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 - 10 - T. S. Eliot's authority

It’s notable about modern poetry that, while its poets are intent on judging – with bitter skepticism – the present and the entire course of civilization, they idealize the Renaissance and its poetry as a model of what they hope to achieve, and for each poet a different period of the Renaissance is at issue. For Yeats, it is the high Renaissance; with his frequent references to Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel, he locates its vision of a “unity of being” as an apogee in the scheme he devises of cultural “cycles” from Homer to the present, as described in his book “A Vision.” For Ezra Pound, the ideal model is to be found in the late Medieval and early Renaissance. And for T. S. Eliot, the final emanation of the Renaissance ideal is the work of the Metaphysical poets, who are essentially ‘medievalized’ in Eliot’s account of them. Donne and Herbert are made bearers of a unity of being achieved under the aegis of the Christian sacrament, an indivisibility of thought from feeling by which these poets “feel their thought as immediately as the odor of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.” And in Eliot’s view (in “The Metaphysical Poets”), by the mid-seventeenth century with the increasing secularization of politics and society, “a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.” Eliot hopes to create poetry that can restore that ultimately sacred juncture between feeling and intellect and forge an imaginative form that is self-sustaining in the face of the ruin of modernity, of its cultural disintegration and squalor. “Self-sustaining” sounds familiar, for it is a tenet of the French symbolists’ early modernist aesthetic that the art work should be autonomous and thus escape the deadnesses of modern prefabricated language, thought, and feeling. For Eliot, such autonomy is achieved by impersonality, “an escape from emotion… [and] personality” (as he states in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”); “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates,” and the “transmutation” of passion which results achieves what Eliot elsewhere calls an “objective correlative,” a nicely mathematical-sounding term for the autonomous, self-sustaining image in literature.

Like Henry James, Eliot was an American expatriate, and even more than the novelist, he embraced a European identity. It is not only that he became an English citizen and a devout member of the Anglican Church; it is, as he writes in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” that the abode housing and finally possessing his imagination is “the mind of Europe… – a mind which [the poet] learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind.” With his conservatism, his European allegiance, and his authoritative style, Eliot’s imagination survived Europe’s mutilating fascism, its self-immolating wars in which millions perished, including the gifted generation of the War Poets, Brooke, Owen, Rosenberg, etc. Eliot, along with Yeats, takes up where the war poets ended – and died – in attempting to answer the question of how the power of the imagination can be extended to include the torn and broken nature of modern life in the midst and in the aftermath of the World War. Eliot’s ‘answer’ differs greatly from Yeats’, despite the influence of each on the other. As I tried to show in an earlier post, Yeats struggles to affirm how the imagination both shapes and is shaped by the experience of passion and suffering and in that way is connected to deeply felt emotion. His poetic voice affirms this connection by projecting an authority of self-reckoning and reckoning.

Eliot, in contrast, seeks the authority of “impersonality” – that of a sage and ironic guide, whose detachment enables him to register yet to position himself above the vagaries of experience and history, to judge the entire course of civilization, and in his later work to affirm a religious purgation as the sole source of language and value. As an essayist, that authority helped to establish the modern canon of literary thought in his era, both its formalism and its texts. As we saw, his critical voice conveys the gravity of impersonality, both in the sense of bearing the weight of its authoritative judgments and in the sense of emanating from a grave familiarity with death, with the deadened, burned-out self (Yeats remarks that Eliot seems incapable of sufficient “self-surrender” by which he meant openness to the resinous life of the heart). Eliot’s criticism projects just such grave authority, for example, when he speaks of the condition of dissociation “from which we have never recovered,” or even when he faults Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” as a failure, for it supposedly does not attain the impersonal ideal of the “objective correlative.”

It is the poetry that best illustrates the force and authority of Eliot’s imagination as he constructs a vision of modernity, of what he later termed “The Wasteland.” From early in his career, he was a master of control as he laced together incantatory repetitions of often squalidly deflating sounds and words. “Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, / The muttering retreats / Of restless nights and one-night cheap hotels… / Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent / To lead you to an overwhelming question . . . / Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’ Let us go and make our visit.” This mocking speaker is only one of the discordant voices in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which presents a stream of selves in which speakers ride on waves of shifting images, sustained conceits (for example, the recurrent “yellow fog”) amid other schizoid fragments of city life. Here is one of the voices, hurting and bitter: “And I have known the eyes already, known them all – / The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, / And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, / When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, / Then how should I begin / To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?” Eliot’s control over these voices is powerfully sustained, as they pour out their mockery or bafflement or self-loathing while registering the conditions of modern urban life. Finally, the coalesced voices in the poem yearn to be submerged in the cleansing magical waves which promise rebirth, truly in the stream of language itself, even as death inevitably approaches when their own “human voices wake us, and we drown.” Life appears to equal death in this early poem, and the same seems to hold in his modernist masterpiece of the nineteen-twenties, “The Wasteland,” to which I’ll turn in my next post.