in which love is not imagined romantic, but is treated as personal and real, poems which to engaged couples have seemed to speak with their own voices. One element conspicuous in much of the poetry, and especially in some of the long poems, of Tennyson is forever outmoded-the effort to keep up with, and to inject emotional power into, beliefs and expectations that came into vogue during his long life-beliefs and expectations of progress, the march of mind, the steamship and the railway. To read any poem of his for the sake of that element requires the spur of the most special curiosity. But let us not therefore deny ourselves the enjoyment of his perfect modulation of melody, and also that restlessness of rebellion against the shibboleths and sham ideals of his time that underlies so much of his utterance and that is at length audible outright in poems of his old age:

What is it all if we all of us end but in being our own corpse-coffins at last,

Swallow'd in Vastness, lost in Silence, drown'd in the depth of a meaningless past?

A poem may attract and please us on account of features not mainly poetic. Perhaps it has associations with places we know and hold dear. Men and women born and brought up in New England, and others who have ties with its past, will enjoy poems by Whittier, and even by Robert Frost. It will not matter to these readers that Whittier, and still less Frost, have not produced poems of the highest poetic quality. What they enjoy are the pictures of colonial life and the evocation of familiar scenery. And why not?

To read poetry for profit is no matter of distrusting our spontaneous likings, but rather a matter of ascertaining the source of every liking. If we have liked a sentimental lyric, let us not be ashamed of our liking, but also let us be aware that the lyric is sentimental. If an artless poem charms us with its memorable expression of homely thoughts, let us be charmed, but let us also be aware that the poem is artless and the thoughts homely. A kinship with poetry of the prophetic and apocalyptic Blake is to be felt in some of Walt Whitman's great rolling surges.

Me and mine, loose windows, little corpses,

Froth, snowy white, and bubbles,

Tufts of straw, sands, fragments,

Buoy'd hither from many moods, one contradicting another,
From the storm, the long calm, the darkness, the swell,

Musing, pondering, a breath, a briny tear, a dab of liquid or soil,
Up just as much out of fathomless workings fermented and thrown,
A limp blossom or two, torn, just as much over waves floating, drifted
at random,

Just as much for us that sobbing dirge of Nature,

Just as much whence we come that blare of the cloud-trumpets, We, capricious, brought hither we know not whence, spread out before you,

Whoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feet.

Both poets were afire with a glowing message. But it would be as injurious for profit to believe that Whitman is a great poet because his doctrine appeals to us as it would be to put our trust in Blake's passionate record of his wild and fabulous vision and to treat it as a revelation because Blake is a magnificent poet.

In short, our object should be never to give ourselves, for any particular enjoyment that we have, the wrong reasons. And to attain this object it may sometimes help to begin with if we go back to poems that were familiar to us in childhood. I myself, for example, am still fond of Longfellow's King Robert of Sicily; I do not want to reread his Excelsior. If there comes to mind for any of us two such poems, not necessarily having a common author, one that we still enjoy, the other that we may never have really enjoyed, let us ask ourselves, with both poems before us, the explanation of our preference. It is indeed in poems which we reread that we can discover new sources of enjoyment; it is also our enjoyment of them that we can hope most successfully to analyze. And it is by means of the analysis of our enjoyment, and the comparison and contrast of the enjoyments yielded by different poems, that we fit ourselves to recognize when a poem which we enjoy is the highest and best poetry.

A LIST OF THE POEMS QUOTED IN THE ABOVE CHAPTER

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner William Wordsworth, Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

Christopher Smart, A Song to David

Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Matthew Arnold, The Church of Brou

Rupert Brooke, The Voice

William Collins, Ode to Evening

Alexander Pope, Iliad; Essay on Criticism; Elegy to the Memory

of an Unfortunate Lady; The Rape of the Lock

William Cowper, The Royal George; The Task; The Castaway
Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes

William Blake, The Chimney Sweeper; America: A Prophecy

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Vastness

Walt Whitman, As I Ebb'd With the Ocean of Life

9

THE "NEW" POETRY

i

THERE ARE READERS WHO ENJOY POETRY, WHO MAY HAVE READ numerous poems and may discriminate among these with assurance, who may even feel that they know who were the best poets in their own language at any particular period, and why. Yet those same readers will be disconcerted by certain poems newly composed in their day. It may even seem to them that such poems are not poetry. If they hear the poems admired and praised, they will hold this unaccountable. Such readers are evidently under a disability. But it is one which need be due neither to ignorance nor to a temperament insensitive to poetry. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch was not only professor of English literature in the University of Cambridge; it was he also who compiled The Oxford Book of English Verse, an anthology which, having appeared in 1900, was still, forty years later, on the crest of popularity. But notwithstanding the intimacy with poetry which these activities presupposed and entailed, he apparently made neither head nor tail of a number of poems written and published during those forty years. Confronted with them, he could only throw up his arms in bewilderment. His experience was not unique. According to the preface of the anthology which W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) made in his old age, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935, we are entitled to couple with Quiller-Couch a poet, and a notable poet. The disability is one from which neither experts in poetry nor poets them

selves may be immune. If any one of us suffers under it also, he need not hesitate to admit it. It is no cause for shame.

But of course it is nothing to be proud of either. No disability is. Merit can only be gained in efforts to conquer one. Whether we ourselves are under the disability or whether, in common with a fair number of our contemporaries, we have found "new" poetry in our own language and of our own time instantly acceptable, we cannot feel superior to those who, although baffled by it, would yet like to be at home with it. Let us not discourage them by superciliousness, but rather assist them by explaining whatever we can. That is the aim of the present chapter.

The remarks which follow are intended to provide a first introduction, as simple and straightforward as possible, to the "new" poetry in English of the first half of the twentieth century. They will deal with the work of only one poet. For this there are two reasons. In the first place, throughout a book which will, if it lives up to its title, encourage reading for profit, I have never so far attempted to be exhaustive. My line has been, instead, to try to elicit some fundamental principles and to indicate a method of reading, so that, reading whatever we please, we may hope that henceforward the profit will accrue. I would not depart from that line now. I shall proceed accordingly in the belief that if only we see how we may read the work of one "new" poet, the work of others of the same or a later generation will present relatively little difficulty. The belief does not imply that all the "new" poets in English have imitated one another, so that it cannot matter to which we go first. No doubt every one of them displays idiosyncrasy more or less. What the belief implies is that one poet can be representative. And that brings me to the second reason for confining my attention to one only. The poet I choose is T. S. Eliot. I shall consider his poems alone, because, in the second place, he was recognized early in his career as being at once the best and the most interesting poet in English of his time.

It is his having been assigned this position which explains why I am now devoting a whole chapter to the "new" poetry while earlier, in Chapter II, I dismissed with a mere paragraph the "new" prose fiction-the fiction of James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf. Why should consideration of Eliot's poetry be more likely to help us to read for profit than