Notes on the Modern Period - 15 - War and the modern imagination

Before I turn to modern fiction and music, I want to write something more about the impact of World War One on modern literature, and particularly poetry. Of course, Eliot’s work – not least “The Wasteland” – and Yeats’ works resonate with the effect of the war and the effort to understand its impact: “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold; / …The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” and “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” The writers who fought or served at the front in the Great War – “the War Poets” – focus much of their work on it. Their writing testifies to their contact with the immense wave of the violence which swept across their lives, for some to end them. These writers include Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and Isaac Rosenberg, all of whom died in the war, and those who survived: Siegfried Sassoon, Ivor Gurney, and David Jones (among others - for example, Hemingway and Cummings). Conventions of ancient classical lyrics are adopted by some of them – paeans to the heroic dead, for example in Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” (written in the first months of the war), or acknowledgements of the equality of suffering in both opposing armies, for example in Wilfred Owens’ “Strange Meeting” (written later in the war), or bitterly realistic evocations of slaughter, for example in Siegfried Sassoon’s “Attack.” The adoption of partly Homeric gestures gives form to the soldier-poets’ sensation that they were experiencing something ancient akin to the origins of human combat, a sort of primal violence and contact with death. [As we'll see in a later post, some modern novels create characters which present an image of and contact with that primal violence.]

Wilfred Owen’s poems present the reader with just that sensation, and frequently they do so by explicitly evoking the ancient world. The Old Testament’s story of the sacrifice of Isaac becomes the premise of “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young,” at the end of which “Abram…slew his son, / And half the seed of Europe, one by one.” Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est” implores the reader to reject the ancient Roman tag: “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / pro patria mori” – it is sweet and proper to die for one’s country. The rest of the poem renders with blunt, modernist immediacy the viewpoint of the soldier in the trenches: the desperate provisional community (“Gas! Gas! Quick, Boys!”), the dream-like disorientation (“As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. // In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning”), and the raw confrontation of the reader to make him or her “see” and hear (“If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, / Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud / Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues”), leading to the critical indictment of the Latin cliché. (There is Jon Silkin’s fine anthology of these poets: THE PENGUIN BOOK OF FIRST WORLD WAR POETRY ( Penguin Modern Classics ).

That Latin cliché also appears in Ezra Pound’s equally bitter fourth poem in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” but the stamp of rhymed iambic pentameter has practically vanished here, for Pound’s pithy, flexible line has no need for the sort of control that a front-line soldier might rely on to be able to speak at all. That desperately maintained balance has been replaced by Pound’s outpouring of incantatory repetition and fragmenting rage: “Dies some, pro patria, / non “dulce” non “et décor” . . . / walked eye-deep in hell / believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving / came home, home to a lie / home to many deceits, / home to old lies and new infamy; / usury age-old and age-thick / and liars in public places.” Pound’s poetry develops the modern qualities evident already in Owen’s further in the direction of experiment, but he accompanies his fine ear for allusion and his insightful eye with a ranting invective, a release from reason, which makes Pound an ambassador from the zone of modern, unleashed chaos.

Two works portray the experience and achievement of the War Poets with particular brilliance. One is Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, with its acuity about their poetic achievements and its depth of understanding about their war experience and the process of finding language in the face of those experiences. The other book is a powerful novel by Pat Barker, Regeneration, the first novel of a trilogy. Barker imagines the struggle of a gifted and ethically questioning psychiatrist, Dr. William Rivers (himself a historical figure), who was assigned to treat Sassoon, Owen, and others in order to return them to the front lines (there is by the way an adequate and well-acted film version of the novel, Behind the Lines).

I’ll be turning soon to modern fiction, though Acts of Terror and Contrition, my novella/nuclear fable about Israel, is about to be released by Amazon.com’s publishing arm, so my next post will attempt to present that novel to you.

Notes on the Modern period - 13 - Williams and "no ideas but in things"

I hope to explore here the contrast between poetry by William Carlos Williams (along with other home-grown Americans) and the poetry I’ve discussed by Eliot – particularly in terms of their differing ideas of “modernism” and of a distinctly modern engagement with ideas of perception as well as with death, both spiritual and physical death.


Williams once wrote that Pound (with his European ‘orientation’) is “the best enemy United States verse has…. [The poetry] of which Americans have the parts and the colors but not the completions before them pass beyond the attempts of his thought.” In the “Prologue to Kora in Hell” (in 1918), Williams criticizes the tradition-obsessed, allusion-cluttered Eurocentrism of Pound and Eliot. He writes that “I praise those who have the wit and courage, and the conventionality, to go deeper toward their vision of perfection…where the signposts are clearly marked, viz, to London. But [I] confine them to hell for their paretic assumption that there is no alternative but their own groove.”

Of course, far from paralyzed, Pound’s poetry moves through a sort of divine comedy but in reverse: he starts on the high ground of the charged, stripped down, musically perfected image, descends through the great eloquently satiric ramble of “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” and many of the Cantos, dispensing for our benefit all his rants and all his knowledge of world literature, and he ends with the Pisan Cantos, where – incarcerated for treason in 1945 by the U.S. in a Pisa prison camp – he intersperses his polyglot rants with moments when he starts once again from scratch, creating fragments of poetry from scraps of perception in his cage amid the wasps and clover: “mint springs up again / in spite of Jones’ rodents / as had the clover by the gorilla cage / with a four-leaf // When the mind swings by a grass-blade / an ant’s forefoot shall save you / the clover leaf smells and tastes as its flower.”

Despite the self-pitying bits, Pound connects up here with the Whitman tradition, of which Williams is the foremost modern expression. In “Leaves of Grass,” for example in the sixth poem in “Song of Myself,” Whitman’s mind certainly “swings by a grass blade” and more: “A child said, What is the grass? Fetching it to me with full hands…. / I guess the grass is itself a child . . . the produced babe of the vegetation… / And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” Finally he thinks that “the smallest sprout” defies death since “it led forward life… and [death] ceased the moment life appeared,” as if the poem like the grassy field were a threshold where life and death meet and together endure in a sort of negotiation lasting as long as art lasts.

Engagement of death and disaster certainly exist for Williams – think of “To Elsie” and countless other of his poems. Williams imagines death as giving way “sluggish” and straggling not only to rebirth but almost literally to birth, for we are here contacting an imagination formed partly by years of Williams’ work as a pediatrician (for decades bringing babies into this world and sustaining their lives for years after – I’m reminded too that Williams, like Pound, was a great friend of poets and nurtured many a young poet toward publication).

Among his poems, a fine example of the process of death’s ‘giving way’ is “Spring and All,” which begins with a blighted scene worthy of Eliot’s “The Wasteland” and its rejection of Chaucer’s images of spring. “By the road to the contagious hospital / under the surge of the blue / mottled clouds driven from the / northeast – a cold wind,” and there is “the waste of broad, muddy fields brown with dried weeds…dead, brown leaves” and “leafless vines” – here, though, halfway through the poem dominated so far by fragmentary dependent phrases, Williams begins to see a new process operate in the “sluggish” weeds: “Lifeless in appearance…dazed spring approaches.” On a sort of threshold between life and death, the grasping for life begins; the shaping metaphor of a newly birthed baby underlies the image of the weeds. “They enter the new world naked, / cold, uncertain of all / save that they enter. All about them / the cold, familiar wind – // Now the grass, tomorrow / the stiff curl of wild carrot leaf.” The leaf, the grass, the root have sprung as if from Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” to struggle with death once more in Williams’ poetry, where the shadowing image of the baby’s birth trumps all that residue of the wasteland: “But now the stark dignity of / entrance – Still, the profound change / has come upon them: rooted, they / grip down and begin to awaken.” In Williams’ mode of writing, the things of this life, of the earth and the body, “matter.” And the sensuous upwelling of this vital matter in language outlasts death; to use Whitman’s image, it leads life forward through death to become the matter of American poetry. From the start of this distinctly American ‘tradition,’ Whitman himself sought to transform the enclosed, mirror-like, auto-erotic world of self-conscious perception into a vehicle for more deeply and immediately engaging the “things” perceived: the earth and the body. In the Preface to “Leaves of Grass,” he imagines breaking beyond the flaneur’s self-consciously detached vantage of perception, and like the Lawrentian hero in “Women in Love,” Whitman would “plunge his semitic muscle” into the grassy land of America.

In a William poem’s version of this union with the object of perception, poetry has the force of perception itself and, in a sense, become the thing perceived. “No ideas but in things” is Williams’ phrase for the process; partly he is questioning Wallace Stevens’ related poems about perception, poems which share with phenomenology a delving sense of the nature of perception even as they display an ironic playfulness in presenting the role self-consciousness has in it. Both Williams and Stevens express the Whitmanesque yearning to reveal how poetry’s self-awareness can achieve a creative entry into and oneness with the perceived world, whether in the guise of the human child’s birth and rooting down, or the guise of the simple “jar” placed on a hill in Tennessee to dominate nature there, or the guise of the woman’s voice drifting over the harbor on a Key West evening, enriching and composing or ‘ordering’ the scene in Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West.”

As I’ve noted in earlier posts, there is a connection in modernity between sensuous immediacy and ordering, self-conscious abstraction. In my next post I hope to explore the connection with regard to modern art itself, using Picasso as one example.