Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings

by Vita Sackville-West

  It is precisely this, I think—this fear of ridicule, this absence of passion, this almost morbid dread of seriousness—which is driving the poets towards trivial, commonplace, or over-intellectualised subjects. The excuse often offered for the trivial and the commonplace is that the poets want to bring poetry nearer to the average human comprehension but I do not believe that there is any honesty in that excuse. No poet worthy of the name cares whether the man in the street understands him or not; he knows only too well that the man in the street doesn’t read him, whether he writes about the immortality of the soul or about a workman throwing his boots at his wife. The intellectualisation of poetry is another thing, and I want to deal with that under my next heading.

  So much, then, for the question of subject matter, which although important enough is by no means all-embracing; for a writer, if he be truly a poet—and in saying “if he be truly a poet” I mean if he be capable of putting his raw emotion into the crucible of his mind, so that it emerges a finer and more shapely thing; if he be truly a poet, I say, we will grant him the right to use any subject matter he think fit; and especially in this question of modern poetry, we shall be less interested in his subject than in the angle from which he approaches it. This brings me to my second point of difference between modern and what we may call traditional poetry, though I am aware that in using the words “traditional poetry” I am slipping into one of those loose expressions I most want to avoid. Still, for purposes of differentiation, we will let it stand.

  My second point of difference concerns the question of focus, and herein lies probably the principal contribution of modern writers to literature. It is a platitude, but also a necessity, to insist upon the change which has taken place in our attitude towards all the arts: painting, sculpture, music, poetry, prose—those who practice these arts today tend, more and more, to dispense with conventional representation, and to inspire their work with something less life-like certainly, but aesthetically, psychologically, and emotionally even, more significant. Of course, as regards some of the other arts, there is nothing new in this; one has but to instance early Chinese pottery, for example, or certain primitive paintings and sculptures, but I am not speaking of the other arts, I am speaking of literature, and more especially of poetry, and so far as literature is concerned I do believe that a very real though, perhaps not a very profound, innovation has been introduced. It was born in France, where Mallarmé and Rimbaud, no less than Cézanne, began to see life from a queer, unfamiliar, oblique angle, something like a caricature, which surprises us first by it unlikeness and then by its likeness to the object. What this angle exactly is, and what this trick of focus, I find difficult to define; it varies, naturally between poet and poet, though in its total impression, it is always recognizable; it has, merely, different manifestations. Very often it manifests itself by a trick of phraseology, by allusion, by ellipses; by noun and adjective placed together in unfamiliar juxtaposition; by mannerisms of every kind. It is an attempt to view things with a fresh and different eye, even if the view is to produce something ungainly as a result; and again, in this respect. The mind is drawn irresistibly to the obvious analogy of modern painting. In a more fundamental sense, their attitude is less difficult to define. It springs, let us say, from the modern disgust with life, from the sense that the squalor of life is at least as evident as its beauty, and the consequent desire to rough-handle these conflicting elements, in an attempt to bring them into some sort of co-relation, an attempt which occasionally lands the poet in a setting-down of contrasts of almost incredible crudity. So we may say, that the principal points seem to be the discarding of conventional beauty and of reality (that is, representation), in favour of interest. No representation is no longer interesting to us, if interesting it ever was; for what it is worth, it has been done over and over again, and brought to such perfection that its achievement, to us, with the example and experience of our ancestors behind us, has become a matter of mere technical skill, an exercise in ingenuity. Conventional beauty is rapidly going the same road; to apprehend it has become a matter of thinking at second-hand, a thing intolerable to any truly creative mind. No, it is a fresh perception that we demand, the expression of states of mind, and a more revelatory interpretation of life, of object, of the universe, are the topics which set out to capture our interest and stimulating response. It follows, automatically, that poetry is becoming more and more abstract, allusive, intellectual—and indeed I am not at all sure that the 17th century metaphysical poets were not as truly our precursors as were the nineteenth-century symbolists.

  I do not think that I am contradicting myself in anything I said before. I said that modern poets were afraid of seriousness, and I adhere to this, with the qualification that this intellectual attitude is the only thing about which they dare to be serious at all, and even that is frequently presented under an apologetic, sarcastic, or paradoxical guise. Nor is it precisely a breeding-ground for passion, but rather an anatomical, desiccated thing. It has called down, among other accusations, on modern poetry the charge of being introspective (though why poetry should not be introspective on occasion I do not know), but it seems to me that this is a false, short view. It is true that if we are interested in states of mind, those states of mind are mostly likely to be our own, since our own mind is the one we know most intimately; but this intellectual poetry is not concerned solely with psychological freakishness: it is concerned also with objects in the internal world, and with the significance that may be extracted from a fresh view of them. Indeed, one of its merits is that it endeavours to see the world, and the objects in the world, in a fresh unprejudiced way, and although the result is often ridiculous, it is also occasionally illuminating.

  It goes without saying that many absurdities are perpetrated in the name of these new aspirations, even by those whose intention is sincere. But it must be remembered that this aspect of modern poetry is not only at the experimental stage, but also that the poets are experimenting with very difficult and ticklish material. If so small a proportion of poems in this new manner are successful as works of art, it is because the balance is so excessively precarious, the line between success and failure so perilously narrow. It is very difficult indeed to deal with the fine shades of perception in so inadequate a medium as words. Only when the moment of clearsightedness has been peculiarly intense, does something come through to us of the vision the writer is trying to render; and if this is true of all poetry, how much truer must it be of poetry which is dealing with experiences so fragile and so elusive. The pity is that so many of those experiments should appear in print, when they ought more properly to have gone into the waste-paper basket. They exasperate the reader, and blind him to the really interesting development which is taking place; they can serve no other purpose.

  There remains the third point of difference, which to my mind is the most superficial of the three, though the most immediately apparent, and that is the question of form. A great deal has been written and said about free verse; a great deal more, I think, than the subject deserves. For one thing, it is not quite new, though it is certainly more generally practised today than heretofore. But it is easy to understand why this controversy should rage: it is because the practice of free verse provides a very dangerous trap, both for the writer and the reader, for the writer because it may enable him to escape many of the exactions of his craft, and for the reader because it is not always easy to distinguish between charlatanism and the genuine article. I want now, however, to discount the work of those charlatans who have brought discredit upon a perfectly genuine and laudable attempt to render the language of poetic diction more pliable and more elastic, and to concentrate only on free verse at its best. I will say at once, and without hesitation, that free verse properly used is as powerful and delicate an instrument as any that has been devised for the poet’s art. I would go further, and say that it is a more civilised form than the regular stress and the recurrent rhyme; more civilised, in that it is furth
er removed from the facile beat and jingle which for obvious reasons please children and unsophisticated people. It demands, for one thing, a finer ear; and this is no paradox, for free verse, in skillful hands, allows of modulations, subtly fitted to the sense, which are denied to all the accepted English forms with the exception of blank verse, its nearest relative. Mr. Robert Graves, with whom I don’t always agree, puts it neatly when he says that “the claim of free verse is that actually each line, not only each stanza or passage, may be subject to a new musical change.” It follows naturally enough that, whereas bad free verse is easy to write—anybody can do it—good free verse demands a sensitiveness and technical skill at least as great as those necessary for writing in a metre which helps the poet with its adventitious advantages, rather than hampers him with its more rigid laws.

  There is a great deal more which I should like to say about free verse, and many illustrations which I should like to give, but time forbids; one comment, however, I must make lest I be misunderstood, and that is, that I do not believe that free verse can ever take the place, for certain purposes, of the recognised poetic forms. The greatest disability, I think, under which free verse labours is that it is less pleasing and consequently, above all, less memorable than its metrical rivals. It may be as satisfying to a well-developed aesthetic sense, but it does not, especially in its more exaggerated forms, take the same hold on the heart. A fine taste, as well as a fine ear, is essential to the poet; he must have a sense of what is suitable, and he must know with a right instinct what is suitable to free verse and what is not. Without wishing to be dogmatic, I would say that much metaphysical, narrative, dramatic, and descriptive poetry might well be cast in free verse, but lyrical poetry never.

  Then there are side-issues on which I have not touched at all, tempting though they are. Every age has had its own poetic fashions, and ours is no exception. Every age has its own vocabulary, and its own flora and fauna; its overworked adjectives, and its favourite words; these things might form the subject of a diverting study, but are of course no more than the ornaments or blemishes of the surface texture. We tire of them as quickly as we tire of every fashion, and look round for something else. Thus already today, merry-go-rounds and harlequins, zinnias and unicorns, bore us as something merely out of date. I might speak too of the modern trick of reference to some detail which is charged with meaning in the poet’s experience, but which has no meaning in ours; it is made to stand as a symbol for unutterable things, but we are given no plank with which to bridge the gap. But these furbelows have no real bearing on the subject we have been discussing, and I shall turn from them to the second part of my problem.

  This was, if you remember, to what developments in poetry may the modern tendencies be expected to lead? And that is a question which no one, unless inspired with the gift of prophecy, can properly answer. I think it will be more useful to sift and summarise what I have said hitherto, and to see what proportion of the desirable and the undesirable we shall get out of such a sifting.

  We have seen—if I have been so fortunate as to get you to agree with me—two principal differences between contemporary poets and their predecessors; firstly, that no high seriousness is allowed to inspire their verse, and secondly, that they endeavour to approach the world, both external and intellectual, from a new angle. There are minor differences, with which I have dealt, but we will ignore them for the moment. Let us call the two principal differences by convenient names: the difference of seriousness, and the difference of focus. In the first lies, according to my view, the loss, the disastrous loss; and in the second the gain. The point, you see, is whether the compensation is adequate. I submit that it is not. I am as interested as anyone in this difference of focus, and I respect it when I come across it, but I cannot believe that it is weighty and sufficient enough to fill permanently the room of the qualities it is trying to oust. It is interesting up to a point, as being representative of an age in which the old values are no longer stable, and in which we are casting round for an expression, almost a formula, of our perplexity and distress; but the whole attitude is, intrinsically, too negative, too limited, surely, to prove anything but a blind alley. To seek, in a new angle of approach, a substitute for the seriousness we have discarded, is surely nothing but a wanton evasion, a begging of the question. This attitude may provide an enrichment to literature, in the sense that it requires an angle of vision which has never been expressed before, but it is an enrichment which should be used sparingly—sparingly and suitably—not put forward as the foundation on which the great weight of literature may safely repose. The attitude fails, moreover, because it is incomplete; this vague discontentment is a thin, peevish thing, without the dignity of true pessimism; it is simply a confession of our inability to grapple with the problems that beset us today. It has not the bite of cynicism on the grand scale, such cynicism as Swift’s or Voltaire’s. Everything has been taken from us, our belief in continuity, in usefulness, in stability; we are disgusted with civilisation; we are bewildered by the pronouncements of science. And to oppose these catastrophes, we can produce nothing but a whimper of discouragement, and a trick of manner by which we hope to carry off and disguise the emptiness beneath.

  “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

  Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

  You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

  A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

  And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

  And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

  There is shadow under this red rock,

  (Come in under the shadow of this red rock

  And I will show you something different from either

  Your shadow at morning striding behind you,

  Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you:

  I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

  Now those are fine lines, and the exactly convey the mood which I have been trying to describe; they say something which is worth saying, but although it is worth saying once in a way, I maintain that it is insufficient. It is too limited. Our attention is arrested for a moment by this frame of mind, partly because we are always more easily arrested by destruction and denigration, but we very quickly come to an end of it, and want to go on to something else. We say, “Very well. You have shown us the stony rubbish, the heap of broken images; we have looked, and admitted the existence of these things; now we must have something to put in their place.” But so far the poets have nothing to give us; they reject the old, quite rightly, and we, quite rightly, are dissatisfied with the new.

  This brings me back to the original question, what is to become of poetry? What becomes of poetry must depend very much on what becomes of men’s minds; it is absurd to think of poetry as something separate from current life, shut away in an air-tight compartment. Literature must always, to a certain extent, hold the mirror up to general tendencies of thought. It is possible of course that we may witness, or that our children may witness, a return to the perennial problems which occupy men’s minds; it is also possible that when we have absorbed the new values of science, when they have become a part of our consciousness, ceasing to be, as today, merely honoured in the intellect, our enlarged conception of Time and the Universe may reflect itself in serious and steadfast poetry. It is impossible to tell. But if our descendants do ever emerge, after this sad age of empty darkness, into a fuller light, they will surely look back on us,

  “Remember us—if at all—not as lost

  Violent souls, but only

  As the hollow men.”

  FROM ANDREW MARVELL (1929)

  Vita’s small book on Andrew Marvell might not seem at first glance a very likely place from which to single out her way of judging, for herself and her contemporary reading public, the poems of another writer and poet. For Marvell was, of course and to understate the case, of a style and outlook totally different from her own. And yet her writing here
shows both her certain grasp of English poetry of that period and her sureness of judgment and fairness of outlook. What she calls the “preposterous rubbish” of the side-splitting “Upon the rock” passage she quotes, and her comments on his metaphors when they are particularly exaggerated or indeed splendid, as she says, seem as convincing as those of many literary critics preceding and following her, who were far better known than she was.

  If her own poetry is uneven in what we might generally, at present, evaluate as its qualities and shortcomings, her taste is remarkably sure, and her assessments incontrovertibly learned. So she discourses on the Horatian ode, the pastoral tradition, and the like, quoting relevant passages as she goes along. What makes her essays particularly engaging is her unfailing eye for the outlandish passages, such as the one below on the Caesarean section, and her stylistic parody, as in the question: “Saw Marvell Cromwell?”

  ANDREW MARVELL

  VII

  It is necessary, however, to turn to that other Marvell—the Marvell who had read too much of Donne, and who exercised his wit either upon ethical questions, or upon love, or even upon religion. It is not to be denied that this Marvell suffered from the faults of his contemporaries. He was capable of writing such preposterous rubbish as the notorious

  Upon the rock his Mother drave,

  And there she split against the stone

  In a Caesarian section;

  he took pleasure in the metaphors drawn from cosmography or geometry which were so fruitful a source of disaster, and, like all his fellows, sometimes he managed them successfully and sometimes he came to grief. Sometimes, again, the question of his success or failure is debatable, and must be resolved by personal taste. What are we to say, for example, of these two verses:

  Unless the giddy Heaven fall,