POETS AND POETRY.
THE NOTORIETY OF MISS EDITH SITWELL.*
FRIENDS and enemies run up and slap the Red Flag into Miss Sitwell's hands. A scrimmage takes place around her. No one is hurt, of course, but the din is exasperating. And it isn't fair. Her poems deserve criticism and need it. They
receive for the most part panegyric and abuse.
The combatants have no doubt of Miss Sitwell's title to the standard of rebellion. An influential and sober newspaper has called Miss Sitwell " the chief votaress of free verse." With such a fine subject for contention, who troubles to find out that she has never written a line of free verse ? She has been so often charged with defiance of convention that few people have attempted to define her own convention or trace its derivation, and no one has remarked upon her plagiarisms in phrase and technique. But one misconception of her work is especially persistent. A cursory reader declares that a poem is deliberately, maliciously and insultingly obscure. Some intemperate admirer will reply : " Serves you right. Poems are not written for such people as you." Yet the truth is that Miss Sitwell's poems arc not very obscure, and their difficulties can easily be explained.
From the beginning most newcomers are perplexed by Miss Sitwell's idiom. When I first met with her poems I found it hard to make sentences, and even phrases, hang together. I fought out every meaning the words could carry ; and after a severe effort I saw with astonishment that the true meaning was obvious. Probably most people would be quicker in apprehension than I was. When I read " Across the fields as green as spinach,
Cropped as close as Time to Greenwich," I asked myself : " Are the fields cropped or is the spinach ? Cropped as close as Time, as close to Greenwich as Time, as close as Time is cropped to Greenwich ? " And when I read " Soundless as any breeze (Amber and orangeries) From isles in Indian seas,"
I couldn't at first decide how " amber and orangeries " came In ; and anyhow, till I had looked up in a dictionary paren- thesis, metaphor, simile, metonymy and the rest, I was uneasy about the construction. I suppose that in some degree many readers have the same difficulty. Since we can remember no writer who says precisely what Miss Sitwell means, we can't believe that she means precisely what she says. If we read her poems with a good confidence in our ability to interpret them they seem simple enough. We have unfortunately lost the habit of weighing the words we speak or hear. Modem languages have been adapted to a quick and superficial inter- course, and we use a jargon which conveys with the least possible effort of mind as little meaning as will suffice. Hear a political speech from a rhetorician of any party and, no matter how wrong in outlook the whole may seem, phrase by phrase you will find it hard to disagree. A word was once an apocalypse : it is now a convenience. Miss Sitwell is by no means free from jargon ; indeed, as we shall see, sometimes she employs abstract terms in a notably loose fashion ; but in part she is obscure to a hasty reader because she so often revivifies her words, and we forget that words were ever alive.
There are still those who, believing it to be the duty of a poet to convey a moral, are annoyed when they can discover no moral to Miss Sitwell's poems. Here we are on the ground of a thousand philosophical disputes. A generous and funda- mental definition of this " moral " could make the proposition self-evident—and would destroy its value as a criterion. We can argue with some success that the good is the beautiful, or the true, or the pleasing, or the useful : we make our terms fit by definition and we are left with an identity. And " moral " is an especially dangerous word. Men will enjoy Polonius's abominable counsel to Laertes for no technical reason, but because they imagine it to be an example of excel- lent moralizing : they will even teach it to children. Yet Polonius is the meanest man in Shakespeare's plays, and his counsel is a supreme exposition of his character. Any explicit, any systematic moral would ruin a poem ; and, if
• Bucolic ("cm& its. By Edith Sitwell. London : Duckworth. [3s. ed. net.] Miss Sitwell's poems contain no such morals, they are by so much the better. We must look for another word to describe the unity that a good poem must possess. Tolstoi remarked in conversation : " The most important thing in a work of art is that it should have a kind of focus ; there should be some place where all the rays meet or from which they go out. And this focus must not be completely explicable in words. One of the hall-marks of a work of art is this—its whole content can be expressed only by itself." It is by their possession or lack of this focus that Miss Sitwell's poems must be finally judged.
But many people are antagonized by these poems because they arc never sure when Miss Sitwell is serious ; they are afraid that if they attempt to understand a poem they will find that they have been taken in. And, indeed, it is true that Miss Sitwell sometimes writes deliberate nonsense. Were Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear abused for that ? Miss Sitwell's nonsense is no more ill-intentioned than theirs. Take an example :-- " Madame Mouse trots
Madame Mouse trots : Grey in the black night I Furred is the light.
The elephant-trunks Trumpet from the sea. . Grey in the black night The mouse trots free. Hoarse as a dog's bark The heavy leaves are furled. . . .
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The cat's in his cradle—
All's well with the world."
I assure you that this is for your enjoyment, not for your annoyance. It may be a mismanagement that next to this in her new book comes a co-ordinated, sober and sombre poem, " Dark Song " :-
" The fire was furry as a bear, And the flames purr. .
The brown bear rambles in his chain Captive to cruel men Through the dark and hairy wood. • • The maid sighed : ' All my blood Is animal. They thought I sat Like a household cat ; But through the dark Woods rambled I. . . ; Oh, if my blood would die ' The fire had a bear's fur, It heard and knew. . . .
The dark earth furry as a bear Grumbled too ! "
Certainly Miss Sitwell gives no guidance herself. But the way, safest for self-love, of reading her poems would be to take them all as nonsense—or at least as merely pictorial— and to find out one's mistakes.
When all allowance has been made for misconception there are still obscurities left, and these cannot be explained to Miss Sitwell's credit. Occasionally she shakes a minatory fist in the faces of her attackers ; and we know that all gestures are out of place in poetry. Instances of this are rare ; she will now and then leave a crudity of expression, or let fly inconsequently at her enemies. It is pardonable in a writer, but deplorable in a poet. She is more often incon- sequent for no reason at all ; but in this case she is not being diabolical or intransigeant ; she has merely not been suffi- ciently self-critical to abandon the disordered but inviting thoughts that came to her mind while she was writing. And similarly, when her metrical effects are ugly, she is not showing a worship of ugliness ; she has been careless and has written badly. Say, indeed, if you choose, that she writes for the most part badly ; but it is false to suggest that she does it on purpose.
From this appeal for disarmament I wish to turn to the more serious business of criticism. A poet may be excellent in theory and tendency ; he may have a most heaven-sent insight into the subjects and laws of poetry ; but if he writes a good poem he is lucky in the extreme. The bulk of the work of most good poets is rather wretched stuff ; and when they write well it seems to be from no virtue of their own, but from the act of providence. At the same time, even in the worst lines of a good poet, we can usually predict, from his motion and bearing in verse : " Here is a man whom providence will think fit to favour." I believe that Miss Sitwell has written poems under the favour of providence ; but it is her motion and bearing that I shall try, in brief, to examine.
Miss Sitwell is almost the first woman to have written steadily a woman's poetry ; and from this comes much of
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her initial strangeness. Her poems are to be read running : their meaning should be caught at, not worked out. Her mind is not intellectual, not selective or plastic ; and she makes no effort to discipline herself to masculine ways of thought. She writes wittily, of course ; half of her poetry is, in a sense, wit. But it is a wit of quick association and wry perception, a rather conversational wit ; it contains no savagery, and it never comments upon fundamentals. Miss Sitwell will sometimes hoist into her lines an abstract term ; but it has no business there, and it works no wonders. It has lost all definiteness and becomes a grouping point for vague idealistic emotions :-
" The small flowers grew to a hairy husk That holds Eternity for its musk."
Eternity has weakened from a concept to a romance.
The hardness, brightness and particularity of Miss Sitwell's world irritate and puzzle many of her readers. The explana- tion can be seen, I think, from such lines as these :- " If cold grew visible again, We should see bell-flowers on the plain With shivering stalks, as white as kings In trembling ermine."
" If cold grew visible again "—if its impact upon our senses were strong and primitive. For with savages often, or with those of not thoroughly discriminated senses, everything external has a more concrete and alien existence. With the sophisticated the world is a part of themselves, a projection of their minds ; with the undeveloped the experience of the objective is a contact with the unknown, and everything tends to become amazingly not themselves. It is this primi- tiveness of sense, this sense-confusion, that especially marks Miss Sitwell's work. It is of no value in itself ; but relatively it becomes of more importance as we become more civilized. Our increasingly discriminated senses would lose the edge of their sensation if they were not thus brought back to hard and vivid impacts. To Miss Sitwell it may be natural, but to her readers it must be an enrichment of experience, to see " the blue pebbles of the rain " or to feel that " The cold wind creaking in my blood Seems part of it, as grain of wood."
In the end we can say of Miss Sitwell only that she has an Individual outlook upon the world, that she describes it honestly, and that sometimes she can make poetry of it.
ALAN PORTER.