CHAPTER 4

Poetry and Peace (1940)

In the great periods of the past which we have grown used to calling times of peace, there were always the millions of faces falling, the long processions of those whose farmlands were overrun, whose villages were burned, who moved away from home and always instinctively took the bedding along.1 If there was room, they would take remembrances, so that life might be resumed somewhere else according to a tradition. The great world was kept to a rigid framework of force, if there were times of peace; there was some over-lord with his rule that promised death, or a chieftain who had whipped other chieftains and did not allow them to snarl; or an empire that could stretch a firm rule even over the seas. God knows it is a wretched thing to be cut down by a sword one day when the weather is fine for fighting for a piece of land in the name of an animal-god; and things have moved along since then. But, to go back to the processes I have been talking about—the two processes of linkage and collision—all invention, all history moves along their tracks, and I daresay linkage has the say for a good part of the time. It is when one flies above a neighborhood one knows, and sees the cities laid out in tilted irregular color, and the crossroads growth of life around a filling-station or a store, and the roads themselves, that one sees their history plainly, and knows one of the very good reasons why planes did not come into our life before they did. It seems quite clear, flying above those roads, that people were working on their improvement a good many years—from animal-track in a field, to mud-ruts and thank-you-ma’ams, to leveling off and asphalt and concrete six-lane highway complete with clover-leaves. When people are working on their roads, you get the long and steady line of development that finally produces engines that may be—by a stroke of imagination—lifted off the road and put into a plane. But if they had not been thinking about their roads!

In the history of our wars and states, it is that, too. Tribal hatred, a barrier broken and crossed, the dead, the stack of tribute and gold cups, and a larger tribe with its work of assimilation and conquest still to do. Conquest of ploughland, conquest of forest, conquest of roads, of desert, of cities and mines—frontiers set and fought for and set again, thrown down like a smokescreen to conceal the surge of ambition of each tribe behind a boundary. The tribal wars, the tribal gains, imposts and tribute and corruption of language. Until the sea, the indivisible, is fought for and divided, and its code is drawn up, so that now we reverence Mahan, who taught us sixty years ago that sea power was the key to world dominion.2 Until we may look forward from tribal war to tribal war to the time when the air itself is partitioned to give power and empire, and we live on an ocean floor of maneuvering navies of planes belonging only to the master-nation.

Our lives have been partitioned as the process went on. There was never quite enough foresight to give up the main tradition—to give up the “road” and think in an entirely new set of terms. It is always much easier to fall in agreement, or to see the long period of strain coming on, as it came over the last years to England, and fail to make the effort that the English are now making to keep humor and commonplace and endurance.3 There is a ritual impatience that seizes us—the impatience of the body for the crisis—once the crisis is foretold. And at times when calculation and reserve are necessary, that quality of ritual impatience may be ranked with the seven deadly sins. It is the obsession with foresight that paralyzes action.4

This quality is to be found, on every level, in poetry that deals with the present in the implications, with possibilities for the future—and most of all, in the poetry that, seeking for a hero in the midst of loss and confusion, has found the victims of social process, of machine insanity or tribal war or class ambition. The search at its most honest has been an attempt to understand the human victims of process; both the victims who were crushed without understanding either the weapons or their defense against them, and those other victims who used the power in their hands and were brutalized through it. The recent efforts toward a conscious social poetry have been full of images of war and waste, darkened by the recurrence of war that has been clearly visible for the last decade, at least, and in direct revolt against the decorativeness of the movement immediately preceding it. It was never a true movement. There was never a formal “school.” But there was a small structure that developed its own rules and rulers much too soon. There have been advances made in consciousness and vocabulary, at least. There has, indeed, been an offering made.5 There is, at this moment, a group of poets who stand in a relationship to society that is vastly different from that of the group of poets who emerged during the 1914 war. And if this is, as I believe it must be seen to be, a second movement in a war that is to be dated—arbitrarily—from 1914, it is in place to review the movements in poetry since then. Very briefly, as may be done if we summarize movements and not the work of the first-rate poets outside of any groups, who have—not of themselves, but through the nature of their work—refused to be allied with any other people—first-rate and original imaginations such as those of Robinson Jeffers and Wallace Stevens.6 Both of these men are implemented to deal with major crisis and catastrophe, Stevens because of his eye for the fantastic, for the painted quality of life, the wrenched forms in everyday occurrence that merely become heightened, and Jeffers since he has seen all history as a headlong plunge towards catastrophe echoed in all the forms of nature and love and death—a catastrophe which he needs very much, since he wishes so desperately for perfection—a catastrophe which must have a cleaning effect. He has said over and over that anything that may happen will be to the good if there can be more distance between people. Fewer people. And he must feel horribly confirmed and relieved at last. There is a certain tragic relief which the actual breaking of war may bring—the prophet’s relief, the impression that one would get in a movie-house if a jammed reel had shown a train advancing and advancing again and coming to the same point over and over, until at last the film flowed again and the train passed. Or, more physically close, if it were a real train that were doing that.7

When the Imagists first began to publish, the same point had been reached.8 It was a revulsion away from suspense, a very civilized wish not to give in to ritual impatience, not to be carried away and broken down by the horror and pity and self-pity that the press and writing in general collapse into in years like 1917 and 1940 that, as much as anything, led to the wish to define in emotional terms—to make clear—to select a point and make it live. In a season of chaos, there are motions that the mind may make, but the important thing is the choice. And to choose becomes a self-conscious act; to throw oneself into a boiling stream of emotionalism, and from time to time reach the surface with an article or a poem for one of the Sunday magazine supplements; or to bandage oneself in a formal device—these are the extremes of choice. But it is like that for those who are identified with a group in art at such a time; and even for the artist of deepest integrity, the choice becomes the peak of concentration. The identification is often false. In one of the most moving statements I know, a personal and simple story, the purest of the Imagists, H. D., has broken through the question and exposed it. This is her own note on her poems, one of the notes that each living contributor to The Oxford Book of American Literature was asked to add to the work itself:

I let my pencil run riot in those early days of my apprenticeship, in an old-fashioned copybook—when I could get one. Then I would select from many pages of automatic or pseudo-automatic writing the few lines that satisfied me. [. . .] I cannot give actual dates to these early finished fragments, but they would be just pre-war and at latest, early-war period. Finished fragments? Yes, I suppose they are that—stylistic slashings, definitely self-conscious, though, as I say, impelled by some inner conflict.9

That bridges the gap, I think, and it is beyond any school.10

The idea of schools and movements in art is one of the happiest and, I suspect, most fanciful of Utopian schemes. The term “school of poetry” presupposes a level of civilization, a centralization of forces, a benevolence of rule, and an expansion of the state in which it occurs, that rarely happen. The material of, say, six people ready with their ideas, just short of their creative height of power, and drawn together by some community of belief or passion, active enough so that they will be stimulated and reinforced by the contact, and not have their energies drawn off into conversation, comes very close to the Olympian standard. But, more important than the gearing of personalities, the climate of belief necessary to a group stand takes first place. And perhaps I come closer here to a definition of belief in the way I have been using it than at any other time. You know that I am not advancing a dogma; I am trying to work this foundation of all that I have been saying into a communicable necessity without turning it into bald statement or leaving you with nothing but a halo of evangelical half-light around something in very soft focus indeed. But, at the beginning, my attempt was to delimit this question by speaking of its lack. The fear of poetry and all that it means in our personal lives, all that it does to our attitude and conduct, is the acid reverse, the destructive lack of this quality. In everything I have claimed, the system that becomes what I have called poetry—the system that is common to all of us, accessible to all of us, whether it finds formal expression or not—is definite and has an existence of its own. But the threat is just as real, and has many more allies in a threatening world, one of whose chief and most deadly weapons is this threat, this fear. And there can be no real stability of effort—not in community—in that atmosphere. What you may find is the extreme and heightened effort of exiles or conspirators who design and maneuver and skillfully contrive to achieve a known end. That happens in politics; it happens in art. But it is conspiracy to a known end; and I think the point will illuminate more than anything that I can say that the belief toward which everything I have said is pointed is an unknown and undefined belief. This may be a weakness. I do not think it is, but I know the times call for incisive definition and immediate action, and I feel very diffident in standing before you with anything more general. Except that candor is best; formulas will not do; what I must say to you is that there are possibilities, and it is those which must be worked out.

The history of poetic movements provides excellent models, the best models of all, I think, better than any in the history of religion or state-craft or any other exploration. I think of Amy Lowell with her capacity for arranging and provoking and organizing, and I do not believe that she had a movement with her; or of some of the recent efforts to build up groups in an atmosphere of pressures and frictions and constraints.11 There are two periods in English history when the motion was made freely, full tide, in gestures that had no object—no label—that permitted the imagination to exercise its range, and provided a climate of belief. One was the Elizabethan period, when at a flash, or so it seems at this distance, many people saw human capacities that had not until then been guessed at in their richness; the other was the time of that group which revolved around Coleridge and Wordsworth and their further intuition about the capacity of the human spirit. The parallel in this country is that time which has been rightly seen as flowering and springtime and frontier, which gave us the Concord group.12 And these artists had liberated themselves from formula, they guessed, they guessed continually in an expanding age, their guesses turned on greatness, and they moved in an air of unboundaried belief.

The wish for belief of this sort is a subtle and terrible thing. And the belief itself, because it is based on no dogma at all, but on a suspicion of great capacity, is likely to break down during great wars, great horror, when not only belief but everything else is killed. So much death in the world; the weight of so much death; and the only solidarity the frightful solidarity of guilt, and the knowledge that we are all implicated in this crime. The belief breaks down; your token is The Waste Land, its symbols of impotence and drought, and the sure consciousness that even if the rain arrives this moment, it arrives too late. People wish for it most of all in despair and madness and war; the wish breeds insanity. I have heard of a Frenchman in this country who went mad last spring, as Paris fell.13 His madness took this form: he went about and asked the people he met to give him orders. He begged for it, only give him orders, any orders, and he would carry them out. One wonders what new forms of madness are taking shape in France.

I have just had the good luck to be offered a chance to read the most revealing document I have ever seen. It is the first of its kind, although it would seem that the science of which it is a part would have a main obligation to assemble material like this for years and years, until there was a base that would be available to all those working in the field.

(Tell about the SCHIZ manuscript; compare Joyce; tell suffering; tell wish; read parts about freedom and belief and passion.)14

Now that is the statement of a madman; and its imagery is that of madness. But it is also the deep wish of a person who is preoccupied with his trouble, and the shocking thing about it is that he comes so close, he is absorbed in his suffering and thinking about it and he recognizes his need. The moment he does recognize his own need, he hits on the one healing principle. He is quite right; if he can find one belief, one axis of reality, he can be cured. The point is that he is right. And until he finds that axis, all that he can express is catastrophe.

If you dilute that suffering—and the only dilution is that of reason—and generalize, and multiply it by the population of a country, I think you will have an approximation of England, or Germany, or any country faced by war today, and split to its heart. England is not, I think, murderously divided against itself, any more than this sick boy is; but we have seen a real civil war between France and England, as real as our own Civil War; and I think the shock of that cleavage has had a lot to do with England’s spiritual resurgence. Again, the only answer in the face of sickness is a set towards belief, and, again here, not a formal belief, but rather a belief in capacity that must grow with action, and feed as it grows, and be elusive, not in its nature, but in the elusive and promising movement of its boundaries.

The answer in this country is very often rigid, much more rigid than one would expect. It is in terms of censorship and hush-editorials; the war is upon us, give up all of this, for the time being at least, talk of nothing but our health, our buoyancy, the splendid vigor of our forces, the necessity of everything as it is accomplished . . . at least until the crisis is past. I know there is a widespread feeling that an unspoken censorship has already arrived, and that a real censorship must follow soon. I should like to read you a comment that has come out of bombed London, emerged in a voice so human and clear, so against all the hysteria that can make straitjackets and gags out of the flags of countries, so deeply civilized that it offers real civilization to the reader:

“The general feeling,” I read [in a letter from an American reader], “is that we are on your side. As pro-British as Roosevelt, but no more.” To be on our side, the side which is against Hitler-steria, against nazi-ness, is to be—“pro-British.”

[. . .]

There were many nations, not necessarily pro-German, who saw no need to be pro-British. [. . .] They could not see that to be against Hitler was to be for something shared by all civilization, something far bigger than can be contained by any word of only national denomination.

[. . .]

We—the Englishmen, Scots, Welsh, Irish, French, Norwegians, Czechs, Poles, Canadians, New Zealanders, Australians, now making our stand in this island—know that we have looked into our souls, and what we have not liked that we have seen there, has borne the imprint of Satan, an imprint we recognize; we are determined to do away, at last, with this split personality, having seen what a split the darker side can so wantonly make when it gets the upper hand. We know it is not a war between countries, nor as some would have us believe among classes, but each man’s war for his soul.15

The slap in the face is a good one; it is the treatment for hysteria, and it works.16

This audacity is very much alive, not the mouthfuls of election talk we have been having, or the overstimulated glandular variety of despair. It is close to the spirit of the Melville letter I read yesterday.17 Its material is the usable truth, and it has no need to be pompous or bloodshot about anything, least of all itself. One looks around for writing like this, for talk like this. I have spoken about immediate emotion, and the need to face meanings, but I do not forget how badly we all want freshness and pleasure and relaxation and delight. A musical comedy can do that, a mystery thriller or a day in the country or going dancing or any number of delightful and irrelevant pastimes can do it, and not wipe out the main fact, but rather add to the effect of not facing, of playing and behaving surreptitiously and behind the back of the world. The editorial and the note about planes crossing over the Channel take the general and very effective horror and put it on a human level again. We need that very deeply. We need it in our day-to-day affairs, in our talk, in our poetry.18 It is at that point that poetry will inevitably not satisfy us at the moment. It will not be able quite so quickly to absorb not the war itself, but the change of world that must include the conditions of war. We’ll have ballads, and songs, and the official verse of laureates and newspaper columnists. There was a horrifying statement reprinted in the newspapers last spring, to the effect that Mr. MacNeice had said that the war was not very interesting yet and there would be no war poetry, in his estimate, until it improved.19 If that statement had been true, it could not have been topped for cold horror and cynicism. But it seemed to be at bottom a statement about catastrophe and expression during catastrophe. If the shock is great and general enough, it is the leveler of expression, and you will have your queens and scrub-women making identical statements of absolute nobility or absolute banality, but—and you may rely on this—extremely simple and direct. Statement during shock is always likely to be extreme understatement of an almost formal quality. Hemingway is master of it; he has taken his characters through entire books, and kept them talking as if they had not yet got over the shock which started them off.20 The point is, of course, that they never will. It is a quality that hardly comes off on the stage, and which makes the most searing and expressive photography. If you have followed Life during its record of France and England this year, you will have been struck by face after face caught in declarative horror, sometimes making a joke of it, or fitting it into the life of that day, but always struck by it and expressing just that.21 That is what happens, and it does not fit into an art-form. It is certainly not ruled out—I cannot see any exclusion possible, of any subject or any attitude, once that subject or attitude has been absorbed; but very few have gone through the process of absorption. And, as the editorial in Life and Letters To-day points out, it is always a surprise to see America using the worn-out phrases; it is a surprise to see the attitudes revert. One magazine, for example, printed a war issue in the same month that this issue of Life and Letters To-day appeared.22 It was an anti-war issue, but without the sharpness of Life and Letters To-day, and without a twist of the humor that can arrive under fire, but which is almost impossible in the moments before that, while there is still time. It spoke of the mistakes made in considering “writers’” problems in the face of war, of the refugees, of the gold buried at Fort Knox, of the new generation to be drafted.23 The issue was in many ways an occasional issue, and showed up in the weaknesses of the “social poets,” for the social poets had become the occasional verse-makers; from drawing-room poets, they had become headline poets, and were corrupted with the disease that struck so many writers in the month of September 1939, and has not ceased to strike; the need to be absolutely right about the headlines twelve hours after they appeared, at the very latest.24

The worst thing that would happen to our poetry at this point, except to neglect it altogether, would be for it to become an occasional poetry of war. A good deal of the repugnance to social poetry was caused, I think, because there were so many degrees of blood-savagery in it, ranging all the way from self-pity, naked or identified with one victim after another, to actual bloodlust and display of wounds, a rotten sort of literary begging for attention and sympathy and charity that did not persuade anybody and did not take in very many. We need the emphasis that the last ten years have given to our poetry. Actually, what the so-called social poets have insisted on has been a tradition in art—one of the few traditions that goes beyond a formal shell to an organic structure which we can in conscience claim and use.25

To keep our validity now, however, we must go beyond the war. Actually, some of us have been writing of nothing else for the last four or five years.26 This has nothing to do with minorities, although it deals with victims. It is the true historic reversal; the line of war the great example of minority rule; the driven people trapped in shock and without expression; the forms of expression, cornered and paralyzed until, a moment later, the gag itself is slipped in place.

They say, and we know to go on from there: We must plan the future as if it extended forever, and work according to that plan. But compromise may be the rule tomorrow.27 And even if it is, we must see over that rule. It is time for the most brilliant and mature imagination, for we must look to the peace that may emerge from this war, to an end of the flights of refugees, to a decentralization of ruined countries, and a building up from the ground of ruin. The lonely ruined countries, of whom we are the last, and in this moment, intact still but with all commitments made! Lonely Ethiopia, lonely Spain, all western Europe, China fantastically ragged and enduring in the east, England swept down-on and alone. Conference tables will not make peace here, and the shrewd hidden reasons of statesmen will not make very much happen. There will need to be live acts, heroic acts of the imagination in the torn countries. (Not just believing. I haven’t talked about what I believe in or what you believe in any more than I’ve talked about what you’re doing or I’m doing—because we have to find our terms and they must be somewhere between. I am just saying your own belief is the measure of yourself, and is the line to hang method on.)28 And in this country, it will mean the reckless premature gestures that we live on in America. That we start our processes with. Like John Brown, that meteor, a crazy murderous old man whom Lincoln had to condemn, but whose act was responsible, was the precipitating stroke that was necessary and right according to its own laws and the laws of action.

It is strokes like that that we need, in poetry as well as in action. Firm rebellious strokes based on belief, and not narrowed by a rigid framework. Since this is not the end of belief, but the beginning, and the rules are not yet laid. There will be a lot of fighting before the peace can be seen. As for rules, you will be able to recognize the peace this way: if it is a false peace, there will be a great many rules; if it is peace, there will not be many. Because then there will be a science to begin, the building-up; and there will be a poetry to suit that growth.

That is the poetry we may begin now. The age has cracked open; our lives have cracked open. It had been coming for a long time; it is our main promise, the sign of a beginning; and if it seems now to cut us off and choke off all speech, we have reminders of what it is we are to imagine, and with what powers we must answer. Dryden has the final lines:

All, all of a piece throughout!

Thy Chase had a Beast in View;

Thy Wars brought nothing about;

Thy Lovers were all untrue.

’Tis well an Old Age is out,

And time to begin a New.29

That is the only young world left, the one that has not yet been clearly imagined. That is the poetry ahead of us.30

(Unpublished, 1940)