A Note on the Status of Modern Poetry

by

Kay Boyle and W.C. Williams

Boyle:

Some kind of poetic form has to be found or I'll go crazy. I can't go on taking what you (and others) made possible and beautiful. I think I've got lots to say in poetry - and no no no form - lousy - loose - no punch - no *shape* - no agony of line like the backside or a lovely thigh or whatnot

Williams:

Precisely - and a timely reaction of the first importance; it marks the present moment for what it is a formless interim - but those are periods calling most for invention which mask or should mask a feverish activity still out of sight to the generality of observers. There is no workable poetic form extant among us today.

Joyce and Stein have been paramount in knocking the props from under a new technique in the past ten years and enforcing it. They have specifically gone out of their way to draw down the attention on words so that the line has become pulverous instead of metallic - or at least ductile. Your comment marks clearly for me the definite departure from that sort of thing toward a metrical coherence of some sort - not *a return* to anything, for God's sake let us be clear on that at the beginning.

2.

Let us once and for all understand that Eliot is finally and
definitely dead - and his troup along with him.

But what remains - Or why should anything remain?

For myself, I have written little poetry recently.
Form, the form, has been lacking. Instead I have been watch-
ing speech in my own environment from which I continually ex-
pect to discover whatever of new is being reflected about the
world. I have no interest, as far as observation goes, in the
cosmic. I have been actively at work (if such sketchy trials
as I employ can be called such) in the flesh, watching how words
match the act, especially how they come together. The result has
been a few patches of metrical coherence which I don't see yet
how to use - but they seem to run to groups of lines. Occasional-
ly they give me the feel of authenticity.

You know, I think, enough of me to understand that I
have no belief in the continuity of history. To me the classic
lives now just as it did then - or not at all. The "Greek" is
just as much in Preakness as it was in Athens. Everything we
know is a local virtue - if we know it at all - the only differ-
ence between the force of a great work and a lesser one being
lack of brain and fire in the second. In other words, art can
be made of anything - provided it be seen, smelt, touched, ap-
prehended and understood to be what it is - the flash of a con-
stantly repeated permanence. This must be a lot of bosh to
anyone who isn't intimate with the materials. But to one who is
working with the stuff it may mean something. If not,

3.

But it doesn't mean enough to create form. It means this however. That whatever form we create during the next ten years will be, in excellence, like all the classic inventions, a new thing, a thing intrinsic in the times. It will probably foretell the decade that is to follow it. It will take its shape from the character of its age - positively, not satyrically. It will not be the symptom of a chronic belly ache or - something else. It will be like no classic which has preceded it. It will not be "like" any classic. It will be identical with all classics. Why do we not read more of Juan Gris? He knew these things in painting and wrote well of them.

I have been working with prose since I didn't know what to do with poetry. Perhaps I have been in error. Maybe I should be slaving at verse. But I don't think so. Prose can be a laboratory for metrics. It is lower in the literary scale. But it throws up jewels - which may be cleaned and grouped.

I don't think any poetry ever originated in any other way. It must have been inherent in the language, greek, latin, italian, english, french or chinese.

And this should blast that occasionally pushing notion that the form of poetry (as that of any art) is social in character. Such an opinion is purest superficiality. The form of poetry is that of language. It is related to all art first, then to certain essential characteristics of language, to words then and finally to everything among all the categories of knowledge among which the social attributes of a time occur. The work of Einstein also merges into it, hardly a social phenomenon.

4.

It is not formed "like" the society of any time; it might conceivably be formed in a manner opposite to the character of the times, a formal rigidity of line in a period of social looseness. That is, the outstanding genius of such a time might, in his attic, be writing that sort of poetry.

This is difficult ground. One might sink in it. All that I wish to point is that poetry is related to poetry, not social statuses. It will, nevertheless, make its form of what it finds. And, so does *seem* to be a social eye. It is nothing of the sort. It remains itself. It remains related only to poetry. As such it can be only good or not so good.

Much more could be said about this. I myself can be accused of contradictions. Possibly I have contradicted myself.

Looking about, the young men who seem concerned with invention - no need to mention names - are still under the spell of Joyce and Stein. They seem to me too wordy, too concerned with words, too little concerned with what words do in conjunction with each other.

Balls. All I want to do is to state that poetry, in its sources, body, spirit - in its form, in short, is related to poetry and not to socialism, communism or anything else that tries to swallow it; to reconcile this with the equally important fact that it deals with reality, the actuality of every day, by virtue of its use of language. Doing so, naturally, it reflects its time, by coincidence. It does, that's all - or may - or may not.

5.

As I have said, for me, its virtue lies in relation
to the immediacy of my life. I live where I live and acknowledge
no lack of opportunity because of that to be alert to facts, to
the music of events, of words, of the speech of people about me.
As well as to the speech of the muse, the intangible perfection
of all excellent verse.

And so - some of the young men seem to me to be too
much influenced by the disintegrationists, the users of words
for their individual forms and meanings. They are after mean-
ings (Joyce) and their objectivity as things (Stein). Well, as
far as poetry is concerned. What of it?

Ezra Pound is too "like" the classics. He is a class-
icist, almost a pedant - according to some. His actuality is
what has been formed on him by his disposition and the mode of
life he affects. He writes in "american" as far as he writes in
any language - but his meter is - what it is - the purifications
of older orders used with modern words. He has brought the mod-
ern language to the water of excellent poetic usuage - then what
the hell? He is teaching it classic dancing. A dash of grotes-
query thrown in with a great sense of time.

Pound is one of the few moderns worth reading. One
can differ with him so easily and excel him only with the greatest
difficulty - if at all. He is still a worth while beginning for
any poet writing in our language. I don't think, though, that he
has solved anything for us. His line is classic adaptation, no
more.

6.

Who else? Jeffers has not been able to overcome
poetic diction. Possibly he has something. I doubt it.

Robinson, well, if you can find anything there. To
me it seems stiff english. I can't see a flicker. He has pas-
sion, though, and a flair for the story. His versification
seems to me pure stucco. It loosens nothing for thought, for
feeling, for inclusion of a variety of understanding. It seems
closed, tight closed to me.

Wallace Stevens had something more than his play with
sequences of sounds. His line, under that, was sometimes fluid.
Worth reading again.

Ivor Winters seems to be bogged in ideas. His line has
a self-inflicted tendency to become short and to stay so. It
excludes too much. It has no largess for the mind or the emotion.

As far as I can see, when we let go we get a loose no-
thing, a rhythmical blurr, a formlessness which is abhorrent now
no matter what it may have been formerly. And when we close down
on the line we get classic imitation or tightness. The bucolic
simplicity of Robert Frost seems to me a halt.

English writers I exclude axiomatically. It may be
that some one will later prove me blind. That must be my mis-
fortune. There will be time to judge of that later. Perhaps we
should turn to France, Italy, Russia. No.

Either I build here or there will be no building as
far as I am concerned. I'd rather feel Russia, France, or what
have you as it comes up here (including newspapers, radio des-

7.

patches, etc.) than get it direct. Oh but that doesn't mean
that I do not enjoy excellence wherever it is. But that is a
personal matter which I will manage as I please. I am talking
first, though, of poetic invention. In that I am a rival of
France. I acknowledge them as overwhelmingly successful (per-
haps) and all that but I do not (henceforth) lean on them.
That's past.

A poet should take his inspiration from the other
arts too. Picasso? which line is significant? Damned if I
know. There may be one. Maybe there is something running
through it all. But he seems so intent on proving that he just
doesn't have to work after any particular mode that I have lost
interest in him.

The dance? Angna Enters has a line which passes
through her satire, but it doesn't seem, on second thought,
much of an invention.

All I can see finally to rely on is the seriousness
of poetry itself, that it stands equal to any endeavor. The
fact that it takes us, turns over the mind, because the re-
quired form is not easy to come at, discloses its pertinence
to the time and the intelligence.

That must be the beginning, as it is about all there
is to take hold of. There is, you see, in our minds the possi-
bility of a technique which may be used. It must be large
enough, free enough, elastic enough, new enough yet firm enough
to hold the new well, without spilling. It must have a form.

Why?

8.

There's no use making a mystery of what we know and
don't know about poetry. Tho' there is no clear perception of
poetic form operative today - and we must understand precisely
that there is never a poetic form of force and timeliness ex-
cept that which is in the act of being created, there is no
poetic form in theory, in the rules, there is no grammar of
poetry - there is only poetry - it is the very essence of the
thing that this is so -

No one can say what poetry will accord to, what it
will be like, for the fact of its existence is in its nature a
supercession an assertion whose - one of whose minor attributes
is the enflorescence not surpassing rule - but disintegrating
them -

Tho' there is no clear perception of poetic form to-
day and tho' none can be made until - there can be none until
the poem itself appear as the rule in fact. Yet it is silly
to make a mystery of the pre-masterly period -

It is a period without mastery, that is all. It is a
period in which the form has not yet been found. It is a forma-
tive time whose duty it is to bare the essentials, to shuck
away the hulls, to lay open at least the problems with open eyes.
It is a time to use the intelligence on the problem - not in
groans and ritual - no matter how "beautiful" or "old" that may
be. It should be possible to state a minimum of what we can
find that is - until we know better - true of modern verse.
What it, leastwise, cannot be any longer as compared with the

9.

past. We ought to be able to make up our mind to a few things.

At least there is no use forgetting what we have
learned in the past twenty years, there is no use in doing
worse work than has been done, there's no use going backward.

That's a good place to begin. When I say backward I
by no means intend to signify that we should not look back at
past mastery. Look and be sure what you're looking for and at.
Few know. But by backward, I mean don't try to make the mis-
takes that can be made by lack of intelligence and information
as to what has been going on.

Personally, I'd like to start by saying, don't write
sonnets. The line is dead, it's unsuited to the language.
Everything that can ever be said from now until doomsday in the
sonnet form has been better said in 12th century Italian. But
I am speaking only figuratively now.

Poetry is creation of new form -

A minimum of present new knowledge seems to me this:
there can no longer be serious work in poetry written in "poetic"
diction. That it is a contortion of speech to conform to a rigid-
ity of line. It is in the newness of alive speech that the new
line exists undiscovered. To go back, to return to poetic and
inverted diction is to deny the first opportunity for invention
which exists. Speech is the fountain of the line into which the
pollutions of a poetic manner and inverted phrasing should never
again be permitted to drain.

10.

That T. S. Eliot knows this (mainly) is at present
the sole reason for reading him. He is concerned with the
line as it is modulated by a limited kind of half alive speech.

Then, the inclusiveness of the diction must be pre-
served. Local tho' the spring of genius may be, we do not live
in mediaeval times, in the cities of northern Italy nor a walled
Paris, Madrid or London. There can be no new enclosure of man-
ner. The line must be pliable with speech, for speech for
thought, for the intricacies of new thought - the universality
of science compels it. There is no use pretending that we live
in a closed "poetic" world in which we do not need to know what
is going on about us and then think we can invent poetry. Assi-
nine presumption. Just as it is to look to the past for assur-
ance - or perhaps we should look to the past for assurance and
nothing else.

The modern line must at least exclude no possibility
of intelligent resource. Thus it will include the age (not that
I repeat is a poetic function in itself) it will include the age
as the Homeric line included Greece, the renaissance line its
age and the Shakespearean line England. It need not be supposed
that it included everything, every offshoot of English genius, it
would be the end of a race if it did. But it cannot be great and
exclude any major element of the civilization in which it exists.

It is this difficulty which makes present invention so
excessively difficult - if at all possible. In the form, the form
of the line (of which diction is a part) it must have room for the

11.

best of Joyce - the best of all living, terminal, bud-end re-
fection of thought and - Einstein - the Soviets. This is com-
pelled (tho' the diagnosis of genius may exclude much that we
think now is important.) This is the seriousness of poetry
itself.

So far I believe that Pound's line in his Cantos -
a feeling appearing in another form in some of Zukofsky's work
(it is by his form that he is important) perhaps Bravig Imbs
has some of it. But in Pound's line I think there is something
**like** what we shall achieve. Pound in his mould, a mediaeval
inspiration, patterned on a substitution of mediaeval simulcra
for a possible, not yet extant modern and living material, has
made a pre-composition for us. Something which when later
(perhaps) packed and realized in living, breathing stuff will
(in its then changed form) be the thing. That at least is my
best estimate of Pound.

Then as your letter intimates, implies foreshadows -
and this is is power that has set me going - next, the modern
line must have an internal tension which is now nowhere.

Free verse, if it ever existed - is out. Whitman was
a magnificent failure. He himself in his later stages showed
all the terrifying defects of his own method. Whitman to me is
one broom stroke and that is all. He could not go on. Nature,
the Rousseauist who foreshadowed Whitman, the imitation of the
sounds of the sea *per se*, are a mistake. Poetry has nothing to
do with that. It is not nature. It is poetry. Whitman grew in-

12.

to senseless padding, bombast, bathos. His invention ended
where it began. He is almost a satirist of his era, is so in
fact when his line itself is taken as the criterion. He evap-
orates under scrutiny - crumbling not into sand, surely, but
into a morraine, sizeable and impressive because of that.

The line must, as a minimum, have a well conceived
form within which modification may exist. Without this in-
ternal play upon the stops, it cannot achieve power. Thank you
for bringing the point into prominence.

But there we are almost at the end of our resources.
To be more specific would be to get into the guessers.

One more positive thing tho' - or minimal requisite -
It seems to me that the "foot" being at the bottom of all prosody -
the time has come when that must be recognized to have changed in
nature. And it must be seen to have changed in its rhythmical
powers of inclusion. It cannot be used any longer in its old
time rigidities. Speech for poetry is nothing but time - I
mean time in the musical sense. That is where the real battle
has been going on.

The new verse is a new time - "rag-time" is only a
penny sample; "Jazz" is excessively limited when looked at thor-
oughly. Its rigidities are exactly like that of all that we
have outgrown. Take away its aphrodisiac qualities and it is
stale. But time is the root of the matter -

Quantitative, qualitative - these things have lost all
clear meaning for us. Then just there is the place for invention.

13.

The metronome beat of doggerel makes us restless, lowers us to
nonsense. The forced timing of verse after antique patters
wearies us even more and seduces thought even more disastrously -
as in Eliot's work. But a new time that catches thought as it
lags and swings it up into the attention will be read, will be
read (by those interested) with that breathlessness which is an
indication that they are not dragging a gunny sack flavored with
anise around for us to follow but that there is meat at the end
of the hunt for us - and we are hungry.