Places and Persons
Strong, L. A. G.
Places and Persons THE NEW CONFESSIONAL By L. A. G. STRONG SOME time ago I undertook to edit, for a period of five years, an annual anthology of magazine verse. To do this I was obliged to...
...For an inquiry of this kind we are concerned less with the aesthetic quality of the verse than with its value as a reflection of life...
...we shall save time by first finding the most representative class...
...The first note was struck by the greatest of living poets, in a poem entitled Leda...
...The Leda poem did in fact precede the rest, but by a matter of days only, and it appeared in a Dublin periodical which had a small sale, and could not possibly have reached America in time to get up such widespread reverberations...
...I wonder...
...There should be, therefore, a case for verse, even before experience had put us on the track...
...His very quickness and his sensitive apprehension make him over-susceptible to the work of others...
...Ordinary egoism, then, spoils the majority of these biographical poems: and one may well ask why on earth so many poets light like this upon a type of subject for which they are not fitted...
...Once we have found that category which is typical of the mass, in the sense that it gives backbone to it, we shall have time to adjust other values afterwards...
...The Georgian cult of escape is discredited, but no definite movement has taken its place...
...scores of harmonies on that one recurrent note...
...The real trouble is that they cannot attain intellectual solitude...
...and it is character with which we are now concerned...
...Of practical politics he speaks no word at all...
...This is chiefly due to the difficulty of contributing verse to British magazines...
...But the novel must treat of life plausibly...
...The question, "Why do you and I love one another best...
...The writing of verse is as nearly disinterested as any modern activity can be...
...The same coincidence often happens with mechanical inventions...
...There is no echo in women's verse of flapperdom or petting parties...
...When a woman poet writes ill, it is generally because she never questions the validity of her feelings...
...In fact, this concern with the things they really need care about, as distinct from the things that leisured gifts find time to think about, is the real contribution of the women poets...
...The Irish poet is a fine craftsman, imposing upon passionate devotion to the past, or to the actual soil and granite of his country, a cold wrought-iron discipline in verse...
...It is not the largest numerically, but it constitutes the health of the body poetic...
...It is too much of a parlor game, played with subtle but infinitesimal variations, to tell us about contemporary England...
...If they are not sheep, then how is it that they flock to the same themes...
...Several score an Alpha minus...
...became "How can you and I love one another best...
...They descend in proportion as their work is vitiated by mimicry, insincerity, and sheer inexperience in the use of words...
...We do not ask at what altitude or with what weapon he encountered the one, nor how he overcame the divinity which hedges the other: we understand he has done all that man could ask, and we murmur our approval...
...The first discovery, when we look at the verse of these five years, is that every year a ruling interest, or idea, finds independent expression through a number of poets, both in America and Britain...
...We cannot assert as much: but many men of science are now saying that the poets are their surest allies, and the vehicle of the seer's utterance, the ancient speech of religion and of magic, seems historically the fittest to express the birthpangs of a newer order...
...In England minor poetry—Beta plus poetry—seems to have got into a backwater, and we can make little of it...
...The Alpha poets speculate, take their craft to task, and tend to use larger forms than have been the fashion...
...There are so very few of them that competition is keen, and the standard of surface accomplishment therefore higher...
...The standard is accordingly very high, and their representation in the five anthologies out of all proportion to their numbers...
...They differ from the Alpha class not so much in kind as in degree...
...I do not mean that sincerity is their monopoly...
...The rocks, the sea, the woods, that are cruel or indifferent to man: the prairie that defeats his effort, the flood that swamps his home...
...The least successful of the women poets are in intention as sincere as the best, because there are some subjects which every woman must take seriously...
...in the Beta pluses they total more than half, and below that grow speedily to the proportion of four to one...
...What each writes will be his own honest thought, but he did not find his own subject...
...And all, from Beta plus downward, write about the same subjects...
...and this short survey, if it is no more than a suggestion for future research, will not have been altogether beside the mark...
...Women write the worst poetry that our period can show, but that is because the particular women who write it have been badly educated...
...These poets never become deliberate imitators, nor adulterate their gifts, but their powers of appreciation are over-stimulated, and lead them to catch any note the leaders utter, and give it a personal echo...
...No infallibility is claimed for these figures, but they are reached after five years' study...
...One might suppose from this that the lead given by an Alpha class poet was eagerly caught up and developed by his followers, and that the case for conscious imitation was thereby proved...
...Freed from the logical restraints of prose, he writes emotionally, in undress...
...and thought finds ready utterance nowadays...
...Otherwise he is a violent satirist...
...In every case investigated, most of the similar poems appear almost simultaneously, and in both countries...
...it must convince...
...It would seem that ideas are infectious, and break through the world's consciousness in several places at once, like the eruptions that announce a disturbance under the earth...
...The Beta plus poets are sensitive, cultured, and intelligent: they care very much for poetry, are sincere, ambitious to write, and possess a considerable degree of skill...
...Will the confessional of verse reveal anything deeper...
...When a discovery is announced, other men are found to have been busy upon similar researches elsewhere, and the successful inventor has distanced them by days only...
...An almost incredible amount of verse is written, and it is largely the work of the younger generation, that fascinating source of copy, the mainstay of journalists and reformers...
...It was a year of "you and I" poems...
...From the poet we demand no such how and when and wherefore...
...There is no money in it...
...Poets will even pay for a hearing...
...In the highest class, women are rare...
...Furthermore, a man never gives himself away so completely as when he sits him down to write a poem...
...To do this I was obliged to read all periodicals, American and British, in which verse appeared: and all the experience of preparing the first issue made me consider, for the first time, the possibilities of verse as material for the historian...
...By others it was handled less explicitly, under the form of divine inspiration...
...There is a deal of "nature" poetry, the result of a cult perhaps, but a cult to which England is more prone than other countries...
...sometimes both...
...The Alpha women poets are almost all intellectual in their verse...
...The poets in this class are influenced by their betters and copied by those beneath them, and so, while scoring the biggest weight of decent achievement, they furnish a clue to all other categories, above or below...
...This would be a good augury for Ireland if poets were in the majority or held the reins...
...but the verse in itself is not a sufficient guide to the troubles of which it is a symptom...
...It is amazing how few writers handle these even decently well...
...The poet has only to convince us in the life of values, whereas from the novelist we demand facts and prices...
...The difference between male and female bad verse is the difference hitherto prevailing between male and female education...
...but the men, by the very fact of their wider range, and the byways they explore, have shown that their choice of subject is arbitrary and mental rather than a condition of their lives...
...We had an ambitious number of character sketches, which served to expose a deal of bad writing...
...Irish literary papers are even fewer...
...Indeed, in England there are a bare dozen outlets for the poet who aspires above the jingle of the popular magazines...
...though it is likely that the stronger and more active note in all women's verse, and particularly in the love poems, is its natural outcome...
...The war has left a dissatisfaction and restlessness which cannot escape the most casual reader...
...Thought outruns practice...
...The classes below are still valuable for our purposes, but less and less so...
...Even during the five years we are considering, women's love poetry has taken a larger share of initiative: not that the poet asserts herself aggressively, but that she regards love less and less as a thing which may or may not happen to her at masculine discretion...
...These are broad generalities, riddled with exceptions: yet with the average poets they hold good...
...Some classification we must have, and perhaps the best will be the scholastic method, Alpha plus, Alpha, Alpha minus, and so forth...
...If not, how comes it that their work expresses them so ill...
...There are plenty of other forms, but these are the favorites...
...Arraignments of civilization are evenly divided between the two: with the interesting difference that men are more allusive, referring constantly to golden ages or heroes of the past, whereas women think in terms of practical, present-day disease and remedy...
...They are, as a class, more serious than the men, and more sincere...
...Ordinary prose is the vehicle for all our practical transactions—law, medicine, advertising, the filling out of our taxation forms, the technical jargon of our daily lives...
...As regards national differences, the American poet is far more enterprising than the British...
...Let us take the five consecutive issues of my anthology and, even more important, the material from which their contents were selected...
...The most resolute of first-class gifts are needed nowadays to preserve a spirit uninfluenced by all that is written and said around it: and the Beta plus poet is here made the victim of his own good qualities...
...In form they fall under two main headings: a sort of sloppy free verse, written without any realization of the difficulties free verse entails ; and the sonnet...
...They are a fine, respectable, healthy class, growing annually in number, advancing steadily in level of accomplishment, yet definitely second-rate...
...but he has less polish and technical skill...
...The representative average poet, to sum up, is an honest and eager explorer of things spiritual and temporal, who has not been able to resist exposure to the discoveries of others...
...By "mere sensibility" is meant a sensitive response to life from a woman's angle...
...Unless his talent is definitely insular, he sells most of his verse to American editors...
...Therefore verse, freed from the necessity to be literally plausible, can give us a better guide to the inward life of its period than can the novel...
...As each issue of the anthology contained about a hundred poems, and for every poem included rather more than seventy were passed over, there will be plenty of matter for our investigation...
...The Beta class of women poets, recording their impressions of life as it affects the intelligent woman or girl of today, are the most helpful of all to our inquiry, for they write upon a far more concentrated range of subjects than the men, and from a more definite standpoint...
...We shall get help in answering this if we look back for a moment to the year of religious and philosophical poems...
...Many others expressed the idea in a pagan setting, many in a Christian...
...His verse shows nothing of the traditional fecklessness and pathos of his race, but often a cold fury, the scorn of an ambitious and dissatisfied intellect...
...The novel is deliberate, an exposition of everyday life as it is or as the writer would like it to be...
...Genuinely moved, she longs to record her emotion, and records it in whatever words come readiest to her mind...
...The Alpha class of poets is naturally small...
...We know something about their surface lives...
...It was inspired by no particular aspect of materialism, but by the more merciless qualities of life itself...
...His conflicts and secret ambitions rise to the surface...
...During this year there appeared a number of poems having for subject the impregnation of humanity by the divine...
...The woman writes rather out of her emotional and physical life, the man out of his journeys: she from what she is, and he from what he does...
...Nor do they express any sex prejudice, for as a rule the reasons which restrict women poets to the lower categories are more creditable to them as individuals than those which restrict the men...
...We acquire a sense of responsibility toward it, and this makes it a less sympathetic vehicle for the thoughts of our inward selves...
...For the moment we can exclude it from consideration...
...Henry Adams put the widest rim of his objective phase soon after 1920, after which man's consciousness was to turn inward to his spiritual resources, instead of outward to a civilization of apparatus...
...Even supposing that he has started to write spontaneously without reference to any other talent, his curiosity and his reading soon make him self-conscious...
...The lower categories need not keep us long...
...As a result there appear morasses of trite, pretty-pretty stuff few men would write, simply because there exist few men unsophisticated enough to feel sincere emotion upon such themes and to express it in such artless language...
...Women poets of the Beta plus class, on the other hand, represent the topmost rung of mere sensibility and womanly feeling, qualities which are the impulse of 90 percent of the women whose work appears in magazines...
...It may seem, then, so slender are our results, that the novel must give a better picture of our times than poetry...
...The themes are equally stereotyped...
...The Alpha poets have this sympathy, of course, but they add to it a degree of personal interpretation...
...Parenthood, whether from the mother's or father's point of view, is also entirely a feminine preoccupation...
...They are less content with their emotions...
...Does this dim, fragmentary remembering that we are vessels of the spirit, denote a first stirring of the new phase...
...sympathy rather than analysis...
...if so crude an illustration will serve...
...Can we take that year's verse as a sign of the spiritual revival so long prophesied...
...This idea is not a reaction to some great material happening, such as a war or an earthquake, but is abstract, a concentration of the poetic intelligence upon one of the main interests of life...
...When he says "I have slain an eagle and kissed a queen" we accept his claim at once...
...They want to say much the same things as the others, but are less successful...
...Therefore the novel is often a misleading guide to the life of its time, since its first business is to appear lifelike...
...There were numerous philosophical and religious poems of quality...
...it must give chapter and verse...
...The Beta class, then, is our standby...
...Nor is there any direct expression of their new economic independence...
...Apart from one or two lyric poets, they are sceptics, piercing the stuff of experience very deeply...
...The next issue developed this into the personal relationship of one human being to another...
...Their faults have some interest, as showing certain qualities and defects of mind, but on the whole they reveal no more than the daily chatter one hears in train or subway...
...how much unconscious patronage there is, and how many see a strange character not as himself or in relation to his own background, but merely in terms of difference from their own way of life...
...Next year the poets had become philosophers, and were engaged upon the interpretation of life...
...An examination of the dates at which the various poems appeared shows this to be impossible...
...To this class examiners would undoubtedly give the label Beta plus...
...The next year was one of biography pure and simple...
...They write first of all of love in all its aspects, and bring to its consideration a high seriousness and a deal of sense...
...In the first year, for example, the dominant note was a perception of nature's indifference to human purposes...
...The poetic differences between the sexes are many...
...how many make their subjects picturesque, or "quaint...
...Plenty d¥ men look upon marriage as a joyful and desirable event, but the only poems treating of marriage as a state come from women...
...Let us go ahead and find out what they say...
...Does this mean that they are second-rate human beings, with second-rate ambitions...
...Social events, treated indirectly in poems about their victims, interest more women than men...
Vol. 12 • August 1930 • No. 15
