CHAPTER 5

Communication and Poetry (1940)

The two figures of communication that I have had before me as I thought about communication in relation to poetry and our time have been those of John Brown and Carossa.1 They are as I see them highly dramatic figures, and each of them in their great moments tells us more about reaching each other than can be said in words. In one, we have the extreme and pathological moment, the boiling over at Harpers Ferry, that had been led up to, prepared for dramatically in the same way that the crisis in a play or a great poem is prepared for. We have a small band of soldiers, in one desperate raid, throwing such passion into their cause that it must lead to an incalculable enlargement of the struggle itself. That execution and martyrdom should come out of such a move is terribly logical; that Civil War should break in another year and a half is part of that pattern. Carossa the poet is passive compared with the figure of Brown, a furious prophetic old man; Carossa is on the other side, finds himself surrounded by violence and the education of violence, and is unable to refuse to oppose it by withholding what he himself calls “his gentle voice.”2 But the gesture is part of the same pattern as Brown’s, no matter how far removed it is in kind. It is the same kind of communication they are trying for. It is the communication that is not prophecy at all, for it is concerned with the present and the past, too, as much as it is concerned with the possible future; it is the attempt at a gesture of revelation, to rip away circumstance and show at one stroke the immediate and powerful moment in its implications. That is the gesture of poetry. It is questioned continually; it is called unimportant—what if it fails? what if it does not communicate? what if it becomes one in a long series of ineffectual gestures? what if it becomes merely statistical? And the old twisted complaint, that if you tell them the truth, they will say you speak in symbols. Brown did not fail; Brown communicated. As for Carossa, we do not yet know. But there is the gesture. And it has been pointed out that the homerun makes more unity in the grandstand than in the batting average. We come of a generation that has been brought up to deal with figures of statistical magnitude, and the index can be made to shift bewilderingly, and the relations of these statistics to each other contain their own bias, are indeed another example of biased abstraction.3 The gestures of Brown and Carossa can be broken down, as any number can be; there are motives to find, cross-currents, delicate balances of outside forces to account for; but what is important in each instance is that here was a whole gesture, with the vitality of a whole life behind it, made in the Harpers Ferry raid with reckless insistence and trust and hopelessness, and in the scene on the platform before the Hitler Youth, with the quiet unemphasized calm that summarizes a lifetime of steady belief. Both of these gestures reach us immediately; they stamp themselves on us without a word.

Scholars, in speaking of the audience to whom Shakespeare directed his plays, have repeated with a wry and jealous smile the fact that the action had to be played to an illiterate audience; and when we deal with any of these problems of communication, it is a good standard to keep in mind. If we in our plays directed the action to the illiterate, the words could be as complicated as you like, the communication would be made on the other level primarily. The incisive gesture would be made in an atmosphere of silence. And that significant gesture made in silence is the communication that is universal.

But take it off the stage. Think of it in poetry, whose nature must be against silence. Poetry cannot even require rests. On the stage, in the films, long pauses between speeches and between actions may supply the most important effects of all. In music, the rest contributes relief and renewal. In poetry, no rest is possible; no breathing-space longer than a full stop, or, at the very most, a blank line which you can never be sure that your reader will observe. Writers like Cummings can juggle all the combinations, but they can never do more than slow down the action of their words; they cannot stop the flow at will.4

The time-material you deal with in writing a poem—and this is true of any kind of writing to a lesser extent, since prose has more time at its disposal, as a rule, and the long poem faces the same hazards of treatment by the reader that prose does—the material of a poem is its length of time, and the hope that it is written in is the hope that it may find that time a receptive period. Its obligation is to make it receptive; but, of its nature, it is fluid, and all its preparation must be made as it goes past in its full intensity.

But to talk in terms of significant action, or of this flow, as if one were snatching at a river, is not as close as I wish to come to the central problem: the problem of communication. Does it reach you? Does it reach your life? Is there a “moment of proof” at which your life meets the work of art? That is the only test.

There has been a breakdown in communication, it is true. It comes through clearly in the specialized jargon of the professions, in the unmanageable multiplicity of terms and half-meanings and shadows of meanings that we use. It comes through very clearly in the word-slinging of a presidential election campaign, with contradiction and evasion and contradiction, until we drown in words.5 And the breakdown has nothing to do with unintelligibility, although this seems a paradox. It is not the experimenters, the ones who are always called unintelligible for a few years at least, who have the guilt. They are working in communication, they are doing the lab work, and you may be reasonably sure of their honesty and conviction, although often they lack the clews that will force them to be communicable, and without which they can talk and analyze and invent to wit’s end, and still be unheard and choked.6 But it is the debasers who break meaning down; they stand in the same relation to meaning that the ward heelers do to the principles they twist to their own ends to keep their jobs, or get new ones. Debasers of values, of meanings, of words, those who dilute and soften and corrupt, the majority in the field, the ward heelers, the magazine versifiers, the soft of will who pick up an instrument and use it in such a way that not only the job is botched, but the subtle instrument is blunted and the corruption goes on.7 The thing is alive, as any disease might be. It grows at its own rate, and thrives—and grows faster than its own nature, because of the culture it lives in; a culture that grows more complicated, and fosters more complicated organisms of all sorts, good and malevolent.

If art fails at this level, it fails in a thorough and complicated way. There is no good in talking about an illiterate audience; it is not an illiterate audience that one has to deal with, but the audience not only literate but sophisticated in comparisons. This audience has seen many worlds, and heard many comments on them. The newspapers and the movies and the radio have seen to that. It is an audience that is sophisticated in a mechanical way, that is sophisticated not through any particular choice of its own, but because these worlds have been poured in on it, and there was not much reason to set up resistance, or even a healthy antagonism.

During the long analysis of the schizophrenia case, from the transcript of which I read some sections yesterday, the mad boy asked a question that I thought struck home tragically.8 In speaking about his own indifference, the key characteristic of his disease, the fact that he feels himself standing still, not planning and living, not having any future, he breaks in with the question, “Just one thing . . . Is there any psychological term at all that is the meaning of a person that just lives right in the present, a person that hasn’t any ideas of his own, that is all ideas he’s collected from other people, learned a great many things from books and from understanding and from talking and experience, but he hasn’t any of his own that he has figured out? Is that a certain type of person or isn’t it?” The analyst tells him that everyone does that to a certain extent, and the boy goes on, “That’s the way I imagine myself. I can’t think of myself any other way because I can’t see where I figured out myself about these things. I’ve taken ideas from other people and they’ve proved true and I accepted them as they came along, but I haven’t fought for ideas of my own . . . That’s what I—I thought there was probably some word for it—some term that’d tell about it—explain it, but I guess there isn’t . . .” The analyst tells him that he doesn’t know of any word for that kind of person. There should be a word. The boy has here come very close to his own suffering. It is this fact of living in the moment without the feeling of ever having worked for an idea—a definition that many people might give offhandedly of enjoyment, of a pleasant condition—that really means being cut off—and that is much more dangerous to a group as a whole than the so-called unintelligibility of the experimental artist. That is the insanity of the audience, and we are all in that audience, no matter to what degree we are producing.

And in a culture of technically “high rank”—using that in the sense that Maxwell spoke of organizations of high rank—we have communication of high rank, although that moves much more slowly, and the kind of communication has not developed as the means for communication have.9 Shakespeare and his candle-lit wooden stage! But it would be naïve to look at the radio in proportional horror. At least we can in conscience devote ourselves to poetry if we want to. We have all the devices.

What the devices have done is to filter poetry down, to get it to its audience in the only way that poetry ever can reach its audience; in a gradual process by which from the poets and that small audience that actually reads poetry, it arrives to the prose writers and is incorporated, and finds form after form which may be touched by it and reminded, until those who are going to be referred back to the poems themselves reach the books, and the others are touched in lesser ways by the changed forms. It is an absurdity to complain about smallness of audience. Of course the audience is small, has always been. The entire audience that saw the performances of all of Shakespeare’s plays during his lifetime—the whole Elizabethan audience of all the plays of that period, if you prefer—is lost among the number of people going to the movies in any one day in America. I suppose the audience that heard either of MacLeish’s radio plays is larger than Shakespeare’s audience.10

The poetic drama is as good a test as any for poetry trying to make itself heard.11 The reasonable solution for the play, it seems to me, has not yet been naturally developed—and that would be the prose play, whose climaxes and heightened situations are thrown into the diction they require, the diction of poetry. The poetic drama of today is either bogged down in Elizabethan mannerisms and hangovers, or is openly experimental and produced only within a narrow range. Jeffers’s Tower Beyond Tragedy, which contains the finest poetry of any American verse play written to date, is written along the lines of Greek blind tragedy—brought sharply and naturally to the present in the magnificent prophecy which Cassandra makes, a prophecy which leaps three thousand years. That play is almost unplayable, except as pageantry and recitation; it has been done by a university group in California.12 Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes has been done here; Auden has been done here, and at Yale, and, very badly, by the Federal Theatre; Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral was given a performance by the Federal Theatre which was uneven theatre, but which sent the poetry into the air and shook the audience with it; Maxwell Anderson is performed by professional groups all over the country; and MacLeish’s one play, Panic, was given a brief and stylized performance and was ripped to pieces afterwards in one of the weirdest symposiums I ever attended, in which MacLeish was actually martyred.13 The high spot of that evening—the high point of all discussions of poetic drama, it seems to me—arrived when one particularly frightening partisan critic objected to the play’s political attitude, because, he said, the author’s political bias was shown by the fact that his hero, the banker, was given a five-foot line while the chorus, the masses who should be in possession, were permitted only three feet to the line! This has been the recent development of poetry on the stage in this country. We have yet to see the broken and electric play that will combine vivid and native speech with the brilliant action that the medium deserves. Radio may do it, television may do it. The failure so far was accented the week following the broadcast of MacLeish’s Air Raid, when Orson Welles’s nightmare adventure proved not only that the premises of MacLeish’s work were false—he was saying, you will remember, that people would not believe a raid—but also proved what the state of receptivity of this country was, what “audience response” really was when it was laid bare.14

The difficulty with recent poetic drama has been its extreme lack of action. Action has been interpreted to mean sweeping and athletic gestures, rather than the smaller and significant detail of movement which will suddenly illuminate a relationship. Another great hindrance, and this has been true of all poetry and not alone the poetry of the theatre, has been its inconclusive search for a tradition.15 The only possible tradition that would seem valid would be that in which all axiom is cut away at the beginning, and a stand is taken with that line of people who may be said to belong to a “non-axiomatic tradition.” For in itself that forms a line, a tradition in the healthiest sense, since repetition is not possible, not permissible within its definition.

And there would be a fortifying, a sense of the past and a continuous present that would defy the paralysis which is seizing so many here, and which must have been creeping across Europe in an epidemic before the war itself broke; the paralysis of anticipation which is likely to prey on the creative mind. At any moment, the balance may be set which will influence all the possibilities of survival—at any moment at all, not this one more or less than any other—and it is with the business of survival and its attendant destructions that tradition itself is concerned. The hope is for a quick glimpse of possibility; but these glimpses are given at the end of long preparation; the hope is for a flash of communication which will reach with the validity of a miracle witnessed; but these miracles are ordered. We must remember continually out of what material the communication must come; on what scene the miracle must be played. For a great part of the world, whatever reaches will be in the nature of dream-singing, a dream-singing in defeat.16 And as we search for a tradition, and for the dreams themselves that will help us to reach one another, we search for the myths of our existence. Read Kafka, and you will feel that search throughout. Kierkegaard and his work stand behind that effort, but almost a hundred years away, and while Kierkegaard felt free to move in the air of the Biblical myth, Kafka could not, and must find his own.17 Kierkegaard saw in Abraham a father, a father of faith, and a father of myth. Kafka accepted a web of complexity, and his images were the endless trial—the networks of courts and laws and questions and answers and deceptions and legalities—or the errand, the smoky detective story that is close to all our hearts of half-known clues, half-known messages, and tricks and fumbling effort and undiscovered reasonings.18 It is as if there were to be some tremendous structure of a story built on, say, the process of an examination, whose form is very close to the Kafka equation, as if you faced unknown questions on which your life hung, and for which there was no preparation possible and no appeal from which could possibly be imagined. It is myth like that, images like that, that have come to express the horror and mystery of the human heart before a complicated and murderous civilization. And, although the process becomes fantastic very soon, cloudy and fantastic, it escapes at least the cynicism which any realistic treatment falls into. Cynicism which is apparent, for example, in most bottom-dog novels, in the course of which it is clear that most of the characters, and certainly the writer himself, has reached a toleration of the hell he describes. The Kafka framework is never one of acceptance, although always the characters fit into the framework; but the very cloudiness breeds questioning.

The myth and the immediacy are found together in poetry, which gives many voices to the questions, and many scenes to the immediacy. Poetry comes the closest of all the communications, I feel, and it is this that brings the vivid discomfort that so many people feel when their barrier, their fear, is threatened. It is uncomfortable, as any approach to naked consciousness is. It is as if you came into a theatre, and sat in your seat to feel the familiar warmth of excitement and leaving yourself as the house darkened and the curtain went up; but as if the curtain went up on a character who stepped forward to make a curtain speech, saying, “This is a play we have come to watch, and it is true that we will be watching throughout, I shall be standing in the wings and you will be sitting in your seats. But what it concerns is your life, and more than that; not only your life but your relation in life to the people who are sitting on either side of you; not only the friend you came with who is sitting at one side, but the stranger who is sitting at the other side; for at this moment, the one thing that we have in common is that we are all alive in a room together—” and all the house lights went on full, and everyone looked at his neighbor. There would be a self-consciousness at that moment, and a place-consciousness, and time-consciousness, that might make that the moment of climax and destroy any possibility that the play itself would get across; but that state would be the acute moment that comes within the range of poetry; the cover would be off; and whatever was possible would be possible at that moment, in all its rawness and shock.

There is a danger of emphasizing shock and rawness. It is like the danger of emphasizing honesty.19 What is hoped for is perception, and the crude bases of that perception are not desirable one by one. A bombardment is not what is meant at all, and the crudity of that curtain speech, for example, would probably be disastrous. The finest poetry is shaded most finely and to prepare a person to wear fine clothes and love fine textures does not require that she be flayed alive. It would be a desperate simplification to call for any violence in preparation, and it would be the same kind of desperate simplification that has called for violence, and nothing but more violence, and more brutality, in poetry. What we hope for is communication of greater complexity to more highly organized readers, people who are sensitive along a constantly increasing range. What poetry can do is to communicate a wide range of expression along a firm and living axis of reality. The forms are limitless, the material itself limitless, and this is true of poetry as much as it is true of any other channel of the human imagination. But what poetry can do that many of the other forms cannot, or can do less directly, is to focus on that complexity—to throw it into an order, to lead its traced developments as subtly as the developments of music, and explicitly—and, in showing us focus after focus of complexity, strengthen that area of attention that so urgently needs to be strengthened now.20

We need sophistication in this, the ability to face clusters, to face a complicated ensemble, and there is everything to suggest that we will need more and more of this sophistication, and that what will best communicate this knowledge will serve us best. We have classified many other kinds of knowledge, and know many uses for them; we are largely utilitarian, and the tendency is to throw out poetry as not falling in with our utilitarian needs. But that in itself is an act against our civilization, which can convert peanut shells into silk, and vegetables into plane fuselages. It is this kind of knowledge that has not been used; and it is against all of our best directions to throw it away as we have. Many barriers have broken down; many countries of the world are split across by the issues now before them; these split peoples need communication more urgently than ever before; and we need desperately to reach ourselves—each other.21 We need communication and insight, and the alertness of perception that is based on those two, and that reaches its concentration in poetry and the attitude that poetry supposes in the world. We very badly need the tradition in which this knowledge may move freely and be at home, that air of acceptance which Melville indicated when he spoke of the usable truth.22

That, I think, is a tradition we may freely choose. The use of truth is its communication. It is a tradition that has to be fought for with whatever insight and power and poetry we can summon in ourselves.23 But there is not only that base of tradition; there are the possibilities involved. Our lives are the nearest of those possibilities; for, very closely, our lives are all implicated, and the next years will cut through many layers of refusal and hesitation, until the choice is made which will have to do for us, for we will have to live according to it.24 But if we can catch the resonance between ourselves, if we can respond to these facts which cluster into their systems and confront us now—with insight, and keep open what communications there are, the communication itself may mean discovery. The age does fall away and change, the poetries do issue, there will be vast destructions before anything is whole and able to stand, but there is a world to emerge, and the hope for poetry is a hope for a world and a peace in which poetry may live, as people may live—a world in which the life of poetry will be the life of people.25

(Unpublished, 1940)