A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry

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_5. The Elizabethan Lyric_

The European influence came afresh to England, as we have seen, with those
"courtly makers" who travelled into France and Italy and brought back the
new-found treasures of the Renaissance. Greece and Rome renewed, as they
are forever from time to time renewing, their hold upon the imagination
and the art of English verse. Sometimes this influence of the classics has
worked toward contraction, restraint, acceptance of human limitations and
of the "rules" of art. But in Elizabethan poetry the classical influence
was on the side of expansion. In that release of vital energy which
characterized the English Renaissance, the rediscovery of Greece and Rome
and the artistic contacts with France and Italy heightened the confidence
of Englishmen, revealed the continuity of history and gave new faith in
human nature. It spelled, for the moment at least, liberty rather than
authority. It stimulated intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm. Literary
criticism awoke to life in the trenchant discussions of the art of poetry
by Gascoigne and Sidney, by Puttenham, Campion and Daniel. The very titles
of the collections of lyrics which followed the famous _Tottel's
Miscellany_ of 1557 flash with the spirit of the epoch: _A Paradise of
Dainty Devices, A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions, A Handfull
of Pleasant Delights, The Phoenix Nest, England's Helicon_, Davison's
_Poetical Rhapsody._

Bullen, Schelling, Rhys, Braithwaite, and other modern collectors of the
Elizabethan lyric have ravaged these volumes and many more, and have shown
how the imported Italian pastoral tallied with the English idyllic mood,
how the study of prosody yielded rich and various stanzaic effects, how
the diffusion of the passion for song through all classes of the community
gave a marvelous singing quality to otherwise thin and mere "dildido"
lines. Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch and his friends have revived the music of the
Elizabethan song-books, and John Erskine and other scholars have
investigated the relation of the song-books--especially the songs composed
by musicians such as Byrd, Dowland and Campion--to the form and quality of
the surviving lyric verse. But one does not need a knowledge of the
Elizabethan lute and viol, and of the precise difference between a
"madrigal" and a "catch" or "air" in order to perceive the tunefulness
of a typical Elizabethan song:

"I care not for these ladies,
That must be woode and praide:
Give me kind Amarillis,
The wanton countrey maide.
Nature art disdaineth,
Here beautie is her owne.
Her when we court and kisse,
She cries, Forsooth, let go:
But when we come where comfort is,
She never will say No."

It is not that the spirit of Elizabethan lyric verse is always care-free,
even when written by prodigals such as Peele and Greene and Marlowe. Its
childlike grasping after sensuous pleasure is often shadowed by the sword,
and by quick-coming thoughts of the brevity of mortal things. Yet it is
always spontaneous, swift, alive. Its individual voices caught the tempo
and cadence of the race and epoch, so that men as unlike personally as
Spenser, Marlowe and Donne are each truly "Elizabethan." Spenser's
"vine-like" luxuriance, Marlowe's soaring energy, Donne's grave realistic
subtleties, illustrate indeed that note of individualism which is never
lacking in the great poetic periods. This individualism betrays itself in
almost every song of Shakspere's plays. For here is English race, surely,
and the very echo and temper of the Renaissance, but with it all there is
the indescribable, inimitable _timbre_ of one man's singing voice.

_6. The Reaction_

If we turn, however, from the lyrics of Shakspere to those of Ben Jonson
and of the "sons of Ben" who sang in the reigns of James I and Charles I,
we become increasingly conscious of a change in atmosphere. The moment of
expansion has passed. The "first fine careless rapture" is over. Classical
"authority" resumes its silent, steady pressure. Scholars like to remember
that the opening lines of Ben Jonson's "Drink to me only with thine eyes"
are a transcript from the Greek. In his "Ode to Himself upon the Censure
of his _New Inn_" in 1620 Jonson, like Landor long afterward, takes
scornful refuge from the present in turning back to Greece and Rome:

"Leave things so prostitute,
And take the Alcaic lute;
Or thine own Horace, or Anacreon's lyre;
Warm thee by Pindar's fire."

The reaction in lyric form showed itself in the decay of sonnet, pastoral
and madrigal, in the neglect of blank verse, in the development of the
couplet. Milton, in such matters as these, was a solitary survival of the
Elizabethans. Metrical experimentation almost ceased, except in the hands
of ingenious recluses like George Herbert. The popular metre of the
Caroline poets was the rhymed eight and six syllable quatrain:

"Yet this inconstancy is such
As thou too shalt adore;
I could not love thee, Dear, so much
Loved I not Honour more."

The mystics like Crashaw, Vaughan and Traherne wished and secured a wider
metrical liberty, and it is, in truth, these complicated patterns of the
devotional lyric of the seventeenth century that are of greatest interest
to the poets of our own day. But contemporary taste, throughout the
greater portion of that swiftly changing epoch, preferred verse that
showed a conservative balance in thought and feeling, in diction and
versification. Waller, with his courtier-like instinct for what was
acceptable, took the middle of the road, letting Cowley and Quarles
experiment as fantastically as they pleased. Andrew Marvell, too, a
Puritan writing in the Restoration epoch, composed as "smoothly"
as Waller. Herrick, likewise, though fond of minor metrical experiments,
celebrated his quiet garden pleasures and his dalliance with amorous
fancies in verse of the true Horatian type. "Intensive rather than
expansive, fanciful rather than imaginative, and increasingly restrictive
in its range and appeal": that is Professor Schelling's expert summary of
the poetic tendencies of the age.

And then the lyric impulse died away in England. Dryden could be
magnificently sonorous in declamation and satire, but he lacked the
singing voice. Pope likewise, though he "lisped in numbers," could never,
for all of his cleverness, learn to sing. The age of the Augustans, in the
first quarter of the eighteenth century, was an age of prose, of reason,
of good sense, of "correctness." The decasyllabic couplet, so resonant in
Dryden, so admirably turned and polished by Pope, was its favorite
measure. The poets played safe. They took no chances with "enthusiasm,"
either in mood or metrical device. What could be said within the
restraining limits of the couplet they said with admirable point, vigor
and grace. But it was speech, not song.

7. _The Romantic Lyric_

The revolt came towards the middle of the century, first in the lyrics of
Collins, then in Gray. The lark began to soar and sing once more in
English skies. New windows were opened in the House of Life. Men looked
out again with curiosity, wonder and a sense of strangeness in the
presence of beauty. They saw Nature with new eyes; found a new richness in
the Past, a new picturesque and savor in the life of other races,
particularly in the wild Northern and Celtic strains of blood. Life grew
again something mysterious, not to be comprehended by the "good sense" of
the Augustans, or expressible in the terms of the rhymed couplet. Instead
of the normal, poets sought the exceptional, then the strange, the
far-away in time or place, or else the familiar set in some unusual
fantastic light. The mood of poetry changed from tranquil sentiment to
excited sentiment or "sensibility," and then to sheer passion. The forms
of poetry shifted from the conventional to the revival of old measures
like blank verse and the Spenserian stanza, then to the invention of new
and freer forms, growing ever more lyrical. Poetic diction rebelled
against the Augustan conventions, the stereotyped epithets, the frigid
personifications. It abandoned the abstract and general for the specific
and the picturesque. It turned to the language of real life, and then,
dissatisfied, to the heightened language of passion. If one reads Cowper,
Blake, Burns and Wordsworth, to say nothing of poets like Byron and
Shelley who wrote in the full Romantic tide of feeling, one finds that
this poetry has discovered new themes. It portrays the child, the peasant,
the villager, the outcast, the slave, the solitary person, even the idiot
and the lunatic. There is a new human feeling for the individual, and for
the endless, the poignant variety of "states of soul." Browning, by and
by, is to declare that "states of soul" are the only things worth a poet's
attention.

Now this new individuality of themes, of language, of moods, assisted in
the free expression of lyricism, the release of the song-impulse of the
"single, separate person." The Romantic movement was revelatory, in a
double sense. "Creation widened in man's view"; and there was equally a
revelation of individual poetic energy which gave the Romantic lyric an
extraordinary variety and beauty of form. There was an exaggerated
individualism, no doubt, which marked the weak side of the whole movement:
a deliberate extravagance, a cultivated egoism. Vagueness has its
legitimate poetic charm, but in England no less than in Germany or France
lyric vagueness often became incoherence. Symbolism degenerated into
meaninglessness. But the fantastic and grotesque side of Romantic
individualism should not blind us to the central fact that a rich
personality may appear in a queer garb. Victor Hugo, like his young
friends of the 1830's, loved to make the gray-coated citizens of Paris
stare at his scarlet, but the personality which could create such lyric
marvels as the _Odes et Ballades_ may be forgiven for its eccentricities.
William Blake was eccentric to the verge of insanity, yet he opened, like
Whitman and Poe, new doors of ivory into the wonder-world.

Yet a lyrist like Keats, it must be remembered, betrayed his personality
not so much through any external peculiarity of the Romantic temperament
as through the actual texture of his word and phrase and rhythm. Examine
his brush-work microscopically, as experts in Italian painting examine the
brushstrokes and pigments of some picture attributed to this or that
master: you will see that Keats, like all the supreme masters of poetic
diction, enciphered his lyric message in a language peculiarly his own. It
is for us to decipher it as we may. He used, of course, particularly in
his earlier work, some of the stock-epithets, the stock poetic
"properties" of the Romantic school, just as the young Tennyson, in his
volume of 1827, played with the "owl" and the "midnight" and the "solitary
mere," stock properties of eighteenth-century romance. Yet Tennyson, like
Keats, and for that matter like Shakspere, passed through this imitative
phase into an artistic maturity where without violence or extravagance or
eccentricity he compelled words to do his bidding. Each word bears the
finger-print of a personality.

Now it is precisely this revelation of personality which gave zest,
throughout the Romantic period, to the curiosity about the poetry of alien
races. It will be remembered that Romanticism followed immediately upon a
period of cosmopolitanism, and that it preceded that era of intense
nationalism which came after the Napoleonic wars. Even in that
intellectual "United States of Europe," about 1750--when nationalistic
differences were minimized, "enlightenment" was supreme and "propria
communia dicere" was the literary motto--there was nevertheless a rapidly
growing curiosity about races and literatures outside the charmed circle
of Western Europe. It was the era of the Oriental tale, of Northern
mythology. Then the poets of England, France and Germany began their
fruitful interchange of inspiration. Walter Scott turned poet when he
translated Burger's "Lenore." Goethe read Marlowe's _Dr. Faustus_.
Wordsworth and Coleridge visited Germany not in search of general
eighteenth-century "enlightenment," but rather in quest of some peculiar
revelation of truth and beauty. In the full tide of Romanticism,
Protestant Germany sought inspiration in Italy and Spain, as Catholic
France sought it in Germany and England. A new sense of race-values
was evident in poetry. It may be seen in Southey, Moore, and Byron, in
Hugo's _Les Orientales_ and in Leconte de Lisle's _Poemes Barbares_.
Modern music has shown the same tendency: Strauss of Vienna writes waltzes
in Arab rhythms, Grieg composes a Scotch symphony, Dvorak writes an
American national anthem utilizing negro melodies. As communication
between races has grown easier, and the interest in race-characteristics
more intense, it would be strange indeed if lovers of lyric poetry did not
range far afield in their search for new complexities of lyric feeling.

_8. The Explorer's Pleasure_

This explorer's pleasure in discovering the lyrics of other races was
never more keen than it is to-day. Every additional language that one
learns, every new sojourn in a foreign country, enriches one's own
capacity for sharing the lyric mood. It is impossible, of course, that any
race or period should enter fully into the lyric impulses of another.
Educated Englishmen have known their Horace for centuries, but it can be
only a half-knowledge, delightful as it is. France and England, so near in
miles, are still so far away in instinctive comprehension of each other's
mode of poetical utterance! No two nations have minds of quite the same
"fringe." No man, however complete a linguist, has more than one real
mother tongue, and it is only in one's mother tongue that a lyric
sings with all its over-tones. And nevertheless, life offers few purer
pleasures than may be found in listening to the half-comprehended songs
uttered by alien lips indeed, but from hearts that we know are like our
own.

"This moment yearning and thoughtful sitting alone,
It seems to me there are other men in other lands
yearning and thoughtful,
It seems to me I can look over and behold them in
Germany, Italy, France, Spain,
Or far, far away, in China, or in Russia or Japan,
talking other dialects,
And it seems to me if I could know those men I
should become attached to them as I do to
men in my own lands,
O I know we should be brethren and lovers,
I know I should be happy with them."

9. _A Test_

If the reader is willing to test his own responsiveness, not to the alien
voices, but to singers of his own blood in other epochs, let him now read
aloud--or better, recite from memory--three of the best-known English
poems: Milton's "Lycidas," Gray's "Elegy" and Wordsworth's "Ode to
Immortality." The first was published in 1638, the second in 1751, and the
third in 1817. Each is a "central" utterance of a race, a period and an
individual. Each is an open-air poem, written by a young Englishman; each
is lyrical, elegiac--a song of mourning and of consolation. "Lycidas" is
the last flawless music of the English Renaissance, an epitome of
classical and pastoral convention, yet at once Christian, political and
personal. Beneath the quiet perfection of Gray's "Elegy" there is the
undertone of passionate sympathy for obscure lives: passionate, but
restrained. Wordsworth knows no restraint of form or feeling in
his great "Ode"; its germinal idea is absurd to logic, but not to the
imagination. This elegy, like the others, is a "lyric cry" of a man, an
age, and a race; "enciphered" like them, with all the cunning of which the
artist was capable; and decipherable only to those who know the language
of the English lyric.

There may be readers who find these immortal elegies wearisome, staled by
repetition, spoiled by the critical glosses of generations of
commentators. In that case, one may test his sense of race, period
and personality by a single quatrain of Landor, who is surely not
over-commented upon to-day:

"From you, Ianthe, little troubles pass
Like little ripples down a sunny river;
Your pleasures spring like daisies in the grass,
Cut down, and up again as blithe as ever."

Find the classicist, the aristocrat, the Englishman, and the lover in that
quatrain!

Or, if Landor seems too remote, turn to Amherst, Massachusetts, and read
this amazing elegy in a country churchyard written by a New England
recluse, Emily Dickinson:

"This quiet Dust was Gentlemen and Ladies,
And Lads and Girls;
Was laughter and ability and sighing,
And frocks and curls.
This passive place a Summer's nimble mansion,
Where Bloom and Bees
Fulfilled their Oriental Circuit,
Then ceased like these."

CHAPTER X

THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE LYRIC

"And the same may be said of lust and anger and all the other
affections, of desire and pain and pleasure which are held to be
inseparable from every action--in all of them poetry feeds and waters
the passions instead of withering and starving them; she lets them rule
instead of ruling them as they ought to be ruled, with a view to the
happiness and virtue of mankind."
PLATO'S _Republic_, Book 10

"A man has no right to say to his own generation, turning quite away
from it, 'Be damned!' It is the whole Past and the whole Future, this
same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very
wretched generation of ours."
CARLYLE _to_ EMERSON, _August 29, 1842_

Let us turn finally to some phases of the contemporary lyric. We shall not
attempt the hazardous, not to say impossible venture of assessing the
artistic value of living poets. "Poets are not to be ranked like
collegians in a class list," wrote the wise John Morley long ago.
Certainly they cannot be ranked until their work is finished. Nor is it
possible within the limits of this chapter to attempt, upon a smaller
scale, anything like the task which has been performed so interestingly by
books like Miss Lowell's _Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_, Mr.
Untermeyer's _New Era in American Poetry_, Miss Wilkinson's _New Voices_,
and Mr. Lowes's _Convention and Revolt_. I wish rather to remind the
reader, first, of the long-standing case against the lyric, a case
which has been under trial in the court of critical opinion from Plato's
day to our own; and then to indicate, even more briefly, the lines of
defence. It will be clear, as we proceed, that contemporary verse in
America and England is illustrating certain general tendencies which not
only sharpen the point of the old attack, but also hearten the spirit of
the defenders of lyric poetry.

1. _Plato's Moralistic Objection_

Nothing could be more timely, as a contribution to a critical battle which
is just now being waged,
[Footnote: See the Introduction and the closing chapter of Stuart P.
Sherman's _Contemporary Literature_. Holt, 1917.]
than the passage from Plato's _Republic_ which furnishes the motto for the
present chapter. It expresses one of those eternal verities which each
generation must face as best it may: "Poetry feeds and waters the passions
instead of withering and starving them; she lets them rule instead of
ruling them." "Did we not imply," asks the Athenian Stranger in Plato's
_Laws_, "that the poets are not always quite capable of knowing what is
good or evil?" "There is also," says Socrates in the Phoedrus, "a third
kind of madness, which is the possession of the Muses; this enters into a
delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric and
all other members." This Platonic notion of lyric "inspiration" and
"possession" permeates the immortal passage of the _Ion_:

"For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful
poems not as works of art, but because they are inspired and possessed.
And as the Corybantian revellers when they dance are not in their right
mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are
composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of
music and metre they are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens
who draw milk and honey from the rivers, when they are under the
influence of Dionysus, but not when they are in their right mind. And
the soul of the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves tell us;
for they tell us that they gather their strains from honied fountains
out of the gardens and dells of the Muses; thither, like the bees, they
wing their way. And this is true. For the poet is a light and winged and
holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired
and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has
not attained to this state, he is powerless and is to utter his oracles.
Many are the noble words in which poets speak of actions like your own
Words about Homer; but they do not speak of them by any rules of art:
only when they make that to which the Muse impels them are their
inventions inspired; and then one of them will make dithyrambs, another
hymns of praise, another choral strains, another epic or iambic
verses--and he who is good at one is not good at any other kind of
verse: for not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine. Had he
learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak not of one
theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the minds of poets,
and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy
prophets, in order that we who hear them may know that they speak not of
themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of
unconsciousness, but that God is the speaker, and that through them he
is conversing with us."
[Footnote: Plato's _Ion_, Jowett's translation.]

The other Platonic notion about poetry being "imitation" colors the
well-known section of the third book of the _Republic_, which warns
against the influence of certain effeminate types of lyric harmony:

"I answered: Of the harmonies I know nothing, but I want to have one
warlike, which will sound the word or note which a brave man utters in
the hour of danger and stern resolve, or when his cause is failing and
he is going to wounds or death or is overtaken by some other evil, and
at every such crisis meets fortune with calmness and endurance; and
another which may be used by him in times of peace and freedom of
action, when there is no pressure of necessity--expressive of entreaty
or persuasion, of prayer to God, or instruction of man, or again, of
willingness to listen to persuasion or entreaty and advice; and which
represents him when he has accomplished his aim, not carried away by
success, but acting moderately and wisely, and acquiescing in the event.
These two harmonies I ask you to leave; the strain of necessity and the
strain of freedom, the strain of the unfortunate and the strain of the
fortunate, the strain of courage, and the strain of temperance; these,
I say, leave."

So runs the famous argument for "the natural rhythms of a manly life," and
conversely, the contention that "the absence of grace and rhythm and
harmony is closely allied to an evil character." While it is true that the
basis for this argument has been modified by our abandonment of the Greek
aesthetic theories of "inspiration" and "imitation," Plato's moralistic
objection to lyric effeminacy and lyric naturalism is widely shared by
many of our contemporaries. They do not find the "New Poetry," lovely as
it often is, altogether "manly." They find on the contrary that some of it
is what Plato calls "dissolute," i.e. dissolving or relaxing the fibres of
the will, like certain Russian dance-music. I asked an American composer
the other day: "Is there anything at all in the old distinction between
secular and sacred music?" "Certainly," he replied; "secular music
excites, sacred music exalts." If this distinction is sound, it is plain
that much of the New Poetry aims at excitement of the senses for its
own sake--or in Plato's words, at "letting them rule, instead of ruling
them as they ought to be ruled." Or, to use the severe words of a
contemporary critic: "They bid us be all eye, no mind; all sense, no
thought; all chance, all confusion, no order, no organization, no fabric
of the reason."

However widely we may be inclined to differ with such moralistic judgments
as these, it remains true that plenty of idealists hold them, and it is
the idealists, rather than the followers of the senses, who have kept the
love of poetry alive in our modern world.

_2. A Rationalistic Objection_

But the Philistines, as well as the Platonists, have an indictment to
bring against modern verse, and particularly against the lyric. They find
it useless and out of date. Macaulay's essay on Milton (1825) is one of
the classic expressions of "Caledonian" rationalism:

"We think that as civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily
declines.... Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his
purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive
and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms.
Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of
a half-civilized people is poetical.... In proportion as men know more
and think more, they look less at individuals, and more at classes. They
therefore make better theories and worse poems.... In an enlightened age
there will be much intelligence, much science, much philosophy,
abundance of just classification and subtle analysis, abundance of wit
and eloquence, abundance of verses and even of good ones, but little
poetry." In the essay on Dryden (1828) Macaulay renews the charge:
"Poetry requires not an examining but a believing freedom of mind.... As
knowledge is extended and as the reason develops itself, the imitative
arts decay."

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