

E-text prepared by Meredith Bach and the Project Gutenberg Online
Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images
generously made available by Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries
(http://www.archive.org/details/toronto)



Note: Images of the original pages are available through
      Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries. See
      http://www.archive.org/details/futureofenglishp00gossuoft





The English Association

Pamphlet No. 25

THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH POETRY

by

EDMUND GOSSE, C.B.

June, 1913






A copy of this pamphlet is supplied to all full members of the
Association. They can obtain further copies (price 1_s._) on application
to the Secretary, Mr. A. V. Houghton, Imperial College Union, South
Kensington, London, S.W.




The English Association

Pamphlet No. 25

THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH POETRY

by

EDMUND GOSSE, C.B.

June, 1913




THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH POETRY

  J'ai vu le cheval rose ouvrir ses ailes d'or,
  Et, flairant le laurier que je tenais encor,
  Verdoyant a jamais, hier comme aujourd'hui,
  Se cabrer vers le Jour et ruer vers la Nuit.

                                       HENRI DE REGNIER.


In venturing this afternoon to address an audience accustomed to listen to
those whose positive authority is universally recognized, and in taking
for my theme a subject not, like theirs, distinct in its definitions or
consecrated by tradition and history, I am aware that I perform what you
may, if you choose, call an act of blameworthy audacity. My subject is
chimerical, vague, and founded on conjectures which you may well believe
yourselves at least as well fitted as I am to propound. Nevertheless, and
in no rash or paradoxical spirit, I invite you to join with me in some
reflections on what is the probable course of English poetry during, let
us say, the next hundred years. If I happen to be right, I hope some of
the youngest persons present will say, when I am long turned to dust, what
an illuminating prophet I was. If I happen to be wrong, why, no one will
remember anything at all about the matter. In any case we may possibly be
rewarded this afternoon by some agreeable hopes and by the contemplation
of some pleasant analogies.

Our title takes for granted that English poetry[1] will continue, with
whatever fluctuations, to be a living and abiding thing. This I must
suppose that you all accede to, and that you do not look upon poetry as an
art which is finished, or the harvest of classic verse as one which is
fully reaped and garnered. That has been believed at one time and another,
in various parts of the globe. I will mention one instance in the history
of our own time: a quarter of a century ago, the practice of writing verse
was deliberately abandoned in the literatures of the three Scandinavian
countries, but particularly in that of Norway, where no poetry, in our
sense, was written from about 1873 to 1885. It almost died out here in
England in the middle of the fifteenth century; it ran very low in France
at the end of the Middle Ages. But all these instances, whether ancient or
modern, of the attempt to prove prose a sufficing medium for all
expression of human thought have hitherto failed, and it is now almost
certain that they will more and more languidly be revived, and with less
and less conviction.

     [1] I here use the word 'Poetry' (as Wordsworth did) as opposed to
     the word 'Prose', and synonymous with metrical composition.

It was at one of the deadliest moments in the life of the art in England
that George Gascoigne remarked, in his 'Epistle to the Reverend Divines'
(1574) that 'It seemeth unto me that in all ages Poetry hath been not only
permitted, but also it hath been thought a right good thing'. Poetry has
occupied the purest and the fieriest minds in all ages, and you will
remember that Plato, who excluded the poets from his philosophical Utopia,
was nevertheless an exquisite writer of lyrical verse himself. So, to come
down to our own day, Ibsen, who drove poetry out of the living language of
his country, had been one of the most skilful of prosodical proficients.
Such instances may allay our alarm. There cannot be any lasting force in
arguments which remind us of the pious confessions of a redeemed burglar.
It needs more than the zeal of a turncoat to drive Apollo out of
Parnassus.

There will, therefore, we may be sure, continue to be English poetry
written and printed. Can we form any idea of the probable character of it?
There exists, in private hands, a picture by that ingenious water-colour
painter of the late eighteenth century, William Gilpin. It is very
fantastic, and means what you like, but it represents Pegasus, the horse
of the Muses, careering in air on the vast white arc of his wings, against
a sky so dark that it must symbolize the obscure discourse of those who
write in prose. You are left quite doubtful whether he will strike the
rocky terrace in the foreground with his slender, silver hooves, or will
swoop down into the valley below, or will soar to heaven and out of sight.
You are left by the painter in a pleasant uncertainty, but Hippocrene may
break out anywhere, and of the vivacious courser himself all that we can
be sure of is that we are certain to see him alighting before us when we
least expect him.

We may put our trust in the persistence of Pegasus through his apparently
aimless gyrations, and in the elasticity of the poetical spirit, and yet
acknowledge that there are difficulties in the way of believing that verse
will continue to be written in the English language for a quite indefinite
period. Perhaps we may as well face one or two of these difficulties at
once. The principal danger, then, to the future of poetry seems to me to
rest in the necessity of freshness of expression. Every school of verse is
a rising and a breaking wave. It rises, because its leaders have become
capable of new forms of attractive expression; its crest is some writer,
or several writers, of genius, who combine skill and fire and luck at a
moment of extreme opportuneness; and then the wave breaks, because later
writers cannot support the ecstasy, and only repeat formulas which have
lost their attractiveness. Shirley would have been a portent, if he had
flourished in 1595 and had written then as he did in 1645. Erasmus Darwin
would be one of the miracles of prosody if 'The Loves of the Plants' could
be dated 1689 instead of 1789. There must always be this fluctuation, this
rise and fall in value, and what starts each new wave mounting out of the
trough of the last is the instinctive demand for freshness of expression.
_Cantate Domino_ is the cry of youth, sing a _new_ song unto the Lord.

But with the superabundant circulation of language year after year, week
after week, by a myriad careful scribes, the possibilities of freshness
grow rarer and rarer. The obvious, simple, poignant things seem to have
all been said. It is not merely that the actual poems, like Gray's
'Elegy', and much of 'Hamlet', and some of Burns's songs, have been
manipulated so often, and put to such pedestrian uses, that they are like
rubbed coins, and begin to lose the very features of Apollo and the script
of the Muses, but that the road seems closed to future bards who wish to
speak with simplicity of similar straightforward things. In several of the
literatures of modern Europe--those which began late, or struggled long
against great disadvantages--it is still possible to produce pleasure by
poems which describe primitive emotions in perfectly limpid language. But
with us in England, I confess that it seems to me certain that whatever we
retain, we can never any more have patience to listen to a new shepherd
piping under the hawthorn-tree. Each generation is likely to be more
acutely preoccupied than the last with the desire for novelty of
expression. Accordingly, the sense of originality, which is so fervently
demanded from every new school of writers, will force the poets of the
future to sweep away all recognized impressions. The consequence must be,
I think,--I confess so far as language is concerned that I see no escape
from this,--that the natural uses of English and the obvious forms of our
speech will be driven from our national poetry, as they are even now so
generally being driven.

No doubt, in this condition, the originality of those who do contrive to
write strongly and clearly will be more vigorously evident than ever. The
poets will have to gird up their loins and take their sword in their
hands. That wise man of the eighteenth century, to whom we never apply
without some illuminating response, recommends that 'Qui saura penser de
lui-meme et former de nobles idees, qu'il prenne, s'il peut, la maniere
et le tour eleve des maitres'. These are words which should inspire every
new aspirant to the laurel. 'S'il peut'; you see that Vauvenargues puts it
so, because he does not wish that we should think that such victories as
these are easy, or that any one else can help us to produce them. They are
not easy, and they will be made more and more hard by the rubbed-out,
conventionalized coinage of our language.

In this matter I think it probable that the little peoples, and the
provinces which cultivate a national speech, will long find a great
facility in expressing themselves in verse. I observe that it has recently
been stated that Wales, which has always teemed with vernacular poets, has
never possessed so many as she does at this time. I am debarred by what
Keats called 'giant ignorance' from expressing an opinion on the subject,
but I presume that in Welsh the resources of language are far from being
so seriously exhausted as we have seen that they are in our own
complicated sphere, where the cultivation of all the higher forms of
poetic diction through five centuries has made simple expression extremely
difficult. I am therefore ready to believe that in Welsh, as in Gaelic and
in Erse, the poets have still wide fields of lyric, epic, and dramatic art
untilled. We have seen, in the latter half of the nineteenth century,
Provencal poets capable of producing simple and thrilling numbers which
are out of the reach of their sophisticated brethren who employ the worn
locutions of the French language.

In new generations there is likely, we may be sure, to occur less
description of plain material objects, because the aspect of these has
already received every obvious tribute. So also there can hardly fail to
be less precise enumeration of the primitive natural emotions, because
this also has been done already, and repeated to satiety. It will not any
longer satisfy to write

  The rose is red, the violet blue,
  And both are sweet, and so are you.

Reflections of this order were once felt to be exquisite, and they were so
still as lately as when Blake and Wordsworth were young. But it is quite
impossible that we should ever go back to them. Future poets will seek to
analyse the redness of the rose, and will scout, as a fallacious
observation, the statement that the violet is blue. All schemes of art
become mechanical and insipid, and even their _naivetes_ lose their
savour. Verse of excellent quality, in this primitive manner, can now be
written to order by any smart little boy in a Grammar-school.

We have agreed, however, to believe that poetry, as an art, in one shape
or another, will escape from the bankruptcy of language, and that Pegasus,
with whatever strange and unexpected gambollings, will continue to
accompany us. But of one thing we may be quite sure, that it will only be
at the cost of much that we at present admire and like that the continuity
of the art of verse will be preserved. If I could suddenly present to you
some characteristic passages of the best English poetry of 1963, I doubt
extremely whether I should be able to persuade you of their merits. I am
not sure that you would understand what the poet intended to convey, any
more than the Earl of Surrey would have understood the satires of Donne,
or Coleridge have enjoyed the odes of George Meredith. Young minds
invariably display their vitality by attacking the accepted forms of
expression, and then they look about for novelties, which they cultivate
with what seems to their elders to be extravagance. Before we attempt to
form an idea, however shadowy, of what poetry will be in the future, we
must disabuse ourselves of the delusion that it will be a repetition of
what is now produced and accepted. Nor can we hope by any exercise of
philosophy to do away with the embarrassing and painful, but after all
perhaps healthful antagonism between those who look forward and those who
live in the past. The earnestness expended on new work will always render
young men incapable of doing justice to what is a very little older than
themselves; and the piety with which the elderly regard what gave them
full satisfaction in their days of emotional freshness will always make it
difficult for them to be just to what seems built on the ruins of what
they loved.

If there is any feature which we can scarcely be wrong in detecting in our
vision of the poetry of the future it is an elaboration which must follow
on the need for novelty of which I have spoken. I expect to find the
modern poet accepting more or less consciously an ever-increasing symbolic
subtlety of expression. If we could read his verses, which are still
unwritten, I feel sure that we should consider them obscure. That is to
say, we should find that in his anxiety not to repeat what had been said
before him, and in his horror of the trite and the superficial, he will
achieve effect and attach interest _obscuris vera involvens_--wrapping the
truth in darkness. The 'darkness' will be relative, as his own
contemporaries, being more instructed and sophisticated than we are, will
find those things transparent, or at least translucent, which remain
opaque enough to us. And, of course, as epithets and adjectives that seem
fresh to us will smell of the inkhorn to him, he will have to exert his
ingenuity to find parallel expressions which would startle us by their
oddity if we met with them now.

A danger, therefore, which the poets of the future will need all their
ingenuity to avoid, will be the cultivation of a patent artificiality, a
forcing of the note until it ceases to rouse an echo in the human heart.
There will be a determination to sweep away all previously recognized
impressions. Affectation, that is to say the obtaining of an effect by
illegitimate means, is an offence against the Muses which they never fail
to avenge by oblivion or by a curtailed and impeded circulation. We may
instructively examine the history of literature with special attention to
this fault, and we find it in all cases to have been fatal. It was fatal
to the poetry of Alexandria, which closed, as you know, in an obscurity to
which the title of Lycophrontic darkness has been given from the name of
its most extravagant exponent. It was fatal to several highly-gifted
writers of the close of the Elizabethan period, who endeavoured to give
freshness to an outworn scheme of poetic ornament; I need only remind you
of the impenetrable cloud or fog, by Cyril Tourneur, called _The
Transform'd Metamorphosis_, and of the cryptic rhymed dramas of Lord
Brooke. It has not been fatal, I hope, but I think desperately perilous to
a beautiful talent of our own age, the amiable Stephane Mallarme. Nothing,
I feel, is more dangerous to the health of poetry than the praise given by
a group of irresponsible disciples to verse which transfers commonplace
thought to an exaggerated, violent, and involved scheme of diction, and I
confess that I should regard the future of poetry in this country with
much more apprehension than I do, if I believed that the purely learned
poet, the prosodical pedant, was destined to become paramount amongst us.
That would, indeed, threaten the permanence of the art; and it is for that
reason that I look with a certain measure of alarm on the excess of
verbiage about poetry which attends not merely criticism, which matters
little, but the actual production and creation. I am confident, however,
that the common sense of readers will always bring about a reaction in
favour of sanity and lucidity.

One great objection to the introduction of a tortured and affected style
into verse-writing is the sacrifice which has to be made of that dignity
and sweetness, that suave elevation, which marks all successful
masterpieces. Perhaps as difficult a quality to attain as any which the
poetry of the future will be called upon to study is stateliness, what the
French call 'la vraie hauteur'. This elevation of style, this dignity, is
foreign to democracies, and it is hard to sustain it in the rude air of
modern life. It easily degenerates, as Europe saw it degenerate for a
century and a half, into pomposity relieved by flatness. It is apt to
become a mere sonorous rhetoric, a cultivation of empty fine phrases. If
we examine the serious poetry of the end of the seventeenth and the
greater part of the eighteenth century,--especially in the other countries
of Europe, for England was never without some dew on the
threshing-floor,--if we examine it in France, for instance, between Racine
and Andre Chenier, we are obliged to recognize that it was very rarely
both genuine and appropriate. The Romantic Revival, which we are beginning
ungratefully to decry, did at least restore to poetry the sense of a
genuine stateliness of expression, which once more gave it the requisite
dignity, and made it a vehicle for the vital and the noble sentiments of
humanity.

Let us now turn, in our conjectural survey, from the