MODERN VERSE.

Press, Volume LXVII, Issue 20174, 28 February 1931, Page 13

MODERN VERSE.

FORM AND MEMORY, (SFECIALL? WRITTEN FOB THE PttESS.) [By Citeano.] Generalisations are sometimes very annoying things. Just as you are most sure of what you are writing doubt comes cranking i% exceptions come leaping to your mind, you start "hedging,'* and tho force of style that you hoped to achieve eludes you. And when you read generalisations you long to meot the writer, so that you might cram the contrary down his throat. I thought this recently when I read an article in "The Author" by Alida Klemantaski Monro (who, I suppose, is a woman; Why aren't names more explicit?) on the poetry of yesterday and to-day. Miss Monro (such X will presume her to be) says it appears to "us" that one of the most salient features of the arts in tho nineteenth century was disguise. "To a great extent this disguise or misrepresentation was due to a desire to look on tho 'brighter* side of things. Men had to be Convinced that they Wore definitely moving from tho 'lowly to sublime.'" They were, so to speak, in a dark tunnel, but they .looked forward to the light they know must shine at the end, and even, convinced themselves that the light was flooding inwards. Tho. present generation can* not see any light,' before or behind. "What pleases ono generation annoys another. This hearty rebellion keeps poetry alive." (Which is true enough.) The nineteenth century, she says,, saw tho moon as a "dying lady lean and pale," or felt its "opiate'? effects, whereas the twentieth century sees "a sour cream moon." Tho nineteenth century believed in tho immortality of tho soul:

l'ho wish that of the living whole No life may fail beyond tho grave, Derives it not from what wo have The likest God within tha soul? But the twentieth affirms: Their eottls are naphtha lamps, Guttering in an odour of cariouo teeth, And I dio with them. By this time I was almost on my foot in protest. I thought of Swinburne's paganism, pretty bleak at times, which does not give much promise of immortality. "The supreme evil, God." I thought of Matthew Arnold's padnesa, and wondered how much faith ho hod in immortality. I thought of Fitzgerald's version of Omar. Not much of the conventional '"brighter" side of tilings there, do you think f I thought of the "winter words" of Thdmas Hardy. I even thought of some of the darker phases of Tennyson. "What is it all but a trouble of ants in the gleam of s million million of buss"? Mr Chesterton had some incisive remarks to make the other day about the people who imagined that because Browning, for dramatic purpose*, made a factory girl on a holiday sing k song about God being in His Heaven and all being right with the world, thi3 was Browning's philosophy of lifo. What about Caliban in the same Browning! -

Saith Be. is terrible: watch Qis feats in ■■■ proof! ( - ' ' One hurricane -will spoil six good months' hop».; Yes, generalisations are dangerous things. A ' But Misa jVfonra immediately switched me off on another lino of thought. Feeling, no (d<rubt, that tho ugliness of tho line about carions teeth had to be -.justified, she says that the modernists | "have determined to let no froth ' of fashionable metaphor eopio between I their minds and their Poetry I "hod to be stripped that we may. see ! how modern dross her." Then 1 in proof Miss Monro asks 119 whether [ the following lines by the much admired % B. Eliot "are not fit to rqnk , with any written by any poet of hny' , age." !' , April is 'the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs oat of thft- dead land, mixing ■ Memory and deajro, atirnng Dull roots with spring rain. 1 ; "Wintdr lunt us warm, covering < . Qsrth in forttotful emw, feeding A little lifs with dried tubers.

I adaa, and I hope thousands with mo, -to eptor an empjiatio "No"J Shores of Matthew Arnold and the touchstones of the "world's great verse that he bado va kgep in our minds! This halting with its final suggestion of the gigtktQ market, the equal of/well, you waKg your' choice. It is these qualities', says Miss Monro, that Have reinstated Jpofltry with the reading public. Have thejrf I wonder what ate Mr Eliot's gale? compared with those of Mr Mase-, field ed Mr do la Mare, boljh of whom keep to the tradition of singing verso. -This raised another question in my njiad/' Do admirers'of modernist poetry regntghber {hey feadf I am not condOmirfng free Verse wholly, br. f hayo wondered from time to tiipo vhetbgr 'it'lingers in the mind liko the old. favourites and is recalled front time to time' as a mental occupation, a delight, -and a sola to. I find that.it does apt, ■ bijt of courso my case may be exceptional. I find that a great deal of modern verse, free' and otherwise, goes in at ope par &nd conjes out at the other., (YosJ I know tho fatuous retort.) There is Mr Humbert Wolfe, for instance. . His ''Requiem" scans and rhymes, yet when I had road ,it I bad but tho fuzziest idea of wt&t it was about. Is it a matter of. too ipuph intellect, of over elaboration in; which simplicity is missed! How many lovers, of poetry remember verse dene in'tfoo freer technique of to-day? Do admirers of the modernists solace thempelVea on spring mornings or summer, evenings with thoughts of teeth and tubers P

Now you 'wnlion it, Of course, ijs like a mouth mhown to ft dentist, «nd I never noticed ji littjia thing , !jko that, , That, I hasten to add, is not tm original, but a parody. But do ad' miters repicmber the looser forms of to-' day and tepeat them with zeat! I ■would like to tnow. I even wonder whether much of "The Testament of Beauty" remainq definite in the mind. Will men qpote lines of'it as easily as they quote Tennyson' and Wordsworth. ,That, no doubt, will be for genera- 1 tions yet unborn to say, even more thanfor this; but, I think r)}yme and the traditional (ringing quality help vqry, materially to plant pQetry in oup hearts,' and will always have that "power. i -- N mrnmrnimmmmmmmmmmmJJmmm

'The "New Statesman's" brief review of Mr Aldous Hhjxley's recent pampftlefc on "Vulgarity in Litera.ttire" has an agreeable asperity: " Mr Huxley's efforts to doflna vulgarity, in life op in JStomMire, ars so pitiful tliikt wo <(? el inpli4o4 W b9IP W»>». Vulgarity ifl art is of eipfßSgibHj etnoljon t no of IstAtement can redeem a book from ti)*t ha* oerarrnd, and "PpSnjt, Gaunter Palpt" !« JijtrinPicaUy At vufear *s "The borrow# of Satan." Thiir essay contains much entertainjnent and sound sense, hilt, is fesndicappoad by Mr Huxley's genuine inability to detect vulgarity except at ffe n4ff 9W9 b ?> For instance, it is most obvions in Poe and jn Diokens, but Is l»y no ,tneans «t its' w6rst even in POe, as any student Of poetry 'Should xealise -when bo remembers what John Keats «o«»ld sink to. The only vulgarity ttat matters is q£ the pnaj-ac-' tir an# spirit, apd from that Dickens and 1 Poe are frAe, while "too many authors, tn-i Oient and modern, of uwjuMtiwied |