, and farewell he is gon!
And poetic truth lies buried in the infant’s grave
that Wordsworth digged a few lines later in the
poem:
I’ve measured it from side to side,
*T is three feet long, and two feet wide.
“I do not know,” says Audrey to Touchstone,
“what “poetical’ is. Is it honest in deed and
word? Is it a true thing?” “No, truly,” says
Touchstone, “ſor the truest poetru is the most.
feigning. Out of the mouth of fools comes forth
wisdom (when the voice is the voice of Shake-
THE ROOTS OF CONVENTION 33
speare!), but poetry in quest of fact has some-
times evinced a kinship with the bewildered
intellect of Audrey.
I am dwelling persistently upon illusion, be-
cause the fundamental conventions of poetry
grow inevitably out of the fact that art is what
it is, a translation, not a transcript, of reality.
And there is another question which it is neces-
sary to ask about illusion. Are there other postu-
lates with which it dare not clash — that say to
illusion: “Thus farshalt thougo, and no farther?”
Two such checks and balances, I think, present
themselves.
In the first place, common sense does not
abdicate its throne. The willing suspension of
disbelief may not be strained too far. Even the
incredible is subject to standards of credibility.
Aristotle, who knew everything, knew that. Bet-
ter a probable impossibility, he declares, than
an improbable possibility. We grant the world
of illusion freely, but once granted, we demand
that it shall have its own probability. For illusion
carries no license to play at ducks and drakes
with the materials which it combines. Dryden,
in his “Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic
License,” quotes what he regards as the best
“example of excellent imaging” from his own


34 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
“State of Innocence and Fall of Man.” Here
it is:
Seraph and cherub, careless of their charge,
And wanton, in full ease now live at large;
Unguarded leave the passes of the sky,
And all dissolved in hallelujahs lie.
Then he proceeds: “I have heard (says one of
[my well-natured censors) of anchovies dissolved
in Sauce; but never of an angel in hallelujahs. A
mighty witticism!” he continues, . . . “He might
have burlesqued Virgil too, from whom I took
the image: “They invade the city, buried in
sleep and wine.’ A city’s being buried, is just as
proper on occasion, as an angel’s being dissolved
in ease, and Songs of triumph.” So Dryden, drag-
ging a red herring across the trail with admirable
dexterity. For “buried in sleep” or “dissolved in
ease” unite two impressions which the usage of
imagery permits to merge. But Seraphs and cher-
ubs dissolved in hallelujahs violate what Cole-
ridge calls “the chosen laws controlling choice,”
of art. Shakespeare’s instinct was infallible, when
he substituted, in revising “Hamlet,” “the morn
in russet mantle clad” for “the sun in russet
mantle clad,” that “walks o'er the dew of yon
high mountain top.” The Sun walking in a russet
mantle remains untranslated, so to speak; the Sun
THE ROOTS OF CONVENTION 35
stays Sun, and the mantle a mantle, as angels re-
main insoluble in hallelujahs. The morn in russet
mantle, walking o'er the dew of yon high eastward
hill is, on the other hand, a blending of images in
entire accord with the tacit understanding that
controls illusion. And observe: though we stickle
at the sun clad in a russet mantle, we accept the
perfect fusion of impressions in:
Where the great Sun begins his state,
Robed in flames and amber light.
The union there has to the full what Coleridge
calls “credibilizing effect.” It is just that effect
which we miss, I think, in the case of Francis
Thomson's poppy:
With burnt mouth red like a lion’s it drank
The blood of the sun as he slaughter'd sank.
The poppy’s “burnt mouth red like a lion’s.”
and the “blood of the slaughtered sun,” mag-
nificently daring as they are, strain my poetic
credulity to the breaking point. The illusion º
shattered because the translation of the actual
is into terms themselves too potently actual to
merge. The Supreme transmutation into the very
quintessence of truth in “Tiger, tiger, burning
bright,” is absent.
Have I made clear what I mean? Illusion is
36 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
not lawless. It is a world apart, if you please, but
within it are its own necessities, which exact in-
exorable adherence to their mandates, if the
world which we have willed is to exist at all.
That is one check upon illusion. Is there another?
There are what we call the laws of nature.
Dare the poet run counter to these? May he
venture, for example, since he may represent the
sun as old and feeble, or may speak of its cold
disk — may he also represent it as setting in the
East? He may modify actual fact; may he also
contradict it? There has been a good deal of dust
raised about the question, but, like the others, it
reduces wholly, in the last analysis, to a matter
of acceptance. How far do we stretch our willing
suspension of disbelief that constitutes poetic
faith? That is the sole criterion. Well, there is no
question of our extending the suspension to in-
clude transcendence of natural law. We accept
without an instant’s hesitation, in the “Ancient
Mariner,” the spectre-bark, and all the super-
natural agencies that underlie the action of the
poem. Like ghosts and fairies and spells, those
belong to the misty midregion of our racial as
well as literary inheritance, towards which we
cherish at least the poetical will to believe. We do
not, on the other hand, unless I am mistaken,
THE ROOTS OF CONVENTION 37
accept violation of natural law — if we know it.
If, in the “Ancient Mariner,” we think that the
“one bright star within the nether tip” of the
moon means what Coleridge pretty certainly
did nºt mean it to mean, – namely, that the
Mariner saw a star through the solid, opaque
body of the moon, — we balk, and begin to write
notes upon the error. For that is n’t part of the
spell that we accept; it contradicts universal
experience, and does violence to that stubborn
persuasion within us which Dr. Johnson felt,
when he refuted Bishop Berkley by “striking his
foot with mighty force against a stone.” In a
word, a star seen through the moon is in a wholly
different category from a spectre-bark. The last
we freely acquiesce in; if we understand the first
to be meant, our suspension of disbelief termi-
nates forthwith. f
I said, a moment ago, that we do not accept
violation of natural law, if we know it. The
poet may, on the other hand, make such things
be, and overcome us like a summer’s cloud, with-
out our special wonder. But if he does it success-
fully, he must seem not to have done it. And that
way peril lies. For in this particular quarter of
the world of appearance there holds good, I fear,
the sad truth that applies to sin: “man may
38 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
securely sin, but safely never” — or at least,
hardly ever. Still, in seeming as in sin, it is some-
times done, and here is a case in point.
On the evening of April 18, 1827, Goethe laid
before Eckermann an engraving of a landscape
of Rubens, and asked him to point out what he
saw. Eckermann named the outstanding details
of the picture.
“Good,” said Goethe, “that would seem to be all.
But you’ve missed the main point. All these objects
that we see before us there — the herd of sheep, the
hay-cart, the horses, the reapers going home — from
which side are they lighted?” “They have the light,”
said I, “on the side turned towards us, and throw the
shadows into the picture. Particularly, the reapers in
the foreground are in strong light, which produces a fine
effect.” “Through what, however, has Rubens brought
about this beautiful effect?” “Through the fact,” I
replied, “that he throws these bright figures against a
dark background.” “But this dark background,” per-
sisted Goethe, “how does it come to be there?” “It is
the strong shadow,” said I, “that the clump of trees
throws towards the figures.” “But how is that?” I con-
tinued, in astonishment. “The figures throw their
shadow into the picture, the clump of trees, on the
other hand, throws its shadow touards the spectator!
So we have the light from two opposite sides; but that’s
really contrary to all nature.”
Now may I interrupt the conversation at this
point to observe that the invaluable Eckermann
did n’t see the violation of nature until Goethe
THE ROOTS OF CONVENTION 39
had performed the Socratic function with truly
national efficiency. And what is more, we may
be reasonably certain that Rubens did n’t mean
the Eckermanns to see it. The Goethes he’d have
to reckon with. To resume:
“That’s just the point,” replied Goethe, with a little
Smile. “It’s through this that Rubens shows himself a
master, and proclaims that he stands with free spirit
above nature, and treats it in accordance with his higher
ends. The double light is certainly audacious, and you
can always say that it’s contrary to nature. But if it is
contrary to nature, then I say along with that, that it
is higher than nature; I say that it is the daring touch
of the master, through which he makes clear, as genius
can, that art is not wholly subject to physical necessity,
but has its own laws.”
And now observe the distinction that is made:
“The artist,” continued Goethe, “must undoubtedly
follow nature in details with scrupulous piety; he may
not arbitrarily alter the conformation of the skeleton
GRTRETOSITIOTOTTISCTES and Sinews in an animal, so
that thereby its individual character is infringed upon.
For that wouTTBe to nullify nature. But in the higher
regions of artistic-technique-whereby-a-picture becomes
in the double light.”
*
In a word, we are back at appearance again. If
there is in a work of art a contravention of na-
ture, and the resulting effect seems more true

40 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
than if it were true, the artist, be he painter or
poet, is justified when he speaketh, and we clear
when we judge. There are infringements upon
natural law which we flatly refuse, under any
circumstances, to accept. There are others where
the artist, put to his shifts, has a fighting chance
to win our assent. But at best artistic illusion
runs counter to the laws of nature at its peril.
There are always commentators in the back-
ground making notes, and then Eckermann is
as wise as Goethe.
We have been discussing appearance and real-
ity in poetry, with our eye, for the most part, on
the physical world. But that is only half of the
content of poetry. “I would to heaven,” scrawled
Byron, on the back of the manuscript of “Don
Juan” —
I would to heaven that I were so much clay,
As I am blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling.
There, in “blood, bone, marrow, passion, feel-
ing,” is the other reality. Can the poet give us
that directly, or must he there again translate?
We have already looked at the question from
one angle. I wish now, very briefly, to bring it
into connection with what has just been said
about illusion.
Consider, for a moment, the poet in relation to
THE ROOTS OF CONVENTION 41
his audience: on the one hand, feeling at its keen-
est edge and highest tension; on the other the
low, placid, unruffled level of our normal moods.
“The faint conceptions I have of poems to
come,” wrote Keats, “bring the blood frequently
into my forehead.” Our blood courses quietly in
our veins. Does the poet— can he indeed—con-
vey to us, cool, collected, serene, the intense
emotion which he feels? Does he even himself go
on feeling at white heat? Or must there once
more be a transfer of some sort?
Let us put the matter briefly to the test. Recall
the great elegies in English. Do they, on the one
hand, express the poignancy of grief? Do they,
on the other, stir grief in us who read them? I
name, for instance, “Astrophel,” “Lycidas,”
“Adonais,” “Thyrsis.” And the very titles are
at once significant — not Philip Sidney, but
Astrophel; not Edward King, but Lycidas; not
John Keats, but Adonais; not Arthur Hugh
Clough, but Thyrsis. And all four poems are
either steeped in pastoral imagery, or similarly
set off from actuality. But for the moment the
one question which I wish to ask is this: Does
any one feel grief on reading any of these elegies?
Did the poets themselves, as they wrote them?
I shall leave my questions, which are not rhetori-


42 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
cal, unanswered for a moment. For, you will Say,
they are none of them, these four great elegies,
the expressions of deep personal loss. There was
never more than sadness. That may well be. Let
us grant it without discussion, and take another
group of four, in which the underlying personal
grief was certainly present. Tennyson’s “In
Memoriam” grows out of the loss of a close and
dear friend — a loss which darkened the poet’s
life for years. Emerson’s “Threnody” springs
from the loss of an only son; Meredith’s “A Faith
on Trial,” from the death of the poet’s wife;
Whitman’s “When Lilacs last in the Doorway
Bloomed,” from the tragic taking off of a be-
loved leader. But in these, too, the bitterness of
death is past, the poignancy of emotion has
softened into recollection. The poet is no lºnger
merely the friend, the father, – compare with
Emerson’s “Threnody” the exceeding bitter cry:
“O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom'
would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my
son, my son!” – he is no longer the husband,
the lover of a dead leader, but the artist. The
grief has not ceased to be personal; it is still that,
To believe otherwise would be to impugn a great
sincerity. But what has happened? The poet is
no longer swept from his moorings, no longer,



THE ROOTS OF CONVENTION 43
like Ugolino, turned to stone within; he is, in a
true sense, outside—his grief-as-ule—are. And
because he is an artist, his grief has become to
him as living clay for the potter's wheel.-Ii musi,
take form. And it can take form only when it is
looked back upon, or down-upon–or through.
And what we feel is not grief at all, but a lofty
tranquility, a deep-beauty—wrung—tram grieſ,
but no longer grief itself. &
wºr- There has, then. been—a translation= the
most momentous which poetry—can-make-the-
transmutation of its ingredients—inte-beatly.
“Aus meinen grossen Schmerzen mach' ich die
kleinen Lieder” — but the Sorrows are not the
songs. Grief, love, hate, at their height are “out-
rageous as a Sea, dark, wasteful, wild.” But the
e e essence is restraiatº-is-not to.
make us grieve, or love—or hate—or flush with
anger, or grow pale with rage. It is to stir us with
the sense of an imperishable beauty. And that
sense is communicated only when the poet has
been first submerged and then detached, when
he has passed out of the very torrent, tempest,
and whirlwind of passion — when “emotion
recollected in tranquillity” has touched the
springs of the imagination.
For the poet’s feelings, like his stubblefield,


44 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
are only a starting-post to something which has
not their sort of reality at all.
Ah, what avails the sceptered race!
Ah, what the form divine!
What every virtue, every grace!
Rose Aylmer, all were thine.
Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes
May weep, but never see,
A night of memories and sighs
I consecrate to thee.
Emotion, formless, chaotic, fluid in itself, has
attained permanence, beauty, form. And in so
doing it has become something which it is not.
I have really been discussing, under the guise
of illusion, the nature of poetic truth. For the
very essence of poetic truth is accepted illusion.
That illusion, in turn, as we have aſs0SEEIT grows
inevitably out of the limitations of the poet’s
medium. And illusion to which we consent, with
all that that implies, is the taproot of the con-
ventions of poetry. I wish now to turn, with the
utmost brevity, to one of the major conventions
which I shall discuss more fully in another chap-
ter namely, rhythm.
The one and only thing I wish to say about
poetic rhythm now is this: It serves notice that
we are on the frontiers of illusion — “Enter

THE ROOTS OF CONVENTION 45
these enchanted woods, ye who dare!” That is,
the expectation with which uſe approach poetry is
utterly different from the expectation with which
we approach prose. We stand ready to accept in
the one what we reject, if we find it, in the other.
And verse, whether directed to the ear or to the
eye, is the outward and visible sign that we are
entering the world where truth of literal fact
yields place to another truth. It is the signal
for that willing suspension of disbelief on which
I have rung the changes. Consider a precisely
parallel situation. What happens when we enter a
theatre? We assume, more or less unconsciously,
a definite attitude of mind towards what we
know we are to see and hear: namely, time that is
not real time; the heightening of make-up; tricks
of light; asides and stage whispers that everybody
hears; letters read aloud that no one ever reads
aloud; it may be, long Soliloquies; it may be, men
and women speaking in blank verse. None of
these things would we accept outside those walls.
There, we know that what we are to be given is
illusion, and we expect and we desire to undergo
it. That is what we go for. Now the sight or
sound of verse stands to poetry in precisely the
relation in which the rising of the curtain stands
to the play. When we hear verse or see it, we pass
46 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
from one world to another, and we expect to pass.
We shall come back to this again, for it is funda-
mental in more ways than one. For the moment,
I have said enough when I repeat that verse,
*-*.
metre, poetic rhythm or cadence (name it by
what name you will) serves notice that we are on
e ound, and opens the door to the
illusion that is poetic truth – a city built to
music, therefore never built at all, and therefore
built forever.
Such, then, as I understand it, is the essential
nature of poetry — a fabric of truth based on
reality, but not reproducing reality. And the
constituent elements of the fabric have their
sanction in consent. Poetry is, in essence, of
convention all compact.


II
THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS
CONVENTIONS exist by virtue of usage, and usage
is, of all things human, the most capricious. The
clothes I should wear were I speaking at eight
instead of five are consecrated by usage to the
hours whose appurtenance is fashion and cere-
mony — provided that those hours fall after sun-
set. What, it is pertinent to ask, would happen,
were one to give a morning lecture garbed in
evening clothes? Yet there is obviously neither
rhyme nor reason in the requirement that I shall
wear a certain coat only between certain stipu-
lated hours, on pain of feeling the weight of the
imponderables that rule the world. But that is
usage—precisely as it is linguistic usage that
permits imponderables to have weight — and
usage is the source and Origin of conventions.
Now convention in poetry (as has been well said)
is only the costume in which emotion attires it-
self, and it comes, like clothes, under the same
capricious sway.
It is the behavior of conventions, then, with
which we have now to do. There are, as we
48 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
have seen, certain fundamental conventions in-
herent in the very nature of poetry itself. But
all conventions are not so firmly rooted. Once
started on their way, they multiply and ramify
and split and merge, and it is the bewildering
and phantasmagoric variety of the branches
rather than their ultimate derivation from a
common root that I wish, if I can, to exhibit.
With the birth of the individual conventions
I shall not particularly concern myself. In one
sense conventions are not born at all. For whate
ever their ancestry, they never come into being
as conventions. It is only when they are taken up
through acceptance into usage that they acquire
conventionality. “The heroic couplet,” says
Professor Manly, with the utmost truth, “origi-
nated . . . suddenly. Chaucer wrote heroic coup-
lets, and there they were.” But when Chaucer
wrote heroic couplets, and there all at once they
were, the heroic couplet did not thereby spring
into existence as a convention. It became that
later, when other poets, following Chaucer,
looked upon it and saw that it was good, and
wore it threadbare.
Yet it is sometimes possible to see how this,
that, and the other convention began. Conven-
tions frequently take their rise, for instance,
THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS 49
from the faulty essays of an early and as yet un-
developed technique. Dramatic conventions by
the dozen had some such origin. The germs of the
stage whisper and the aside and the soliloquy are
present in the naïve endeavors of a primitive
dramatic technique to produce its special illu-
sion. After Noah has presented himself to the
audience, in the Hegge Miracle Plays —
Noe, seres, my name is knowe;
My wyff and my chyldere here on rowe —
his wife proceeds with the further enlightenment
of the spectators by giving to Noah presum-
ably superfluous information:
I am your wyff, your childeryn these be.
There is the artless device by which the early
drama strove to solve the technical problem of
imparting certain necessary facts to the audience
through a supposedly natural conversation be-
tween the dramatis persona". And the footman
and parlor-maid of modern comedy represent
but a later stage in the evolution of the same
convention.
The essential point, however, is that conven-
tions become conventions through wholesale
imitation, conscious or unconscious, of forms,
devices, methods of expression, which may them-
50 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
selves have had their origin in any of a hundred
ways. There is nothing mysterious about the
process. One does in letters, as in life, what one
sees others doing. If anybody who has read for
years the Contributors’ Club of the Atlantic
aspires to become a contributor himself, he falls,
half consciously, half instinctively, into the pre-
vailing tone (if he can) of that delightful causerie
— a prevailing tone which it has, please mark,
because hundreds of other contributors have
been doing just that thing. If, on the other
hand, he addresses his observations to the New
York Nation he finds himself, more or less
unconsciously, curbing and pruning his style to
fit the Nation’s more austere conventions. And
all this may not mean in the least that one is
merely, even consciously at all, perhaps, “play-
ing the sedulous ape.” One simply follows the
path of least resistance. And very much so, not
in any specially occult or thaumaturgic way, one
has to think of literary conventions as arising.
The innate human tendency to imitation, cou-
pled with that other formidable phenomenon
which we call habit, does the business.
Out of the seeming chaos, however, of poetic
conventions emerge two weighty and paradoxical
facts, which have influenced the development of
THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS 51
poetry from its beginnings, and are potent still
to-day: the plasticity of conventions, while the
life still runs in their veins; and their tendency
(if I may change the figure) to harden into empty
shells, like abandoned chrysalids when the in-
forming life has flown. And through these two
opposing characteristics of convention, it comes
about that art moves from stage to stage by two
divergent paths: on the one hand, by moulding
the still ductile forms; on the other, by shattering
the empty shells — the way of constructive ac-
ceptance, and the way of revolt. Each has its
place, because each grows out of the ways of
conventions themselves. What I have to say now,
accordingly, looks directly forward to the under-
lying theme of the remainder of our discussion.
We shall be clear only by being very concrete.
And I am going this time to draw my illustra-
tions chiefly from mediaeval poetry, and more
especially from Chaucer. Nor shall I make any
secret of my reasons. One is the fact that the
older conventions, through their very unfamil-
iarity, stand out to us in sharp detachment as
conventions. They are not, as in the case of
contemporary poetry, part and parcel of what
for most of us is a subtle texture of personal asso-
ciations and predilections. And since I am anx-
52 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
ious to isolate and disengage the conventions as
conventions, the freedom from disturbing mod-
ern implications is, for the moment, valuable.
Moreover, quite frankly, I am doing what I do
just now, because the Middle Ages are so tre-
mendously alive. For while they lasted, please
perpend, they were not the Middle Ages at all.
They had n’t the faintest idea that they were
mediaeval; to themselves they were as “modern”
as we think we are. And they were as blissfully
ignorant of what we in our wisdom were going to
think of them and tag them, as we are mercifully
oblivious of what succeeding centuries are going
to think of (and label) us. For we too shall be —
Heaven only knows what, but most certainly
not “modern,” soon enough. “Stop! careless
youth,” the fourteenth century might cry from
its crypts to our self-styled modernity:
Stop! careless youth, as you pass by;
As you are now, so once was I;
As I am now, so you will be.
“As you are now, so once was I” — that homely
“Hark from the tombs,” then, I should like to
propose, for the moment, not as a memento mori,
but as a vade mecum. For the poet of the Middle
Ages was in essentials altogether such an one as
ourselves.
THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS 53
I have said, then, for one thing, that conven-
tions are plastic, so long as they are alive. Let us
consider, to begin with, their capability of form-
ing new attachments. And I know no more il-
luminating instance of this particular trick than
the case of the rose and the daisy in Chaucer’s
century.
In the first place, the rose and the lady of the
lover’s dream were identified. That is the theme
of the most remarkable and influential of all the
mediaeval allegories, the “Ptoman de la Rose.”
And as time went on, the perfections of the flower
were carried over bodily to the lady. We are
familiar with the transfer yet: “Oh, my Luve's
like a red, red rose”; “Queen rose of the rosebud
garden of girls” — and all the rest. The conven-
tion as such has its roots in the tendency that has
already been discussed at length. But now a new
and most interesting factor enters into the life of
this particular poetic commonplace. Through the
celebration by a group of French courtly poets of
the charms of certain ladies whose name was
Marguerite, the daisy became the fashionable
symbol for the poet’s mistress. What happened?
The wealth of conventions that had gathered
about the rose was transferred, through the acci-
dent of a lady’s name, in toto to the marguerite.
54 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
And that carried with it a rather astonishing re-
sult. The marguerite falls heir to the possessions
of the rose; the rose is endowed with fragrance;
ergo, the daisy, which now represents the lady,
must possess it too. And so it follows that the
marguerite, in Machaut,
Par excellence est garnie d’odour.
The poet, preternaturally acute, even smells the
daisy from afar:
Sa douce odeur qui de loing m'est présente.
And Froissart goes so far as to tell us where it
got its fragrance:
Zepherus li donna odours.
Deschamps more cautiously admits the possi-
bility:
Voir de tel fleur a maint l’odeur proufitte —
but he enters mild protest in another poem: “It
is n’t a flower that’s puffed up, for its odor is n’t
haughty or fierce (car sodeur n'est orgueilleuse
ne fière)” l But it is Chaucer who caps the climax.
In the Prologue to the “Legend of Good
Women,” after the exquisite passage in which
he describes his homage to “these floures whyte
and rede, Swiche as men callen daysies in our
toun,” and pictures himself as
THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS 55
Kneling alwey, til hit unclosed was,
Upon the Smale softe swote gras,
he goes on to tell how the grass was
. . . with floures swote enbrouded al,
Of swich Swetnesse and suich odour over-al,
That, for to Speke of gomme, or herbe, or tree,
Comparisoun may noon y-maked be;
For hit surmounteth pleynly alle odoures,
And eek of riche beautee alle floures.
The reference is plainly to the daisy, and the
daisy — the English flower that Chaucer knew
— is odorless. One recalls the well-known song
that opens the “Two Noble Kinsmen,” which
happens to use odor as the distinguishing quality
of the flowers it names:
Roses, their sharp spines being gone,
Not royal in their smells alone,
But in their hue;
Maiden pinks, of odour faint,
Daisies smell-less, yet most quaint,
And sweet thyme true.
Or, if one hesitates to trust the testimony of one
poet against another, or even the evidence of
one’s proper nose, one may find impartial and
scientific authority on the point from the herb-
alists of the sixteenth century down to the
botanists of the twentieth. The English daisy
has no odor, and never had. Chaucer speaks of
its odor as beyond comparison with that of gum,
56 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
or herb, or tree — as flatly surpassing all odors.
“Whom,” in Mr. Browning’s impassioned words,
“whom shall my soul believe?”
Well, the thing that had happened is obvious
enough. The marguerite, like the rose, was but
the symbol of the lady; the lady must be perfect
and entire, wanting nothing in all the qualities
inherent in a lady; therefore, her flower must
be possessed of all the perfections of a flower.
Fragrance is such a perfection; therefore it fol-
lows inevitably that the daisy must possess the
attribute, for very much the same reason that
to Anselm existence had to be predicated of the
Deity. The fragrance of the rose was transferred
to the daisy without a qualm. It had to have it,
and realism looked the other way.
It continued, indeed, to keep its eyes averted.
For I wish to ask you to observe another signifi-
cant fact. For over five centuries not a soul but
the much-maligned Godwin seems ever to have
observed that Chaucer does represent the daisy
as endowed with fragrance. The passage has been
quoted times without number for what it is —
one of the most charming descriptions of the
flower in the whole range of English poetry.
Most of us think of it, when we think of Chaucer,
before any other lines except the Prologue to the
THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS 57
“Canterbury Tales.” As Longfellow reads Chau-
cer, “from every page Pise odors of ploughed
field” — incidentally, there is n’t a ploughed
field, except in one simile, in Chaucer — “or
flowery mede.” It’s Eckermann and the Rubens
landscape over again. The illusion is so complete
that five centuries of English Eckermanns failed
to observe that it was illusion, and not fact.
Chaucer, in other words, has so vivified the con-
vention that it seems truer than a transcript
from reality.
Just that performance we should not, I pre-
Sume, repeat to-day. Keats puts odorous daisies
where, to our mind, they properly belong —
namely, in the Elysian fields. There the bards of
passion and of mirth are
Seated on Elysian lawns
Browsed by none but Dian’s fawns;
Underneath large blue-bells tented,
Where the daisies are rose-scented,
And the rose herself has got
Perfume which on earth is not.
At the same time I am not at all sure that a
daisy has n’t as good a right to smell as a trum-
pet-flower to “bray and blare,” which it does
(with modesty enough and likelihood to lead it)
in the most impeccably correct “new” poetry.
The transfer of qualities, then, from the rose
58 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
to the daisy is full of a number of things that il-
luminate the behavior of conventions. And simi-
lar shifts meet us on every hand. Since we have
been dealing with one odor which on earth is not,
let us give a moment to another.
The mediaeval lover, particularly if he were
French or North Italian, was not unlikely, in his
panegyric of his lady, to identify her with a
panther. It was a commonplace of compliment.
And it arose through a perfectly normal transfer
of conventions. In the first place, the Middle
Ages found in Pliny’s “Natural History” and a
treatise known as “Physiologus,” a mine of use-
ful and misleading information. The two together
furnished most of the data for the “unnatural
natural history” that ran riot as late as Lyly's
“Euphues.” But the Middle Ages had their own
way of dealing with their facts. From still earlier
centuries had come down an inordinate fondness
for allegorizing everything on which allegory
could lay its hands. And so there sprang up
the Bestiaries, amazing compilations of beasts,
and birds, and fishes, endowed with qualities
they never had, and allegorized into types of
sacred things. And in the Bestiaries the pan-
ther holds an honorable place. Now the “fact.”
about the panther was that it possessed a breath
THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS 59
of marvellous sweetness (a quality which it had
in common with the whale), and this fragrant
breath attracted other animals to it. So much
for the fact. Allegorized, the panther became the
type of Christ. For his sweetness draws all men
to him. But so does the lady’s sweetness draw
her lovers. Accordingly, on the basis of a common
quality transferred from one to the other, the
panther became the symbol of the lady. That the
panther's breath was not sweet, has nothing to
do with the case. It was accepted as such, and
that was enough. Nor does it matter in the least
that the precisely similar endowment of the
whale turned it into a symbol of the devil, who
also exercises attraction. It is all as irrational as
words or dress. For conventions are irrational.
Yet let us be chary of casting the first stone.
When the poet even now invokes his mistress as
his dove, his star, his rose, his lily, he is perform-
ing a legerdemain with his conventions that is
identically the same. We still acquiesce in the
dove's gentleness, the lily’s purity, the rose’s
beauty; we withhold acceptance from a panther
breathing odors of Araby the Blest — and that
is all. The conventions are different; their behav-
ior is the same. *=
What we are concerned with for the moment,
60 CONVENTION AND PREVOLT IN POETRY
please remember, is the freedom with which
conventions form new attachments — a freedom
which renders them susceptible of constantly
new and varied use. Let us consider, now, a par-
ticularly interesting group of conventions which
occur in one of the most finished masterpieces of
subtly penetrating characterization in English
poetry — the description of the Prioress in the
Prologue to the “Canterbury Tales.” It is a
delicately ironical, yet exquisitely sympathetic
portrayal of a clash of ideals. The Prioress is a
nun; she is also very much a woman; and what
Chaucer is depicting is the engagingly imperfect
submergence of the feminine in the ecclesiastical.
And he does it by a daring yet consummately
adroit transference of conventions. At his dis-
posal, on the one hand, was the mass of conven-
tional phraseology indelibly stamped through
long usage with the associations of the poetry of
love; on the other hand, luminously present in
his mind, and pervaded with his inalienable hu-
mor, was his conception of the devout and gentle
Prioress, who has not only immortal but very
mortal longings in her. And he achieves the im-
pression which permeates the whole description
— the impression of the hovering of the worthy
lady's spirit between two worlds—by deftly
THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS 61
carrying over to the nun conventions steeped in
reminiscences of earthly love. It is the clash of
associations between the two sets of conventions
that creates the character. All this is generaliz-
ing; let us come to the thing itself.
There were two words with which every reader
of French poetry in Chaucer’s day (and every-
body in Chaucer’s circle read French poetry) had
clearly defined and inevitable associations —
“simple” and “coy.” For “simple” alone, and
“coy” alone, and “simple and coy” together,
belong to the stock phraseology of fourteenth-
century courtly poetry. The lady’s eyes were
simple (even Medea's among others) — usually
simple as a dove; SO was her look, her face,
her voice, her speech, her Smile, her bearing and
herself. “Coy” (which meant “quiet,” with
a touch sometimes of the demure, though not
of coquetry) was applied by the lover to his
mistress incessantly. And the combination of
simple and coy (simple et coie) was no less a com-
monplace of the “sweet jargoning” of mediaeval
lovers. One of its favorite habitats was the pas-
tourelle, and the engagingly frank and often frail
young persons who are the heroines of the genre
are uncommonly likely to be simple and coy.
Nor is it less a pet locution of the inexorably
62 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
long-drawn catalogues of the lady’s physical
charms. In a word, the phrase, so far as I know,
was confined to the poetry of courtly love, and
any lover to any lady was pretty certain to em-
ploy it. Now Chaucer begins his sketch of the
Prioress as follows:
Ther was also a Nonne, a Prioresse,
That of hir Smyling was ful simple and coy.
There, in the second line, is struck the keynote of
the description. The convention did n’t belong
to the nun at all, as nun. To every one of Chau-
cer’s readers its distinctly earthly rather than
heavenly flavor was unmistakable. The first hint
of the clash between the woman and the nun is
dexterously given by the impinging, so to speak,
of two opposing auras of associations.
I must pass over the exquisite incongruity of
the nun’s self-chosen, unecclesiastical, flower-
like name, Madame Eglantine, and her choice of
a one-time artist, and courtier, and lover of
beautiful attire, the French Saint Eloi, as her
favorite saint. For Chaucer is by no means done
with his shifting of old conventions to new uses.
And the next transfer is an audacious one. Start-
ing centuries before Chaucer with that Bible
of mediaeval chivalric practice, Ovid’s “Art of
THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS 63
Love,” and handed down through scores of poets
after him, there developed a code of conven-
tional injunctions to lovers and ladies alike —
injunctions ranging from the fit of the lover's
clothes, and the care of his or her teeth and nails,
to the most esoteric doctrines of love's joys and
perils. High among these precepts stood observ-
ance of dainty manners (mediaevally dainty, that
is to Say) at table. And in a famous, even
notorious passage in Jean de Meun's part of the
“Roman de la Rose” the convention attains a
peculiarly vivid embodiment. For there an old
harridan, La Vielle, rehearses to a youth to
whom she has taken a liking, the checkered story
of her life, and descants at large, with intimate
detail, upon the failings of her sex. Among these
foibles are the wiles a woman uses to allure a
potential yet still demurring lover, and among
these, in turn, is her delicate behavior at the
table. Now come back to Geoffrey Chaucer and
his Prioress. What does he do next? He coolly
appropriates the lines from the “Roman de la
Rose”—lines which everybody knew as we know
Hamlet’s soliloquy — and transfers them to
Madame Eglantine:
At mete wel y-taught was she with-alle;
She leet no morsel from hir lippes falle,
64 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
Ne wette hir fingres in hir sauce depe.
Welcoude she carie a morsel, and wel kepe,
That no drope ne fille up-on hir brest.
In curteisye was set ful muche hir lest.
Hir over lippe wyped she so clene,
That in hir coppe was no ferthing sene
Of grece, whan she dronken hadde hir draughte.
Ful Semely after hir mete she raughte.
The Smile of the Spirit of Comedy lurks behind
the lines! And to every one of Chaucer’s readers
came the flash of delighted association from the
rehearsal of the Prioress's dainty manners to
the intent, distinctly more mundane than pious,
of precisely these same manners as enjoined
with gusto by the Duenna in the “Roman de la
ROSe.”
But Chaucer is not yet done. The Prioress’s
dress and bearing, and her little dogs, and her
tenderness of heart, must be passed over. We have
still to be told how she looked. And that brings
us to another of the amazing conventions of
mediaeval love poetry. For it was accepted poetic
good form that the lover, writing of his lady,
should inventory her charms from top to toe in
good set terms, and with an anatomical exhaus-
tiveness that extenuated nothing. There is the
right and meet phrase for every feature; they
occur with desolating unanimity in the pages of
THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS 65
a hundred poets. Her eyes must be gray or vair—
gray as a falcon, gray as a goose, gray as glass;
her mouth must be petite, vermeille, riant; her
nose traitis (a mediaeval lady with an ill-propor-
tioned nose was rarer than the “soleyn fenix of
Arabye,” of whom there was just one); her fore-
head broad, and high, and white, and polished
like ivory; her chin a little cleft; her face mingled
lily and rose. Head one, and you have all. Now
Chaucer describes the Prioress in five lines, but
every detail might have come from any four-
teenth-century lover's description of his mistress:
Hir nose tretys; hir eyen greye as glas;
Hir mouth ful smal, and ther—to softe and reed;
But sikerly she hadde a fair forheed;
It was almost a spanne brood, I trowe;
For, hardily, she was nat undergrowe.
The convention has been lifted bodily from its
attachment to the earthly lady and transferred,
with all its blushing associations thick upon it,
to the nun. Yet no less noteworthy than the skill
with which the lines suggest still youthful flesh
and blood behind the well pinched wimple, is the
restraint which foregoes the remainder of the
inevitable inventory, and leaves the Prioress
charmingly human, without a suggestion of the
SellSUIOUIS.
66 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
Yet one more transfer and Chaucer is done.
The closing lines of the sketch are these:
Ful fetis was hir cloke, as I was war.
Of smal coral aboute hir arm she bar
A peire of bedes, gauded al with grene;
And ther-on heng a broche of gold ful shene,
On which ther was first write a crowned A,
And after, Amor vincit omnia.
That is the most consummate touch of all. For
the motto on the Prioress’s brooch was a conven-
tion with a history. The line (“love conquers all
things”) is, as everybody knows, from one of Vir-
gil’s Eclogues. There it refers, of course, to the
way of a man with a maid. But by a pious trans-
fer, which took place long before Chaucer, and
had behind it the strange jumble of mediaeval
superstitions about Virgil, the line was con-
verted to the use of love celestial. Now is it
earthly love that conquers all, now heavenly; the
phrase plays back and forth between the two.
And it is precisely that happy ambiguity of the
convention — itself the result of an earlier trans-
fer — that makes Chaucer’s use of it here, as a
final summarizing touch, a master stroke. Which
of the tuo loves does “amor” mean to the Prioress?
I do not know; but I think she thought she meant
love celestial.
THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS 67
Throughout the masterly characterization,
then, the hovering of the conventions between
their two environments is the medium which
Chaucer uses, with unerring skill, to convey the
wavering of the Prioress’s spirit between her two
worlds. {
I have dwelt on Chaucer’s delineation of the
Prioress, because it makes clear one of the two
points I wish especially to emphasize. Conven-
tions are not static. They form new attachments,
acquire fresh content. And so far forth they are
plastic stuff for the artist’s hand.
But there is another important modus operandi
of conventions. Not only do the same conven-
tions acquire new content, but the same content
may also assume new conventions. In other
words, not only may outworn conventions
achieve new life by forming fresh attachments,
but outworn themes may be rejuvenated by
taking on contemporary garb. This last proce-
dure is one that never ceases. But again let us
use, to begin with, a mediaeval instance — the
remarkable series of transformations, namely,
that took place when the classical epic passed
into the twelfth- and thirteenth-century romance.
And in this case we can follow the successive
metamorphOSes straight down to our own time.
68 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
The Middle Ages seized on the great stories of
the classics with avidity. Their core of narrative
was felt as vividly alive; its sheath of epic ma-
chinery and classical mythology and obsolete
manners and customs, on the other hand, was
alien and remote. And So, when the “ABneid”
becomes the “Roman d'Eneas,” and the “The-
baid” the “Poman de Thèbes,” and the “Phar-
salia” the “POman de Julius César,” and the
Homeric stories the “Poman de Troie,” the nar-
rative core persists, but the sheath of epic con-
ventions has for the most part been sloughed off.
And in its place has developed a new and highly
significant integument, conventional to the last
degree, but now no longer classically, but medi-
aevally conventional. The Middle Ages, that is
to say, translated the classical conventions into
terms of the commonplaces dear to their own
heart.
For one thing, the stage was completely reset,
and the actors recostumed. The classical heroes
and heroines were transmogrified into mediaeval
knights and ladies; battles were turned into
tournaments; Greece, Pome, Troy, and Carthage
became twelfth- or thirteenth-century France.
We have already seen the mediaval ideal of
feminine beauty. And here, for instance, is what
THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS 69
Philomela becomes in the little romance that
Chrétien de Troyes made out of Ovid’s sixth
Metamorphosis:
Forehead white and broad without wrinkle; eyes
clearer than jacinth, wide apart; straight eyebrows,
neither painted nor adorned; nose high, and long, and
straight; face with fresh color of roses and fleur de lis;
Smiling mouth, lips full and a little redder than red
Samite in grain; breath that Smells Sweeter than piment,
or balsam, or incense; little teeth, white, in a row; chin
and neck, throat and breast, whiter than any ermine —
and so on through two mortal pages more. And
Helen and Hecuba, Andromache, and Cassandra,
and Polyxena in the “Roman de Troie,” Dido
and Lavinia in the “Eneas,” Antigone and Is-
mene in the “Thébes,” and Cleopatra in the
“Roman de Julius César” agree in foreheads,
noses, eyes, and chins with each other and with
all the ladies of the poets of the day, precisely as
in the eighteenth-century gardens “grove an-
swers grove, And every alley has its brother.”
Greek and Ptoman and Trojan heroes joust in
accordance with the canons of chivalry, garbed
in the French guise, with Turkish bows, in hel-
mets of Spanish gold, on good steeds bred in Cas-
tile. Amphiorax is a bishop; Ismene attends
Atys’ funeral vested as a nun. Carthage has don-
jon, ditch, and barbican; Troy and Thebes are
70 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
mediaeval towns. Anachronism is blithely ac-
cepted, and elevated to a virtue. Chaucer’s plea
of extenuation when he arms his Grecian knights
with Prussian shields — “there’s no new fashion
that it was nºt old” (“ther nis no newe gyse,
that it nas old”) — that plea would never have
been entered by the French romancers. The ob-
solete has been calmly jettisoned; the translation
into the contemporary is complete.
But there was another metamorphosis even
more startling. The mediaeval courtly romances
of the period were crowded with the marvellous.
And the marvellous had built up its own impos-
ing fabric of conventions. And when Benoit and
the unknown writers of the other classical ro-
mances came to their Latin material, they found
there a no less imposing paraphernalia of con-
ventional machinery — the wrath of Juno, the
wiles of Venus, the missions of Hermes, the in-
stigations of Pallas Athene. But the gods of
Greece and Pome had meantime undergone their
Götterdämmerung, and the elaborate structure
built on their interventions had become to the
Middle Ages an empty shell. And so when the
epics went over into the romances, for mythology
were substituted marvels; in place of the inter-
positions of gods and goddesses appears the
THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS 71
world of magic — magic robes, magic swords,
magic tents, enchanted castles and chambers,
fées and monsters. Above all, the romances revel
in a bewildering profusion of automata — as-
tounding fabrications of gold and silver and
precious stones, in the form of birds, beasts,
plants, and men, that behave as if they were
alive. In the hall where AEneas and Dido sit
down to dine there grows on a trellis of silver a
vine of gold, subtly ramified, with grapes of
precious stones, and in the vine and on the trellis
are ten thousand birds of fine gold, whose least
worth is the value of a city. When the wind
blows through the branches, the birds all sing,
each with its own note, so that from neither harp
nor organ issues sweeter sound. Briseida has a
robe made through necromancy by an enchanter
of India Superior — a robe given by a sage In-
dian poet to her father Calchas — made partly
from skins of sables that dwell in the River
of Paradise. But as Benoit himself observes,
no one could write on parchment, either in ro-
mance or Latin, all its wonders, and I shall
waive the enterprise. Those are but two ex-
amples out of a hundred. The gods have van-
ished, and instead the land is “al fulfiled of
fayerye.”
72 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
Nor is it only the gods who have suffered a sea
change. The Sphinx, for instance, has been made
Over in the mediaeval image. It was green, states
the “Poman de Thébes” — “green as a leaf of
ivy; its head hideous and terrifying, with a nose
a cubit long, and great teeth curving to the neck;
the teeth that jutted from its mouth curved
around till they touched the neck behind. Its eyes
were red as a leopard’s—no man ever saw so ill-
favored a look. . . . But there is still a greater
marvel” (so the “Thébes” goes on); “it covers
itself wholly with its ears; its ears are long, and
broad, and hairy, and frightful. Its arms are big
as a great tent; its mouth black and all its snout;
its hands have nails like a lion's. . . . It is clad
in a brown mantle, that the fées made, fasting.”
That is the typical ogre of Celtic and French
romance, and in the last amazing conception —
fées weaving, fasting, a broun mantle for the
Sphina — is a compendium of the incredible
transmogrification which the mythological con-
ventions underwent.
I shall pass over the displacement of the long-
drawn-out epic similes by the pithy and succinct
comparisons that our mediaeval ancestors, antici-
pating the modern Imagists, delighted in. For
there is a still more significant translation of
THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS 73
conventions in the classical romances that de-
mands attention.
To us moderns perhaps the most extraordinary
phenomenon of the Middle Ages is the mass of
conventions that in literature and life accumu-
lated about love. It is not that love itself has
changed its spots. We that are true lovers run
into strange capers still, and certain outstanding
symptoms of love (the medical term is used ad-
visedly) are as familiar to-day as a thousand
years ago — a lean cheek, a blue eye and sunken,
an unquestionable spirit, a beard neglected, and
everything about one demonstrating a careless
desolation. The difference is this. Through a re-
markable series of converging influences — Ovid,
Greek medicine, the exotic oriental doctrines
of the great Arabic physicians — the physical
symptoms of love became in the Middle Ages
established as conventions, pure and simple.
Sleeplessness, loss of appetite, emaciation, pal-
lor, weeping, Swooning, restlessness, taciturnity,
aversion to society, were not merely the outward
and visible signs of an inward and spiritual state;
they were, for one in love, good form, to be as-
Sumed as such, if one were so unfortunate as not
to be afflicted with them in due course of nature.
They constituted what Chaucer calls the “low-
74 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
eres maladye of Hereos,” and Burton elucidates
them with a wealth of captivating detail, under
the title of “Heroicall Love,” in the “Anatomy.”
That was one set of mediaeval love conventions.
There was another, no less conspicuous, but
this time social rather than physical in its char-
acter. For it involved primarily the attitude of
the lover towards his lady. What underlies it
holds as good to-day as it did then. But its
clothes are different, and in clothes the obsolete
is the fantastic. We shall have to touch it very
briefly. The most distinctive word in the jargon
of the poetry of courtly love is “danger.” And
danger meant not what it means to-day, but the
woman’s instinctive difficulty of access, her inex-
pugnable reluctance to be easily won. And the
mediaeval lover lived constantly (to use the ac-
cepted phrase) in his lady’s danger, “held up by
the brydel at the [shaftes] ende.” Above all, he
must fear as well as love her. “He who fears not
does not love” is an endlessly repeated dictum,
and the phrase “love and dread” lies thick on the
pages of French poetry as autumnal leaves that
strow the brooks in Vallombrosa. Moreover, the
lover (not the husband; the Middle Ages made
sharp distinction there) must obey his mistress.
She is his “lady sovereyne”; his “earthly god.”
THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS 75
(“mon Dieu terrien”), to whom he owes unques-
tioning allegiance. She may send him to the ends
of the earth to win his spurs — “to Walakye, To
Pruyse and in-to Tartarye, To Alisaundre, [and]
in-to Turkye,” or even to the mysterious Dry
Sea on the edge of the goblin-haunted sands by
the Jade Gate into Cathay, or farther still, to the
mystic Dry Tree on the “straunge strondes” at
the outposts of the world. I am speaking by the
card; invention were superfluous. “She sent
him,” says Chaucer of Arcite’s new lady —
She sent him now to londe, now to shippe;
And for she yaf him daunger al his fille,
Therfor she had him at hir owne wille.
The principle and its practice are, it happens, not
obsolete to-day. But the bizarre conventional
garb in which this and other tenets of courtly
love array themselves, fill us twentieth-century
moderns, serenely oblivious of our own motley,
with unfeigned wonder and amaze. There, then,
they were, these conventions of love, dominating
and permeating mediaeval literature, as they
dominated and permeated mediaeval life.
Now love in the classical epics played a minor
part. There was none of it in the “Pharsalia”;
the Homeric legends, as they first reached the
Middle Ages, were devoid of it; and it touched
76 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
with beauty but a single episode in the “The-
baid.” It is only in the great and moving tale of
Dido in the “AEneid” that love assumes a major
rôle. And it was to these epic narratives, for the
most part barren of one of the most powerful
mediaeval appeals, that the courtly romancers
CalT16.
What happened? Love was interpolated where
it was not, and translated, where it was, into the
reigning conventions of the day. Dido and AEneas,
in the “Roman d'Eneas,” deport themselves in
accordance with the strictest canons of courtly
love. Dido, in Chaucer as in the “Eneas,”
“waketh, walweth, maketh many a brayd, As
doon thise loveres, as I have herd Sayd.” She
“swowneth . . . dischevele” — as indeed, she
must. I have counted, in a rapid running over
of the “Roman de Troie,” thirty swoons of he-
roes and heroines; in the “Thébes,” twenty-two;
and to swoon four or five times hand running
during a single trying situation is no novelty.
Above all, on the bare hint of the “AEneid,” the
innamoramento of Æneas and Lavinia is elab-
orated into one of the most amazing documents
now extant of the very malady of heroic love.
The visit of Julius Caesar to Egypt in the “Phar-
salia” is seized upon by its redactor to introduce,
THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS 77
point-device in its accoutrements, the liaison
between Caesar and Cleopatra. But the most
remarkable history of all is that of the Trojan
story. In the oldest Latin documents there ap-
pear, among others, three conventional portraits,
of Briseida, Troilus, and Diomede, respectively.
They are not brought together, and there is abso-
lutely no story of them in this early work. But, as
has been aptly pointed out, given such promising
materials as a lady declared to be “affabilis . . .
oculis venustis”—“affable, with winning eyes”;
one knightly warrior described as “pulcherrimus,
pro aetate valens” — “most handsome and val-
iant for his age”; and a second hero who was,
among other things, “cerebro calido, impatiens”
— “hot-headed and sudden”: granted this start-
ing-point, and the eternal triangle is not far to
seek. And so, in the “Roman de Troie,” we find
the three brought together, and one of the world’s
supreme love stories launched upon its way — a
story into which, before it left the Middle Ages,
had been poured the hot blood of Boccaccio's
intrigue with Maria d’Aquino, contributions
from the exotic romance of “Floris and Blaunche-
fleur,” bits from the affair of Jason with Medea,
and finally, Chaucer's matchless insight and
humor and felicity of phrase.
78 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
In a word, as regards love, no less than myth-
ology and backgrounds, the Middle Ages re-
clothed the classical epics in the garb of their
own day.
But, you say, the garb is ridiculous and has
no bearing on the conduct of conventions now.
Very well. Let us waive the question of perti-
nence for a moment and move a little nearer to
to-day. The mediaeval poetic idiom came after
while to seem a jargon — quaint, to be sure, and
delectably naïve, but tedious and drolly untrue
to life. Dido did n’t wallow and swoon, or AEneas
wear a helmet equipped with a carbuncle that
made the night as bright as day; Troy was n’t a
second Paris, or Carthage defended by serried
rows of magnets that drew steel-armed enemies,
and held them, fixed and astonished, to the walls.
Let us put away childish things. And so the sev-
enteenth century proceeded to put them away.
And in the heroic romances of Gomberville,
andMademoiselle descudéry, and La Calprenède,
Antony and Cleopatra, Sappho, Cyrus, and Ar-
taxerxes became denizens of the Hôtel de Ram-
bouillet, and later of the salon of the “matchless
Orinda” herself. And the quaint eccentricities of
courtly love gave place to that sage and serious
schematization of passion which found its com-
THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS 79
pendium in the “Carte du Tendre,” where the
River of Inclination flowed into the Dangerous
Sea between the Lake of Indifference and the
Sea of Enmity, through rolling country dotted
with the hamlets of Sensibility, and Assiduity,
and Pleasing Verses, and Forgetfulness, and An
Amorous Letter, and Indiscretion. And in such
terms the heroes and heroines of antiquity, no
longer absurdly mediaeval but impeccably up-to-
date, discoursed, in one sole novel only, through
sixthousand six hundred and seventy-nine deadly
pages. And that was in Molière’s century.
But, you still gently insist, it was n’t ours.
Well, let us look at ours, and consider the matter
of love alone. What do we do? What, for exam-
ple, has Stephen Phillips done in “Ulysses” and
in “Herod,” and Oscar Wilde in “Salome,” and
Hermann Sudermann in “Johannes,” and Paul
Heyse in “Mary of Magdala”? There are the
ancient narratives, classical and Biblical, in
which love plays about as slight a part — on the
whole, indeed, a considerably more tenuous one
— than it played in the epics on which the ro-
mances were built. And I can repeat, without
change of a word, for the dramas that I have
named, what I said a few minutes ago of the
romances: “Love was interpolated where it was
80 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
not, and translated, where it was, into the reign-
ing conventions of the day.” The eroticism of
“Salome,” of which there is not the slightest
trace in the original, is of a piece with the stuff
of any one of a hundred novels that represent
the vogue; the sexual passion in “Johannes” is
one with the passion in “Das hohe Lied.” I am
not passing judgment, either ethical or asthetic,
on the facts. That is entirely beside the point.
The one thing that concerns us, at the mo–
ment, is the fact that we in our way are doing
precisely what the twelfth and the seventeenth
centuries did in theirs — we are reclothing the
same materials in the garb of our own conven-
tions. And I am inclined to think that the
twenty-fifth century (which will have its own
particular modernity to amuse it) will put, for
instance, Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” in the same
museum of conventions with the tale of Lavinia
and Dido in the “Eneas,” and will catalogue
Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations to the play
with Briseide’s mantle and the Sphinx. And when
it comes to the audit before high heaven, it may
well be that the Prioress’s smiling that was sim-
ple and coy will hold its own with the little
crooked smile of the modern heroine. Let us not
forget our vade mecum: “as we are now, so once
THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS 81
were they.” Nor is the accompanying memento
mori in this case without its pertinence: “as they
are now, so we shall be l’’
Convention, then, is ineluctable. It can Say
with Brahma:
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings.
We escape the conventions behind us only to find
ourselves implicated in a new set of our own cre-
ating — a consideration which should induce in
us large charity towards those limed souls of
earlier days who, similarly struggling to be free,
were like us more engaged. And that leads di-
rectly to a somewhat practical remark. It is this.
The relation in which the reader of poetry
stands to poetic conventions is radically different
from that in which the poet stands to them, as he
writes. For the poet, the zest of the game lies in
his adventures among conventions. Shall he
clothe himself in them as with a garment? Shall
he impose his will upon them, until form and
content coalesce, and instead of an enveloping
integument the conventions become bone of his
bone and flesh of his flesh? Or shall he grasp their
sorry scheme of things entire, shatter it to bits,
and then remould it nearer to the heart’s desire?
82 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
The poet, as he writes, must reckon with conven-
tions as the tools of his craft, the medium of his
expression, the impediments that thwart his ut-
terance. His relation to them is immediate, and
exigent, and practical. But the reader of poetry
is in no such predicament. And in these days
when the makers of poetry keep in their com-
muniqués the warfare with convention inces-
santly before us, it is well that the distinction be
made sharp and clear. For we who read poetry
are ridden and haunted by no such insistent
problem, nor are we concerned alone with the
coin just issuing from the mint. To us, the old
conventions are what the new will one day be —
the mould which gives to the very age and body
of their time its form and pressure. They repre-
sent to us the ways along which beauty has in the
past been sought and found, and the very fact
that the paths are now deserted and beauty
sought no longer where they lead, may lend them
a peculiar permanence. An Attic drachma minted
in the days of Pericles is no less beautiful because
it no longer passes current. Yet, on the other
hand, the coin that does pass current must bear
the image and superscription of its day. There,
in a word, is the distinction which there is some
danger that we may obliterate. Those who make
THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS 83
poetry are intent, and rightly, on moulding
it in living forms. But so in their day were all
the poets who have ever lived, from puny whip-
sters to supreme creators. And whatever one
may think about the writing of poetry, its
enjoyment demands a sympathetic understanding
of conventions, whether alive, or dead in the
death that is sometimes the only enduring life.
Sympathetic understanding means, to be sure,
imaginative effort — your true reader of poetry
is always a bit of a poet himself — but the game
is worth the candle. From which brief excursion
into homiletics, let us now return to our sheep.
I have said that from the reader’s point of
view imaginative sympathy coupled with knowl-
edge will reinvest old conventions with some-
thing of their one-time contemporaneousness.
Here, very briefly, is a case in point. We’ve been
considering love. Let us turn, for a moment, to
the poem from which we culled the rose-scented
daisy — Chaucer’s “Legend of Good Women.”
Did you ever stop really to consider who these
“good” women were? Or has the spell of the illu-
sion carried unquestioning acceptance with it?
They are, among others, Medea, Dido, Cleopa-
tra, and Hypermnestra, and they are (to quote
no hypothetical objector, but an actual modern
84 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
critic who professes English) “they are, as we
should say to-day, “women with a past.” And
that is perfectly true. Cleopatra scarcely lived or
died in the odor of sanctity; Medea was the mur-
deress of her children; Hypermnestra, of her
husband; Cleopatra (to round out the tale), of her
younger brother, Ptolemy. And Dido was guilty
of a flagrant lapse of conventional morality. Why
call them “good,” and more than that, why act-
ually canonize them, by endowing them with
legends, the peculiar prerogative of saints 2 It is a
pretty problem in the behavior of conventions.
And the reason is as simple as in the case of the
daisy, which assumed in verse a fragrance that
nature had denied it in reality. Chaucer’s cen-
tury (and by no means that century alone) had a
trick of conventionalizing a single person into
the representative, the exemplum, of a particular
attribute or quality. Absalom was the stock em-
bodiment of beauty, Solomon of wisdom, Croesus
of wealth, Hector of prowess, Hercules of
strength, Esther of meekness, Penelope of wifely
devotion — and so on, ad libitum. They were
other things, to be sure, as George Washington
is something more than the frigid stateliness,
and Lincoln than the homespun sagacity, for
which they stand to most of us. But the Middle
THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS 85
Ages, with uncompromising thoroughness, sac-
rificed ruthlessly subsidiary qualities to throw,
into sharp relief the salient trait, till Griselda, for
example, carried patience beyond the utmost
bound of human thought.
Now loyalty was in love (as it still remains)
the supreme and crowning virtue. And so Chau-
cer makes
. . . a glorious Legende
Of Gode Wommen, maidenes and wyves,
That weren trewe in lovinge al hir lyves.
It was as exemplars of fidelity in love, in the same
category exactly as Penelope and Lucretia and
Alcestis, that not only Chaucer, but Boccaccio,
and Deschamps, and Christine de Pisan, and the
mediaevals all and some, thought of Cleopatra
and Dido and Medea. Overlooking their weak-
ness, their evil behavior, the poet saw their loy-
alty alone. The convention lies in the isolation of
a single quality from the mass. And on the side of
their conventional form the “good” women are
of a piece with a hundred creations since. They
are close kin to the figures of the Jonsonian
Comedy of Humors, in whom “Some one peculiar
quality Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers, In their
confluctions, all to run one way.” They are first
86 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
cousins to the Micawbers and Barkises and all
their breed of Dickens’s Human Comedy, who
“roll all their strength and all their sweetness up
into one ball,” and live perpetually in singleness
of heart, as “willing”or “waitingfor somethingto
turn up,” or whatever the insulating phrase may
be. And last but not least, their congeners by the
dozen lie sleeping on the hill in the Spoon River
churchyard. The convention is strange and bi-
zarre only when looked at from outside. Once
inside it, we’re at home; and Medea, despite her
failings, is as “good” (to tilt the convention at
another angle) as Anna Karenina or Hester
Prynne. .
But conventions do die. They have, it is true, a
disconcerting way at times, like old Roger under
the apple tree in the folk-game, of rising abruptly
from their graves, and it is never wholly safe to
carve their epitaphs. But enough of them are
surely dead to warrant a summary statement of
how conventions cease to live.
For one thing, conventions die through a pro-
cess of sloughing off, as new and more vigorous
life develops within them. We see it happening in
the Moralities, to take one instance only. Here
are the conventional virtues — Mercy, Contem-
plation, Perseverance, Pity, Sapience, Discretion,
THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS 87
Devotion — there are “forty feeding as one,” all
impeccably correct, “lading out Latin with
scoops,” in the pithy phrase of an unrecon-
structed Vice. And among them come leaping
the Vices — New Guise, and Nowadays, and
Folly, and Mischief, and Free Will, and Ignorance
— with their vivid, even lurid Saxon, and their
pungent tang of forbidden fruit. What, may I
ask, was going to happen when things like the
following came into immediate juxtaposition?
In “Mankynd” Mercy lucubrates (his spelling
stripped of its eccentricities) as follows:
O sovereigns, I beseech you your conditions to
rectify,
And with humility and reverence to have a remotion
To this blessed Prince that our nature doth glorify,
That ye may be participable of his retribution . . .
Mercy is my name, and my denomination;
I conceive that ye have but a little force in my
communication.
“Ay, ay,” retorts New Gyse, “your body is full
of English Latin”! And here is the way in which
he and his confrères in sin discourse:
Whoop! whoo! lend us a foot-ball.
Peace, fair babes! Ye shall have an apple to-morrow!
Beware! quoth the good-wife, when she smote off
her husband’s head, beware!
88 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
Crabbed youth and age can live as well together
as those two lingoes. And the staid conventions of
the Virtues slip into innocuous desuetude (they
would have rolled the phrase as a sweet morsel
under their tongues), while the racy license of
the Vices heads straight towards Falstaff.
But in the main, conventions die of being used
to death. Poets of low vitality ensconce them-
selves ...ke hermit-crabs, generation after gener-
ation, in the cast-off shells of their predecessors.
The French poetry of Chaucer’s day (to come no
nearer home) is possessed of a jargon beside
whose deadly yet fascinating monotony the
poetic diction of the eighteenth century is kalei-
doscopic in its variety. Nor is it the diction only
which has hardened into rigor mortis. The setting
of the vision, the remorseless bead-roll of the
catalogues, the stock descriptions whose end is
inevitably foreseen from the initial phrase — one
feels that the poets relaxed into them and were
at rest, as the Bishop at St. Praxed’s lay luxu-
riating in the blessed mutter of the mass, and in
the good, thick, stupefying incense Smoke. For
there is, indeed, something almost narcotic in
much mediaeval poetry; one is lulled into a pleas-
ing stupor such as one feels in crossing our great
central plains, watching from the car window
THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS 89
a landscape which always moves yet rarely
changes, set for the ear to the steady, monoto-
nous beat of the pulsing wheels. Fitzgerald wrote
that Professor Cowell “constantly reads Miss
Austen at night after his Sanskrit Philology is
done: it composes him, like Gruel.” I apologize for
even repeating that slander on Jane Austen.
But if Professor Cowell had known fourteenth-
century French courtly poetry, Jane Austen’s
occupation had been gone. I confess that I
Snatch a fearful joy myself in the settled assur-
ance of the sort of thing predestined to confront
one when the next page is turned. It comes as
near certainty as one attains in this our life.
But that shuddering relish for the horrors of
conventions at their worst I grant to be a purely
human frailty, like a fondness for detective sto-
ries. Artistically, the thing is reprehensible, and
the feet of it go down to death.
One gets the same thing, too, in the astounding
vogues of certain poetic forms — astounding,
however, only when one forgets the sonnet cy-
cles, and the heroic couplet, and the short story,
and the O. Henry or Pudyard Kipling opening,
and vers libre. There were the allegories in general
and the vision poems in particular; there were
journeys through heaven and hell and the under-
90 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
world (the sentimental and zigzag journeys being
yet in the seeds of time); there were temples of
this, and mirrors of that. And there was the débat;
the sort of thing which a little later one finds
in the elder Heywood’s “Play of Love,” that
delectable old Interlude in which appeared four
characters, of whom one was loving but not
loved, another loved but not loving, a third both
loving and loved, and a fourth neither loved
nor loving. And the amicable debate jogged
comfortably on as to which was the more miser-
able, the “loving not loved,” or the “loved not
loving”; and which was the happier, on the
whole, “both loved and loving,” or “neither
loving nor loved.” There was also beginning
what Mr. Lucas recently called “the first effu-
sion of the deplorable cataract of balades and
rondeaua,” that swept over Europe. Machaut,
Froissart, Oton de Granson, Christine de Pisan
wrote them by the score. Of the indefatigable
Deschamps I speak with something verging on
emotion, for I have twice felt bound to go over
the whole four thousand eight hundred eight-line
stanzas of the one thousand two hundred balades
which he alone has left behind — not to speak of
the one hundred and seventy-one rondeaua, the
eighteen virilais and the fifteen lais. If one wrote
THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS 91
at all, one had to write balades, rondeaua, and
virilais. There were regular rules of the game.
Deschamps himself laid them down in all their
bewildering complexity, in what Chaucer would
have called a “litel thing in prose.” It was a test
of virtuosity to comply with them. It mattered
little what was said; to be formally and conven-
tionally correct was the thing that counted, and
that was easiest of attainment, naturally, by
slipping as usual into the well-worn verbal com-
monplaces of the eternal theme of courtly love.
Conventions were tyrants as well as servants,
then as now.
I have been scrupulously keeping to the Mid-
dle Ages. But almost everything that I have said
has had its de te fabula for to-day. For conven-
tions are shifting, and undergoing metamor-
phosis, and case-hardening into forms that cabin
and confine, now as they were then. But it is hard
to estimate justly the significance of their con-
temporary behavior, because we are caught in the
vortex. Critical detachment demands perspec-
tive, and we ourselves are in the picture. Yet
something approaching perspective may be
gained through the recognition of the present in
the past. And I have had the present steadily
before my eyes in all that has just been said.
92 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
There are, then, three determining attitudes
toward conventions: we may accept them and
passively conform; or we may keep and mould
them; or we may gloriously Smash them, and go
on. Those who passively accept are negligible —
senza infamia e senza lodo. Neither infamy nor
praise is theirs; they are the neutrals in the clash
of forces that press outward the frontiers of art.
It is the other two that will concern us here:
those who accept, but in accepting transmute
and re-create; those who reject, and in rejecting
strike out for unpath’d waters, undream'd
shores. And to the first we may now come.
III
ORIGINALITY AND THE MOULDING OF
CONVENTIONS
I AM free as the air to-day to coin a vocabulary of
my very own, and speak to you in its fresh-
minted words. I should be thereby, I take it,
“original” in the sense in which many of us
seem to understand the term. Only one thing
stands in my way: I most potently and power-
fully desire to be understood by you. You exer-
cise no compulsion whatsoever. If you don’t un-
derstand, you simply cease to listen. And I, who
am here to communicate, conform. Obviously,
then, the individual is not the only factor to be
reckoned with in what we call originality, so far
as expression is concerned. We express in order
to communicate; to communicate, we must be
understood; in order to be understood, we must
employ the language of those to whom we speak.
That is a fact so obvious that we sometimes
forego the desideratum of putting it on its
inferences.
As a matter of fact, we are all of us original
in our expression until our wings are clipped. I
94 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
know a three-year-old boy who calls an auto-
mobile a “cadeüga.” It is, both to him and in
point of fact, an excellently descriptive term,
based, like many a word in the pristine days of
speech, on the sound the thing makes. But you
Can’t go to the telephone and ask for a “cadeü-
ga” with any valid hope of seeing it appear.
And since the world with which the young ad-
venturer must communicate prefers to call the
affair a motor, Or a car, or a machine (incom-
parably less exact and fitting terms), he will in-
fallibly drop his own fresh and vivid coinage, and
conform. The tangential energy of the individual
beats its wings in vain against the centripetal
force of the community, and every infant an-
archist in speech yields at last to the usage of
that world by which, if he is to live, he must be
understood.
All this, of course, has larger implications. Ex-
pression in art can no more escape the demands
of intelligibility, than expression in every-day
speech. The poet writes in order to communicate,
and to communicate he, too, must be understood.
And the language of poetry in the broader sense,
poetic forms and conventions of whatever sort,
is established by long usage, like speech itself.
It may, from the point of view of either rhyme or
OPIGINALITY AND CONVENTIONS 95
reason, be irrational, even absurd. So are words.
But there it is. And though the poet is free as
air to create a new poetic language, he takes, if
he does, the chances of the youthful coiner of
“cadeüga.” His own immediate poetic family
may understand and marvel, but the world goes
on unmoved. What he can do is to use the com-
mon language with a new distinction, a fresh
vividness, a more compelling power. And that
offers to originality its richest field.
There are two deep-rooted idiosyncrasies of
human nature that bear on our acceptance or re-
jection of what is offered us. We have, in the first
place, an innate bias for the familiar. Whatever
we’re thoroughly unfamiliar with is apt to seem
to us odd, or queer, or curious, or bizarre. For it
is no mere trick of speech, but one of those appall-
ingly veracious records of human nature and
experience in which the history of words abounds,
through which “outlandish” and “uncouth”
attained their present meaning. For “outlandish”
meant in the beginning only what does n’t be-
long to our own land, and “uncouth” was simply
“unknown.” The change in meaning registers a
universal trait. Whatever is alien to our Own
ways — the costume, manners, modes of speech
of another race or of other times — is strange;
96 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
and “strange” itself, which started out by
meaning merely “foreign,” is only another record
of the same idiosyncrasy. That is one thing.
But there is still another trait that is no less
broadly human. Whatever is too familiar wearies
us. Incessant recurrence without variety breeds
tedium; the overiterated becomes the monoto-
nous, and the monotonous irks and bores. And
there we are. Neither that which we do not know
at all, nor that which we know too well, is to our
taste. We’re averse to shocks, and we go to sleep
under narcotics.
Now both the shock and the narcotic have, I
grant, at times their fascination. But they are
apt to beforward, not permanent, Sweet, not last-
ing. The source of more or less abiding satis-
faction for most normal human beings lies in a
happy merging of the two — in the twofold de-
light in an old friend recognized as new, or a new
friend recognized as old. The experience and the
pleasure are universal. All the lovers who have
ever lived have made experiment of it; a face
that you’ve passed a hundred times, nor cared to
see, remains the face you’ve always known, but
becomes all at once the most beautiful and thrill-
ing object in the world; the person you’ve never
known before, you find all at once you’ve known
ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTIONS 97
from all eternity. Now art, like love, sends its
roots deep into what we are. And our most per-
manent asthetic satisfaction arises as a rule from
things familiar enough to give the pleasure of
recognition, yet not so trite as to rob us of the
other pleasure of surprise. We are keen for the
new, but we insist that it establish some connec-
tion with what is friendly and our own; we want
the old, but we want it to seem somehow new.
Things may recur as often as they please, so long
as they surprise us — like the Ghost in “Ham-
let” — each time they appear.
Let me illustrate what I mean from a single
device of poetry. What is it that charms us in
these stanzas from a fifteenth-century carol?
He came also still.
There his mother was,
As dew in April
That falleth on the grass.
He came also still
To his mother’s bour,
As dew in April
That falleth on the flour.
He came also still
There his mother lay,
As dew in April
That falleth on the spray.
98 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
The balance between recurrence and variation is
so delicately kept that monotony itself becomes
the signal for a fresh surprise. And Poe’s con-
summate and deliberate technique, no less than
the limpid simplicity of the carol, secures its
almost magical effects by the same means:
The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crispèd and sere,
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October,
Of my most immemorial year;
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir:
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.
That is but one way out of a thousand in which
the familiar merges with the strange. And when a
poet, through whatever Secret of his art, gives to
the expected the thrill of a discovery, he need
have no fears for his originality.
What we call originality, then, does not so
much consist in the creation of something wholly
new, as in this repristination (to use Browning's
word) of something old. That is not, of course,
quite the whole story. But the other side may
securely wait. **
Let us begin with one or two conventions. And
though we start out with the elder poets, we
ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTIONS 99
shall arrive, in the end, at the year of our Lord
that we date by. We have glanced at the dreary
and wire-drawn inventories of feminine charms
in the poetry of courtly love. We should have to
search far to find anything more nearly in the
article of death, and it is worth a moment to see
what could be done towards vivifying it. Here is
a part of Chaucer’s description of Alisoun, the
racy young person who helps give zest to the
“Miller’s Tale.” All the familiar paraphernalia
of the stock catalogue are there intact. You begin
with resignation (unless you happen to remem-
ber that it’s Chaucer you are reading), prepared
for the inevitable — whiteness of fleur de lis, red-
ness of roses, smoothness of ivory, clearness of
crystal, grayness of glass; and you find — the
slimness of the weasel, the softness of the wool
of a wether, the shrilling of the swallow’s song,
the blackness of the sloe, the fragrance of apples,
the fairness of the pear tree in the spring. The
correct and courtly formulas have gone playing
truant in the fields!
Fair was this yonge wyf, and ther—with-al
As any wesele hir body gent and Smal. . . .
Ful Smale y-pulled were hir browes two,
And tho were bent, and blake as any sloo.
She was ful more blisful on to see
Than is the newe pere-jonette tree;
100 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
And softer than the wolle is of a wether. . . . .
But of hir song, it was as loude and yerne
As any Swalwe sittinge on a berne.
Ther-to she coude skippe and make game,
As any kide or calf folwinge his dame.
Hir mouth was swete as bragot or the meeth,
Or hord of apples leyd in hey or heeth.
Winsinge she was, as is a joly colt,
Long as a mast, and upright as a bolt.
The hackneyed convention has become vivid
as a branch of hawthorn leaves, and racy of
good English soil. Let us see what happened to
another.
One of the most notorious instances of the
mediaeval trick of listing things is the so-called
Ubi sunt formula. It is a comprehensive and de-
tailed interrogation, on the order of “Where, oh,
where are the Hebrew children?” as to the where-
abouts of all the ancient worthies:
Dic, ubi Salomon, olim tam nobilis,
Vel ubi Samson est, dux invincibilis-
and so on through an interminable list. That hap-
pens to be from a mediaeval hymn, but the thing
is everywhere. I shall give at once the most ter-
rible example that I know. Where, asks Des-
champs in one of his twelve hundred balades—
where are David and Solomon, Methuselah,
Joshua, Maccabaeus, Holofernes, Alexander and
ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTIONS 101
Samson, Julius Caesar and Hector and Pompey;
Croesus, King Arthur, Godfrey, Charlemagne,
Darius the Great, Hercules, Ptolemy; where is
Denis the felon king, Job the courteous, Tobias,
Aristotle, Hippocrates and Plato, Judas, Hester,
the good Penelope, Queen Dido, Pallas, Juno,
Guinevere, Iseult, and Helen, fairest of all; where
is Jason, Romulus, Saladin; where he who con-
quered Aragon, or he who built Avignon, Paris,
Pheims, and Pouen? That is a list from a single
balade only; I spare you two others in a similar
strain. The old convention came to life again only
the other day, in Illinois:
Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom, and
Charley . . .
Where are Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie, and Edith,
The tender heart, the simple soul, the loud,
the proud, the happy one? —
All, all, are sleeping on the hill. . . .
Where are Uncle Isaac and Aunt Emily,
And old Towny Kincaid and Sevigne Houghton,
And Major Walker who had talked
With venerable men of the revolution? —
All, all, are sleeping on the hill.
FHerman and Holofernes, Elmer and Aristotle,
Methuselah and Major Walker, Aunt Emily and
Dido — whether it hails from Beauté-sur-Marne
or from Spoon River, the Ubi sunt is catholic,
102 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
and holds all, quietly inurned. But modern
instances aside, the thing with its appalling
fecundity dogs one down the Middle Ages in
unrelieved monotony. All at once, in France,
a supremely gifted poet took it up. He took it
up and kept it; but he added one thing—the
penetrating beauty of a refrain which fused the
dead list into one of the most haunting symbols
of human transitoriness:
Tell me now in what hidden way is
Lady Flora the lovely Ptoman?
Where’s Hipparchia, and where is Thais,
Neither of them the fairer woman?
Where is Echo, beheld of no man,
Only heard on river and mere, —
She whose beauty was more than human? . . .
But where are the snows of yester-gear?
Sainte-Beuve long ago pointed out that Willon’s
poignant refrain — his “Mais oil sont les neiges
d’antan!” — transformed by the alchemy of
genius the hackneyed formula. It did. The one
compelling phrase became a solvent, through
which the hoary banalities of the convention
were merged in the fleeting evanescence of all
things that are.
Moreover, what Villon did with the balade in
general is a no less illuminating case in point. He
found it more dead than any modern poet has
ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTIONS 103
ever thought he found the chrysalids from which
the spirits of Tennyson and Arnold and Swin-
burne have flown. It was a garment walking
about with nobody in it. Deschamps in particular
had used it as a catch-all for the multifarious
sheddings of his mind. His military campaigns,
his maledictions on the toothache, his Weltan-
schauung in general, his dislike of tripe, his resent-
ment against England, his observations on dif-
ferent ways of eating, his counsels of perfection
addressed to kings and princes, his profound dis-
taste for truffles, his lament for the misfortunes
of the church, his views on the seven liberal arts,
his lucubrations on the Seven Deadly Sins — all,
all, are poured indiscriminately into the balade
receptacle. It was trite, hackneyed, shop-worn,
traditional, bookish, second-hand, ready-made,
stereotyped, artificial, rigid — a list of epithets
which I have culled from a recent pronounce-
ment of the newer poetry upon the only less new,
which has already stiffened, it would seem, in
death. The balade could cry peccavi to these stern
indictments all and some. And so Willon found it.
The thing he should have done, of course, was
to discard it utterly, as fit only for the scrap-
heap. He did n’t, by the grace of Heaven, and
everybody knows what happened. The dead
104 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
awoke, and not only the “Balade des dames du
temps jadis,” but “La belle Heaulmière,” and a
dozen others stand, with vivid and imperishable
freshness, among the Supreme achievements of
poetry.
We might dwell with no less profit upon the
progressive desiccation, a little later, of the son-
net. Nobody ever put the reason for what hap-
pened better than Sidney himself, who, showing
the steep and thorny way to Heaven, on Occasion
recked not his own rede.
You that do search for every purling spring
Which from the ribs of old Parnassus flows,
And every flower, not sweet perhaps, which grows
Near thereabouts, into your poesie wring;
Ye that do dictionary’s method bring
Into your rimes, running in rattling rows;
You that poor Petrarch’s long-deceased woes
With new-born sighs and denizen’d wit do sing;
You take wrong ways; these far-fet helps be such
As do bewray a want of inward touch.
And through these far-fetched helps the sonnet
became, in the hands of innumerable practi.
tioners, a thing of frigid conceits worn bare by
iteration; of servile borrowings; of artificial sen-
timent, flat as the lees and dregs of wine. One has
only to read seriatim the Elizabethan Sonnet
cycles (with their glorious islets rising here and
ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTIONS 105
there out of the general haze) to find every ear-
mark of the incorrigibly case-hardened conven-
tion. Well, Shakespeare responded to the vogue,
and made of the sonnet, with lapses here and
there, the vehicle of the very quintessence of
poetry. “And, when a damp Fell round the path
of Milton, in his hand The Thing became a
trumpet.”
But, we are told — and not by recent protes-
tants alone — the sonnet’s day is at last done.
Keats wrote that he was “endeavoring to dis-
cover a better sonnet stanza than we have”
— but it is worth observing that he left as his
legacy the realms of gold in the lines: “On First
Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” “I will never
write another;” Byron declared; “they are the
most puling, petrifying, stupidly platonic com-
positions.” Fitzgerald thought sonnets were fit
only to “serve as little shapes in which a man
may mould very mechanically any single thought
which comes into his head, which thought is not
lyrical enough in itself to exhale in a more lyrical
measure,” and that its metre was “a good excuse
for the dull didactic thoughts which naturally
incline towards it.” And he also expresses the
pious wish “to tie old Wordsworth’s volume
about his neck and pitch him into one of the
106 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
deepest holes of his dear Duddon.” But through it
all the sonnet holds its way. And Pupert Brooke,
like Villon, comes along and writes this—of
the dead, too, but not “du temps jadis”:
These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,
Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth.
The years had given them kindness. Dawn was
theirs,
And sunset, and the colours of the earth.
These had seen movement, and heard music; known
Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly
friended;
Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;
Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is
ended.
| There are waters blown by changing winds to
laughter
And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after,
- Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance
And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white
Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,
A width, a shining peace, under the night.
The new comes and takes its place beside the
old, and we welcome it. But it is not wise to give
up too soon the old for dead. The ways of genius
with supposedly cast-off and lifeless forms have
to be reckoned with. For the touch of genius is
like the miracle of Spring.
Let us return, for a moment, to our thesis.
Neither familiar things grown trite, nor things
ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTIONS 107
so new as still to be remote and alien, ever grip
us as do those things which are at the same time
old enough to touch the chords of memory, and
yet fresh (if I may use a poet’s phrase) with some
unspent beauty of surprise. And the supreme
test of originality is its power to give us the sense
of a footing on trodden and familiar ground,
which all at once is recognized as unexplored.
That is what Chaucer does times without number.
That is what Villon does in the balade. For orig-
inality, rightly understood, seldom concerns it-
self with minting a new and particular medium
of its own. And genius of the highest order is far
more apt to disclose the unexpected resources of
whatever vehicle of expression it falls heir to,
than to spend itself upon the fabrication of a new.
I know that this is not the doctrine of the hour.
And I know, too, that the hour, within due lim-
its, is not without a valid case. “I holde,” says
that peerless natural philosopher, the Wife of
Bath, “I holde a mouses herte nat worth a leek,
That hath but oon hole for to sterte to.” And
originality undoubtedly fulfils itself in many
ways. But precisely because the way of creative
acceptance is just now more or less anathema, I
am doubly anxious, not to defend, but to establish
it. The way of constructive rejection shall have
108 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
full hearing by and by. Meantime, there are cer-
tain fundamental and (I believe) still fruitful
and operative principles to reckon with.
The current notion that invention is a mark of
high originality is one of the vulgar errors that
die hard. If it were true, “The House of a Thou-
sand Candles” or the “Filigree Ball” would bear
away the palm from many a masterpiece. But it
is not the case. None of the great poets has ever
troubled himself particularly to invent. That is
especially true, of course, of narrative and dra-
matic poetry, and in spite of the fact that both
narrative and the drama have now been largely
commandeered by prose, the usage of Sophocles,
and Dante, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and
Goethe (although I am far from wishing to con-
jure with great names) is not without relevance
still. They took, then, for the most part, materi-
als that had come down to them — themes that
had grown and developed through a selective
instinct working, often, through long genera-
tions. And instead of inventing, they discovered.
If that Sounds cryptic, let us start with a modern
instance that is n’t poetry at all.
Dickens, as everybody knows, took over in
“Pickwick Papers” a farcical series of sporting
Sketches, already begun, and intended to centre
ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTIONS 109
about a mythical Nimrod Club. In these earlier
sketches Mr. Pickwick appeared (absit omen!) as
a tall, thin man. But before he reached Dickens’s
hands, by one of those changes on which immor-
tal issues turn, he had become short and fat.
And so Dickens found him, and proceeded with
his book. And now I quote Mr. Chesterton, lest
I be suspected of building up a parallel ad hoc.
“He made,” says Chesterton of Dickens, “in the
midst of this book a great discovery. . . . And
that discovery constituted . . . the outstanding
and arresting original feature in ‘The Pick-
wick Papers.” . . . He had chosen (or somebody
else had chosen) that corpulent old simpleton as
a person peculiarly fitted to fall down trapdoors,
to shoot over butter slides, to struggle with apple-
pie beds, to be tipped out of carts and dipped
into horse-ponds. But Dickens, and Dickens
only, discovered as he went on how fitted the
fat old man was to rescue ladies, to defy tyrants,
to dance, to leap, to experiment with life, to be a
deus eac machiná, and even a knight errant. Dick-
ens made this discovery. Dickens went into the
Pickwick Club to scoff, and Dickens remained to
pray.” So Mr. Chesterton, and in this fashion
Samuel Pickwick joined the company of the im-
mortals. And I need not remind you, in passing,
110 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
that one Sir John Falstaff, despite his own vera-
cious rehearsal of the circumstances of his birth,
had a not dissimilar pedigree.
Dickens, then, did n’t invent Mr. Pickwick; he
discovered him underneath his disguising habili-
ments. And out of his discovery grew a unique
book. There is another unique performance that
grew out of a similar flash of insight. Chaucer
did over into English the story of Troilus and
Cressida as it came to him, particularly through
Boccaccio. He found it an Italianate romantic
epic; he left it the first great English novel.
“Nothing like it,” as has been recently said,
“was ever in the world before.” How does he
do it?
He starts out in pretty close dependence upon
Boccaccio. And he reaches Cressida herself, and
Pandar. Then all at once something happens,
and you can see it happening before your eyes,
if you read the two narratives together. Some of
you will recall what Stevenson says of “Kid—
napped”: “In one of my books, and one only,
the characters took the bit in their teeth; all at
once they became detached from the flat paper;
and they turned their backs on me and walked
off bodily, and from that time my task was steno-
graphic.” Well, that is what happened to Chau-
ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTIONS 111
cer. There before him was Boccaccio's Cressida,
the conventionally fickle woman. “I came like
water, and like wind I go,” she might have said,
in Omar's words. And the facility with which she
went is rivalled only by the fatal ease with which
she came. But something else in her seized upon
Chaucer, and lifted him, and Cressida with him,
bodily out of Boccaccio. And as a result of that
flash of vision, a conventional treatment of the
hackneyed theme of a woman lightly won and
Quickly lost, turns into a penetrating and pro-
foundly sympathetic portrayal of the shifting,
fluctuating impulses of a woman yielding both
against and with her will. And I know no char-
acter outside Shakespeare that is at once so
human, and so hauntingly elusive in its com-
plexity, or so tragically implicated in the defects
of noble qualities, as the Cressida of Chaucer's
discovery. What he discovered in Boccaccio's
Pandaro, and the matchless figure that he
made of it, time fails to tell. But through his
fresh conception of what he found in the mate-
rials that came to him, he created a new and
amazing literary form, and did something that
was never done again until Fielding and Thack-
eray and Meredith appeared.
But Chaucer had the habit of discovering
112 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
astounding possibilities in things that appear to
have incurably gone stale. Let us take another
instance. The Middle Ages had a passion for col-
lecting. Jacobus de Voragine, in the “Golden
Legend,” collected Saints; Boccaccio, in the “De
Casibus,” collected tragedies; in the “De Claris
Mulieribus” he collected famous women; the
mediaeval preachers were indefatigable collectors
of eacempla. Story collections, then, were a stock
convention. Chaucer himself had tried his hand
at them more than once. He had done it in the
“Legend of Good Women,” and he had done it
in what later came to be the “Monk’s Tale.”
Indeed, the Monk cheerfully stated, before he
launched into his string of tragedies, that he
had a hundred of them in his cell! Such collec-
tions, however, were merely collections—stories
strung together, or confined within some station-
ary framework; tales lifted from their native soil,
and mounted, classified, and pressed in an her-
barium. But stories grou. They spring from the
fillip of some suggestion, and one begets another,
and they smack of the qualities of their narra-
tors. A group of men (and I am not forgetting
Chaucer for a moment) are gathered in the
smoking compartment of a Pullman car. The
cigars burn freely, and the bars come down. The
ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTIONS 113
captain of industry lets himself be known by
stories of big business; the soldier has tales of the
trenches; the Californian sings the glories of his
State in dazzling anecdote; the college professor
strives to seem unacademic, but the damned
spot will not out; the commercial traveller tells
the story of his life, and the clergyman discreetly
seeks his berth. Pecall, moreover (for you find
Chaucer everywhere), your transatlantic voy-
ages, when such things were. A body of people
whose paths have never crossed before are
thrown together for a week or so without the
possibility of respite or escape. And an act of the
Human Comedy promptly takes the stage. The
boat is scarcely out of sight of land till attrac-
tions and repulsions are weaving back and forth.
Like gravitates to like, and propinquity has its
perfect work, to make or mar; total strangers
leave the boat betrothed, and friends of years no
longer speak. Journeys are both fertile soil for
stories, and Swift reagents upon human nature.
Now Chaucer knew no Pullman cars nor trans-
atlantic liners, but he did know something that
combined the merits of them both, the pilgrim-
age. And pilgrims, like their modern counter-
parts, had their scrips chock-full of news inter-
spersed with lies: “pilgrymes, With scrippes
114 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
bret-ful of lesinges, Entremedled with tydinges.”
Moreover, pilgrimages threw together, willy-
nilly, every sort of person in the world — “a
companye Of Sondry folk, by aventure y-falle In
felaweshipe.” And they told their tales each after
his kind, and as they rode they developed antipa-
thies and disclosed affinities. And Chaucer made
the great discovery. Journeys are uſhere stories
live when they’re at home. Why leave them
stranded in a collection, “lyk a fish that is water-
lees”? And by a stroke of genius he turned a
static into a dynamic thing, and out of a hack-
neyed literary type the Human Comedy itself
unfolds before our eyes. For if ever the Spirit of
Comedy, with its sage’s brows and its slim feast-
ing smile, was luminous and watchful overhead,
it was when the “nyne and twenty in a com-
panye” set out from Southwerk at the Tabard,
on the road to Canterbury. And there, like Cres-
sida, “I take my leve.” “Who-so wol here it in a
lenger wyse,” says the Monk when he has told
the Tale of Ugolino, “Pedeth the grete poete of
Itaille, That highte Dant, for he can al devyse
Fro point to point; nato word wol he faille.”
And what Chaucer says Dante did for Ugolino,
Professor Kittredge has recently done for Chaucer
himself. And the Supreme originality of the
ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTIONS 115
“Canterbury Tales” — the matchless give-and-
take along the Canterbury road, the self-revela-
tions, the breaking into life of hackneyed narra-
tive forms, when they fall from the racy, or
stately, or ribald lips of the pilgrims — all that
has been, once for all, devised from point to
point, and I shall not retell what has been so
luminously told.
I said I should drop the “Canterbury Tales”
with that. But I must cast just one more longing,
lingering look behind to those warm precincts of
the cheerful day. Some of you will remember
the incomparable lines in which the Wife of
Bath breaks in upon her retrospect:
But, lord Crist! whan that it remembreth me
Upon my yowthe, and on my jolitee,
It tikleth me aboute myn herte rote.
Unto this day it dooth myn herte bote
That I have had my world as in my tyme.
Well, that is Chaucer’s own savoring of life. And
that is the secret of his originality. He was origi-
nal because he could n’t be anything else to save
his soul. For he was alive to his finger tips, and
nothing that he really touched could remain
dead. And it is this invincible zest of his, this
keen and intimate relish of the Human Comedy
— his own rôle with the rest — through which he
116 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
vitalizes everything he lays his hands on. He is
everlastingly discovering that dead things are n’t
dead at all. He dares to begin the immortal Pro-
logue to the “Canterbury Tales” itself with a
device that had been worn to the bone in the
swarming vision poems of the day. It was always
Spring when the dreamer fell asleep. And the
same conventional birds, trees, and breezes re-
peat each other, till almost one’s spirit dies “for
wo and wery of that companye.” How deadly
they were you can only know if, like Chaucer,
Thou gost hoom to thy hous anoon;
And, also domb as any stoon,
Thou sittest at [boke after] boke,
Till fully daswed is thy loke,
And livest thus as an hermyte.
But Chaucer as usual saw what others had n’t
seen. And he struck through the shell of the trite
springtime convention to the heart of Spring it-
self. Spring is the time of the irrepressible Wan-
derlust, of longings for the open road, over the
hills and far away: “than longen folk to goon on
pilgrimages.” And So:
Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTIONS 117
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Pam his halfe cours y—ronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open ye,
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages):
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
(And palmers for to seken straunge strondes)
To ferne halwes, couthe in Sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende -
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The holy blisful martir for to seke.
And the pilgrimage is on. And a spirited turn to
a jaded commonplace has achieved an opening
that is flawlessly organic — and, incidentally,
has given to English poetry the lines whose
familiarity has kept its April freshness through
five hundred years. t
Jriginality, then, is independent of invention,
Jt is rather the gift of seeing and seizing the
latent possibilities of familiar things. We accept
that formulation without demur when the fa-
miliar things are the appearances of earth, and
air, and sea, and sky — effects of light and
shade, nuances of color, aspects of mass and line,
sound, fragrance, movement — all the bewilder-
ing, iridescent throng of old impressions that all
at once flash into new, when the eye is quickened
and alert. What we fail, perhaps, to realize is
this: that the old and well-worn forms of art, the

118 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
familiar treatments of traditional themes, stand
to the poet in precisely the same relation as the
world of eye and ear. And they too may flash into
life under the same compelling vision that at
rare moments pierces the husks of things, and
discloses beauty. For art is tradition, and what is
handed down is itself material for the alembic.
It may prove to be utterly intractable, its pris-
tine ductility vanished forever. Well and good;
that is a malady incident to art no less than to
manners and costume and speech. But that is the
other half of the truth — the half that is turned
towards us to-day. What we are concerned with
at the moment is the half that has suffered tem-
porary eclipse: the fact that old forms and old
themes have always remained, and in large
measure still remain, malleable under creative
energy. And what we call originality has always
found rich stuff for its transmutation there.
I shall not summon Shakespeare as a witness.
It is all or nothing with him. One thing only I
shall say. If you wish a complete compendium of
the essentials and the quintessentials of origi-
nality, in all their conceivable manifestations, go
on a voyage of discovery of your own, and begin
by reading Lodge’s “Posalynde,” and Brooke's
“Pomeus and Juliet,” and the old “King Leir and
ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTIONS 119
his Three Daughters,” and North’s noble trans-
lation of Plutarch’s “Life of Antony,” page by
page, and sometimes word by word, with the
plays that Shakespeare built on them. That is
neither a counsel of perfection, nor an injunction
to settle Hoti’s business; it is a practicable and
supremely illuminating enterprise. And forty
thousand lectures could not, with all their quan-
tity of lore, make up its sum. For in the first-
hand comparison of what Shakespeare found and
took with the astounding thing he made of it,
lies the touchstone of all originality whatsoever.
There is, however, another question about
Originality, the answer to which is not without
importance. What are the limits of originality,
in its Sovereign dealing with other men’s work?
The problem has been rather hopelessly mud-
dled in our minds through a failure to remember
that Originality in its narrower sense, as a mere
antonym for plagiarism, has always been itself
a pure matter of convention. The metes and
bounds between “mine” and “thine” in literary
property have never remained fixed. They have
been, for any given period, determined solely by
the current literary usage. And the ethics of the
question need concern us only so far as it is a
matter of the evolution of conventions. Concern
120 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
us it must, however, because we persist in judg-
ing in accordance with the conventions of to-day
older practices, that were subject to a wholly
different usage.
The Middle Ages, for example, had practically
no sense whatever of literary property, as we
conceive it. Rights of possession in other men's
work were “free as the road, as large as store.”
Froissart’s words about another matter are ap-
plicable here: “there was nothing of which one
could say “It is mine,” for everything was com-
mon as the sun and moon.” Short of wholesale
and servile cribbing, A was as free to incorpor-
ate what B had written, as he was to levy on the
blessed sun of heaven, for his poetic needs. And
it was as little incumbent upon him to state
that he had done so, as it is even yet for me
to announce that I lifted “the blessed sun of
heaven” from Shakespeare. The works of other
men, in fact, stood on practically the same foot-
ing, to a writer, as the works of God. Chaucer
fuses the results of his reading into a new thing,
precisely as he fuses his keen and infallible Ob-
servations of life. And usually he combines the
two. The Wife of Bath — who should have lived
long enough hereafter to have met in Falstaff her
only peer and her only match — the Wife of
ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTIONS 121
Bath herself is simply Chaucer’s multifarious
and vivid reading of books, and his alert and
omnivorous reading of life, poured together con
amore into the mould of a superbly vital imagi-
native conception. Now one of the Wife's chief
components happens to be St. Jerome — the most
amazing metamorphosis that ever a saint has
undergone. St. Jerome, however, I suspect would
be the first to waive acknowledgment of such a
borrowing. But the Wife of Bathis no less a debtor
without acknowledgment to one of Chaucer’s
contemporaries, Eustache Deschamps. What is
to be said of that? Let Deschamps answer for
himself. Long before the Wife's apologia pro vita
sua was written, Deschamps sent across the
Channel to Chaucer, by a common friend, a
remarkable balade, the refrain of which is this:
“Grand translateur, noble Geffroy Chaucier”
— Geoffrey Chaucer, the great translator. That,
to Deschamps, is Chaucer’s distinction; he has,
as it happens, sowed the flowers (it is the balade
speaking, and not I) and planted the rosebush of
the “Roman de la Pose” for those who are igno-
rant of French. But those who are ignorant of
French are also deprived of Deschamps. And so,
in the envoy, Deschamps proffers a suggestion.
In Chaucer's garden, he modestly protests, he
122 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
would be, to be sure, but a nettle – “En ton
jardin ne seroye qu'ortie” — but he makes it
unmistakably clear that he was anxious to be
transplanted there, if only Chaucer would. And
the sequel is this. Chaucer did find in Deschamps,
as we now know, stuff for his loom, and wove it
into his own tapestry. But it is only within the
last dozen years that the discovery was made
that he had actually done so. For, in entire ac-
cordance with the usage of his day, which Des-
champs followed with the rest, Chaucer made no
acknowledgment. It would have been a work of
pure supererogation if he had. For among that
happy breed of men to whom all things were
theirs, to take over another’s “goodly words”
into one’s own “douce melodie” was in itself a
compliment as acceptable and courtly as any
that one could pay. Acknowledgment might or
might not be made, precisely as one pleased.
And there, indeed, lies the crux of the whole mat-
ter. Barring the single point of acknowledgment,
Originality meant in Chaucer’s day substan-
tially what it means now — the transmutation
of what is taken over, into something that is
essentially one’s own. And the difference with ref>
erence to acknowledgment grew directly out of
the absence of any such active sense as ours of lit-
ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTIONS 123
erary property — an absence which, in turn, was
the result of causes rooted deep in mediaeval life.
Our modern sensitiveness to any infringement of
our property rights in the children of our brain
is merely a stage a trifle farther on in the evolu-
tion of a convention.
I am not wholly sure, however, that our ethical
gain through the development has not been offset
by an aesthetic loss. At all events, our robust el-
ders in poetry exercised the same imperial rights
of eminent domain over beauty to their liking in
a book, that they exerted over beauty of their
finding in earth, Sea, or sky. And the stipulation
of their holding was in either case the same —
they must improve the property. The simile in
Virgil of the souls that fell from the banks of
the Styx like leaves, becomes Dante’s property
when he enriches Virgil’s lines from his own cre-
ative observation; precisely as, no more, no less,
the greenness of new grass becomes inalienably
his when the same penetrating observation con-
fers on it the vividness of fresh emerald the in-
stant it is split. Virgil and the meadow were
alike priceless, and alike legitimate, treasure-
trove. And all this meant, in the end, a splendid
and cumulative bodying forth in poetry of the life
of men and things. For poets like Dante, and
124 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
Chaucer, and Shakespeare recognized far more
clearly and surely than we the perennial vitality
latent in tradition. And one of their glories is the
interpenetration, in their work, of books and life.
There they both were; and the creative energy in
those more spacious days struck as straight and
true for the one as for the other, to find its stuff.
And this richness of assimilation of what tradi-
tion furnishes gives to the older poetry a body, a
fulness of habit, of which we often feel the lack
these days, when we all too seldom catch in
verse that sense of a rich and varied background
flashing into expression in a single poem, or
pouring its profusion into the compass of one
master work— the sense that sometimes in a
single phrase throws windows open upon endless
vistas. And qualities like those we can ill afford to
miss. t
For originality is more than the saying of
something never said before about something
now for the first time perceived. That has its
own high value, we may grant at Once; but it
has its limitations too. For however exciting it
might well be to play a second Adam, and have
the Lord God bring to each of us, all new, every
beast of the field and fowl of the air to see what
we would call them — however thrilling that
ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTIONS 125
might be to each happy individual, the universe
would not thereby get far. Fresh beginnings are
excellent stimulants to a jaded world, but a
defective method of progression. The great con-
structive element in both life and art is the deal-
ings of genius with the continuity of tradition.
And poetry becomes original by breaking with
tradition at its peril. Cut the connection with the
great reservoir of past achievement, and the
stream runs shallow, and the substance of poetry
becomes tenuous and thin.
This is not an apologia for bookishness in poe-
try. The bookish, the erudite, the academic, are
worlds away from what I mean. Cut connection
with the other reservoir — “the mighty world of
eye and ear” — and the stream again runs shal-
low, and the substance of poetry becomes this
time not merely tenuous and thin, but hard and
dead. The vitality of tradition and the quicken-
ing impulse of immediate contact with reality—
it is the fructifying influence of each of these
upon the other that makes for life in poetry.
Either without the other means sterility.
}Originality, then, is in the main independent
of derivation. Its specific quality is the individual
stamp: the pervasion of thought and expres-
sion, whencesoever derived, by something that
126 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
gives distinction, freshness, individuality. Take
a line and a half of Wordsworth’s:
. . . that uncertain heaven received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.
When Coleridge read that, he sat down and
wrote in a letter: “had I met these lines running
wild in the deserts of Arabia, I should have in-
stantly screamed out ‘Wordsworth !’” Of course
he would; they are Saturated through and
through with him, - as
For lo! the New-moon winter bright!
And overspread with phantom light
(With swimming phantom light o’erspread
But rimmed and circled by a silver thread) —
as these lines are permeated with the very quin-
tessence of Coleridge. But,
An ampler ether, a diviner air,
also bears Wordsworth’s unequivocal image and
superscription, though this time the gold is the
gold of Virgil.
For although in life “the rank is but the
guinea stamp, The man’s the gowd for a’ that,”
in art, where form and content are as indisso-
lubly one as body and spirit, the distinction
fails to hold. It is the cutting of the intaglio that
gives its value to the gem. And “Drink to me
ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTIONS 127
only with thine eyes” is as inalienably Ben Jon-
son’s, by virtue of its chiselled terseness, as if
almost every phrase of it were n’t buried in the
letters of a Greek rhetorician; and “Still to be
neat, still to be dressed” is incomparably more
original than a thousand poems that are n’t, like
it, the transmutation of the dross of a dozen old
Latin lines into a finished bit of goldsmith’s work.
Read some day, when your stomach is strong,
the old song which Burns took over in “John
Anderson my jo, John,” and remember, as you
read, that the soaring melody of the rondo in the
Waldstein sonata is Beethoven’s similar trans-
figuration of the air of a ribald folk-song about
fleas in straw. For that matter, recall Beetho-
ven’s transformations of the conventional minuet
of Haydn and Mozart into that vehicle of rollick-
ing gaiety, and grim mystery, and tragic portent,
the scherzo of the Third, Fifth, Seventh, and
Ninth Symphonies. And in Miss Lowell’s “Guns
as Keys: and the Great Gate Swings” — to come
down with a leap to the most modern of the mod-
ern — the daring constructive device is no less
original because it gives a brilliant new turn to
what is as old, on the one side, as the “Odyssey”
(in the constant juxtaposition of its great Sweep
forward and its waiting goal), and, on another,
128 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
of as long date as “Aucassin and Nicolete” (in
its alternation of verse and — with apologies!—
prose); while from a third angle it’s a superb
appropriation and translation into words of the
methods of the cinematograph. None of these
things move us, whether in Wordsworth, or Ben
Jonson, or Burns, or Beethoven, or Miss Lowell.
They are stuff for the loom, clay for the potter,
gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble
— it matters not what in the slightest degree.
We know what they are, but we know not what
they may be, when the poet is done with them.
For it is n’t by the materials you use that your
claim to originality will stand justified or con-
demned; it is solely by the thing you do with
them.
There is one other question that will certainly
and properly be asked. Where does inspiration
come in? Is n’t it that which, after all, is the true
criterion and touchstone of originality? Is it not
when, as Goethe puts it, “the good ideas stand
suddenly before us like free children of God, and
cry out: ‘Here we are!’” — is n’t it then that we
are most authentically original? What, too, of
that larger aspect of Goethe’s doctrine, which
comes So near expressing, once for all, what we
each of us would say, if we could, of genius:
ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTIONS 129
Every productivity of the highest type, every signi-
ficant aperçu, every invention, every great idea that
bears fruit and achieves results, stands in no man’s
power, and is exalted above all earthly might. Things
that so come we must regard as unlooked—for gifts from
above, as veritable children of God, to be received with
reverence and with joyful gratitude. They are akin to
the daºmonic, which does resistlessly with us as it will,
and to which we unwittingly yield ourselves, even while
we think we are acting on our own initiative.
Is n’t that what we really mean by originality?
you will surely ask. Let us see, in the first place,
what is not involved.
The ways of genius are as manifold as the
mercies of the Lord. Inspiration may spring
from what Tennyson calls “unseen germina-
tion”; it may come on the spirit, as Keats once
wrote, “with a fine suddenness.” It may arrive
through brooding over an idea and waiting pa-
tiently until it shines, as Buffon enjoined. Or it
may come in the amazing way in which it came
to Mozart: “When I am riding in a carriage, or
in a walk after a good meal, or in a sleepless
night, then the thoughts come to me in a rush,
and best of all. . . . Then [the thing] goes on
growing . . . and however long it be, becomes in-
deed almost finished in my head, so that I after-
wards survey it at a glance, like a goodly picture
or handsome man; and in my imagination do not
130 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
hear it at all in succession ... but as a simultane-
ous whole. That is indeed a feast! All the finding
and making goes on in me as in a very vivid
dream.” Inspiration may seize on one as “Tam
O'Shanter” seized on Burns, when he walked all
day by the riverside, “crooning to himsel,” and
“in such ecstasy that the tears were happing
down his cheeks,” as he wrote his verses on the
top of his sod-dyke along the stream. Or it may
weary one, as it wearied Wordsworth: “William
tired himself with seeking an epithet for the
cuckoo . . . William very nervous. After he was
in bed, haunted with altering “The Rainbow.”
. . . William tired himself with hammering at a
passage.” It may come as to Goethe, in his bare
little anchorite’s cell of a study, from which (he
says) he scarcely stepped the whole winter
through, except into the still more Spartan bed-
room opening out of it; or it may come as it used
to come to Scott, while he galloped on horseback
over the moors. It may descend as it descended
upon Gautier, working imperturbably in the
midst of the clatter of printing presses; or it may
respond only to cloistral isolation, as with Flau-
bert: “I’m like a bowl of cream: if the cream is
to form, the bowl must sit immobile.” One may
write of pastoral Scenery, as Lodge did in “Posa-
ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTIONS 13)
99 & 6 º'
lynde,” “in the ocean when every line was wet
with a surge”; or one may write of the sea, as
Tennyson made “Break, break, break,” “in a
Lincolnshire lane, at five o’clock in the morning,
between blossoming hedges.” For inspiration is
like the wind, that bloweth when and where and
how it listeth. And the modes of its workings are
utterly irrelevant to our concern. For Words-
worth tiring himself for an epithet, or Flaubert
“afflicting his soul over some dubious word,” is
as original as Burns gesticulating by the riverside
in an ungovernable access of joy, or as Byron
dashing off verses after a ball.
But what is it that sets the winds of inspiration
blowing 2 That is absolutely the only question
that concerns us here. For what we call inspira-
tion, in whatever wondrous ways it may behave
once started, always starts. And its starting-
point is some concrete suggestion, and that Sug-
gestion may be anything. It may be a stubbler
field under the autumn light, that all at once
touches the springs of inspiration; it may be a
visit with one’s sister to the Piver Wye, or the
bugle music of the boatmen on Lake Killarney,
or the nest of a field mouse turned up by a
plough. And it may equally well be a line of Vir-
gil, or some phrase of Horace, itself “the birth of
132 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
some chance morning or evening . . . among the
Sabine hills,” that in a flash gives wings to the
imagination; or a page of “Purchas His Pil-
grims,” or an old yellow book picked up in a
Florentine book stall. The titanic sweep of inspi-
ration through “King Lear,” and the thoughts
beyond the reaches of our souls in “Hamlet,”
were stirred to life by two old plays. We are back
where we started. What we call inspiration is the
dynamic factor in originality — that is all.
Let us end orderly as we began. Poetry may
never with safety cut loose from the old, because
the old is always new. The tide of generations
flows on unceasingly, and for each the old experi-
ences have their pristine freshness. That is why
the old themes are perennial. Love is as dazzling
a miracle to every lover who loves to-day as if
unnumbered millions had n’t loved since time
began. Death is n’t trite to you and me because
it’s been the common lot since life first was; nor
have the moon and stars grown old because un-
counted centuries ago, beside the rivers of Baby-
lon and Egypt, or among the hills and pasture
lands of Israel, or in the wide stillness of Arabia,
men saw them, and brooded, and wondered, and
dreamed. The oldest things in the world are the
things that also have been new as many times as
ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTIONS 133
human beings have been born. I happened one
day this summer to look across at an adjoining
cottage. There on the porch was a group of ur-
chins absorbed in constructing a fleet of whittled
ships, and on the path below, two little girls,
heads close together, each with an arm about
the other’s waist, oblivious of all but their own
secrets. And there, too, was the eternal Sea. And
each was as old as the other — and as new.
Now that is what the greatest poetry has
always built on. Its roots strike deep into the
eternally familiar. But the gift of the gods to
genius is the power to catch and fix that familiar
in the recurrent act of becoming new. That is
Originality.
IV
THE HARDENING OF CONVENTIONS, AND REVOLT
ART moves from stage to stage, as we have seen,
by two opposing paths: the way of constructive
acceptance, and the way of revolt. The one is the
road of the builders; the other of the adventurers
and pioneers. You may prefer one path, and I
the other. We shall certainly not all agree on
either. But what Chaucer wrote to his little son
Lewis is still to the point: “diverse pathes leden
diverse folk the righte wey to Rome.” And there
will always be these two great highways to a
common goal, whatever may be your preference
or mine. It is because human beings are what
they are that the world advances, now by the
creative transmutation of the old, now by the
discovery and conquest of the new, and now
through both together.
For behind our differing attitudes towards
conventions stand two fundamental human
bents, that between them comprehend the
world. There are always souls, the salt of the
earth, who say: “So was it when my life be-
gan; SO is it now I am a man; So be it when
CONVENTIONS AND REVOLT 135
I shall grow old” — who could, and do, wish
their days to be bound each to each by natural
piety. There are always, on the other hand,
restless spirits, who rejoice that man is hurled
from change to change unceasingly, his Soul’s
wings never furled. And it is n’t to be wondered
at that those who live to watch wild ecstasies
mature into a sober pleasure, and those who
spend their passionate lives in leaps all day to
reach the sun, seldom see eye to eye. But the
unsolicitous spectator of the game sees both,
and sees each as a factor in the paradox of
human progress. It would be, I fear, a dull world
that developed without break of continuity; it
would surely be a mad world that progressed by
leaps alone. Neither Wordsworth nor Browning
(from whom I strung together my opposing
phrases) saw the thing whole. The world and art
alike move on through what, in the main, is a
continuous evolution, punctuated by the sudden
flaming or flowering of a crucial moment now
and then. For in poetry, as in the State, it is after
all a constitutional régime, tempered by occa-
sional revolution, that remains the least objec-
tionable mode that has been found of muddling
through. The amazing scheme of things of which
we find ourselves a part demands both conserva-
136 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
tives and radicals as indispensable instruments of
its unfolding.
We have dealt with the constructive accept-
ance of the old. And this creative assimilation of
what is handed down constitutes the great con-
servative force in poetry. But the radical attitude
towards the old must be reckoned with too. And
that attitude is apt to be twofold. It is destruc-
tive, because it is tired of the old, and frequently
proceeds without compunction to consign it to
the scrap-heap. It is also constructive, because it
wants the new, and sets forth, not without a
cheerful flourish of trumpets now and then, to
find it. It is sometimes justified in both proce-
dures; it is usually extreme; and it is always
interesting. And without it poetry would indu-
bitably be the poorer.
I propose, then, to consider the radical temper
as the complement, no less than the antithesis,
of the conservative trend in poetry. But I wish
to make my immediate purpose clear. It so hap-
pens that we are at the moment in the midst of
a period of revolt in poetry. I shall not, how-
ever, in this chapter, deal primarily with the
idiosyncracies of this particular insurgent move-
ment. Those will be matter for consideration
later, for what is going on has quite enough
CONVENTIONS AND REVOLT 137
significance to be taken seriously. But it can’t
be taken seriously, if it is proclaimed as some-
thing sui generis. It is very far from that. It is
an old familiar friend, revisiting, with punctual
observance of its period, the glimpses of the
moon. And it is this periodic aspect, this back-
ground with a long perspective, that is too
frequently overlooked. Pevolt is perennial, and
the best aid to reflection on its meaning now is
some acquaintance with its previous behavior.
It is with the phenomena of revolt in general,
accordingly, that we have immediately to do.
The current insurgence will concern us only
indirectly.
Let us return for a moment to the type of origi-
nality that has already been discussed. It con-
sists, essentially, in a remoulding in fresh forms
of old materials. It discovers the new, in other
words, as latent in the old, and it finds in existing
forms no check upon its own freedom to recreate.
Its cachet is its power to call breath from the four
winds, and breathe upon the valley of dry bones,
and make them live. The temper of mind which
we have now to analyze finds in the old, on the
other hand, a hindrance rather than a help to
freedom, and for it the new lies without, not
within, the confines of the familiar. Poetry, as
138 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
the radicals react to it, is shackled by a mass of
inherited conventions — dead rhymes, dead me-
tres, dead diction, dead stock ideas. They would
play the rôle of Perseus to a new Andromeda, and
set the starry prisoner free. Life in poetry, as they
conceive it, is a continual sloughing off of chrys-
alids and trying of new wings. Over against the
transmutation of old conventions is sharply set
their repudiation in favor of the new. The radical
attitude, then, is both negative and positive; not
iconoclastic only, but in its way creative too.
And it is necessary to regard it from both angles.
We may consider the negative aspect first.
The insurgent temper rebels against what it feels
to be the dead hand of convention. And it may
be granted at once that its revolt is often war-
ranted. We have seen something of the ways of
genius in dealing with conventions. But conven-
tions by no means always fall into the hands of
genius. More often than not it is poetry’s jour-
neymen who ply their trade with them, and then
the worst is apt to happen. Let us consider very
briefly, then, some of the conditions out of which
revolt takes its rise.
The path of least resistance has always shared
honors with the primrose way. And the history
of conventions offers no exception to the rule.
CONVENTIONS AND REVOLT 139
To touch a trigger and release a formula is easier
than to forge and file a thought. If I say “white
as” — and stop, nine out of ten of you will in-
stantly complete my phrase by “Snow”; a few
of you will probably supply “a sheet”; for a
smaller, more poetically minded group, the trail
leads to “a lily.” But beyond “white as snow,”
“white as a sheet,” “white as a lily,” few of us
will go except by taking thought. If I begin “red
as”—most of you have already ended the phrase
with “blood,” before I pause; a few of you with
“fire”; a few with “a rose.” “Red as blood,”
“red as fire,” “red as a rose,” stand for so many
beaten tracks; the cue once given, one goes off at
score. And every-day speech and poetry alike are
strewn with innumerable phrases which, once
started on, conduct us, willy-nilly, along a well-
worn channel to an inevitable end. Now most
human minds are indolent, and thought is tough.
And the temptation to slip at ease along a groove
already worn is irresistible. That is why slang is
so insidious and so pervasive; it too is a facile
Surrogate for thought. And the mass of common-
places and clichés that permeate poetry, as they
permeate speech, Spring in large measure from
this inveterate bent of the average mind to follow
the line of least resistance. Pope, whose unri-
140 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
valled terseness and point have spared countless
thousands the travail of thought on a number of
themes, pays his respects to the “tuneful fools
who haunt Parnassus”:
While they ring round the same unvary’d chimes,
With sure returns of still expected rhymes;
Where’er you find “the cooling western breeze,”
In the next line, it “whispers through the trees”;
If crystal streams “with pleasing murmurs creep,”
The reader’s threatened (not in vain) with “sleep.”
Most excellent fooling! But out of the five occa-
sions on which “breeze” ends a line in Pope’s
own verse, in four it punctually rhymes with
“trees.” And here are three of them:
Her fate is whisper’d by the gentle breeze,
And told in sighs to all the trembling trees.
In some still ev’ning, when the whisp'ring breeze
Pants on the leaves, and dies upon the trees.
The dying gales that pant upon the trees,
The lakes that quiver to the curling breeze.
With such fatal facility we glide by the canal, or
take the poetic turnpike road! For poetry, after
all, is very much like Harvard Yard. Somebody,
in the good old Colony days, cut across at a new
angle, and another at another, and adventurer
followed in adventurer’s wake. And the sequel
CONVENTIONS AND REVOLT 141
to-day of their brave farings-forth is a criss-cross
of trim and sacred paths. Which parable he who
runs may read — and lo! into the waiting rut
I too have comfortably slipped.
There is, moreover, another significant factor
in the creation of the conditions out of which
revolt is born. It is what we may call the sur-
vival of the unfittest in conventions. The basic
human fact which underlies it meets us every-
where. I recall, for example, one vivid and com-
manding figure whose tricks of speech and eccen-
tricities of gesture are stamped on scores of men
who in the classroom have sat under him, while
his vividness and his power remain as inaccessible
to their emulation as the moon. Every powerful
personality imposes himself inevitably upon a
recipient group of followers. But what he cannot
give or they receive is the quality that makes him
what he is. That is incommunicable. What he
can and does transmit is the accidents, the idio-
syncrasies, the mannerisms of his genius. And so
it comes about that Pope’s couplets run wild
without Pope’s pith and point; that Sterne prop-
agates his inconsequence, while his suavity and
ease of style die with him; and that Byron’s
rhetoric rolls on, bereft of Byron’s “daring, dash,
and grandiosity.” The slopes of Parnassus are
142 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
crowded with poets clad in the cast-off accidents
of genius.
And so, when dead conventions Squeak and
gibber in the streets, there are just three ways of
reckoning with them. Poets may set the conven-
tions going with the detachment of aphonograph,
and even absent themselves, to all intents and
purposes, entirely. Or they may exercise creative
energy, as we have seen, upon dead forms and
empty shells, and bring about a metamorphosis.
Or, finally, they may rise up in revolt, repudiate
the old coinage altogether, and more or less defi-
nitely set themselves to minting new. And the
last procedure is as common, and as inevitable,
as the other two.
For artistic reactions move in cycles. In per-
petual alternation the same tendencies emerge,
give rise to their opposites, are supplanted by
these opposites, and out of that very eclipse
emerge again, to undergo like metamorphosis.
And there is a certain cosmic humor in the recur-
rent shift by virtue of which the rebel, in due
course, becomes the conservative, the older free-
dom a new tyranny — when the cycle automat-
ically starts again. The way to perfection, as
Pater declares, is through a series of disgusts.
And it is an inveterate habit of English poetry,
CONVENTIONS AND REVOLT 143
once in so often to be stricken with conviction of
sin, and — in the words of the catechism — to
turn from it, with full purpose of, and endeavor
after, new obedience. For the excesses of verse,
no less than those of frail humanity, carry in
their wake the inevitable reaction, and the his-
tory of English poetry is an illuminating record
of periodical farewells to folly. The poetic aber-
rations of the seventeenth century (broadly
speaking) led to a sharp revulsion of feeling and
practice in the eighteenth; against the tyranny
of the mid-eighteenth-century conventions, the
late eighteenth and the nineteenth century rose
in revolt; and now the air is vocal with the battle-
cries of the young insurgents of the twentieth.
The wheel has simply come full circle, and they
are here—till the moving wheel turns on again!
For any revolt — this, that, or the other — is
merely one of the countless waves of action and
reaction between which the arts, like life, per-
petually Swing to and fro, and, through an occa-
sional ground swell, sometimes farther on.
And that brings us to the positive aspect of
revolt. With the spirit of the rebel there often
goes hand in hand the spirit of the pioneer. For
we obviously cannot forever merely transform
and retransform the old. If poetry is not to be-
144 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
come a stagnant pool, there must also be fresh
influx of the new. But in our preoccupation with
the trodden paths, most of us remain oblivious
to the vast tracts of the unexplored, which lie
waiting to be drawn within the circle of the
known, and so, and only so, to become the plastic
stuff of art. Now poetry, which attains its high-
est triumphs in the transmutation of the famil-
iar, is also everlastingly reaching out, for new
substance for its alchemy, into the regions of the
strange. It has always done it, and presumably
it always will. It may, and frequently does, make
shipwreck in the process. But it also may, and
frequently does, bring back from whatever new
lands it has spied out at least the promise of en-
larged possessions. It takes even chances, when
it sets out, of shipwreck or of spoils. But neither
the race nor its poets would have got far without
a certain ardor in the blood that leaps at chances,
and that adventures to the shores washed with
the farthest sea.
Nor need we vex our souls particularly over
the Vagaries of the voyagers. The inevitable ex-
tremes are merely insurgency’s alms for oblivion.
The essential point is that a residuum persists; a
new inch of the strange has been made familiar;
and the frontiers of art have been so far ad-
CONVENTIONS AND REVOLT 145
vanced. And when the Kandinskys and Stravin-
skys, the Picassos and the Matisses, futurism
and cubism, and all the other isms that make
the recent history of art read like a series of
bulletins from revolutionary Russia — when
these have enjoyed their nine days’ wonder, and
been gathered to their fathers, the technique of
art is usually found to have gained a little in
finesse and flexibility, and our recognition of
beauty to have been appreciably widened in its
scope. For after the pioneers there follow others,
when the strange has become no longer strange,
who transmute what the adventurers have
brought within the circle into something that
is enduringly old and new in one. And in the
fact that it makes this ultimate transformation
possible lies one of the outstanding glories of
revolt.
The insurgent temper, accordingly, supple-
ments, even while it apparently contravenes, the
spirit that busies itself creatively with forms and
themes that have been handed down. The irony
of revolt, to be sure, lies in the inability of the
new to remain the new for more than a fleeting
moment. The less commonplace it is, the more
eagerly it is seized upon, and the more Swiftly
and surely worn trite. The cliché is merely the
146 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
sometime novel, that has been loved not wisely
but too well. Yet none the less, the highest boon
which the new can crave of the gods will always
be the chance of becoming old. For the old will
perennially become new at the hand of genius.
That is the paradox of art, and likewise the
reconciliation of conservatism and revolt.
I trust that I have now made clear my con-
ception of the function and the value of revolt.
For I am anxious not to be misunderstood as
captious or censorious in pointing out certain
tendencies inherent in the radical procedure,
which constitute not so much a menace to poetry
as an efficacious mode of suicide for their prac-
titioners. The devotion of insurgency to the
principle of neck or nothing (a devotion which
is one of its engaging qualities) carries certain
fairly uniform consequences in its wake. And just
now an unprejudiced appraisal of the pros and
cons together may not be without its value. A
discussion of either without the other, whether
it be panegyric or tirade, is futile.
In the first place, there is one general principle
which it is important to emphasize. Pevolt, in
the nature of the case, suffers under a specific
limitation. Its own character is in large measure
determined by that against which it is directed.
CONVENTIONS AND REVOLT 147
The new must not only not be that, but it must
be different. And, as a rule, the aim of revolt is to
be as different as possible. Action and reaction, in
poetry as elsewhere, are apt to be equal in inten-
sity and opposite in direction. The thing against
which we protest exercises its compulsion upon
us even in our act of protest, and no declaration
of independence can ever be itself quite free.
Moreover, human nature is so constituted that
the mental state accompanying protest intensi-
fies itself by a sort of auto-intoxication, and
grows by what it feeds on. “The French,” said
Goethe, speaking in 1830, “at the beginning of
their present literary revolution, were after
nothing further than a freer form. They could
not stop with that, however, but threw over-
board, along with the form, the previous content
too.” And that verdict is borne out by the history
of practically every literary revolt, before or
since. The tendency, inherent in human nature
in its protesting moods, is (if I may spoil the
Egyptians of a proverb) to throw out the baby
with the bath. And even when it does not adopt
that simple but extreme procedure, revolt is still
restricted, now more, now less, by the condi-
tions that gave it birth. It is not a free and
independent, but a contingent phenomenon. And
148 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
that is a fact which we shall need to bear in
mind.
It confronts us at once when we approach the
revolutionary notion of originality. The type of
Originality which we have already analyzed, and
which exerts itself in the creative transforma-
tions of old forms and of familiar themes, is
anathema to the insurgent bent of mind. The
determining factor in the insurgent quest of ori-
ginality is a fine impatience of the stereotyped
and second-hand. The element of recoil becomes
at once the dominant influence, and the would-
be original veers perilously towards the extrava-
gant and the eccentric.
It does so largely, and it always has, because
of a very plausible and quite intelligible frame
of mind. The old things have all been said; there
is nothing left us but to say new things, or else to
give to what has already been said some dazzling
or sharply arresting turn. We run across the feel-
ing unmistakably after the great Elizabethans
and Jacobeans had left the platter bare. “We
acknowledge them our fathers in wit;” writes
Dryden, “but they have ruined their estates
themselves, before they came to their children’s
hands. There is scarce an humor, a character,
or any kind of plot, which they have not blown
CONVENTIONS AND REVOLT 149
upon. All comes Sullied or wasted to us. . . . This
therefore will be a good argument to us, either
not to write at all, or to attempt some other
way.” And in different words, but to the same
effect, the twentieth-century artist heroine of
Eden Phillpott’s “Banks of Colme” speaks to the
question: “Just because [art] can’t surpass [the
old masters], it wants to find new channels and
be different. It wants to say new things in a new
language that’s never been used by art before.
. . . We don’t want to say again [what’s been
supremely well said]. . . . We want to say some-
thing new.” That is a desire with which even a
lecturer can poignantly sympathize, but alas!
there are lions in the way. For the world is very,
very old, and back in the caves of the Pleisto-
cene, art began saying things, and it’s kept at it
ever since. And now to say something in a way
that shatters the moulds and discloses a marvel
is n’t, as old Thomas à Kempis says of 'self-
abnegation, “Opus unius diei, nec ludus parvu-
lorum” — it’s neither child’s play, nor will the
labor of a day suffice to reach it. Now and again
some lucky mortal does the trick, and that is a
red-letter day for poetry. But since the desire
and its expression spring eternal, while the visit-
ings of genius touch endeavor only at rare and
150 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
fleeting moments, the upshot of the effort, for
the most part, is a more or less violent straining
after the unusual.
Now this striving after a salient individuality
of expression coupled with the tang of novelty,
leads poetry, on Occasion, to play fantastic
tricks before high heaven. We are endeavoring
to reach clearness about the quality of revolt in
general, rather than to lay stress, at the moment,
on the insurgency that holds the stage. Let us go
back, accordingly, to Some earlier exemplifica-
tions of the same tendency.
There is, as it happens, a singular phenomenon
which we may designate as spurious originality.
It retains the old conventions, but instead of
transforming them, it strains them, as Celia
would say, out of all hooping. It works by dis-
tortion rather than by transmutation, and its
practitioners aim at novelty by the happy ex-
pedient of each going the other one better. The
lady’s eyes kindle the flame of love in her ador-
er’s heart. That is an immemorial convention.
But it becomes trite and commonplace. One of
the Italian fifteenth-century concettisti, Tebal-
deo, improves upon his predecessor Cariteo,
takes the convention, and twists it into a more
arresting form. His lady’s house one day takes
CONVENTIONS AND REVOLT 151
fire. Her friends rush up with buckets of water—
all in vain! For the fire from the lady’s eyes com-
pels the would-be rescuers to dash the water, not
against the burning house, but in self-defence on
their own now flaming breasts. Barnabe Barnes,
an Elizabethan sonneteer, achieves another con-
tortion:
[My passions], when the Taper of mine heart is
lighted,
Like Salamanders, nourish in the flame.
Robert Tofte, Gentleman, tells how
On quicksedge wrought with lovely eglantine,
My Laura laid her handkercher to dry;
Which had before snow-white y washed been.
Dut after, when she called to memory,
That long 't would be before, and very late,
Ere sun could do, as would her glistering eyes:
She cast from them such sparkling glances straight,
And with such force, in such a strangy guise,
As suddenly, and in one selfsame time,
She dried her cloth; but burnt this heart of mine.
The Elizabethan Sonnet-cycles are a treasure-
trove of conventions, distorted, in a mistaken
endeavor to galvanize them into life, into sheer
grotesquerie. Their last state is worse than the
first, as a danse macabre is more fantastic than a
quiet corpse.
The natural recoil from the commonplace, in
152 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
other words, is towards the singular. Not only
must we be spared the obvious at all hazards,
but unexpected and remote analogies must star-
tle us incessantly. And there is perhaps no more
salient instance in English poetry of this revul-
sion from the conventional to an unchartered
individuality of expression than the case of John
Donne. For here was one of the most daring and
penetrating imaginations, one of the most subtle
and restless intellects that ever, before or since,
expressed itself through the medium of verse.
Yet for all his magnificent and lavish gifts,
Donne is the prečminent example of the inability
of genius itself to escape the inevitable, when a
dominant individuality refuses to be subdued to
what it works in, and rebels against the limita-
tions imposed upon every one who would impart
his thoughts. Donne imagines (or recalls) a flea,
in which his own and his lady’s “two bloods
mingled be.” “Oh! stay,” he cries,
. . . three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than marry’d are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed and marriage temple is.
Though parents grudge, and you, we’re met,
And cloister'd in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.
CONVENTIONS AND REVOLT 153
But ideas that essentially belong asunder cannot,
even at the hands of genius, be permanently
joined together, and the shock of surprise once
Over, we wonder at an amazing and perverse
ingenuity, and pass on. And in Donne at his
worst, the passion for singularity contorts,
through its excess, both stuff and form into the
fantastic. Yet he has also left, along with pro-
foundly imaginative poems, imperishable lines:
“I long to talk with some old lover's ghost Who
died before the god of love was born”; the
famous characterization of “her pure and elo-
Quent blood”; and that supremely character-
istic interpenetration of Love and Death and
Beauty in one haunting phrase: “a bracelet of
bright hair about the bone.” But those lines
of his which live, survive by virtue of a trans-
cendent and unique originality of another type,
which works through pervasion, not distortion,
and which leaves what it touches strangely,
it may be even eerily, luminous. The others
coruscate like brilliant pyrotechnics — and go
Out.
But Donne did not and does not stand
alone. Pichard Crashaw, for example, in “The
Weeper,” lets himself go in a wild flight after
new images to express the Magdalen’s weeping
154 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
eyes, and the result is a locus classicus of seven-
teenth-century conceits:
Hail, sister springs!
Parents of silver-footed rills!
Ever-bubbling things!
Thawing crystall snowy hills!
Still spending, never spent! I mean
Thy fair eyes, sweet Magdalene! . . .
Such the maiden gem
By the purpling vine put on,
Peeps from her parent stem,
And blushes at the bridegroom sun.
This wat'ry blossom of thine eyne,
Ripe, will make the richer wine.
And so through eighteen incredible stanzas up to
this:
And now where’er He strays,
Among the Galilean mountains,
Or more unwelcome ways;
He’s followed by two faithful fountains;
Two walking baths, two weeping motions,
Portable, and compendious oceans.
It’s as if a lunatic had propounded a series of
conundrums: “Why are the Magdalen’s tears
like grapes? Why are they like cream? Why like
snowy hills? Why like nests of milky doves?”
And Crashaw plies his ingenuity to answer them.
Yet Crashaw’s no less is the sheer magnificence
of the closing apostrophe of “The Flaming
Heart”:
CONVENTIONS AND PEVOLT 155
O thou undaunted daughter of desires!
By all thy dower of lights and fires;
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove;
By all thy lives and deaths of love;
By thy large draughts of intellectual day,
And by thy thirsts of love more large than they;
By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire,
By thy last morning’s draught of liquid fire;
By the full kingdom of that final kiss
That seized thy parting soul, and Seal’d thee
His —
and so on to the close of the splendid lines. The
absurdities of “The Weeper” are merely origi-
nality gone astray, seduced and obsessed by the
mania for novelty at any cost.
The discovery of the circulation of the blood
was, I Suppose, a theme worthy of the lyre. Any-
way, Cowley thought so. And in his “Ode upon
Dr. Harvey” he depicts the discoverer as hot on
the scent of nature — “coy nature,” who
When Harvey’s violent passion she did see,
Began to tremble and to flee . . .
What should she do? through all the moving
wood
Of lives endow’d with sense she took her flight:
Harvey pursues, and keeps her still in sight.
But as the deer, long-hunted, takes a flood,
She leap'd at last into the winding streams of
blood;
Of man’s meander all the purple reaches made,
Till at the heart she stay’d.
156 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
Once there, she incontinently boasted of her
safety:
She spoke: but ere she was aware,
Harvey was with her there —
and there I leave them! “Thise cookes,” cries the
Pardoner in the “Canterbury Tales,” “how they
Stampe, and streyne, and grinde, And turnen
substaunce into accident 1” Than which I know
no terser summary of the procedure of what I
must Once more call originality gone astray.
I have gone back to the seventeenth century,
because it is perspective that we are seeking. But
the tendency, mutatis mutandis, is not confined
to any period. And most of the worst of our own
So-called “New Poetry,” and occasionally some
even of the best, is characterized by this same
straining of expression, often to the breaking
point, in its ardent quest of the striking and the
novel as a recoil from the threadbare and the
trite. The tendency to rebound from that béte
noire, the cliché, into the far-fetched and the ex-
travagant, is there, and it is unmistakable. And
now, as always, its indulgence is an expeditious
way, to court mortality. And many of those who
follow it deserve a better fate.
“I think,” wrote Keats in one of his letters, “I
think poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and
CONVENTIONS AND REVOLT 157
not by singularity.” There, infallibly touched, is
the distinction which poetry insurgent is apt to
overlook. A fine excess is not only not inconsist-
ent with poetic truth; it may even be part and
parcel of it. Singularity intrudes itself, and shat-
ters the illusion. It does more. And Keats hints
at its fatal defect in his next words: “[Poetry]
should strike the reader as a wording of his own
highest thoughts, and appear almost a remem-
brance.” For poetry may never with safety cut
wholly loose from what is common to the poet
and the rest of us. Subject to that, it may be as
individual as it pleases. But as individuality
approaches singularity, it retreats from its lines
of communication, and isolates itself. And that
way disaster lies.
For there are always, as we have seen, two
parties to all communication of whatever sort —
the individual who speaks, and the community to
whose usage he must conform, if understanding
is to follow. It is the hall-mark of the conserva-
tive temper that it never loses sight of the com-
munity by which it would be understood. At its
worst (and its worst is very bad), it conforms
with entire and slavish acquiescence; at its best,
it enters into an intimate partnership, following,
while at the same time it leads. But the tendency
158 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
of revolt is to let the community go hang, and to
be at all costs itself. And precisely to the degree
in which the purely individual as such thus
isolates itself, it dissolves the partnership out
of which permanent and fruitful understanding
grows. For the problem of all great expression in
art reduces itself to this: to the striking of the
supremely difficult and delicate balance between
the contribution of the individual and the con-
tribution of the mass, of which he is, whether he
will or no, a part. Overbalance the nice adjust-
ment on either side of the scale, and loss is the
inevitable result. Throw the weight overwhelm-
ingly on the side of conformity with the usage of
the community, and freshness and vitality flee
away, and the thing that has been goes on to be,
till the end of the chapter. Throw it overwhelm-
ingly on the side of the sharp projection of the
individual, and the resulting saliency strains, if
it does not break, those lines of junction with the
community which are the sine qua non of intel-
ligibility and acceptance.
The characteristic of revolt which we have just
discussed has to do rather with form than with
content. But the insurgent temper rebels against
threadbare themes, precisely as it repudiates
hackneyed expression. And here as there, it sets
CONVENTIONS AND REVOLT 159
out in quest of new. Let us turn, then, to its
dealings with the subject-matter of poetry.
We are perhaps in some danger, in our purely
academic preoccupations, of forgetting that
poetry behaves as it does, because people are
what they are. And revolt in poetry is not a wind
that blows aloof and fitfully along the upper
reaches of the air. It is bound up with the general
ebb and flow of attractions and repulsions which
go to make up life. And it is never amiss to begin
by scrutinizing life, when one is questioning the
ways of poetry.
Now life, as we all agree, is a mass of more-
than-Chestertonian paradoxes. And none of
them is more curious than that twofold attitude
of ours towards the familiar and the strange,
which we have already had occasion to observe.
For stable satisfaction we most of us settle down
in the familiar. But we are all, at the same time,
creatures of reaction, “with what we most enjoy
contented least.” Too long a siege of the familiar
without mitigation sets us hankering after the
strange, as William James, in the midst of the
irremediable flatness of Chautauqua, found him-
self longing for “Something primordial and sav-
age, even though it were as bad as an Armenian
massacre, to set the balance straight again” —
160 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
for that element of precipitousness, as he calls it,
which gives its picturesqueness to the wicked
outer world. On the other hand, give us a pro-
tracted sojourn in the exotic and the alien, and
there descends upon us an overwhelming, even
passionate homesickness for the familiar. “Da
wo du nicht bist, da ist das Glück” — that pi-
quant dictum holds the keys to asthetic reac-
tions, as well as to the more homely human sort.
For deep in the paradoxical heart of all of us
is the perennial longing to be what we are not.
Jaded and oversophisticated denizens of towns
devote themselves to pastorals; Marie Antoinette
and her court play shepherds and shepherdesses at
the Trianon; Horace Walpole turns Strawberry
Hill into the fearful and wonderful thing that he
thought was Gothic; and the watchword of a
land of cities is “Back to the farm.” And all that,
I suppose, is the Secret of the lure of the unknown,
which has exercised at times a more or less com-
pelling influence on poetry. The unexplored is,
for the moment, where we are n’t, and therefore
where, for the moment, we want to be. Let it
Once cease to be unknown, and paradox reasserts
itself, and the glamour fades. But that comes
later. And one of the symptoms of revolt in
poetry is the appearance, side by side with its
CONVENTIONS AND REVOLT 161
respectable, burgher-like, work-a-day themes, of
more or less outlandish strangers. And when the
fit is on, the remote in space, the distant in time,
and the recondite and occult in human nature
alike attract the insurgent temper. Let us glance
briefly at but one of the three.
One of the most illuminating chapters in the
history of art—and I do not know that any one
has fully written it — would be that which dealt
with the gradual drawing of the strange in space
within the purlieus of the familiar. For the re-
mote in space has always had the faculty of stir-
ring that shuddering pleasure which springs from
what, in equal parts, we shrink from, and wº
want. The lure of the thing is exercising its old
potency afresh to-day, in manifold forms. But
since restriction is imperative, I shall confine my-
self to the spell which has always been thrown
Over poetry by the Orient, especially since that
happens to lend itself to a further use. For the
influence of the East has gone through stages
that are perhaps of some significance.
The most vivid record of that fascination which
I know is found in the mediaeval Mappemondes
— those images du monde in which Europe, Asia,
and Africa lie folded close together, three cells
within the circle of the Ocean Stream, like the
162 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
embryo of the later world. For there, on the sides
of the North, and especially in the unfathomable
East, were set down all the dreams the Middle
Ages ever dreamed — the shadowy and fabulous
Pentexoire, the land of Prester John, where the
mediaeval fancy revelled in the most engaging
set of marvels that even it conceived; the Castle
of Gog and Magog, just across from where Japan
now lies; not far from it, the Land of Femenye;
in easy reach of that, the Earthly Paradise itself
— and so on endlessly. And back along the mys-
terious trade routes, stretching dimly into Central
Asia, came bits of fact that were speedily meta-
morphosed into new marvels, until the maps with
their legends, and their accurately pictured gob-
lins and demons and monsters, became a verita-
ble repository of the illustrated fiction of their
day. All that in drab reality was not, received a
local habitation and a name to conjure with, just
across the frontiers of the known. And poetry
seized upon its opportunity, and what we have
seen in the classical romances, with their child-
like Zest in the marvellous, is one of innumerable
embodiments of the same ineradicable tendency.
Then gradually the unknown East became fa-
miliar. And it is possible to watch the glamour
fading on the very maps themselves. John Speed,
CONVENTIONS AND PEVOLT 163
at once cartographer and worthy member of the
Merchant Tailors’ Company, had on his map of
China, of 1626, beneath the ghoul-haunted Des-
ert of Lop, the cautious legend: “Where men are
thought to be seduced by wonderful illusions and
deuilish spittings.” But Speed had moments
when his faith was wholly dry. For on his map of
Tartary, near the head of the River Ob, appears
this quite unpunctuated record of his disillusion-
ment: “Pliny places the perosites here whom hee
saith be so narrow-mouthed that they live only
by the Smel of rost meat beleeve it not.” And so
John Speed became a convenient index of the
general fading of this special vision into the light
of common day. Even by Marlowe’s and Shake-
speare’s time the Orient, as a terra incognita
where the fantastic had free rein, was largely
of the past.
But it had lost its first hold only to catch imag-
ination in a yet stronger toil. The Orient known
became more profoundly unknown than before,
though in a different way. It had ceased to be
the haunt of naïve and fantastic marvels, but it
had come to be, as it still remains to us Occiden-
tals, seductive with all that is cryptic and un-
fathomable in humanity itself. “The mysterious
East faced me,” wrote Conrad in “Youth,”
164 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
“perfumed like a flower, silent like death, dark
like a grave.” And I cannot serve my purpose
better than by quoting the unforgettable con-
tinuation of the passage, in which the Orient,
silent, impassive, and motionless, looks down in
the morning at the shipwrecked boats come up
from their tussle with the Sea: “And then I saw
the men of the East — they were looking at me.
The whole length of the jetty was full of people.
I saw brown, bronze, yellow faces, the black
eyes, the glitter, the color of an Eastern crowd.
And all these beings stared without a murmur,
without a sigh, without a movement. . . . Noth-
ing moved. The fronds of palms stood still
against the sky. Not a branch stirred along the
shore, and the brown roofs of hidden houses
peeped through the green foliage, through the
big leaves that hung shining and still like leaves
forged of heavy metal. This was the East of the
ancient navigators, so old, So mysterious, re-
splendent and sombre, living and unchanged,
full of danger and promise.” And that is the East
which has exercised its spell upon Occidental
poetry for centuries — on Goethe, and Púckert,
and Heine; on Flaubert, and Baudelaire, and
Gautier; on Marlowe, and Byron, and now, very
particularly, on the poets who are Writing at this
CONVENTIONS AND REVOLT 165
moment. And they are doing both an old thing
and a new thing.
On the one hand, what is happening to-day is
what has happened again and again through the
long and checkered career of poetry. For when-
ever poetry finds the uses of its special world
gone flat and stale, it is very apt indeed, before
the reaction runs its course, to turn its eyes to
the exhaustless East. And that is what it is doing
now. But the interesting thing is that it is doing
it in a fashion entirely in keeping with its own
peculiar tendency. It is n’t the vastness or the
mystery of the East that this time exercises its
old compulsion. For very modern poetry has
set its face like a flint against all vastness and
mystery whatsoever. These are among what it
would call the “cosmic” qualities, and from the
cosmic its very soul revolts. That which does
allure it in the East is an amazing tininess and
finesse — the delicacy, that is to say, and the
deftness, and the crystalline quality of the verse
of China and Japan. Bits of chinoiserie, and
Japanese jewels five-syllables-long are our chief
modern treasure-trove. And all that is as inevi-
table as gravitation. If you happen to be rebel-
ling against what you regard as too much soul in
poetry, you can’t be expected to set out forth-
166 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
with in quest of the illimitable. And that is why
a new and significant phase of the immemorial
Oriental influence is coming into English poetry.
And so far that is pure gain. If you or I happen to
prefer an East perfumed like a flower, silent like
death, dark like a grave, the East of the mystery
is still there. For in our rebellion against rebellion
we sometimes overlook the fact that poetic revo-
lution, unlike civilized warfare, leaves unmarred
the objects even of its deep antipathies. Mean-
while, it is as idle, in the present instance, to
quarrel with a predilection for the intense com-
pression of the hokku, for example, because its
sharp terseness does n’t loom vast and vague,
as it is to object to a squirrel because it’s not a
mountain:
If I cannot carry forests on my back,
Neither can you crack a nut.
And I strongly suspect that deftness and precision
are an asset of high value to poetry just now. At
all events, if the technique of Oriental verse en-
riches European poetry as the technique of the
Oriental graphic arts has enriched European
painting, this particular excursion beyond the
bounds of the familiar will not have been a mere
vagary. And in things like Mr. Fletcher’s “Blue
CONVENTIONS AND REVOLT 167
5
Symphony,” and the magic casements opening
into old Japan in Miss Lowell’s “Guns and
Keys,” one feels that new achievement is not
far off.
But to say that is not to say all. I have chosen
deliberately the attitude of poetry towards the
Orient, because that happens to be conveniently
symbolic of changes that have been, unless I am
mistaken, coming slowly over the character of
revolt itself. For more and more the spirit of re-
volt, in its successive manifestations, has been
undergoing sublimation, if I may put it so. The
strange, the remote, in its larger, more broadly
human aspects — and by that I mean such uni-
versal qualities as in the older influence of the
Orient stirred the imagination through the ap-
peal of mystery, or spoke to the spirit of adven-
ture — all this has been gradually losing its
hold upon poetry. Instead, when we fly from the
obsession of the familiar, it is growingly apt to
be to the more recondite, or precious, or quin-
tessential, or even perverse embodiments of the
strange or far — to “the special, exquisite per-
fume” of Oriental art; to beauty that is “the
deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts,
and fantastic reveries, and exquisite fancies”;
to the exceptional and the esoteric, in a word,
168 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
rather than to the perennial and universal. That
was the trend of the Symboliste movement in
France; it characterized the “naughty nineties”
in England, and fin de siècle art in general; and
some of the very best of the poetry that is being
written now is moving in the same direction.
That means gain, I repeat without the slightest
hesitation. For the present tendency of poetry to
“quintessentialize,” as Henley called it, enriches,
without cavil, the interpretation of life through
art. But to grant that does not release us from
the endeavor to attain perspective; and looked
at in perspective, one or two Salient facts stand
Out.
There is, for one thing, a striking tendency of
latter-day revolt, which is a corollary of the phase
that we have been discussing. I have spoken of
the individual poet in his relation to the com-
munity by which he must be understood. But
the very term “community” is now ambiguous.
A community is a body of people bound together
by common interests and a common medium of
communication. And when poetry began, all
those to whom it was addressed had, as a matter
of fact, all their interests virtually in common.
But what we’re pleased to call civilization has
profoundly modified the old conception. The
CONVENTIONS AND REVOLT 169
larger community, which was once the only one,
is split up into a complex of intersecting circles
that represent the rise of innumerable special
interests. There is, of course, an area common to
all the circles — an area in which all men still
meet On common ground; there are smaller areas
common to a number of the circles, but not to
all; and there are tracts which fall within the
circumference of one circle only. And the grow-
ing disposition of revolt is to strike away from
the common centre to the special areas that lie
Out towards the periphery. In other words, the
tendency of poetry to quintessentialize results
in a narrowing of its audience from the whole
community to the élite, and the poetry of revolt
is apt to become the poetry of a coterie. That
was true of Symbolisme; it was true of the ac-
tivities of the nineties; it is true, with certain
large qualifications, of the insurgent movement
of to-day.
All this carries with it another characteristic
result — a certain more or less malicious satis-
faction in throwing into as strong relief as pos-
sible the great gulf fixed between Philistinism
and the elect. That, to be sure, is a by-product,
rather than an end sought for its own sake. But
it is an almost inevitable concomitant of the sort
170 CONVENTION AND PEVOLT IN POETRY
of reaction which found typical expression in
Baudelaire’s axiom: le beau est toujours bizarre.
“Fleurs du Mal” may not have been written
expressly d’étonner le bourgeois, but neither its
author nor any of the Symbolistes, nor Oscar
Wilde nor any of that circle, put far behind
his back the temptation to “shock the mid-
dle classes.” If the frisson nouveau, which was
to the elect a delicately titillating shudder, hap-
pened to set the teeth of the Philistines chatter-
ing in a convulsion, two goodly birds had been
killed with the same stone. Now it is obvious
that to stress to the limit the element of strange-
ness in beauty is at the same time to run a line of
cleavage sharply through the general commun-
ity. It is, in other words, to make the enjoyment
of poetry primarily an affair of the illuminati, or
the cognoscenti, or whatever other flattering unc-
tion we may turn into a name. “The beautiful,”
declared the Goncourts, “is that which seems
abominable to uneducated eyes. The beautiful
is that which your mistress or your cook in-
stinctively finds hideous.” And that is the inex-
orable logic of the recoil from the banal to the
outré.
Let us grant at once that it is the excess of a
virtue. But whatever our admission, it remains
CONVENTIONS AND REVOLT 171
excess. In its fruitful recognition of the strange
as an inherent element of beauty, it overlooks
the power, more strong in beauty, born of the
familiar. For the greatest art — and by that I
mean what the insurgents themselves with vir-
tual unanimity have always admitted as such —
the greatest art, from Homer down, has had its
roots deep in the common stuff. It may and will
have overtones; it may and will awaken thoughts
beyond the reaches of the average soul. But no
attempt to make poetry once more a vital, civil-
izing force need ever hope to attain its goal, if
it sets to work solely by way of the initiates and
the elect. For what the art of the coterie ignores
is the weighty fact that the very public which
it scouts wants in reality more than it knows it
wants. The more or less crude touching of the
springs of laughter and of tears, of love, and
pity, and indignation, and adventure — this
- which it thinks is all it asks, is merely the in-
strument ready at the artist’s hand for creating
and satisfying finer needs. The Elizabethan
public wanted blood and thunder; Shakespeare
took the raw materials of melodrama, and gave
it “Hamlet.” And “Hamlet” still fills the house.
That is the case in a nutshell. For the public
will accept what the artist has to give, if the
172 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
artist is big enough and wise enough to build on
ground common to the masses and the coterie.
The finest and most exquisite art need make no
compromise whatever with the public taste. At
its height it transcends and transmutes that
taste; it responds, and in its response creates. If
this be error and upon me proved, then Dante,
and Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and Goethe
wrote amiss.
There is still another corollary of the individ-
ualistic bent of revolt. It is prone to insist on
being a law unto itself. Remy de Gourmont
characterizes Symbolisme as “individualism in
literature, liberty of art, abandonment of exist-
ing forms. . . . The sole excuse,” he continues,
“which a man can have for writing is to write
down himself, to unveil for others the sort of
world which mirrors itself in his individual glass.
. . . He should create his own asthetics — and we
should admit as many aesthetics as there are original
minds, and judge them for what they are and
not for what they are not.” This is quoted in the
Preface to the 1916 “Imagist Anthology,” with
the remark: “In this sense the Imagists are the
descendants of the Symbolistes; they are Indi-
vidualists.” And the Preface closes with this
temperate and disarming Sentence: “We are
CONVENTIONS AND PEVOLT 173
young, we are experimentalists, but we ask to
be judged by our own standards, not by those
which have governed other men at other times.”
Most heartily, yes! “A whetston is no kerving
instrument,” says Pandar, “and yet it maketh
sharpe kerving toles.” And it is mere captious-
ness masquerading in the guise of criticism, that
cavils at a whetstone because it’s not a sword-
blade, or demands that a sword-blade shall not
flash and cut, but whet. It is the inalienable right
of any movement to insist that its accomplish-
ment be judged in the light of what it has set out
to do, and not as if it were attempting what the
critics might, and probably would, attempt. But
who shall assess the relative values of the ends?
“That is poetry,” says Professor Saintsbury,
in a moment of relaxation, “that is poetry to a
man which produces on him such poetical effects
as he is capable of receiving.” And, we might
fairly add, that it is poetry to a critic which pro-
duces on him such poetical effects as he is capable
of perceiving. We seem, in a word, to be con-
fronted with Chaos and Old Night, with as many
poetries as there are poets, critics, and lay readers
in the world.
But we are not yet, I think, driven to accept
a poetic Petrograd as our Parnassus. Individual
174 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
aims, however successfully attained, fall ulti-
mately into place in a scheme of values. And that
adjustment of values comes about through no
individual critic or group of critics, but through
the relentless judgment of that community of
all the communities which persists undisturbed
through the waves and the billows of each suc-
cessive generation. Individualism in poetry is
worth having at all hazards. The hazards are
there, but the game is well worth the candle. Yet
we are not thereby called upon to abrogate the
standards of values that are fixed, not by you and
not by me, but by the taciturnity of time.
The peculiar separateness of recent insurgent
movements — to come back for a moment to the
concrete — appears in another and more curious
fact. Symbolisme in France during the eighties,
decadence (or what you will) in England in the
nineties, and now the “New Poetry” of the pres-
ent decade on both sides of the water, have each
been convoyed to immortality by an extremely
active flotilla of little periodicals. In France there
were L’Hydropathe, Le Chat-Noir, Lutèce, the
first and second Vogue, La Revue Indépendent,
Le Décadent, La Cravache, and Art et Critique;
in England appeared The Yellow Book, The
Savoy, The National Observer, The Pageant, The
CONVENTIONS AND REVOLT 175
Dome, and The New Age. And now we — a little
late in the game, but ignoring with admirable
aplomb the fact that we are tardy — we of the
current decade have, or have had (for the things
are deciduous), The Egoist, Blast, The Poetry
Review, Poetry, Others, and The Little Review.
And the last carries, nailed to the mast of its
cover, the legend: “A Magazine of the Arts,
making no Compromise with the Public Taste.”
The trumpets of the elect are still blowing about
the stubborn walls of Jericho. And indeed I
cannot put more tersely the general attitude of
the fervid little insurgent periodicals towards
the public, than in a superb remark of the
equally insurgent Billy Sunday: “They say I
rub the fur the wrong way. I say, let the cats
turn round!”
For myself, I confess to unfeigned delight in
the insurgent propaganda. Its fine ardor and
alacrity of spirit, its enthusiasm for ideals, its
eager hospitality to all poetic Ishmaelites, self-
exiled from Abraham’s bosom, are metal more
attractive than a complacent and impeccably
correct inertia. And militant poetry is more to
edification than poetic or any other pacifism. “I
was ever a fighter, so one fight more,” might
Serve as a motto for many a poet besides Ptobert
176 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
Browning. It is true that the war drums throb
no longer as in the robust anathemas of Ritson,
and Percy, and Warton, when the critics clothed
their necks in thunder, and the poets pawed in
the valley; a slighter breed can scarcely hope to
draw Ulysses’ bow. But the electric amenities
that pass between artistic temperaments at dif-
ferent tensions still find free play. And there are
happy moments when the periodicals emulate
the practice of the late author of the “Way of
all Flesh”: “I am,” some of you will remember
Butler said, “the enfant terrible of literature and
science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get
the literary and scientific critics to give me a
shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks
in the middle of them.” And bricks fly freely
across the embattled slopes of the new Parnas-
sus. Since, however, in the case of poetry insur-
gent, the critics are apt to be those bêtes noires
of the inner circle, “the sterile professors,” the
contest is scarcely an even one. But in the main,
the revolutionists in poetry are quite the mild-
est-mannered men that ever scuttled ship, or
cut a throat. And the insurgent journals, from
the eighties on, have busily combined the func-
tions of a gadfly and a star, stinging and beck-
oning with the same facility. Above all, it is to
CONVENTIONS AND REVOLT 177
their ephemeral pages that we must turn, if we
seek the harbor from which many a rare spirit
has set out for immortality.
I am, however, emphasizing for the moment
that type of revolt which leads to the poetry of
the coterie. For most of the little periodicals have
been, and are, the Organs of a group. The milieu
from which the Symboliste journals sprang is set
forth with precision and verve in André Barre's
“Le Symbolisme.” And their Anglo-Saxon suc-
cessors owe their idiosyncracies to a not dissimi-
lar environment. But this aspect of revolt is, of
course, but a single strand in a mingled yarn. Re-
volt has, in fact, as many directions as a bursting
bomb. The same recoil from accepted themes and
formulas that sends one group to the special,
exquisite perfume of China or Japan, dispatches
another to the stark realism of Chicago Or Spoon
River. And the divergent tendencies may synchro-
nize or overlap, and the same insurgent journal
print poems as antipodal as a slaughter house and
a hand-painted fan. For literary movements have
a disconcerting habit of complexity, and the com-
mon bond between variant and simultaneous
avatars of the spirit of revolt is often merely
“a general union of total dissent.” Moreover,
reaction against reaction is one of the most fa-
178 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
miliar of all the phenomena of revolt. The pre-
occupation of poetry with the exquisite and the
remote has more than once set up a sharp recoil
to the nudities and crudities of the sheerest nat-
uralism. Extreme breeds extreme, and in com-
pany with fiction and the drama, poetry plunges
like a falling star from the circle of the elect
to bury itself for a time in the contemplation
of characters who, in the words of Mr. Wells,
“crawl along drain pipes till they die.” And
then, when it tires (to paraphrase Huysmans)
of the great road so deeply dug out by Zola, it
rises again to trace the parallel pathway in the
air — “now up, now doun, as boket in a welle.”
For art behaves uncommonly like the rest of
UIS.
... I’ve been three weeks [here] shut within my
ImeW,
A-painting for the great man, saints and saints
And Saints again . . .
Ouf! I leaned out of the window for fresh air.
There came a hurry of feet and little feet . . .
And a face that looked up . . . zooks, sir, flesh and
blood,
That’s all I’m made of ! Into shreds it went,
Curtain and counterpane and coverlet —
and you know the rest. And Fra Lippo Lippi
has had many a follower. “Saints and Saints and
CONVENTIONS AND REVOLT 179
saints again,” in art and actuality, drive us to
sinners, and from sinners we fly back again to
saints. There will always be revolt in poetry, so
long as action and reaction play their systole
and diastole in life.
We are confronting a condition, then, and not a
theory. It will not do to say magisterially: “Take
the child away!” I suspect that even exhortation
is superfluous. Like its forbears, it will burn its
own fingers, and go its Own gait, and One day
awake to the fact that not only has it ceased
itself to be revolt, but has become the cause of
revolt in others. And poetry should be the last
to rebel against the operation of poetic justice.
What I should like to write over the door of every
stronghold of revolt is the motto over the gate-
way of the castle in the folk-tale: “Be bold, be
bold — but not too bold!” To which the insurg-
ents will promptly and properly retort, with
Hamlet, “Be not too tame, neither!” And both
are right.
V
THE DICTION OF POETRY VERSUS POETIC DICTION
ST. PETER admirably enjoins us to be ready al-
ways to give an answer to every man that asks
us a reason for the faith that is in us, with meek-
ness and fear. And one of the greatest services
which the present insurgent movement is per-
forming is in sending us back to first principles,
in a salutary endeavor after such preparedness.
For it is a strong offensive that is on, and not all
the lines are holding. To take stock of resources,
accordingly, is more or less incumbent upon all
of us.
It is about some of the fundamentals of poetry
that the sharpest issues have been raised, and
we are bound, I think, to make an effort to reach
clearness. And in doing this I propose to abide
by the method of procedure we have so far fol-
lowed. I am not primarily concerned with the
present movement per se, but rather with the
important questions which are being raised once
more about poetry itself. It is these larger poetic
problems, then, in the light of what is going on
to-day, that constitute the subject of the re-
THE DICTION OF POETRY 181
mainder of this volume. And among them the
diction of poetry is now, as it has always been,
a vigorously mooted point.
Let us take the bull by the horns at once. What
is the difference between the diction of poetry
and the diction of prose? And by prose I mean
now plain, work-a-day prose, not artistic or
elevated prose. And I am limiting poetry to
poetry in verse. The problem of so-called prose-
poetry or poetic prose will concern us later.
The difference, then, between the diction of
poetry and that of prose depends on a difference
between the functions of words in the two me-
diums. The business of words in prose is prima-
rily to state; in poetry, not only to state, but also
(and sometimes primarily) to suggest. We may
gain clearness by setting over against poetry,
for the moment, purely expository, scientific
prose. In such prose words may be used for
their exact, precisely delimited meaning only
speaking to the hard, clear intellect alone. Any
blurring of their sharp definiteness by vague, or
especially by emotional associations, intrudes at
once a disturbing influence. The terms must be
cold as a diagram. That is why the sciences build
up their technical terminologies, in which one
word conveys one idea, and one idea only, and
182 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
awakens no more emotion than the binomial
theorem. To sum up what I am saying by using
myself a technical term, words in Scientific prose
are used for their denotation. They must suggest
nothing beyond the rigorous exactitude of their
Sen Se.
But in poetry the case is fundamentally dif-
ferent. For poetry, though it speaks to the intel-
lect, is directed equally to the emotions. And
that which scientific prose is bent on ruthlessly
excising — namely the suggestions, the connota-
tion of words — that constitutes in large degree
the very stuff with which the poet works. For
words stir our feelings, not through a precise de-
limitation of their sense, but through their envel-
oping atmosphere of associations. “Not poppy,
nor mandragora, Nor all the drowsy syrups of
the world” — read that, and the hovering as-
sociations merge and blend, and not one word
produces its effect through what a dictionary
can afford. “We bring the hyacinth-violets,
sweet, bare, chill to the touch.” That is a bit
of Imagist verse, and “violets, sweet, bare, chill
to the touch,” owes its clear and delicate beauty,
not to the lucid exactness of the epithets alone,
but even more to a composing of their faint
and elusive suggestion into an impression not
THE DICTION OF POETRY 183
remotely resembling the fugitive and chilly
perfume of the flowers themselves. “In the style
of poetry,” says Joubert, in one of his luminous
“Pensées,” “each word reverberates like the
note of a well-tuned lyre, and always leaves be-
hind it a multitude of vibrations.” For over that
which we call the meaning of the words a poet
uses, there goes on an incessant play of suggestion,
caught from each user's own adventures among
words — flashes that come and vanish, stirrings
of memories, unfoldings of vistas — and the poet
builds up his fabric out of both the basic mean-
ings and the overtones. He does n’t create the
overtones, any more than he creates the meanings;
both are there. What he does create is a harmony.
For his exquisite art consists, not in sacrificing
either for the other, but in holding the balance
true between the two. Verlaine said the thing
once for all, in his “Art poétique,” when he spoke
of “la chanson grise Oil l'Indécis au Précis se
joint.” For it is the successful blending of the
undefined and the definite in words that consti-
tutes the triumph of the poet’s art.
Between purely scientific prose at the one
end of the scale, and verse that is saturated with
emotion at the other, there are, of course, endless
gradations in the balance between the denota-
184 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
tion of words and their connotation. But in gen-
eral, the bare significance of words plays the
larger part in prose; their associations, an essen-
tial and sometimes a major part in poetry.
Now these facts are constantly put upon
Wrong inferences, and the conclusion drawn that
poetry has a peculiar diction of its own — that
“poetic” words, as we call them, must be some-
how different from the words of every-day prose.
They may be, or they may not be. And the whole
question of poetic diction has been confused by
isolating it from the fundamental facts of usage.
Let us see if the bringing together of a number
of these perfectly familiar facts may not conduce
to clearness.
Everybody has several vocabularies. Which is
merely saying in other words that each of us
belongs to a number of communities. We talk in
the bosom of our family in a way different from
that in which we discourse on state Occasions.
I permit myself, in speaking to a body of stu-
dents with whom I have come to stand in fairly
close relations, a freedom in the use of collo-
quialisms which I should not indulge in, were I
reading a formal paper before a learned Society.
The diction of a sermon is not quite that of
an after-dinner speech. Nor do people write for
THE DICTION OF POETRY 185
the British Quarterly exactly as they write for
Punch. We shift our vocabularies, as we pass
from clothes to clothes, and for the same reason.
The character of the Occasion determines each.
Moreover, there is an extensive tract common to
all the vocabularies that we possess. We don’t
talk like a book at one time, and at another dis-
card every word that might adorn the printed
page. But we do, on grave or more formal
Occasions, draw largely on one element of our
vocabulary; whereas, in the freedom of intimate
circles, when the touch is light, our drafts are on
an entirely different fund. Given the same sub-
ject-matter, and there are words which we are
apt to use on this occasion, others on that; but
there is a far larger residuum which we use on
all. This is common experience, and needs no
argument.
But it helps us, I think, towards a clearer un-
derstanding of our immediate problem. For the
diction of poetry and the diction of prose have
also a vast tract in common. And that common
store of words is the backbone of poetry. There
are also, of course, words which are proper in
prose, but which would be more or less out of
place in poetry. There are words which are fit-
ting in verse, that would strike a jarring note in
186 CONVENTION AND PEVOLT IN POETRY
prose. And we shall have to consider the rela-
tion to poetry of both these outlying districts
of the general vocabulary. But it is the great
central tract of diction that is common to both
poetry and prose which must claim our attention
first.
The very greatest effects of poetry are often
produced without the use of a single word which
might not be employed in ordinary speech.
What words in the following passages are not,
as words, equally at home in prose?
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candlel
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages.
Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair.
Had we never lov’d sae kindly,
Had we never lov’d sae blindly,
Never met — or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
jº
And never lifted up a single stone.
THE DICTION OF POETRY 187
Poetry may be poetry, then, and the loftiest at
that, without employing the diction which we call
poetic. Its richest store lies within and not with-
out the tract that it holds in common with prose.
And our original question may now receive a
fuller answer. *-
The fundamental difference between poetry
and prose, so far as their diction is concerned,
is not in the words themselves, but in the use that
is made of the words. Poetry communicates ideas,
but it does more. It is concerned with truth
“carried alive into the heart by passion”; it
aims at the transmission, through the exercise
of imaginative energy, of impressions, not facts;
and its words take up and absorb fresh potencies
from these powerful elements in which they
move. They are the same words precisely as
when they occur in prose. But a new virtue (in
the fine old sense of the term) has passed into
them. It is not merely that their meaning is de-
termined by their context. It is both that and
more. To a certain degree in prose and essentially
in poetry, words are impregnated by their con-
text; they are subdued to what they workin, like
the dyer's hand. To put the same thing barely,
words have an emotional and imaginative, as
well as an intellectual context. The last is the
188 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
chief determining factor in prose; it is the first
which is powerfully operative in poetry.
Let us return for a moment, with this in mind,
to one or two of the passages already quoted
Here is the tenth line of “Hyperion”: “But
where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.” That
has been referred to (and I think justly) as “a
line almost as intense and full of the essence
of poetry as any line in our language.” Why?
Certainly not on account of any independent
poetical quality in a single one of its ten un-
impassioned and familiar monosyllables. It is
something else. What the line does is to resume
and gather up in one penetratingly simple de-
tail, the whole of that motionless, hueless, silent
landscape on which we have already dwelt; and
it is the imaginative intensity of the whole con-
ception which transforms every syllable of its
closing line. So Wordsworth’s: “And never lifted
up a single stone,” focuses in itself the stark
simplicity of the rustic tragedy of “Michael.”
And it is the same power of imbuing with
penetrating emotional cogency words which are
without distinction in themselves that finds su-
preme expression, times without number, in
Dante; as in the famous: “Quel giorno più non
vi leggemmo avante”—“That day they read in
THE DICTION OF POETRY 189
it no farther.” Indeed, it is very largely through
just this penetration of familiar words with im-
aginative quality that poetry exercises its crea-
tive energy.
Brightness falls from the air.
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold.
“Falls,” “hang,” and “shake” mean what they
mean in prose; but there has been exerted on
them an influence which, without distorting or
in any way infringing on their ordinary sense,
has endowed them with the power to stir im-
agination in us.
Is it possible, now, to set any limit to this
transfusing power which poetry exercises over
words? Are there, to put it differently, words
which remain intractable to its assimilating
influence? It is perilous to make categorical
assertions. If the imaginative energy is strong
enough, almost no word can remain insoluble,
and a flat denial of poetic possibilities, in the
case of any vocable, is liable to disastrous refutas
tion by a triumphant instance of the “poetizing’
(as Goldsmith calls it) of that very word. “In-
trinsicate” is a word we should rule out at once
190 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
on general principles. And there it stands, su-
perb in its resolution of Cleopatra’s trenchant
monosyllables:
Come, thou mortal wretch,
With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate
Of life at once untie.
“Vitreous” is a prose word, if ever there was
one. Yet, listen!
Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of departed sunset — earth of the mountains
misty-topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just
tinged with blue!
Far-swooping elbow’d earth — rich apple-blossom'd
earth!
Smile, for your lover comes.
It would take a word of tougher fibre than even
“vitreous,” to withstand the amalgamating
power of such a context as that! And we might
illustrate endlessly. There are misguided souls
who think that a word like “Scratch,” for ex-
ample, is unpoetic. In splendid isolation, I Sup-
pose it is. But in poetry that is worthy of the
name there are no isolated words. Their sugges-
tions interpenetrate each other, and every word,
even “Scratch,” may take on, chameleon-like,
the colors of its fellows:
THE DICTION OF POETRY 191
Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each.
If the current runs strong, there are few words
which it cannot safely carry with it.
It is when the stream runs shallow, that the
words refuse to blend. They jut out from their
context, unassimilated entities. I have just used
the figure of a stream. Here is a quatrain quoted
with gusto by Professor Everett of beloved mem-
ory, in “Poetry, Comedy, and Duty”:
The essence of mind’s being is the stream of thought,
Difference of mind’s being is difference of the
Stream;
Within this single difference may be brought
The countless differences that are or seem.
Nothing is wrong with the words, so far as their
poetic potentialities are concerned. “Difference”
is a bit over-worked, to be sure, but it is poeti-
cally sound:
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!
“Essence” is unimpeachable:
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels Weep.
192 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
And the other words need no bush. One thing
Only is the matter with the quatrain. It is n’t
poetry at all. It is innocent of the slightest trace
of imaginative fusion. No stream whatever pulses
through it. And the words remain words — not
winged things, with “colors dipt in heaven.”
Set beside this another treatment of a similar
theme, this time by a philosopher who was a
poet too:
Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,
Repeats the music of the rain;
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit
Through thee, as thou through Concord Plain.
Thou in thy narrow banks art pent:
The stream I love unbounded goes
Through flood and sea and firmament;
Through light, through life, it forward flows.
I see the inundation sweet,
I hear the spending of the stream
Through years, through men, through nature fleet,
Through love and thought, through power
and dream.
Musketaquit, a goblin strong,
Of shard and flint makes jewels gay;
They lose their grief who hear his song,
And where he winds is the day of day.
So forth and brighter fares my stream, -
Who drink it shall not thirst again;
No darkness stains its equal gleam,
And ages drop in it like rain.
THE DICTION OF POETRY 193
“Inundation,” if you please, is less poetic (as we
say) than either “difference” or “essence.” But
true poetry, like Musketaquit, makes jewels out
of shards and flints.
Words in themselves, then, are neither poetic
nor unpoetic. They become poetic, or they re-
main unassimilated prose, according as the poet’s
imaginative energy is or is not sufficiently power-
ful to absorb them.
If there are words which may become poetic,
are there words which are inherently poetical to
start with? Let us begin with an assumption that
may be safely made. There are, without ques-
tion, words which are more readily assimilated
by poetry than others, and these are, for the most
part, words which are associated with objects that
stir the sort of emotion which is the basis of po-
etry—with the immemorial, universal phenom-
ena of soul and sense, which are common ground
for all humanity. Sun, moon, and stars, the sea,
the fall of evening, night and sleep, the fireside,
roads, sounds innumerable (as of footsteps, the
rain, running water, winds, the surf, sheep-bells,
bird notes, flutes), certain odors and colors, the
seasons, birth and especially death, and all
the throng of emotional experiences that come
between them, together with all the familiar
194 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
homely objects of daily use—it is needless more
than to suggest. That which gives to Hebrew
poetry, for instance, its depth and poignancy is
just this elemental quality in its words. The
large and simple and permanent objects and
elements of life — the eternal hills, the treasures
of the Snow, rain coming down upon mown grass,
winds and all weathers, the rock in the desert,
still water in pasture lands and the sea that
roars and is troubled, sleep and the fleetingness
of dreams, the mystery of birth and death — all
the perennial, elemental processes of nature, all
the changing, yet abiding physiognomy of earth
and sky, were charged for psalmist and prophet
with spiritual significance, and woven into the
very texture of their speech.
And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind,
and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a
dry place, as the Shadow of a great rock in a weary land;
Thy righteousness is like the great mountains; thy
judgments are a great deep; He shall come down like
rain upon the mown grass: as showers that water the
earth; Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they
are as a sleep; As a dream when one awaketh; so, O
Lord . . . thou shalt despise their image; AS for man,
his days are as grass; as a flower of the field, so he
flourisheth; for the wind passeth over it, and it is gone;
and the place thereof shall know it no more.
Utter simplicity, limpid clearness, the vividness
THE DICTION OF POETRY 195
of direct, authentic vision of “unworded things
and old”: these are the salient qualities of the
diction of the poetry of the Bible. I may not at
the moment speak of the influence of the King
James version upon the diction of English
poetry. What I am concerned with now is the
readiness for poetic use of words which, like
those of Hebrew poetry, are pervaded already
with emotional or imaginative suggestion. Here
are two lines from Stevenson’s “Pequiem”:
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
The words themselves are latent poetry —
which is a very different thing from saying that
they are poetic diction.
“Home,” “sailor,” “sea,” “hunter,” and
“hill,” then, are not poetic, any more than they
are prose words. They are both. They simply
happen to belong to that element of the common
vocabulary which is especially apt for the poet’s
use. And out of this arises a common fallacy.
For all five words that I have named are of na-
tive origin, as, indeed, are most of the words which
come closest to men's business and bosoms. And
the statement is not infrequently made that
Saxon words are more “poetic” than the words
196 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
of foreign, chiefly Latin origin, in which our con-
glomerate speech abounds. There is just so much
of truth in that as lies in the fact that the native
stock is peculiarly endowed with homely vigor,
and forthrightness, and vividness, and concrete-
ness, all of which are qualities of worth in poetry.
But other words than native words possess these
qualities, and they are not the only qualities of
poetry. For poetry is protean in its moods and
dispositions, and its diction changes with its
bents and its occasions, as yours does or mine.
And absolutely the only test of the poetic
quality of a word is its ability to hold its own
triumphantly in its particular poetic setting.
I suspect that the greatest poetry is, as a rule,
what Fitzgerald calls “a concise and simple way
of saying great things.” But all poets are not
concise and simple souls, and even the simplest
souls have complex moments. Moreover, the po-
tential of poetry, so to speak, shifts incessantly,
from the most impassioned lyric to the coldest,
keenest satire. Not even a poet can live perpet-
ually at white heat without burning out. And
certainly no sane reader of poetry cares to glow
with emotion as a steady regimen. Poe’s doc-
trine of brevity, as a mandate laid upon poetry
by the inflexible nature of things, is sound, in
THE DICTION OF POETRY 197
so far as it rests on the indisputable fact that we
cannot feel intensely at too long a stretch with-
out something snapping or sinking limp. Shake-
speare knew what he was doing, when he sent the
drunken porter stumbling across the stage just
when he did. In other words, poetry is not always
tugging at Our heartstrings. It sweeps the chords
of all the faculties that we possess. When it is
forthright, it deals in forthright words; when
thought plays glancing and shifting above the
deeper current, its diction becomes prismatic and
subtle with intellectual quality; when it runs
through the whole gamut, then, as Coleridge has
it, “words that convey feelings, and words that
flash images, and words of abstract notion, flow
together, and . . . rush on like a stream.”
Saxon words, then, are no more inherently
poetic than the naturalized aliens of our richly
cosmopolitan tongue. They fit more poetic occa-
sions, as is inevitable, and that is all.
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me —
has not a single word that is n’t native Saxon
(and only two that are n’t monosyllables), and it
Owes its poignancy largely to that fact. But,
198 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past—
owes its certainly no less exquisite poetic qual-
ity to five words—“sessions,” “silent,” “sum-
mon,” “remembrance,” “past”—which are of
Latin origin. And he would be rash, indeed, who
should say that one word was more poetic than
another in passages like these, where it is the
consummate balance of native and foreign-born,
monosyllable and polysyllable, that achieves the
miracle:
Magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faëry lands forlorn.
Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
What is excellent,
As God lives, is permanent;
Hearts are dust, hearts’ loves remain.
The miracle can be achieved, to be sure, by bare
monosyllables alone:
Since there’s no help, come, let us kiss and part!
Nay, I have done; you get no more of me!
And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly I myself can free.
There are thirty-three monosyllables in succes-
sion, and in all four lines but two words that
are not. But,
THE DICTION OF POETRY 199
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
with its roll of sonorous Latin polysyllables; and
Splits the unwedgeable and gnarled oak,
with its tough and massy native polysyllables;
and
In the dark backward and abysm of time,
with its poising of one against the other, are all
the essence of poetry. And so is that other line
without a single polysyllable with which to bless
itself:
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
There is, accordingly, no law whatever that
can be laid down, whereby one word is taken and
another left by poetry at large. This or that par-
ticular poem has a circumscribed range of choice,
determined by its own unity of i.ipression.
Poems are inevitably limited; poetry is not. And
what is “Don Juan’s” meat may be “The Excur-
sion’s” poison. Here is a sample:
All these things will be specified in time,
With strict regard to Aristotle’s rules,
The Wade Mecum of the true sublime,
Which makes so many poets, and some fools:
Prose poets like blank-verse, I’m fond of ryme,
Good workmen never quarrel with their tools;
I’ve got new mythological machinery,
And very handsome Supernatural scenery.
200 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
Imagine any single word of that in the “Ode to
the West Wind” or “La Belle Dame Sans
Merci”! There are, I know, ethereal spirits who
deny that “Don Juan” is poetry. From such I
must gently but firmly part company. A fugitive
and cloistered poetry that never at any time
heard the chimes at midnight, is ill-accommo-
dated to the uses of this world. “Dost thou think,
because [Milton, and Southey, and Wordsworth
are verbally] virtuous, there shall be no more
cakes and ale? Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger
shall be hot i' the mouth too,” for Chaucer, and
Burns, and Byron. And they will by no means
always employ “a stately speech, Such as grave
Livers do in Scotland use, Peligious men, who
give to God and man their dues.” Moreover, if
poetry chooses to discourse in slippered ease, it
may fall into colloquialisms with the best of us:
Shut, shut the door, good John! fatigu’d, I said,
Tie up the knocker, say I’m sick, I’m dead.
The Dog-star rages! may ’t is past a doubt,
All Bedlam, or Parnassus, is let out . . .
A dire dilemma! either way I’m sped,
If foes, they write, if friends, they read me dead . . .
All my demurs but double his attacks;
At last he whispers, “Do; and we go snacks.”
The diction of poetry includes every word
which poetry can use. ,
THE DICTION OF POETRY 201
There are, however, two classes of words
about which the battle has always raged, as it
rages now, with particular intensity — anti-
quated and brand-new words; or, more exactly,
archaisms and neologisms. And first as regards
archaisms.
Gray, in one of his letters, makes the following
statement: “As to matter of style, I have this
to say: The language of the age is never the
language of poetry; except among the French,
whose verse, where the thought or image does
not support it, differs in nothing from prose. Our
poetry, on the contrary, has a language peculiar
to itself.” I have been running counter to that
very high authority, in respect to the latter
statement, although the difference is far more a
question of interpretation than of fact. What of
the other dictum: “The language of the age is
never the language of poetry” 2. As a matter of
fact, independently of all theory, it is true. Po-
etry, law, ecclesiastical ritual, and sports are the
four most powerful conservators, not only of older
words, but also of older forms of words, and older
meanings. And in all four cases this tenaciousness
is due to the strong traditional character of their
usages. The one point which I wish to emphasize
is this: archaic words are as proper to poetry as
202 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
any other words. The only question that we have
a right to raise, is that of their fitness to their
particular use. They are no more specifically
poetic, except in so far as they may carry richer
associations, than the current coin of speech.
“Words borrowed of antiquity,” says Ben Jon-
son, in those observations on style in the “Dis-
coveries,” whose every rift is packed with ore,
“do lend a kind of majesty to style; . . . for they
have the authority of years, and out of their in-
termission do win themselves a kind of gracelike
newness.” On the other hand, archaic words may
even be less poetically effective — as they cer-
tainly are, when they are intruded for their own
sake, or under a mistaken notion of their sanc-
tity. There are words which vie with Cleopatra
living: “Age cannot wither them, nor custom
stale Their infinite variety.” There are words
which are like Cleopatra dead: “Now she is
very old and dry and faded, With black bitumen
they have sealed up her mouth.” It is the poet’s
instinct that must determine which is which.
Spenser, of course, is the most notorious exam-
ple of over-indulgence in an archaic diction, and
many of you are familiar with the justification
of his practice in the Epistle Dedicatory to the
“Shepheardes Calender.” I shall quote but one of
THE DICTION OF POETRY 203
E. K.’s sentences: “In my opinion it is one spec-
ail prayse of many, whych are dew to this Poete,
that he hath laboured to restore, as to theyr
rightfull heritage, such good and naturall English
words, as have ben long time out of use, and
almost cleane disherited.” Against that, how-
ever, we must set Ben Jonson's terse remark:
“Spenser, in affecting the ancients, writ no lan-
guage.” As usual, the whole truth lies neither
with the poet nor with his critics. Dryden brings
his stalwart common sense to bear upon the
problem, and clarifies the issue: “If the first end
of a writer be to be understood, then, as his
language grows obsolete, his thoughts must
grow obscure. . . . When an ancient word, for its
sound and significancy, deserves to be revived,
I have that reasonable veneration for antiquity
to restore it. All beyond this is superstition.”
And so we are brought back to our funda-
mental principle of intelligibility. And the
charge of unintelligibility sometimes laid at the
door of archaisms is not always a man of straw.
Wordsworth’s poem entitled “The Force of
Prayer” begins as follows: “What is good for a
bootless bene?” And this is what Lamb wrote to
Wordsworth: “Apropos — when I first opened
upon the just-mentioned poem, in a careless tone,
204 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
I said to Mary, as if putting a riddle, ‘What is
good for a bootless bene?’ To which with infinite
presence of mind, she answered, “A Shoeless pea.’
It was the first joke she ever made.” Lamb
proceeds, it must be added, to apologize for his
levity on such an occasion, but I fear it was
warranted. Wordsworth, to be sure, condescends
to our weakness in the premises, for the poem
at once becomes a glossary:
“What is good for a bootless bene?”
With these dark words begins my Tale;
And their meaning is, whence can comfort spring
When Prayer is of no avail?
But all archaisers are not so thoughtful!
Quite apart from intelligibility, however, the
congruity of the diction with the tone and spirit
of the individual poem constitutes the determin-
ing factor. Archaisms are of the very substance
of “The Ancient Mariner,” and “The Blessed
Damozel”; they would strike a hopelessly jarring
note in “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” or the
“Barrack Room Ballads.” If an archaic word is
intelligible, and produces the effect which the
poet wishes to produce, it is good poetic gold. On
the other hand, Imagist poetry, for example, is
right in veering away from any tinge of archaism
in its diction, because it is aiming at an effect
THE DICTION OF POETRY 205
with which such diction is inconsistent. One may
question, if one please, the worth of the effect;
that, for the moment, is another question. Once
grant the aim of the modernists, however, and
their instinct in this respect is sound. Both in his
acceptances and his rejections of words, then, the
burden of proof rests on the poet. And the proof
even of his pudding is the eating of it.
Precisely the same principles of intelligibility
and fitness apply to the use of neologisms in
poetry. There goes on in any living language an
incessant streaming up into good and accepted
usage of low words, new words, strange words,
technical words. Terms of the utmost dignity
to-day began as slang, and a word that is slang
to-day may be President (so to speak) to-mor-
row. Scientific inventions crowd into every nook
and cranny of our lives, and scraps of the termi-
nology of science follow them. War heaves up
into the level stretches of our every-day, civilian
speech masses of words, a few months ago un-
known, but now glib on our tongues. There are
always new words, and there always will be, so
long as the language lives, and they are often
fresh and vivid as well as new. Must poetry keep
hands off? Well, that depends upon just two
things: what the poet is trying to achieve; and
206 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
what he is willing to risk. If that which he is
writing demands the use of Dante’s “sieve for
noble words,” the newcomers will undoubtedly
sift through; their patent of nobility is not yet
conferred. If, on the other hand, he is writing
racily, or colloquially, or in lighter vein, they
may fit into his pattern. But in any case, he takes
his chances. If they remain at par or advance, he
wins; if they depreciate, his margin of safety is
wiped out. And there, I suppose, lies one of the
sweet uses of revolt. Your insurgent is adven-
turous, and takes the chances. He proposes the
new word (I am quoting Dryden) to be natu-
ralized, by using it himself; “and, if the public
approves of it, the bill passes.” As Meredith
declares, “poetic rashness of the right quality
enriches the language.” But (still to allow the
poets themselves to speak of what they know)
Ben Jonson shows the more excellent way. For
“the eldest of the present, and the newest of
the past language, is the best.”
So much for general principles. Let us see,
now, what happens when poetry labors under the
delusion that, to be poetic, it must get away
from the basic elements of the general vocabu-
lary to a peculiar diction of its own. I shall use
the vagaries of the eighteenth century to point
THE DICTION OF POETRY 207
my implicit moral, and shall follow briefly the
vicissitudes of poetic diction down to the pres-
ent active propaganda against it. And obviously
suggestion rather than exhaustiveness must be
my aim. e
What led to the outbreak of a diction that
swept over the eighteenth century like the
plague, is of the utmost interest, but impossible
of treatment here. I must plunge in medias res.
And I shall have to hold up Pope himself as a
terrible example. Since that is so, I wish to say
explicitly that Pope, in the bulk of his work, is
absolute master of the raciest, most familiar,
most cogent and telling elements of the vernacu-
lar, and one of the most consummate craftsmen
who ever dealt in words. If he, like his Erasmus,
is a “great injur’d name,” it is largely because
his imitators perpetuated his worst, which was
within their scope, and not his best, which was
beyond their reach. The tendency, then, of
which Pope was at the same time a result and
an active cause, was, for one thing, away from
the direct, simple, downright calling of things by
their names, if the things were regarded as in any
way common or unclean. To call a spade a spade
was like presenting one’s self in company in puris
naturalibus. It is all very suggestive of Bottom
208 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
and Snout and the Lion in the “Midsummer
Night’s Dream.” “To bring in a lion,” says Bot-
tom, “to bring in — God shield us! — a lion
among ladies, is a most dreadful thing; for there
is not a more fearful wild-fowl than your lion
living.” “Therefore,” says Snout, “another pro-
logue must tell he is not a lion.” And so, for
the benefit of artistic sensibilities, in the poetry
we are considering, the lions roar as gently as
any sucking dove. The wind is softened to “the
trembling zephyr,” or “the fragrant gale.”
Shakespeare’s “rude, imperious surge” becomes
“the sprightly flood,” or “swelling tide”; a boot
is “the shining leather that encased the limb”; a
pipe is “the short tube that fumes beneath the
nose”; negroes are “Afric’s sable progeny”; bulls
are “monarchs of the brindled breed”; pigs, “the
grunting, bristly kind”; sheep, “the soft, fearful
people.” Does one make coffee? “From silver
spouts the grateful liquors glide, While China’s
earth receives the smoking tide.” Does one serve
fish and fowl? “From Darkin’s roosts the feath-
ered victims bleed, And Thames still wafts me
Ocean’s scaly breed.” Are you blind of one eye?
“To one the fates the visual ray deny.”
“AEaca’s isle,” in Keats, “was wondering at the
moon.” Francis Fawkes wonders too; he wonders
THE DICTION OF POETRY 209
“Why silver Phoebe, meek-ey’d queen of night,
Now slackens, now precipitates her flight.” And
I wonder with what amazing circumlocution
Fawkes would have said, “Since there’s no help,
come, let us kiss and part!”
And I indulge in that remark advisedly. For it
is in the attempts of the eighteenth century to
translate into its own lingo the noble simplicity
of great speech, that poetic diction finds its re-
ductio ad absurdum. Francis Fawkes was nobody.
But it’s the nobodies of poetry, even to-day, who
are the straws that show the way the wind is
blowing. I wish space permitted me to set down
in antiphonal sequence the twelfth chapter of
Ecclesiastes, and Fawkes's poetizing of it. Here,
however, is a taste of his quality, from his ren-
dering of David’s lament over Jonathan:
Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of
WOI (16I1.
Thy love was wondrous, soothing all my care,
Passing the fond affection of the fair.
If ever the beauty of Israel was slain upon its
high places, it was then! Let us pass to the
stately lines of the Song of Deborah:
He asked for water, and she gave him milk; she
brought forth butter in a lordly dish.
210 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
But that is prose; here is poetic diction:
He ask’d refreshment from the limpid wave,
The milky beverage to the chief she gave.
Even periphrasis, apparently, could not lift but-
ter to the plane of poetry, and it remains un-
wept, unhonored, and unsung. But, you will say,
it is as patently disingenuous to single out
Francis Fawkes, as it would be to pitch upon the
veriest camp-follower of the New Poetry as the
abstract and brief chronicle of its procedure.
Very good. Let us move above the salt. And
now I shall set down, in antiphonal sequence, a
few verses of Isaiah, and Alexander Pope:
The glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excel-
lency of Carmel and Sharon.
See lofty Lebanon his head advance,
See nodding forests on the mountains dance:
See spicy clouds from lowly Saron rise,
And Carmel's flow’ry top perfumes the skies!
Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the
ears of the deaf shall be unstopped.
He from thick films shall purge the visual ray,
And on the sightless eye-ball pour the day:
'T is he th’ obstructed paths of sounds shall clear,
And bid new music charm th’ unfolding ear.
The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither
for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee.
No more the rising Sun shall gild the morn,
“Nor ev’ning Cynthia fill her silver horn.
THE DICTION OF POETRY 211
Chaucer in wig and small-clothesis too mourn-
ful a spectacle for us to linger over, when instead
of “gladſing] every flour with his warmnesse,”
his Phoebus now “glads the glebe and paints the
flowery fields”; and I pass on to Homer.
Thus spake she wailing, and stirred unending moan.
Then thirdly Helen led their sore lament.
And now Pope:
Thus spoke the dame, and melted into tears.
Sad Helen next in pomp of grief appears;
Fast from the shining sluices of her eyes
Fall the round crystal drops, while thus she cries.
Some of you will recall the passage in Boswell
which tells of the inextinguishable laughter at Sir
Joshua Peynolds’s, one night, when Dr. Grain-
ger read from his manuscript of “The Sugar-
Cane” the line: “Now, Muse, let’s sing of rats”;
and how somebody, slyly looking over the read-
er’s shoulder, saw that the word had been origi-
nally mice, but had been altered to rats, as more
dignified; and how, finally, the unlucky Grainger
triumphantly substituted for his rats: “the
whisker'd vermin race.” I shall make but one
more excerpt from Pope’s Homer, in which Pope
makes a similar excursion round Pobin Hood's
barn. Here is Homer, in Andrew Lang's prose:
And as when a lazy ass going past a field hath the
212 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
better of the boys with him, an ass that hath had many
a cudgel broken about his sides, and he fareth into the
deep crop, and wasteth it, while the boys Smite him with
cudgels —
and so on. But Pope balks at “ass”:
As the slow beast, with heavy strength endued,
In some wide field by troops of boys pursued,
Though round his sides a wooden tempest rain,
Crops the tall harvest, and lays waste the plain;
Thick on his hide the hollow blows resound,
The patient animal maintains his ground.
Pope justifies himself on the ground that “a
translator owes so much to the taste of the age in
which he lives as not to make too great a compli-
ment to the former ſage]; and this induced me to
omit the mention of the word ass in the transla-
tion.” May I give, in its full context, a passage
from one who was not induced to omit the men-
tion of the word ass?
Come, thou mortal wretch,
With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate
Of life at once untie. Poor venomous fool,
Be angry, and despatch. O, couldst thou speak,
That I might hear thee call great Caesar ass
Unpolicied!
Char. O eastern star!
Cleo. Peace, peace!
Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,
That sucks the nurse asleep?
Char. * O, break! O, break!
Cleo. As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as
gentle, – O Antony!
THE DICTION OF POETRY 213
If there be such a thing on earth as the grand
style, it is that speech, of which ass is an integral
part. And it passes without break of a line or a
jarring syllable into poetry of the most poignant
and supernal beauty. And in the juxtaposition
of a conventional poetic diction with that su-
preme embodiment of the diction of poetry, I
have made the only comment that I care to
make on the merits of the case. &
We have already seen that action and reaction
are pretty certain to be equal. And everybody
knows how Wordsworth reacted against the
eighteenth-century poetic diction. The sternest
compression and excision are imperative, but I
shall try not to be unfair. Wordsworth’s doctrine
is a compound of fundamental truths and subtle
fallacies. And when he wrote with his eye on his
theory, and not on the object, the truths slipped
out from under him, and the fallacies rode him
like hags. When he threw his theory to the
winds, “held the hye wey, and lat his gost him
lede,” he could write like the Angel of the Vision.
Now the gist of his theory, as elucidated in the
Preface to the “Lyrical Ballads,” is this. Poetry
should choose incidents and situations from com-
mon, preferably humble and rustic life; and it
should employ, in relating and describing them,
214 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
“a selection of language really used by men.” The
reasons for the tenets were, in part, quite wrong,
but the tenets themselves represent a sound and
healthy revolt against an affected and citified
diction, in which the sun never rose across open
fields, but “Sol thro' white curtains shot a
tim’rous ray.” In his recoil from the stilted,
however, Wordsworth pitched headlong into the
trivial, and in its rebellion against the artificially
poetic, his diction became the apotheosis of the
prosaic.
“Now, little Edward, say why so:
My little Edward, tell me why.” —
“I cannot tell, I do not know.” —
“Why, this is strange,” said I . . .
At this, my boy hung down his head,
He blushed with shame, nor made reply;
And three times to the child I said,
“Why, Edward, tell me why?”
His head he raised — there was in sight,
It caught his eye, he saw it plain —
Upon the house-top, glittering bright,
A broad and gilded vane.
All the words in these famous stanzas from the
“Anecdote for Fathers” are susceptible of poetic
quality, but there is nothing present to infuse
them with it. And having the form of poetry
THE DICTION OF POETRY 215
without the power thereof, they sink below the
level of prose itself to the prosaic.
Why bustle thus about your door,
What means this bustle, Betty Foy?
Why are you in this mighty fret?
And why on horseback have you set
Him whom you love, your Idiot Boy?
Wordsworth Wrote to one of the critics of “The
Idiot Boy” a letter which occupies eight full
pages of the “Memoir.” Two sentences are of
special interest: “It is probable that the principal
cause of your dislike to this particular poem lies
in the word Idiot. If there had been any such
word in our language, to which we had attached
passion, as lack-wit, half-wit, withess, etc., I
should certainly have employed it in preference;
but there is no such word.” The difficulty, how-
ever, lies in no single word — certainly not in
“idiot.” As Sir Walter Paleigh has said, poets
“redeem words from degradation by a single
noble employment,” and Shakespeare had saved
“idiot,” if it required salvation:
. . . It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
The head and front of Wordsworth’s offending,
in this and in the other poems of its kind, hath
216 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
this extent, no more: his employment of his words
is not noble. The indictment lies, not against his
diction, but against its use. And that use is not
infrequently due to a defective Sense of humor —
a perilous lack, when One is dealing with the po-
tential incongruities that lurk, malignly expect-
ant, in the associations of words. “I never wrote
anything with so much glee,” said Words-
worth of “The Idiot Boy.” It is precisely when
Wordsworth is most gleeful that he is most af-
flicting, for then his touch on words is never sure.
And that means Peter Bell, and Betty Foy, and
Goody Blake, and Harry Gill, and little Edward,
and the Blind Highland Boy who went to sea, not
in a bowl, but in
A household tub, like one of those
Which women use to wash their clothes.
And Wordsworth’s sense of values remained de-
fective, when, flying from Scylla to Charybdis,
he changed the tub to a turtle-shell—
A shell of ample size, and light
As the pearly car of Amphitrite,
That sportive dolphins drew.
And yet Wordsworth’s theory, stripped of the
limitations which he imposed upon it, was ab-
solutely sound. The diction of poetry was to be
“a selection of language really used by men.”
THE DICTION OF POETRY 217
Pightly understood, that means a selection of
the language really used by William Words-
worth, and not of that employed by Betty Foy.
The poet is more than the mouth-piece of an idiot
and his mother. He is the translator of their halt-
ing speech, not a mere emulator of their inartic-
ulateness. Wordsworth says of Michael: “His
mind was keen, Intense, and frugal, apt for all
affairs.” That is a selection of the language
really used by men. But it has behind it the
copious stores of Wordsworth’s own vocabulary,
from which are culled the apt, and fitting, and
exact words to express a man who could not pos-
sibly thus express himself. And aphraselike “keen,
intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs,” refutes
once for all the absurdities of “Now, little Ed-
ward, say why so.” There is a simplicity of dic-
tion which reflects a meagre and barren stock;
there is also a simplicity which results from the
winnowing of a rich abundance. The one is
the simplicity of the “Anecdote for Fathers”;
the other of “Michael.” And in the Tintern
Abbey lines, and the “Ode on the Intimations
of Immortality,” and the great Sonnets, and in
such lines as:
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep.
218 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are
fresh and strong.
. . . to send
Its own deep quiet to restore our hearts.
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago —
in all these, Wordsworth transcends, without
contravening, his theory. He employs the lan-
guage really used by men, but his employment is
now noble with a nobility attained only by the
greatest.
The pendulum, however, is always swinging,
and the Pomanticists opened up new and vast
regions for poetry. And since they all had, to a
greater or less degree, that Hang zum Unbe-
grenzten — that penchant for the infinite —
which Goethe ascribed to Byron in particular,
the vocabulary of poetry increased enormously
its store of words of heightened emotional asso-
ciations, of vague splendors, of richly sensuous
suggestion. The diction of poetry became, with
notable exceptions, Opulent, sumptuous, lavish, .
rather than pointed, terse, concrete. And this
very opulence of the Pomantic diction — at its
best, one of the glories of English poetry —
tended to confuse the issue for the Ptomanticists’
THE DICTION OF POETRY 219
successors. Words once nobly used were taken to
be inherently noble, and were employed to con-
fer on poetry the nobility which it is poetry’s
function to confer on words. Once more, as so
often, words came to be regarded as having in
themselves poetic virtue, so that one need only
arrange in ordered sequence the proper number
of poetic terms, in order to achieve a poem. I
am not now speaking primarily of the masters.
They usually thought straight amid their splen-
dors. It was when the splendors cut loose from
the architectonic compulsion of ideas, and walked
off, alone and invertebrate, that poetry became,
as practiced by its minor acolytes, the haunt of
slumberous glooms, and verdurous gleams, and
murmurous darks and deeps. And so there arose
a new conventional diction, less crass, but more
insidious than that of the eighteenth century —
a diction which conferred plenary absolution
from the pains of thought upon poet and reader
alike. As usual, a powerful poetic force set the
echoes reverberating through the pages of minor
poetry.
And now against that, in turn, the inevitable
reaction has set in. It finds its most sharply de-
fined expression in the principles and practices
of the Imagists, to whom, however, it is by no
220 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
means confined. They merely happen to be the
most articulate among the groups. And their
tenets are both negative and positive.
Stevenson once wrote to Henry James:
My two aims may be described as:
1st. War to the adjective.
2d. Death to the optic nerve.
Well, the two battle cries of the New Poetry, as
I catch their echoes, are:
1st. War on the eloquent.
2d. Death to the cliché.
“Take eloquence and wring its neck,” wrote
Verlaine in his “Art poétique.” That might well
be the motto of the present movement, so far as
diction is concerned — that, and “A cliché is
worse than a crime.” And the time was undoubt-
edly ripe for just such a revolt. The pruning-
hook was needed, and though it is often used
by dreadfully inexpert and ruthless hands, the
stock is strong enough to stand it, and to
grow the more vigorously for the lopping. The
destructive trend of the reaction is of course
extreme, but revolutionary movements always
are extreme, and the inevitable counter-offensive
will win back whatever territory of value is for
the moment lost. We may imperturbably possess
our souls: “Nothing is here for tears, nothing to
THE DICTION OF POETRY 221
wail Or knock the breast.” The tide is at a turn-
ing; that is all.
But the movement is positive, too, in its atti-
tude towards the diction of poetry. It proposes
to use, in the words of the Imagist pronounce-
ment, “the language of common speech, but to
employ always the exact word, not the nearly-
exact, nor the merely decorative word.” That is
not far from the Ringdom of God, if so be that
William Wordsworth is that Kingdom’s prophet!
It took the pendulum exactly one hundred and
fifteen years to swing from Wordsworth’s “se-
lection of the language really used by men,” out
through the interstellar spaces of the Romanti-
cists and the Victorians, and back again to the
Imagists’ “language of common speech.” The
differentia of the new statement, however, lies in
the phrase “to employ always the eacact word.”
That has been authoritatively interpreted as
meaning “the exact word which conveys the
writer’s impression to the reader.” And unless
everything that has been said in the opening
chapter of this book is wrong, that is sound
doctrine.
For poetry gives, not facts, but the poet’s im-
pression of facts, and these impressions may and
must be of infinite variety. The doctrine of the
222 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
exact word, so understood, admits the utmost
flexibility of diction, while at the same time in-
sisting that each word shall carry, not any im-
pression, but the impression that is sought. If
the impression is one of Splendor, then the splen-
did word is also the exact word. The protest is
not, if I understandit, against this or that type
or class of words per se, but against the use of any
word solely for its adventitious values. That is in
accord with the consistent usage of the great
poets, and the Imagists are right in Saying that
their contention is not new. The renewed em-
phasis upon it is none the less wholesome, in
spite of some obvious limitations and extremes
in practice. We shall return to the matter, for
the view under discussion is inextricably bound
up with the whole question of vers libre. In the
meantime, two or three passages from very
recent poetry, Imagist and otherwise, may serve
to bring out its catholicity with respect to
diction. Here is a bit of Mr. Frost’s “After
Apple-Picking”:
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through
a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I did n’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
THE DICTION OF POETRY 223
Apples I did n’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
Mr. Edward Arlington Pobinson thus writes
on cider barrels:
From one of them
A bright pine spile stuck out alluringly,
And on the black flat stone, just under it,
Glimmered a late-spilled proof that Archibald
Had spoken from unfeigned experience.
There was a fluted antique water-glass
Close by, and in it, prisoned, or at rest,
There was a cricket, of the brown soft sort
That feeds on darkness.
This is Miss Lowell:
I have whetted my brain until it is like a Damascus
blade,
So keen that it nicks off the floating fringes of
passers-by,
So sharp that the air would turn its edge
Were it to be twisted in flight.
Licking passions have bitten their arabesques
into it,
And the mark of them lies, in and out,
Worm-like,
With the beauty of corroded copper patterning
white steel.
My brain is curved like a scimitar,
And sighs at its cutting
Like a sickle mowing grass.
And here is another Imagist, Richard Aldington:
224 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
O Death,
Thou art an healing wind
That blowest over white flowers
A-tremble with dew;
Thou art a wind flowing
Over long leagues of lonely sea;
Thou art the dusk and the fragrance . . .
Thou art the silence of beauty,
And we look no more for the morning;
We yearn no more for the sun,
Since with thy white hands,
Death,
Thou crownest us with the pallid chaplets,
The slim colorless poppies
Which in thy garden alone
Softly thou gatherest.
And now still a third Imagist, Mr. John Gould
Fletcher:
Whirlpools of purple and gold,
Winds from the mountains of cinnebar,
Lacquered mandarin moments, palanquins swaying
and balancing
Amid the vermilion pavilions, against the jade
balustrades.
In the evening I listen to the wind’s lisping,
While the conflagrations of the sunset flicker and
clash behind me,
Flamboyant crenellations of glory amid the
charred ebony boles.
The new poetry, after all, is very like any
other poetry, in the actual words that it uses
— from “So keen that it nicks” to “flamboyant
THE DICTION OF POETRY 225
crenellations.” Its insistence is upon the manner
of their use. And that involves questions that
will concern us later. r
It is poetry, then, which, through its energizing
influence, gives to words poetic quality; it is not
poetic diction which makes poetry. If this were
the truism that it seems to be, the critic’s occu-
pation would be gone. ,
VI
RHYME, METRE, AND VERS LIBRE
IT is true, I fear, that most of us who talk about
the poet’s craft are innocent of experience in its
practice. “We never drank of Aganippe’s well;
Nor never did in shade of Tempe sit.” Like
Mephistopheles’ philosopher in “Faust,” who
elucidates the mysteries of the weaver’s craft,
we’re capable of a luminous demonstration of
how the thing is done:
The scholars praise it, but Lord love 'em,
It has n’t yet made weavers of 'em!
And so I often find myself leaning strongly to-
wards a remark of Thomas Gray’s to Mason:
“You know I do not love, much less pique my-
self, on criticism, and think even a bad verse as
good a thing or better than the best observation
that ever was made upon it.” Gray, to be sure,
had begun his letter by saying that he was “al-
most blind with a great cold,” and I’m inclined
to think that his dictum must therefore be taken
with a grain of allowance. But one may heartily
agree that even the germs of creative energy are
infinitely precious in a world where things are in
the saddle and ride mankind, and one great verse
RHYME, METRE, AND VERS LIBRE 227
alone outweighs a critic’s volume. Yet criticism
and creation do go hand in hand, and even the
harmless, necessary expositor may sometimes
have a place. And so, without a line of verse to
bless myself withal, I still venture, most undog-
matically, a few observations on the versifier’s
art.
Let me say at once, however, that I have no
intention of going into the technicalities of verse.
For one thing, that is something on which only
the specialist has a right to speak, and I have no
claim to expert knowledge in the intricate and
baffling field of metrical technique. For another
thing, the phase of the subject which concerns us
here is independent of technical niceties. It is the
bearing of certain broad and general considera-
tions upon present problems that I wish to dis-
cuss. The view is vigorously urged to-day that
rhyme and metre hamper the poet’s free expres-
sion. It is that contention which I should like to
examine, and the one object of this chapter is to
attempt some answer to these questions: How
far do rhyme and metre restrict the poet’s free-
dom; and, as a corollary, wherein consists the
peculiar freedom of free verse? That is really the
central point at issue: the balance between re-
straint and liberty in art.
228 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
Let us recognize, without delay, that neither
metre, in the strictest Sense, nor rhyme, as we
apply the term, is essential to poetry as such.
Hebrew poetry, of course, had neither, and even
the oldest English poetry was based on a rhyth-
mic system other than that in use to-day. We are
not concerned at the moment with their differ-
ences. For our immediate purpose, those are
entirely immaterial. The essential point is that
metrical forms are conventional, and therefore
rest, like all matters of usage, On acceptance.
They are open to change as any convention is
open to change, and in the same way—namely,
by a slow and gradual consent to something else.
And the new thing will stand or fall according
as it does or does not win its way into the
permanent acceptance of the great community of
readers, which moves together, if it move at all.
The issue rests with the thing and the public.
What you or I may say makes little difference.
Why say it, then? I confess that, like Words-
worth’s little Edward, I am sometimes hard put
to it for an answer. As I have already indicated,
I am something of a fatalist when it comes to
matters of convention. “But al shal passe that
men prose or ryme; Take every man his turn, as
for his tyme.” Chaucer was wise, when he wrote
RHYME, METRE, AND VERS LIBRE 229
that, with the wisdom (and the humor) of experi-
ence. Eclipse and emergence in art go on inces-
santly, and always have. Nevertheless, under-
neath the inevitable flux there are permanencies.
And while conservatives hearten conservatives,
and radicals fire radicals to keener ardors, the
rest of us may at least endeavor to reach clearness.
As has been said, the point at issue is really that
of freedom. And we may first consider the extent
to which metre and rhyme impose restrictions
upon expression. That involves at once the rela-
tions between the rhythms of verse and those of
ordinary speech, when speech is touched with
emotion. For language wholly devoid of emo-
tional quality does not enter into the question
at all.
The language of elevated thought or feeling is
always rhythmic. Strong feeling of whatever
sort, that is, imposes upon speech a rhythmic
beat. Even you and I, whose Ordinary daily talk
maintains its slow or hurried, nervous or phleg-
matic, staccato or legato, but always pedestrian
gait — even you and I, under stress of compel-
ling emotion, find our speech taking on not only
deeper color, but a more or less measured beat.
That rhythm is not the rhythm of verse; it is
infinitely more varied, less susceptible of formu-
230 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
lation, ebbing and flowing with the rise and fall
of the emotion, controlled or unrestrained, that
gives it being. And it is that heightening of
rhythmic quality, whenever thought is deeply
touched with feeling, that characterizes elevated
prose.
In metrical verse, on the other hand, the
rhythm follows relatively fixed patterns. In reg-
ular English metres the line is the salient unit,
both to eye and ear, and the line is made up of
a limited number of groups of stressed and
unstressed syllables. Moreover, the number of
unaccented syllables that may accompany an
accented syllable is also limited. Beyond verse
made up of varying alternations of one accented
and one unaccented syllable, or of one accented
and two unaccented syllables, English metre
rarely goes. To state these obvious facts is to
admit at once that metrical verse imposes re-
strictions upon the freedom of ordinary speech
— which is merely to say in other words, that
verse is a convention of art, whose very essence
is restraint. It is contended, however, that this
particular restraint is unduly rigid. Rhythmic
utterance does not normally fall into units of
fixed length, nor does it group its syllables in-
evitably by twos and threes. The protest is
RHYME, METRE, AND VERS LIBRE 231
not against Thythm; it is against imposing upon
rhythm the strait-jacket of metre. That is a per-
fectly intelligible position, and it is plausible to
the last degree. Its measure of justification is, I
think, neither so great as the radicals, nor so
slight as the conservatives, insist. At all events,
it is no merely academic question.
Now there is a fundamental fact which the
protestants, if I understand them, overlook.
Upon the length or the development of the larger,
infinitely varying rhythmic units, metre does not
impose any limitations whatever. These are free.
They are merely taken up into and merged with
another rhythmic movement. Let me make
clearer what I mean. The movement of regular
verse is a resultant, a resolution, of two rhythms,
one of which, taken alone, tende tºwards utter
freedom, the other of which, taken alone, tends
towards restraint. There is in verse, on the one
hand, the metrical unit — that is to say, for Our
present purpose, the line. There is, on the other
hand, what we may designate as the Sentence
rhythm or cadence. If the line length and the
sentence rhythm uniformly coincide (as they
do in Some of Pope’s couplets, for example) We
get monotony, deadly and intolerable. If there is
only the sentence cadence, without the beat of
232 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
the line, there is variety, but it is merely the
variety of your speech and mine, when charged
with emotion in varying degrees. Metrical verse,
that is not sheer doggerel, is built upon the
harmony of both. Behind the endlessly weaving
rhythms of the sentence cadences beats steadily,
in the best verse unobtrusively, the rhythm of
the line. In the hands of the artist, the rhythmic
cadences determined by the thought, or by the
breath, or both, flow around and through and in
the beat of the lines, but the beat of the lines is
there, like time in music. The freedom of regular
verse is the freedom of infinitely varied rhythms
thrown against a constant rhythmic background.
And the aesthetic pleasure of such verse lies
largely in the conscious or unconscious rec-
ognition of unity in variety, of the fixed and
constant taken up into the movement of the
ever changing — in a word, in our inexhaustible
human delight in the known and expected, when
invested with the added charm of the unfore-
seen. The regular beat and the shifting rhythm
— neither alone, but the two together — these
constitute normal English verse. What free verse
would strike out, to anticipate for a moment, is
the recurrent rhythm of the line. Hegular verse
is the resultant of two rhythms, interwoven into
RHYME, METRE, AND VERS LIBRE 233
innumerable harmonies. Free verse is built on
one alone. That, broadly speaking, is the funda-
mental difference
I have said that the rhythm of the sentence or
the phrase plays through and about the rhythm
of the line, so that constantly shifting rhythmic
patterns weave through the warp of the steadily
beating metrical units. If you recall the second
movement of Tschaikowsky’s Pathetic Sym-
phony, where the measured and muffled throb-
bing of the kettledrum holds its way without
cessation through the surging rhythms of the
orchestra, you will have one of a thousand musi-
cal analogues of the blending of the two rhythms
in verse, which I am trying to make clear. Better
still, let verse speak for itself. Here is a passage
from Shakespeare, ruthlessly printed as if it were
merely metrical lines. One rhythm, that is, has
been torn bodily away from the other, in order
that we may see with some clearness what is left:
With fairest flowers.
While summer lasts and I live here, Fidele.
I’ll sweeten thy sad grave. Thou shalt not lack.
The flower that’s like thy face, pale primrose, nor.
The azur’d harebell, like thy veins, no, nor.
The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander.
Out-sweeten’d not thy breath.
That, so read, is not verse, but a monstrosity.
234 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
Yet that is what must be, if metre really does
impose itself as a restriction upon the larger free-
dom of rhythmic utterance. Of course it does not.
Here is what Shakespeare wrote:
With fairest flowers
While summer lasts and I live here, Fidele,
I’ll sweeten thy sad grave. Thou shalt not lack
The flower that’s like thy face, pale primrose, nor
The azur’d harebell, like thy veins, no, nor
The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander,
Out-sweeten’d not thy breath.
The metrical units are there, but they are taken
up into the larger rhythmic movement, to whose
variety they impart a basic unity.
Or let us take two passages from one poet — a
poet who is writing now, and who is catholic
enough to practice in both kinds. One is a fully
rhymed stanza in absolutely Orthodox metre; the
other is in vers libre. I shall not, at the moment,
indicate which is which. Here is one.
I followed her for long,
With gazing eyes and stumbling feet.
I cared not where she led me,
My eyes were full of colors:
Saffrons, rubies, the yellows of beryls,
And the indigo-blue of quartz;
Flights of rose, layers of chrysoprase,
Points of orange, spirals of vermilion,
The spotted gold of tiger-lily petals,
The loud pink of bursting hydrangeas.
RHYME, METRE, AND VERS LIBRE 235
I followed,
And watched for the flashing of her wings.
And here is the other:
The little apple leaves above their heads
Let fall a quivering Sunshine.
Quiet, cool,
In blossomed boughs they sat.
Beyond, the beds of tulips blazed,
A proper vestibule and antechamber to the
rainbow.
Dyes of prismed richness:
Carmine. Madder. Blues tinging dark browns
to purple.
Silvers flushed to amethyst and tinct with gold.
Pound eyes of Scarlet,
Spotting tender saffron hues.
Violets sunk to blacks,
And reds in orange crushed.
The last (which I have arbitrarily printed as
free verse) " is a regular, metrical, rhymed
stanza. And its metrical pattern has imposed
upon the rhythmic movement no more restric-
tion, to the ear, than the unchartered freedom
of the first. And it is for the ear, not for the eye,
that poetry is written.
This is not a controversial document. It is an
attempt, as unbiased as the academic mind per-
* The rhyme-words, which make it possible to restore the
stanza, are: heads, cool, beds, vestibule, dyes, blues, flushed, eyes,
hues, crushed.
236 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
mits, to state the facts. And one fact that has
suffered temporary eclipse these days is the lib-
erty inherent in the type of verse which is popu-
larly supposed to cabin, crib, confine, bind in the
poet’s freedom of expression. tº
But metre imposes other checks on freedom.
Words in normal speech, we are told, neither are
so constructed in themselves, nor do they so fall
into relation with each other, as to marshal the
accented and unaccented syllables punctually
at the proper intervals for the genesis of metrical
feet. Yet the verse stress and the word stress
must correspond. We may n’t say “the fertile
plains of Mésopótamia,” though our rhythm cry
out for it ever so loud. If we keep the rhythm,
Mesopotamia must go Overboard, and some such
makeshift as “the fertile plains that börder ön
the Tigris” must take its place. And “border on
the Tigris” may not be in the least what our
scheme of things demands. Moreover, if we keep
the words we want, we must often shift the order.
If I’m writing in a certain metre, I may n’t say:
“When Porphyria glided in, she straight shut
out the cold and the storm.” I must say:
“When glided in Porphyria, straight
She shut the cold out and the storm.”
Granted at once both counts of the indictment!
RHYME, METRE, AND VERS LIBRE 237
Verse is not prose. But before I take the high
ground that I propose to take on that point, let
us look a little more closely at the facts.
In the first place, we do not scan English
verse. The basis of English verse is accent, and
accent, unlike classical quantity, is absolutely
incapable of formulation. In the sentence I have
just written, or in the One I am writing now,
there are accented syllables of all degrees of
stress, and there are likewise relatively unac-
cented syllables that carry more actual stress
than some that are technically accented. There
is one way, and only one, of correctly reading a
Latin hexameter. There may be three or four
ways of reading an English blank verse line. I
venture to say that no two mortals ever read
aloud any given long passage of verse with pre-
cisely the same rhythms. I am very sure that I
should never read certain lines as the books on
metrics say they should be read, and the metrists
themselves read the same lines differently. And I
seriously question if, for many lines, there is such
a thing as a fixed reading. In other words, the
state of things within the line is closely analogous
to the situation we have seen in the case of the
line and the circumambient sentence rhythm.
There is for the line a general norm — iambic,
238 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
trochaic, what you will — which carries through
as a metrical background. But half the time we
feel the norm merely as something which persists
through shifting variations from it. And the idea
of metre as a rigid locking up of rhythm into
set and stereotyped forms, is the offspring of
a priori notions, and not of the reading of great
verse itself. The hampering influence of metre
upon phrasal rhythm within the line has been
rather grossly exaggerated these days, in the in-
terest of a propaganda. Verse is not prose, let me
say again; but neither is it a lock-step.
When we come to the dislocation of the nor-
mal order of words which is laid at the door of
metrical necessity, we find a similar overstate-
ment of the facts. Inversion undoubtedly occurs
with unnecessary frequency in some English
verse. “I have given up “Hyperion,” wrote
Reats; “there were too many Miltonic inversions
in it.” “I hate inversions,” declared Tennyson —
a statement which, I fear, will lead some of the
modernists forthwith to embrace them. The
plain fact is that, relatively speaking, inversion
in English verse is rare. Shifts in the position
of words and phrases for the sake of emphasis
are common — precisely as we practice them
in prose. But the decided tendency of English
RHYME, METRE, AND VERS LIBRE 239
verse, taken not here and there, but in the mass,
is to preserve the normal word order. To illus-
trate adequately would be to print a dozen pages
from a dozen poets, excluding one or two who
do, by their individual usage, extend aid and
comfort to the enemy. Here I may only instance
a few random lines which, I think, it will none
the less be admitted are typical. And I shall
choose them from no one sort of poetry.
Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know'st thy estimate:
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate.
I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost
Who died before the god of love was born.
But to our tale: Ae market night,
Tam had got planted unco right;
Fast by an ingle, bleezing finely,
Wi’ reaming swats, that drank divinely;
And at his elbow, Souter Johnny,
His ancient, trusty, drouthy crony;
Tam lo’ed him like a vera brither;
They had been fou for weeks thegither.
Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, Sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are Selfish men. .
240 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
Well! If the Bard was weather-wise, who made
The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence,
This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence
Unroused by winds.
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.
. . . for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Those are all as straightaway as your talk or
mine, and they represent normal English verse.
The contention that inversion is a necessity in-
herent in metre is a man of straw. That it is
sometimes the path of least resistance is clear
enough, and poets, like the rest of us, often take
to their hurt the easy way. But that is rather the
fault of the poet than of his medium.
But, insist the protestants, even though we
grant all that, you are merely making the shoe
pinch at another point. To keep the metre and
avoid inversion still involves restriction, for we
are not thereby relieved of the necessity of
choosing words that fit the line. The limitation
RHYME, METRE, AND VERS LIBRE 241
still persists. Undoubtedly it does. I have not the
slightest intention of denying it. If I did, I
should be denying that poetry was an art. And
there is where I part company with some of my
very good friends. Art demands a medium. That
medium is never the same as the thing which it
presents. Canvas is not a landscape, stone flesh,
the stage reality. Obliterate the difference, and
you have actuality, not art. We have already
seen the grounds for this, and I shall not restate
them here. Let the medium of poetry conform
completely to the usages of ordinary speech, and
it ceases to be poetry. If poetry is art, it must
produce its effects through a medium which dif-
ferentiates it, without divorcing it, from reality.
It may not be unaccommodated speech. And
that differentiation does without question im-
pose restrictions upon the poet’s absolute free-
dom of expression. But it is precisely these
restrictions which make the poet.
Wer Grosses will, muss sich zusammen raffen:
In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister,
Und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben.
Goethe has touched the core of the problem that
confronts us now. The very restrictions of his
medium become to the artist, as blank verse
became growingly to Shakespeare, the way to
242 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
freedom; and the triumphs of art have been
through its sovereign dealings with the intract-
able, “when the hard means rebel.” Let me con-
tinue my quotation:
O Poet, then, forbear
The loosely-sandalled verse,
Choose rather thou to wear
The buskin — straight and terse;
Leave to the tiro’s hand
The limp and shapeless style;
See that thy form demand
The labor of the file. . . .
Paint, chisel, then, or write;
But, that the work surpass,
With the hard fashion fight, —
With the resisting mass.
Those are the words, not of a pedant or a peda-
gogue, but of Théophile Gautier. Let me set be-
side them — as artist’s, not schoolmaster’s wit-
ness again — a remark of Henry James from one
of those distilled prefaces of his. He is speaking
of the “charm of supreme difficulty” to the art-
ist: “To put all that is possible of one’s idea into
a form and compass that will contain and express
it only by delicate adjustments and an exquisite
chemistry, so that there will at the end be neither
a drop of one’s liquor left nor a hair's breadth of
RHYME, METRE, AND VERS LIBRE 243
the rim of one’s glass to spare — every artist will
remember how often that sort of necessity has
carried with it its particular inspiration.” That
is written of fiction, but it is supremely true of
verse. And verse foregoes its limitations at its
peril. For art gambles with that which makes it
art, when it rebels against restriction.
But we are not yet done with the shackles.
There is still rhyme. And we shall consider that
as we have considered metre, only in its relation
to freedom of expression.
In the first place, rhyme is, of course, an acci-
dent rather than an essential of verse. And it is
scarcely necessary to point out that the term
rhyme, in its popular acceptance, refers to what is
technically known as end rhyme. Strictly speak-
ing, alliteration is rhyme too — that is to say, it
is initial, as contrasted with end rhyme. But the
technical distinction need not concern us here.
By rhyme I mean what we all mean in ordinary
usage — similarity or identity, as between two
words or even sets of words, of an accented vowel
sound and whatever follows it, set off by differ-
ence in the preceding sound. And rhyme, thus
understood, does several things.
For one thing, it gives the sort of aesthetic
pleasure which arises from the recognition of
244 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
sameness with difference — the pleasure which,
in another fashion, metre itself affords. Let me
illustrate what I mean from an unrhymed poem.
The first line of Collins’s “Ode to Evening” is
this:
If aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song.
If, now, you do what I am certain Collins never
did — namely, write out the consonant sounds of
the line, you find a remarkable result. Here it is:
f t f t (n) st p r p st r (1 s ng). The
same consonants are repeated in a sequence
which resembles a mathematical design. But
observe: the recurrences of identical consonants
are accompanied by totally different vowel
sounds — by a vowel sequence, in fact, as re-
markable as the consonantal sequence, ranging
from the full open sound of “aught,” down
through “oat” and “stop,” to the lighter o in
“pastoral,” and up again in “song.” The music
of the line, in other words —
If aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song—
is due to the nice conjunction of recurring con-
sonants with subtly varying vowels. And if one
cares to see the difference between such an effect
and that of crass identity, one has only to read
the next line as Collins first wrote it:
May hope, O pensive Eve, to sooth thine ear.
RHYME, METRE, AND VERS LIBRE 245
There “hope O pe” is sheer cacophony, and
“sive Eve” little better. And Collins, whose ear
was exquisite to a degree, changed the line to
read:
May hope, chaste Eve, to sooth thy modest ear —
sacrificing “pensive” on the altar of musical
effect.
Now rhyme, by a similar merging of same-
ness with difference, gives a specific sort of aes-
thetic pleasure, and that, I take it, is its raison
d’étre. It does, however, other more or less useful
things. It obviously sets off the metrical unit,
the line; and, paradoxically enough, it also binds
lines together in larger units — couplets, qua-
trains, or what not. For the first sound still
echoes in the ear when its counterpart occurs,
and the two link together, in varying degrees
according to the interval, their respective lines.
Rhyme plays, then, a rather important, though
not an essential part in verse. *
But rhyme, in the nature of the case, imposes
restrictions upon the poet’s liberty. The number
of words in the language that rhyme with any
given word is obviously limited. The use of a
word in rhyme, accordingly, compels the poet to
choose a second word, not for its sense alone, but
246 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
for its sound. And even so, his range of choice is
circumscribed by a purely accidental fact — the
number of rhyming words which actually exist.
Only a fanatic would deny that this constitutes
a definite restraint upon free choice, and nobody
that I know of does deny it. The poets them-
selves have grumbled freely. Chaucer translates
three Balades of Oton de Granson, and ends
his envoy thus:
And eek to me it is a greet penaunce,
Sith rym in English hath swich scarsitee,
To folwe word by word the curiositee
Of Graunson, floure of hem that make in Fraunce.
I pass over reluctantly the battles royal that the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries waged on
the subject, with Spenser and Gabriel Harvey,
Campion and Daniel, among the protagonists.
Dryden speaks of “the slavery of rhyme,” and of
“the close of that one syllable, which often con-
fines, and more often corrupts, the sense of all
the rest.” Gray characterizes lyric style in words
which I wonder that the Imagists have not ap-
propriated as their motto: “Extreme conciseness
of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical.”
“This,” he goes on, “I have always aimed at,
and never could attain; the necessity of rhym-
ing is one great obstacle to it.” Per contra,
RHYME, METRE, AND VERS LIBRE 247
Tobert Lloyd protests, in some rhymes “On
Rhyme,” that
While the trim bard in easy strains,
Talks much of fetters, clogs, and chains;
He only aims that you should think,
How charmingly he makes them clink.
But of sterner stuff is Quevedo’s “Complaint of
the Poets in Hell”:
Oh, this damn’d Trade of Versifying,
Has brought us all to Hell for lying!
For writing what we do not think,
Merely to hear the Verse cry Clink;
For rather than abuse the Meter, *
Black shall be white, Paul shall be Peter.
And I would there were space to quote from the
Reverend John Edwards, the Paul, the Augus-
tine, the Bradwardine, the Calvin of his day,
as his admirers called him, the passage which
begins: “Verse is Words put into a Wanton-
Posture,” and ends: “Those who are excessively
addicted to [Rhymel have generally their Minds
and Manners distorted. This Poetic Age hath
prov’d the most Atheistical and Immoral.”
“Truly,” one might say to rhyme, as Touch-
stone to Corin, “truly, thou art damm’d. . . .
thou art in a parlous state.”
And it would be easy to accumulate corrobo-
rative evidence from the poets themselves —
248 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
especially if, to make a case, we levy on their
Juvenilia:
Memory! dear enchanter!
Why bring back to view
Dreams of youth, which banter
All that e'er was true?
That is Tennyson at the age of sixteen or so, and
“banter” dances to “enchanter’s” piping, since
“canter” was the sole alternative left open to the
dreams of youth. Reats's trees sprout “a shady
boon For simple sheep” under the obvious com-
pulsion of the moon; and his solitary thinkings
“dodge Conception to the very bourne of hea-
ven,” because they can’t dodge “lodge” in the
preceding line. The Alps in “Childe Harold” are
endowed with scalps, since even Walker’s Lexi-
con could give no help. Marjorie Fleming's divine
candor is shared by few of her fellow-craftsmen:
He was kill’d by a cannon splinter
Quite in the middle of the winter,
(Perhaps it was not at that time,
But I can get no other rhyme).
Of course the difficulty puts adventurous spirits
on their mettle. Browning said he thought he
could make a rhyme for every word in the Eng-
lish language, and you may read in the Tenny-
son “Memoir” his tours de force on rhinoceros,
RHYME, METRE, AND VERS LIBRE 249
Ecclefechan, and Craigenputtock. And every-
body knows Byron’s
But—Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,"
Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck’d you all?
But that is amiable license and not liberty.
I have now played the devil’s advocate with
exemplary thoroughness. Phyme restricts the
poet’s freedom. Very good; so be it. The sole
question is, how far the game is worth the candle.
Admitting losses, are there countervailing gains?
For the law of compensation rules supreme in
art, as it holds sway in life, and you cannot eat
your cake in poetry, and have it too. Abandon
rhyme, and the lady (I am quoting Hamlet!)
shall say her mind more freely. Will she, or he,
however, say it with more beauty? Will it even
necessarily be said more exactly? Sometimes,
yes! But one of the curious phenomena of lan-
guage is the uncanny way in which Sound and
sense have the trick of playing into each other's
hands. The disclosure of a sort of Cartesian pre-
established harmony between rhyme and reason
is one of the prerogatives of the poetic gift. And
some of the most felicitous turns of thought and
phrase in poetry are the result of a flash of in-
spiration under the happy guidance of a rhyme.
250 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
That is not an offhand statement, but I must
confine myself for illustration to a single case in
point. In the sonnet “On first looking into
Chapman’s Homer,” Keats first wrote:
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet could I never judge what men could mean,
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold
Then the nine low words that crept in one dull
line: “Yet could I never judge what men could
mean” — gave place, under the compulsion of
the rhyme, to the splendid phrase which now
completes the figure:
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene,
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.
That is one instance out of hundreds, of the hap-
piness in words which rhyming often hits on,
which reason itself could not so prosperously be
delivered of.
In a word, poetry, regarded from the side of
its technique, is the moulding of language to ar-
tistic ends. It deals with the aesthetic as well as
the significative values of words. In so far as the
two sets of values do not clash, rhyme enhances
that power of awakening delight which verse
RHYME, METRE, AND VERS LIBRE 251
shares with music. If the values conflict, rhyme
has no case. But it is part of the poet’s challeng-
ing and obdurate enterprise to see that they do
not conflict. Rhyme simply affords him what
Byron sought in the study of Armenian: it offers
him something craggy for his mind to break on.
And whether they take the form of rhyme or
metre, or of something else, I confess to a firm
belief in the tonic properties of crags.
Moreover, the other function of rhyme is
something which poetry can ill afford to spare.
For rhyme is one of the binding elements in both
the production and the perception of structural
unity. Great poetry is vertebrate. Cogency and
consecutiveness of development are as character-
istic of the Supreme lyrics, even, as are rhythm
and imagery. Creative energy in its highest exer-
cise is magnificently architectonic, and it im-
poses upon the lyric impulse an ordered sequence
and an organic unity. For the great poets have
not only thought straight themselves, even when
they felt most deeply, but they have also made
it incumbent on us to think straight after them.
And rhyme is a powerful factor in throwing into
relief what Pope would call “the strong connec-
tions, nice dependencies, gradations just,” which
constitute a poem an artistic whole. I am well
252 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
aware that there are those who will reject my
major premise. If one prefer (as one may) De-
bussy to Beethoven, or Gauguin to Rembrandt,
one may, quite intelligibly, care little for firm
structural line in poetry. If we recognize at all,
however, that beauty of form which consists in
a sequence of balanced parts composing into an
ordered unity, we shall also recognize the con-
structive value of rhyme. It would be difficult
to imagine the superb cogency of the “Divine
Comedy” apart from the welding power of the
terza rima. And to pass to one of the briefest
and at the same time most flawless of all lyrics,
I shall ask you to observe not merely the music,
but also the synthesizing effect of the rhymes in
Goethe’s lines:
Ueber allen Gipfeln
Ist Puh;
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.
Bob that of its rhymes, and you obliterate its
very essence. Or consider the first stanza at
which my “Oxford Book of English Verse” hap-
pens to Open:
RHYME, METRE, AND VERS LIBRE 253
Have you seen but a bright lily grow
Before rude hands have touch’d it?
Have you mark’d but the fall of the snow
Before the soil hath smutch’d it?
Have you felt the wool of beaver,
Or swan’s down ever?
Or have smelt o’ the bud o’ the brier,
Or the nard in the fire?
Or have tasted the bag of the bee?
O so white, O so soft, O so sweet is shel
That, too, is slight, if you will; but its struc-
ture is as firm as it is delicate, and the design is
pricked out, so to speak, by the rhymes.
I need scarcely add, I hope, that a poem may
possess artistic unity of high order, without the
aid of rhyme. But it is no less true that rhyme
has become in English poetry a constructive ele-
ment of great value, and may not be discarded
without loss. Whether there are compensatory
gains is another question, which we shall come
to in a moment.
The conventional forms of English verse, ac-
cordingly, do not shackle poetry so disastrously
as we are sometimes asked to believe. On the
contrary, the very limitations frequently become
in a true sense creative agencies. But it does
not follow that the door is therefore closed to
fresh adventures in technique. And such an ad-
venture is now in full career.
254 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
It is, among other things, a frank revolt
against metrical conventions, and, like all insur-
gent tendencies, it is extreme. But it is also con-
structive, and it is experimenting in a genuinely
fruitful fashion. At its best, it is a serious attempt
to readjust the relations of content and form in
poetry, and as such it is worthy of the most re-
spectful consideration. At its worst, it is no more
absurd than scores of its predecessors, long since
embalmed among the curiosities of literature.
The movement is neither a bogy nor an avatar.
It is merely part and parcel of the intellectual
ferment of our day — one more wave in the end-
less ebb and flow of action and reaction, the in-
finitesimal increments of which we call Progress.
And criticism has no cause to scoff, even though
it may not feel called upon to pray. To under-
stand, So far as possible, and to appraise are
more to the point.
But both understanding and appraisal are ex-
tremely difficult. For one thing, we are too close
for perspective. I have tried to establish a general
background, but even at that we are still in too
close proximity to the picture. Contemporary
judgments, pro or con, are notorious even among
time's laughing-stocks. And one of the most
quintessential of time’s little ironies is its trick
RHYME, METRE, AND VERS LIBRE 255
of extinguishing us, through the very process of
providing us with due perspective. Yet we can’t
wait till we’re dead, to make up our transitory
minds. We must speak now, or forever after
hold our peace.
Moreover, clarity and poise of judgment in
this particular instance are rendered almost un-
attainable through the fact that the movement
we are concerned with is beset with innumerable
cross currents and shifting channels. The new
poets themselves are far from unanimous in
either theory or practice. There are wings ex-
treme to the point of anarchy — the Paroxysm-
ists in France, the Vorticists in England, and
mild lunacies of one sort or another in this coun-
try, There is also, within the insurgent camp it-
self, an unobtrusive but unmistakable reaction
from these extremes, Out of which has emerged a
relatively moderate and balanced Centre. And
there are gradations all the way between. And
since one group repudiates what another group
stands sponsor for, it is sometimes difficult in a
brief discussion to avoid, without interminable
qualifications and abatements, a certain appear-
ance of unfairness. That, I fear, is inevitable.
As for myself, taking the insurgents by and
large, I have profound respect for certain of their
256 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
aims, and I admire tremendously some things
that they have done. But I doubt the validity of
some of their assertions, and I do not wholly
share their implicit faith in their own methods,
or their pardonable family pride in all their off-
spring. I shall briefly indicate what seem to me
both gains and losses.
It is their metrical tenets that concern us now.
And it is not my purpose to discuss either the
Origins or the history of vers libre. It is sufficient
to say that the present impulse comes primarily
from France; that it found, when it came, the
ground prepared for it in differing ways by
Arnold, and Whitman, and Henley, and others;
and that it has since passed, or is passing, both
directly and at second-hand, under the influence
of Greek, Chinese and Japanese, and even He-
brew poetry. Its history, in a word, is absolutely
typical of the procedure of English poetry from
the Middle Ages on, in that it represents the
grafting of foreign Scions upon the native stock.
So far as its behavior in this respect is concerned,
it is maintaining the established traditions of
English poetry.
When one asks precisely what free verse is, the
answer is more difficult. Miss Amy Lowell has
been at more pains than anybody else to define
RHYME, METRE, AND VERS LIBRE 257
and to explain it; and in the Preface to “Sword
Blades and Poppy Seed”; in the North American
Review for January, 1917; in the closing chapter
of her recent volume, “Tendencies in Modern
American Poetry”; and still more recently in
the Dial (January 17, 1918), she has made it as
clear as it probably can be made. And I shall
draw for my statement upon these documents.
“The definition of vers libre is: a verse-form
based upon cadence.” But cadence is not metre.
“To understand vers libre, one must abandon
all desire to find in it the even rhythm of met-
rical feet. One must allow the lines to flow as
they will when read aloud by an intelligent
reader.” Or, to put it another way, unrhymed
cadence is “built upon ‘organic rhythm,” or the
rhythm of the speaking voice with its necessity
for breathing, rather than upon a strict metrical
system.” “Free verse within its own law of ca-
dence has no absolute rules; it would not be ‘free”
if it had.” What is this law of cadence? For that
is the vital point. I shall still essay no statement
of my own. “The unit of vers libre is not the foot,
the number of the syllables, the quantity, or the
line. The unit is the strophe, which may be the
whole poem, or may be only a part. Each strophe
is a complete circle.” The emphasis, then (and
258 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
this is fundamental), is upon what has been else-
where called “the desire of verse to return upon
itself.” The law of cadence, accordingly, if I un-
derstand it, applies to a balanced flow of free
rhythm, of which any given line is but a part.
The group of lines constitutes the unit, which is a
rhythmic movement returning upon itself, like
the swing of a balanced pendulum. Within that
swing, the lines move as the poet wills. The poem
“can be fast or slow, it may even jerk, but this
perfect swing it must have; even its jerks must
follow the central movement.” This summary
is, I believe, a perfectly fair statement of the
insurgent position. It is not my own, except in
the selection and arrangement of the excerpts,
and in that I have been scrupulously careful to
wrest nothing from its context.
Now this represents free verse as its serious
practitioners understand it. And it is with this
alone that I am concerned. The chopped-up
prose that goes by the same name is worth nei-
ther your time nor mine for critical considera-
tion. The genuine attempt to work out a new
artistic medium has suffered from the confusion,
and I am glad to emphasize the difference. I have
read most of the best and, led on by an unholy
fascination, far more than my quota of the worst
RHYME, METRE, AND VERS LIBRE 259
free verse printed in recent years, and I speak by
the book. And now for the more serious experi-
ment itself.
Free verse, as just defined, is at its best essen-
tially strophic. It is a larger rhythmic movement
which subsumes other rhythms. Pegular verse
is also at its best essentially strophic. It too, as
I have already tried to make clear, is a larger
rhythmic movement which subsumes other
rhythms. The two have in common, then, an
enveloping rhythm. What is the difference?
Mainly this: in the one, the constituent rhyth-
mic elements, namely metrical lines, have a rela-
tively uniform beat; in the other, they are free to
vary as they please. Therein lies the peculiar
freedom of free verse. It is not in the strophic
element as such. That it has in common with
regular verse. The great strophic rhythms of
“Paradise Lost,” for example, which are far
more significant than the rhythms of Milton’s
lines, are as free as the strophic rhythms of any
poem in vers libre. The sentence and phrasal
rhythms of the great rhymed lyrics are always
potentially, and in many cases actually, as un-
restrained as the modern cadences. What the
modern unrhymed cadences abandon, as I have
already said, is the recurrent beat of the line. It
260 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
is here that they have freed themselves from a
partially real and partially supposed restraint.
The constituent elements of the strophic rhythm
need not, as in regular verse, be uniform.
Where lies the gain? The answer to that in-
volves the other tenets of the movement. For
free verse (and I am still speaking only of the
more artistic use of it) may not fairly be separated
from its content. The poets who use it insist that
they see the world in their own way, and they
have hit upon a medium which they believe
serves best to record their impressions of what
they see. And they have a right to ask, as they
do, that this fact be taken into account. How,
then, does the New Poetry envisage its world?
For one thing, it sets itself in sharp opposition
to what it calls “the cosmic poet,” who indulges
in vague generalities, magnificent and Sonorous,
about his universe. The new, especially the
Imagist poetry “concerns itself with man in his
proper relation to the universe, rather than as the
lord and master of it.” The insurgent poets, as
One of them has put it, are children of a scientific
age. They know that man is not the centre of the
universe, and so they scrupulously refrain from
any attempt to impose their feelings upon things.
And One of their chief aims, accordingly, is the
RHYME, METRE, AND VERS LIBRE 261.
attainment of what they have variously called
externality, exteriority, objectivity, or immedi-
acy. That means, in turn, that their chief end in
expression is clearness and hardness of presenta-
tion, “discarding . . . all extraneous detail which
tends to blur ... the vividness of the main
theme.” And finally, their search is for “the
exact word,” the word that at once presents the
thing and conveys the writer’s impression of it
to the reader. That is a consistent and reasoned
doctrine of the poet’s business, and it cannot be
dismissed with a gesture.
Unrhymed cadence, then, is felt to serve these
ends with peculiar aptness. It imposes no re-
striction upon the choice of words, since within
the strophic movement the rhythm is variable
at will, and no accentual idiosyncrasies need bar
a refractory but inevitable word from its meet
place. By the same token, the temptation to em-
ploy inversions ceases to operate. And finally,
the rhythms, bare as they are of conventional
emotional associations, are a tabula rasa on which
the poet may inscribe his own sharp and clear
impressions for conveyance, in their pristine
freshness, to the reader.
Before coming to debit and credit, I must
avow a certain skepticism on one important point.
262 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
I do not believe that vers libre has nearly the ad-
vantage over metre that is claimed for it in the
choice of the mot juste. If it is merely a matter of
relative ease that is involved, I yield the point
at once. But ease in art is not a high desidera-
tum; we are concerned with the results. And over
against every example of the inevitable word in
unrhymed cadence (and the number is happily
large), may be set “exact” words, not single spies
but in battalions, from metrical verse. Given a
rich vocabulary and the artist’s sense for words,
and metre will interpose little or no obstacle to
the mot juste. The diction of Mr. Robinson and
Mr. Frost — to leave William Shakespeare and
a few others out of account — is quite as exact,
in the full Imagist sense of the term, as the dic-
tion of H. D. or Pichard Aldington, and the
blank verse does n’t halt for it either. I am talk-
ing of artists, of course. Neither free verse will
save, nor metre damn, the others. -
As for profit and loss, I have no hesitation in
saying that in my judgment the serious practiv
tioners of vers libre are making contributions of
genuine significance to English poetry. I also be-
lieve that over against this indebtedness must
be set certain definite abatements. Let us take
the contributions first.
RHYME, METRE, AND VERS LIBRE 263
It is the freshness and vividness of the diction,
in the best free verse, that is of particular worth
just now to poetry. Less, indeed, than is con-
stantly insisted, but still to an unfortunate de-
gree, poetry has been tending to become vague,
and nebulous, and stereotyped in its vocabu-
lary. And it is a relief to come to a diction that is
frequently crisp, and incisive, and terse, and (if
you will) external. The vocabulary of poetry is
undergoing a renovation. And only the captious
can well decline to admit the fact, or to recognize
the significance of what is happening.
Furthermore, wherever the new rhythms are
to be classified — and that is a question which
will concern us later — they constitute, in com-
petent hands, a medium of unmistakable artistic
possibilities. And they are sometimes very beau-
tiful. There are even stern traditionalists who
cherish a surreptitious liking for the thing, en-
hanced by the pleasantly uneasy sense that it
ought n’t to be liked. When that happens, tradi-
tion must rub the sleep out of its eyes, and ac-
cept the challenge that bids nor sit nor stand,
but go. And that in itself is reason enough for
those of us who love the old to bid a hearty
welcome to the new.
But that welcome does not absolve us from a
264 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
critical scrutiny of the other side of the account.
And there are two points in particular which give
one pause. In the first place, the trend of recent
poetry towards what it calls externality, results
in the virtual exclusion of much that is no less the
stuff of creative art. I sympathize profoundly
with a poetry that does n’t make a pageant of
its bleeding heart, or that even declines to wear
its heart, bleeding or not, on its sleeve. But chil-
dren of a scientific and analytic age though we
may be, and however fruitful our exploiting of
the field of the external and the concrete, it still
remains true that we are children of more ages
than our own. Intellectually, the contention of
the New Poetry has some validity; with respect
to that which lies deeper than the intellectual —
I distrust the word, or I should say with respect
to the spiritual — the case is not so clear. There
are still “exultations, agonies, And love, and
man’s unconquerable mind,” and no recoil from
the so-called “cosmic” releases poetry from its
wrestlings with these, except to its grave loss. I
know that the poets insist that they are not ex-
cluded; that the concrete and the external are
merely, in their work, the medium through which
the informing spirit is expressed. In a measure
that is true. But the medium itself is so alluring,
RHYME, METRE, AND VERS LIBRE 265
and the delight in pure sensation so acute, that
the suggestions and impressions which do reach
us stir certain regions of consciousness alone, and
leave the depths unmoved. I am not quarrelling
with the squirrel because it is not a mountain,
nor judging Imagism by a standard that is not
its own. I am merely insisting that there are also
other standards, valid still, and that the old
fields have not yet been exhausted. I yield to no
one in my admiration for the chiselled, pellucid
beauty of many an image that lends distinction
to the best work of the new school. But the peril
to the movement at the hands of its most notable
exponents lies, as I see it, in an over-preoccupa-
tion with an exquisite craftsmanship in verbal
textures — a craftsmanship which in its own way
sometimes rivals that of the Flemish painters.
Of such technique there can scarcely be too much
in a slipshod world; but the self-imposed restric-
tion of that technique to the expression of sheer
immediacy of experience is a grave limitation.
This at least is the dispassionate judgment of a
not unsympathetic reader.
As for the rhythms of free verse, my genuine
liking for many of them is also tempered by a
doubt. One feels in the new verse — and one is
meant to feel it — the absence of a norm. Yet
266 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
freedom is felt as the freedom of art, only when
it is exercised within restraint. The restraining
rhythms of the free verse strophe, to be sure, are
there, but they are themselves unrestrained, ex-
cept by an inner compulsion of their own. And
that compulsion is felt at all, it would seem, only
by the finer craftsmen of the genre. In the mass
of what answers to the name of free verse, the
“quality of return” is absent. In so far, then, as
the experiment keeps clearly before it the ineluc-
table necessity of a moulding form, even though
that form have not as yet received the sanction
of tradition, its warrant is secure. Its peril in this
direction lies in a tendency to obliterate the an-
cient landmarks between freedom and license.
And even at its best, in electing this peculiar
freedom of its own, vers libre has at the same
time made certain definite renunciations. For
by substituting rhythm alone for the fusion of
rhythm and metre in one, it has foregone the
great harmonic, orchestral effects of the older
verse. That it has a perfect right to do; but
the compensations which it has to offer must
be clear.
I do not wish to close without saying what in
my judgment is the thing that after all most de-
mands expression. Far more significant than the
RHYME, METRE, AND VERS LIBRE 267
faults of the movement, or even than its merits,
is the fact that it eacists. At no time, perhaps, in
the history of this country at least, has there
been so keen and widespread an interest in po-
etry. We may carp at the form that it takes, we
may poke fun at its vagaries, we may leave it, if
we please, unread. The fact remains that more
people are reading poetry to-day than for a pe-
riod of many years. That in itself is of happy
Omen. You can’t steer a boat that is n’t moving.
Once let it gather headway, and the rudder will
do its part. The new preoccupation with poetry
in this country is a fact of large significance —
not so much for what the poetry itself now is,
as for what it promises. Many of us have been
free with criticism and suggestion, not because
we do not believe in the importance of the move—
ment, but because we do. The critic, usually,
does not produce — as he is often told in no un-
certain terms. The poet, on the other hand, is
apt to lack the detachment which alone makes
fruitful criticism possible. The two must work
together to a common end. If they do — if the
new poets can bring themselves to moderate
their attitude of somewhat sensitive resentment
towards those who call their art in question; if
the critics, on their part, can forego their not
268 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
infrequent tone of irritating condescension, and
welcome, with no surrender of discrimination,
a fresh impulse — if this fraternity of interests
can be brought from Utopia to Earth, we may
look with some assurance for a genuine poetic
Renaissance.
VII
THE INCURSIONS OF PROSE AND THE VOGUE OF
THE FRAGMENTARY
THE great uncharted region in the realm of let-
ters is the borderland between poetry and prose.
It has been for centuries the Debatable Ground,
the No Man’s Land of literature, claimed now
by one side, now by the other, and securely
held by neither. Is all speech that possesses
imaginative quality poetry, or must it have
rhythm too? If “Paradise Lost” is poetry, why
not the great purple patches of the “Areopa-
gitica”? If Chaucer’s “Troilus and Creseyde,”
why not “Tom Jones”? “There have been
many most excellent poets that never versified,”
declared Sir Philip Sidney, adding, however,
a quid pro quo: “and now Swarm many ver-
sifiers that need never answer to the name of
poets.” “Plato was essentially a poet,” says
Shelley; “Lord Bacon was a poet.” The pretty
battle of the books has raged since Aristotle,
with all the fine fury that attends a bloodless
combat. And the Homeric bead-roll of the pro-
tagonists, and their acts, and how they warred,
270 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
behold they are written in the second chapter
of Professor Gummere's notable volume on the
“Beginnings of Poetry.” There you may read,
in racy summary, the arguments pro and con. I
have no desire, and there is no occasion, to ride
into the lists. All that need be said here is this:
We use the word “poetry,” as we use hundreds
of other words, in a loose as well as in a more rigid
sense. When we accord ourselves an entirely per-
missible latitude, we may say with Keats that
“the poetry of earth is never dead”; we may
assert with Blackie that “to live poetry is always
better than to write it”; we may affirm with
perfect propriety and truth that all language is
poetry. But as a matter of usage merely, if we
speak of poetry without qualification or saving
clause, we are commonly understood to have
reference to both an imaginative and a rhythmic
use of speech. We do not, as a rule, include prose.
But we may not wisely whistle before we are
out of the woods. For prose may be rhythmic
too. And that brings us to the really fundamental
distinction — a distinction which, unlike the
other, has more than academic interest. The im-
portant contradistinction is not that of poetry
and prose, but the antithesis of prose and verse.
That eliminates the common factors, and reduces
THE INCURSIONS OF PROSE 271
the problem to one of form. And until recently
our feet were on firm ground. “The only strict
antithesis to Prose is Metre,” wrote Wordsworth.
That is neat and satisfactory to the last degree.
Prose may be and verse is rhythmic; but verse
is always and prose never metrical. Metre be-
comes, accordingly, the exact and scientific dif-
ferentia between verse and prose. But now a re-
spectable body of verse turns its back on metre
and walks out. Does it remain verse? If it does,
what is now its differentia? Rhythm is not, for
prose may be rhythmic. Metre is not, for it has
thrown metre to the dogs. How does the rhythm
of emancipated verse differ from the rhythm of
elevated prose? That is the disconcerting ques-
tion which confronts us, and it is a question from
which there is no escape.
Now elevated prose may be strongly rhythmic,
but we still think of it as prose, never as verse.
Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from fol-
lowing after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and
where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my
people, and thy God my God: where thou diest, will I
die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me,
and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.
Underneath that runs the balanced structure of
the Hebrew poetry which it is, but it is a trans-
272 CONVENTION AND, REVOLT IN POETRY
lation into the noble rhythms of surpassingly
perfect prose. It is not verse.
O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none
could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath
dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath
flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and de-
spised: thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched
greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man,
and covered it all over with these two narrow words,
Hic jacet.
Raleigh’s apostrophe is majestic in its rhythm
beyond all but the greatest verse, but its ca-
dences are still the cadences of prose. No one
could possibly mistake it for anything else. Or
take the haunting close of Sir Thomas Browne’s
“Garden of Cyrus”:
Nor will the sweetest delight of Gardens afford much
comfort in Sleep, wherein the dullness of that Sense
shakes hands with delectable Odours; and though in
the bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise
up the ghost of a Rose. . . . But who can be drowsie at
that hour which freed us from everlasting sleep? or have
slumbring thoughts at that time when Sleep itself must
end, and, as some conjecture, all shall awake again?
We may call that poetry, if we please; we should
never think of describing it as verse.
But these represent the uncertain glories of
the Elizabethan and Jacobean prose — the surg-
ing cadences which, after the reaction of the
THE INCURSIONS OF PROSE 273
eighteenth century, appeared again with other
contours in De Quincey and Carlyle and Puskin,
and now have vanished. The rhythms of modern
artistic prose are simpler. Now they are like this
of Pater’s: 1
The perfume
Of the little flowers of the lime-tree
Fell through the air upon them,
Like rain;
While time seemed to move ever more slowly
To the murmur of the bees in it,
Till it almost stood still
On June afternoons.
Now the rhythms are like these of Joseph
Conrad:
The bright domes
Of the parasols -
Swayed lightly outwards
Like full-blown blossoms
On the rim of a vase . . .
The wheels turned solemnly;
One after another the sunshades drooped,
Folding their colors
Like gorgeous flowers shutting their petals
At the end of the day.
Again there are cadences of almost languorous
beauty as in these of Fiona Macleod:
* I have intentionally printed the prose that follows in such
fashion as to bring out its cadences to the eye.
274 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
The gloaming came,
Silverly.
The dew glistened
On the fronds of the ferns,
In the cups of the moss.
The stars
Emerged delicately,
As the eyes of fawns
Shining through the green gloom
Of the forest . . .
A cool green freshness
Came into the air.
The stars
Were as wind-whirled fruit
Blown upward from the tree-tops.
The moon,
Full-orbed and with a pulse of flame,
Led a tide of soft light
Across the brown shores of the world . . .
A doe,
Heavy with fawn,
Lay down among the dewy fern,
And was at peace.
Here, with a stronger rhythm, is Maurice Hew-
lett:
As he had seen her,
So he painted . . .
A grey, translucent sea
Laps silently
Upon a little creek
And, in the hush of a still dawn,
The myrtles and sedges on the water's brim
Are quiet . . .
THE INCURSIONS OF PROSE 275
She would vanish, we know,
Into the daffodils
Or a bank of violets.
And you might tell her presence there,
Or in the rustle of the myrtles,
Or coo of doves
Mating in the pines;
You might feel her genius
In the scent of the earth
Or the kiss of the West wind;
But you could only see her
In mid-April,
And you should look for her
Over the Sea.
What is it really that we have been reading?
If I had not given due notice, I think you would
promptly say, Free verse. There has been no
juggling of the cards. We have merely been pay-
ing strict attention to the “‘organic rhythm,”
or the rhythm of the speaking voice,” and allow-
ing the phrases (still to quote a well-known de-
scription of free verse) “to flow as they will when
read aloud by an intelligent reader.” Let me
complete the quotation: “Then new rhythms
will become evident—satisfying, and delightful.
For this poetry definitely harks back to the old
oral tradition; it is written to be spoken. For we
believe that poetry is a spoken, not a written
art.” That is sound doctrine. But do not these
satisfying and delightful rhythms (as they are)
276 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
appear in what we have just read? And that
still, rightly or wrongly, goes by the name of
prose.
I am not, let me say most emphatically, bring-
ing an indictment against vers libre, or seeking to
filch from it its name. I am trying, as a Somewhat
mystified admirer, to detect its specific differ-
ences. Metre is gone. Its cadences are either the
cadences of rhythmic prose, or they are not. If
they are not, some difference should be obvious
to the ear. What we have so far read does not
form a fair test, because for it the only standard of
comparison is our vague recollection of the gen-
eral effect of free verse rhythms. Let us put free
verse and modern rhythmic prose in immediate
juxtaposition. The ear is the sole judge. Beyond
the law of the strophic rhythm, we are told, free
verse has no absolute rules, since it would not be
“free” if it did. We are therefore compelled to
become empiricists.
Three years ago, I printed in the Nation a
brief article called “An Unacknowledged Imag-
ist.” In it I quoted a remark of Mr. Witter Byn-
ner's: “George Meredith has thousands of Imag-
ist poems incidental to each of his novels.”
Having observed this myself, not perhaps by
thousands, but at least by scores, it occurred to
THE INCURSIONS OF PROSE 277
me to put the statement to a test. Their lucid
clarity (if I may repeat a few sentences of what
I then said), their texture “dur et rare,” their
marvellous fidelity to the particular fact, above
all, their depth of imaginative insight — all this
was obvious enough. There were images that
suggested the clairvoyance of a crystal gazer;
images with the luminous precision of a bit of
landscape seen in the reflex of a lens; images that
“quintessentialized an emotion until it burnt
white hot,” images crisp, incised, penetrating,
“strait and terse.” But did they fulfil the other
requirements of Imagist verse? Did they have
“the quality of return . . . the balance which
produces the effect of music upon the ear”? In
other words did they have the strophic character
which constitutes the law of cadence of free
verse?
Let us set side by side, then, a few passages of
Meredith’s prose and a few bits of Imagist verse,
and compare the cadences. In none of the Mere-
dithean excerpts have I varied from the original
by a syllable, and I have chosen the vers libre for
its beauty. I have no desire to make a case by
setting good prose Over against bad verse.
Her face was like the after-sunset
Across a rose-garden,
278 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
With the wings of an eagle
Poised outspread on the light.
The light of her face falls from its flower,
as a hyacinth,
hidden in a far valley,
perishes upon burnt grass.
The two fragments are alike beautiful; they are
alike strophic. But the first is from Meredith’s
“Sandra Belloni,” the second from a poem in
vers libre by H. D. Let us dwell for a moment on
two more faces:
He had a look
Superior to simple strength and grace:
The look
Of a great sky-bird
About to mount.
In your eyes
Smoulder the fallen roses of out-lived minutes,
And the perfume of your soul
Is vague and suffusing,
With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.
Both things of beauty in image and rhythm.
George Meredith’s is written as prose; Miss
Lowell’s as verse.
She had the secret
Of lake waters under rock,
Unfathomable
In limpidness.
THE INCURSIONS OF PROSE 279
She has new leaves
After her dead flowers,
Like the little almond tree
Which the frost hurt.
The first, precisely as it stands, is from Mere-
dith’s prose; the second is a complete poem in
vers libre by Pichard Aldington; and the strophic
rhythm in each is obvious to any ear. Listen once
more to the “return . . . the balance which pro-
duces the effect of music on the ear”:
He was like a Tartar
Modelled by a Greek:
Supple
As the Scythian’s bow,
Braced
As the string!
That is Meredith. And here is H. D. again:
Sand cuts your petal,
furrows it with hard edge,
like flint
on a bright stone.
Now my ear, like the Sphinx's, may be heavy;
such as it is, however, it can detect no essential
difference between the unrhymed cadences of
free verse and the unrhymed cadences of certain
modern rhythmic prose. I emphasize “modern,”
because the rhythms of vers libre have little in
common with the movement of the older prose.
280 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
Nor have they, indeed, any close affiliation with
Whitman’s verse. His elemental measures —
“brawny enough, and limber and full enough,”
as he himself described them — breathe deep,
whereas vers libre respires more lightly. The
giant’s swinging stride has passed, save for a
lumbering Titan here and there; and like Agag,
modern free verse walks delicately. It is rather
the exquisite craftsmanship of France than the
surging and orotund utterances of “Leaves of
Grass” that has given to free verse, alike in
England and America, its most distinctive quali-
ties.
The rhythms of vers libre in English, then, un-
less I am mistaken, are in large degree the
rhythms of a certain type of modern rhythmic
prose. But that is not an assertion that free verse
is prose. There are differences which set the one
off from the other. The prose from which I have
culled my excerpts does not maintain unbrokenly
the rhythms which I have shown it to possess.
If it did, we should certainly hesitate to call it
prose. The best free verse poems, on the other
hand, do maintain these rhythms consistently.
And that is an important difference: the rhythms
which are occasional in one are persistent in the
other. Moreover, in prose like Meredith’s and
THE INCURSIONS OF PROSE 281
Conrad's and Pater’s and Hewlett’s, the strophic
element, the quality of return, although it is fre-
quently present (as in most of the passages which
I have quoted) is also not uniform. If it recurred
with any regularity, the prose would at once be-
come bad prose. On the other hand, it is the re-
currence of “return” that makes verse verse at
all. And my reason for declining, in spite of the
evidence which I have pointed out, to ticket free
verse as prose, is the fact that it deals with prose
rhythms in a fashion which prose itself may not
employ without thereby ceasing to be prose.
That is as far as I can, at the moment, see my
way. Vers libre is exploring the borderland be-
tween prose and verse. It is doing certain things
which hitherto verse has done, and prose has not.
It is doing certain other things which hitherto
prose has done, and verse has not. It has simply
staked out its claim in No Man’s Land, and that
is not a region mild, of calm and serene air. On
the contrary, it is open to fire from two sides at
once. And both sides are practicing their marks-
manship. If free verse holds its ground (and from
what I know of the versifiers I have a strong
suspicion that it will), there will be at least an
armistice by and by to consider terms.
As I see it, then — to anticipate that happy
282 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
hour — we are shut up to two alternatives.
Either we must declare that free verse is n’t
verse, or our definition of verse must undergo
revision. The first is the simple and summary
way. The Queen in “Alice in Wonderland” is
a singularly appealing character, and “off with
his head” is a happy issue out of all our critical
afflictions. But it is the primrose path. And I fear
we must turn our eyes regretfully from this ex-
peditious mode of settling criticism’s business,
and choose the more thorny way. But it is also
too soon to reconstruct our definitions. Free
verse is not yet out of the experimental stage,
and the artists who practice it have still the
artisans in their own craft to reckon with. For
Browning’s wish has at last come true:
I want to know a butcher paints,
A baker rhymes for his pursuit,
Candlestick-maker much acquaints
His soul with song.
The poetic world is already too safe for democ-
racy. And the daily prayer of free verse should
be for deliverance from the tender mercies of
misguided friends. But when the air is clear,
and the fittest have survived, criticism can then
no longer evade the issue. Definitions follow
facts. If new facts are unmistakably established,
THE INCURSIONS OF PROSE 283
definitions must either be modified to fit them,
or break down. There is no third alternative.
The present movement wants its status deter-
mined in a moment. No one alive can possibly do
that. If it has a fair field, it need ask no favor.
It can make its contribution, and trust to time
to assess its work and define its category. Mean-
while, let us meet a serious and sincere experi-
ment in the technique of poetry with an open
mind, and, without for a moment withholding
criticism, let us at least criticise with understand-
ing. Even the best of the group we are dealing
with, run into absurdities; I am aware of few
poets, even among the greatest, who have not.
But no criticism which dwells on the extrava-
gancies without at the same time recognizing
the constructive attempt that lies behind them,
is criticism worthy of the name.
Free verse, then, is an artistic medium of not
yet fully developed possibilities. Its freedom is a
liberty conditioned upon a subtle restriction of
rhythms which it shares with prose, but which it
wields in different fashion. It is gradually being
perfected as an instrument of delicate precision
and rare flexibility for recording the impressions
of observed phenomena. Its danger lies in its
very freedom, which, in the absence of a norm
284 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
outside itself, permits form to become at times
elusive. And being itself the child of a reaction,
it foregoes, as a matter of conscience, certain
possibilities, the abstention from which impov-
erishes it in one direction, while it is itself enrich-
ing poetry in another. In a word, just because
the movement is a revolt, it is still too largely
conditioned by its repugnances. That, as al-
ways is a passing phase. It is more important
to remember that the insurgents are also pi-
OIlêeTS.
If free verse puts us to our shifts to place it, the
so-called polyphonic prose comes near baffling
the attempt. But where the poet dares to go, the
critic must perforce gird up his loins and follow,
envying, though he may not emulate the vigor
and agility of his guides. One feels occasionally,
however, like the worthy Bottom trying to keep
up with Puck.
Polyphonic prose concerns us briefly here, be-
cause it is an endeavor, even more radical than
vers libre, to combine the functions of both prose
and verse. It was invented in France by M. Paul
Fort; Miss Lowell was the first to attempt it in
English; and she and Mr. John Gould Fletcher
are its chief exponents in its adopted tongue.
And since the new form is still in the plastic
THE INCURSIONS OF PROSE 285
! stage, I shall venture to point out quite frankly,
but in no spirit of captious protest, wherein it
seems to me to limit and even thwart its own
possibilities. I realize my danger. A critic, who is
at the same time friendly to the new and not
blind to the defects of its virtues, is always in a
parlous state. He can only ask that his intentions
be taken as honorable, and pursue his way be-
tween the devil and the deep sea, where balance
perilously resides, with such cheerfulness and
resolution as he can muster.
What is polyphonic prose? It was heralded by
Mr. Fletcher a couple of years ago as follows:
“During the past year something has happened
in the sphere of the arts quite as important in
my opinion, as the European war in the sphere of
politics . . . or the discovery of radium in that of
science. A new poetic form, equal if not superior
in value to vers libre, has made its appearance in
English.” That roars pretty loud, and thunders
in the index, and I am deliberately quoting it,
because it illustrates the sort of extreme that
begets in retort the opposite extreme, and ren-
ders judicial criticism difficult. Mr. Fletcher de-
fines polyphonic prose as a “way of fusing to-
gether unrhymed vers libre and rhymed metrical
patterns, giving the rich decorative quality of
286 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
the one and the powerful conciseness of state-
ment of the other.” “Intense and concise grasp
of substance,” he points out, “is not enough; the
ear instinctively demands that this bare skeleton
be clothed fittingly with all the beautiful and
subtle orchestral qualities of assonance, allitera-
tion, rhyme, and return.” Free verse, that is,
lacks something which regular verse has, notably
“rhymed metrical patterns” and “orchestral
qualities.” I have said something to the same
effect myself, you may remember, but I do not
care to press the point. The new medium, then,
is to combine in prose the merits of both sorts of
verse. “Here,” exclaims Mr. Fletcher, “are the
Beethoven symphonies, the Bach fugues, the
César Franck chorales, of poetry.”
Miss Lowell’s statement shuns flamboyancy,
and is plain and definite.” “The word ‘poly-
1 For a still fuller discussion, printed since this paragraph
was written, see the Preface to “Can Grande's Castle.” And the
achievement in “Can Grande's Castle” itself challenges, through its
vividness and contagious zest in life and color, an unreluctant ad-
miration. But the vividness and the zest are native to Miss Low-
ell, whatever the vehicle of their expression, and certain obstimate
questionings of the medium, in two at least of its details, remain
as intractable as Banquo's ghost. It is not, unless I am very much
mistaken, the elements of rhyme and metre in “Can Grande's
Castle” which give to it its rare union of vigor and deftness, pre-
cision and flexibility, imaginative grasp and clarity of detail. Its
jormal achievement lies rather, as I see it, in a remarkable exten-
sion of the potentialities latent in the movement of free verse. And
THE INCURSIONS OF PROSE 287
phonic’ is [the] keynote of the genre.” “‘Poly-
phonic’ means — many-voiced — and the form
is so called because it makes use of all the “voices’
of poetry, viz., metre, vers libre, assonance, allit-
eration, rhyme, and return. It employs every
form of rhythm, even prose rhythm at times,
but usually holds no particular one for long. . . .
The rhymes may come at the ends of the ca-
dences, or may appear in close juxtaposition to
each other, or may be only distantly related.”
So Miss Lowell, as over against Mr. Fletcher.
The essential point, however, is the same. Poly-
phonic prose avails itself of the two qualities of
regular verse which free verse rejects, namely
metre and rhyme. It is an attempt at a single
medium which shall gather into itself all the po-
tentialities of prose, metre, unrhymed cadence,
and rhyme. The enterprise is rather splendid in
its audacity, and commands one’s admiration,
even when one doubts its entire feasibility. And
despite ungrudging recognition of accomplish-
ment, a lurking doubt persists.
For in my sober judgment such an attempt
goes far towards marring one great medium of
these potentialities it might retain to the full (to venture once
more my own opinion) without the adventitious aid of the two
conventions which free verse rejects. In what follows, the grounds
of this belief are given more at length.
288 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
expression in the effort to make it perform the
functions of another. I am not forgetting that
we have been warned against misunderstanding.
“‘Polyphonic prose’ is not a prose form, although,
being printed as prose, many people have found
it difficult to understand this.” But even an intel-
ligent reader may be pardoned if he fails to un-
derstand that what is called prose and printed
as prose is yet not prose. It is a little as if, your
name being Schwarzkopf, and your physiog-
nomy Teutonic, you should expect me to under-
stand that you were Irish. I am not flippant, but
genuinely anxious to make clear what seems to
me to be the crucial point involved.
That point is this. The legitimate expectation
with which we approach a given artistic medium
is something that the artist is compelled to
reckon with. We expect on the stage the make-up
and the costumes which would disconcert us, if
we met them on the street. Per contra, we should
be thrown out of our reckoning, and disturbed
in our enjoyment, if we saw on the stage faces
without the heightening of make-up, and in un-
assisted light. Now in the same way we approach
prose and verse respectively with perfectly defi-
nite and entirely different expectations. We
rightly expect, when we approach verse, a
THE INCURSIONS OF PROSE 289
heightening, both in form and in content; we
look as a matter of course for rhyme, and asso-
nance, and alliteration, and for cunningly fash-
ioned rhythms and cadences, as we look on the
stage for a corresponding heightening of effect.
When we approach prose, on the other hand, we
expect these things sparingly or not at all, pre-
cisely as we expect to find make-up on the faces
of our friends either discreetly inconspicuous
or absent altogether. And the artist in words,
whether he will or no, faces as part of his prob-
lem the legitimate expectation with which his
readers approach his medium.
Now I agree at once that polyphonic prose is
not genuine prose. But it is called prose, and so
printed. And it carries with it the good-will, so to
speak, of prose. One cannot keep the form with-
out assuming the responsibility of the form. And
a prologue which says: “If you think I come here
as a lion, it were pity of my life; no, I am no such
thing,” — such an assurance, except in a “Mid-
summer Night’s Dream,” does not quite meet
the case. For when we find in that which bears
the name and assumes the appearance of prose,
the very things, rhyme and metre, which the
masters of prose Sweat to keep out of it, we are
either confused or irritated, and sometimes both.
290 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
If it is felt that rhyme and metre must be kept,
as essential and distinguishing elements of the
medium, it is not, I think, straining a point to
suggest that both the name and the printing of
the new form be changed. The signals are set
wrong, and the more intelligent the reader, the
more violently he goes off the track. .
But why, in sober sadness, should rhyme and
metre be retained? All which has been urged
against them by the adherents of free verse, ap-
plies with double force when they appear in a
medium which carries with it the associations of
prose. If rhyme and metre have no place in
verse, they have, bull or no bull, less place there.
And one is at once constrained to ask in addition:
If they are effective in polyphonic prose, why do
they cease to be effective when they appear in
verse?
I know that polyphonic prose, if I may quote
again, “usually holds no particular (rhythm] for
long,” and that it is printed as prose “for con-
venience, as it changes its character so often,
with every wave of emotion, in fact.” But it is
precisely that constant shift of gear, so to speak,
which disturbs us, and leaves us restless, rather
than poised for flight. Either metre alone or free
verse or prose alone is surely capable of keeping
THE INCURSIONS OF PROSE 291
pace with the varying shades of emotion. One
does nºt, I think, feel at one instant metrically,
and unmetrically the next.
I am aware that all this sounds exceedingly
destructive. It is, however, neither destructive
nor hostile. If my criticism has any value at all,
that value is constructive. The medium has
shown itself capable, at its best, of splendid
vigor and vivid pictorial power, of richness of
color and sharpness of contrasts. It is a pity that
it should labor under a self-imposed handicap.
If rhyme and metre are abandoned, except in
intercalated passages, I suspect that the half
which is left will be more than the whole. In the
Preface to “Sword Blades and Poppy Seed” the
author remarked of the form we are discussing:
“Perhaps it is more suited to the French lan-
guage than to English.” The genius of the lan-
guage is clearly one of the factors in the problem.
And there are obstacles in the way of such a
medium in English — among them what Keats
once called its “pouncing rhymes” — which do
not apply in French.
“Do not blame me,” wrote Gray to Mason,
apropos of his insistence that “deigns” in a
poem of Mason’s should be “deign'st” (even
though the change did wreck a rhyme!) — “do
292 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
not blame me, but the English tongue.” And
with fervent fellow-feeling I echo Gray.
May I add, as a matter of more than mere
historical interest, that a very similar experiment
was in full swing in Shakespeare’s day? Lyly and
the Euphuists were experimenting in artificial
prose much as the polyphonists are to-day. And
they too indulged in rhyme, and assonance, and
balanced alliteration, and even metre: “The
foule toad hath a faire stone in his head, the fine
gold is found in the filthy earth”; “I will to
Athens, there to tosse my bookes, no more in
Naples to live with faire lookes”; “Then
wounded with griefe, hee Sounded with weak-
nesse”; “My tongue is too too base a Tryton to
eternize her praise, that thus upholdeth our
happy daies.” Time fails for more than these
shreds and patches. Euphuism ran its course and
died, not without its contribution to the flexibil-
ity of the English tongue. The present experi-
ment, which (despite its differences) is singularly
like the old in many ways, may find perhaps in
its extremes, if not a caveat, at least a caution.
Finally, so far as this phase of the subject is
concerned, the attempt to efface the boundaries
between prose and verse is symptomatic. It is
only one aspect of the prevailing tendency to
THE INCURSIONS OF PROSE 293
obliterate the dividing lines between all the arts.
Music is trying to do the work of poetry and
painting. Painting is striving to approximate on
the one hand the rigidity of architecture, on the
other the fluidity of music; poetry is experiment-
ing with the technique of both, and it has cast
besides an appropriating eye on the hardness
and clarity of sculpture; while sculpture is mean-
while undergoing its own private metamorphosis.
Kandinsky, says his English interpreter — and
the same is asserted of Picasso and others by
their followers – “Kandinsky is painting music;
that is to say, he has broken down the barrier
between music and painting.” And Kandinsky’s
fundamental thesis is the encroachment of the
arts upon one another. For him, “in music a
light blue is like a flute, a darker blue a 'cello; a
still darker a thunderous double bass; and the
darkest blue of all an Organ.” One has only to
think of Strauss, Debussy, Schönberg, and Stra-
vinsky to recognize the converse tendency: the
One group paints music, the other orchestrates
painting. The phenomenon is nothing new. The
reciprocal strivings of the arts to merge into each
other is as old as art itself. Out of it will come, as
there always has come in the past, a certain wid-
ening of the scope of each of the arts involved.
294 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
But with whatever augmented flexibility and
enhanced expressiveness, it is more than proba-
ble that prose will remain prose, verse verse,
music music, and color color, and that each will
revert, with whatever gains, to its own tech-
nique. So far as poetry is concerned (unless the
past can teach us nothing), it will lose little of
value, and it may in the end gain more, from the
present attempt to enlarge its possibilities.
Up to this point we have been dealing with the
dubious borderland between prose and verse, and
with recent adventures between the lines. The
really serious incursions of prose upon poetry
(not merely this time upon verse) have been,
however, of a very different nature. So soon as
we stop to think, it is clear that prose has pre-
empted a lion’s share of the territory once held,
either in Sovereignty or on equal terms, by po-
etry. The drama, save for a few gallant leaders of
forlorn hopes, has surrendered unconditionally to
prose. The epic (and largely the drama itself) has
yielded place to the novel, and the briefer nar-
rative in verse has retired before the ubiquitous
short story. The conquered regions are firmly
held and well administered, and it is useless to
reargue a seemingly adjudicated case. I am not
sure that poetry, without dispossessing prose,
THE INCURSIONS OF PROSE 295
may not once more win a footing on equal terms
in at least a portion of the abandoned field. The
fact remains, however, that lyric and descriptive
poetry are now all that hold their place unchal-
lenged.
But even here there are signs of a confusion of
aims which may work disaster. And this time the
threatened encroachment of prose is along the
road of content and not of form. With the range
of poetry limited as it now is, how far afield may
the poet go in his search for themes? Are there,
in other words, subjects which are not adapted
to poetry, but which rightly belong to prose?
Are there limitations upon the poet’s freedom of
choice which are imposed, not by tradition, but
by the very nature of his medium? That is a
question of some importance, and the issue is
far from being academic at the present moment.
The third article of the Imagists’ Declaration
of Principles is as follows: “To allow absolute
freedom in the choice of subject.” What that
really means, I shall come to in a moment. What
it means to the extremists is clear from one sen-
tence in the summary of the aims of the French
Paroxysmists: “It [that is, the movement known
as “Paroxysm”] perceives the elements of po-
etry contained in modern cities, locomotives,
296 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
aeroplanes, dreadnaughts, and Submarines; in a
stock exchange, a Wall Street, or a wheat pit;
and in every scientific marvel, and in the sono-
rous song of factories and railways.” It is with
such pronunciamentos as that in mind, I suspect,
that the moderate Imagist declaration proceeds
to qualify its doctrine of absolute freedom. “It
is not good art,” it continues, “to write badly
about aeroplanes and automobiles; nor is it nec-
essarily bad art to write well about the past. We
believe passionately in the artistic value of mod-
ern life, but we wish to point out that there is
nothing so uninspiring nor so old-fashioned as an
aeroplane of the year 1911.” And even the leader
of the English Vorticists remarks: “There is no
necessity to burn candles in front of your tele-
phone apparatus or motor car.” The issue, then,
is sharply joined between the two wings of the
Modernists themselves. And the question is one
of capital importance.
Let us strike at once to the heart of the matter.
What Thales and the Seven Sages thought and
wrote is matter of historical interest merely.
Sappho is contemporary with Rupert Brooke.
William Mason’s “Ode to Mr. Pinchbeck on his
newly invented patent Candle Snuffers,” pub-
lished in the notable year of the Declaration of
| THE INCURSIONS OF PROSE 297
Independence, is now introduced to you, I sus-
pect, for the first time. It has followed its patent
candle Snuffers to oblivion. The contemporary
“Elegy in a Country Churchyard” you know by
heart; its theme is death, and death knows no
oblivion. The themes of poetry are the enduring
beliefs, and feelings, and passions of humanity,
and everything whatsoever that is bound up
with those. But life is endlessly taking on and
sloughing off new shells, and collecting about it,
only to discard them, its external, extrinsic para-
phernalia and apparatus — its motor cars, and
telephones, and submarines, and aeroplanes, and
all the rest. Poetry has perfect freedom to con-
cern itself with either. It may deal with what
persists, and be understood, if it is good enough
to last, a thousand years from now. It may lavish
its art (as Tennyson did in a stanza which he
did n’t wait for time to kill) on the wonders of
gas, and be rendered obsolete by electricity. It
is perilous for poetry to be up to date.
Let us not, however, mistake the reasons. It is
not tradition and convention that this time hold
the flaming sword. It is an inhibition rather than
a prohibition that interposes, and its roots are in
part in the nature of poetry, and in part in the
transiency of things. Until objects have become
298 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
part and parcel of the loves, and hates, and
hopes, and fears of men, they are not plastic
stuff for art to work with. As objects, they are
outside the domain of art. “It is poetry’s job to
catch up,” says Mr. Ezra Pound, who was once
a poet. Perhaps; but when poetry has caught up
with a 1916 model, what doth it profit it in 1917?
Things as things belong to prose. Even the purely
intellectual is interwoven with poetry at the
poet’s risk. The sections of “In Memoriam” that
deal with evolution were antiquated while Ten-
nyson was yet alive; and the contemporary sci-
ence in Dante, and Chaucer, and Ben Jonson, and
Milton is a stone of stumbling and a rock of of
fence, except to those of us whom its elucidation
helps to live. So long as a scientific textbook is
obsolete in a decade or less, to poetize science is
to court mortality. Wordsworth was absolutely
right:
The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Bota-
nist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the
poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed, if the
time should ever come when these things shall be . . .
manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and
suffering beings. . '•
“Material to us as enjoying and suffering be-
ings” — that is the clue through the labyrinth.
THE INCURSIONS OF PROSE 299
In that lies the reason why objects of imme-
morial use and wont have an initial advantage,
as themes for poetic treatment, over the new and
amazing machinery of modern life. That is why
an open road lends itself more readily to the
poet’s purpose than a railway, a lamp than an
electrolier, an open fire than a radiator, a well
than a waterworks, a scythe than a McCormick
reaper. What I have said of words is true of
things. There are objects that are not in them-
selves more poetical than others, which yet,
through their associations, stir feeling more
directly. And these are perennial in their
appeal. -
But once more it is with things as it is with
words. If the creative energy is strong enough,
the most intractable words may be merged, as
we have seen, in the very stuff of poetry. And if
imagination, instead of being caught in wheels
and pistons, penetrates to whatever of human —
glory of motion, daring of flight, beauty and
terror and power — is bound up with invention
and the processes of modern life, then aeroplanes,
and railways, and wireless telegraphy, and all the
rest become fit matter for its exercise. And the
poet is by ancient right the interpreter of their
significance. But he dare not concern himself
300 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
with how the wheels go round. That is the privi-
lege of prose. Eighteenth-century poetry usurped
the prerogatives of prose at just this point, and
its débâcle offers food for thought, as poetry
stands again at the dividing of the ways. I wish
I might fill the next few pages with copious
extracts from Ring’s “Art of Cookery,” and
Garth’s “Dispensary,” and Grainger’s “Sugar-
Cane,” and Dyer’s “Fleece,” and Thomson’s
“Sickness,” and Green’s “The Spleen,” and
Dodsley’s “Agriculture,” and Armstrong’s “Art
of Preserving Health,” and Glover’s “London,
or the Progress of Commerce,” and a few other
like attempts to wring poetry out of the stuff
of prose. Here, instead, is a part of the Argument
to the third book of “The Sugar-Cane”:
“Hymn to the month of January, when crop begins.
Address. Planters have employment all the year round.
Planters should be pious. . . . Crop begun. Cane-cutting
described. Effects of music. Great care requisite in
feeding the mill. Humanity towards the maimed recom-
mended. . . . How to preserve the laths and mill-points
from sudden squalls. Address to the Sun, and praise of
Antigua. A cattle-mill described. Care of mules. Dis-
eases to which they are subject. . . . The necessity of a
strong clear fire, in boiling. Planters should always have
a spare set of vessels, because the iron furnaces are apt
to crack, and copper vessels to melt. The danger of
throwing cold water into a thorough-heated furnace.
Cleanliness and skimming well recommended.”
THE INCURSIONS OF PROSE 301
Peminding you that this is part of the prospectus
of a poem, I shall come to the description of the
mill. And this is not the prospectus, but the poem
itself. Remember, please, that Grainger's theme
is to his day what the aeroplane, and the locomo-
tive, and the automobile are to ours.
By transverse beams
Secure the whole; and in the pillar'd frame,
Sink, artist, the vast bridge-tree’s mortise’d form
Of pond’rous hiccory; hiccory time defies:
To this be nail'd three polish’d iron plates;
Whereon, three steel capouces, turn with ease,
Of three long rollers, twice-nine inches round,
With iron cas'd, and jagg’d with many a cogg.
The central cylinder exceeds the rest
In portly size, thence aptly captain nam’d.
To this be rivetted th’ extended sweeps;
And harness to each sweep two seasoned mules:
They pacing round, give motion to the whole.
The close-brac’d cylinders with ease revolve
On their greas'd axle; and with ease reduce
To trash the canes thy Negroes throw between.
Fast flows the liquor through the lead-lin’d spouts;
And depurated by opposing wires,
In the receiver floats a limpid stream.
That is what happens when poetry usurps the
place of prose, and meddles with machinery.
One is impelled to urge upon the Muse the
heartfelt caution which Grainger offers to his
planter:
302 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
O beware!
Nor trust, between the steel-cas’d cylinders,
The hand incautious: off the member Snapt
Thou’lt ever rue; sad spectacle of woe!
Let me set over against that a poem which is
not great, but which offers an illuminating con-
trast — Charles Tennyson-Turner’s Sonnet on
the “Steam Threshing-Machine with the Straw-
Carrier”:
Flush with the pond the lurid furnace burn’d
At eve, while smoke and vapour fill'd the yard;
The gloomy winter sky was dimly starr’d,
The fly-wheel with a mellow murmur turn’d;
While, ever rising on its mystic stair
In the dim light, from secret chambers borne,
The straw of harvest, sever'd from the corn,
Climb'd, and fell over, in the murky air.
I thought of mind and matter, will and law,
And then of him, who set his stately seal
Of Poman words on all the forms he saw
Of old-world husbandry: I could but feel
With what a rich precision he would draw
The endless ladder, and the booming wheel!
I have quoted that partly for its own sake — for
its fusion of pictorial power and imaginative sug-
gestion; partly for the sake of its reference to the
“Georgics.” For in the “Georgics,” Virgil has
dealt with implements and utensils in the one
THE INCURSIONS OF PROSE 303
and only way open to poetry in making its own
the machinery that has taken their place. He has
given the essence and not the accident; he has
never lost sight of pictorial beauty, nor relaxed
precision where precision was required; and he
has imbued every object that he touches, with the
light and warmth and color absorbed from its
contact with life. And modern poetry may still
gain hints for its craft in the exactness of impres-
sion and the imaginative vision of the “Georgics.”
There is still another caution which it is well
to keep in mind. It is in its dealings with the
sharply impinging actualities of contemporary
life that poetry is apt to forget that art is fun-
damentally illusion. “It is too true,” wrote Flau-
bert of his “Education Sentimentale,” “and
speaking asthetically it lacks the falsehood of
perspective.” Walt Whitman, for example, was
constantly “too true,” and some of his succes-
sors follow in his steps. “Strange and hard that
paradox true I give,” he writes, in “A Song for
Occupations”; “objects gross and the unseen
soul are one.” That is a good beginning, but here
is how he proceeds:
House-building, measuring, sawing the boards,
BlackSmithing, glass-blowing, nail-making, coopering,
tin-roofing, Shingle-dressing,
304 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
Ship-joining, dock-building, fish-curing, flagging of side-
walks by flaggers,
The pump, the pile-driver, the great derrick, the coal-
kiln and brick-kiln —
and on through more than a full page of cata-
logue, including:
Beef on the butcher’s stall, the slaughter-house of the
butcher, the butcher in his killing clothes,
The pens of live pork, the killing-hammer, the hog-
hook, the scalder’s tub, gutting, the cutter’s
cleaver, the packer’s maul, and the plenteous
winterwork of pork-packing.
And then he concludes:
These shows all near you by day and night — work-
men! whoever you are, your daily life! . . .
In them realities for you and me, in them poems for
you and me . . .
In them the development good — in them all themes,
hints, possibilities.
Nothing could be more profoundly true than
that. In things are poems and possibilities, but
the things themselves are neither. I believe that
poetry has a great and supremely difficult adven-
ture before it, in the interpretation of the life
immediately about it, with the complex and tyr-
annous machinery in which it is involved. The
poets recognize to the full the greatness of the
task; its almost insurmountable difficulties they
THE INCURSIONS OF PROSE 305
are taking lightly. There are essays in the right
direction. Poetry wants even Chicago, and Carl
Sandburg, in a poem that is like the blow of a
fist in the face, gives it to us. I do not like poems
that black your eye, any more than Professor
Firkins likes poems that put up their mouth to
be kissed. But Chicago is not an unobtrusive
town, and Mr. Sandburg has at least tried to
grasp it, and hurl a complete impression at us.
And that is something.
In a word, the passionate belief of modern
poetry in the artistic value of modern life is not
misplaced. But it must catch the permanent
behind the modern, for while the poet writes, the
modern is slipping into obsolescence, and hard-
ening into the rigid Past.
The defection to prose of the larger forms of
poetry has had another result. The short has
tended to become the fragmentary. That, of
course, does not inevitably follow. And we may
consider for a moment the general shift of taste
from long to short.
The Middle Ages liked things long. “I thank
you,” writes the lover to his lady in Machaut’s
“Voir-dit,” “that the length of what I write
does n’t bore you, for certainly when I begin, I
don’t know how to end.” And Peronne was a
306 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
true child of her time, as well as a courteous lady,
when she replied in her next letter: “By my
faith, if what you wrote stretched out as long as
the “Romance of the Pose’ or the ‘Lancelot,’
it would not bore me in the least.” Now the “PO-
mance of the Pose” reached 22,814 lines, and
there is one version of the “Lancelot” of which
the fragment that survives extends beyond its
forty-seven thousandth line! Nor must we forget
the account which Froissart gives in “Le Dit dou
Florin” of how in the winter of 1388, night after
night, in rain or wind, he went from his inn to
the castle of Gaston Phébus, Count of Foix, and
there in the brightly lighted room where supper
was spread, read aloud, night after night, for ten
mortal weeks, six before Christmas and four
after, his own interminable romance, the “Méli-
ador.” And Gaston Phébus — witness his treat-
ment of his little son — was not a naturally
patient person. One recalls, moreover, that Des-
champs had begun on the thirteenth thousand
of his lines on marriage when death stayed his
hand.
Of course our less remote ancestors are a close
second in endurance. The ten volumes of Mlle.
de Scudéry’s “Le Grand Cyrus” ran to 6679
pages, and the rest of the heroic romances kept
THE INCURSIONS OF PROSE 307
the same leisurely pace — a pace successfully
emulated by “Clarissa Harlowe” and “Sir
Charles Grandison.” Tennyson, who liked what
he called “those great still books,” used to say,
“I wish there were a great novel in hundreds of
volumes, that I might go on and on”; but he
would have found few, I fear, to concur in his
longing. The ten-volume novel shrank to three;
the three to one; even on that the short story is
rapidly encroaching; and the ten-word headline
bids fair to become the type of modern narrative.
The old-fashioned, far-flung epic simile has given
place to the concision and compactness of the
metaphor. And poetry itself, in an age of effi-
ciency, must go through no unnecessary motions.
The tired business man — Mr. Wells’s “weary
Titan” — wants his poems snapped at him,
rapped at him, barked at him, like the pregnant
utterances of the heroes of the detective stories.
Now in the hands of an artist, a poem of a
dozen or sixteen lines may have as flawless unity
as an epic, and the emphasis upon compression,
and concentration, and “quintessentializing,” to-
gether with the weight attached to the strophic
element in verse, makes indubitably for unity of
form. But the poets, now as always, are hope-
lessly outnumbered by the poetasters. And since
308 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
it is as easy to write verse (especially free verse)
badly, as it is difficult to write it well, the total
impression of recent poetry is apt to be that of a
thing of shreds and patches.
For the great danger ahead of poetry, when it
is primarily interested in the recording of sensu-
ous impressions, is that it cease to think. I trust
I have made it clear that I should regard po-
etry which embodied thought alone, as prose in
the disguise of verse. But however feeling may
render plastic the stuff of poetry, the poem, if it
be worthy of the name, is forged in the brain.
What I feel about the ruck of recent verse, es-
pecially as it ebbs and flows by the moon through
the monthly periodicals, is that its writers have
thought nothing through, and least of all a poem.
I could read you by the score, from the mass
of recent verse, impressions, often beautifully
phrased, which as poems have neither begin-
ning nor middle nor end. If one could but feel
that they were preliminary studies, like Rem-
brandt’s or Leonardo’s sketches, one might
gladly rest content. But they are not. They are
fondly regarded as finished works themselves.
And so we get the disjecti membra poeta — as if
the poet had been hit and scattered into crystal
fragments by a bomb, or had been, at best, cut
THE INCURSIONS OF PROSE 309
up, like Pomeo, into little stars. Except in some
of the more serious craftsmen, the architectonic
power has suffered atrophy. In the great poets,
impressions are richly present, but they are in-
tegral components of a whole, fused from innum-
erable parts by the steady, unintermitted energy
of the creative imagination. It is that sustained,
fusing energy of which, I think, we feel the lack
to-day — and not in poetry only. It is not mere
accident that much modern verse is cinemato-
graphic. The trend of all but the best current
poetry is away from the consecutive and towards
the discrete. I have read volumes of recent verse
in which little fragment after little fragment is
dropped into the receptive mind, as the succes-
sive globules, when a faucet is turned off, fall
with distinct yet gentle impact upon the water
in a bowl. And one cries to Heaven, after an hour
of it, for the sweep of the winds, and the heaving
of the tides, and even shattering cataracts of rain.
One wearies quickly of what somebody has called
“thumb-nail sketches of the star in the puddle.”
I wish again to say distinctly that this indict-
ment does not lie against all recent poetry. But
it does grow in large measure, I believe, out of
the quest for externality and immediacy of im-
pression. The stronger spirits are able to impose
310 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
their will upon the phantasmagoria of images
which they evoke. The others shed impressions
as a cat sheds hairs.
Is poetry, then, going to the wall? Far from it,
I should say. Since we happen at the present
moment to be alive, however, we get the bad
contemporary verse together with the good. And
since quantitatively the bad is in excess, the ef-
fect is rather overwhelming. What we overlook
is the fact that every previous generation has
gone through the same experience. The only dif-
ference is that their bad verse is safely dead and
decently interred. Ours is n’t — yet! By and by
it will be, and the happy lecturer a hundred
years from now will find the house swept and
garnished, and will have the simple task of dis-
coursing on the early-twentieth-century classics.
But I shall not anticipate his list!
VIII
THE ANGLO-SAXON TRADITION
I HAVE said “Anglo-Saxon,” because there is no
other term that quite expresses what I have in
mind. And “Anglo-Saxon” is itself ambiguous.
By the Anglo-Saxon tradition I mean the ideals
and qualities that have been handed down
through those who speak the tongue that Shake-
speare spoke — the poetic tradition of our Eng-
lish-speaking race. It is a very splendid tradi-
tion. And it has both the surpassing merits and
the complementary defects of the breed from
which it springs. I shall not attempt to deal with
it exhaustively. But in these days when the whole
of Wordsworth’s line is true as it was never true
before: “We must be free or die, who speak the
tongue that Shakespeare spake” — in these days
we turn back to our kind, merits and defects
alike, with new affection and a great pride. And
I am allowing myself in closing to say certain
things I want to say, without particular regard
to their connection with either convention or
revolt.
There are two outstanding facts about the
312 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
English language which have their counterparts
in English poetry. In each there is the directness
and the virility of the native stock; in each the
flexibility that comes from an unrivalled power
of assimilation. But through all the influences
and agencies from without, in speech and poetry
alike, the stock persists; and be the influence
French, or Italian, or Spanish, or what not, the
resultant is none of these, but English. It is this
persistent native strain, with all its imperfections
on its head, to which we may now come.
Let me illustrate the qualities that I have
particularly in mind. Here is a paragraph from
Malory’s “Morte Darthur”:
And as the king lay in his cabin in the ship, he fell
in a slumbering, and dreamed a marvellous dream:
him seemed that a dreadful dragon did drown much of
his people, and he came flying out of the west, and
his head was enamelled with azure, and his shoulders
shone as gold, his belly like mails of a marvellous hue,
his tail full of tatters, his feet full of fine sable, and his
claws like fine gold; and an hideous flame of fire flew
out of his mouth, like as the land and water had flamed
all of fire. After him seemed there came out of the orient
a grimly boar all black in a cloud, and his paws as big
as a post; he was rugged looking roughly, he was the
foulest beast that ever man saw, he roared and romed
so hideously that it were marvel to hear. Then the
dreadful dragon advanced him, and came in the wind
like a falcon, giving great strokes on the boar, and the
THE ANGLO-SAXON TRADITION 313
boar hit him again with his grisly tusks that his breast
was all bloody, and that the hot blood made all the sea
red of his blood. Then the dragon flew away all on an
height, and came down with such a Swough, and Smote
the boar on the ridge, which was ten foot large from the
head to the tail, and smote the boar all to powder, both
flesh and bones, that it flittered all abroad on the Sea.
There is in the diction of that sinewy prose a
directness, a vigor, a forthrightness, which are a
part of our ancestral heritage. They are part of
our ancestral heritage in poetry as well.
For from “Beowulf” down to the “Barrack-
Room Ballads” a splendidly robust and virile
strain has run through English poetry. Think of
a few of the many names: “Beowulf” itself, the
Romances and the Ballads, the “Canterbury
Tales,” “Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” first and
second “Henry IV,” Ben Jonson’s comedies,
Dryden’s satires, “Tam o'Shanter” and the
“Jolly Beggars,” “Don Juan,” the “Biglow
Papers,” “Leaves of Grass.” Common to all of
them, despite their infinite array of differences,
is a masculine energy that never overlooks the
mass in the detail. Ornament, prettiness, finesse
are secondary qualities; boldness of conception,
frankness of delineation, directness of speech
are their distinctive marks. They are less con-
cerned with moonlight and with skylarks and
314 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
with enamels and cameos, than with men and
their affairs. They deal with action rather than
with objects; they are dynamic rather than sta-
tic; they do not leave the brain idle while they
seek to touch the heart, or titillate the sense.
The poets whom I have particularly in mind —
Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Dryden, Samuel Johnson,
Burns, Scott, Byron, Henley, and their line —
looked on life as what we call nowadays “aman's
job,” and they looked with masculine eyes. That
implies limitations without doubt. The qualities
that we name feminine are apt to be present in
fusion with the so-called masculine in all the
greatest art. And exquisiteness, and delicacy,
and charm go hand in hand with vigor, and raci-
ness, and even coarseness in some of the poets
whom I have named. The two points on which
I am intent are these: the English tradition in-
cludes a magnificently virile strain; and that
strain shows itself chiefly in poetry that takes
for its province the actions of men. .
Let me say at once that it is not a question
of admiring either robustness or delicacy to the
exclusion of the other. It is not even a matter
of being happy with either, were tother away.
Catholicity of taste is still, even in these days of
partisan politics in poetry, at once desirable and
THE ANGLO-SAXON TRADITION 315
possible. If I say that I like one thing, it is bad
logic, however usual, to fling it in my face that I
must therefore dislike the opposite. And particu-
larly in the case of the antithesis we are consid—
ering, there is danger of misunderstanding. I
like tremendously, for instance, this drinking-
song from “Gammer Gurton’s Needle”:
I cannot eat but little meat,
My stomach is not good;
But sure I think that I can drink
With him that wears a hood.
Though I go bare, take ye no care,
I nothing am a-cold;
I stuff my skin so full within
Of jolly good ale and old.
Back and side go bare, go bare;
Both foot and hand go cold;
But, belly, God send thee good ale enough,
Whether it be new or old. . . .
And Tib, my wife, that as her life
Loveth well good ale to seek,
Full oft drinks she till ye may see
The tears run down her cheek:
Then doth she trowl to me the bowl
Even as a maltworm should,
And saith, “Sweetheart, I took my part
Of this jolly good ale and old.”. . .
That is neither delicate, nor exquisite, nor re-
fined. But my liking for it does not in the least
detract from my delight in this:
316 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I’ll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove's nectar Sup,
I would not change for thine.
The thing we may regret is that the masculine
vigor of the one is somewhat in abeyance in
English poetry to-day. "
I suspect that is due in part to a fact which
has met us elsewhere. Prose has taken over, in
the drama, and the novel, and the short story,
that portion of the field of poetry which once
claimed as its own men and action and affairs.
The tradition has not lapsed; it has been diverted
from poetry to prose. And however great the
gain for the one, the loss has been indubitable
for the other. I suppose that if Chaucer had lived
to-day, he would have written prose fiction. If
he had, many a brow would now be looking to
its laurels. Nevertheless, literature would prob-
ably have been on the whole the poorer. For the
form of the “Canterbury Tales” has given them
an immortality which prose could scarcely con-
fer — precisely as the swiftness and vividness
and verve of “Tam o'Shanter” find their inevit-
THE ANGLO-SAXON TRADITION 317
able vehicle in verse. Poetry, in a word, has
abandoned far too lightly the play for the set-
ting. The play is still the thing. “Scenery is fine,”
wrote Keats, whose letters I am quoting freely,
“but human nature is finer — the sward is
richer for the tread of a . . . nervous English
foot — the Eagle's nest is finer, for the Moun-
taineer has looked into it.” And in the midst of
the finesse, and the artistry, and the meticulous
minutiae of recent verse, one longs at times, not
for less refinement but for more virility, for a
return on the part of poetry, without the relin-
quishment of the impressions of things, to the
doings of men.
I believe the wind sits in the shoulder of the
sail and convoy is assistant, for the adventurous
voyager who will sail the old lanes of the seas
again. Whatever one’s fears and scruples about
polyphonic prose, of one thing there can be no
doubt: it is at least striking, definitely and with
something of the old-time directness, into the
open road of narrative. I am not one of the
devotees of the “Spoon River Anthology.” It
lacks, in my judgment, the distinction which
would lift it to the level of great art. Yet it too is
in the line of the great tradition, in its immediate
and sole concern with life. And its chief signifi-
318 conveNTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
cance lies in its amazing popularity — a vogue
which means, unless I am much mistaken, that
the readers of poetry are ready, even eager, to
welcome once more in verse the actions and the
lives of men. That is, and always has been, and
presumably will always be, the deepest and most
abiding human interest. And if ever a time was
ripe for its return, that time is now. -
Let us look at another closely related element
of the tradition. English poetry has been in
large measure a poetry of ideas, and that has
been both its glory and, on Occasion, its undoing.
It has been its glory, because the great poets
have always recognized that we do not cease to
think, even when we also feel profoundly, or
exert imaginative energy. There is, to be sure, a
fantastic notion abroad these days that thought,
whatever other excellence it may possess, is not
a thing of beauty, and therefore is taboo for po-
etry. Now I grant at once that poetry’s first con-
cern, yesterday, to-day, and in secula seculorum,
is beauty. And pure ratiocination, where the
intellect works cold and aloof in dry light, what-
ever may be its austere and remote beauty of
another sort, is not as such the stuff of poetry. Its
results may be; its own fit medium of expression,
as unaccommodated thought, is prose. But if
THE ANGLO-SAXON TRADITION 319
thought, however penetrating or profound, takes
body in beauty of imperishable form, even a poet
may with impunity plead guilty to its exer-
cise. “I hope,” wrote Keats the year before his
death, “I hope I am a little more of a Philosopher
than I was, consequently a little less of a versify-
ing Pet-lamb.” We may continue without com-
punction to look askance at detachable gems of
thought in verse. But we do not, I think, find
either the “Divine Comedy,” or “Hamlet,” or
“Faust” the less poetry, because we never ex-
haust the creative energy of thought that they
hold stored to quicken thought, whenever there
is vital contact with a mind.
But that quickening power, let me repeat, is
exercised through something more than thought,
as such. Dante thought profoundly in the “Con-
vivio,” and Goethe (however wrongly) in the
“Farbenlehre.” And we think after them when
we read these things. More than that happens,
when we read the “Divine Comedy” and
“Faust.” We are not merely thinking after them;
we are started on voyages of our own. There is
something that eludes analysis, but which is the
very heart of poetry, in the mysterious fusion
of thought and form in Supremely great verse.
Take these lines from “Antony and Cleopatra’’:
320 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
- Cheer your heart. -
Be you not troubled with the time, which drives
O'er your content these strong necessities;
But let determin’d things to destiny
Hold unbewail'd their way.
“The time, which drives O'er your content these
strong necessities” — there in one phrase is the
burden of this tragic year of Our Lord, which has
just dawned upon the planet." And in the rest of
it: “But let determin’d things to destiny Hold
unbewail'd their way” — is not only the spirit of
“what’s brave, what’s noble, Let’s do it after
the high Roman fashion,” but, stern and austere
in its simplicity, the ultimate formulation of the
spirit with which, by millions, the Supreme trag-
edy is being met to-day. And I submit that a
thought so imperishably phrased that it sums up
not only the cataclysm of a world, but also the
stoic and indomitable temper that endures it, is
of at least as much worth as the embodiment of
a sensuous impression, however exquisite. That
has its place, and it is high, but it is not the soli-
tary peak of poetry.
The poet, then, cannot think too deeply, if he
thinks through the imagination, which gives to
thought its wings. Without that, ideas are out of
* I have allowed these lines to stand as they were written in
January, 1918. - .
THE ANGLO-SAXON TRADITION 321
place in poetry. With it, no idea, however
freighted with pabulum for the brain, is alien or
inimical to poetry. That means that when a poet
thinks, he must think as a poet. If he thinks as
a Presbyterian, or a professor, or a socialist, or a
partisan of any movement, or an adherent of any
creed, he comes under Touchstone’s anathema —
he is damn'd, like an ill-roasted egg all on one
side. He is versifying his ideas, such as they
are, not impregnating thought with imaginative
beauty — which is one at least of poetry’s high
prerogatives.
It happens to be my business to teach English
literature. That carries with it for any frail mor-
tal a lurking peril. There develops, insidiously
and unawares, the academic bent of mind — an
excellent thing in its place, but devastating out
of it. But in spite of shades of the prison-house,
some of us still read poetry as human beings, and
it is as a human being, so far as possible, that I
am speaking now. And most of us, I believe, find
satisfaction in the challenge to thought, while at
the same time we feel, and, through an awakened
imagination, see. And poetry at its greatest
seeks for nothing less than the whole of us. There
is, I know, a public that does n’t want to think.
But if, through poetry, its brain is surrepti-
322 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
tiously reached, at least it does n’t know it’s
hurt, and it even may and sometimes does ex-
perience a new delight in the unasked for and
involuntary exercise of its intelligence. And any-
way, neither they nor we get all of what a great
poem has to give. For when thought invests
itself in imaginative beauty, it becomes, by the
miracle which we call genius, inexhaustible.
Now the great tradition in poetry has always
offered ungrudging hospitality to ideas, and that,
as I have said, has been one of its glories. It has
been more than once its evil genius, too. For
the intellectual element in poetry must be com-
pletely permeated with imagination and fused
with feeling, if it is not to mar where it should
make. And that supreme and difficult interpene-
tration has by no means always been achieved.
Much of the work of some of the greatest has
been vitiated by thinking, unassimilated to the
inexorable demands of art. I shall not reiterate
what has been said a hundredtimes about Donne,
and Wordsworth, and Browning, and Shelley,
and Meredith, for example — five shining and
imperishable names. Each, in his way, exempli-
fies the peril that besets a highly gifted poetic
nature, when at bad moments thought inhibits
imagination, instead of being transfused and
THE ANGLO-SAXON TRADITION 323
informed and made luminous by it. Even Shelley
Sometimes mingles poetry and propaganda to
their mutual disaster. And though Dryden’s
intellectual vigor and Pope’s consummate art
raised at times that shibboleth of the eighteenth
century, the understanding, almost to the level
of imagination, in the verse of their school it
persisted flinty and intractable.
Let us not, however, confuse the issue. Merely
to think is itself no easy task, as most of us know
to our sorrow. To think imaginatively is the gift
of genius. To give to thought, winged with im-
agination, an imperishable form — that is the
supreme achievement of genius in its highest
exercise. And the fact that even genius has
sometimes lapsed, and the further fact, sad but
inexorable, that the vast majority of those who
write verse are unendowed with the assimilating
alchemy of genius — these facts should not be-
tray us into the repudiation of a great tradition.
We are dealing with a phase of the subject
which requires endless qualification, because the
intellectual element runs through poetry like a
great watershed. On the one side the streams
flow off toward the sublime; on the other they
plunge headlong to the ridiculous; and the turn
of a hair may save or damn. And the Eng-
324 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
lish tradition has steered a course not without
lapses down the wrong side of the ridge, with
respect to one vitally important matter. Is it
poetry’s business to teach 2 There is perhaps no
single interrogation which sets so swiftly the
storm signals flying. And there is probably no
answer which will command universal assent.
The poetic tradition is itself ambiguous, but we
can at least discriminate.
There is native to our Anglo-Saxon blood a
distinctly didactic, even homiletic, strain. Cole-
ridge once said to Lamb, “I believe, Charles,
you never heard me preach.” “My dear fellow,”
replied Lamb, “I never heard you do anything
else.” And it is one of our racial traits to point a
moral even while we adorn a tale.
O Reader! hast thou ever stood to see
The Holly Tree?
The eye that contemplates it well perceives
Its glossy leaves
Order’d by an intelligence so wise
As might confound the Atheist’s sophistries.
I love to view these things with curious eyes,
And moralise:
And in this wisdom of the Holly Tree
Can emblems see
Wherewith perchance to make a pleasant rhyme,
One which may profit in the after time.
THE ANGLO-SAXON THADITION 325
I shall not quote the rest of the poem, in which
Southey asseverates that
Gentle at home amid [his] friends [he'd] be
Like the high leaves upon the Holly Tree,
and expresses the pious hope that
In [his] age as cheerful [he] might be
As the green winter of the Holly Tree.
Dorothy Wordsworth's birch tree, “glancing in
the wind like a flying sunshiny shower,” and
“bending to the breezes as if for the love of its
own delightful motions” is worth unnumbered
cords sawed from Southey’s holly tree. For there
are tongues in trees assuredly, but they are the
tongues of trees, and not of tractates.
Coleridge reports in his “Table Talk” a con-
versation between himself and Mrs. Anna Letitia
Barbauld—who wrote, among other things, “An
Address to the Deity,” and “Hymns in Prose
for Children.” “Mrs. Barbauld,” says Coleridge,
“once told me that she admired the ‘Ancient
Mariner” very much, but that there were two
faults in it, — it was improbable, and had no
moral. As for the probability, I owned that that
might admit some question; but as to the want
of a moral, I told her that in my own judgment
the poem had too much; and that the only, or
326 CONVENTION AND PEVOLT IN POETRY
chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of
the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as
a principle or cause of action in a work of Such
pure imagination. It Ought to have had no more
moral than the Arabian Nights’ tale of the mer-
chant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of
a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a
genie starts up, and says he must kill the afore-
said merchant, because one of the date shells had,
it seems, put out the eye of the genie’s son.”
It was Coleridge rather than Mrs. Barbauld
who was right. Yet even here we must discrimi-
nate. For the poem offers a striking example of
ethical values employed both as art may, and
also as art may not, employ them. The “Ancient
Mariner,” to a degree surpassed in the case of
few other poems in English, is a work of sheer
imagination. It is absolutely in keeping with that
fact that it should have a firm yet flexible frame-
work. And it has. It is not inconsistent with its
imaginative quality that the framework, if one
plots it, looks like the bare bones of a sermon —
Crime; Punishment: (a) for oneself, (b) for the
innocent; Penitence, and the Burden falls; Pen-
ance; Absolution; A New Life. Happily one
does n’t plot it, unless one is out (as I am at the
moment) for that sort of game. As one reads the
THE ANGLO-SAXON THADITION 327
poem, its skeleton is as unobtrusive as yours or
mine; as Hazlitt says of the allegory in the
“Faëry Queene,” it does n’t bite. And what I
wish to emphasize is the fact that, as Coleridge
employs it, it has a high artistic and imaginative
function. The sense of the homely and traditional
moral values is to the poem — like the quiet
harbor and the wedding feast — part of “the
known and familiar landscape,” to quote Cole-
ridge's famous statement, over which the sudden
charm of the accidents of light and shade is
to be diffused. For there is, in fact, nothing so
strange as the familiar, when a cataclysm has
changed you, and left it untouched. The ethical
background of the poem, then, is not a moral; it
is an imaginative use of moral values, as an in-
tegral element of an imaginative conception —
and that is a horse of a totally different color. It
is when, at the close of the poem, an explicit
moral is definitely drawn (how under heaven
Mrs. Barbauld missed it, I don’t know) that the
moral sentiment is, as Coleridge Says, obtruded
openly on the reader. The “Ancient Mariner”
ought to be as bare of a categorically pointed
moral as “Kubla Khan.” -
Poetry may teach, then, if it teaches in art’s
way — if, in Browning's phrase, it “does the
328 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
thing shall breed the thought.” “To instruct
delightfully,” says Dryden, following Sir Philip
Sydney, “is the general end of all poetry. Philos-
ophy instructs, but it performs its work by pre-
cept, which is not delightful, or not so delightful
as example.” Browning and Dryden are at one;
the poet’s business is not with precept. The
teacher's and the preacher’s is — though not
so much, I shrewdly suspect, as they suppose.
Poetry does not teach us, but it allows us to be
taught, as life and the universe permit us, if we
will, to learn. The poet’s sense of ethical values,
if he has it, may communicate itself to us, as
Shakespeare’s does, implicitly, without the in-
trusion of a moral sentiment. “We hate poetry,”
wrote Keats, “that has a palpable design upon
us. . . . Poetry should be great and unobtru-
sive,” he goes on, “a thing which enters into
one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it
with itself—but with its subject.” So soon as
he moralizes, the poet has abdicated his throne.
Once more, the end of art is the disclosure of
beauty. But the great tradition of English poetry
is sound in its steadfast insistence that beauty is
latent in actions and ideas, and may be present
even when actions and ideas have ethical quality.
I believe profoundly in the doctrine of art for
THE ANGLO-SAXON TRADITION 329
art’s sake—of art, that is, for the sake of what art
alone can give, and give only in art’s way. That,
as I see it, admits no alternative. But I object to
the limitation of the dictum to anything short
of beauty wherever it is latent, and awaiting
the touch of art to release it and reveal it. That
means that I accept as valid, So far as it goes,
the Symbolistes’ application of the shibboleth,
and its rejuvenation by their present-day disci-
ples. But the formula imposes fetters upon art,
when it confuses art’s way, which is immutable,
with the themes of art, which are subject to no
limitation save their fitness for endowment with
artistic form. And a theme that possesses ethical
implications, so treated as to disclose beauty, ful-
fils the stern requirements of l'art pour l'art as
completely as a similar treatment of themes that
may be fitly described as Emaua et Camées. The
sole criterionisthe treatment. If the poetremains
relentlessly the artist, he is as true to art for
art’s sake when he composes an “Ode to Duty,”
as when he writes a “Symphonie en Blanc Ma-
jeur.” The one inexorable mandate is that he
take art’s way.
It is when art’s way is abandoned, and only
then, that poetry is overtaken by disaster. And
that, and that alone, is why the Anglo-Saxon
330 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
tradition, with its emphasis on content, has too
often led its followers astray. Didacticism in
poetry is high seriousness turned wrong side out.
And what one gets as a result is suggestive of
Stevenson’s malign but alluring reference to
George Eliot as “a high, but (may we not add 2)
a rather dry lady.” Nor is it, perhaps, without
significance that most of the poets who have thus
offended have been, in varying degrees, devoid
of humor. For didacticism and a sense of humor
are mutually exclusive qualities. And that sug-
gests the Saving grace.
For through the high gift of humor and the
resultant power of detachment, English poetry
has been enriched with a long series of magnifi-
cently unmoral embodiments of moral reprehen-
sibility. I decline, respectfully but firmly, to split
hairs over the question of casuistry involved in
that deliberate paradox. What I wish to say is
this. Any poetic tradition is fairly secure, in the
final audit, against the charge of Surrender to the
didactic, which can set over against the worst that
Southey, and Wordsworth, and Martin Tupper,
and Felicia Hemans at their worst can do, the
Pandar of “Troilus and Creseyde,” and the Wife
of Bath and all the engaging rascals of the “Can-
terbury Tales,” and Falstaff, and Cleopatra, and
THE ANGLO-SAXON TRADITION 331
Tam o'Shanter, and the Jolly Beggars, and Don
Juan, and Fra Lippo Lippi. They might not save
Sodom and Gomorrah, but they insure English
tradition against possession in fee simple by the
Philistines. For English poetry, whatever its de-
fections into the parochial, has also gloriously
recognized the truth which Goethe once stated
in speaking of Byron. The excellent Eckermann
had expressed a doubt regarding Byron’s value
as a moral factor in the uplifting of humanity.
“I must take issue with you,” said Goethe, “By-
ron’s daring, dash, and grandiosity — has that
not educative value? We must guard,” he went
on, “against seeking such values only in what
is distinctly pure and moral. Alles grosse bildet, —
whatever is great is creative.” That from the
creator of Mephistopheles has weight. And even
the Puritan Milton—Heaven be thanked for it!
— rose to the highest height of his great argu-
ment in the Superb conception of the moral
grandeur of Satan. -
There is another tendency that demands a
passing word. It does not belong to the great tra-
dition, but, at least since the days of Laurence
Sterne, it has flowed, warm, and moist, and
saccharine, and sometimes nebulously ecstatic,
through minor English verse, and occasionally
332 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
a major poet relaxes his fibre and admits it. For
English poetry — and here alas! it cannot throw
stones from its glass house at Germany — is
sometimes sentimental. One of the most delect-
able articles I know is a paper in the “Essays
and Studies” by members of the English Associ-
ation, entitled “Some Suggestions about Bad
Poetry.” I commend it to the Imagists as an
arsenal of weapons, and to the non-combatant
reader as a Pill to Purge Melancholy. Now senti-
mentality is at its worst in verse, when emotion
flows over a theme, vague, and hazy, and amor-
phous, with the non-inebriating quality of warm
tea. It is the sort of thing that in its earlier days
revelled (as Miss Sichel notes in the article re-
ferred to) in “Lines to Cherokees,” and “Odes
on the Sentiments of Young Indians at Sunrise.”
“There is nothing,” she proceeds, “that cannot
be imagined by people of no imagination, and
the emotions of colored races on large natural
phenomena admit of any amount of woolly
thoughts, facile emotions, and false possibilities.
Perhaps,” she continues, “this is the reason why
this era can boast more minor poetesses than any
other.” If the thing were confined to musings on
the emotional reactions of the untutored but
sensitive Savage, it would not be so bad. But
THE ANGLO-SAXON TRADITION 333
nothing evades the sentimentalist. Some of you,
I hope, remember the heroine of Mrs. Radcliffe’s
“Romance of the Forest.” May I refresh your
memory?
Adeline, as they returned home through a romantic
glen, when her senses were no longer absorbed in the
contemplation of this grand scenery, and when its
images floated on her memory only in softened colors,
repeated the following lines:
SUNRISE
A Sonnet
Oft let me wander, at the break of day,
Thro’ the cool vale o'erhung with waving woods;
Drink the rich fragrance of the budding May,
And catch the murmur of the distant floods,
Or rest on the fresh bank of limpid rill,
Where sleeps the violet in the dewy shade,
Where opening lilies balmy sweets distill,
And the wild musk-rose weeps along the glade.
Two pages farther on, Adeline
as she viewed the tranquil splendor of the setting sun
. . . touched the strings of the lute in softest harmony,
her voice accompanying it with words which she had
one day written after having read that rich effusion of
Shakespeare’s genius, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
I omit the lines from Titania to her Lover, but
take up the thread immediately after them.
Adeline ceased to sing — when she immediately
heard repeated in a low voice,
“To mortal sprite such dulcet sounds,
Such blissful hours, were never known!” .
334 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
and turning her eyes whence it came, she saw M. Armand.
She blushed and laid down the lute, which he instantly
took up, and with a tremulous hand drew forth tones
* “That might create a soul under the ribs of Death.”
In a melodious voice, that trembled with sensibility, he
sang the following Sonnet.
We may also pass over the sonnet, which led
M. Armand to burst into tears, and come to the
sunset in the next chapter. As she observed it,
Adeline, resigning herself to the luxury of sweet and
tender emotions, repeated the following lines.
All that we need of the lines is their closing
couplet:
So sweet! so tranquill may my evening ray
Set to this world — and rise in future day.
After which:
Adeline quitted the heights, and followed a 'narrow
path that wound to the beach below: her mind was now
particularly sensible to fine impressions, and the sweet
notes of the nightingale, amid the stillness of the woods,
again awakened her enthusiasm.
And the poem “To the Nightingale” ends:
Then hail, sweet bird! and hail thy pensive tear
To taste, to fancy, and to virtue dear!
Now Adeline’s prompt responsiveness to stim-
ulus is typical. Your sentimentalist, if I may risk
THE ANGLO-SAXON TRADITION 335
a most unsentimental simile, is very like a penny-
in-the-slot machine. Let nature drop in a Sunset,
or life a heart-throb, there is a little click, and
a poem drops soft and warm into your out-
stretched hand. Why not? The austere require-
ments of clarity of imagery, of precision and
lucidity of thought, of compression and balanced
harmony of form — these trouble the sentimen-
talist not a whit. All that is necessary is to reach
out into an atmosphere of rosy mist, and capture
the first nebulous notion that floats into one’s
grasp. If it is the pensive tear of a nightingale,
the absence of lachrymatory glands in that
otherwise poetic bird is beneath the notice of the
divine afflatus. The sentimentalist escapes the
stern travail of thought. The poem is born in a
sort of poetic twilight sleep.
“The greatness of an author,” wrote George
Henry Lewes in an infinitely suggestive little
book, “The Principles of Success in Literature,”
— “consists in having a mind extremely irrita-
ble, and at the same time steadfastly imperial.”
The artist, in other words, must be sensitive and
receptive to impressions, alert to every stimulus
from within and from without, beyond the
capacity of ordinary men. But he must hold
imperial sway over his impressions, selecting,
336 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
clarifying, ordering, moulding, filing, and re-
filing them. The sentimentalist is often enough
extremely irritable, in Lewes's sense; he is never
steadfastly imperial. Impressions flow through
him and drop on us. “To sit as a passive bucket
and be pumped into,” says Carlyle of Coleridge’s
talk, “can in the long run be exhilarating to no
creature, how eloquent soever the flood of utter-
ance that is descending.” And poetry which bathes
us in lukewarm emotion is not toughening to the
spiritual fibre.
I wish we could think that such poetry has
sometimes a certain value as a sort of propae-
deutic for the primary grades. The heart of the
crowd is undoubtedly a thing of vague, inchoate
yearnings to be touched. It may be more or less
distressing, but it is none the less significant,
that it is the sentimental doggerel sung by two
lovers in the spotlight during every comic opera
that draws the most heartfelt and continuous
applause. And on a little higher plane, we know
the audience that has tears to shed, and throngs
to shed them, over “Camille,” and the “Music-
Master.” And there are also gospel hymns. If
one could believe that the fondness for the senti-
mental song were the protoplasm of a liking for
“Tristan and Isolde,” and that the far-off interest
THE ANGLO-SAXON TRADITION 337
of the tears shed over “Camille” were a capacity
for the purging through pity and fear afforded by
“Othello” or “King Lear,” the case would be
a reasonably clear one. But I fear that evolution
does not so work. A taste formed on the cloying
sweetness of the sentimental is more apt than
not to turn away unfed from the stern Sweetness
— Montaigne’s “sévère douceur” — of great
poetry.
Happily, the great English tradition has kept
its sweetness sound and wholesome. Sentimental
verse in English, appalling as its expanse may be,
represents a back-water, past which the main
stream flows fresh and strong. Sentimentality,
however automatically it may exude itself in
verse, is not and cannot be the stuff of poetry.
And that is our salvation.
I have dealt now with the emphasis of the
poetic tradition in English on actions and ideas,
and with its relations to didacticism and senti-
mentality. I do not wish to close this course
without a word as to the spirit of English poetry,
as that spirit concerns us now.
These lectures have been written with a di-
vided mind. Why talk about poetry with a
world in flames? Is there not poignant truth once
more in those words which Carlyle wrote in his
338 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
“Life of Sterling”: “As to song so-called ... we
will talk of that a couple of centuries hence, when
things are calmer again. Homer shall be thrice
welcome; but only when Troy is taken : alas,
while the siege lasts and battle’s fury rages
everywhere, what can I do with Homer?” That
comes home with pitiless directness to any one
who ventures to talk of poetry to-day.
And yet if poetry is, as I believe it to be, not
merely an ornament that graces life, but an inti-
mate reading and record of life, as life strives to
catch and fix in form the endless flux in which it
moves — if poetry is life itself, reaching out
creatively after the permanence of beauty—
then poetry is worthy of consideration now.
Shelley wrote in his “Defence of Poetry” these
profoundly suggestive words:
We want the creative faculty to imagine that which
we know; we want the generous impulse to act that
which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our cal-
culations have outrun conception; we have eaten more
than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences
which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man
over the external world, has, for want of the poetical
faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the in-
ternal world; and man, having enslaved the elements,
remains himself a slave. . . .
The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired
than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and
THE ANGLO-SAXON TRADITION 339
calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials
of external life exceed the quantity of the power of as-
similating them to the internal laws of human nature.
That selfish and calculating principle has taken
a form, in these days in which we are both
privileged and doomed to live, which Shelley, I
think, could scarcely have conceived, - the form
of a national and racial egoism that has turned a
continent into a shambles. I do not believe that
poetry is a panacea for the cataclysm of a world;
I should be ashamed to regard it as a sentimental
refuge, a fugitive and cloistered retreat from the
most tremendous issues that humanity has ever
faced. If there is in it a tonic virtue, an assurance
that the stuff of our stock is indestructible, that,
at least, justifies our concern with poetry now.
Heaven forbid that I should seem to preach or
sentimentalize. But the spirit that animates our
race to-day is the spirit that has animated Eng-
lish poetry itself from those earliest days when
its virile speech, unintelligible now, embodied the
same indomitable will that yet looks on tempests
and is never shaken.
Gaston Paris, at the beginning of the Franco-
Brussian war, lectured at the Collège de France
on the “Chanson de Roland.” No man ever
brought to the study of poetry a more sternly
340 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
Scientific attitude, or a more rigorous devotion to
truth, than that master of method in research.
And what he pointed out in his opening lecture
was this: the spirit of France — that gallant and
chivalrous spirit that has streamed like an ori-
flamme through the storms of centuries — was
implicit in that old masterpiece. He could not
know that this same spirit would later find its
apotheosis in the magnificent “They shall not
pass” of Verdun. And what I want to make clear
is the fact that the “Carry on” of England and
America has been present in English poetry from
its beginnings. For poetry is not something iso-
lated and aloof from life, a fit subject merely for
tea-table talk, or even doctoral dissertations. It
is these things, and rightly; but it is more. It is
the incarnation of the spirit of a people.
From its very beginnings English poetry has
embodied a superb individualism. We say we are
fighting to make the world safe for democracy.
I do not know fully what that means; I wish I did.
But if it means anything vital and constructive,
it must include the conservation of the spirit of
the race. And that spirit, whatever the checks
and balances upon excess, has been uncompro-
misingly individualistic. Not only is it the indi-
vidual who has dreed his own weird, but it has
THE ANGLO-SAXON TRADITION 341
been the individual who has moulded the inert
mass. Now great poetry is never written à parti
pris, and its interpretation of the temper of a great
people is implicit, not dogmatic or express. And
a poetry that numbers among its outstanding
figures Beowulf, and Chapman’s Bussy d'Ambois,
and Milton’s Satan and Samson Agonistes, and
Tennyson’s Ulysses, and Childe Roland, who to
the Dark Tower came, is a poetry whose demo-
cracy is tempered by a stubborn conviction that
democracy thwarts the development of the indi-
vidual at its peril. -
Let me be still more concrete and specific. For
I want to make clear, as one of the things which
poetry has to offer to-day, a continuity of tradi-
tion that runs from the battle of Maldon to
Ypres and Arras and the Somme. In that fine old
Anglo-Saxon poem, the “Battle of Maldon,” a
veteran warrior, when the tide was setting strong
against a dwindling handful, speaks to his young
comrades in arms:
Hige sceal pe heardra, heorte pe cenre,
mod Sceal pe mare, peure maegen lytlač.
“Purpose shall be the sterner, heart the bolder,
courage the more, as our strength littleth.” I
wish I might quote the whole poem. Nothing that
342 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
has yet come from this vast carnage touches it
for stern beauty. Yet, barring the accidents of
changed conditions, it might have been written
yesterday. So might the words of the hero of the
old romance, “Libeaus Desconus”:
As he gan sore Smerte,
Up he pullede hys herie,
And keverede of hys state.
“When pain smote him sore, up he pulled his
heart, and was himself again.” It’s like Johnie
Armstrong in the ballad:
Said John, Fight on my merry men all,
I am a little hurt, but I am not slain;
I will lay me down for to bleed a while,
Then I’ll rise and fight with you again.
It is the same dauntlessness that animates Mil-
ton’s splendidly English Satan:
What though the field be lost?
All is not lost — the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield,
And what is else not to be overcome.
It animates Ulysses, as Ulysses, in a new Odys-
sey, passed from Homer by way of Dante into
English poetry:
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, -that which we are, we are,
THE ANGLO-SAXON TRADITION 343
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
And “Prospice” and “Childe Roland” and
“The Grammarian’s Funeral” and the Epilogue
to “Asolando” need no quotation here.
Moreover, English poetry from its very begin-
nings is permeated by that dynamic fatalism
which has characterized our stock. There is a
fatalism (one thinks of the type as prečmi-
nently Oriental) which says: “What shall be, will
be; why act?” — and folds its hands. There is
another type which says: “What shall be, will
be” — and leaps to action, hand in hand with
fate. Navigate necesse est, vivere non est necesse —
“Sail we must, we need not live” — that motto,
inscribed over the doorway of one of the great
halls of the Hanseatic League, sums up the spirit.
And that has been the fatalism of our Anglo-
Saxon ancestry. You find it in “Beowulf”:
Wyrd oft mere 8
unfagne eorl, ponne his ellen deah!
“Fate often saves an unfated warrior, if his
courage holds!” And “Beowulf” is nowhere more
consummately national than in that superb reso-
lution of foreordination and free-will. Cromwell’s
“Put your trust in God, but mind to keep your
344 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
powder dry”; Franklin’s “God helps those who
help themselves,” are but other phrasings of the
same canny playing of the game with destiny.
You get it in one of the greatest of the old ro-
mances, the English “Gawain and the Green
Knight”:
pe kny3t mad ay god chere,
& sayde, “quat schuld I wonde,
Of destines derf & dere?
What may mon do bot fonde?”
“The knight made ever good cheer and said: Why
should I swerve from destinies stern and strange?
What can one do but dare 2° And Chaucer, in
that great balade in which he concentrates all that
the Middle Ages felt about Fortune—Chaucer
strikes the same ringing note:
This wrecched worldes transmutacioun,
As wele or wo, now povre and now honour,
With-outen ordre or wys discrecioun
Governed is by Fortunes errour;
But natheles, the lak of hir favour
Ne may nat don me singen, though I dye,
“Iay tout perdu mon temps et mon labour”:
For fynally, Fortune, I thee defye!
The same indomitableness speaks again in Hen-
ley:
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
THE ANGLO-SAXON TRADITION 345
And it is the moving spirit of the stark austerity
of Thomas Hardy’s verse, as it dominates his
prose. And finally, the acceptance of fate as a
call and not a quietus, finds expression in the
superb close of Whitman’s “Passage to India”:
Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only,
- Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou
with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared
to go,
And we º risk the ship, ourselves and all.
The poetry which embodies the temper of our
stock has tonic quality. -
And the modern pedagogical psychologist as-
severates that only contemporary poetry has fit
place in the schools! If the inculcation of a long
and glorious tradition, if familiarity with great
spirit embodied in great form, be not an element
of Surpassing value in any education that is wor-
thy of the name, then let us frankly recognize
that in Our concern with producing the efficiency
of a machine, we are no longer interested in
the making of men.
For that which goes to the making of great
poetry is, mutatis mutandis, the law of the mould-
ing of life. And I return in closing to the thesis
with which this course began. Here is the indi-
vidual, and here the chaotic welter of the life
346 CONVENTION AND REVOLT IN POETRY
about him. And the object of the artist whose
medium is words, and of that other artist whose
medium is life, is one: it is to give to the amor-
phous welter form. Carlyle once said of Tenny-
Son: “Alfred is always carrying a bit of chaos
around with him, and turning it into cosmos.”
Well, that is poetry’s job, and it is amazingly like
the enterprise of life. And one reason why poetry
is worthy of the consideration of men and women
breathing thoughtful breath, in this return to
chaos, is the fact that poetry’s essence is also, in
a Sense that is profoundly true, the goal of life —
it is creative energy made effective through re-
straint. And in these days when a shattered world
is to be made over, and moulded into form and
comeliness again, whatever throws into relief the
eternal validity of the balance between freedom
and restraint, of the belief that the individual is
most truly individual when he builds, as indi-
vidual, upon that which is common to him and
to his kind — whatever lays stress On that, is of
constructive worth. And that is why, in spite of
what has seemed at times the almost unbearable
triviality of all but the one overpowering fact,
I have still ventured to deal with poetry.
THE END
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