MODERN ART
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The Situation of the Poet is certainly a topic much discussed at literary conferences. Often, the discussion takes the form of poets telling a large audience that they cannot communicate with its members. Sometimes, it takes the more practical one of discussing how to give economic aid to poets by making them do other things than write poetry -- teaching, for example. Anyway, it offers a picture of poets as being peculiarly helpless in the circumstances of modern life.
The question, 'What can poets do to save civilization from destruction?' is often asked by some member of the public at the very conference where the poet is on show in his role of helpless, hopeless anachronism. This suggests that poets, though neglected, somehow command the secret of the time in which we are living. If the Voice of the Imagination were heeded, enemies would be reconciled and the hungry fed. Two confusions are involved here. Firstly, there is a tendency, in the mind of a public, for the poet to be more a matter of concern than the poetry. The other is the idea that if poetry and the poet were given their true place, this would really have some effect on a world distracted and tormented with fear. The second of these propositions is one that poets -- that is, imaginative writers (whether they write poetry, fiction, or drama) -- sometimes share.
The belief that poets can alter and have altered the world is contained in Shelley's famous claim that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. No modern poet would regard this as anything but preposterous. Yet underneath the denials, the idea that the life and works of the imagination somehow provide an incandescent centre in which human personality and even social forms can become molten and transformed, certainly persists, in Lawrence, in Rilke, even in Joyce.
So much preoccupation with the situation of the poet, and with the function of the poetic imagination, results doubtless from the feeling that in the past poets fitted better into the community, and their poetry was better understood. Certainly, we are right in feeling that there was a difference, but I doubt whether this was it. There were perhaps merely different expectations on the part of the poets, different misunderstandings on that of the public. What may be a modern peculiarity is that poets today expect to be understood for the qualities that they regard as intrinsic to their poetry being poetry, just as painters expect their paintings to be admired not for their subjects, or their beauty, but for qualities called painterly, perhaps even for the texture of the surface of the pigment.
No one could say that the poets of the Victorian era -- Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold, were neglected, or even went unappreciated. And yet they seem rather like displaced persons who acted to their audience the Victorian public's idea of 'the poet', rather as a refugee may, in his exile, find himself having to act out the accent and behaviour which his neighbours expect of someone coming from the country of his origin. 'Vex not thou the poet's mind, With thy shallow wit,' Tennyson growled at a public expecting the cloaked and bearded poet to growl. And if one glances back rapidly from precedent to precedent of English poets across the centuries, one finds poets who were courtiers, cavaliers, politicians, customs inspectors, ambassadors, writers of flourishing dedications to patrons, lunatics, gangsters, but rarely a situation which could be regarded as favouring them simply because they wrote their poetry. This is true even of the greatest. We feel that Milton belonged to the conscience of a puritan revolution (though he had friends who were poets and scholars), that Shakespeare belonged to a very fertile period of history and a group of players, that Chaucer was one of his own Canterbury pilgrims, that Wordsworth was the property of the Wordsworthians, that the Romantics belonged to their biographies, that Tennyson belonged to Arthur Hallam and Queen Victoria.
If we are discouraged by the thought that modern poets don't 'communicate' we may find comfort in the reflection that there can have been few periods when their poetry communicated as poetry. In the opinion of his contemporaries Shakespeare seems to have been only one among a number of playwrights who were doubtless judged not for the poetry but for the play being the thing. He comes rather low on the list of playwrights supplied by his contemporary, Meres.
Yet I would not care to dispute the truth of the observation of someone who said that a modern poet, launching forth his slim volume of verse today, is like a person dropping a feather over the edge of the Grand Canyon and then waiting for the echo. Nevertheless, certain living poets get back a considerable reverberation. We ought to remember this. What is more important, there never was, as I have suggested, a period in which the arts were more appreciated for the specific qualities which are considered peculiar to each art. In fact, the arts run the risk of being over-purified, and artists of feeling obliged to produce some quintessential extract of the qualities of their art, so great is the pressure of critical connoisseurs on them to produce only the real, right thing.
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