A Survey of Modernist Poetry by Laura Riding

THE motto to Mr. Hemingway's modernist novel _The Sun Also Rises_ is: ‘"You are all a lost generation" -- Gertrude Stein, in conversation. ' The title ("The sun also ariseth") is taken from Ecclesiastes, from the passage in which occurs the better-known text: "Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. " This is the conclusion of the greater number of the modernist poets, though not a counsel of altogether unrelieved gloom. Miss Sitwell's chief message, if she may be said to have one, is the endless, minute triviality of life. Mr. Eliot's _Waste Land_ is prefixed by a Latin motto which relates how the Cumaean Sibyl, when asked by the acolytes what her wishes were, replied (exhausted by her prophetic visions) "I wish to die". But in general, although the total effect of modernist poetry on the reader may be depressing because it does not shine with those convictions and grandeurs which have made poetry in the past a beacon of seldom-failing optimism, the modernist poet himself is gay -- if drearily gay -- under the triviality of life or the philosophy of gloom to which he may be committed. The vanity of the world seen without other-worldly compensation does, in fact, demand a wilful cheerfulness in the poet. And it is this gloomy cheerfulness, if anything, which produces an effect of gloom on the reader; and perhaps rightly, if the reader's temperament is not thus complicated. The temper of this generation, however, is not to be confused with the temper of two other previous lost generations, the generation of Byron and the generation of the 'nineties. The first was gloomy because gloom gave a tone of romantic defeat to fanciful ideals that could not be seriously lived up to; the next was gloomy because gloom gave a tone of romantic defeat to a fanciful want of ideals. The poet of the 'nineties could either get over his gloominess by becoming successful, or by becoming a blindly devout Catholic; or he could blow out his brains. The present lost generation does not feel its lack of ideals as sinfulness, but rather as sophistication. It does not love itself, but it does not hate itself. It does not think much of life, but neither does it think much of death. It is a cynically common-sense generation which would not, for example, consider dying for the freedom of a small enslaved nation or for literary fame, for that matter. The gloom, then, that it seems to cast does not come from self-pity or emotional prostration; but even from its painful wittiness, as extreme common-sense is always witty. The intellectuality of the humour of this generation may indeed be responsible for the impression of gloom it gives -- its passion to show that common-sense is not common, that it is, in fact, not of the substance of happy platitudes but of hard wit.

Because it is a common-sense generation, it must claim experience, it must have tried everything. Because it emphasises the wit in common-sense rather than the common-sense in wit, and because wit is cynical, it is a cynical generation; yet not a sentimental generation, because of its common-sense; nor a pessimistic generation, because pessimism is sentimental. It has tried everything and like Ecclesiastes found it lacking. But it has reached a degree of sophistication which is a stage beyond that of Thomas Hardy or Anatole France. It is not interested in denouncing. It cannot be bothered any more about the failure of Heaven to answer prayers, or the hypocrisy of the ‘unco guid', or the inconstancy of lovers and fortune. It declares, more definitely, a drastic alteration in traditional values; but without the violence characteristic of minds that have reached this stage by more emotional paths. It is a generation opposed to stress; and to go on living is always easier than to die. Above all things, it is interested in self-preservation. It is therefore an intensely serious generation in its way, whose wilful cheerfulness is often mistaken for drunken frivolousness: a generation that the War came upon at its most impressionable stage and taught the necessity for a self-protective scepticism of the stability of all human relationships, particularly of all national and religious institutions, of all existing moral codes, of all sentimental formulas for future harmony. From the War it also learned a scale of emotional excitement and depression with which no subsequent variations can compete; yet the scale was too nervously destructive to be wished for again. The disillusion of the War has been completed by the Peace, by the continuation of the old regime patched up with political Fascism, by the same atmosphere of suspense that prevailed from 1911 to the outbreak of nationalistic war and now again gathering around further nationalistic and civil wars.