The Future of English Poetry

I do not question that the closing up of the poetic field, the depending more and more completely for artistic effect upon an ‘effusion of natural sensibility’, will isolate the poet from his fellows. He will be tempted, in the pursuit of the symbol which illustrates his emotion, to draw farther and farther away from contact with the world. He will wrap his singing-robes not over his limbs only, but over his face, and treat his readers with exemplary disdain. We must be prepared, or our successors must, to find frequently revealed the kind of poet who not merely sees nothing superior to himself, but nothing except himself. I am not concerned to say that this will be unfortunate or blameworthy; the moralist of the future must attend to that. But I can believe that this unyielding and inscrutable attitude may produce some fine artistic effects. I can believe that both intensity and dignity may be gained by this sacrifice of the plainer human responsibilities, although I am not prepared to say at what loss of other qualities. It is clear that such a writer will not allow the public to dictate to him the nature or form of his lyric message, and he will have to depend for success entirely on the positive value of his verse.

The isolation of the poets of the future is likely to lead them to band themselves more closely together for mutual protection against the reasonable world. The mystery of verse is like other abstruse and recondite mysteries, – it strikes the ordinary fleshly man as absurd. The claim of the poet on human sympathy, if we regard it merely from the world’s standpoint, is gratuitous, vague, and silly. In an entirely sensible and well-conducted social system, what place will there be for the sorrows of Tasso and Byron, for the rage of Dante, for the misanthropy of Alfred de Vigny, for the perversity of Verlaine, for the rowdiness of Marlowe? – the higher the note of the lyre, the more ridiculous is the attitude of the lyrist, and the coarse public applauds the violence of Diogenes when he tramples on the pride of the poets with a greater pride than theirs. I cannot help thinking that this attitude of the sacred bard, maundering from the summit of his ivory tower, and hollowed out and made haggard by a kind of sublime moral neuralgia, will have to be abandoned as a relic of the dead romantic past. So far as it is preserved by the poets of the future it will be peculiar to those monasteries of song, those ‘little clans’, of which I am now about to speak as likely more and more to prevail.

In France, where the interest in poetry has, during the last generation, been far more keen and more abundant than anywhere else in the world, we already see a tendency to the formation of such experimental houses of song. There has been hitherto no great success attending any one of these bodies, which soon break up, but the effort to form them is perhaps instructive. I took considerable interest in the Abbaye de Creteil, which was a collectivist experiment of this kind. It was founded in October 1906, and it was dissolved in consequence of internal dissensions in January 1908. It was an attempt to create, in defiance of the public, in contemptuous disregard of established ‘literary opinion’, a sort of prosodical chapel or school of poetry. It was to be the active centre of energy for a new generation, and there were five founders, each of whom was highly ambitious to distinguish himself in verse. At Creteil there was a printing-press in a great park, so that the members should be altogether independent of the outside world. The poets were to cultivate the garden and keep house with the sale of the produce. When not at work, there were recitations, discussions, exhibitions of sketches, for they were mixed up with the latest vagaries of the Cubists and Post-impressionists.

This particular experiment lasted only fifteen months, and I cannot conscientiously say that I think it was in any way a success. No one among the abbatical founders of Creteil had, to be quite frank, any measure of talent in proportion to his daring. They were involved in vague and nebulous ideas, mixed up with what I am afraid I must call charlatans, the refuse and the wreckage of other arts. Yet I consider that it is interesting to note that the lay monks of Creteil were in a sense correct when they announced that they were performing ‘a heroic act’, an act symbolical of the way in which poetry would in the future disdainfully protect itself against the invasion of common sense, the dreadful impact of the sensual world. I think you will do well, if you wish to pursue the subject of our conjectural discourse, to keep your eye on this tendency to a poetical collectivism. We have not noticed much evidence of it yet in England, but it is beginning to stir a good deal in France and Italy. After all, the highest poetry is a mysterious thing, like the practices of the Society of Rosicrucians, of whom it was said, ‘Our House of the Holy Ghost, though a hundred thousand men should have looked upon it, is yet doomed to remain untouched, imperturbable, out of sight, and unrevealed to the whole godless world for ever.’ If I am sure of anything, it is that the Poets of the Future will look upon massive schemes of universal technical education, and such democratic reforms as those which are now occupying the enthusiasm and energy of our friend the Lord Chancellor, as peculiarly hateful expositions of the godlessness of a godless world.

To turn to another branch of our subject, it appears to me very likely that sexual love may cease to be the predominant theme in the lyrical poetry of the future. Erotic sentiment has perhaps unduly occupied the imaginative art of the past. In particular, the poets of the late nineteenth century were interested to excess in love. There was a sort of obsession of sex among them, as though life presented no other phenomenon worthy of the attention of the artist. All over Europe, with the various tincture of differing national habit and custom, this was the mark of the sophistication of the poets, sometimes delicately and craftily exhibited, but often, as in foreign examples which will easily occur to your memory, rankly, as with the tiresome persistence of a slightly stale perfume, an irritating odour of last night’s opopanax or vervain. And this is the one point, almost I think the only point, in which the rather absurd and certainly very noisy and hoydenish manifestoes of the so-called Futurists, led by M. Marinetti and his crew of iconoclasts, are worthy of our serious attention. It is a plank in their platform, you know, to banish eroticism, of the good kind and of the bad, from the practice of the future. I do not, to say the truth, find much help for the inquiry we have taken up to-day, in the manifestoes of these raucous young gentlemen, who, when they have succeeded in flinging the ruins of the leprous palaces of Venice into its small stinking canals, will find themselves hard put to it to build anything beautiful in the place of them. But in their reaction against ‘the eternal feminine’, they may, I think, very possibly be followed by the serious poets of the future.

Those who have watched rather closely the recent developments of poetry in England have been struck with the fact that it tends more and more in the direction of the dramatic, not necessarily in the form of what is known as pure drama, particularly adapted for representation to listening audiences behind the footlights, but in the increased study of life in its exhibitions of energy. This may seem to be inconsistent with the tendency, of which I spoke just now, to withdraw from the world itself, either into an egotistical isolation or into some cloistered association of more or less independent figures united only in a rebellious and contemptuous disdain of public opinion. But the inconsistency may very well be one solely in appearance. It may well happen that the avoidance of all companionship with the stereotyped social surfaces of life, the ignorance, – really, the happy and hieratic ignorance, – of what ‘people’, in the fussy sense, are supposed to be saying and doing, may actually help the poet to come more fruitfully and penetratingly to what lies under the surface, to what is essential and permanent and notable in the solid earth of human character. Hence, I think it not improbable that the poetry of the future may become more and more dramatic, although perhaps by a series of acts of definite creation, rather than as the result of observation, which will be left to the ever-increasing adroitness of the brilliant masters of our prose.

As a result of this obsession in creative drama, I suppose that we may expect to find in the poetry of the future a more steady hope for mankind than has up to the present time been exhibited. The result of an excessive observation of the startling facts of life, a work appropriate to the violent energy of realistic prose, has been a general exaggeration of the darker tints, an insistence on that prominence of what was called the ‘sub-fuse’ colours which art-critics of a century ago judged essential to sublimity in all art. In Continental literature, and particularly in the very latest Russian drama, this determination to see blackness and blackness only, to depict the ordinary scene of existence as a Valley of the Shadow of Despair, has been painfully frequent. In England we had a poet of considerable power, whose tragic figure crossed me in my youth, in whose work there is not a single gleam of hope or dignity for man; – I mean the unfortunate James Thompson, author of ‘The City of Dreadful Night’. I cannot but believe that the poetry of the future, being more deeply instructed, will insist less emphatically upon human failure and less savagely upon the revolt of man. I anticipate in the general tone of it an earnestness, a fullness of tribute to the noble passion of life, an utterance simple and direct. I believe that it will take as its theme the magnificence of the spectacle of Man’s successful fight with Nature, not the grotesque and squalid picturesqueness of his occasional defeat.

Your chairman has admirably said, in one of his charming essays, that ‘History may be abstract, science may be frankly inhuman, even art may be purely formal; but poetry must be full of human life’. This consideration, I think, may make us feel perfectly secure as to the ultimate maintenance of poetic expression. For humanity will always be with us, whatever changes may be introduced into our social system, whatever revolutions may occur in religion, in legality, in public order, or in the stratification of composite life. I confess the only atmosphere in which it is impossible for me to conceive of poetry as able to breathe would be one of complete and humdrum uniformity of existence, such as was dreamed of at one time, but I think is no longer so rigidly insisted on, by extreme socialistic reformers. As long as there is such variety of individual action possible as will give free scope to the energies and passions, the hopes and fears, of mankind, so long I think the element of plastic imagination will be found to insist on expression in the mode of formal art. It is quite possible that, as a result of extended knowledge and of the democratic instinct, a certain precipitant hardness of design, such as was presented in the nineteenth century by Tennyson in the blank verse lyrics in ‘The Princess’, by Browning in the more brilliant parts of ‘One Word More’, by Swinburne in his fulminating ‘Sapphics’, may be as little repeated as the analogous hardness of Dryden in ‘MacFlecknoe’ or the lapidary splendour of Gray in his ‘Odes’. I should rather look, at least in the immediate future, to a revival of the liquid ease of Chaucer or the soft redundancies of ‘The Faëry Queen’. The remarkable experiments of the Symbolists of twenty years ago, and their effect upon the whole body of French verse, lead me to expect a continuous movement in that direction.

It is difficult indeed to speak of the probable future of poetry without introducing the word Symbolism, over which there has raged so much windy warfare in the immediate past. I cannot help believing that the immense importance of this idea is one of the principal – perhaps the greatest discovery with regard to poetry which was made in the last generation. Symbols, among the ancient Greeks, were, if I mistake not, the signs by which the initiated worshippers of Ceres or Cybele recognized their mysterious unison of heart. A symbol is an indication of an object, in opposition to a direct description of the same; it arouses the idea of it in the awakened soul; rings a bell, for we may almost put it so, which at once rouses the spirit and reminds it of some special event or imminent service. The importance of making this the foremost feature of poetry is not new, although it may be said that we have only lately, and only partially, become aware of its value. But, really, if you will consider it, all that the Symbolists have been saying is involved in Bacon’s phrase that ‘poetry conforms the shows of things to the desires of the soul, instead of subjecting the soul to external things’.

There could never be presented a subject less calculated to be wound up with a rhetorical flourish or to close in pompous affirmation than that which I have so temerariously brought before you this afternoon. I hope that you will not think that your time has been wasted while we have touched, lightly and erratically, like birds on boughs, upon some of the probable or possible features of the poetry of the future. Whatever you, or I, or the wisest of professors, may predict on this theme of the unborn poets, we may be certain that there will of ours can ‘digest’. I began with the rococo image of a Pegasus, poised in the air, flashing and curvetting, petulantly refusing to alight on any expected spot. Let me return to it in closing, that I may suggest our only sage attitude to be one of always watching for his inevitable arrival, ready to put grateful lips to the waters of Hippocrene as soon as ever they bubble from the blow of his hoof.

hover in their restless headsOne thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,Which into words no virtueEDMUND GOSSE.

1

I here use the word ‘Poetry’ (as Wordsworth did) as opposed to the word ‘Prose’, and synonymous with metrical composition.