R. C. Trevelyan

“ Ancient poetry was in an obvious and literal sense an incantation, at once charming and exciting the mind through the ear. Now modern poetry, though no longer chanted but spoken, still retains, or should retain, something of its primitive nature as an incantation. It is notorious that poets, when reading verse, generally fall into a kind of chanting delivery, which sometimes, owing to their lack of skill, may seem affected, and even absurd. But their [Pg 26] instinct is none the less right. Poetry read to sound like prose is intolerable. Thought is not poetic unless it be kindled into emotion ”

“ The function of the imagination is to interpret and illuminate reality, and it cannot therefore neglect or despise the normal aspects under which reality presents itself to the human mind. But it must also appeal to the human heart; and since the passions and dreams of the heart are less mutable than the intellect, it is in this respect that the nature of poetry is least likely to suffer any fundamental change. The garment in which it clothes itself will alter, as language alters, and as poets of genius are moved to enlarge or contract it. ”

“ Otherwise we shall not be reading poetry. It is indeed quite possible that twenty lines of Milton, read silently thus, may actually take up somewhat less time than they would if they were read aloud; but the pace ought not to seem hurried: in so far as it does, the magic of the medium will be impaired or destroyed. Moreover poets themselves, when, as they often do, they write more for the eye and for the mind than for the ear, are not writing literature at all, let alone poetry. ”

“ The medium of poetry consists not merely of words, but of speech, that is of words, phrases and sentences in syntactic and logical relations to one another; and although these relations necessarily tend to be more emotional and less rational in poetry than in prose, because poetry is the more emotional medium, yet there are limits which it is dangerous to exceed. Much no doubt depends upon the nature of the subject-matter. ”

“ Nevertheless there are those who take a gloomier view of man’s destinies. Poetry, they tell us, like mythology, religion and metaphysics, is a primitive and puerile function of the human mind. It is already becoming superseded by less rudimentary, more rational means of self-expression. We are entering upon an era of science and prose, and may as well at once frankly put away poetry, along with other childish things. ”

“ The poetical drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was, from a historical point of view, no more than a brief and glorious episode. The declamation of dramatic verse may well have been a great art on the English, French and Spanish stage; but, if so, it has not survived into our own time, and shows little sign of resurrection. The development of polyphonic and instrumental music, while it has made modern opera and the Lieder of Schubert and Brahms possible, seems to have destroyed all hope of an equal marriage between music and lyrical poetry. ”

“ The tyranny of Latin over English poetry only began to wane towards the end of the eighteenth century; then suddenly in Shelley and Keats, and later in Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, Mr. Bridges, and even Browning, the Hellenic spirit becomes a veritable Castalian fountain of inspiration. Now that the knowledge of Greek is likely to become a rare accomplishment, it is possible that its influence will die away as quickly as it flowered. ”

“ But the value of poetry resides primarily in the medium itself. If that be not beautiful, then verse is a thing of naught, and worse than naught. None the less poetry should be no mere meaningless verbal incantation, nor yet a melodious transmitter of congenial lies and irresponsible reverie. ”

“ The best safeguard is that we should fully realise both what the medium is and what it is not. All art consists in exploiting the possibilities and limitations of a medium; and any art of which the medium is misunderstood, and so misused, is likely to degenerate into gracelessness or triviality, and perish as it deserves.
Now that poetry is generally no longer performed, but read, it is obvious that its nature has to a certain extent grown more like that of prose, [Pg 30] and that there has been a corresponding increase both in subtlety of expression, and in the possible range of material. ”

“ Modern polyphony is a great art, but a tyrannous; and though a beautiful poem may still inspire a beautiful setting, the medium of the [Pg 8] resulting work of art will be musical, and not poetic. Verse no doubt can still be declaimed, whether on the stage or elsewhere; but actors have generally neither taste nor tradition; the poets themselves have seldom enough skill or training to be effective; and professional reciters are “abominable, unutterable, and worse.” Thus it would seem that all the avenues which might lead to the public performance of poetry are blocked. ”

“ Few satires survive the ephemeral social follies that provoked them, because, being by nature parasites, when that which supported their growth decays and perishes, they too must perish, unless indeed they are rooted deeply in the unchanging soil of imagination and poetry. Truly great satire will always be very rare. It is still possible to read with delight Byron’s Vision of Judgment, and portions of his Age of Bronze ”

“ Much of the most memorable English poetry is neither in a strict sense lyrical, nor philosophic, nor anything else than beautiful and shapely verse. No other literature is so rich as ours in quasi-lyrical poetry, such as the sonnets of Shakespeare and Wordsworth, Gray’s Elegy and Keats’ Odes. ”

“ Yet though the disappearance of poetry is unlikely, and would be a real disaster, it is much to be desired that poetry should become more rational and responsible, more intelligently aware of the best interests and ideals of its most civilised contemporaries. It would be childish and unwise for poets to disregard the fact that our habits of mind are growing continually more scientific. ”

“ Yet, in spite of the beauty and grandeur of our translations of biblical Hebrew verse, and of certain majestical passages in such writers as Sir Thomas Browne, rhythmical prose has seldom proved itself able to compete with formal poetry. It is too primitive, too monotonous and cumbersome to perform more than a small part of the various functions of modern spoken verse, to which we should inevitably be driven before long to revert. ”

“ But it is a narrow view which can deny that verse should ever be employed, unless the result be poetry. If an artist in language is able to set forth philosophic matter that is of great intrinsic interest more luminously and attractively in verse than could be done in prose (which is precisely what Lucretius did with the crabbed sentences of Epicurus) , let us not grudge him the praise and gratitude that are his due. However, it seems unlikely that scientific philosophy will ever again inspire an expository treatise such as the De Rerum Natura. ”

“ A contempt for clarity has almost come to be regarded as an artistic virtue, rather than as a vice, or at best an occasionally inevitable evil. Nothing in truth can be more fundamentally [Pg 73] inartistic than needless obscurity. Poetry that is intellectually and emotionally complex, is certain in any case to be difficult enough; and the less a reader is called upon to make avoidable mental effort, the more convincingly will the essential context of a poem be communicated to his mind. ”

“ So long as human nature remains what it is now, as in spite of cynical prognostications it is likely to do for some time to come, it will both demand and obtain satisfaction for its ideal needs from literature, as well as from the musical and plastic arts: and in fact, if verse were to be proscribed or abandoned by general consent, we should be soon compelled to find an awkward substitute for it in rhythmical or poetic prose. ”

“ Perhaps I should have been more prudent if I had confined my discussion to the more purely technical aspect of poetry, without venturing upon the dangerous sea of general reflections upon style and theme, attitude and tendency. I have at least tried to refrain from dogma and prophecy, and attempted rather to suggest future possibilities by drawing attention to the lessons which we can still learn from the past. It may well be that the only really profitable discussions about poetry are technical discussions. “The thought of man is not triable. ”

“ One danger indeed we have little reason to fear. I mean the sterilising tyranny of some dominant lyrical form, such as the Greek elegiac couplet, or the late-classical Chinese stanza. Our poetry is already so abundantly rich in types, and so fertile in breeding new varieties, that neither the spirit of a new Age, nor genius however individual need be at a loss for appropriate forms of lyrical self-expression. A twentieth-century Catullus or Heine would have no cause for complaint if he were to be born an Englishman. ”

“ Even if it be true, as I have suggested earlier in this essay, that poetry has ceased to be a great popular and social art, there will be no need to regret the change in so far as it may make it more easy for poets to disregard fashionable success, and so to retain their artistic integrity. ”

“ When we read aloud a leading article, or any other piece of utilitarian and unemotional prose, we are not as a rule in the least aware of the rhythm of the sentences. But suppose we were to read the same leading article with a simulated mock-heroic emotion, we should then find, if we cared to observe, that we were now emphasising the before latent rhythm in two ways: we should be stressing certain syllables with greater force ”

“ Another province of literature, which we have seldom as yet attempted to make our own, is that of comic poetry. We have indeed had many and various comic writers of first-rate quality; but although, when they were so minded, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Byron could show themselves to be masters of comedy in verse, we have as yet had no Aristophanes, but have been obliged to content ourselves with the charming trivialities and vulgarities of [Pg 51] a Gilbert. ”

“ When associated with music, it is absorbed in the more dominating medium. It is of course possible, though unlikely, that music will evolve in the [Pg 31] direction of greater simplicity or that some few musicians may grow sufficiently interested in poetry to devise a special kind of music, so tenuous and transparent that poetry will be able to live and breathe through it. It is also conceivable that, although the public of the commercial theatre will not tolerate poetry on the stage, satisfactory amateur productions of verse plays may become more common. ”

“ Poetry, when it is healthy and vigorous, is continually discarding such worn-out words and phrases, as being indeed no longer poetical enough for its purposes. It is the simpler, homelier words and idioms of everyday speech that carry with them most poetic suggestion. ”

“ But as we cannot always be doing that, we must, when reading silently to ourselves, listen with our unsensual ear to the same sounds and the same rhythms, moving at the same pace, as though we were reading aloud. ”

“ This surely is as it ought to be; for though a language like ours, which has shed most of its inflections, is compelled to have a more rigid word-order than an inflected language like Latin, yet emotional stress and the need for rhetorical emphasis will always, even in prose, tempt writers to violate the conventional rules, and still more in poetry, where the position of words and phrases in relation to the line is of such, paramount importance. ”

“ Bridges has demanded more effort from some of his readers than they will be able to give. But if so, it is to be hoped that he will write more poetry on the same method, so that the counting of syllables may become as natural and instinctive a [Pg 37] process with us as it evidently is with him. He has already had the courage to explore the possibilities of English quantitative verse; yet though some of the poetry he wrote according to that system was of remarkable beauty, the experiment was perhaps too alien to the rhythmical genius of our language to be altogether satisfactory. ”

“ Waley’s translations the classical Tang poets with those earlier primitive writers, who were not yet afraid of composing on a fairly large scale, we shall then see what may be the fate of a literature that has grown ashamed of employing the breadth and energy of movement without which great poetry is impossible. Of course there has always been, and always will be, bad rhetoric, as well as good. ”

“ In every fertile and creative age of literature, it will generally be found that there were two main stimulating influences at work: in the first place naturalism, or an awakened sensitiveness to the suggestive beauty of the actual world; and secondly the fascination exercised by the masterpieces of earlier periods and alien cultures. By this I do not mean the direct inheritance of a poetic medium. Milton no doubt learnt his metrical technique from Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, but in everything else he owed far more to his loving study of Homer, Euripides, [Pg 70] Virgil and the Bible. ”

“ It would seem as though the poetic imagination, when it sets itself the most arduous of its tasks, that of alembicating tragic beauty from human misery and passion, welcomes the limitation [Pg 56] of choice, the simplicity of atmosphere, the freedom from distracting contemporary preoccupations, which a remote theme brings with it. None the less Ibsen’s Brandt and Peer Gynt show how a modern, though scarcely a familiar world, may be made the background of true poetic tragedy ”

“ The mind of even the most detached artist is a part of the world into which he was born, and his matter must to a large extent be a reflection of his environment. But the material and spiritual world changes far more swiftly than the language and the rhythmical artifices which constitute the poetic medium. ”

“ It is true that rhythm is still there, and the general proportions of the whole: but rhythm and movement, unembodied and uninterpreted by performers, are far more difficult for us to realise by the less sensuous, more purely mental process of reading; while in the absence of musical and histrionic contrasts and emphasis, even the general proportions are likely to be somewhat obscured. ”

“ Emotion in fact always [Pg 18] tends to regularise and emphasise rhythm, even in prose. Now the main function of verse is deliberately, by its structure, to regularise rhythm, and so to create emotion artificially. Let us take a normal English verse: “The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.” The five stressed syllables, cur-, tolls, knell, par-, day, are felt to be equi-distant in time. No doubt they are in fact only approximately equi-distant. The human voice is not an instrument like a piano or a violin, by means of which we can divide time into mathematically equal spaces. ”

“ If only Ben Jonson, in addition to stage-craft, Gargantuan comic energy and Titanic eloquence, had been gifted with a particle of that fiery celestial ether, by which alone mortal art can become divine, then indeed perhaps.... ”

“ If the Muses and Apollo represent the established, conservative tradition of poetry, then in Thamyris must be embodied the perennial revolt of the creative younger generation against the prestige and authority of the past. Though the penalty of rebellion may sometimes be blindness, egoism and eccentricity, yet the sacred fire will remain alive in the heart of the rebel, and will be handed down by him to his posterity, who, themselves neither blind nor mutinous, will often become in turn the persecutors of their own [Pg 84] children. ”