Who Killed Poetry? A Critique of Modernism and Post-Modernism (Part I)

by Edward C. “Ted” Hayes

 

A Prefatory Poem (or a Gaggle of Goosefeathers)

Some will judge this essai the exact thing it’s not –
Distilled, unvarnished, contemned tommyrot
For asserting mod poets’ sad lack of discernment
And non-Sense of Craft – for expressing concern, meant
To blow a loud trumpet, to unveil a pose
To reveal the false emperors, stripped of all clothes
And rescue dear children, deceived by their ramblin’,
And led over cliffs by new Pipers of Hamelin
By a gaggle of goosefeathers, fluffed up in down
Patent-med poets of rhymeless renown
Who croon to us coyly, iPhones in hand,
A slithy-toved, saboteur, ill-gotten band
Of choristers brash, in fortissimo praise
For heralds mediocre, screeds untimely raised
All, scribes without vision, purveyors of the odious
Sacking the savory, inspired, melodious
Whose canon is aimless, whose object, despair
Whose howls make my cat run under the chair!
Ah, rhyme! How you’ve fallen on times unpropitious!
And meter! Your death, at a pace surreptitious
Is traced to the doors of these cardboard imposters
Who must never be named to Art’s glorious roster!
An example: from scratchings which endlessly pour
Out Academe’s window, and in at its door
John Donne is “examined” – his pow’r, undetected
Like a bug under glass, a man wholly dissected
‘Til nothing is left but pure Academese –
While the author reaps Tenure for speaking Chinese!
Think ye, these unvarnished lines are unfair?
Then say, why did Keats leave T.S. in despair?
Of this limning caterwaul I now make an end
Yet before I step down, there’s one fence I would mend
There are certain poets whose work is redeeming –
Can you find, in what follows, the which are the seeming?

For a gloss of the above prefatory poem see the end of this essay.

 

PART I

Forward and Overview

Most poetry in the English-speaking world, and virtually all that is professionally recognized, is produced by university faculty who publish in scholarly and purely academic journals for public enjoyment and their own advancement. It is “modern”—meaning, generally, lacking in meter and rhyme.

In contrast, the poetry written prior to the 1920s—lyrical, high-minded, and authored by writers with little or no university affiliation—has all but disappeared, its place taken by poetry “slams” for the masses, and by something hard to categorize, but decidedly less than lyric, formally entitled modernism and post-modernism (roughly, 1920 – 1945 and 1946 to the present), two terms which encompass both the simply non-rhyming, non-metered style, but also a host of other styles, including obscurantism, word-inversion, and thought-jumping from line to line, all hiding under the impressive titles of imagism, symbolism, surrealism, dadaism, minimalism, and more.

The leading lights of these formats were literary revolutionaries who enthusiastically trashed the poetic canon of the preceding centuries. Under their influence metered poetry gave way to free verse, disciplined thinking to stream of consciousness, fundamental optimism to fundamental pessimism or neutrality, belief in a divine order—and with it, a clear moral order—to belief in self, nature, language itself, the occult, or nothing, while elevated themes gave way to personal confession, stark cynicism, and deliberate ugliness.

Beauty, the great single standard of art for the classical world and for the West, was removed as an aesthetic requisite.

And yet, great poetry has never had to win popularity contests. Its exemplars have their place in a pantheon far from the keyboards of the moment. Nor has the historic canon of the visual arts fully surrendered to the century just past, despite the efforts of a host of unpainters and unsculptors, who see heaven in an overblown image of a Campbell soup can. But now we are well into a new century. The time is at hand—no slouching beast at all—when poetry can again be written according to the aesthetic ideals, and toward the aspirations, which have given Western civilization its enduring worth.

Ring out, wild bells! “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

 

1. An Outline of History

After a magnificent run of five centuries, much of English poetry by the third decade of the twentieth century had run off the road and over a cliff.

(For a modestly-stated critique of this decline see Joseph Epstein, “Who Killed Poetry?” Commentary August 1988. The present author decided on the same title before his awareness of the Epstein piece. For an exposition harsher than Epstein see Elizabeth Kantor, The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature [Washington DC: Regnery, 2006], a book described by the publisher as an expose of “the professors who have hijacked syllabuses to obliterate the great literature in the English language” and “a crash course on the classics you may have been denied in school.” For the contrary view, see Donald Hall, onetime U.S Poet Laureate, Death to the Death of Poetry [University of Michigan Press,1995].)

Why high-minded poetics suffered this fate—having survived centuries of scientific and technological advance, the Reformation and the Renaissance, the emergence of global empires and the invention of both symphonic and operatic forms in music—is a fair question, and all the better for being so rarely asked.

But to professors with, or aiming for, tenure, who now produce the bulk of contemporary poetry, the question of who killed poetry is not stimulating or interesting. It is not even ridiculous.

It is inconceivable.

Nor do most contemporary writers find the question blasphemous, for they have long since  discarded the West’s foundational religion, a reversal which helps explain, as much as any other factor, their newfound interest in the commonplace, the undemanding, the complaining, the pleasurable, and—to complete the list—the scatological and morbid.

True, not all have gone this direction, and the infatuation with the worst of these styles has, since the mid-decades of the twentieth century, declined. There is a small but increasing band of New Formalists, discussed briefly here and at length in Part II of this essay, who are keen on reviving the old standards. Some poets never quite let those standards go, and some held onto traditional forms before making their reputations as modernists. All these will be considered anon. But taken together these writers remain the minority, rarely if ever appearing in respected journals. Creative poetry’s true north is still set by “culturally liberated” thinkers.

 

2. The Influence of World War I

How and why did this seismic shift in acceptable poetic themes and style come about?

The nineteenth century provided a foretaste. The poetry of Verlaine and Whitman, the somewhat raucous—and uproarious—plays of Oscar Wilde, and the more familiar writing-styles of novelists Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson can be seen, in retrospect, as a prelude, but no more, for the coming cultural thunderclap.

The thunderclap was triggered by an event: World War I.

Sometimes called The Great War or The War To End All Wars, World War 1 (1914 -1918) was an event of unparalleled material and human destruction. Previous to it, the largest number of casualties in a single battle had occurred during the American Civil War at Gettysburg. During that three-day battle in July of 1863 some 7,863 died. The total casualty figure, including dead and wounded, numbered over 51,000.

Those figures were cataclysmic at the time and remain harsh today. But they were dwarfed by the war which followed just forty-nine years later. During the year-long battle at Verdun in 1916, the total of dead and wounded numbered 750,000—a single, prolonged battle in which casualties equaled three quarters all the casualties of the four-year Civil War. In the closing months of 1918, the final “Hundred Days Offensive” of the Allies which led to victory, resulted in a casualty figure of 1,856,000—three times the death toll of the Civil War.

It was the most horrific conflict in Europe’s history, one which introduced the use of poison gas, rapid-fire machine guns able to kill hundreds of onrushing infantry with a few bursts, hand grenades, armored vehicles with steel treads delivering death from guns mounted in rotating turrets, bombs dropped from the sky, and the deliberate killing of civilians. The daily press introduced these horrors, in words and pictures, to an astonished public, along with the phrase “no man’s land”—a phrase denoting the killing grounds between stalemated front lines, outdoor cemeteries on which lay the decaying bodies of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of just-killed men, mutilated and stinking, with some pulled back as barricades to protect the next wave of soldiers before their charge into bloodshed.

The slaughter was front page news. Stories and pictures flooded the streets and living rooms of the world, with harsh facts made harsher by the sensationalist proclivities of the Hearst-style press and accompanied by effects both unexpected and unexampled. The Western world’s basic beliefs in a superintending Divinity of love and goodness, indeed in its understanding of history and life itself, were shaken to the core. From this intellectual and spiritual bouleversement, salted for many by the philosophy of the Bolshevik revolution in Moscow, came the culturally unbounded intellectuals who redefined the course not only of poetry but of Western civilization itself.

For a brief period the traditional—read, lyrical—poetic form held on. It was still the style among the British “War Poets,” so named for their support of the war, a group which included Rupert Brooke, Rudyard Kipling, and Wilfred Owen; among Georgian poets Hilaire Belloc, Walter de la Mare, and Siegfried Sassoon; and with John McCrae, author of “In Flanders Fields.” The poems of these writers brought them deserved rank among the great poets in the language. But they also represented the dying gasp of that form’s monopoly on poetic style. N

(Brooke, author of “The Soldier” and other heroic war sonnets, served as a commissioned officer in the Royal Navy and died in uniform while sailing to a major battle at Gallipoli. Kipling, too old for service when the war broke out, reported on the war, arranged for his son’s enlistment, and of it penned his lesser known “Epitaphs of the War, 1914-1918.” McCrae, Canadian born lyric poet, physician, and professor of English and mathematics, served as surgeon on the front lines and died of pneumonia in the war’s last year while commanding a Canadian hospital in France. His poem “In Flanders Fields” was published in the London magazine Punch in 1915 and was used in countless campaigns to raise wartime funds.)

 

3. The Intellectuals’ Response

The war provided intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic a license for revolution in aesthetic standards. Ante-bellum poetry and literature had been sedately or profoundly sentimental, wholly grammatical, elevated in tone, clear in meaning and within standard bounds of rectitude. After 1918 the bulk of celebrated poetry went the other way. The adjective “Victorian” became a pejorative. Not all writers moved exclusively to offbeat themes or innovative techniques, but the underlying absolutes of Western poetic and literary aesthetics—which, time immemorial, had ruled all such novelty off limits—were gone, as absolutes, forever.

Consider, for example, the cultural contributions of the following poets:

Ezra Pound (1885-1972): “’We ought I think, to say in civil terms: you be damned’ (Palmerston to Russell, re / Chas H. Adams)”
Hilda Doolittle, pen name H.D. (1886-1961): “In me (the worm) clearly / is no righteousness”
E.E. Cummings (1894-1962), punctuation in the following follows the original: “while in the battered / bodies the odd unlovely / souls struggle slowly and writhe / like caught. brave: flies”
D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930): “How beastly the bourgeois is”
Theodore Roethke (1908-1963): “I know the purity of pure despair”
A.R. Ammons (1926-2001): “Nothing useful is of lasting value”
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966): “there in the hall, flat on a sheet of blood that / ran down the stairs. I did appreciate it”
Anne Sexton (1928-1974), on the death of her mother: “And what of the dead . . . They refuse / to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone”
Thom Gunn (1929-2004): “Nightmare of beasthood, snorting, how to wake. / I woke. What beasthood skin she made me take?”
Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016): “The raw magi, part barbarians, / Entranced by demons and desert frost, / By the irregular visions of a god, / Suffragens of the true seraphs. Lust / Writhes …”
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963): “The vampire who said he was you / And drank my blood for a year.”

Isnt’ that inspiring?

(The above list is only a small sample. Some English poets after World War II, known as “The Movement,” made a return to traditional rhyme and meter, but with the same disenchanted outlook. These include the much-praised Philip Larkin (1922-1985), declared by The Times to be Britain’s greatest post-war writer and in 2016 the recipient of one of the highest honors British society can bestow on a poet: a memorial stone in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner. Larkin achieved this recognition with four slim post war volumes known for traditional poetic style, a generally dolorous tone, and four-letter words, including the following: “They f___ you up, your mum and dad.” Larkin was praised by poet-critic Adam Kirsch (Invasions, Ivan Dee 2008): “There was no purer genius: / philistine, uncompromising, foul mouth stuffed with rust.”

After World War II rule-smashing continued in America with the beat generation in San Francisco, whose notables included Alan Ginsberg (1926-1997) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919 -). Member of the pedophile advocacy group NAMBLA, Ginsberg begins “Love Poem on a Theme by Whitman” with the following: “I’ll go into the bedroom silently and lie down between the bridegroom and the bride . . . bury my face in their shoulders and breasts, breathing their skin . . . ” Ferlinghetti established fame through an uninterrupted stream of nontraditional, anti-establishment diatribes in a variety of formats, including “Pity the Nation”: “Pity the nation whose people are sheep / And whose shepherds mislead them / Pity the nation whose leaders are liars / Whose sages are silenced . . . ”

 

4. More on Postwar Gore: Joyce and Eliot

James Joyce

Among the best known of this new breed was Irish novelist and poet James Joyce (1882 – 1941), best known for Finnegan’s Wake (1939) and Ulysses (1922). The latter is an experimental-style novel in which Joyce rewrites, to his own taste, several of the episodes in classical Greek poet Homer’s dramatic poem The Odyssey (c. 700 BC). Joyce’s narrative includes the following:

“It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding sustained, to come, don’t spin it out too long long (sic) breath he (sic) breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessness (sic) . . .”

And this:

“God! He said quietly. Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. EPI OINOPA PONTON. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! I must teach you. You must read them in the original. THALATTA THALATTA ! She is our great sweet mother . . . .”

In 1917 Joyce penned “A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight,” which begins: “They mouth love’s language / Gnash / The thirteen teeth / Your lean jaws grin with / Lash / Your itch and quailing, nude greed of the flesh . . . .”

The critics refused to label any of this either tasteless or incomprehensible.

T.S. Eliot

The well-known American-turned-Englishman T.S. Eliot was, during the 1920s, while remaining discretely out of the limelight, very much a part of this cultural realignment. Consider the following lines

“Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc’d. Tereu”

from his “The Fire Sermon,” a section of his celebrated long poem “The Waste Land” published in England and America in 1922. The poem, faithfully reproduced in whole or part in countless anthologies and school texts, begins with a section entitled “The Burial of the Dead.” In mockery of Biblical content and cadence an unnamed voice speaks to the “son of man”—Jesus’ phrase to describe himself in the New Testament—and asks him “what are the roots that clutch” and the “branches that grow. . . Out of this stony rubble?” Poet Eliot then gives answer:

“Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images . . . ”

Here is articulate, and complete, disillusion with Christian orthodoxy, written by a man who would soon become an icon of Western writers. Nine years after “The Waste Land” Eliot published his essay “Thoughts After Lambeth,” arguing that “The Waste Land” was not an expression of disillusion. But this seems more advocacy than fact. The poem, helped to its conclusion by ultra-modernist Ezra Pound and dedicated to him by Eliot, helped powerfully in establishing the legitimacy of the stream-of-consciousness, meter-and-subject-hopping, spiritually nihilistic style as an archetype for modern poetry, while consigning the heretofore requirements of poetic form and spiritual optimism to the circular file.

In 1923, after Joyce had written Ulysses and “A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight,” Eliot confirmed his own artistic identity by describing Joyce’s technique as “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history . . . .”

Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” (1930) is further evidence. The poem takes its title from the Christian holy day during which believers have their foreheads rubbed with ashes in repentance. Published when his marriage was coming apart and the decade of the 20s behind him, it is often defined as Eliot’s turn towards religion. Eliot by then had begun describing himself as a “catholic-anglican” (sic) after an official conversion to the church. The poem both invokes God—capital G—and expresses a vague hope of finding something to hope for, thus representing something of a new start in Eliot’s views. But a start is not an arrival. Written in stream-of-consciousness form, without regular meter or cadence and with almost no rhyme, it begins with the following: “Because / Because I do not hope to turn again / Because I do not hope / Because I do not hope to turn,” and continues later with the following image: “The same shape twisted, on the banister / Under the vapour in the fetid air / Struggling with the devil of the stairs . . . .”

Perhaps the reader can find the Christian convert in this.

 

5. Ground Zeros: London, Paris, New York, Moscow

The leading lights of the new outlook congregated in various locales across Europe and North America, most famously in Paris, London, and New York. There they reinforced their new-found literary and social science theories and enjoyed both fleeting and lasting sexual relationships with their own and the opposite sex, often without the hindrance of marriage.

In London, the movement was led by the Bloomsbury Group (or Bloomsbury set), formally so named for the area in the city where the cultural banditti lived and socialized; in Paris at the salon of Gertrude Stein, meeting first at 27 rue des Fleurus and later at rue Christine, and at the bookstore at 12 rue de l’Odeon; and in Greenwich Village, New York, close to the intersection of Waverly Place and Gay Streets and at the historic Hudson Hotel.

(In the late 19th and first decades of the twentieth century Greenwich Village was already known as a mecca for the then-avant garde, including poet Walt Whitman, distinguished Beaux-Arts sculptor August St. Gaudens and writers Robert Louis Stevenson, Samuel Clemens [Mark Twain], and Hart Crane. After World War I the Village hosted a wholly different breed of artistes including novelist William Faulkner, abstract impressionist painter Jackson Pollock, dancer Isadora Duncan, surrealist painter Salvador Dali, and communist-in-training John Reed. In the war’s last year a group of enthusiastic residents declared the area “The Independent Republic of Greenwich Village.” By the 1930s it had a national reputation for its Bohemian life style.)

The Bloomsbury set had begun meeting a good decade before the war and for some time had been known, not for poets, but for writers, critics, and painters, all on the long march away from traditional guidelines. In personal relations many exemplified and justified sexual “liberation,” while the majority, in writing and pronouncements, opposed the Great War. Some of the better-known include avant-garde fiction writer and essayist Virginia Woolf, defender of pacifism, feminism, and lesbianism. She and husband Leonard Woolf formed Hogarth Press in 1917 which two years later published T.S. Eliot’s early poetry. Ezra Pound, the modernist’s modernist, whose injunction to poets “Make it new” became the simple explanation of poetry’s new direction, spent time with both the London and Paris groups. Robert Lowell, American Poet Laureate-to-be, writer in both formal and free verse and putative founder of the “confessional” style of poetry, and mid-century modernist Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Bishop, both made literary pilgrimages to Bloomsbury as did dozens of lesser lights.

In Paris, the disillusioned and the ambitious gathered at 27 rue des Fleurus and 12 rue de l’Odeon. Paris was a chosen site because of its relaxed sexual codes, acceptance of experimental writing, and inexpensive living. Rue des Fleurus was the home of French modernist and American expatriate Gertrude Stein. Visitors included Spaniard Pablo Picasso, co-founder of the new school of art, Cubism, painter of the famous war-protest picture “Guernica,” World War II member of the French Communist Party, and recipient of the Stalin Peace Prize. 12 rue de l’Odeon included the free-living, but not fully modernist, American writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and World War I ambulance driver Ernest Hemingway, along with complete converts Stein, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce. Joyce used the store as his office.

In Russia a lesser known (in the West) group of writers, film and stage producers, actors and poets, collectively called Futurists, created a literary foundation for the 1917 Communist revolution in Moscow. Among them was experimental poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, vocal spokesman for the Communist revolution and author of an epic poem in praise of Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin.

(Mayakovsky’s work was increasingly censored and his travel passport denied as Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin consolidated the new regime’s power in the 1920s. Mayakovsky took his own life in 1930.)

 

6. The Rest of the Story

It would be an oversimplification to lay all responsibility at the door of World War I. Along with it, and accelerated by it, was the decline in Christian faith and, more broadly, a decline in the basic moral beliefs held in cultures throughout the world and throughout history: belief in good and evil, belief in a divine and good Creator, and belief in the law of retribution (“you reap what you sow”; “what goes around comes around”). Avant la lettre doubters, both philosophers and poets, had been writing in England and the Continent since at least the eighteenth century. French poets had been chipping away in the nineteenth century but without official approval. For example, Paul Verlaine joined the short-lived Paris (communist) Commune in 1871; gained, lost, and regained his French literary audience, and died at 52 wasted by drugs and alcohol. The literary avant-garde in London and Paris had been burrowing for a good decade before 1914. The war was simply the last straw.

Two additional events deserve mention. The Russian revolution, a byproduct of the war, and the stock market crash of 1929 both contributed to the new direction in Western art and poetry. Each heightened the appeal of communism and socialism to Western writers and intellectuals, many of whom, believing that the next stage of civilization had been unveiled, now made Moscow a spiritual destination. Academia developed social sciences which provided a social-democrat, seemingly non-doctrinaire, view of society and economics. Under the influence of these two events, college-level economics turned towards the reform capitalist prescriptions of Bloomsbury economist John Maynard Keynes. Philosophy and education departments moved toward the existentialism of Jean Paul Sartre and the progressivism of John Dewey. With the notable exception of some Christian colleges and universities, academia as a whole, both in America and in England, moved from preexisting absolutes towards a new Absolute: the perceived failure of the West.

(Nowhere is that absolute more noticeable today than in the accelerating rate of decline of university courses in Western civilization. A recent study by the National Association of Scholars [NAS – New York and Princeton] showed that, in 2010, of 50 elite colleges and universities rated as the best in the United States by U.S. News and World Report—including Amherst, Harvard, Columbia University, University of North Carolina, Notre Dame, Michigan State, and the state universities of Arizona, Nebraska, Colorado, Idaho, Maine, North Dakota, and California, and thirty-seven more of equal stature—not a single one required a course in Western civilization, down from 20 percent which did have that requirement in 1964. Just 32 percent made such information available in any form such as Great Books surveys or courses in general education. The study also found that, for all fifty colleges and universities, surveys of American history were no longer included in general education requirements. See: Glenn Ricketts et. al., The Vanishing West: 1964 – 2010 [National Association of Scholars, Princeton New Jersey, 2011. Contact: www.nas.org].)

Newspapers, scholarly journals and textbooks accelerated this shift and poetics simply joined the parade. The prim modernism of Marianne Moore in the 1930s, still reflecting the rules of an earlier era, was replaced by her own student Elizabeth Bishop, who contemplates in fascinated horror her own possible suicide in “At the Fishhouse;” by Sylvia Plath, who finally did put her head in a gas oven (“Dying / Is an art, like everything else / I do it exceptionally well”); then by a gaggle of the utterly wretched (on display at the Web site Morbid Gothic Poems – viewer discretion advised), and by the plain weird, including Mark Strand, American Poet Laureate 1990-1991: “Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. / There is no happiness like mine. / I have been eating poetry.”

 

7. The Decline of Faith

There is another reason for the decline of post-war artistic standards which to this point has only been mentioned in passing: the shattering of belief in the doctrines and mores of Christianity. These had been the foundation of Western civilization, perhaps the defining element, with Biblical stories, themes, moral injunctions and overall outlook serving as guides to “polite society” in public and private life, and as overt inspiration for the shining lights of Western art, architecture, music, and poetry. With the loss of this foundation, a loss powerfully hastened by the war, European civilization, which until then could clearly be called Christian, lost its lodestar.

(For a formal “death of God,” the most memorable midwife was German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the nineteenth century, while it gained wider authority through the writings, political activities, and death of German theologian and Hitler resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed by the Nazis in 1945. A “God is Dead” movement blossomed in the 1960s. See Matthew Rose, “The Death of God Fifty Years On,” Commentary August 2016.)

Other religious faiths and secular philosophies hastened to fill the gap. Poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1957), who held to recognizable poetic instincts down to his death, wrote in his imaginatively-entitled Opus Posthumous (1957), “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.” But for many literati before him and for most in the generations following World War I even this sedately atheistic view was too limiting. There was neither need nor desire for a substitute god or for the moral restraints imposed by any religion.

(A small number of modern-era writers have defied the trend. Novelist Evelyn Waugh [1903-1966] converted openly to Catholicism in 1930, announcing that “Everything in the world that is good depends on (God),” and that “The Church . . . is the normal state of man from which men have disastrously exiled themselves.” From: Unpublished letter to Edward Sackville-West, July 2, 1948; quoted in Selina Hastings, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography [1995]. Traditional poets have found an outlet in the journal Lyric since 1918, and more recently a small group around the Society of Classical Poets [New York], including President Evan Mantyk and Joseph Charles MacKenzie, have written and promoted only poetry with traditional forms and values.)

A year before Stevens’ death the Beat poet Alan Ginsburg published “Howl,” an unrhymed, word-inverted protest against American society based on his worldly experience with jazz musicians, poets, drug addicts, mental cases and homosexuals. The tone of the poem is revealed in its first lines: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix. . . .”

The above is not an apology for the truth of any religion, but for the historical influence of the Christian faith on both aesthetic standards and social mores. Its decline has been coterminous with, and a major factor in, the decline of each.

 

8. Life and Death of the “Emancipated”

Just how far down the liberated approach could take the intellectuals is evident in their lives. Many suffered from alcoholism, depression, and drug use. Writer Jack London killed himself by an overdose of a mixture of drugs in 1916, although whether his death was deliberate or accidental is still debated. Poets Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Bloomsbury-set writer Virginia Woolf each took their own lives. So, too, did Russian “Futurist” poet and Russian revolution supporter Vladimir Mayakovsky, who ended his life in 1930 at age 37. Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, British Poet Laureate from 1984 to 1998, was a frequent employer of occult themes, lifelong stream-of-consciousness writer and a celebrity in London literary circles. He seemed to articulate this unhealthy side of the liberated approach and even foretell the self-destruction of Sexton (and perhaps the suicide of his and Plath’s son in 2009) in “Crow”:

“Flying your black bag of jewels
From chaos to chaos
Probe hard for those maggoty deaths
Which poison our lives . . . ”

Twenty years after his dictum “Make it new,” modernist Ezra Pound, for his support during World War II of fascist leader Benito Mussolini, was incarcerated in Italy for treason, and after the war at St. Elizabeth’s in New York for insanity.

Thus the modern poet, freed from all constraints and confinements. What shall we call this: poetic apotheosis, or the end of the line? Compare Hughes, above, who made the god of Christianity a laughingstock in “Crow,” with George Herbert (1593-1633), writing almost four centuries earlier on the Church:

“I joy, deare Mother, when I view
Thy perfect lineaments, and hue
Both sweet and bright:
Beautie in thee takes up her place,
And dates her letters from thy face,
When she does write . . . .”

and with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s aesthetic expressed in “The Rhodora” (1834):

“Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing / Then Beauty is its own excuse for being . . . .”

And compare the whole of the modernist melange with the previous, and main, thread of Western art and literature, as given by German romantic poet Friedrich Schiller in his charge to artists – and in particular, to writers of poetry:

“O sons of Art! Into your hands consigned / O heed the trust, O heed it
and revere / The liberal dignity of human-kind!” (“The Artists” 1789. Free English translation by Edward Bulwer-Lytton.)

The above injunction is preceded by the lines: “So, scattering blooms, the still guide Poetry / Leads him [the artist] . . ’till the time / When what we long as poetry have nurst / Shall as God’s own swift inspiration burst / And flash in glory . . . ”

 

9. Conclusion

We have paid a price for shedding the guidance of the centuries as to what is truly poetic. Schiller was not the first to note that civilization itself is uplifted by its creative artists. Aristotle, in The Politics, called for a close watch over the music listened to by youth to ensure that it formed good character. Poetry is not, and has never been, “mere poetry”; it has always been both a measure of society’s cultural level and a powerful guiding light. Which of the poets cited in this essay would the reader wish to clip and put in his scrapbook? From which would he teach his children, and from which take his own direction?

 

A university faculty (PhD  University of California 1967, political science) and freelancer in his early career, Ted Hayes moved into full-time journalism and is now retired.

 

Gloss of prefatory poem

Line 1 “essai” – The French word for “attempt,” it also has the connotation of an extended essay.

Line 2 “contemned” – Old French, contemner; Latin, contemnere, to scorn. “Chiefly literary” – Webster’s.

Line 4 “non-Sense of Craft” – This plays on the word “nonsense,” a one-word summary of this poem’s thesis, and “Craft” being poetry itself.

Line 6 “false emperors, stripped of all clothes” – From Hans Christian Anderson’s folk tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (Copenhagen 1837), in which a haughty emperor employs clever tailors who promise to weave him a set of new clothing which all will admire except those who are unfit for their high positions. In fact, the tailors produce no clothes at all, and when the emperor “wears” the suit no one is brave enough to call him on it until a child who cries out: “He’s wearing nothing at all!” From this story comes the phrase “The emperor has no clothes.”

Line 8 “Pipers of Hamelin” – A folk tale which appears in Robert Browning’s poem “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” as well as Grimm’s Fairy Tales. In 1284 the mayor of Hamelin, a small town in Saxon Germany, hired a flute player wearing colorful (pied) clothing to lure the rats away from his town and into the nearby river. The piper does so, but the mayor cheats him from the full amount promised. The piper returns with his pipe and lures away almost all of the town’s children who are never seen again. Some versions of the story have the children drown in the river, Browning’s has them disappear into a cave in a nearby mountain, and some have the piper returning the children when he is paid three times the amount promised.

Line 9 “gaggle of goosefeathers” – A “gaggle of geese” is a colloquial term. Just as a “flock of ducks” means a group of ducks, or a “pride of lions” means a group of lions, a “gaggle of geese” means a group of geese. But what is a gaggle of goosefeathers? Exact definition is left to the reader, but “bunch of nothing” is a suggested start.

Line 10 “Patent-med” – Patent medicines, a century ago, were placebos – in pill or liquid form – sold by phony salesmen (“snake oil salesmen”) who falsely touted their medicinal qualities.

Line 12 “slithy toved” – From Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky,” in his Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The word “slithy” is, Webster’s tells us, a “portmanteau word” – meaning, a made-up word, composed of other words, which in this case Carroll made up himself. The word “slithy” is a combination of “slimy” and “lythe” (this explanation given as an example of a portmanteau word in Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, 1950, p. 658). Borrowing from Carroll’s freedom with English, I have turned the noun “toves” into the adjective “toved.”
But what is, or were, “toves?” The word does not appear in Webster’s of 1950, 1964, or 1999. The following is from the website www.alice-in-wonderland.net, the handiwork of Dutch woman Lenny de Rooy, a Carroll enthusiast:
“Toves – curious creatures that are something like badgers, something like lizards, and something like corkscrews. They make their nests under sun-dials and live on cheese.”

Line 12 “saboteur” – Here, the French noun refashioned as an adjective. Thanks to Mr. Carroll for the eccentric path now condoned as poetic license.

Line 13 “Fortissimo” – A musical notation calling for the highest volume.

Line 14 “Untimely raised” – An amended borrowing of the phrase “untimely ripped” in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Witches’ assure Macbeth that no person “born of woman” could kill him; but in mortal combat with Macbeth, Macduff tells him that he was “from my mother’s womb / untimely ripped” – in effect, unnaturally born.

Line 17 “canon” – “A law, or body of laws, of a church” (Webster’s). Here, the canon of modern poets is the absence of any laws. Adding just one “n,” the word denotes a piece of artillery and creates another meaning.

Line 25 John Donne (1572-1631) – Author of some of the greatest poems in English, including “Death Be Not Proud” (“Death, thou shalt die”). Not all moderns condemn Donne. Lionel Trilling and Cleanth Brooks have acknowledged his poetic abilities. T.S. Eliot offers him half a loaf, mentioning with approval “the massive music of Donne” and speaking of Donne’s “most successful and characteristic effects” (T.S. Eliot, review of Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems . . . .Donne to Butler (Oxford: Clarendon Press), in the [London] Times Literary Supplement, October 1921.
But others are more severe. C.S. Lewis, modern but no modernist, considered Donne overrated. Stanley Fish describes Donne’s work as “bulimic” – a word describing the illness of overeating followed by vomiting. British academic John Carey, twice chair of the Booker Prize and a prolific poetry critic known for his cynical view of high culture, in his full-length study of Donne’s life and poetry (John Donne: Life Mind and Art, first published 1981, revised 1990, republished by Faber and Faber/Faber Finds in 2008) decries Donne’s poetry as powerful only as it reflects the poet’s personal social aspirations, while displaying a masculine drive to dominate. Dr. Freud, take a bow.

Corrections to the above essay were made on March 7, 2019.