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Modernist Poetry
A Modernist poet sings –
O bright Apollo “Tin’ andra, tin' heroa, tina theon," What god, man or hero Shall I place a tin wreath upon!
and a modernist critic acclaims it as a marvellous, aye, a stupendous piece of poetic art; it figures, according to him, the very body of the modern consciousness and resthesis. The modern consciousness, it is said, is marked with two characteristics: first, it is polyphonic, that is to say, it is not a simple and unilateral thing, but a composite consisting of many planes and strands, both horizontal and vertical. A modern consciousness is a section of world-consciousness extending in space as well as in time; there is, on one hand, the bringing together and intermingling of diverse and even disparate contemporary cultures, produced by free and easy and rapid communication between different parts of the world; on the other hand, there is the connection and communion with all the past civilisations brought about by modern scientific researches. A modern man, who is representative of the age, when he looks close into himself, would find in him a texture of consciousness, the warp of which is spread out from the culture of the Greenlander in the North Pole to that of the Polynesian near the South Pole as well as from the culture of the Anglo-Saxon in the far West to that of the Korean and Nipponese in the far East; and the woof consists of traditions and legends threading past the Egyptian, the Sumerian and Atlantean glyphs and runes, and forward to present-day Page – 191 ideologies – totalitarianism and proletarianism or others like and unlike. A modern artist when he creates, as he cannot but create himself, will have to embrace and express something of this peculiar cosmopolitanism or universalism of today. When Ezra bursts into a Greek hypostrophe or Eliot chants out a Vedic mantra in the very middle of King's English, we have before us the natural and inevitable expression of a fact in our consciousness. Even so, if we are allowed the liberty of comparing the flippant with the serious, even so, a fact of Anglo-vernacular consciousness was given graphic expression in the well-known lines of the famous Bengali poet and dramatist, D. L. Roy, ending in
Amara (we) ... A queer amalgam of Sasadhar,* Huxley and goose. Indeed it has been pointed out that the second great characteristic of modern art is the curious and wondrous amalgam in it of the highly serious and the keenly comic. It is not, however, the Shakespearean manner; for in that old-world poet, the two are merely juxtaposed, but they remain separate; very often they form an ill-assorted couple. At best, it is a mechanical mixture – the æsthetic taste of each remains distinct, although they are dosed together. In a modern poet, in Pound, or to a greater degree, in Eliot, the tragic and the comic, the serious and the flippant, the climax and the bathos are blended together, chemically fused, as part and parcel of a single whole. Take, for example, the lines from Ezra Pound quoted above, the obvious pun (Greek tin' or tina, meaning "some one" and English "tin"), the cheap claptrap, it may be explained, is intentional: the trick is meant to bring out a sense of lightness and even levity in the very heart of seriousness and solemnity. The days of Arnold's high seriousness, of grand style pure and severe, are gone. Today the high lights are no longer set on a high pedestal away and aloof, they are brought down and immixed with the low lights and often the two are indistinguishable from each other. The grand style rides always on the
*Old style orthodox Pandit. Page – 192 crest
of the waves, the ballad style glides in the trough; but the modern
style has one foot on either and attempts to make that gait the
natural and normal manner of the consciousness and poetic movement.
Here, for example, is something in that manner as Eliot may be
supposed to illustrate: At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.¹
Well, the question is, has it succeeded? For here, as in
everything else, nothing succeeds like success. Any theory may
be as good as any other, but its test is only in the fait
accompli. Neither Pound nor Eliot has that touch of finality and
certainty, the definitiveness and authenticity beyond doubt, the
Q.E.D. that a major and supreme creator imposes.
Bottrall, a modernist poet himself, says in effect the
same thing. His poetic credo runs in this wise: Nightingales, Anangke, a sunset or the meanest flower Were formerly the potentiates of poetry, But now what have they to do with one another With Dionysus or with me?
Microscopic anatomy of ephemerides, Power-house stacks, girder-ribs, provide a crude base; But man is what he eats, and they are not bred Flesh of our flesh, being unrelated
Experientially, fused in no emotive furnace.² What Bottrall means is this in plain language: we reject the old-world myths and metaphors, figures and legends, wornout ornaments – moon and star and flower and colour and music – we must have a new set of symbols commensurate with our present-day mentality and environment – stone and steel and teas and talkies; yes, we must go in for new and modern terms, we have certainly to find out a menu appropriate to -------------------- ¹ The Waste Land ²The Thyrsus Retipped
Page – 193 our own æsthetic taste, but, Bottrall warns, and very wisely, that we must first be sure of digesting whatever we choose to eat. In other words, a new poetic mythology is justified only when it is made part and parcel, flesh and blood and bone and marrow, of the poetic consciousness. Bottrall’s epigram "A man is what he eats" can be accepted without demur; only it must also be pointed out that things depend upon how one eats (eating well and digesting thoroughly) as much as what one eats – bread or manna or air and .fire and light. The modernist may chew well, but, I, am afraid, he feeds upon the husk, the chaff, the offal. Not that these things too cannot be incorporated in the poetic scheme; the spirit of poetry is catholic enough and does not disdain them, but can transfigure them into things of eternal beauty. Still how to characterise an inspiration that is wholly or even largely pre-occupied with such objects? Is it not sure evidence that the inspiration is a low and slow flame and does not possess the transfiguring white heat? Bottrall's own lines do not seem to have that quality, it is merely a lesson – a rhetorical lesson, at best – in poetics. A poet – a true poet – does not compose to exemplify a theory; he creates out of the fullness of an inner experience. It may be very true that the modern poetic spirit is seeking a new path, a new organisation, a "new order", as it were, in the poetic realm: the past forms and formulae do not encompass or satisfy its present inner urge. But solution of the problem does not lie in a sort of mechanical fabrication of novelties. A new creation is new, that is to say, fresh and living, not because of skilful manipulation of externals, but because of a new, a fresh and living inspiration. The fountain has to be dug deep and the revivifying waters released. It is a simple truth that we state and it is precisely this that we have missed in the present age. Chaucer created a new poetic world, Shakespeare created another, Milton yet a third, the Romantics – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byron – each of them has a whole world to his credit. But this they achieved, not because of any theory they held or did not hold, but because each of them delved deep and struck open an unfathomed and unspoilt Pierian spring. And this is how it should be. In this age, even in this age of modernism, a few Page – 194 poets have actually shown how or what that can be, – a Tagore, a Yeats or A.E., by the bulk of their work, others of lesser envergure, in brief scattered strophes and stanzas - such lines, for example, from Eliot Who are those hooded hordes swarming Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon – or such other out of even Cecil Day .Lewis:
And willing to kiss again; She is the potency of earth When woods exhale the rain. My lover of air, like Artemis Spectrally embraced, Shuns the daylight that twists her smile
To mineral distaste. In general, however, and as we come down to more and more recent times we find we have missed the track. As in the material field today, we seek to create and achieve by science and organisation, by a Teutonic regimentation, as in the moral life we try to save our souls by attending to rules and regulations, codes and codicils of conduct, even so a like habit and practice we have brought over into our æsthetic world. But we must remember that Napoleon became the invincible military genius he was, not because he followed the art of war in accordance with laws and canons set down by military experts; neither did Buddha become the Enlightened because of his scrupulous adherence to the edicts which Asoka engraved centuries later on rocks and pillars, nor was Jesus the Christ because of his being an exemplar of the Sermon on the Mount. The truth of the matter is that the spirit bloweth where it listeth. It is the soul's realisation and dynamic perception that expresses itself inevitably in a living and authentic manner in all that the soul creates. Let the modernist possess a soul, let it find out its own inmost being and he will have all the newness Page – 195 and novelty that he needs and seeks. If the soul-consciousness is burdened with a special and unique vision, it will find its play in the most categorically imperative manner. What the modernist usually expresses is his brain or a part of it, his small vital desires and velleities, his sensational reactions or some sections of these. He can do that certainly, but he can do that well only when he has reached and touched the soul that is behind them: for once this is found, those become vehicles and instruments, echoes and sparks, symbols and signatures of that one thing needful. Page – 196
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