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'Stepping Out of the Gloaming' : A Reconsideration of the Poetry of Walter de la Mare (page 3)
Richard Hawking
The second distinction
to be made is perhaps a more disregarded and fundamental one. This is that the
term 'Georgian' is a loose one for it does not represent an easily definable
mode or type of poetry. Indeed, to a certain extent poets that are frequently
viewed as being synonymous with the Georgian movement are poetically diverse.
In fact, Bloom goes as far as to propose that Georgianism should not be seen
as a movement at all. Instead, he believes that it "describes another current
in the modern movement sometimes parallel to and sometimes intermixed with Imagism,
Vorticism and Futurism",[18] all of which represent movements closely linked
with the Modernism. Hence, it would be naïve to propose that those associated
with the rise of the Modernist movement disliked all poetry that was included
in the Georgian anthologies. Equally, it would be naive to suggest that all
contributors to Marsh's volumes disliked poetry in the vein of Newbolt.
However, the heterogeneous
poetic ideal of the Georgians was eclipsed, or certainly outshone, with the
rise of Modernism. In any critical evaluation of early twentieth century poetry,
it is the doctrine of the Modernists that dominates. Driven by Yeats, Eliot,
Joyce and Lawrence, who were the foremost modern writers during the First World
War and after, the Modernist movement represented "various ways of stamping
upon literature the impress of contemporary life".[19] As has been suggested
above, the impress of contemporary life that they were faced with was arguably
a deepening one. Amongst other strains was the weight carried by the theories
of Darwin, Marx and Freud, not to mention growing capitalism and rapid industrialisation
and the force of the First World War.[20] Such factors contributed to society's
increasing subjection to hollowness or incongruity.[21] As a consequence of
the changing language and images that society was witness to (and of course
part of), "traditional conceptions of time and space [became] disordered, and
[crucially] the connections to what had been living traditions - especially
the Romantic Tradition - [were] denied".[22]
For this reason, Eliot
advanced the view was that "Romanticism was immature" [23] and called for a
usable, adult tradition that could accommodate contemporary life and it shifting
values. Essentially, the belief was that "the stuff of life is squeezed out
as experience is packaged in literary merchandise".[24] In other words, the
form, diction and language of existing poetry was a disabling medium for the
experience of 'modern' life. For Eliot and the early Modernists, the questioning
of poetic conventions meant a rejection, not just of Victorian, Edwardian and
Georgian poetry per se, but also of the Romantic tradition that had under-pinned
English poetry throughout this period.[25] Instead, he called for a return to
the source, which manifested itself in the New Classicism.[26] Consequently,
poets such as Pound and Eliot desired clarity, sharpness and sparseness in their
work. Accordingly, there was a move "away from the messiness and confusion of
natural things"[27] that they saw as characterising and blighting previous poetry
towards a more self-reflexive, harder and objective mode of poetry.[28] Although
not applicable to all Modernist poets, a significant result of this shift was
the employment of irony and, with the use of a more precise diction, the breaking
down of traditional forms, metre and versification.
One of the fundamental
implications of stamping literature with (external) reality was the rejection
of the "conception of a crude, undifferentiated, infinite all",[29] which had
underpinned the hegemonic English literary tradition. Central to this argument
was the belief that the Self was essentially autonomous and could not be fully
known. In contrast to the romantic notion of the unique Self, it was viewed
as unoriginal because ultimately it was embedded in an elaborate cultural tradition.[30]
For that reason, what we believe to be the self is simply a product of that
tradition. Of course, inherent in this argument was that poetry itself, as with
all art, was simply a product of culture: a poem could not be either original
or unique. Clearly, this had dire consequences for poetry that was seen to be
subjective and so to any notion of romantic individualism. In short, the Modernists
felt that the poetic that was being employed by poets such as the Georgians
was inadequate for transcribing modern experience (or reality).
Modernism's vocal rejection
of what had gone before made a huge impact on English poetry. Ultimately, however,
this impact went deeper than the development of a new poetic ideal for it also
had a powerful influence on the subsequent development of English Literature
as an object (subject) of study. In order for literary studies to be taken seriously
as an academic subject in the years following the First World War, critics argued
that it needed to become a more scientific, rigorous and impersonal discipline.[31]
Consequently, this study needed a foundation, and in Eliot's essay 'Tradition
and the Individual Talent' (and, more generally, Modernist poetry) they found
the fundamentals characteristics of it. As Bloom notes, "this aesthetic base
was predicted on the idea of impersonality and of art as an cultural artefact".[32]
Thus extrapolated from Eliot's aesthetic (Modernistic) base, critics such as
Leavis, Empson and Richards formulated theories on the direction that they believed
poetry and criticism should travelling. These men were hugely influential in
their respective writings, with Richard's Principles of Literary Criticism (1924)
and Practical Criticism (1929) becoming regulation texts for students in their
study of English Literature. This formation of a critical orthodoxy was given
further impetus during the 1930s and 1940s courtesy of critics such as Tate,
Brooks Warren and Ransom.[33]
Although individually
diverse in their critical aims, these 'New Critics' did share a general desire
for a criticism free "from the impressionism and emotionalism of the amateur
tradition and the intentionalism of literary-historical scholarship".[34] Essentially,
they proposed a fresh way of studying literature in which a poem should be regarded
as a complex and autonomous entity that must be closely read if a full understanding
of it is to be achieved. In this approach, contextual information was largely
relegated in favour of a more focussed and clinical view of the workings of
the text.[35] A result of this academic development of English Literature was
that certain poetry was viewed as unsuitable for critical investigation. Consequently,
by the early 1930s "a canonical list of truly modern poets had been draw up
[and that] only the poet that had avoided or overcome […] the debilitating effects
of late Victorian romanticism could be considered for inclusion".[36]
Therefore, the development
and dominance of this functionalist approach in the study of Literature meant
that to be regarded as a serious poet was becoming increasingly difficult if
you were not writing with the above aesthetic in mind.[37] In short, it clearly
favoured the hard, objective and self-reflexive nature that characterised the
Modernists poetic because, in the New Critics view, it was better suited their
critical approach. Accordingly, it was argued that Modernist poetry provided
a solid textual platform for the students (and critics) of literature to work
from. To assess this impact in practical terms, all we to need do is to consider
the poetry studied at our Universities today. Whilst Brooke and Graves may make
an appearance (although most probably because of their war poetry), the likes
of Houseman, Masefield and de la Mare remain inconspicuous in their absence.
Although this critical orthodoxy has been challenged in academic circles during
the past twenty or thirty years, it is still reasonable to propose those poets
that primarily display Modernist tendencies (Eliot, Yeats and Pound) dominant.
Although this is a gross
simplification of the Modernist ethic and its subsequent ramifications in the
sphere of English Literary criticism, it does serve to highlight the departure
that its protagonists were attempting to make from the type of poetry that was
dominant at the time. It also serves highlights a theme common to both the Modernists
and the Georgians, which is simply that they were both reacting against the
literature that had preceded them: both movements were attempting to reject
their literary inheritance, albeit to different extents. Whilst the Edwardians
and the Victorians bore the brunt of the Georgian reaction, the Georgians felt
the initial blast of the Modernists. As a consequence, Georgian poets were subject
to damning accusations being made towards their work, with few distinctions
made between those regarded as Georgian. They were accused of being self-indulgent,
of turning away from reality, and not facing up to the indeterminate and fragmentary
nature of it. Critics who believed their poetry to be feeble, romantic and thus
unsuitable for firm and objective critical analyses compounded these accusations.
In this context, the Georgians, and the tradition in which they were writing,
were inevitably going to suffer.
So, with the main aims
of this study in mind, this chapter has sought to do two related things. Firstly,
it has suggested that the Georgians should not be considered as a distinct movement.
By generalising and not drawing distinctions between different types of poetry
denies a proper appreciation of the poets that still have something to critically
offer us. It is wrong to suggest that all Georgian poetry is bad or good, and
so poets associated with it should not be dismissed because they are Georgian
or considered Georgian. Secondly, the Georgians and the Modernists are often
regarded to have held widely disparate poetic ideals and, as the above discussion
demonstrates, to a significant extent this is true. However, it is reasonable
to suggest that the disparities between them were initially overstated and have
subsequently been compounded. It should be remembered that literary history
is ripe with evidence of poets and critics each seeking to 'make it new' for
their generation. They have to create their own space in which to operate. This
often means denying or rejecting what has preceded them, even though the gap
between their respective work may not be as vast as they would like or profess
it to be. Accordingly,
we must be aware that delineating movements and drawing distinctions between
them should be done, and accepted with caution, not only with regards to this
discussion but with others as well. There is an ever-present danger when looking
towards poetry to regard it as being part of one movement or another and pigeonholing
it. As a consequence, the influences movements shared and the similarities between
them are played down or overlooked by critics, which has a subsequent effect
in that individual poets who display qualities akin - and separate - to the
delineated catergories are often neglected. As we shall see below, Walter de
la Mare is a case that proves this point.
