AUNT EUDORA, AND THE POETS
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] Sia,—Mr. Michael Roberts has written you an epistolary article, of 1150 words, in which he deplores my unfairness to the younger poets and my behaviour in " pretending to hide behind the opinions of an aunt who prefers poems about snow- (imps." I am therefore compelled to confess that when reporting my conversations with Aunt Eudora I had two objects in view. Firstly, I wanted to write something amusing to The Spectator. (I felt that the dear old lady needed a tonic.) And secondly, I wanted to give the younger poets a chance to be amusing at my expense. Whether Aunt Eudora has amused your readers can only be conjectured. Whether the younger poets have replied amusingly is also conjectural, but to me their remonstrances have been a disappointment. I suppose they took me too seriously.
A. C. Boyd wrote that " Aunt Eudora must have overlooked the metaphysical verse of the seventeenth century, and this gap in her reading might partly account for her difficulties with the poetry of 1935." It might. A. E. Housman, in his lecture on The Name and Nature of Poetry, described the meta- physical poets of the seventeenth century as follows. " There was a whole age of English in which the place of poetry was usurped by something very different which possessed the proper and specific name of wit : Wit not in its modern sense, but as defined by Johnson, ' a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things appar- ently unlike.' Such discoveries are.. .no more poetical than
anagrams ; such -pleasure as they give is purely intellectual and intellectually- frivolous ; but this was the pleasure princi- pally sought and found in poems by the intelligentsia of fifty years or more of the seventeenth century."
I am, of course, aware that Poetry is undergoing an anti- romantic revival—or ordeal. There is also the superficially " new " visual riiecillmism caused by the cinema. There is also the tendency to over-exploit the discoveries of modern psychologists. Nevertheless I feel that Professor Housman's lecture contains wisdom which most of us can afford to assimi- late with our chemistry, physics, and the rest of the " curricu- lum of contemporaneity."
Mr. Michael Roberts concludes his letter by asking me to explain my failure to share his enjoyment of three poems, which he specifies. Mr. Empson's Doctrinal Point may be good metaphysical verse, but I cannot agree that the following lines, when printed as prose, are anything else. " Professor Eddington with the same insolence called all physics one tautology ; if you describe things with the right tensors all law becomes the fact that they can be described with them ; this is the Assumption of the description. The duality of choice thus becomes the singularity of existence ; the effort of virtue the unconsciousness of foreknowledge."
Then there is Mr. Spender's The. North. I do not wish to heckle Mr. Spender, any more than I wish to discourage Mr. Empson. Both of them are trying very hard to produce something original and significant. But I feel that they are trying a little too hard.
As descriptive semi-prose The North is interesting. Rut consider this :
"Return, return, you warn. We do. There is A network of railways, money, wools, words, wools. Meals, papers, exchanges, debates, Cinema, wireless ; the worst is Marriage."
\Vas Mr. Spender writing poetry when he wrote that ? If so, the art of Poetry must find a new name.
Mr. MacNeice's Perseus is carefully contrived and highly artificial. It is without emotional vitality :
"Shut your eyes There are suns beneath your lids Or look in the looking-glass in the end room You will find it full of eyes The ancient smiles of men cut out with scissors and Kept in mirrors."
.Mr. Roberts states that his enjoyment of these three poems is comparable, in degree. but not in kind, to his enjoyment of Shakespeare, Donne, and Shelley. Without the least desire to be offensive, I differ from him. A clever, self- conscious arrangement of words is an unsatisfactory substitute for the real thing. (Mr. Spender has occasionally produced the real thing, or something very like it.) My advice to our younger poets is that they should control their imagery and study simple and direct utterance. Also their rhythms worry me, and seem to lack impetus. But I am a pre- machine-age poet, and therefore hopelessly old-fashionetl. Schubert-minded, I crave tunefulness I also crave the forgiveness of the younger poets for lecturing them like this.
[The administration of a tonic to The Spectator was a kindly thought on Mr. Sassoon's part. Actually our circuit'• lion and revenue figures are serving that purpose quite adequately.—En. The Spectator.]
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