A Survey of Modernist Poetry by Laura Riding

So far our sympathy with modernist poetry has been contemporary sympathy. We have been writing as it were from the middle of the modernist movement in order to justify it if possible against criticism which was not proper to it, which belonged to the preceding stage in poetry-making and which should have passed as the stage passed. It is now possible to reach a position where the modernist movement itself can be looked at with historical (as opposed to contemporary) sympathy as a stage in poetry that is to pass in turn, or may have already passed, leaving behind only such work as did not belong too much to history. The apparent contradictions that will occur in this chapter and seem to gainsay the emphatic sympathy of former chapters will be found to be caused by this superseding of contemporary sympathy by historical sympathy. As nothing can remain contemporary for very long, we were obliged to assume this position if our criticism was to stand before rather than behind its subject.

In discussing the difficulties which exist between contemporary poetry and the contemporary reader, it is necessary to discuss also the difficulties which the contemporary poet has had to face if he has wished to write as a contemporary -- to be included in the generation to which by birth and personal sympathy he historically belongs. As the poet, if a true poet, is one by nature and not by effort, he must be seen writing as unconsciously as regards time as his ordinary reader lives. For one remembers the date only by compulsion; no one really feels older to-day than he felt yesterday. The relation of a poet's poetry to Poetry as a whole and to the time in which it is written is the problem of criticism; and if this problem becomes part of the making of a poem, it adds to the unconscious consciousness of the poet when he is in the act of composition an alien element, a _conscious_ consciousness which we may call the ‘historical effort'. In reading poetry in which this alien element appears one must indeed make the same historical effort if the full intention of the poem is to be appreciated. Therefore the plain reader is likely to prefer to modernist poetry of a past period, in which the historical effort, wherever it has been present, has been absorbed or neutralized by the automatic passing of the period into history.