Part 12 (1/2)
Incidentally one may add that is why the great medieval Hebrew poets like Solomon Ibn Gebirol, Jehudah Ha Levi and Moses Ibn Ezra, are great poets.[172:A]
Heine in his poem on _Jehuda Ben Halevi_ deplores the fact that these three poets are not well known to Aryan peoples. In fact the liturgical poetry of the medieval Hebrew poets is non-sectarian and can be appreciated by any lover of the literature of ecstasy. Any reader of poetry may be moved by Jehudah Ha Levi's _Ode to Zion_, or Bachya Ibn Pakuda's _My Soul_. There are able prose translations of these in B.
Halper's _Post-Biblical Hebrew Literature. An Anthology_, Vol. II.
Any one who reads the history of the poetry of a country, that is, of the poetry in verse, will find much to amuse him in the alleged progress made in the conventions of poetry. One poet dethrones another and the reader gets the impression that the later poet is always superior to the earlier one because he has destroyed convention, and introduced what is often a minor change. The eighteenth century rated Chaucer and Spenser rather low, the nineteenth century killed off Dryden and Pope, Tennyson and Browning were a.s.sumed to have advanced upon Byron and Sh.e.l.ley, and the mid-Victorians in turn were deemed to have been supplanted by the poets of ”the nineties.” Though a later age may make some technical improvements in the art of writing poetry, it is genius that counts.
Many problems about poetry have disturbed critics since Byron died, but none of the succeeding generations have been able to detract from the quality of poets like Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Sh.e.l.ley and Keats. For a poet is such by virtue of his ability to convey great emotion and thought, and he does not become obsolete solely by the technical innovations of a later age.
Many poets are praised for the ”note of revolt” in their poetry, because they have brought about some changes in the technical art of writing poetry, or have written their poetry in a manner different from the ancients only in form. But let us never lose sight of the fact that these changes which are considered tokens of great courage on the part of the innovators, amount to very little when these so-called audacious poets remain on an intellectual and moral level with the ma.s.ses and do not rise as high as the older poet whose vision soared ahead of his time.
A poet may be great even though he uses the old machinery of the supernatural, even though he indulges in artificial diction, cliches and stereotyped metres, for what counts in poetry is the greatness and power of a human soul and personality, the ecstatic presentation of an advanced point of view, his share as a battler for truth, freedom and justice, the intensity and importance of his emotion. People are under the impression that all the martyrs for human liberty perished in the medieval ages; that the world has been set free by those who gave up their lives to liberate humanity from kings and priests, and that there is no more work to be done by poets to-day in championing human liberty.
Critics who admire Milton and Sh.e.l.ley as champions of liberty attack to-day's unpopular champions of it. It amuses one to read of the epithets, revolutionary and radical, applied to versifiers because they have arranged a system of vowel-sounds combination in their poems, or imported a metre, or broken with an old conventional metre, while the substance of their poetry remains far below the intellectual and aesthetic level of poets who lived many centuries ago.
But what greater poetry has been produced in the last two generations, than many of the novels and prose dramas written in Russia, Germany, France, Italy, England and Scandinavia? Why is there greatness in the poetry in these works? Is it not because of the character drawing, the delineation of great emotional conflicts, of the ecstasy bathing the ideas? Would these poets have been any the less great, had they continued to use the same ideas, emotions and situations, tricked out even in the old conventional forms of rhyme, metre, tropes, allegories, high personages, supernatural agencies? In fact plays like _Peer Gynt_ and _The Sunken Bell_ are rather technically conventional as verse plays, but could any one compare with them the vapid, senseless and trite lyrics created by some of our so-called modern ”revolutionary”
poets? The great poet who deals with the capabilities of man in experiencing emotion, and fears not to track the human soul, even into morbid feelings, who has the courage to challenge society with ideas, even though these arouse the most bitter antagonism of some of the leaders of society, is the man whom posterity will most enjoy, for he is most human and bold and he never loses sight of the fact that he deals with real ecstasy, and not with the cultivated nuances of some cliques of versifiers.
If the reader will make a close study of many of the revolutions in writing poetry, he will find that the great change often amounted to nothing more than the subst.i.tution or creation of a new rhythm or trope for the one used by the old poet; such changes are of minor importance.
No doubt our contemporary poets have done away with many conventions.
They no longer employ inversions of words and phrases, nor cultivate the stock poetical terms and words allowed formerly as a matter of poetic license. They no longer tolerate cliches such as whenas, o'er, whatime, dost, 'mongst, anon, ere, morn, even, o'er, main, taen, athwart, e'en, forsooth, alack, oh thou, didst, hath, perchance, methinks, steed, gleeds, prithee, trow, 'neath, 'gainst, ween, wist, espy, twixt. But it took them a long time to discover what the prose writers always knew; namely, that distorted speech should be avoided in literature. But the avoidance of cliches does not make a poet.
Some of our so-called modern free verse poets like Amy Lowell are artificial in substance and manner, labored and uninspired, dull and bookish, and lacking in human interest, ecstasy and ideas. Their technique may be different from that of the old poets, but these new writers often have no ideas, reveal no poetic personality, and convey no emotion. Many of them are afraid of being personal, and as a result they fall below even the old New England poets whom they despise. A poet like Longfellow may be deficient in intellectual power and sympathy with liberal and democratic ideas, but when he tells a tale of such human interest as _Evangeline_, presents an idea against war as in _The a.r.s.enal at Springfield_, or draws on his personal life in such fine lyrics as _My Lost Youth_, _The Bridge_, _The Day is Done_, he moves us and we know we are reading poetry, though it has not the emanc.i.p.ating and stimulating effect of some of the work of Walt Whitman. Lafcadio Hearn, by the way, condemned the tendency to depreciate Longfellow.
Many of our free verse writers produce no great poetry, even though they write in a medium that is the proper language of poetry. The opponents of the free verse writers, who see no merit in many of the latter's productions, are often right; these productions are not poetry because they lack ecstasy and ideas. Much of the work in the old forms produced to-day has more ecstasy, and hence it is poetry.
Determination of the merits of the poets of eminence to-day is outside the scope of this volume.
There has been much comment about the fact that we need and indeed are getting an American or national poetry. Now one of the things that Whitman has overdone was this demand for poetry that is distinctly American. Poetry appeals to the universal element in man first. A great idea like a pa.s.sage in the _Song of Myself_ could have been written by and can be appreciated by the people of another nation. A cry of sympathy for the sufferings of animals and man such as you find in _Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking_ is not an American but a human note.
You can translate a love poem from the Greek, Latin, German, French or Italian into English prose, and if you remove the proper names or other unessential adjuncts, no expert or scholar will be able to tell what nationality the poem represents. No one has better shown the hollowness of the claimants for nationalism than James Russell Lowell in two essays on nationality in literature, one written in sympathetic review of Longfellow's _Kavanagh_ and collected in _The Round Table_, and another in review of Piatt's poems, collected in _The Function of the Poet_.
Goethe, before Lowell, ridiculed the idea of purely national poetry.
True, there are national traits and characteristics, modes of thought and feeling peculiar to different peoples, that enter into and distinguish every literature, but these do not usually make one literature so national as to be incomprehensible to other nations. When this does happen, the product has no universal appeal and hence is not great poetry. Again poetry may have local color; it may be steeped in national traditions, it may express a racial philosophy but it is then of value only in so far as it represents the mode of thinking and feeling of the rest of mankind. Poetry may be rooted in the soil, be an indigenous product, depict native customs or a provincial life; it may depict certain types of heroes, and glory in the country of its birth, and describe its richness, but all these features are incidentals. Human nature is much the same the world over. Feeling is universal, though it may be colored by national traits, though one nation may feel more keenly, or indulge a certain emotion more frequently than others. The heart and the head, the emotions and the mind, rule in writing. The _Old Testament_ and Shakespeare are no longer national products for they speak to the whole world. They have the local color and the ideas of their time and depict a certain phase of life, but we all feel in reading these books that they are written about ourselves and to ourselves. ”We have spoken too much about nationalist art, forgetting that though the roots may lie in nationality and personality, the results, independent of school and nation, should overleap boundaries and enter the universal heart.” (Isaac Goldberg, _Studies in Spanish-American Literature_.)
Poetry then grows out of the soil, but like imported fruit tastes as well to the man a thousand miles away as to the native.
The literature of a country however should be individualistic, not imitative. Whitman is an American poet in the sense of recording his own individuality, while Lowell is a transplanted Englishman. It is only a Whitman rather than a Lowell who could have written the following pa.s.sages, which appear in the famous Preface to the first edition of _Leaves of Gra.s.s_.
In the make of the great masters the idea of political liberty is indispensable. Liberty takes the adherence of heroes wherever man and woman exist--but never takes any adherence or welcome from the rest more than from poets. They are the voice and exposition of liberty. They out of the ages are worthy the grand idea--to them it is confided, and they must sustain it.
Nothing has precedence of it, and nothing can warp or degrade it.
I do not mean that the author of that bold poem in the first Bigelow Paper, against the recruiting sergeant, and of the lecture on _Democracy_, was not, in spite of his dislike of Whitman, in accord with the above quoted pa.s.sage. Nor do I mean that he could not have learned to write a pa.s.sage like that from the nation which gave us such fine prose poems in defence of liberty as Milton's _Areopagitica_, Locke's _Letters on Toleration_, Jeremy Taylor's _Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying_, Mill's _Liberty_ and Morley's _Compromise_. But Whitman was the first American poet who taking his cue from American political doc.u.ments embodied in his poetry views of political and individual liberty, as the fruit of democracy. Even Whitman stopped short of championing economic liberty. Some of his present-day disciples do champion it. But Whitman's plea for liberty does not make him a national poet, for European poets have also sung of liberty.
FOOTNOTES:
[172:A] The greatest authority in America on medieval Hebrew poetry is Prof. Israel Davidson of the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York City.
CHAPTER X