A Survey of Modernist Poetry by Laura Riding

THE eighteenth-century reading public had poetry made clear for it, both by the way in which new poetry was written and previous poetry, early English and Classical, rewritten. But the eighteenth century had a very limited recipe for poetry; for metre the heroic couplet, which broke thought up into very short lengths; for language a stock poetical vocabulary of not more than a couple of thousand words. Anybody could write poetry then if he obeyed the rules, without necessarily being a poet. In the nineteenth century, because of a reading public enlarged by democracy, clearness meant not so much obeying rules as writing for the largest possible audience. The twentieth-century reaction in poetry against nineteenth-century standards is not against clearness and simplicity but against rules for poetry made by the reading public, instead of by the poets themselves as they were in the eighteenth century. This is why so many modern poets are forced to feel themselves in snobbish sympathy with the eighteenth century. The quarrel now is between the reading public and the modernist poet over the definition of clearness. Both agree that perfect clearness is the end of poetry, but the reading public insists that no poetry is clear except what it can understand at a glance; the modernist poet insists that the clearness of which the poetic mind is capable demands thought and language of a far greater sensitiveness and complexity than the enlarged reading public will permit it to use. To remain true to his conception of what poetry is, he has therefore to run the risk of seeming obscure or freakish, of having no reading public; even of writing what the reading public refuses to call poetry, in order to be a poet. The only fault to be found with a poet like E. E. Cummings is that he has tried to do two things at once: to remain loyal to the requirements of the poetic mind for clearness, and to get the ordinary reading public to call the result ‘poetry'. He has tried to do this by means of an elaborate system of typography, and the only gratitude he has had from the reading public is to be called freakish and obscure because of his typography.

The following is a poem describing day-break seen through a railway carriage window in Italy.