A Book Report

白马西北驰

A Book Report on The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction
[Rosenthal, M. L. The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960/Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press,2004.]



  Times changed. As entering a new epoch, we have recovered from the crisis of the modern times, especially the disaster at the beginning of the 20th century. The writings of the modern poets have been carved in marble pillars as inscriptions for the past times. We tend to shake off the painful memory and try something new and different. But what is remained is the truth that among the seeming choices, that is, the only choice left for poets is to be honest. This principle is the backbone of the great poetic tradition, as Rosenthal puts it in the comment on contemporary British poetry:
  …it is authenticity of voice that makes a poetry live, whatever we may think of what the voice is saying and however short its life may prove to be. (p 220)

  In this sense, we may relate the destiny (or career) of a poet to his social condition, which cannot be taken as mechanical and decisive as well as meaningless and ignorable. The emergence of the modern poetry was an \"objective correlative\" to that epoch of the changing social context. But this relation, in my view, ought to be considered in an abstract way other than mechanical one, because of the various individualities of the modern poets. They, as members of a great generation, share only one common character in its broadest sense, that is, their authentic voice.

  In this book, Rosenthal introduces modern poets and their poems respectively, and leave the task of accomplishing the whole jigsaw for the readers.

  The description of the modernist poets plays an important part in this volume. Modernism is a term \"widely used to identify new and distinctive features in the subjects, forms, concepts, and styles of literature and the other arts in the early decades of the present century, but especially after World War Ⅰ(1914-18). The specific features signified by 'modernism' …involves a deliberate and radical break with some of the traditional bases not only of Western art, but of Western culture in general.\"(Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literature Terms: p167) But Rosenthal places the same emphases upon the workings of tradition as the broaden sensibility of the modern age. The heritage of tradition may justify the establishment of the modernism (although this term never appears in this book). These workings include: the relations between the modern poets such as Yeats and their forerunners, their attitudes toward religion; the original use of tradition, the resemblance of approach, theme, and mood; the rediscovery and appropriation of the foreign literatures and neglected works in English literature. To some extent, the traditional elements help to make modern poetry be classical and conventional in its turn as times changing.

  Yeats, Pound, and Eliot are indisputable leading figures of the modern poets. Rosenthal calls Yeats as Prophetic and Pound as the Poet as Hero. These tittles derived from Thomas Carlyle show the author's great respect to the two poets. In my impression, Yeats is a poet purer than Pound and Eliot. He has the character of ancient bards, and in this respect he may be more traditional. He is prophetic because he is really religious, not as suspicious as Pound or Eliot. Like prophets in the mythic age or times of the Bible, he believes what he said in his bones. Although in a metaphoric way, what he said was justified by history-the decadence of mankind and the burst of disastrous war. But it is not an easy task to justify Pound as a hero because his political mistake was not evadable. But in the realm of poetry, Pound is an explorer as audacious as Odysseus. Eliot is a scholar at the same time as a poet. In some respect, he is as ambitious as Pound, but he confined himself within the border of literature. (These comments are all impressionistic and may be clichés repeated again and again, but I can go only so far owing to the lack of knowledge for the present time.)

  Stripped off all the labels, poets can only express themselves with their poems, which need t genius and craftsmanship more than politically correct points of view. (The silence of the poetry after the establishment of new China may be a proof for this assumption.) In this sense, I think great works of Yeats, Pound, and Eliot have been forged into the culture heritage and become a part of tradition.

  Why the author relates Eliot to the \"displaced sensibility\"? I cannot find a explicit answer in the author's demonstration. The clues may be found in Eliot's essay on the \" objective correlative\". He criticized Hamlet as an \"attempt to express the inexpressible horrible,\" (p 82) that is, Hamlet lacks the necessary objective correlative with the protagonist's emotion. Rosenthal reasonably holds that \" It is obviously, though, the maggot in Eliot…And it would appear to be the maggot in the displaced modern man, who carries a burden of emotion without exact referent.\" So, the displaced sensibility may refer to the predicament of modern man who cannot express himself freely and fully.

  Unlike Pound and Eliot who were born in America but mingled into the whole English literary tradition, there were some great American poets who committed to exhibit the local character. Robinson and Frost both took the New England as background of their poetry in traditional metrics, but the former tended to praise the elapsed beauty of past times and the latter was more intimate to the Nature. Williams and Stevens expressed modern spirit of America more than any poets before them. William was \"alert to the subtler life of the senses\", and Stevens emphasized the power of imagination. Among all these innovative poets, Williams seems to me more amicable with a strange sense of familiarity.

  If poets are grouped reasonably in last chapter, problems of classification can be observed in the chapter of Lawrence, Crane, Auden and others. What is the similarity between Auden and Lawrence? Why they are arranged in the same chapter? Is it the case that they are both Englishmen? But Hart Crane is not. Is it the case that they share political opinions? But their opinions are quite different from each other.

  In the critic on Auden’s \"Spain 1937\", Rosenthal discusses on the secret how political poetry can remain poetry. He indicates that it maintains the seriousness of revolutionary politics and the passion of its oratory while at the same time leaping clear of the obvious clichés that could so easily drag down such poetry.\" But the real secret is hidden in the poems, which can be seen but not told clearly.

  Only in the last chapter Rosenthal speaks in the first person to comment on the relative younger poets as his peers. For example, he argues: \"Miss Bishop, as I observed, extends the Imagist instant\". This shift of the point of view shows Rosenthal's different attitudes toward the established poets and the later ones waiting for time's test. He lives in the same times as the poets who he observes in an exquisite chaos. Can the chaos be made clear? Which is the mainstream of post-modernism poetry? Dylan Thomas in England and Robert Lowell in America are the leading figures of the English literature in this period. Their poems subvert the inclusive and ambitious maze of the high modernist poets. It's a great pity that Sylvia Plath as an outstanding follower of the Poetry of Confession does not appear in this volume. When this volume published in 1960, Plath just began to establish her fame, and Philip Larkin's poetry did not develop fully.

  After reading this volume, the question raised in my mind is how to solve the predicament of the contemporary poets, especially that of the Chinese ones. The gap between the poets and the readers is increasingly broadened. In the preface, Rosenthal shows us a miserable scene of the American poetry: \"most poets, though, are known to a few people only-an established poet who has encouraged them, an editor or two, a teacher, a few other writers in similar circumstances.\" But, the condition of poetry is more miserable in our country.

  Once I saw an awarded poem printed upon side window of a bus together with the patron's advertisement. There's an obvious printing error in the poem, which almost damaged it. The ad of milk is prominent, while the slight error of the marginal poem may be ignored. After all, the appearance of poems in the public sight is still an improvement.

  Protecting and developing poetry is an important part of the mission to protect and develop the culture. As R. P. Warren once said, that mission is as endless as we hope our civilization to be. (Warren, R.P. Introduction to Fifty Years of American Poetry. P xiii)