The question is a simple one—but it gets complex when we try to answer it.
If there is one thing which happened, beyond all else, to poetry, during the so-called revolution of Modernism in the early 20th century, it was this:
Poetry got less sentimental.
The Imagist movement (one of the little ‘movements’ inside the larger Modernist craze) said:
Just the Thing. No sweaty-palmed commentary, please.
This was very easy to understand, as easy to understand as the way poetry was introduced to me as a school boy. My class learned about (and simultaneously) learned to write—haiku. Creative Writing replaced English.
OK, fine. We’ll add an appreciation of haiku to our appreciation of Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Shelley, Poe, Tennyson, Browning, Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Wait a minute. No. The Modernists and the Imagists were fine. All those others had to go.
And this is how Modernism was like the French revolution. New was all. The guillotine was required.
What had to go?
Pure poetry.
The sneering sarcasm of Byron’s longer poems fit with the Modernist ideal.
But Byron—all of him—had to go, because Byron was born in the 18th century. Byron couldn’t be seen writing impure poetry because he wasn’t new. Byron was a Romantic—he was at the center of what had to be swept aside. It would take too much explaining to say, “we want to keep this part of Byron…” so the Modernist revolution just got rid of him.
The “old” poetry, according to the influential poet and critic from Tennessee, John Crowe Ransom, was a “compound” poetry—it consisted of two elements: morality—hidden by sweetness.
Modernism, however, had advanced beyond crude “compound” poetry and given us poetry which was pure—in the way ‘pure’ science and ‘pure’ poetry no longer have anything to do with each other—modern scientists don’t write treatises in verse.
The old “compound poetry” is sentimental poetry—it has a moral floating in it.
Modernism, almost everyone agrees, has advanced beyond this—morality nor sweetness, nor their too-obvious combination—none of this, belongs to Modernism—which separates out poetry from all the other pursuits: science, religion, advertising, law, history, architecture, painting. The example Ransom gives is Wallace Stevens. Poetry for the sake of poetry.
Of course this is crazy. Didn’t Stevens mix philosophy with his poetry? Doesn’t advertising use poetry? Wasn’t it Poe who argued for this kind of pure poetry (when at the same time Poe advanced scientific thinking as much as any writer)?
But let’s follow Ransom in his argument—he was, after all, perhaps Modernism’s greatest spokesmen.
Ransom, who was as savvy as his more European counterpart, Eliot, dumped Byron explicitly, in his 1938 essay on modern poets, “Poets Without Laurels:”
“…modern poets are quite capable of writing the old compound poetry, but they cannot bring themselves to do it; or rather, when they have composed it in unguarded moments, as modern poets still sometimes do, they are under the necessity of destroying it immediately.”
[they are under the necessity of destroying it immediately!!]
Ransom continues, “There is no baffling degree of virtuosity in the old lines,
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin, his control
Stops with the shore.
The modern poet can accomplish just as elegant a rumination as this; but thinks it would commit him to an anachronism, for this is the style an older period.”
I wonder if Ransom was aware that Ezra Pound used “thee” in his poems?
But “thee and thou” are natural anachronisms—they have nothing to do with this “compound” theory of Ransom’s—which bar the modern bard from Byron forever.
Why was Byron out?
Is it the fact that Byron is speaking directly to the ocean? Is the address too oratorical? Is Byron not allowed to do that? But perhaps Byron is saying it in a whisper, to himself—he’s not really addressing the dark blue Ocean; he’s uttering a simple observation under his breath, making an observation to himself. What is wrong with that? The idea that the ocean is less marred by humans than the land: is this idea not itself allowed? (Poe, who sometimes admired Byron and sometimes did not, would agree—poets should not lecture too much.) Ransom, however, doesn’t say; he only really wants to tel us that Byron is archaic.
Surely Ransom is not saying we can’t still be influenced and inspired by Byron? He doesn’t dare say as much. It’s not really clear what Ransom is saying—except to put signs up around the Romantics which say “Keep Out.”
Byron is roughly 100 years younger than Ransom.
A 30 year old poet—today—is 100 years younger than Pound, Eliot, Williams, Frost—and Ransom.
Let’s let Ransom finish his thought on why “we” can’t write like Byron anymore:
“In that period, though it was a comparatively late one, and though this poet thought he was in advance of it, the prophets of society were still numbering and tuning their valuable reflections before they saw fit to release them; and morality, philosophy, religion, science, and art could still meet comfortably in one joint expression, though perhaps not with the same distinction they might have gained if they had had their pure and several expressions. A passage of Byron’s if sprung upon an unsuspecting modern would be felt immediately as “dating;” it would be felt as something that did very well for those dark ages before the modern mind achieved its own disintegration and perfected its faculties serially.”
Ransom refuses to discuss the Byron passage itself—as he and his New Critics insisted over and over again we ought to do. He merely continues to hammer home in a vague manner (“the prophets of society were still numbering and tuning their valuable reflections before they saw fit to release them…” ??) that Byron is lost to us, and he belongs, with all his irreverent swagger and wit, to “those dark ages.”
Writing in another essay, “Criticism, Inc.,” Ransom said reading Chaucer is 95% “linguistics and history” and 5% “aesthetic and critical.” Are we to assume that a “thee” in Byron—or Pound—blocks all aesthetic pleasure? Are “aesthetic” and “critical” joined in a kind of “pure” and valid appreciation of poetry? So many questions.
Robert Penn Warren, too, was one of the High Priests of Modernism. He co-wrote a school textbook, (with a fellow New Critic,) Understanding Poetry, which successfully went through 4 editions from the 1930s to the 1970s. (Scarriet has written a great deal on this subject.) RP Warren writes the following in his 1942 essay, “Pure and Impure Poetry:”
“Poetry wants to be pure, but poems do not.”
Like Ransom, Warren (his colleague) wrestles with the idea of “poetic purity.” They are very much in the wake of Poe, in this regard (who they practiced, as good moderns, not to like): Before we write poetry, what is it?
Ransom’s point made in the 30s was that modern poetry was “pure” in terms of division-of-labor—poetry no longer supported science, philosophy and religion—poetry was “modern,” meaning it was specialized. The Modernist poet is resigned to “purity,” or, we might put it this way: to ‘think small.’
Robert Penn Warren comes at the problem with very different terminology—modern poetry is “impure,” and this is what marks it as modern. But just as Ransom rejects all of Byron with one “blue Ocean” quote, Warren demolishes Shelley by comparing a short lyric, Shelley’s beautiful “The Indian Serenade,” to the more wide-ranging garden scene in a play by Shakespeare—his Romeo and Juliet.
The reasoning is somewhat different, but the result is the same: Romantics Poets, go home!
Let’s give Warren a chance to make his case, because like Eliot and Warren (and unlike Pound, who was more or less a crank) Warren is wrong-headed, (like all the Modernists) and yet persistent and even brilliant:
“Poetry wants to be pure, but poems do not. At least, most of them do not want to be too pure. The poems want to give us poetry, which is pure, and the elements of a poem, in so far as it is a good poem, will work together toward that end, but many of the elements, taken in themselves, may actually seem to contradict that end, or be neutral toward the achieving of that end. Are we then to conclude that, because neutral or recalcitrant elements appear in poems, even in poems called great, these elements are simply an index to human frailty, that in a perfect world there would be no dross in poems which would, then, be perfectly pure? No, it does not seem to be merely the fault of our world, for the poems include, deliberately, more of the so-called dross than would appear necessary. They are not even as pure as they might be in this imperfect world. They mar themselves with cacophonies, jagged rhythms, ugly words and ugly thoughts, colloquialisms, cliches, sterile technical terms, head work and argument, self-contradictions, clevernesses, irony, realism—all things which call us back to the world of prose and imperfection.”
This soaring passage, a paean to cacophony and dross, by a prominent New Critic, co-author of the college textbook, Understanding Poetry, which every student was exposed to from the late 1930s across the 20th century, destroys, once and for all, any notion that the “conservative” New Critics opposed the poets of Donald Allen’s New American Poetry anthology (1960).
This duality is a myth. The New Critics, despite their tweedy exterior, fell into ecstasy in the woods all the time when no one was looking.
Pound, Williams, Olson, and the entire nexus of post-modern poetry was the Frankenstein monster of Dr. Frankenstein—a Fugitive and New Critic who attended Vanderbilt. There was no opposition. The only opposition is between Poe/19th century and Pound/20th century. There is no other.
Either elements of a poem effectively work toward the end of that poem—or they do not. Poe or Pound. You must choose. ( The 20th century may slide “backwards” occasionally).
But let Professor Warren talk. (I am not sure how many times he says “nature conspires,” but it is somewhat bizarre.) In a moment of exciting critical acumen, Warren highlights Juliet rejecting Romeo’s moon metaphor (representing the old poetry) amidst “recalcitrant elements” (characters) who pull against Romeo in Shakespeare’s play. However, these competing “elements” in Romeo and Juliet certainly do not represent a “cacophony.” Further, Warren, it seems to me, unfairly raises the bar for Shelley’s lyric—so that a brief poem by Shelley is forced to compete with Shakespeare’s play. Professor Warren resumes where we left off:
“Sometimes a poet will reflect on this state of affairs, and grieve. He will decide that he, at least, will try to make one poem as pure as possible. So he writes:
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.
We know the famous garden. We know how all nature conspires here to express the purity of the moment: how the milk-white peacock glimmers like a ghost…
And we know another poet and another garden. Or perhaps it is the same garden, after all:
I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low
And the stars are shining bright.
I arise from dreams of thee,
And a spirit in my feet
Hath led me — who knows how?
To thy chamber window, Sweet!
We remember how, again, all nature conspires, how the wandering airs “faint,” how the Champak’s odors “pine,” how the nightingale’s complaint “dies upon her heart,” as the lover will die upon the beloved’s heart. Nature here strains out of nature, it wants to be called by another name, it wants to spiritualize itself by calling itself another name. How does the lover get to the chamber window? He refuses to say how, in his semi-somnambulistic daze, he got there. He blames, he says, a “spirit in my feet,” and hastens to disavow any knowledge of how this spirit operates. In any case, he arrives at the chamber window.”
I find it interesting to note how Warren, the New Critic, is going against the New Critic’s creed here: he is attempting to paraphrase Shelley’s half-quoted poem, (never paraphrase! the New critics say) and by doing so (it seems intentional) Warren here becomes the grumpy, old-fashioned, condescending critic all young poets fear.
Shelley “refuses to say…” (!!) Shelley “blames…a ‘spirit in my feet,’ and hastens to disavow any knowledge of how this spirit operates.” (!!) Maybe that’s the point? The “spirit” doesn’t “operate.” It is the soul and body (“spirit in my feet”) blending. Warren displays a great deal of impatience. Warren, in a semi-exasperated state, now breaks into a condescending grin, as he continues, but now he will introduce Shakespeare:
“In any case, he arrives at the chamber window. Subsequent events and the lover’s reaction to them are somewhat hazy. We only know that the lover, who faints and fails at the opening of the last stanza, and who asks to be lifted from the grass by a more enterprising beloved, is in a condition of delectable passivity, in which distinctions blur out in the “purity” of the moment.
Let us turn to another garden. The place: Verona; the time: a summer night, with full moon. The lover speaks:
“But soft! what light thru yonder window breaks?
It is the east…
But we know the rest, and know that this garden, in which nature for the moment conspires again with the lover, is the most famous of them all, for the scene is justly admired for the purity of its effect, for giving us the very essence of young, untarnished love. Nature conspires beneficently here, but we may chance to remember that beyond the garden wall strolls Mercutio, who can celebrate Queen Mab, but who is always aware that nature has other names as well as the names the pure poets and pure lovers put upon her. And we remember that Mercutio outside the wall, has just said:
…’twould anger him
To raise a spirit in his mistress’s circle
Of some strange nature, letting it there stand
Till she had laid it and conjured it down.
Mercutio has made a joke, a bawdy joke. This is bad enough, but worse, he has made his joke witty and, worst of all, intellectually complicated in its form. Realism, wit, intellectual complication—these are enemies of the garden purity.”
Warren is protesting too much. Intellectually complicated? Realism? It’s just a bawdy joke. Or—and we can see this even as an amateur—it can be read without the bawdiness. Shakespeare, the genius, surely knows this. It is the kind of wordplay which some find overbearing in Shakespeare. To call it “intellectually complicated in its form” is high-sounding and empty; it doesn’t really identify what Mercutio’s speech actually is, or what it’s doing in terms of poetry. It’s almost as if Warren is yelling, “Mercutio has a big dong!” No, professor Warren, “intellectually complicated in its form” doesn’t, by necessity, mean bawdy punning. Warren continues:
“But the poet has not only let us see Mercutio outside the garden wall. Within the garden itself, when the lover invokes nature, when he spiritualizes and innocently trusts her, he says
Lady by yonder blessed moon I swear,
The lady herself replies,
O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb.
The lady distrusts “pure” poems, nature spiritualized into forgetfulness. She has, as it were, a rigorous taste in metaphor, too. She brings a logical criticism to bear on the metaphor which is too easy; the metaphor must prove itself to her, must be willing to subject itself to scrutiny beyond the moment’s enthusiasm. She injects the impurity of an intellectual style into the lover’s pure poem.”
There’s a couple of problems with this. Shakespeare’s play is being witty, not the characters themselves. Romeo has used a metaphor in a vow and Juliet is merely chiding him by drawing one of her own. This has nothing to do with the triumph of the “impurity of an intellectual style” over “purity.” Elements either harmonize, or they don’t. Shakespeare makes them harmonize in his play. Shelley makes them harmonize in his lyric. Warren is splendid at recording and organizing observations—but what exactly his ideas are, and where they are going, is sometimes hard to tell. But, in this case, it is palpably easy. Warren is trying to set up some kind of out-of-context contest between Mercutio and Shelley—to make the Romantics seems shallow and humorless, to make the Romantics seem, in a word, sentimental. Warren continues:
“And we must not forget the voice of the nurse, who calls from within, a voice which, we discover, is the voice of expediency, of half-measures, of the view that circumstances alter cases—the voice of prose and imperfection.
It is time to ask ourselves if the celebrated poetry of this scene, which as poetry is pure, exists despite the impurities of the total composition, if the effect would be more purely poetic were the nurse and Mercutio absent and the lady a more sympathetic critic of pure poems. I do not think so. The effect might even be more vulnerable poetically if the impurities were purged away. Mercutio, the lady, and the nurse are critics of the lover, who believes in pure poems, but perhaps they are necessary. Perhaps the lover can only be accepted in their context. The poet seems to say, “I know the worst that can be said on this subject, and I am giving fair warning. Read at your own risk.” So the poetry arises from a recalcitrant and contradictory context.
Let us return to one of the other gardens, in which there is no Mercutio or nurse, and in which the lady is more sympathetic. Let us mar its purity by installing Mercutio in the shrubbery, from which the poet was so careful to banish him. You can hear his comment when the lover says:
And a spirit in my feet
Hath led me—who knows how?
To thy chamber window, Sweet!
And we can guess what the wicked tongue would have to say in response to the last stanza.
It may be that the poet should have made his peace with Mercutio, and have appealed to his better nature. For Mercutio seems to be glad to cooperate with a poet. But he must be invited; otherwise, he is apt to show a streak of merry vindictiveness about the finished product. Poems are vulnerable enough at best. Bright reason mocks them like bright sun from a wintry sky. They are easily left naked to laughter when leaves fall in the garden and the cold winds come. Therefore, they need all the friends they can get, and Mercutio, who is an ally of reason and who himself is given to mocking laughter, is a good friend for a poem to have.”
Shakespeare is a great playwright—no one would argue with this. But will installing Mercutio in the shrubbery of Shelley’s poem improve Shelley’s poem? Is mocking laughter always closer to reason than sorrow? Do cold winds always produce laughter?
Warren has placed shame in the garden. He gives to Romanticism, in the form of a beautiful and magnificent lyric by Shelley, a designation, a false designation, and then, at some length, devalues that designation. Ransom did the same thing.
Poetry is only as good as our thoughts about it (Warren is right about one thing: poetry is “vulnerable”) What we think about something—for a minute—becomes the way we think about it for a hundred years.
What always matters is what the poem is doing and how the parts harmonize to do it. Poetry is not necessarily improved by adding the “merry vindictiveness” of “intellectually complicated form” as personified by a Mercutio hiding in the shrubbery. The critic should know that it all depends.
Mercutio will ruin a poem, even a poem by Robert Penn Warren (the only writer to win Pulitzers for poetry and fiction) and countless others. Are you Shakespeare? Are you writing a play? OK, maybe bring Mercutio in. As a supporting actor.
But don’t write cultural bromide as an advertised New Critic and pretend it is literary criticism as you claim the “intellectual” high ground with the installation of Mercutio into a Shelley poem.
Harmony is the soul of art. One either understands this or fails.
Romanticism—and Victorian poetry in its wake, was cast aside by Modernism in precisely the emotional and intellectual manner exhibited in the Robert Penn Warren essay just quoted. These were the men (Warren, Ransom, Allen Tate, WC Williams, Pound, together with the next generation led by Robert Lowell) who won the prizes, wrote the school textbooks, published the essays, commandeered the “school government ship” which invaded both city and suburb, where Edward Arlington Robinson conversation languished quaintly in handsome and dead-quiet libraries. Ashbery studied Warren at Harvard. Ginsberg studied Warren at Columbia.
Mercutio, for a few exciting moments in the mid-20th century, did become Poetry.
But Modernism itself only seemed to triumph. It didn’t really. Byron was read less. But “old” Shakespeare proved popular—even ubiquitous—in college stage productions. Ransom, Warren, or Eliot and the next generation, John Berryman, for instance, would, as old men, read their poems on campus to medium sized audiences—and it was difficult to tell whether the undergraduates in the back were laughing at them or not.
Mercutio is a funny drink. It disables as much as it amuses.
And did modern poetry, in the end, become less sentimental than Shelley? Did modern poetry finally triumph, intellectually, because it wanted less to do with Shelley and Byron?
Not really. Not at all. Shelley seems art, not sentiment, when compared to many modern poems.
But let’s admit it. Shelley is sentimental, as Warren went out of his way, splendidly, to prove.
Byron encouraged the “blue ocean” to “roll,” and, according to the insouciant, modern, manner and common sense of John Ransom (b 1888), modern poetry should have nothing too much resembling the hyper-sentimentality of Byron.
But isn’t all poetry, finally, sentimental?
At least in the sense that poetry is “vulnerable,” as Robert Penn Warren so aptly described it? Therefore, as Warren put it, poetry needs the “wicked” Mercutio as a friend. It needs to listen to the old nurse and her wisdom, and listen to the beloved—whose scrutiny questions the metaphor of its vow. Yes, no doubt.
But unpack as many elements as you wish, it must all finally be rolled back into the dramatic product, or poem, and live or die as that singular and artificial thing—Shelley, Shakespeare or Ashbery—before a sentimental audience, living in a form which is finally a sentimental, vulnerable thing—because it was written by a human being, and not by a machine.
James Wright studied with John Ransom at Kenyon (where no doubt Byron was beaten out of him). Wright won the Pulitzer, as did his son, Franz. This is considered his most beloved poem. People were swooning and cooing over it on FB (“this is my favorite poem of all time!”) just the other day. It was published in 1961.
The Blessing
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
This is “pony love” as perhaps never experienced before—or since. And what can happen “just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota” but that someone—who compares lonely and loving ponies to “wet swans”—will “suddenly” feel, were they to step out of their “body,” that they would “break into blossom?” You may like this. And it is perfectly fine if you do. Ransom, who taught Wright at Kenyon on the GI Bill, surely felt sincerely proud for his ex-student. James Wright must have felt deeply happy and proud that he wrote and published this poem.
You may consider yourself an arbiter of taste yourself.
But if you like this poem, and feel that, in its way, it is a perfection of the modern style, kindly do not call the Romantics—Shelley, Byron, Poe—or even those women Victorian poets who are forgotten, “sentimental” again.