The garment of praise; the necessity for poetry

Preface

“Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.” — Shelley.

“We should conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom to conceive of it. We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in general men have as¬ signed to it hitherto.” — Matthew Arnold.

To many people, such statements must sound vaguely, dis¬ tantly true — true, in that there is little temptation to deny them, but false as well, in that they remain uncomprehended and unapplied. This book attempts to make their truth im¬ mediate and clear, by showing what poetry seeks to accom¬ plish, by illustrating this from the history of English poetry, and lastly by suggesting that in spite of its present short¬ comings poetry may prove as valuable in the future as it has proved in the past.

The book divides, therefore, into three parts. First there is a discussion of the nature of poetry, in which we attempt a clear statement of the purpose and the methods of that art. But before any such statement can take on richness and true meaning, it must be illustrated; so the second part of the book is a treatment of some of the major figures and trends in English poetry, from Saxon days to Victorian. Throughout this section, poetry is considered in relation to history and to the implied moral comments of the poets upon the world as they saw it, rather than from the narrowly aesthetic point of view. Finally, the third part of the book is an attempt to relate the poetry and the general life of to¬ day in such a way as to help in understanding both of them. The nature of contemporary civilisation, the part which poetry is playing in that civilisation, and the part which it

v

VI

PREFACE should play therein, are some of the questions considered in section three.

The authors take this opportunity to express their grati¬ tude to Mr. Morris Croll, Mr. Theodore Greene, Mr. Ray¬ mond Sontag, and Mr. George Fox, all of Princeton Uni¬ versity, to Mr. John F. Fennelly of Columbia University, and to Mr. Howard Patch of Smith College — each of whom has read some portion of the manuscript and offered valuable suggestions and criticisms.

The authors alone, of course, are responsible for the opin¬ ions expressed in these pages.

Part One The Nature Of

POETRY

NOTE: The following chapters are by Miss Chilton: Part One, Chapter Two; Part Two, Chapters Two and Five; Part Three, Chapter Two.

C[ The following chapters are by Mr. Agar: Part One, Chapter One; Part Two, Chapters One, Three, Four, Six and Seven; Part Three, Chapter One.

Chapter One

That knowledge only which is of the real and the invisible can make the soul look upwards, and whether a man stares at the heavens or blinks on the ground, seeking to learn some particular of sense, I would deny that he can learn, for nothing of that sort is matter of true knowledge. — Plato, Republic.

I

The attitude which underlies the poetic view of life is expressed in this quotation. To Plato, as to all poets, “reality” means not the dubious and shifting world of sense impressions, or matter-of-fact, but the perdurable world of the spirit, whose truths are those things which the imagi¬ nation has tested and found satisfactory, things which may therefore endure, since they are not subject to laboratory proof on one day or disproof on the next. However, there are always people who believe that “reality” is the external world which can be felt or heard or looked upon. For them, the rest is moonshine. It naturally follows that their truth is scientific truth — meaning the body of hypotheses and tentative conclusions which men of science have put to¬ gether on the basis of their experiments, and which is subject to change without notice whenever it is discredited by a new test or by a more useful hypothesis. This view as to the nature of truth is especially widespread to-day, when many people have learned some of the conclusions, but none of the humility, of science. It is the view of the common sense man, who admires science because it deals with “facts,” but who considers philosophy and poetry as elaborate forms of nonsense.1 It is a view that creates, unconsciously, a world of flux, where “nothing is but what is not”; for the world of science, useful as it is, has nothing to do with ultimate truth or with any form of knowledge which can bring peace to the spirit of man. It is engaged in the laudable attempt to ob¬ serve and to explain the operations of nature, and in so doing it has often been able to predict and control natural forces in ways which have proved of benefit to man. That is very well; but it is where science stops that the province of poetry or religion begins. There is no meaning to the world of science. Things happen as a result of causes which are ingeniously described, but they happen without meaning. Poetry and religion must suggest that meaning, and by doing so must satisfy what is probably man’s fundamental need. The human race proved that it could live for a long time in a world without chemistry or a just knowledge of the size of any star, but it becomes daily more doubtful whether it can survive in a world without meaning.

To return to the quotation from Plato: “That knowledge only which is of the real and the invisible can make the soul look upwards.” “The real and the invisible” — behind that phrase lies the essence of the poetic view of life. Poetry affirms that reality and truth are to be found in the sphere of the ideal, of the creative imagination, and that there is not only no necessity, but no excuse, for confining our¬ selves to the realm of physical fact. It is not that the poet is indifferent to the findings of science; it is merely that he is aware of their inadequacy. Much of his interest and passion

1 Compare the following, by Mr. H. L. Mencken, in the New York World for August 14, 1927: “The truth is that philosophy, like its brother theology, belongs to a relatively early stage of the development of the human mind. . . . The rising tide of exact knowledge engulfs it precisely as theology is engulfed. It cannot survive facts. But there is a type of mind that still clings to the philo¬ sophical way of thought. It marks the sort of man who never grows up. One such man, carrying the infantile taste for games into maturity, is found on the golf links. Another writes poetry at the age of fifty. . . . Yet another devotes himself to the moony speculations of the philosophers.”

are of course lavished on the external world, but even when he seems to be exclusively preoccupied with that world he regards it as an adjunct to the world of the spirit, not as a system in itself. For example, Milton was keenly alive to the scientific accomplishments of his day, and kept himself well informed in regard to them. He was particularly interested in astronomy, and knew that the Copernican system was su¬ perior to the time-honoured Ptolemaic one, and that it had already superseded the Ptolemaic among informed people. He would never have denied the claims of the new astronomy to scientific truth, and yet, when he wrote his great poem of creation and the fall of man, he pictured a Ptolemaic uni¬ verse. He did this because the old system was easier to handle in his epic, and was also rich in associations and tra¬ dition — whereas he knew that for a poem attempting to treat the destiny and the moral purpose of man, the truth or falsity of his astronomy made no difference at all. And still Milton honoured science, and strove to understand it; but he knew its place. He would not have tried to cure his blindness by means of poetic intuitions, neither would he have tried to nourish his soul on the dusty answers from a laboratory.

There is no reason, of course, why the man of science may not find true beauty in his work. His spirit may be as nobly stirred by analysing a piece of rock as by climbing a moun¬ tain. But in that case science is considered as a means toward a poetic end, toward a quickening of the imagination and an awareness of value. It is only when science is considered as the means toward truth that its answers become dusty. For science can not reveal truth. It can describe the circumstances under which, in the physical world, events take place. Such descriptions may help man to predict and to control the work¬ ings of nature; applied practically, they may enable man to travel with pleasing speed from New York to Cairo, or to re¬ cover from a disease which would otherwise have proved fatal. But neither the reaching of Cairo nor the continuation of life has, in itself, any value. The value must come from the imagination, or the spirit; and science is here but a convenient means to an end which it can neither define nor modify.

Instead of recognising this fact, and seeking for value in the one realm where it can be found, we have adopted the opposite attitude. “Belief I define to be the healthy act of a man’s mind,” said Carlyle; but he meant spiritual belief, and not our modern blind faith in any utterance from a labora¬ tory. Because organised religion has in some cases allowed itself to become tied to dogmatic assertions about the physical world, and because modern science has made dogmatism in that realm silly, there has followed a twilight of all the gods and we believe in nothing except the one thing that can not even pretend to deal in finalities — science. A man reads in his morning paper that it has been “discovered” that sun spots are caused by solar storms, or whatever it may be. He at once “knows” that this is true, although he has never seen a sun spot or never previously heard of one. The same man would reject as moony nonsense the affirmations of Wordsworth or St. Francis about our spiritual kinship with nature, although he would accept a biologist’s account of man’s relationship to a fish. Now the latter may possibly be false; but the former is surely true to any one whose imagi¬ nation has once encompassed it. Faith in the former is the type of belief which is the healthy act of a man’s mind, whereas the lay public’s uncritical acceptance of the latter is idolatry and superstition.

I say “the lay public,” because of course the attitude I have described is not that of the genuine man of science, who is one of the just prides of the modern world. With a humble spirit, a plastic, critical mind, he goes about his task of seeking to understand the physical realm, and he must be equally disgusted by the ignorant claims made in his name and by the ignorant attacks of people without either spiritual or mental capacity.

It is a misfortune that organised religion, which should be an ally of the spirit, seems to be forever breeding people whose spirituality is so bound to physical forms that they must rush to the defence of outmoded science. For such is what the external world of the Bible represents — the primi¬ tive science of Arabian nomads. And if the dogmas of Christianity were all brought up to date and expressed in the terms of our present physical theories, it would not be long before new scientific hypotheses precipitated, among the heathen, a new conflict. New Fundamentalists would be con¬ vinced that only in a Darwinian world could the spirit operate, and new Menckens would be crying out that these Chris¬ tians are a set of scurvy fools, still claiming that the world is round when every sane man knows it to be triangular.

Fortunately, poetry is exempt from these unseemly wran¬ gles, and in that respect at least it may claim to be a truer servant of the spirit than religion. The poet is free to honour, and to strive to understand, the man of science; for even if some one proved that Sir Isaac Newton wrote Shakespeare and that Mount ' Olympus was a hole in the ground, the poet would not feel tempted to abandon his spiritual life. No matter who else forgets to distinguish between truth and the physical appearances of things, be¬ tween the realm of meaning and the realm of half-appre¬ hended flux, the poet and the lover of poetry can not forget.

Poetry, I have said, is concerned with the realm of the real and the unseen. Yet for the most part it must deal with this in terms of the seen. In fact, poets as a class have been particularly notable for their love of the visible world and for their fellow-feeling with it. To show how both these statements can be true it will be necessary to analyse the poetic process.

The first and most obvious statement that can be made about poetry is that it is an art whose medium is spoken language, language used in such a fashion that the sound is of very great importance, as well as the sense. Properly speaking, poetry does not exist until it is read aloud, any more than music exists until it is played. The musician may learn to read a score and derive pleasure therefrom, and it is possible to read poetry silently and still with profit. But that is only because the reader is suggesting the sound to himself by means of his imagination; and no such suggestion can equal the reality. Rhythm, rhyme, euphony, tonality — all the paraphernalia of poetry show that here is language which is meant to be heard.

Now the difference between language heard and language which is merely thought is that the former has the sensuous quality of sound and that it can therefore make an appeal to the emotions directly, quite apart from its thought content. So on this lowest level we can say that poetry must at least be language used with regard for its sensuous appeal, used partly for its own sake, and not only as a means for con¬ veying ideas. These two functions of language may be found in any proportions. The thought content may be allimportant, and the sensuous appeal slight — as in much of the Eighteenth Century English poetry; or the sensuous appeal may usurp most of the attention, and the ideas be so tenuous as to approach the vanishing point — as occa¬ sionally in Swinburne. Such poetry is little more than vir¬ tuosity — the use of language to evoke nebulous and unat¬ tached emotion, profitless, without meaning, but strangely sweet to one who can experience it. As an example of what I mean, I refer to Swinburne’s “Ballad of Dreamland,” which begins :

I hid my heart in a nest of roses,

Out of the sun’s way, hidden apart;

In a softer place than the soft white snow’s is,

Under the roses I hid my heart.

Why would it sleep not? Why would it start,

When never a leaf of the rose-tree stirred?

What made sleep flutter his wings and part?

Only the song of a secret bird.

As restrained melody this would be hard to surpass, and unquestionably the whole ballad has a charming effect when read aloud; but it is almost without thought content, either in the ordinary sense of those words or in any higher and strictly poetic meaning. We happen to know how the ballad was written. The refrain, “Only the song of a secret bird,” came first to Swinburne, and he decided to fit a poem around it. He succeeded strangely well; but his success illustrates the possibilities and also the serious limitations of this which I have called the lowest level of poetry. Many people can derive a keen and enduring pleasure from verse of this type, and it is important not to underestimate it. But it is still more important not to overestimate it, to recognise it always for what it is, and not to be beguiled into ascribing to it the dignity and worth which attaches to the higher spheres of poetry.

It will be noticed that my description of this type of verse as “language used with regard for its sensuous appeal, used at least partly for its own sake,” etc., is not a definition, in that it does not necessarily exclude prose. But all I was trying to do was to point out the primary and most obvious quality which must be common to all poetry, and I then turned aside to observe that some poetry had this quality and little else.

Important poetry, however, has a great deal else, and it is in seeking to describe this “else” that we come first upon hazardous ground. It is probably impossible to describe intelligibly all the qualities of poetry — witness the inconclu¬ siveness of the many essays on this subject. So I warn the reader in advance that what follows does not pretend to be complete. . . . Poetry, when it aspires to be more than mere sensuous appeal, mere melody and emotional excitation, must obviously increase its proportion of thought content; but it is in defining the nature and qualities of this thought content that the difficulty arises. If it be nothing other than the type of thought which could be put in prose, then it most certainly should have been put in prose. There is no excuse for dress¬ ing up a prose idea in the trappings of another art. Either the idea will be obscured by a form which can add nothing to it, or else it will be cheapened and robbed of subtlety by the attempt to overcome the difficulties of expressing it clearly in an alien medium.

Both these results — but especially the latter — can be illus¬ trated from the poetry of Pope. In the introduction to his “Essay on Man,” Pope describes what he is trying to do in this work, and then adds,

This I might have done in prose ; but I chose verse, and even rhyme, for two reasons. The one will appear obvious: that principles, maxims, or precepts, so written, both strike the reader more strongly at first, and are more easily retained by him afterwards: the other may seem odd, but it is true : I found I could express them more shortly this way than in prose itself.

Deplorable reasons for turning to poetry! To be sure, Pope describes his work as “verse,” and if by that he means merely to imply that it is metrical, without claiming that it is poetic, it would be ungracious to quarrel with him. But even in that case it is worth pointing out that if the system of ethics which Pope was expressing had merit or profundity to begin with, it would surely have been ruined by being forced into verse. A great poet may be assumed to have a system of ethics, but he will not attempt, in poetry, to give it dogmatic or systematic expression.

And spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,

One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

The verse form makes that a memorable and an epigram¬ matic statement — which is perhaps all that Pope would have

THE TYPES OF POETRY n

claimed for it. But the verse form does not make it even faintly poetic, and it does preclude any chance of doing what little justice might have been done to the idea which lies behind the statement. When Pope wrote, “This I might have done in prose,” he condemned his work as harshly as any critic could do.

What, then, is the type of thought content which is proper to poetry? Before describing this, I must attempt to make clear what I mean by the words spirit and spirituality. The words will be used throughout the book, and I must define them with some clarity if I am to avoid the impression of flabby meaninglessness which the words often convey. In what follows I am trying to state, not what spirit means to other people, or what it should mean, but merely what it does mean in this book.

It is convenient to divide all things of which we are aware into an outer world which we perceive through our senses and an inner world of which we are more directly and mys¬ teriously cognisant. Both of these worlds may be considered in two ways : either as abstracted material for the intellect, or as something coloured and conditioned by the imagina¬ tion also, and by the emotions with which we naturally con¬ front them. A tree, for example, is a convenient symbol of the outer world. As material for the intellect, the tree will present problems of a botanical nature, such as its classifica¬ tion; or it will present philosophical problems, such as whether or not it has objective existence apart from the mind of an observer; or it will present questions of utility, as from the point of view of a lumberman. In all these cases, the tree has been considered by the mind alone.1 But as soon as it is considered in the light of the entire personality, instead of the intellect alone, the tree ceases to be merely a problem

1 Strictly speaking, “the mind alone” does not exist. It must always be con¬ ditioned to some extent by the rest of the personality. What I mean by the phrase, of course, is the mind when it is operating as detachedly as possible.

and becomes a source of value and knowledge. The imagi¬ nation suggests countless associations with the tree, investing this collection of sensory images with depth and richness. The tree becomes a metaphor for life itself, suggesting at one moment the “light-leaved spring” and at another the “bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” Mean¬ while the beauty of the tree will have made an appeal to the emotions, and this too will have been reinforced by associa¬ tion with remembered beauties, and with the idea of per¬ fection. Any one who has experienced a tree to this extent will think of it no longer as an abstraction, but as a per¬ sonality whose nature, if understood, has much to teach the sensitive observer. . . . The point of all this is that the tree could not have been understood so long as it was con¬ sidered materially, by the mind alone. The tree as material, or as fact, was the tree as it was perceived by the intellect. The tree was not known until it was considered by the entire personality — mind and imagination and emotions co-operating and producing an intuitive awareness of the truth about the tree. This truth is spiritual truth; and when I speak of a spiritual attitude toward external reality, I mean such an attitude as I have here described. It is characterised by that harmonious co-operation of the faculties which makes possible intuitive knowledge, by a sense of value which comes from a perception of the relations between things, and from a free indulgence in the tendency to find a symbol of a larger per¬ fection in the discrete beauties which surround us.

This same distinction between an intellectual and a spiritual way of viewing something is applicable to the phenomena of the inner world as well as of the outer. The emotion of love, for instance, may be considered as a purely material problem, as a question of glandular balance or blood chem¬ istry, and a study may be made of the physical changes which precede, or accompany, or follow, this state. But love may also be considered in the light of the imagination and the emotions, in addition to the intellect,1 in which case it too will become a source of value and knowledge, as it does in Plato’s Symposium. This is the spiritual treatment of love, and its fruit is a direct perception of love’s meaning — and behind that there may even come a glimpse of the meaning of all fair things whatever, and hence a partial revealment of one of life’s secrets.

To sum up, then, a man can only view life spiritually in so far as his intellect and his imagination and his emotions are harmonious allies. If his nature is at cross purposes with itself, or if any aspect of his nature is temporarily disre¬ garded, the spirit suffers. But when the spirit is functioning freely, things are perceived in the light of a larger relation¬ ship and a larger meaning than alone they could embody; this is the contribution of the imagination. At the same time, things are coloured by the emotions which they have evoked, and which in turn evoke forgotten echoes; in this way again things become more significant and more far-reaching than, perceived factually, they could ever be. Lastly, the intellect will insure that the imagination and the emotions between them do not produce a picture that will be inconsistent or ridiculous. But the standard of inconsistency will be set by the entire nature — the spirit — rather than by the mind alone.

The wild winds weep And the night is a-cold ;

Come hither, Sleep,

And my griefs unfold :

1 1 am not here attempting any tripartite division of the personality, such as Plato’s. I am merely using the words intellect, imagination, and. emotion to describe three aspects of the personality. A problem in geometry is solved by the intellect; fear is an emotion; it is with the imagination that a poet creates a metaphor, such as “the mellowing year.” I am aware that this is a rough and unscientific division, and that no one of these qualities is ever found at work in a pure form, untinged by the other two. But still, there are unques¬ tionably times when each one of them is uppermost, and there are other times when they work together on a more equal footing. This is all I am seeking to suggest.

But lo! the morning peeps Over the Eastern steeps,

And the rustling beds of dawn The earth do scorn.

This, to the unaided intellect, is absurd; but to the spirit it is not.

If a man has attained to the harmony which I have been describing, and if he is living in the light of all his capacities, his sense of values will differ so widely from that of most people that he will be regarded as madly erratic and as driven on by forces other than those which commonly inhabit man¬ kind. This is a mistake. The spiritual man is not a peculiar prodigy; he is man in a simple and healthy state, man as he was intended to be. Most of us have allowed one side of our natures to crowd out or dwarf the others. We are men of intellect, refusing credence to anything not subject to logical treatment; or we are emotionalists, or sensualists, or something of the sort. In any of these cases we can never grasp “that knowledge which is of the real and the invisible,” for such is attainable only by the spirit, which, being many-sided, can find meaning behind the appearances of things.

I hope that in my illustration of the tree I showed what is meant by “the real and the invisible.” This phrase does not mean the abstract, in the sense that a mathematical equa¬ tion is abstract. The tree is a physical reality. But the tree as seen by the spirit is both a physical reality, with purely physical properties, and an imaginative and emotional reality, with character and meaning and value, none of which could be perceived or expressed in purely physical terms.

It will be seen from what I have written that the spirit tends to accomplish two somewhat contradictory results. On the one hand it is highly personal, in that it sees and values things in subjective terms; but on the other hand it is im¬ personal, in that it strives to relate things to a larger whole. The tree, as I have said, when it is perceived by the spirit,

THE TYPES OF POETRY l5

takes on a metaphorical richness, becoming a symbol for aspects of the life process. This is a subjective way of view¬ ing the tree, at least in its origin — for a vital metaphor will always find its source in the individual’s most personal ex¬ perience. However, having once conceived the metaphor, it is possible to de-personalise it, making the tree into a symbol, no longer of one’s own life, but of life itself, losing one’s sense of identity in the cosmos which has been momentarily grasped. In this way the spirit may end by merging into a larger whole not only the objects of the outer world but of the inner subjective world as well. This is the tendency which results in mysticism, a loss of personal desire and per¬ sonal values in a vision of ecstasy and completeness. It is obvious that such a state of soul can not be maintained steadily. The spiritual view of life may be continuous, but the mystical extreme must be an occasional experience. When the spirit has lost itself, and all else, in mysticism, it has be¬ come temporarily abstract, inexpressible in terms of human value, bodiless and white.1 But for the rest, the spirit is warm and many-coloured, concrete and vivid as experience, and it is partly to avoid any confusioii between spirituality and ab¬ stractness that I have undertaken this long digression.