To begin with, two hazards, one positive, one negative, made two decades apart from each other, and bookending the period that we think of as entailing modernism and high modernism. Shortly before his death in 1918, Guillaume Apollinaire, that most European and seminal of early modern poets, who straddled the nexus between symbolism and romanticism on the one hand, and modernism on the other, wrote, in a critical essay entitled LEsprit Nouveux et les Poetes, or The New Spirit and the Poets: The new spirit which is making itself heard strives above all to inherit from the classics a sounds good sense, a sure critical spirit, perspectives on the universe, and on the soul of man, and the sense of duty which lays bare our feelings and limits or rather contains their manifestations. It strives further to inherit from the romantics a curiosity which will incite it to explore all the domains suitable for furnishing literary subject matter which will permit life to be exalted in whatever form it occurs. It was Wyndham Lewis, that other seminal purveyor of modern art, who wandered Europe before world war one examining and studying the manifestations and outbursts of an incipient modernism everywhere, who announced on April 1, 1940 in the New Republic, The End of Abstract Art: When an art dies, there is no announcement in the newspapers, as in the case of the demise of an eminent citizen. So no one knows that it is dead. It is still spoken of as if it were alive and kicking. This article is a sort of obituary notice. It is written to announce the death of abstract art. At last the Cube, the Cone, the Cylinder are still forever. They will never again stalk the streets of Paris. The Equilateral Triangle has breathed its last. Bracques abstract bric-a-brac is fast becoming junk. The most amusing collage will fetch nothing in Europe. Brancusis Egg has gone to join the Dodos. But in all its forms--not only in its purest absolute--abstract art is no more. It is in vain to cite Picasso--his latest spawn is mere reflex action, from a lower center, that does not count any more than the stampede of the chicken after its head has been severed. A little kicking goes on, of a morning, in Monsieur Legers studio, no doubt (for he is still alive, of course). But all such activity today--however corrupt and involved with natural form--belongs to a movement that is dead. It just runs on for a while, here and there, the work of practitioners no longer young. But it always was, I am afraid, a bit of an automaton. Abstract art--the real article, the simon-pure--was a modest little affair, though it made a great stir at the time. It had no pretentious metaphysic. It sought to be a visual music--a perfectly respectable ambition--but it was classed (by Herr Hitler among other people) as a peculiarly decadent idea. Myself. I painted a number of abstract fugues, which nobody could understand, but which were in fact severely classical. Had this been revealed at the time there would have been a considerable scandal. People supposed these incomprehensible oddities to be so revolutionary and satanic that the thought of them kept them awake at night. So in our time the deradicalization process that has taken hold of the minds and spirits of our poets has become all but complete. Critics and commentators, who are largely and almost to a man beholden to academic interests and criteria of perception and assessment, fail to see or feel the spirit of poetry itself, that which is most important about poetry but least subject to the constrained demands of interpretation, or explanation. The poets themselves have by and large abdicated the responsibilities and duties of one who would seek to add poetry of lasting value to the contributions of the world and the word. They no longer read with the depth and breadth, or with the meticulous sensitivity got from wide and deep reading and a rich cultural inheritance, for our current culture is itself threadbare and thin on history and its own origins, a sense of existing not only in our own time, but with an equal respect for and knowledge of other times, past or future, and other cultures, present or possible; they are whipped and made docile by the exigencies of current mores and of the illustrious machine of cache awards and commercial publishers propagated by the creative writing boom--major publishers who, I might add, cannot even get very many people to buy, read, review, or even notice the poetry books that they publish, and rightly so, their contents being so execrable. Either that, or the younger poets turn (rebelliously and superiorly they imagine) in the direction of the so-called Avant Garde--which is, of course, from any truly enlightening viewpoint, not avant garde in the least, but weak and deteriorating reiterations of essentially insignificant [formal, technical and spiritual] discoveries which were all of them made or predicted or insinuated decades and decades ago by the first generation or two of modernists who in several of their exemplars saw all of the implications of modernism and postmodernism in a nutshell and as a single revelation invoked by the grand cataclysm of modern experience from its beginnings. Their dribblings pall, go nowhere, leave us nothing, and will be forgotten. For the true avant garde is, and always will be, the individual pursuit of knowledge and illuminated expression, which needs must be cognizant of and philosophically sensitive to the formal attributes of the world and history which constrain and thus release the particularities of perception and expression. The illuminated, individual perception and expression, whether realized in formal meters or in gibberish, is the only real avant garde. *** So what then of the future of poetry? The nature of the cosmos is old and secure, and the nature of life abiding, and abstractly cyclical, abstractions being obeisant to particulars, as particulars are to that which abides. The problems of poetry, and the nature of the poetic enterprise, are unchanging: and entirely subject to the exigencies of individual genius, acutely sensitive as it must be to the material and spiritual context of the world. The everyberrys nature doesnt change. Why would anyone suppose it had? Eight hazards pooled from the bottom of the well: There shall be these 8 conditions necessary for the creation of poetry of lasting value: It is first this that the poets are after: 1. (VISION AND PURSUIT) There is no extricating music from the rapidity and sensual subtlety of thought which at first incites the poetic pursuit, and later propagates it. One begins with that knowledge which is unexplained, inarticulate, and elusive, yet richly in touch with the issues of existence and its grand forbears. First and foremost the poet is possessed by genius. An explicable gift of vision and its corresponding collateral in emotion, inform her from the start, of the mysteries of the world which are set at the heart of the philosophers stone. Iona, setting about to make a parcel of truth, reduced her audience to the size of her own tears. The family table, with its hidden mysteries, must some way, whether negative or positive, set its mark on the son. The poet stands apart from all these, and sees though her own way, the fruit of her labours, but moreover--her own original instinct, divining mysteries where others are only conducted over them. It is she who will linger over a window, staring out at a wind or a tree or a hall, and fill them with the belief in a despair of nature, causing them to resurrect the idol of a triallumphiance. The private institution of the picnic has been lost, and with it an incunabula of world perspective. One would admit a certain symbolism to forests. The poet will feel in a vital instant in infancy the pull of a world view or a cosmic view that is archetypal, and it is this that we call genius: its expression in a perfect order privately realized. by the waters of Leman . . . What did Eliot mean when he wrote these words? He meant that he was dissatisfied with the state of intrigue and espionage that was ravaging Europe, performed for him by the image of the dead king of Bavaria Ludwig, whether or not less so by the image of the dead Archduke Rudolph (one would have to ask Marie), and by the unease with which any penholder must carve so unrelated an observation, the inexpressible fighting to be given voice in the piercing shrapnel of ironic dissociation. That he should permit himself to voice the conscience of God . . . The statement is oracular. And must pose, and, mark you, for its reader alone, the question of the divine. The infant prodigy knows the existence of other worlds, other existences, other knowledge. Thus it is the first excitement and yearning of the poetic genius to wish to give articulate, felt expression to that which remains unexpressed, that which is the poets burden, call it the word of God, or what you will. I seem to have already touched upon several of my types. No matter. To the proscribed naming-- But we are speaking of the poet. The condition that is elemental to poetry is meter, and its aural offbursts, color and tone, drama and idiom. The lasting poet must have a virtuoso familiarity with the elasticity and obedience of meter, in the great code of its many instances, as primeval as the beating of a brass band, as prime and primal as the white of mountain clouds. Eliot made great dodges, that were very modern, early on, by 1918, but they were never repeated, and our language has sunk dead in them, troubled by their dry bed of classical spleen. Returning to Masefield, we find his fusion of sense and diction impeccable. English has had a certain lax quality. Eliot has gone to the grave with his, resurrecting the bones of further silences. They are worshipping at the St. Apollinaire. One must have something to build on. The extraordinary license of a felt synthesis of experience. In order to bring vision to its greatest density and complexity, words must have plain dealing with truth, in order with all their other charges, and even at the fictive level, may it never be reached; and participate even as counters in the resurrection of Empire, whether of god or man. This is to say, in the fewest possible words, that they must be possessed of a world view, whether rehearsing the imageries of patronage, or cut from all but the vine, as in Samuel Beckett. The infant prodigy aspires to excess of riches, which upon maturing provide the foundation for infinite subtleties of claritas dictum. And in consternation with their art, they must attain to that highest aesthetic of spiritual integration, exemplified by the circular closing of sentences, the manner in which the best sentences close in upon themselves, attaining to a circularity of form which partakes of the crosscurrents of civilized and primitive thought, cosmic order and sensation. What the poet must possess is empathic imagination, the ability to project oneself into other situations, states of mind, private experience and historical epochs, inanimate objects, the mind of God . . . To read poetry with discerning eyes and a responsive pulse is to know the heart of these things. The poet must be possessed by deep memory, entirely personal as well as cultural. The new poetry will have to return to single moments of catastrophic emotional importance, whether they are so silent as to remain inconspicuous to undiscerning eyes. Freud said that anywhere he had gone, a poet had been there first. The world view of the poet must be reactionary, in the classical and cosmopolitan sense, and not in the currency of provincial and local slang. For the poet must lead us out of the bullrushes and into the promised land.
Posted on: Wed, 02 Apr 2014 02:51:32 +0000
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