A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry (ereader with android TXT) đ
- Author: Bliss Perry
- Performer: -
Book online «A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry (ereader with android TXT) đ». Author Bliss Perry
Now it is precisely this revelation of personality which gave zest, throughout the Romantic period, to the curiosity about the poetry of alien races. It will be remembered that Romanticism followed immediately upon a period of cosmopolitanism, and that it preceded that era of intense nationalism which came after the Napoleonic wars. Even in that intellectual âUnited States of Europe,â about 1750âwhen nationalistic differences were minimized, âenlightenmentâ was supreme and âpropria communia dicereâ was the literary mottoâthere was nevertheless a rapidly growing curiosity about races and literatures outside the charmed circle of Western Europe. It was the era of the Oriental tale, of Northern mythology. Then the poets of England, France and Germany began their fruitful interchange of inspiration. Walter Scott turned poet when he translated Burgerâs âLenore.â Goethe read Marloweâs Dr. Faustus. Wordsworth and Coleridge visited Germany not in search of general eighteenth-century âenlightenment,â but rather in quest of some peculiar revelation of truth and beauty. In the full tide of Romanticism, Protestant Germany sought inspiration in Italy and Spain, as Catholic France sought it in Germany and England. A new sense of race-values was evident in poetry. It may be seen in Southey, Moore, and Byron, in Hugoâs Les Orientales and in Leconte de Lisleâs Poïżœmes Barbares. Modern music has shown the same tendency: Strauss of Vienna writes waltzes in Arab rhythms, Grieg composes a Scotch symphony, Dvorïżœk writes an American national anthem utilizing negro melodies. As communication between races has grown easier, and the interest in race-characteristics more intense, it would be strange indeed if lovers of lyric poetry did not range far afield in their search for new complexities of lyric feeling.
8. The Explorerâs Pleasure
This explorerâs pleasure in discovering the lyrics of other races was never more keen than it is to-day. Every additional language that one learns, every new sojourn in a foreign country, enriches oneâs own capacity for sharing the lyric mood. It is impossible, of course, that any race or period should enter fully into the lyric impulses of another. Educated Englishmen have known their Horace for centuries, but it can be only a half-knowledge, delightful as it is. France and England, so near in miles, are still so far away in instinctive comprehension of each otherâs mode of poetical utterance! No two nations have minds of quite the same âfringe.â No man, however complete a linguist, has more than one real mother tongue, and it is only in oneâs mother tongue that a lyric sings with all its overtones. And nevertheless, life offers few purer pleasures than may be found in listening to the half-comprehended songs uttered by alien lips indeed, but from hearts that we know are like our own.
âThis moment yearning and thoughtful sitting alone,
It seems to me there are other men in other lands
yearning and thoughtful,
It seems to me I can look over and behold them in
Germany, Italy, France, Spain,
Or far, far away, in China, or in Russia or Japan,
talking other dialects,
And it seems to me if I could know those men I
should become attached to them as I do to
men in my own lands,
O I know we should be brethren and lovers,
I know I should be happy with them.â
9. A Test
If the reader is willing to test his own responsiveness, not to the alien voices, but to singers of his own blood in other epochs, let him now read aloudâor better, recite from memoryâthree of the best-known English poems: Miltonâs âLycidas,â Grayâs âElegyâ and Wordsworthâs âOde to Immortality.â The first was published in 1638, the second in 1751, and the third in 1817. Each is a âcentralâ utterance of a race, a period and an individual. Each is an open-air poem, written by a young Englishman; each is lyrical, elegiacâa song of mourning and of consolation. âLycidasâ is the last flawless music of the English Renaissance, an epitome of classical and pastoral convention, yet at once Christian, political and personal. Beneath the quiet perfection of Grayâs âElegyâ there is the undertone of passionate sympathy for obscure lives: passionate, but restrained. Wordsworth knows no restraint of form or feeling in his great âOdeâ; its germinal idea is absurd to logic, but not to the imagination. This elegy, like the others, is a âlyric cryâ of a man, an age, and a race; âencipheredâ like them, with all the cunning of which the artist was capable; and decipherable only to those who know the language of the English lyric.
There may be readers who find these immortal elegies wearisome, staled by repetition, spoiled by the critical glosses of generations of commentators. In that case, one may test his sense of race, period and personality by a single quatrain of Landor, who is surely not over-commented upon to-day:
âFrom you, Ianthe, little troubles pass
Like little ripples down a sunny river;
Your pleasures spring like daisies in the grass,
Cut down, and up again as blithe as ever.â
Find the classicist, the aristocrat, the Englishman, and the lover in that quatrain!
Or, if Landor seems too remote, turn to Amherst, Massachusetts, and read this amazing elegy in a country churchyard written by a New England recluse, Emily Dickinson:
âThis quiet Dust was Gentlemen and Ladies,
And Lads and Girls;
Was laughter and ability and sighing,
And frocks and curls.
This passive place a Summerâs nimble mansion,
Where Bloom and Bees
Fulfilled their Oriental Circuit,
Then ceased like these.â
THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE LYRIC
âAnd the same may be said of lust and anger and all the other
affections, of desire and pain and pleasure which are held to be
inseparable from every actionâin all of them poetry feeds and waters
the passions instead of withering and starving them; she lets them rule
instead of ruling them as they ought to be ruled, with a view to the
happiness and virtue of mankind.â
PLATOâS Republic, Book 10
âA man has no right to say to his own generation, turning quite away
from it, âBe damned!â It is the whole Past and the whole Future, this
same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very
wretched generation of ours.â
CARLYLE to EMERSON, August 29, 1842
Let us turn finally to some phases of the contemporary lyric. We shall not attempt the hazardous, not to say impossible venture of assessing the artistic value of living poets. âPoets are not to be ranked like collegians in a class list,â wrote the wise John Morley long ago. Certainly they cannot be ranked until their work is finished. Nor is it possible within the limits of this chapter to attempt, upon a smaller scale, anything like the task which has been performed so interestingly by books like Miss Lowellâs Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, Mr. Untermeyerâs New Era in American Poetry, Miss Wilkinsonâs New Voices, and Mr. Lowesâs Convention and Revolt. I wish rather to remind the reader, first, of the long-standing case against the lyric, a case which has been under trial in the court of critical opinion from Platoâs day to our own; and then to indicate, even more briefly, the lines of defence. It will be clear, as we proceed, that contemporary verse in America and England is illustrating certain general tendencies which not only sharpen the point of the old attack, but also hearten the spirit of the defenders of lyric poetry.
1. Platoâs Moralistic Objection
Nothing could be more timely, as a contribution to a critical battle which is just now being waged, [Footnote: See the Introduction and the closing chapter of Stuart P. Shermanâs Contemporary Literature. Holt, 1917.] than the passage from Platoâs Republic which furnishes the motto for the present chapter. It expresses one of those eternal verities which each generation must face as best it may: âPoetry feeds and waters the passions instead of withering and starving them; she lets them rule instead of ruling them.â âDid we not imply,â asks the Athenian Stranger in Platoâs Laws, âthat the poets are not always quite capable of knowing what is good or evil?â âThere is also,â says Socrates in the Phoedrus, âa third kind of madness, which is the possession of the Muses; this enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric and all other members.â This Platonic notion of lyric âinspirationâ and âpossessionâ permeates the immortal passage of the Ion:
âFor all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful
poems not as works of art, but because they are inspired and possessed.
And as the Corybantian revellers when they dance are not in their right
mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are
composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of
music and metre they are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens
who draw milk and honey from the rivers, when they are under the
influence of Dionysus, but not when they are in their right mind. And
the soul of the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves tell us;
for they tell us that they gather their strains from honied fountains
out of the gardens and dells of the Muses; thither, like the bees, they
wing their way. And this is true. For the poet is a light and winged and
holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired
and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has
not attained to this state, he is powerless and is to utter his oracles.
Many are the noble words in which poets speak of actions like your own
Words about Homer; but they do not speak of them by any rules of art:
only when they make that to which the Muse impels them are their
inventions inspired; and then one of them will make dithyrambs, another
hymns of praise, another choral strains, another epic or iambic
versesâand he who is good at one is not good at any other kind of
verse: for not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine. Had he
learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak not of one
theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the minds of poets,
and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy
prophets, in order that we who hear them may know that they speak not of
themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of
unconsciousness, but that God is the speaker, and that through them he
is conversing with us.â [Footnote: Platoâs Ion, Jowettâs translation.]
The other Platonic notion about poetry being âimitationâ colors the well-known section of the third book of the Republic, which warns against the influence of certain effeminate types of lyric harmony:
âI answered: Of the harmonies I know nothing, but I want to have one
warlike, which will sound the
Comments (0)