John Gould Fletcher

“ POPPIES OF THE RED YEAR
(A Symphony in Scarlet)
I
The words that I have written
To me become as poppies:
Deep angry disks of scarlet flame full-glowing in the stillness
Of a shut room.
Silken their edges undulate out to me,
Drooping on their hairy stems;
Flaring like folded shawls, down-curved like rockets starting
To break and shatter their light.
Wide-flaunting and heavy, crinkle-lipped blossom,
Darting faint shivers through me;
Globed Chinese lanterns on green silk cords a-swaying
Over motionless pools. ”

“ This novel form never is altogether novel, nor is the subject altogether a new subject. For, as I pointed out at the beginning of this preface, that all arts sprang practically out of the same primary sensations, so the subject-matter of all art must forever be the same: namely, nature and human life. Hence, any new type of art will always be found, in subject-matter as well as in technique, to have its roots in the old. Art is like a kaleidoscope, capable of many changes, while the material which builds up those changes remains the same. ”

“ Looking forth on the world again he still sees war, like a monstrous red flower, dominating mankind. He hears the souls of the dead declaring that they, too, have died for an adventure, even as he is about to die. ”

“ He finds himself alone in a great city, surrounded by noise and clamour. It is as if millions of lives were tugging at him, drawing him away from his art, tempting him to go out and whelm his personality in this black whirlpool of struggle and failure, on which float golden specks—the illusory bliss of life. ”

“ Rather is it more important to observe that almost any prose work of imaginative literature, if examined closely, will be found to contain a plentiful sprinkling of excellent verses; while many poems which the world hails as master-pieces, contain whole pages of prose. The fact is, that prose and poetry are to literature as composition and colour are to painting, or as light and shadow to the day, or male and female to mankind. There are no absolutely perfect poets and no absolutely perfect prose-writers. Each partakes of some of the characteristics of the other. ”

“ Thus architecture gives us feelings of density, proportion, harmony: sculpture, of masses in movement; painting, of colour-harmony and the ordered composition of lines and volumes from which arise sensations of space: music, of the development of sounds into melodic line, harmonic progression, tonal opposition, and symphonic structure.
The object of literature is not dissimilar from these. Literature aims at releasing the emotions that arise from the formed words of a certain language. But literature is probably a less pure—and hence more universal—art than any I have yet examined. ”

“ No sincere artist cares to handle subject-matter that has already been handled and exhausted. It is not a question of a desire to avoid plagiarism, or of self-conscious searching for novelty, but of a perfectly spontaneous and normal appeal which any new subject-matter always makes. Hence, when a new subject appears to any artist, he always realizes it more vividly than an old one, and if he is a good artist, he realizes it so vividly that he recreates it in what is practically a novel form. ”

“ In the arts, the tendency has been to strip each art of its inessentials and to disclose the underlying basis of pure form. In life, the principles of nationality, of racial culture, of individualism, of social development, of Christian ethics, have been discussed, debated, and examined from top to bottom, until at last, in the early years of the twentieth century we find all Europe, from the leaders of thought down to the lowest peasantry, engaged in a mutually destructive war of which few can trace the beginnings and none can foresee the end. ”

“ For it must be apparent to all minds that not only is a word a definite symbol of some fact, but also it is a thing capable of being spoken or sounded. The art of literature, then, in so far as it deals with definite statements, is akin to painting or photography: in so far as it deals with sounded words, it is akin to music.
III
Literature, therefore, does not depend on the peculiar twists and quirks which represent, to those who can read, the words, but rather on the essential words themselves. ”

“ The last one pauses and says, "'Tis a dream."
His bridle shakes.
The sky
Is filled with oval violet-tinted clouds
Through which the sun long settled strikes at random,
Enkindling here and there blotched circles of rosy light.
These are poppies,
Unclosing immense corollas,
Waving the horsemen on.
Over the earth, upheaving, folding,
They ride: their bridles shake:
One of them sees the sky is red:
One of them sees the earth is dark:
The last man sees he rides to his death,
Yet he says nothing at all.
III
There will be no harvest at all this year ”

“ Literature, and especially poetry, as I have already pointed out, partakes of the character of both painting and music. The impressionist method is quite as applicable to writing as it is to landscape. Poems can be written in major or minor keys, can be as full of dominant motif as a Wagner music-drama, and even susceptible of fugal treatment. Literature is the common ground of many arts, and in its highest development, such as the drama as practised in fifth-century Athens, is found allied to music, dancing, and colour. ”

“ Hence, I have called my works "Symphonies," when they are really dramas of the soul, and hence, in them I have used colour for verity, for ornament, for drama, for its inherent beauty, and for intensifying the form of the emotion that each of these poems is intended to evoke.
VII
Let us take an artist, a young man at the outset of his career. His years of searching, of fumbling, of other men's influence, are coming to an end. Sure of himself, he yet sees that he will spend all his life pursuing a vision of beauty which will elude him at the very last. ”

“ But still the crimson rockets rose.
They seemed to be
One great field of immense poppies burning evenly,
Casting their viscid perfume to the earth.
The earth is sown with dead,
And out of these the red
Blooms are pushing up, advancing higher,
And each night brings them nigher,
Closer, closer to my heart. ”

“ Along with the prevailing preoccupation with technique which so marks the early twentieth century, there has gone also a great change in the subject-matter of art. Having tried to explain the aesthetic form-basis of poetry, I shall now attempt to explain my personal way of viewing its content.
It is a significant fact that every change in technical procedure in the arts is accompanied by, and grows out of, a change in subject-matter. ”

“ In prose, the emotions expressed are those that are capable of development in a straight line. In so far as prose is pure, it confines itself to the direct orderly progression of a thought or conception or situation from point to point of a flat surface. ”

“ Some explanation of my own peculiar theories and beliefs is necessary, however, to those who have not specifically concerned themselves with poetry, or who suffer in the presence of any new work of art from the normal human reaction that all art principles are so essentially fixed that any departure from accepted ideas is madness. ”

“ The key pattern on the lip of a Greek vase may be beautiful, but it is less beautiful, less satisfying, and less conclusive a test of artistic ability than the composition of satyrs and of mænads struggling about the centre. Therefore I maintain, and will continue to do so, that the mere craftsman-ability to write in regular lines and metres no more makes a man a poet than the ability to stencil wall-papers makes him a painter. ”

“ This is so far true that scarcely any landscape painter finishes his pictures from nature, but in the studio: and almost any art student, painting a landscape, will disregard the colour before him and employ the colour-scheme of his master or of some painter he admires. As Delacroix noted in his journal: "A conception having become a composition must move in the milieu of a colour peculiar to it. ”

“ In every case art aims at the evocation of some human emotion in the spectator or listener. Where science proceeds from effects to causes, and seeks to analyze the underlying causes of emotion and sensation, art reverses the process, and constructs something that will awaken emotions, according to the amount of receptiveness with which other people approach it. ”

“ The midsummer clouds were piling up upon the south horizon,
Mountains of drifting translucence in the larkspur-fields of the sky:
Ascending and toppling in crumbled ravines, dribbling down chasms
of silence,
Reassembling in crowded multitudes, massive forms one above another. ”

“ This colour, and the imaginative phantasmagoria of landscape which it evokes, thereby creates, in a definite and tangible form, the dominant mood of each poem.
The emotional relations that exist between form, colour, and sound have been little investigated. It is perfectly true that certain colours affect certain temperaments differently. But it is also true that there is a science of colour, and that certain of its laws are already universally known, if not explained. Naturally enough, it is to the painters we must first turn if we want to find out what is known about colour. ”

“ The sensation of depth is finally obtained by arranging these blocks in a rising climacteric progression, or in parallel lines, or in a sort of zigzag figure.
The psychological reaction that arises from the intelligent appreciation of poetry is quite different. In poetry, we have a succession of curves. The direction of the thought is not in straight lines, but wavy and spiral. It rises and falls on gusts of strong emotion. ”

“ I have tried to depict the sort of temptation that besets most artists at this stage of their career: the temptation to abandon the struggle for the sake of a purely sensual existence. In this case, however, the appeal of sensuality is conveyed under the guise of a dream. It is resisted, and the struggle begins anew. ”

“ It is the same with colour and sounds. Many musicians have observed the phenomenon, that when certain notes, or combinations of them, are sounded, certain colours are also suggested to the eye. A Russian composer, Scriabine, went so far as to construct colour-scales, and an English scientist, Professor Wallace Rimington, has built an organ which plays in colours, instead of notes. Unfortunately, the musicians have given this subject less attention than the painters, and therefore our knowledge concerning the relations of colour and sound is more fragmentary and incomplete. ”

“ Most often it creates strongly marked loops and circles. The structure of the stanza or strophe always tends to the spherical. Depth is obtained by making one sphere contain a number of concentric, or overlapping spheres.
Hence, when we speak of poetry we usually mean regular rhyme and metre, which have for so long been considered essential to all poetry, not as a device for heightening musical effect, as so many people suppose, but merely to make these loops and circles more accentuated, and to make the line of the poem turn upon itself more recognizably. ”

“ To take only one out of innumerable examples, the new subject-matter of Wagner's music-dramas, of an immeasurably higher order than the usual libretto, created a new form of music, based on motifs, not melodies. Other examples can easily be discovered. ”

“ We discover that painters continually are speaking of hot and cold colour: red, yellow, orange being generally hot, and green, blue, and violet cold—mixed colours being classed hot and cold according to the proportions they contain of the hot and cold colours. ”

“ Nevertheless, although the subject-matter in this book is not altogether new, yet I have realized it in a way which has not often been tried, and out of that fresh and quite personal realization have sprung my innovations in subject as well as technique. Let me illustrate by a concrete example.
V
A book lies on my desk. It has a red binding and is badly printed on cheap paper. I have had this book with me for several years. Now, suppose I were to write a poem on this book, how would I treat the subject? ”