This is where it greats really weird, so bear with me.
By a quirk of fate, a book recently fell into my lap, which I have been perusing, somewhat nostalgically, with great delight—The Penguin Book of Lieder.
German Romantic poems with English translations—which also happen to be lyrics to music by some of the greatest composers the world has ever known.
Hundreds of ballads which seduce, whisper, moan, laugh. Which practice irony and subtlety. Tragedy softened by beauty, the wretched transformed into something more wretched—by art. The poet in every instance, no matter what the topic, faithful to a lullaby joy, bending over backwards to make the reader happy: life, a dream; a dream, a life; the real, a symbol; the symbol, real; death, living; sorrow, happy; poetry, poetry.
This book is a library of bliss, including everything but the music itself—which my smart phone provides. Goethe set to Mozart! Forgotten poets lending Schubert their words! Mahler and poetry! Heine and music! What a treasure trove! Achingly beautiful, tender, songs—and since German’s syllabic stress is so much like English (not to mention so many word/wort similarities) the music of the German poetry itself (especially fur mir who hast studied Deutsch a little in school)—are mine to ravish, besides the very competent, sometimes soaring, translations in English, by a German humanities and music scholar who landed in London in 1939.
But here’s where the beautiful dream ends and I return to my strident theme: the betrayal of poetry by the New Critics, by Ezra Pound, by T.S. Eliot (who nastily vituperated both Shelley and Poe, using his acumen in the service of low figures (F. Ford, A. Crowley, J. Quinn, E. Pound) allied with him—the pale, the exquisite, the sensitive T.S. Eliot!—in high-rent ambition, the sort of semi-secret ambition of rashness and prejudices—which tramples beauty and the good will of the world.
The paradigm is drawn by Robert Penn Warren, author of the textbook, Understanding Poetry, in his piece, “Pure and Impure Poetry,” published in John Crowe Ransom’s Kenyon Review in the late 1930s, that “low, dishonest decade” when Pound was in Italy, T.S. Eliot was warning us about the Jews, and everyone realized their happy and improving life was merely a pause between World War One and World War Two—Brahms wasn’t going to save civilization; industry and bombs were.
In that essay, Warren sneers at “pure poetry,” which the weak want, and with manly hands on hips, professor Warren has a good laugh at a little poem by Shelley, one that Poe had chosen for simple praise. Sometimes a poem is just tender and beautiful–and deserves simple praise. But not then! This was the 1930s. Romanticism, which attempted to make every part of a person’s life holy and beautiful, was beginning to fall terribly out of favor. The 1930s—even more rough and tumble than the 1920s. Men of importance, with sly propaganda ministers and half-starved armies at their side, had ever more important things to do. Edna St. Vincent Millay had to die. Poetry was now “difficult,” or it wasn’t really poetry. Poetry needed an institution and smart men. Difficult men. Impotence and gulags wanted nothing to do with happy Romanticism. The wretched and the “impure” was going to have its say, by God.
So here’s the thing. If one reads carefully the essays, articles, and speeches of Pound and Eliot (with Emerson, who knew Eliot’s grandfather at Harvard, the ghost, cheering them on—see Emerson’s racist, anglophile, Nietzschean “English Traits” —and I won’t go into the enmity between Emerson and Poe) one sees a harrowing purity of prejudice—Eliot and Pound were not just Anti-Semites. They hated everyone: the Third World, the Russians, the Poles, the Germans, never mind the English Romantics.
But their personal failings aside, what is more important (and tragic) is how immense their literary influence was, how narrow it was, and how like the sensibility of the 1930s it was, when the art of the Renaissance succumbed to Picasso, with Pollock just around the corner. How fast it all happened, just like World War Two. Beethoven became “Roll Over Beethoven” in the blink of an eye.
But Modernism had little to do with either Beethoven or Chuck Berry—Romanticism was poetry, was art itself. Modernism was pure energy, pure disruption, pure mockery, pure negativity, an absent presence, fleeting, still-born, anti-matter to whatever was coherent and good, the emptier, lonelier reaches at the edges of Romanticism, a purity of sickness and pain. (Pieces of Modernism can certainly be admired; what’s worse than what it is, is what Modernism dismissed.)
Here is why the Penguin Book of Lieder is such a godsend, as I wrestle with this theme of pure and impure poetry. The most important intellectual wrestling match since ancient times, perhaps: Modernism, stunningly triumphant—yet self-destructive, CIA-funded, obscure, v. Romanticism, defeated, not “cool,” still not trending—yet defining, with its ancient spirit, great art and accessible art.
Pound and Eliot deliberately ignored and dismissed a great deal, but here’s my insight: they ignored with glee (there may be a trivial exception, or two) the treasure that was German Romanticism. The whole Modernist thrust was French, (Villon for Pound, Corbiere for Eliot) not German, even though (as Poe, beloved of the French, pointed out) the French have no verse—none of that stress which unites German and English. (Sy-lab-i-fi-ca-tion says the Frenchman, Sy-lab-i-fi-CA-tion says the American the quickest way to make the point).
Who cares about a Goethe/Mozart song?
How convenient that the “free” verse revolution (and its inane children, such as the awkward crackpot, Charles Olson, or the army of flacid, pretentious poetasters which still overwhelm us today) steered clear of the clarion songs of German Romanticism, whose poetry fed remarkable musicians like Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, Wolf, Mahler, Hindemith.
Pure and Impure, as outlined by Robert Penn Warren, must be rejected.
Of course all sorts of eclectic poetry movements will emerge, and quickly perish, or hang on for some convenient reason (I can be bad and call myself a “poet!”) and poetry will always have many houses, but that doesn’t mean we should be completely ignorant about what has occurred over the last one hundred years, and be ignorant of what we need to do—as we escape from ephemeral art “movements,” and ask ourselves: What is poetry? Who are we?