A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry

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That fragile, transient fashions of expression have their own evanescent
type of beauty no one who knows the history of Euphuism will deny. And
much of the New Verse is Euphuistic, not merely in its self-conscious
cleverness, its delightful toying with words and phrases for their own
sake, its search of novel cadences and curves, but also in its naive
pleasure in rediscovering and parodying what the ancients had discovered
long before. "Polyphonic prose," for instance, as announced and
illustrated by Mr. Paul Fort and Miss Amy Lowell, is prose that
makes use of all the "voices" of poetry,--viz. metre, _vers libre_,
assonances, alliteration, rhyme and return. "Metrical verse," says Miss
Lowell in the Preface to _Can Grande's Castle_, "has one set of laws,
cadenced verse another; 'polyphonic prose' can go from one to the other in
the same poem with no sense of incongruity.... I finally decided to base
my form upon the long, flowing cadence of oratorical prose. The variations
permitted to this cadence enable the poet to change the more readily into
those of _vers libre_, or even to take the regular beat of metre, should
such a marked time seem advisable.... Rhyme is employed to give a richness
of effect, to heighten the musical feeling of a passage, but ... the
rhymes should seldom come at the ends of the cadences.... Return in
'polyphonic prose' is usually achieved by the recurrence of a dominant
thought or image, coming in irregularly and in varying words, but still
giving the spherical effect which I have frequently spoken of as
imperative in all poetry."

Now every one of these devices is at least as old as Isocrates. It was in
this very fashion that Euphues and his Friends delighted to serve and
return their choicest tennis balls of Elizabethan phrase. But little De
Quincey could pull out the various stops of polyphonic prose even more
cleverly than John Lyly; and if one will read the admirable description of
St. Mark's in _Can Grandel's Castle_, and then re-read Ruskin's
description of St. Mark's, he will find that the Victorian's orchestration
of many-voiced prose does not suffer by comparison.

Yet though it is true enough of the arts, as Chaucer wrote suavely long
ago, that "There nys no newe thing that is not olde," we must remember
that the arts are always profiting by their naive rediscoveries. It is
more important that the thing should seem new than that it should really
be new, and the fresh sense of untried possibilities, the feeling that
much land remains to be possessed, has given our contemporaries the
spirits and the satisfactions of the pioneer. What matters it that a few
antiquaries can trace on old maps the very rivers and harbors which the
New Verse believed itself to be exploring for the first time? Poetry does
not live by antiquarianism, but by the passionate conviction that all
things are made new through the creative imagination.

"Have the elder races halted?
Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,
Pioneers! O pioneers!"

PART II

THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR

"O hearken, love, the battle-horn!
The triumph clear, the silver scorn!
O hearken where the echoes bring.
Down the grey disastrous morn,
Laughter and rallying!"
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY

CHAPTER VII

THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY

"'Lyrical,' it may be said, implies a form of musical utterance
in words governed by overmastering emotion and set free by a
powerfully concordant rhythm."
ERNEST RHYS, _Lyric Poetry_

That "confusion of the genres" which characterizes so much of contemporary
art has not obliterated the ancient division of poetry into three chief
types, namely, lyric, epic and dramatic. We still mean by these words very
much what the Greeks meant: a "lyric" is something sung, an "epic" tells
a story, a "drama" sets characters in action. Corresponding to these
general purposes of the three kinds of poetry, is the difference which
Watts-Dunton has discussed so suggestively: namely, that in the lyric the
author reveals himself fully, while in the "epic" or narrative poem the
author himself is but partly revealed, and in the drama the author is
hidden behind his characters. Or, putting this difference in another way,
the same critic points out that the true dramatists possess "absolute"
vision, i.e. unconditioned by the personal impulses of the poet himself,
whereas the vision of the lyrist is "relative," conditioned by his own
situation and mood. The pure lyrist, says Watts-Dunton, has one voice and
sings one tune; the epic poets and quasi-dramatists have one voice but can
sing several tunes, while the true dramatists, with their objective,
"absolute" vision of the world, have many tongues and can sing in all
tunes.

_1. A Rough Classification_

Passing over the question of the historical origins of those various
species of poetry, such as the relation of early hymnic songs and
hero-songs to the epic, and the relation of narrative material and method
to the drama, let us try to arrange in some sort of order the kinds of
poetry with which we are familiar. Suppose we follow Watts-Dunton's hint,
and start, as if it were from a central point, with the Pure Lyric, the
expression of the Ego in song. Shelley's "Stanzas Written in Dejection
near Naples," Coleridge's "Ode to Dejection," Wordsworth's "She dwelt
among the untrodden ways," Tennyson's "Break--Break" will serve for
illustrations. These are subjective, personal poems. Their vision
is "relative" to the poet's actual circumstances. Yet in a "dramatic
lyric" like Byron's "Isles of Greece" or Tennyson's "Sir Galahad" it is
clear that the poet's vision is not occupied primarily with himself, but
with another person. In a dramatic monologue like Tennyson's "Simeon
Stylites" or Browning's "The Bishop orders his Tomb in St. Praxed's
Church" it is not Tennyson and Browning themselves who are talking, but
imaginary persons viewed objectively, as far as Tennyson and Browning were
capable of such objectivity. The next step would be the Drama, preoccupied
with characters in action--the "world of men," in short, and not the
personal subjective world of the highly sensitized lyric poet.

Let us now move away from that pure lyric centre in another direction. In
a traditional ballad like "Sir Patrick Spens," a modern ballad like
Tennyson's "The Revenge," or Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner," is not the
poet's vision becoming objectified, directed upon events or things outside
of the circle of his own subjective emotion? In modern epic verse, like
Tennyson's "Morte d'Arthur," Arnold's "Sohrab and Rustum," Morris's
"Sigurd the Volsung," and certainly in the "Aeneid" and the "Song of
Roland," the poet sinks his own personality, as far as possible, in the
objective narration of events. And in like manner, the poet may turn from
the world of action to the world of repose, and portray Nature as
enfolding and subduing the human element in his picture. In Keats's "Ode
to Autumn," Shelley's "Autumn," in Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper,"
Browning's "Where the Mayne Glideth," we find poets absorbed in the
external scene or object and striving to paint it. It is true that the
born lyrists betray themselves constantly, that they suffuse both the
world of repose and the world of action with the coloring of their own
unquiet spirits. They cannot keep themselves wholly out of the story they
are telling or the picture they are painting; and it is for this reason
that we speak of "lyrical" passages even in the great objective dramas,
passages colored with the passionate personal feelings of the poet. For he
cannot be wholly "absolute" even if he tries: he will invent favorite
characters and make them the mouthpiece of his own fancies: he will devise
favorite situations, and use them to reveal his moral judgment of men and
women, and his general theory of human life.

_2. Definitions_

While we must recognize, then, that the meaning of the word "lyrical" has
been broadened so as to imply, frequently, a quality of poetry rather than
a mere form of poetry, let us go back for a moment to the original
significance of the word. Derived from "lyre," it meant first a song
written for musical accompaniment, say an ode of Pindar; then a poem whose
form suggests this original musical accompaniment; then, more loosely, a
poem which has the quality of music, and finally, purely personal poetry.
[Footnote: See the definitions in John Erskine's _Elizabethan Lyric_, E.
B. Heed's _English Lyrical Poetry_, Ernest Rhys's _Lyric Poetry_, F. E.
Schelling's _The English Lyric_, John Drinkwater's _The Lyric_, C. E.
Whitmore in _Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass._, December, 1918.]
"All songs, all poems following classical lyric forms; all short poems
expressing the writer's moods and feelings in rhythm that suggests music,
are to be considered lyrics," says Professor Reed. "The lyric is concerned
with the poet, his thoughts, his emotions, his moods, and his passions....
With the lyric subjective poetry begins," says Professor Schelling. "The
characteristic of the lyric is that it is the product of the pure poetic
energy unassociated with other energies," says Mr. Drinkwater. These are
typical recent definitions. Francis T. Palgrave, in the Preface to the
_Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics_, while omitting to stress
the elements of musical quality and of personal emotion, gives a working
rule for anthologists which has proved highly useful. He held the term
"lyrical" "to imply that each poem shall turn on a single thought, feeling
or situation." The critic Scherer also gave an admirable practical
definition when he remarked that the lyric "reflects a situation or a
desire." Keats's sonnet "On first looking into Chapman's Homer," Charles
Kingsley's "Airlie Beacon" and Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain!" (_Oxford
Book of Verse_, Nos. 634, 739 and 743) are suggestive illustrations of
Scherer's dictum.

_3. General Characteristics_

But the lyric, however it may be defined, has certain general
characteristics which are indubitable. The lyric "vision," that is to say,
the experience, thought, emotion which gives its peculiar quality to lyric
verse, making it "simple, sensuous, passionate" beyond other species of
poetry, is always marked by freshness, by egoism, and by genuineness.

To the lyric poet all must seem new; each sunrise "_herrlich wie am ersten
Tag._" "Thou know'st 'tis common," says Hamlet's mother, speaking of his
father's death, "Why seems it so particular with thee?" But to men of the
lyrical temperament everything is "particular." Age does not alter their
exquisite sense of the novelty of experience. Tennyson's lines on "Early
Spring," written at seventy-four, Browning's "Never the Time and the
Place" written at seventy-two, Goethe's love-lyrics written when he was
eighty, have all the delicate bloom of adolescence. Sometimes this
freshness seems due in part to the poet's early place in the development
of his national literature: he has had, as it were, the first chance at
his particular subject. There were countless springs, of course, before a
nameless poet, about 1250, wrote one of the first English lyrics for which
we have a contemporary musical score:

"Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu."

But the words thrill the reader, even now, as he hears in fancy that
cuckoo's song,

"Breaking the silence of the seas
Beyond the farthest Hebrides."

Or, the lyric poet may have the luck to write at a period when settled,
stilted forms of poetical expression are suddenly done away with. Perhaps
he may have helped in the emancipation, like Wordsworth and Coleridge in
the English Romantic Revival, or Victor Hugo in the France of 1830. The
new sense of the poetic possibilities of language reacts upon the
imaginative vision itself. Free verse, in our own time, has profited by
this rejuvenation of the poetic vocabulary, by new phrases and cadences to
match new moods. Sometimes an unwonted philosophical insight makes all
things new to the poet who possesses it. Thus Emerson's vision of the
"Eternal Unity," or Browning's conception of Immortality, afford the very
stuff out of which poetry may be wrought. Every new experience, in short,
like falling in love, like having a child, like getting "converted,"
[Footnote: See William James, _The Varieties of Religious Experience_.]
gives the lyric poet this rapturous sense of living in a world hitherto
unrealized. The old truisms of the race become suddenly "particular" to
him. "As for man, his days are as grass. As a flower of the field, so he
flourisheth." That was first a "lyric cry" out of the depths of some fresh
individual experience. It has become stale through repetition, but many a
man, listening to those words read at the burial of a friend, has seemed,
in his passionate sense of loss, to hear them for the first time.

Egoism is another mark of the lyric poet. "Of every poet of this class,"
remarks Watts-Dunton, "it may be said that his mind to him 'a kingdom is,'
and that the smaller the poet the bigger to him is that kingdom." He
celebrates himself. Contemporary lyrists have left no variety of physical
sensation unnoted: they tell us precisely how they feel and look when they
take their morning tub. Far from avoiding that "pathetic fallacy" which
Ruskin analysed in a famous chapter,
[Footnote: _Modern Painters_, vol. 3, chap. 12.]
and which attributes to the external world qualities which belong only to
the mind itself, they revel in it. "Day, like our souls, is _fiercely
dark_," sang Elliott, the Corn-Law Rhymer. Hamlet, it will be remembered,
could be lyrical enough upon occasion, but he retained the power of
distinguishing between things as they actually were and things as they
appeared to him in his weakness and his melancholy. "This goodly frame,
the earth, seems _to me_ a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy,
the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof
fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing _to me_ than a
foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man!
How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty!... And yet, _to me_,
what is this quintessence of dust?"

Nevertheless this lyric egoism has certain moods in which the individual
identifies himself with his family or tribe:

"O Keith of Ravelstone,
The sorrows of thy line!"

School and college songs are often, in reality, tribal lyrics. The
choruses of Greek tragedies dealing with the guilt and punishment of a
family, the Hebrew lyrics chanting, like "The Song of Deborah," the
fortunes of a great fight, often broaden their sympathies so as to
include, as in "The Persians" of Aeschylus, the glory or the downfall of a
race. And this sense of identification with a nation or race implies no
loss, but often an amplification of the lyric impulse. Alfred Noyes's
songs about the English, D'Annunzio's and Hugo's splendid chants of the
Latin races, Kipling's glorification of the White Man, lose nothing of
their lyric quality because of their nationalistic or racial inspiration.
Read Wilfrid Blunt's sonnet on "Gibraltar" (_Oxford Book of Verse_,
No. 821):

"Ay, this is the famed rock which Hercules
And Goth and Moor bequeath'd us. At this door
England stands sentry. God! to hear the shrill
Sweet treble of her fifes upon the breeze,
And at the summons of the rock gun's roar
To see her red coats marching from the hill!"

Are patriotic lyrics of this militant type destined to disappear, as
Tolstoy believed they ought to disappear, with the breaking-down of the
barriers of nationality, or rather with the coming of

"One common wave of thought and joy,
Lifting mankind again"

over the barriers of nationality? Certainly there is already a type of
purely humanitarian, altruistic lyric, where the poet instinctively thinks
in terms of "us men" rather than of "I myself." It appeared long ago in
that rebellious "Titanic" verse which took the side of oppressed mortals
as against the unjust gods. Tennyson's "Lotos-Eaters" is a modern echo of
this defiant or despairing cry of the "ill-used race of men." The songs of
Burns reveal ever-widening circles of sympathy,--pure personal egoism,
then songs of the family and of clan and of country-side, then passion for
Scotland, and finally this fierce peasant affection for his own passes
into the glorious

"It's comin' yet for a' that,
That man to man the world o'er
Shall brithers be for a' that."

One other general characteristic of the lyric mood needs to be emphasized,
namely, its _genuineness_. It is impossible to feign

"the lyric gush,
And the wing-power, and the rush
Of the air."

Second-rate, imitative singers may indeed assume the role of genuine lyric
poets, but they cannot play it without detection. It is literally true
that natural lyrists like Sappho, Burns, Goethe, Heine, "sing as the bird
sings." Once endowed with the lyric temperament and the command of
technique, their cry of love or longing, of grief or patriotism, is the
inevitable resultant from a real situation or desire. Sometimes, like
children, they do not tell us very clearly what they are crying about, but
it is easy to discover whether they are, like children, "making believe."

_4. The Objects of the Lyric Vision_

Let us look more closely at some of the objects of the lyric vision; the
sources or material, that is to say, for the lyric emotion. Goethe's
often-quoted classification is as convenient as any: the poet's vision, he
says, may be directed upon Nature, Man or God.

And first, then, upon Nature. One characteristic of lyric poetry is the
clearness with which single details or isolated objects in Nature may be
visualized and reproduced. The modern reflective lyric, it is true, often
depends for its power upon some philosophical generalization from a single
instance, like Emerson's "Rhodora" or Wordsworth's "Small Celandine." It
may even attempt a sort of logical or pseudo-logical deduction from given
premises, like Browning's famous

"Morning's at seven;
The hillside's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing:
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in his Heaven--
_All's right with the world!_"

The imagination cannot be denied this right to synthesize and to
interpret, and nevertheless Nature offers even to the most unphilosophical
her endless profusion of objects that awaken delight. She does not insist
that the lyric poet should generalize unless he pleases. Moth and snail
and skylark, daisy and field-mouse and water-fowl, seized by an eye that
is quick to their poetic values, their interest to men, furnish material
enough for lyric feeling. The fondness of Romantic poets for isolating a
single object has been matched in our day by the success of the Imagists
in painting a single aspect of some phenomenon--

"Light as the shadow of the fish
That falls through the pale green water--"

any aspect, in short, provided it affords the "romantic quiver," the
quick, keen sense of the beauty in things. What an art-critic said of the
painter W. M. Chase applies equally well to many contemporary Imagists who
use the forms of lyric verse: "He saw the world as a display of beautiful
surfaces which challenged his skill. It was enough to set him painting to
note the nacreous skin of a fish, or the satiny bloom of fruit, or the
wind-smoothed dunes about Shinnecock, or the fine specific olive of a
woman's face.... He took objects quite at their face value, and rarely
invested them with the tenderness, mystery and understanding that comes
from meditation and remembered feelings.... We get in him a fine, bare
vision, and must not expect therewith much contributary enrichment from
mind and mood."
[Footnote: _The Nation_, November 2, 1916.]
Our point is that this "fine, bare vision" is often enough for a lyric. It
has no time for epic breadth of detail, for the rich accumulation of
harmonious images which marks Arnold's "Sohrab and Rustum" or Keats's "Eve
of St. Agnes."

The English Romantic poets were troubled about the incursion of scientific
fact into the poet's view of nature. The awful rainbow in heaven might be
turned, they thought, through the curse of scientific knowledge, into the
"dull catalogue of common things." But Wordsworth was wiser than this. He
saw that if the scientific fact were emotionalized, it could still serve
as the stuff of poetry. Facts could be transformed into truths. No aspect
of Tennyson's lyricism is more interesting than his constant employment of
the newest scientific knowledge of his day, for instance, in geology,
chemistry and astronomy. He set his facts to music. Eugene Lee-Hamilton's
poignant sonnet about immortality is an illustration of the ease with
which a lyric poet may find material in scientific fact, if appropriated
and made rich by feeling.
[Footnote: Quoted in chap. VIII, section 7.]

If lyric poetry shows everywhere this tendency to humanize its "bare
vision" of Nature, it is also clear that the lyric, as the most highly
personalized species of poetry, exhibits an infinite variety of visions of
human life. Any anthology will illustrate the range of observation, the
complexity of situations and desires, the constant changes in key, as the
lyric attempts to interpret this or that aspect of human emotion. Take for
example, the Elizabethan love-lyric. Here is a single human passion,
expressing itself in the moods and lyric forms of one brief generation of
our literature. Yet what variety of personal accent, what kaleidoscopic
shiftings of mind and imagination, what range of lyric beauty! Or take the
passion for the wider interests of Humanity, expressed in the lyrics of
Schiller and Burns, running deep and turbid through Revolutionary
and Romantic verse, and still coloring--perhaps now more strongly than
ever--the stream of twentieth-century poetry. Here is a type of lyric
emotion where self-consciousness is lost, absorbed in the wider
consciousness of kinship, in the dawning recognition of the oneness of the
blood and fate of all nations of the earth.

The purest type of lyric vision is indicated in the third word of Goethe's
triad. It is the vision of God. Here no physical fact intrudes or mars.
Here thought, if it be complete thought, is wholly emotionalized. Such
transcendent vision, as in the Hebrew lyrists and in Dante, is itself
worship, and the lyric cry of the most consummate artist among English
poets of the last generation is simply an echo of the ancient voices:

"Hallowed be Thy Name--Hallelujah!"

If Tennyson could not phrase anew the ineffable, it is no wonder that most
hymn-writers fail. They are trying to express in conventionalized
religious terminology and in "long and short metre" what can with
difficulty be expressed at all, and if at all, by the unconscious art of
the Psalms or by a sustained metaphor, like "Crossing the Bar" or the
"Recessional." The medieval Latin hymns clothed their transcendent themes,
their passionate emotions, in the language of imperial Rome. The modern
sectaries succeed best in their hymnology when they choose simple ideas,
not too definite in content, and clothe them, as Whittier did, in words of
tender human association, in parables of longing and of consolation.

_5. The Lyric Imagination_

The material thus furnished by the lyric poet's experience, thought and
emotion is reshaped by an imagination working simply and spontaneously.
The lyrist is born and not made, and he cannot help transforming the
actual world into his own world, like Don Quixote with the windmills and
the serving-women. Sometimes his imagination fastens upon a single trait
or aspect of reality, and the resultant metaphor seems truer than any
logic.

"Death lays his _icy hand_ on Kings."

"I wandered _lonely as a cloud_."

Sometimes his imagination fuses various aspects of an object into a
composite effect:

"A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May,
Although it fall and die that night;
It was the _plant and flower of light_."

The lyric emotion, it is true, does not always catch at imagery. It may
deal directly with the fact, as in Burns's immortal

"If we ne'er had met sae kindly,
If we ne'er had loved sae blindly,
Never loved, and never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted."

The lyric atmosphere, heavy and clouded with passionate feeling, idealizes
objects as if they were seen through the light of dawn or sunset. It is
never the dry clear light of noon.

"She was _a phantom_ of delight."

"Thy soul was _like a star_, and dwelt apart,
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was _like the sea_,
Pure as _the naked heavens_...."

This idealization is often not so much a magnification of the object as a
simplification of it. Confusing details are stripped away. Contradictory
facts are eliminated, until heart answers to heart across the welter of
immaterialities.

Although the psychologists, as has been already noted, are now little
inclined to distinguish between the imagination and the fancy, it remains
true that the old distinction between superficial or "fanciful"
resemblances, and deeper or "imaginative" likenesses, is a convenient one
in lyric poetry. E. C. Stedman, in his old age, was wont to say that our
younger lyrists, while tuneful and fanciful enough, had no imagination or
passion, and that what was needed in America was some adult male verse.
The verbal felicity and richness of fancy that characterized the
Elizabethan lyric were matched by its sudden gleams of penetrative
imagination, which may be, after all, only the "fancy" taking a deeper
plunge. In the familiar song from _The Tempest_, for example, we have in
the second and third lines examples of those fanciful conceits in which
the age delighted, but that does not impair the purely imaginative beauty
of the last three lines of the stanza,--the lines that are graven upon
Shelley's tombstone in Rome:

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