Merit
The Collected Poems of Harold Monro. -With a Biographical Sketch by F. S. Flint and a Critical Note by T. S. Eliot.
(Cobden Sanderson. 8s. 6d.)
IDE request that I provide a-" serious assessment of Monro's poetry " is mildly surprising in relation to the fact that all expression 'of my opinion was rigorously excluded from England during the ten or twelve - years -preceding Mr. Harzusworth's publication of my How to Read. And I think no expression of even a kindred point of view occurred there during that decade save only of such elements of that view as coincided with Mr. Eliot's, in which case the literary criticism has been either overshadowed or diluted by his trivial retrogressive excursions into politics and theology. So far as what one supposes to be the reading public is concerned, a thousand people have heard a few catchwords for every three who have considered Mr. Eliot's remarks on literature as plenum—a plenum modified by new inventions.
Money or the financial statement should give a true picture of goods and services ; that is to say, the paper statement of demand should coincide with the material facts. Critical book-keeping must make its statement in some sort of valuta, sound, current or counterfeit. The current may be either counterfeit (consciously counterfeit) or simply unsound. Opinions of soundness vary, but " current " English criticism has, or had, long been of a nature which the present writer at least mistrusts (I mean if one avoid a still shorter word).
The typical and prevailing mode is, or was, to construct or to " give an impression of " the author's " soul " or mind or psychosis, based on the usually insufficient data of his verbal manifestations. This appears to me the height of tautology. Either the writer has left his carte de visite or he hasn't ; he has either delivered his message " or he hasn't ; and the reader who can't understand it from perusal of the author's text will certainly not understand it from a reviewer's con- jecture, though he may more or less understand the reviewer's impoverishment or simplifieatory distortion. This kind of " criticism " emerges from men who wish to write articles or to be essayists and are not primarily interested in literature (or, in the case of poets, in poetry).
In a long and far from pleasant experience I have found very few Englanders who can stand the kind of objectivity found in Dante's definition : " A canzone is a composition of words set to music." Appreciation of writing in your island largely consists in pity rather than in sympathy : poor fellow, he stuttered ; poor Shelley, he died. The transition is easy, and shows in the shift or weakening of the current sense of the word sympathy itself via putting one's self into an imaginary harmony with the writer's hypothetical (more or less distinguished) melancholy, &c. This permits enjoy- ment of the worst, or at least of very bad, poetry provided the reader has a good enough heart, but it scarcely leads to
assessment. •
There are several half-truths which can be used to obfuscate discussion. Viewed from infinity one man is as good as another. (This out-Jeffersons the declaration of American Independence, which merely postulated an equality at the moment of birth.) " The amount of real poetry any man can write is a fixed constant." " The amount of real poetry any man has in him is equal to that contained in any other man." Both these statements arose in an era that muddled up alt sorts of subjective and inchoate states of consciousness with the different specific registrations of those states or percep- tions in the media of different arts.
I affirm that Monro has left his carte de visits. " Who touches this book touches a man." That much for its being worth while to- discuss the book at all.
As for assessment of the volume as " verbal manifestation " : a great deal of the " thought " is twaddle expresSed in the language of Alice in Wonderland. The book contains a number of good poems, which have probably, all of them,, defects visible at first sight to the specialist in verbal mani- festation and either invisible or of low visibility to the general sympathetic reader. When the thought is twaddle it is a kind of twaddle " sanctified by long usage," a usage which makes a great deal of poetry accepted in British curricula (often with the label " profound " or " metaphysical ") highly unsatisfactory to a reader of early Italian verse. I mean that "'fiiney " has replaced exact thought. If you translate " ben del intelktto" as " benefit of the intellect," Monro never had it. If you translate the same
immortal phrase as " intellectual good " or even as " intel- lectual goods," he had it in the form of a dim basic appre7 hension of value, as if of a North vaguely off there somewhere, but nothing to be defined by the minuter degrees and seconds of an intellectual compass. And this apprehension became more definite with the years.
Reducing this to the technical terms of verbal manifesta- tion, his language became more exact and he used fewer un- necessary words, and fewer patches of dead idiom as he matured. The defects tended to become superficial ; that is, they concerned progressively a thinner and thinner surface of the work, the inner structure becoming progressively sounder. The objectivity of Cat's Meat " as a whole is superior to the objectivity of many younger writers who are most conscientiously concerned with the objectivity of every individual word in their poems.
The only evil I have observed as attendant on " schools of poetry " and " experimental " schools of poetry is that, whether a group or scattered nebula, writers intent on some necessary but recently neglected element of their art lose perception of other elements taken for granted and thereby forgotten in the work of their immediate predecessors. People overlooked Hardy's poetry because of his old-fashioned idiom, failing to see that in every poem Hardy had a subject which, in so far as I can remember, he invariably presented to the reader. In " Cat's Meat " Monro had a subject ; he had incidentally a felicitous onomatopoeia, which incidentally makes the subject stick in the. reader's memory. This latter is a purely technical virtue. The general reader needn't ever find it out. The specialist will instantly sec it, and approve it. And if he be a sufficiently competent specialist he will see how far the specific weight or value of the poem outweighs a few trivial flaws.
In over two hundred pages of verse these objective presen- tations make a creditable total. The author appears to have preferred dogs to men ; he grumbles at the aspidistra ; he reproves the cat for its hunger, or at least appears to have a certain moral umbrage both at the cat and the universe : in other words, he belonged to a decade which did not know the answer and brooded. All this is irritating if one belongs to a decade which is firmly convinced that the answer to most of Monro's causes of complaint is perfectly well known, and that it is the duty or hedonic privilege, if not of every writer at least of every member of the intelligentsia, to think into and through the bearing of contemporary thought.
The irritation is needless. Monro died, or at any rate was dying, before any general public recognition of a new era had occurred. The work records Monro's brooding during the collapse of an era, a morose recognition of, concretely, the
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