AUNT EUDORA AND THE POETS
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
[Correspondents are requested to keep their letters as brief as is reasonably possible. The most suitable length is that of one of our " News of the Week " paragraphs. . Signed letters are given a preference over those bearing a pseudonym.—Ed. THE SPECTATOR.'
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR,—The bitterness which enters into nearly all discussions of modern poetry is very notable. Powerful prejudices are involved and the majority of older readers seem to approach modern poetry, if they approach it at all, in a spirit of hostility, expecting trouble and prepared to make it. It is surprising to find Mr. Sassoon, whose work once met the same hostility and deliberate misunderstanding, now taking the side of the poet- baiters, many of whom rail at the younger poets without being able to name them or quote from their works at all.
Since such strong feelings are involved, it would surely be worth while to try to discover the roots of the trouble. It is useless to put all the blame either on the poets or the readers. Both sides are at fault, but the difficulty is to find precisely where the fault lies. If some modern poets do not write lyrics on rural topics without bringing in politics and morality and heaven knows what, it is because they cannot honestly keep these topics out : to give an accurate and spontaneous account of his feeling on looking at a buttercup the poet may be compelled to mention, say, the unnecessary suffering in the world. This makes the poem rather nasty for people who don't want to be reminded of such things. Again, the majority of modem poets have had an ordinary grammar- school or public-school education, and, because a certain amount of chemistry and physics is as familiar to them as the main stories of Greek mythology, they find it natural to refer to ideas which are ingrained in their thought but foreign to readers brought up on a different curriculum.
There is no doubt that some of the work of the younger poets is more tortuous than it need be : in attempting to express thoughts as well as feelings, they use abstract state- ments less exact and less moving than the images which the poem really needs. Again, they expect the reader to be willing at all times to enjoy a certain amount of lively thought, and the difficulty is to know where to draw the line, and at what point the labour of thinking makes the reader become insensible to the imagery and rhythm of the poem. A person who was puzzled for a single instant by Janus's problem last week about the pound note isn't likely to be able to read Mr. Empson's poems without losing sight of the sensuous elements altogether. Mr. Empson would admit, I think, that sonic of his poems have been too tightly knotted to please any large number of readers.
But something more than this is involved : it does not account for the deliberate reluctance of readers to enjoy the poetry first and understand it afterwards, as they willingly do on reading Shakespeare. I do not think that this reluctance is wholly due to the number of critics who have done their best to convince the public that all the young poets are deliberately incomprehensible, nor can the turgid verbiage and large claims of the other critics whom Mr. Sassoon quotes have much to do with it. For one thing, few people read them ; and for another, Shelley made claims for poetry quite as ambitious as those which Mr. Sassoon considers " a pretty tough proposition." To talk of resolving " psychological, ethical and logical conflicts " may well alarm some readers, but hardly enough to make them dislike the poetry at sight. Readers of Kubla Khan are not put off by the jaw-cracking terminology which Coleridge used in his criticism. Surely a poet may tackle something harder than the problems of a simple descriptive poem without becoming, as Mr. Sassoon seems to imply, a prig. Probably the poet will solve the " problem " when he is not worrying about it, and the reader will not think of it as a problem at all. After all, some of the problems are pretty easy, and the " solutions " neat and enjoyable.
What, then, is the real source of the hostility ? Is there today a divergence between young people and their elders so profound that the older people instinctively dislike and ridicule the most articulate of their juniors ? It seems un- likely, but if it really exists it ought to be remedied. This is a job for some critic to tackle, ,and for which Mr. Sassoon is well equipped. The issue is important, because, while the squabble is going on, people are turning away from poetry altogether, and a language without a living poetry is poor and crude. If people cannot appreciate the rhythms and sensuous significance of words, they can no longer use speech to tidy their thoughts and phantasies and feelings. For that reason, those of us who are opposed to the tendency to treat poetry as a silliness of school girls should thrash out our differences patiently and honestly until they disappear or assume their true importance in the light of graver issues. We don't want to appear like a pack of Edinburgh Reviewers debasing criticism to the level of buffoonery or gang- warfare.
Presumably, Mr. Sassoon was trying to be critical in his review of The Year's Poetry : 1935 ; but his essay leaves me unenlightened. Obviously he dislikes the poems of his juniors, and obviously he thinks that those of us who like them are in some way his inferiors, but instead of trying to show us our shortcomings, he ridicules the poems, or rather, he shirks the responsibility of ridiculing them by pretending to hide behind the opinions of an aunt who prefers poems about snowdrops. (Why, knowing her tastes, did Mr. Sassoon not read to her Mr. Dyment's Switch Cut in April ?) Finally, Mr. Sassoon contrasts the complexity of the flat lines' of a stanza from the most complicated poem Mr. Empson has written with the simplicity of one of the very few simple poems ever written by Hopkins, obscuring the fact that Hopkins is, on an average, far more difficult, and does far greater violence to the English language, than Mr. Empson or any other young poet.
If I reviewed Mr. de la Mare's poems and happened to dislike them (I don't) and, after quoting the line " Sacred of old was the dyed baboon " as a fair sample, reported the comments of an imaginary nephew who preferred poems about cowboys, I am sure that Mr, Sassoon would think, quite rightly, that I was being silly. Clearly, Mr. Sassoon is not in the habit of being silly, and he has himself written poems which are more often enjoyed by the people who like the poems he condemns than by the Aunt Eudoras. Perhaps he will take us into his confidence and explain what he really thinks about the poetry he was invited to review, and explain in what way those of us are at fault who find that our enjoyment of Erripson's Doctrinal Point, Maclieice's Perseus, or Spender's North differs from our enjoyment of Shakespeare, or Donne, or Shelley, in degree but not in kind.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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