THOMAS HARDY, CHARLOTTE MEW, EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON, EDGAR LEE MASTERS, STEPHEN CRANE
Robert Bridges probably sent Thomas Hardy a complimentary copy of Hopkins’s poems in 1918, but Hardy makes no reference to it. The work of an obscure Jesuit is unlikely to have made an impression on the seventy-eight-year-old atheist. With Swinburne Hardy maintained a cordial and mutually admiring correspondence. But he is remote from both men, having more in common with Arnold. He tetchily disagrees with him from time to time. The question of influence hardly arises. But with Browning it’s a different matter.
Hardy, more famous as a poet now than ever before, has suffered a sorry fate since the Second World War. This private, discontented man, author of great novels and a huge body of mainly melancholy poetry, has been stiffened by polemicists into a kind of totem, a talisman against alien American and Irish modernism, a vindicator of the Palgrave’s Golden Treasury principle of nice or pretty English lyric poetry. Those who dislike the real and imagined legacy of Hardy heap contrary coals on his head. Provincial, (inventive) traditional formalist, pragmatist and pessimist, even misogynist, Hardy is drafted into service for a range of causes, a play of longer and longer echoes. The poet Gottfried Benn, speaking of German Geist, or cultural spirit, said that when you try to define it, it dies: it exists, like time in a clock, unexplained and informing. Once history or national politics demand that it be codified, it loses creative force and becomes an instrument of tyranny. What once nurtured now constrains: writer, reader and critic repair to it, not as a resource but as a legitimizing ideology. There are two Hardys, both intriguing: the living writer and the dogmatic critical construction. We’re concerned here with the former, though it’s necessary to allude to the latter, if only to cut the poet free of the strangling patristics that have ivied him over.
Robert Louis Stevenson visited Hardy in Dorset in 1885, thirteen years before Hardy’s first collection of poems appeared. He saw “a pale, gentle, frightened little man, that one felt an instinctive tenderness for, with a wife—ugly is no word for it!—who said ‘Whatever shall we do?’ I had never heard a human being say it before.” Stevenson took away a vivid impression of Emma Hardy, but only sympathy for the “little man,” her husband, already a celebrated and controversial novelist. Even at that time the label “pessimist” had attached to him; it was only a few years before he was stigmatized for “immorality” because of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1896) and abandoned prose fiction in favor of verse.
The wife Stevenson found rebarbative is Hardy’s unlikely Muse. Anyone who reads the poems and novels might sympathize with Mrs. Hardy: her husband was not—as his success grew—a barrel of laughs. A joyful, tempestuous courtship and marriage subsided into dogged vocation, a sense of faded days for her, and an increasing unease at her husband’s fame and his developing themes, not to mention his not necessarily innocent, and certainly not infrequent flirtations with admiring younger women. Stevenson saw the ash of a real fire of love, the human embodiment of Hardy’s theme of disappointment and the subject of his best poems, the failure of love under time’s unforgiving dial.
Hardy was born in Bockhampton, Dorsetshire, in 1840, the third year of Victoria’s reign. His father was a builder and a musician. Hardy partly acquired both skills. His mother regarded herself as socially a cut above her husband (Emma later regarded herself as a cut above Thomas). She had ambitions for her son and he received the best education his family could afford, studying in Dorchester and later at King’s College, London. Articled as an ecclesiastical architect from 1856 to 1861, he became a specialist in the Gothic Revival and a more than competent draftsman. His poems and fiction include architectural images, and he is persistently preoccupied with visual perspective. The crafts associated with building, wood- and stoneworking also appear.
For five years he worked in London at an architect’s office and became a prizeman of the Royal Institute of British Architects. During this period he wrote the earliest of the poems he was ultimately to collect decades later in Wessex Poems (1898). In 1870, by inclination and encouraged by his friend Horace Moule, he began a career as a novelist with Desperate Remedies, published in 1871.
From childhood he exercised in verse and regarded himself as a poet. He attempted to translate the biblical book of Ecclesiastes into Spenserian stanzas—a project he (perhaps fortunately) never completed, though he deploys biblical images and subject matter and echoes the rhythms of the King James Version by second nature in prose and verse; certainly the glum vision of Ecclesiastes affected him.
He was always musing about poetry, defining and redefining, thinking in terms of poems, developing his craft in the spirit of a joiner or stonemason perfecting skills in preparation for the big work—a rood screen, a spire, The Dynasts. Some of the early poems Hardy turned into prose and used in descriptive passages in his fiction. Later he translated them back into verse. It is possible to see the impact of his poetic concerns throughout the fiction, in the shaping of scenes, the obliquity and economy of satirical and tragic payoffs, and most of all in the highly organized rhythms of the prose at points of lyrical or dramatic heightening. The impact of the fiction on the verse is also clear: he is a storyteller. His first surviving poem, “Domicilium,” written when he was seventeen, about his paternal grandmother, a figure central to his boyhood, reveals how things were when she first came to live in her new house at Higher Bockhampton. The opening could almost be by Robert Frost:
It faces west, and round the back and sides
High beeches, bending, hang a veil of boughs,
And sweep against the roof. Wild honeysucks
Climb on the walls, and seem to sprout a wish
(If we may fancy wish of trees and plants)
To overtop the apple-trees hard by.
A number of his critical opinions are provident and—if we take into account the literary milieu of Victorian and Edwardian England—radical. Sometimes wry asides, observations on the practice of criticism or the craft of writing, issue in aphorism. “My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.” “My opinion is...”: his useful opinions emerge from long practice in prose and verse; the doubtful ones are the fruit of ingrained prejudices and disappointments. Both true and false are put forward as undeniable verities.
In 1887 he writes, “I begin to feel that mere intellectual subtlety will not hold its own in time to come against the straightforward expression of good feeling.” But his poetry grew in intellectual range and ambition, if not in subtlety, culminating in The Dynasts. Hardy is never technically straightforward. He sets himself exacting challenges in almost every poem. Still, he claims his mission to be to show “the other side of common emotions.” “The business of the poet... is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things, and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things,” bringing opposites and contrasts into controlled tension, without resolution. “To find beauty in ugliness is the province of the poet.” Such dicta are an index of his practice and can be applied to the work of many of his successors, but not all, and not necessarily the best. Like Philip Larkin’s critical declarations in more recent times, Hardy’s are adduced by his partisans as gospel, though they emerge from and refer back to his own accomplishment. Some of them are deliberately mischievous.
Out of this program—if you line up his statements they draw parameters within which “the poet” functions—comes a specific poetic style. “The whole secret of living style and the difference between it and dead style, lies in it not having too much style.” In dealing with “the other side of common emotions,” style must grow out of the commonness. Language must correspond in register to the subject matter and be appropriate to the occasion: a rustic plot demands plain diction; a poem on the loss of the Titanic (“The Meeting of the Twain”) a more developed, contrived language, appropriate to the subject, drawn from the technological age whose skills and overreaching pride produced the doomed liner. The language must finally be subtle enough to contain the “beauty” and “ugliness,” and containment is a function of meter and form. This is a suggestive view of poetic tension: some poems—“The Man He Killed,” for example—state one thing (“quaint and curious war is”) but in hesitant syntax, metrical disruption, contradict what the speaker seems to be saying.
“A certain provincialism of feeling is invaluable,” writes Hardy. “It is the essence of individuality, and is largely made up of that crude enthusiasm without which no great thoughts are thought, no great deeds done.” This view, too, has become an item of faith for some (including Lawrence), who reject cosmopolitan modernism and the formal pretensions of writers who seem to them to practice “mere intellectual subtlety.” In the British context this issues in a narrowing chauvinism, a refusal to engage with work that does not conform to what became the Georgian prejudices that abide, in a decayed form, in the “provincial” and local enthusiasms of our time.
Hardy can’t be held responsible for what posterity makes of him. At Max Gate, sour and retiring, he did not feel like a pope; as new generations of writers (novelists and poets) came up behind him, he may have felt bewildered. A temptation in an age overwhelmed with literary options, as ours has been since the teens of the twentieth century, is to sacralize a substantial poet and draw laws out of his work, rather as, in the two centuries after Milton, he was the Anointed, and Spenser the Baptist.
Much that later critics take as Hardy’s fixed opinions are his passing attempts to justify himself to real and imagined critics. “Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.” One of his ambitions was to write a handful of poems worthy of inclusion in a good anthology. Even when he speaks of other writers, he responds to virtues that he imagines their works share with his. He highlights in one writer “the principles that make for permanence”: “the value of organic form and symmetry, the force of reserve, and the emphasis on understatement, even in his lighter works”—a concise description of a Hardyesque, conventional English temperament. Ironic that it emerges from his reading—or misreading—of a French writer, Anatole France. Odd too that he of all writers should apostrophize “organic form”: not since the Augustans has there been such a constructor of poems as Hardy. The “art that conceals art” does not mask his effortful mastery: his poems are constructed, not grown. Whatever the bucolic trappings, he’s a craftsman.
From other writers he picks up tags and phrases to applaud: “Incidents in the development of a soul! Little else is worth study” (Browning); the poet “should touch our hearts by showing his own” (Leslie Stephens). Illumination falls on what Hardy wanted his poetry to be. The poems both exceed and fall short of these aspirations.
In 1874 Hardy married Emma Gifford, who so alarmed Stevenson eleven years later. Emma was the sister-in-law of a parson whose church in Cornwall Hardy helped to “improve” in the Victorian manner of marring with commendable intent. The first two years of their marriage were apparently happy, but passion cooled. Hardy may never have behaved badly to her, but his gallantry became formal and aloof, endurance replaced love, and more than thirty-five years’ unhappiness elapsed before Emma died. It was at her death that she became the faded Muse of his great poems, the elegies of 1912–13, and a few others that came later. On her death, his mind flooded by recollections of their happy years, he experienced remorse for his part in the decades of hostility. He wrote her poems not at the age of thirty, when he was courting, or at thirty-four, when happily married, but in 1912, at seventy-two, when death did for his heart what life had failed in.
The elegies are poems of guilt as much as love. They lament not the death of Emma but the squandering of love. She died suddenly, and the first elegy (“The Going”) expresses urgent recrimination as well as guilt:
Never to bid good-bye,
Or lip me the softest call,
Or utter a wish for a word, while I
Saw morning harden upon the wall,
Unmoved, unknowing
That your great going
Had place that moment, and altered all.
The materiality of the language (“saw morning harden”) heightens the harsh paradox of her “deed.” The alteration it effected was devastatingly simple. Emma, in dying, denied Hardy the chance to atone for his part in their unhappiness. She rendered the present hard, the past unalterable:
Well, well! All’s past amend,
Unchangeable. It must go.
I seem but a dead man held on end
To sink down soon... O you could not know
That such swift fleeing
No soul foreseeing—
Not even I—would undo me so!
If he forgives her in this stanza, in the breaking syntax of loss, he also accuses her. The nature and scale of his loss become clear in the poems that follow. They entail his entire past, bringing to an intimate personal climax a theme that in the novels and poems sometimes seems contrived, the almost systematic unfulfillment of promise. There are twenty-one poems in the final sequence, “Poems 1912–13” (the first eighteen are the original run), and they progress from immediate apprehension of loss to a kind of stoical acceptance—not the religious consolation of Tennyson’s movingly if implausibly resolved In Memoriam but something more rueful and certainly unredeemed.
In 1914 Hardy married again, a much younger woman, Florence Dugdale, who had long been his amanuensis. With her—she must have been a patient woman—he revisited places where he had stayed with Emma in their happy years. Later he went alone. Poems came from these revisitings: “Beeny Cliff: March 1870–March 1913,” “At Castle Boterel,” “St Launce’s Revisited,” and “Where the Picnic Was.” Emma in turn revisits him as the “hauntress,” and when he employs so poignant a ghost, the verses acquire an intensity he seldom achieved before. “The Voice” is among his few flawless poems, opening with the lines:
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one that was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Three stanzas of this fluent, desolately monosyllabic, powerfully nostalgic cadence are arrested on a final variant quatrain. Fancy deceives no more; it gives way to the unmitigated reality of isolation:
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.
The sequence originally appeared in Satires of Circumstance (1914). Its emotional veracity, quite as much as its technical variety and assurance, set it in a class apart from the other Satires. Elsewhere Hardy’s insistent predisposition to pessimism borders on the comical. Here we have something qualitatively different, a vulnerable candor, an insistence on going deep, without mercy to self and without “constructing something upon which to rejoice.”
In Hardy’s early poems the syntax is often obscure and full of inversions. He needs at times to reverse into a rhyme or displace a polysyllabic word from its natural position in syntax in order to adjust it to the meter (so much for the organic metaphor). But there’s little development—except in deftness—through his poetry. Themes of nature’s indifference and hostility, lost or thwarted love, and time, are developed with mournful insistence. Many poems are organized in a similar way, the plot working to an unexpected climax, as in a verse fable. But we come to expect the would-be unexpected turn of plot; the element of surprise, as in the stories of Maupassant, becomes mechanical.
In The Life of Thomas Hardy, Hardy says, “The world does not despise us; it only neglects us.” In his poem “Neutral Tones” he evokes nature’s neutrality. Objective and subjective worlds do not correspond. Tragedy is beyond his range: there are no gods to offend or serve. There is no sin against a given rule, only the sin, repeated day after day, against self, the failure to choose rightly and to act in pursuit of a noble happiness. There is guilt, to be sure: “hid from men / I bear that mark on me.” There is a sense of responsibility for others. But the dominant theme is always individual unfulfillment in time. Where Wordsworth’s past contains the lost childhood, the infant “trailing clouds of glory” gradually diminishing into impoverished man, and Tennyson’s past is an idealized world of order, Hardy’s vision is of a past not idealized but unrealized, a past that was full of potential, when “everything glowed with a gleam”—but “we were looking away.” A past with a wide range of choices is placed beside a present that wrong choices have impoverished. What is stands juxtaposed, implicitly or explicitly, to what might have been.
Death plays a leading role. Hardy chooses situations where death—or the dead, always equipped with ironizing memory—watch life, or life watches death. In almost every poem death or ephemerality is present. “I rose up as my custom was”—the speaker of the poem gets out of his grave to go visit friends. In “Channel Firing” the dead sit up and comment on the futility of their lives, of war, of faith, the foolishness of God, the featurelessness of the future. In other poems the poet seeks out ghosts or old people and talks with them or makes them talk. Resignation gives them all a similar voice.
There is frequently a problem of tone in the poems. Apart from inadvertent humor in an ill-judged phrase, or the overinsistent lugubriousness, there are poems where he varies the manner deliberately. Humorous poems are interspersed with decidedly serious ones. At times he leaves a poem hauntingly suspended between seriousness and humor. “Transformations” is one of his best short poems, revealing the “other side of common emotions.” He is writing about a graveyard, but the poem presents no image of decay. On the contrary, he celebrates life—admittedly, vegetable life—with such imaginative force that the graveyard alters into something unexpectedly generative. Man is resurrected, but not as the church promises.
And the fair girl long ago
Whom I often tried to know
May be entering this rose.
There’s an erotic charge in the triplet, the rose bearing a complement of symbolic association, the verb its sexual overtones. Through the rose—someone admired but unattained—the speaker relates to the graveyard and what it implies. But how real is the consolation? The line that throws doubt on the tone is “So they are not underground...” It strikes a comic note, a kind of proto-Lawrencian “Look, we have come through—in flowers.” The poem continues a little further, heightening the images of growth with “nerves” and “veins,” “the growths of upper air.” The pathetic fallacy is at once proposed and subverted; the tone remains tantalizingly unresolved.
Other graveyard poems are less positive in imagery and unambiguous in tone, for example “Rain on a Grave,” “Voices Growing from a Churchyard” and “Drummer Hodge.” But nature absorbs the dead here, too. Hardy appreciates natural objects without any sense of metaphysical content—as objects. He may long for religious faith and the community and communion it brings, but he is “outside, prayer denied,” and he finds little comfort in religion, except in its artifacts. His ghosts are seldom meant to be more than stage properties, illusions. No gothic horror trails them from the grave. Their news is of failure in life—and afterlife. “Death’s inviolate halls” don’t let real souls go. Nor will he romanticize objects in nature. Shelley’s “Skylark” is a poem in which he concedes to the bird power to make a song that might throw men into ecstasies—but the creature is not immortal. Hardy is saying, “Hail to thee, blithe bird! Spirit thou never wert.” His “Darkling Thrush” is a real bird, too, growing old, still singing. The song does not fill the poet with joy; it accentuates his grief. There is no romantic certainty, only the concession of a possibility, as tenuous as that expressed in “The Oxen.”
His habit of setting past and present experiences side by side amounts to more than a dramatic strategy. When newlyweds are about to consummate their marriage, a street musician plays a tune that, for one of them, conjures a past love, and their mutual rapport is destroyed. This is like the world of Proust, in which dormant memory stirs in the midst of a new relationship and disrupts it. Memory and desire are in tension, but memory is the more powerful. Hardy’s refrain is that individuals are finally sealed in the particulars of their own biography, that they can never communicate or share themselves fully with another. There is an implicit, universal alienation between individuals; they cannot progress beyond a limited intimacy. Shakespeare will “remain at heart unread eternally.” So will each of us.
Isolation causes unfulfillment, and there’s no remedy. Memory cannot be controlled, it bursts into the room of the present like an unwelcome guest or a messenger. God himself—the God of Hardy’s childhood—like the ghosts, appears as a memory to accentuate isolation. Expressing joy, the darkling thrust confirms sorrow. Life becomes—life is—“a thwarted purposing.” The past is clarified only as the present reveals what we have missed and lost. In one poem an old lady lives willfully in the past: “Past things retold were to her as things existent. / Things present but as a tale.” In the elegies to Emma, the past, rich with potential, is juxtaposed with the present, too. But the world of memory is invariably more complete:
Nay: one there is to whom these things,
Which nobody else’s mind calls back,
Have a savour that things in being lack,
And a presence more than the actual brings;
To whom today is beneaped and stale,
And its urgent clack
But a vapid tale.
The present, hinted in the fleeting sound of the train—“urgent clack”—is flattened by “vapid tale,” which corresponds to it rhythmically and syllabically, but which in its different sound and sense values destroys the urgency. Things in memory are vivid and disrupting to the individual largely because they are so private, like the “savor” of food, and not to be shared.
Accused of willful pessimism, Hardy called himself an “evolutionary meliorist,” quoting the line from “In Tenebris ii:” “If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.” The “satires” teach us not to make the same mistake twice, or not to repeat the errors others have made. Yet since every poem is about error, the suggestion must be that, even if we do not repeat we will find our own strategies of unfulfillment. There is in Hardy’s notion of time and memory something that no evolution could ameliorate. The world might become as he urges in the late novels and in some poems that startled his late-Victorian audience (“The Christening” and “A Wife to Another,” for example), more tolerant and hence more tolerable. But the individual condition is hardly improved. Social optimism is balanced by psychological pessimism. He calls it realism and the poems are didactic, “applications of ideas to life.” But he is not a philosopher. He presents “a series of fleeting impressions I have never tried to coordinate,” “unadjusted impressions.” It is fruitless to look for system or myth. There is only repeated “process,” an insistence on returning—like one of his beloved dogs so piously buried at Max Gate—to the same thematic bone.
The poems were written by a novelist, but they are different in kind from fiction, whatever they learn from its forms; the impulse, structure and effect are insistently lyric, the style original without being particularly idiosyncratic. He uses (and discovers) a wider range of rhymed and metrical forms than any other modern English poet, including Auden. His oeuvre amounts to almost a thousand poems. Whereas the novels bring background into focus—landscape, community, the intrusions of history—the poems generally take setting for granted. Unlike Kipling, who has to establish a setting before his poem can get going, Hardy takes location as implicit and plunges in medias res, thriftily giving only necessary information in a phrase, a tone of voice suggested by metrical pause or variation. We’re seldom engaged by the character of the speaker; it’s a situation that arrests us, its moral or psychological typicality. His “voice,” unlike the individuating and unique “voice” of the modern poet, is Wordsworth’s common voice, “a man speaking to men” in a common language of experience.
The Dynasts, his epic verse “drama,” reveals most of his stylistic skills and weaknesses. It appeared in three successive volumes (1904, 1906, 1908). Written “in three parts, nineteen acts, and a hundred and thirty scenes,” largely in verse, about the wars with Napoleon, it covers the action of ten years (1805–1815), shifting between England and the Continent, and culminating at Waterloo. On a Tolstoyan scale it is his account of “The Human Tragedy”—not only of heroes and generals but of common men, with backing from a chorus of lugubrious “phantom intelligences.” The central fact of the poem is Napoleon’s isolation, which causes his downfall. Hardy conceived the poem as early as 1882. He noted down: “Write a history of human automatism, or impulsion—viz., an account of human action in spite of human knowledge, showing how very far conduct lags behind the knowledge that should really guide it.” Twenty-two years later he published the first part. It is the summa of Hardy’s thought, but as he himself noted, he is not a thinker but a man of deep intuitions. Intuition serves the lyric imagination, but the epic imagination requires more comprehensive skills, a more various emotional culture. The burden of The Dynasts is borne much better and with real economy in fine short poems—“The Man He Killed” or “In Time of the ‘Breaking of Nations’ ”—than in the lumbering development of The Dynasts. Structure lets it down. The “phantom intelligences” have no poetic valency. The best parts of the poem relate the thoughts and preoccupations of common people, with the simple diction of their speech.
Many poems contain invented words: nouns turned to verbs, positive words made negative, and so on. In the wonderful short poem “Thoughts of Phena: at news of her death,” the following invented or archaic words appear: “unsight,” “enray,” “enarch,” “disennoble” and “upbrimming.” He uses odd epithets—“aureate nimb,” for instance—and a sense of ghostly musing is conveyed in words of spectral quality, suggesting meaning without containing it, unfamiliar but comprehensible. This poem, without images, remains clear through a consistent use of negatives; it deals in thoughts, not pictures. It is a poem of “unsight.”
He is capable of unfortunate coinages—“stillicide” and “cohue” are two—but when he invents, or borrows from Dorset usage, the word “unhope” at the end of “In Tenebris ii,” we forgive his less happy inventions. He is also capable of writing grotesque lines, with the comic effect of unresolved syntax or sentimental twaddle. In one poem he writes, “While her great gallied eyes through her hair hanging loose...” In a piece composed for a charitable cause, he evokes the “frail human flowerets, sicklied by the shade,” a line to touch the heart of Madeleine Basset.
Hardy, sixty years old at the turn of the century, is the first essentially twentieth-century poet, familiar with Darwinism, acquainted with Einstein’s work, caught between a new scientific approach and old religious dogmas. He conceived his moral role as “interfusing” essential religion, stripped of superstition and dogma (and, much to Emma’s dismay, godhead) with scientific rationality. But it was not this, or his ideas about time and the individual, that made him “the most far-reaching influence, for good or ill... in British poetry of the last fifty years,” as Donald Davie calls him. It is more his approach to craft and subject matter that in certain crucial ways illuminates the path for others. Davie writes, “Hardy has the effect of locking any poet whom he influences into a world of historical contingency, a world of specific places at specific times.” Here as much as in Jonson we have a sense of the poet’s “occasions,” which has been developed by Thom Gunn and those who learn from him. We have, as in Geoffrey Hill, the sense of places “enghosted” with echoes, events and voices that attach to them, belong to them as much as the stones and trees do: history inherent. Here is the limited world of provable experience which contains Larkin’s tight-fisted Muse. Poetry detects order and expresses it. It is not the function of the poet to project order or to accept, even rhetorically, untenable consolations. He makes the real world more accessible, more real. If the truths of that world are hard little pellets of disappointment, so be it. The truth is told. The poet’s task is not to posit an alternative world, even though behind the satire and its merciless ironies is the might-have-been.
Many of Hardy’s early critics lament a lack of technique; rusticity was seen as naïvete or faulty craft. Strachey spoke of “the gloom... not even relieved by a little elegance of diction.” But this want of “elegance” is original, in the way Wordsworth’s was original in Lyrical Ballads. It delivers poetry back to an inclusive, less class-bound tradition, in which the poem’s language is not prescribed but new-made in the light of its subject.
Ford says that Hardy “showed the way for the Imagists”—a suggestive note, coming from an editor and friend of the Imagists. In two ways particularly he may have affected them. His direct language, sharing the quality of speech, stood out sharply against the poised, literary idiom of Robert Bridges, the metrical drubbing of Kipling at his most popular, and the polite ruggedness and “picturesque” of the Georgians. Another perhaps more important example Hardy set the Imagists was of the power of juxtaposition, showing how two incidents, images or plots can “interfuse” one another. Ezra Pound wrote of his poems, “Now there is clarity. There is the harvest of having written twenty novels first.”
Hardy, like Housman, is an ironist. But irony in their poems is different in kind from the ironies that permeate modern verse and the dominant literary and critical idiom in England. Donald Davie writes, “The older poets do not recommend irony as a secure or dignified stance from which to confront reality, rather it is the stance of reality as it confronts us. Their irony is cosmic, where an Auden’s is provisional and strategic.” When Hardy writes of “life’s little ironies,” the ironies are inherent in “life,” not in the poet’s approach to it. They are thematic, not strategic. This sets Hardy apart from poets who have learned lessons at his knee; cosmic irony and guilt are the acid residue of failed faith.
Another attraction to later poets is his unsentimentality, unless we take his insistent pessimism to be a sort of blurring of categories, an automatic or easy habit of response. Lionel Johnson commended the “primitive savor” of his work, its “earthy charm,” but more emphatically stated, “He is among the least sentimental of writers.” For this quality Auden was drawn to him. But Auden especially admired his “hawk’s vision, his way of looking at life from a very great height... To see the individual life related not only to the local social life of its time, but to the whole of human history... gives one both humility and self-confidence.”
The very faults in Hardy make him a good teacher. His followers do not imitate his techniques but perceive in the way his poems work and fail to work what problems of form and subject matter he was grappling with. He clarifies in his poems many of the modern poet’s problems. No serious writer since the turn of the century has written in ignorance of him. In one way or another, the substantial writers of the last eighty years acknowledge a debt. When Robert Graves visited him at Max Gate, the house he built near Dorchester, where he died in 1928, Hardy said, “All we can do is write on the old themes in the old styles, but try to do it a little better than those who came before us.” It’s an extraordinarily modest statement for the man who brought English poetry forward, unpretentiously and irreversibly, into the twentieth century. Modest too is the claim:
I am I
And what I do I do myself alone.
Why has Charlotte Mew never found the larger readership her work merits? She was among Hardy’s favorite women writers. I first heard of her from Elizabeth Jennings in 1970: she wanted to edit a selection of the work. Mew was republished in 1953 by her friend and champion Alida Monro, then again in 1979 when her Collected Poems and Prose were issued for the first time, with an introduction by Val Warner. Even after a biography that anatomized her eccentricities, and a novel that suggests she had a romance with Hardy, poetry readers are likely to ask, as I did in 1970, “Charlotte who?”
In 1953, before Sylvia Plath altered the map of English poetry, Mew must have seemed a sad, rebarbative figure. Alida Monro’s edition of her poems looked like an act of piety. In 1979 readers must have been more ready for the poems, but in a chunky volume with all of her stories they were buried under the weight of prose. Her originality of form and theme, her electrifying uniqueness, mean that one day she will find a constituency, without special pleading.
Her life was not easy or happy. She was born in London in 1869 into a moderately well-to-do family. Her father was an architect who had come to London and married his boss’s daughter. She, a petite, apparently cosseted Victorian lady, was one for keeping up appearances. Had she married beneath herself? When financial hardship beset the Mews, she insisted on maintaining a genteel front. Eventually it became necessary to let out rooms to lodgers, but this was kept secret from all but the most intimate friends.
Charlotte enjoyed the education of a Victorian lady, was taught no skills and never went—in formal education—beyond the Lucy Harrison School for Girls in Gower Street. Her home was not particularly literary. She confessed that she never learned the rules of punctuation. Monro regularized the punctuation of her poems.
If her mother was painfully particular, her father took family responsibilities less seriously, and when he died—she was twenty-nine and still living at home—he left almost nothing. Charlotte and her sister Anne (her dearest companion) and their mother suffered to remain “proper,” indeed, to survive. Anne was an artist specializing in furniture restoration. Charlotte could teach. The anguish of earning their way became a permanent torment: they had not been reared to this. In the year of her death, through the good offices of John Masefield, Walter de la Mare and Hardy, Charlotte was awarded a Civil List pension—but it came too late.
Charlotte had another sister, and a brother, both of whom suffered acute mental instability and were placed in asylums. There seemed to Charlotte and Anne to be a taint of madness in their family, and each vowed never to marry lest the illness be handed down. This decision may have been prompted as much by inclination as by conscience. Charlotte’s most anthologized, though not her best, poem, “The Farmer’s Bride,” tells the story of a country marriage where the bride refuses to be touched, much less possessed, by her groom. The stair—an image that recurs in several poems—separates man and wife for good:
She sleeps up in the attic there
Alone, poor maid. ’Tis but a stair
Betwixt us. Oh! my God! the down,
The soft young down of her, the brown,
The brown of her—her eyes, her hair, her hair!
Her aversion to the farmer is equal in intensity to his desire.
Charlotte’s early travels, to northern France especially, impressed her deeply. When she reached the peak of her poetic powers in the years 1909–1916, writing at last with confidence and urgency, she set several poems in France. She is temperamentally an urban poet, a poet of characters in cities, rooms, passageways, a poet of confined spaces. Even the poems set in the English countryside have this enclosing quality. She knew rural England as a visitor, seeing it through the eyes of the pastoral poets she admired, notably Hardy.
Despite her intense reticence she urgently needed to express something, the nature of which she herself did not completely grasp. Given the hardships she experienced, her emotional nature and her educational background, it is astonishing that—after the unpromising early prose romances—she did not create a fantastic, escapist world. Instead, she began to develop a prose style that engaged with her reality at its most vulnerable and exposed. From this style it was a small step to poetry. The rhythms of her verse are present in her mature stories. Those stories belong to their period and have little to offer modern readers, except as a context for her verse.
Communication in the best stories is by gesture, facial expression, or through symbols. Conversation is always secondary to how things are said. The ordering of images is more expressive than the plot itself. Later, in the poems, the form is of crucial importance. There is as much eloquence in the disrupted, dramatic syntax, the long fluent line, the rhythmical emphasis and the quality of the objects rendered, as in plot and explicit statement, if these are present at all.
When Mew was writing her best poems, Alida, wife of Harold Monro, the poet, publisher and manager of the Poetry Book Shop, read her work in a magazine. She invited Mew to a reading at the shop and later arranged for the publication of her two books, The Farmer’s Bride (1916) and The Rambling Sailor (1929), which appeared posthumously. Alida’s memoir was for many years the only source of biographical information on the poet.
A letter Charlotte wrote to a friend tells us about her mode of composition and her idea of form. She writes of “In Nunhead Cemetery” (note the dashes): “The last verse which you find superfluous is to me the most inevitable—(and was written first)—being a lapse from the sanity and self-control of what precedes it—the mind—the senses can stand no more—and that is to express their failure and exhaustion.” She does not write the poem straight out: she assembles it, fits it together. The artistry is in organization. Content, under sufficient emotional pressure, will violate form if the poem is to be true. We often look in vain for formal roundedness and perfection in her work, regularity of meter or consistency of stanza: form is servant, not master. The emotional content elbows the form out, or draws it in. To very different ends she allows herself precisely those freedoms that Edward Thomas demands, but her poetry is more deeply subjective, more private, than his. Its power is in the physical veracity of observation, the astonishing metamorphoses of imagery, and a speaking quality of voice, all indexes of the speaker’s intense response.
Her review of Emily Brontë’s poems brings us a little closer to her notion of form. She has been compared with Emily Brontë, but apart from a shared intensity, the comparison does damage to the integrity of each. They differ as much in their use of form as in the quality of passion they convey. Mew remarks that Emily Brontë’s forms are “curiously deficient”: “They are melodies, rather than harmonies, many of a haunting and piercing sweetness, instinct with a sweeping and mournful music peculiarly her own... Everywhere, too, the note of pure passion is predominant, a passion untouched by mortality and unappropriated by sex.” Mew’s own poems, in a determined and unusual way, aim at harmonic effect—in other words, the combining of a variety of elements in a single phrase or rhythmic run. She achieves opacity, the poetry paced phrase by phrase (the phrases of different lengths) rather than through extended cadences, even in the long-lined passages. Each phrase draws elements—sometimes contradictory or conflicting—from several registers of human sensation and emotion, together with qualities of voice, tone and inflection. It is not a poetry of developing thought but of developing emotional recognition in a physical world. We find little sweetness: her poems are everywhere infected with mortality, lament the passing of beauty, passion, people and things loved. There is a profound, troubled sensuality about all her poems and an explicit sexuality in some. It is the impure passion, longing for purity, usually expressed in religious imagery (she was drawn to Roman Catholicism but never crossed over) since there is no earthly permanence.
Mew’s early poems dwell on religious suffering (in the form of martyrdom), punishment, death, sorrow, loss and love, a cheerless panoply of the big themes. There is one poem of misanthropic humor, “Afternoon Tea,” but the others, occasionally sparking with wit, are dramatic and elegiac. Images of the stair, the rose, red petals, dreams and hair recur, so that the poems seem to interqualify and illuminate each other. Traditional images are heightened and made strange by her peculiar physicality of response.
It was in “Poems from France” that she established her voice. “The Fête” was her first outstanding poem. A boy in a French school experiences the fair—and love. His dramatic monologue ends with an expression of loss—loss, in effect, of purity, innocence, something intangible:
All my life long I shall see moonlight on the fern
And the black trunks of trees. Only the hair
Of any woman can belong to God.
The stalks are cruelly broken where we trod,
There had been violets there,
I shall not care
As I used to do when I see the bracken burn.
The pain and loss implicit in pleasure are conveyed in an exacting verse form; the response is uncomprehended, coming in phrases that relate to physical particulars but do not, for the speaker, cohere, though for the reader they build a mood and story. The same power of expression characterizes “Madeleine in Church,” her largest achievement, uneven but powerful. It too is a dramatic monologue and also a prayer, of 140 lines, spoken by a woman who fails to reestablish religious faith after a life of sensuality. The printer first entrusted with the task of typesetting the poem returned the manuscript, solemnly declaring it blasphemous.
“Madeleine” reminds us of Mary Magdalene, whose redemption was made possible only by the physical person of Christ. “She was a sinner, we are what we are: the spirit afterwards, but first the touch.” The poem is about “the touch,” and the inability of the person—without incontrovertible, personal revelation—to credit anything beyond the physical world. Christ cannot, surely, understand the darkness of her soul. She tries to explain herself to Him:
We are what we are: when I was half a child I could not sit
Watching black shadows on green lawns and red carnations burning in the sun,
Without paying so heavily for it
That joy and pain, like any mother and her unborn child were almost one.
I could hardly bear
The dreams upon the eyes of white geraniums in the dusk,
The thick, close voice of musk,
The jessamine music on the thin night air,
Or, sometimes, my own hands about me anywhere—
Her materialism is not intellectual but emotional. It longs for and cannot comprehend the metaphysical. “We are what we are” is the refrain. She asks God, “If it is Your will that we should be content with the tame, bloodless things.” The poem is celebration as much as lament. She laments the ephemerality of the physical experiences which seem all-important, and yet she relives and celebrates. The power of the poem is in the ambiguous way she at once prays to and rejects Christ, and in the astonishing formal risks she takes with line length and pace. “If there were fifty heavens God could not give us back the child who went or never came.” She cannot accede to Christ:
Oh! He will take us stripped and done,
Driven into His heart. So we are won:
Then safe, safe are we? in the shelter of His everlasting wings—
I do not envy Him His victories, His arms are full of broken things.
It is hard not to hear the probing, unappeasable voice of Hopkins in the penultimate line, but how remote are their two worlds, except in physical intensity and spiritual hunger. For Madeleine, as for Mew, if we can trust the evidence of the poems, the world is too real to allow belief in anything beyond the power that bodies and objects and their mute attraction have over the mind and heart—and soul: “the spirit afterwards, but first the touch.”
There are echoes in Mew—of Browning, inevitably, but also of Hardy and others—but “influences” are assimilated to her own ends. With Hardy she shares some themes, for instance the unalterability of past experience, memory, and their effect on the present; ephemerality of passion, regret, the difficulty of sustained love. Heaven is not “to come” but in the past, in youth and its spent intensities. The future is merely a termination of possibilities, a putting out of candles one by one. “I remember rooms that have had their part / In the steady slowing down of the heart.” It is a difficult, unredeemed vision, thoroughly materialistic: her pseudo-mystical stair leads to a physical landing. Refusing the Christian heaven in “Not for that City” she defines the stair:
And if for anything we greatly long,
It is for some remote and quiet stair
Which winds to silence and a space of sleep
Too sound for waking and for dreams too deep.
“Things that kill us seem / Blind to the death they give,” she wrote in “The Quiet House,” a poem she reckoned her most subjective. In it the physical imagination is sharpened to a degree unprecedented even in “Madeleine in Church”:
Red is the strangest pain to bear;
In Spring the leaves on the budding trees;
In Summer the roses are worse than these,
More terrible than they are sweet:
A rose can stab you across the street
Deeper than any knife:
And the crimson haunts you everywhere—
Thin shafts of sunlight, like the ghosts of reddened swords have struck our stair
As if, coming down, you had spilt your life.
Mew’s sister Anne died in the winter of 1927. The loss weakened the poet and she was taken to a sanatorium. She entrusted to Alida the copy Hardy had taken in his own hand of her poem “Fin de Fête.” She bought some disinfectant and drank it. When her death was reported in the local paper, she was identified as “Charlotte New, said to be a writer.” It is no wonder Hardy admired her: had he written a sequel to Jude the Obscure, it might have been the story of her life, which enacts so many of his cruel themes.
In American poetry a transitional figure comparable to Hardy in all but scale and stature is Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935), whose name is often coupled disadvantageously with that of Robert Frost. They both, Frost says, “stayed with the oldfashioned way to be new”—itself a Hardyesque strategy—pouring the new wine of their subjects into old bottles burnished for the purpose. Robinson is more artful than Hardy, more coy than Frost. His New England is domestic and sometimes a little like a picture postcard: “Here where the wind is always north-north-east/And children learn to walk on frozen toes...” Yet in double measure he is the poet of “life’s thwarted purposing,” of what might have been. On his mother’s side he was descended from Anne Bradstreet—another life of “thwarted purposing.”
Hardy invented Wessex, a landscape with towns and villages parallel to his native Dorset. Robinson invents a New England town, Tilbury, and peoples it with voices. Browning is behind his monologues, and Robinson seems to talk to himself through them:
“Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon
Again, and we may not have many more;
The bird is on the wing, the poet says,
And you and I have said it here before.
Drink to the bird.”
“The bird is on the wing.” Mr. Flood, who speaks the poem, rather implausibly nods to Robert Browning.
His people live “Like a dry fish flung inland from the shore,” or pursue, with almost no hope of discovering, the vanished land of past potential. He wrote the sprawling trilogy of poems Merlin (1917), Launcelot (1927) and Tristram (1927), his magnum opus comparable in ambition to Hardy’s The Dynasts; but like Hardy, it is for his poems on a smaller scale that he is remembered, like the treacherously self-revealing “Miniver Cheevy”:
Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.
Miniver sighed for what was not,
And dreamed and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And Priam’s neighbors.
In “Isaac and Archibald,” a long poem, a child watches two old men, “And wondered with all comfort what might come / To me, and what might never come to me...” This is the sort of world (but on a smaller scale) George Crabbe inhabits in Suffolk and makes real in the Tales. Robinson in 1896 wrote a sonnet to Crabbe:
Give him the darkest inch your shelf allows,
Hide him in lonely garrets, if you will,—
But his hard, human pulse is throbbing still
With the sure strength that fearless truth endows.
In spite of all fine science disavows,
Of his plain excellence and stubborn skill
There yet remains what fashion cannot kill,
Though years have thinned the laurel from his brows.
Crabbe is the flame of unattenuated wisdom beside which, Robinson suggests, the lights of current poets are but flickers. In this he includes his own unstable light.
Born in Maine, Robinson was brought up in Gardiner, the prototype for Tilbury. He thought of himself as “a tragedy from the beginning.” His parents were old and couldn’t make sense of him; he did not follow his brothers into the commercial paths prepared for him. He was sickly and sensitive, and his love of literature was not approved of. He spent two years at Harvard but was recalled when his father’s health and fortunes went into decline. His romantic life was equally vexed: his first love rejected him and married one of his more solid brothers; when that brother died, she still refused his overtures. Easier than speaking in his own voice, which might have been marked by self-pity, he channeled his feelings through characters, parceling himself out (for each is an aspect of his own disappointments or, when winged, a vehicle for his own aspirations) among them.
He paid for the publication of his first book in 1896, The Torrent and the Night Before, revising and republishing it a year later as The Children of Night. Theodore Roosevelt admired it. Then Robinson moved to New York, where he lived in poverty, drinking heavily. In 1902, assisted by friends, he brought out a novel in verse, Captain Craig. Roosevelt secured Robinson a clerkship in the New York Custom House in 1905. His first book to be commercially published was The Town Down the River (1910). He began each summer to stay at the MacDowell Colony, a composers,’ artists’ and writers’ residence in Peterboro, New Hampshire. His 1916 collection, The Man Against the Sky, was his breakthrough. He went on to win three Pulitzer Prizes and publish extensively. Tristram was a best-seller. Robert Frost wrote the introduction to his posthumous volume—his twenty-ninth book—in the year of his death from cancer and alcoholism. “His theme was unhappiness, but his skill was as happy as it was playful.”
Robinson’s pessimism was more pathological than philosophical. He speaks of many people, invoking Everyman, allegorizing, fictionalizing, refracting, but in the frame is always “I,” however masked, however recondite. The “playful” skill that prefers to deliver a compelling effect rather than a compelling truth, that gives elegance and finish precedence over the authority of subject, is characteristic of many poets who “stayed with the oldfashioned way to be new.” The received forms imposed received expectations of form. In “New England” he writes,
Passion is here a soilure of the wits,
We’re told, and love a cross for them to bear;
Joy shivers in the corner where she knits
And Conscience always has the rocking-chair,
Cheerful as when she tortured into fits
The first cat that was ever killed by Care.
It’s elegant, the personifications made domestic and fleetingly concrete in a tissue of received ironies. He is a brilliant writer of sonnets. His brilliance is homespun but not in the tonally and formally adroit way of Frost: the air of contrivance and prettification hovers about his poems; there is pain, but pain witnessed rather than endured. Given that the life was as it was, we might have anticipated a greater formal radicalism, a break with the constraints that, in literature, echoed the constraints of the rigid culture he was born of. He comes close sometimes. In “Richard Cory” he writes,
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
His little tragic characters are on a scale with Arthur Miller’s in, for example, Death of a Salesman. Yet Miller’s characters bear the weight of the history and politics of a cruel and reductive economic model. Robinson’s characters cannot gain that purchase on themselves. They are creatures of emotional failure, psychological ciphers who touch us and move us, but not deeply or very far. In the end Robinson is literary, so that the literal “facts” that disrupt his poems, that are supposed to ground them in a real world, are effects on a par with the plangent prosody, the irony, the choice diction. “Miniver Cheevy,” his most celebrated poem, is almost autobiographical. Miniver was “born too late.” Like his author, he longs for a “Vanished Land.”
More prolific than Robinson was Edgar Lee Masters (1869–1950). He wrote fifty books, one of which, Spoon River Anthology, is still widely read—like the poems of John Betjeman—by people who have little taste for Poetry with a capital P. His Spoon River is a Midwestern version of Tilbury, but the people who live there, in personality, intrigue and tragedy, are more credible than Robinson’s—like smaller-scale, poetic versions of Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis characters (the presence and the controversial success of Spoon River is said to have inspired them).
Masters was a lawyer in Chicago for twenty-five years (starting at the age of twenty-two). Born in Kansas, he was raised in rural Illinois. An independent boy out of sympathy with his father, in tune with his quiet, artistic mother, he earned his own living by the age of sixteen, attended Knox College in Illinois, and wrote poems. Before he was twenty-five he had written four hundred poems in a variety of styles, most of them nineteenth-century. Swinburne and Shelley, Poe and Whitman all had their impact on him. In 1915 he stumbled upon a Whitman-derived free-verse line, on the whole shorter-breathed than Whitman’s and full of particulars of voice and circumstance. His goal was concision, the authority of the epigram. Like those novelists who, from the compelling sprawl of Proust, learn to write briefly, so from the immense abundance of Whitman he learned to condense his style. Spoon River Anthology includes more than two hundred epitaphs, each spoken by the dead of Spoon River. They sit up and essentialize themselves, then return to a recumbent posture and await Judgment Day. What they tell of their community and their tight-fisted, tight-hearted world is satire and realism in equal measures. The introduction promises us a cast of characters as vivid and rooted as those that appear in Hardy’s Satires of Circumstance and Life’s Little Ironies. These are life’s little people.
The problem with the collection—what makes it popular and what very nearly confines it to the world of prose—is the two-dimensionality of the characters created. They stand for various forms of failure and unfulfillment, and the ironies that emerge from each are similar in valency. Yet, unlike Robinson, Masters does elude the merely literary. If his figures are thin, they also convince. This must be a function of the free verse, used with immense discretion, the rhythms throwaway, casual.
Those of my generation reared in America on New Critical anthologies had reason to resent Masters. His poem “Petit the Poet,” a kind of parody (we did not sense it at the time), summarized everything we disliked about the art of poetry—what made us impatient with Dickinson and Poe and Bryant and the great Joyce Kilmer, author of “Trees,” and all the rest. Masters’s poem begins:
Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,
Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel—
Faint iambics that the full breeze wakens—
But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof.
Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,
Ballades by the score with the same old thought:
The snow and the roses of yesterday are vanished;
And what is love but a rose that fades?
What was he doing, alluding to Villon in the snows of yesteryear, and to Whitman and Homer at the poem’s conclusion? Masters was creating the poet that he wanted not to be, the small-minded poet whose eyes were closed to his world even as they opened on all the resources of his art. It is in inclusive poems like “The Hill” (where all the Spoon River dead are buried) and “The Lost Orchard” that we might have come to love him, as we learned unaccountably to love Carl Sandburg because there was no varnish on him. It is those poems rather than “Petit” that sent the book through nineteen printings in its first edition and caused a great stir of controversy because of the “negative” picture of provincial life it painted.
Masters was part of the “Chicago Renaissance”—or “Naissance”—working with Harriet Monroe at Poetry, aware of the work of Ezra Pound and H.D., among others. In the end, propelled by the success of Spoon River, he moved in 1920 to New York and spent his last few years at the Chelsea Hotel among other writers. The provinces when they succeed gravitate to the metropolis as if to home—to Chicago, to New York or London—and are translated out of themselves. From 1915 to his death in 1950, only The New Spoon River of 1924 made any mark, and that mark was nine years familiar. Fame liberates and fame confines. He was an unlikely heir of Whitman. The New Spoon River attacks urbanization, but a bitterness that seems put on, an anger that rings hollow, deflect his earlier insight. He was far from his characters, his “Hill” and his relations and their lives.
If we are looking for unalloyed “truth” at this time of day, we must turn to a prose-writer poet who died young: Stephen Crane (1871–1900). He is more modern than Robinson and Masters, indeed, in some respects, more modern than Frost—like Isaac Rosenberg, with a spirit touched by the Old Testament and uncomforted by the New. “God is cold,” says a refrain to a late poem, discovered long after his death. It is his directness that is so astonishing, the absence of “literary” definition. Like Hardy, he was a novelist. He has many stories and six novels to his credit, the best-known being The Red Badge of Courage. He also wrote two volumes of verse before he died of tuberculosis in a German sanatorium. He was twenty-nine.
Crane’s father, a Methodist minister in New Jersey, died when he was eight. He studied at Lafayette (military) College, and then Syracuse University, rejecting every one of his father’s values. He was drawn to journalism as a career, and—a quiet and gentle man—he was fascinated by poverty, violence and war. His first novel was infatuated with sordid realism, more Hardyesque than Hardy in its deterministic pessimism: “It tries to show,” he says in a dedicatory note, “that environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives regardless. If one proves that theory, one makes room in Heaven for all sorts of souls (notably an occasional sweet girl) who are not confidently expected to be there by many excellent people.” In Jacksonville, Florida, he married such a girl, Cora Taylor, a brothel madam, whom he brought to England in 1897. They settled at Brede Place, Sussex. Like gun running and being a war correspondent, it was an adventure to which he committed himself in earnest.
The writer Hamlin Garland, meeting Crane, was curious about some papers he saw sticking out of his pocket. “Upon unrolling the manuscript,” he reports, “I found it to be a sheaf of poems written in blue ink upon single sheets of legal cap paper, each poem without blot or correction, almost without punctuation, all beautifully legible, exact and orderly in arrangement.” Crane had more “up here”—tapping his head—“all in a little row.” He could draw them off complete. He published Black Riders in 1895. In his final year a second volume of poems, War Is Kind, appeared.
Joseph Conrad, Henry James and H. G. Wells admired his prose. The poems were slow to catch on. John Berryman, largely responsible for revaluing Anne Bradstreet, also shone a light on Crane. The poems are like the prose in one way: they depend upon a Hardyesque irony, the irony of life, not of style. There is something cold and archetypal about the poetry, as about Rosenberg’s early biblical verse, and something that seems more of the twentieth than the nineteenth century: a poetry of bones without flesh, of acid resignation without hope.
A man feared that he might find an assassin;
Another that he might find a victim.
One was more wise than the other.
Untitled, numbered like entries in a verse journal, often staccato, the poems have an essential, un-literary urgency about them. They seem to have been written out of a pressure of content, and not because Crane imagined himself to “be a poet.”
Fast rode the knight
With spurs hot and reeking
Ever waving an eager sword.
“To save my lady!”
Fast rode the knight
And leaped from saddle to war.
Men of steel flickered and gleamed
Like riot of silver lights
And the gold of the knight’s good banner
Still waved on a castle wall.
A horse
Blowing, staggering, bloody thing
Forgotten at foot of castle wall.
A horse
Dead at foot of castle wall.
What do we make of such a poem? What do we make of Rosenberg’s “Dead Man’s Dump”? Crane’s poems are allegorical anecdotes, jottings that seed in us and provoke reflection. They require that we add to them our own ironies:
The impact of a dollar upon the heart
Smiles warm red light,
Sweeping from the hearth rosily upon the white table,
With the hanging cool velvet shadows
Moving softly upon the door.
The impact of a million dollars
Is a crash of flunkeys,
And yawning emblems of Persia
Cheeked against oak, France and a sabre,
The outcry of old beauty
Whored by pimping merchants
To submission before wine and chatter.
There has been nothing like this in English poetry before. It owes debts to the Bible, perhaps to Whitman, to the discipline of responsible journalism, and to an eye for hard truths. It is verse entirely free of class bias, national bias, but not of an informing tradition that makes him write “Cheeked against oak” and “the gold of the knight’s good banner.” Berryman declares that he “was not only a man with truths to tell, but an interested listener to this man. His poetry has the inimitable sincerity of a frightened savage anxious to learn what his dreams mean.” This is wrong: he wants to understand his waking hours and what happens when he witnesses a battle, or a love, or a cruel sunset. The linguistic range is narrow, the themes chillingly repetitive but always in a subtly different key. Yet he teaches a modern poet more than Masters and Robinson can do, and he anticipates many of the radical departures that awaited English poetry when Victorian verse at last finished dying.