A RADICAL-CONSERVATIVE
By Harriet Monroe
MAX EASTMAN speaks up again for exact metrics and against
the freer forms which he once called "lazy verse." This time his
argument—American Ideals of Poetry he calls it—forms the preface to his new
book of delicately wrought "poems and songs and sonnets," entitled
Colots of Life (Alfred A. Knopf). In this thirty-page article he sums up his
case, the case of a man whose lingering conservatism, chased out of other
departments of his mind, finds a last refuge in art.
Why not admit that Max Eastman is one of the most vivid and
exuberant of human souls—an ardent creature who works, as he lives, with
passion, convinced that he would not cringe before the white light of truth ?
The truth—he finds it in the old pagan clarity, uniting, across the Christian
centuries, with the pitiless searching breath of modern science to bear away
speculative fogs and aristocratic snobberies and humilities of faith. Like
Rupert Brooke, he gives his ardor, to a cause, and would die for it in
glamorous ecstasy if need were. And, again like Brooke, he sees the figure of
Beauty not quite lithe and nude, as Blake saw it, or—let us venture to say—as
H. D. sees it today, but decorously draped in the sheerest and most softly
colored of veils—silken chiffons that fall, almost with but effort, into
rhythmic folds, into wistful modern reminders of the austere Greek line.
But, in presenting the fine brief sonnets and other lyrics
which are the result of his prayerful communings with Beauty, he is not sure
enough of them to offer them without preliminary theory, without a plea. His
plea takes the form of a contrast between Whitman and Poe, and an indictment of
free verse as necessarily unrespectful of the line and therefore unstructural
and formless! He quotes from Whitman's proud invitation to the poets of the
future—that assertion that "there is something inevitably comic in
rhyme," and that "the truest and greatest poetry, while subtly and
necessarily always rhythmic and distinguishable easily enough, can never again,
in the English language, be expressed in arbitrary and rhyming metre;" and
over against this he sets certain "icy" admonitions from Poe's
Philosophy of Composition which he thinks assert that poet's
"preoccupation with 'verbal melody' " and his point that "beauty
is the sole legitimate province of the poem." And Mr. Eastman adds:
"The details of this difference are fascinating, but the generalization of
it is what will illumine the modern problems about poetry."
Well, in Mr. Eastman's generalization one
gets indeed his point of view, the clever argument of a special pleader, but
not much illumination. He says, "The opposition of these two characters
and attitudes is complete;" when, in fact, however the personal characters
of Poe and Whitman may be in contrast, their aesthetic principles are far from
irreconcilable. Does Mr. Eastman seriously ascribe to Whitman "a grand
contempt for beauty?" or think that Poe, in asserting, "beauty is the
sole legitimate province of the poem," means by beauty merely "verbal
melody"—indeed, a metrically restricted verbal melody at
that—and does not include spiritual motive? Does Mr. Eastman mean to imply that
iambic metrics, rhyme, the pentameter line, or any other familiar instruments
of English poetry, are anything but tools and aids, are in themselves
structure? Does he find more "form" (much abused word!), more sheerly
structural modelling, in The Raven than in that glorious elegy When lilacs last
in the door-yard bloomed, even though the former poem is in the school, let us say,
of Houdon and the latter in that of Rodin?
To come down to our own immediate moment, does Mr. Eastman
find more form—a more severely modelled classic shape—in Witter Bynner's fine
Celia lyrics, or his own purely carved love sonnets in this volume, than in
Carl Sandburg's Lost or The Great Hunt, H. D.'s Oread or The Shrine,
Aldington's Choricos, Amy Lowell's Venus Tran- siens, or Ezra Pound's Dance
Figure and certain other lyrics? Mr. Eastman may prefer strictly measured
iambics to free verse—no one will deny him a right to his preference; but when
he tries to ascribe to these all the architectonics of the poetic art he is
treading on shoals and quicksands.
Mr. Eastman complains that the line-divisions of free verse
are arbitrary, that if they were once scrambled together in any poem even the
author could hardly unscramble them. But may one ask him what that alleged fact
has to do with the case? If this scrambling makes prose of any piece, then it
was always prose—as indeed much verse is, both bond and free. Would Hamlet's
soliloquy or Antony's death-speech be any the less poetry if written out as
prose, or if scrambled into irregular lines ? Is Lincoln's Gettysburg speech
any the less essentially poetry, in rhythm, structure, and spiritual motive,
because it happens to be printed without line- divisions ?
If the eye-test shatters Mr. Eastman's
arguments, the ear- test is similarly destructive. He says: if "two or
three of the most free and subtle" of the vers-librists were "to read
one of their favorite passages into the ear of an instrument, it is safe to
assert that there would be less identity in the actual pulsations recorded than
if the same two or three were reading a passage of highly wrought English
prose." Possibly; but if these same two or three were to read Paradise
Lost or the Ode to the West Wind, or any other poem of subtle or sweeping
cadences, there would be still less identity. Such investigations as Dr.
Patterson's (sensibly approved by Mr. Eastman and thoughtlessly disapproved, in
a recent Dial, by John Gould Fletcher) will turn the pitiless light of science
upon the empiricism of prosody, and upon the unrhythmic misinterpretations of
poetry which most readers are guilty of. A life-time of theatre-going,
including more Shakespeare and other poet-playwrights than may be found on the
stage today, has convinced me that ninety-nine per-cent of actors deliberately
hash poetic lines into prose so that even Mr. Eastman could hardly unscramble
them. And few poets, whatever their rhythmic instinct, may be trusted to read
their own poems.
In short, Mr. Eastman's argument will not hold water. It is
a wistful effort to give the sanctity of unalterable law to merely individual
theories and preferences. ( Mr. Eastman wants poetry as a refuge from life's
passion and turmoil, and he uses the great name of Poe as his authority—Poe, to
whom "a poem was an objective thing," Poe, who "would take
sounds and melodies of words almost actually into his hands, and carve and
model them until he had formed a beautiful vessel." Ah, but Poe's passion
was beauty, especially beauty as it is found in poetry, whereas Mr. Eastman's
passion is life, and its enhancement through social revolution. In politics and
social ethics he is a radical; but shocked conservatism must take refuge in
some sacred corner of one's being, and in his case the muse presides there with
draped and decorous dignity. ) H. M.
