Hulme, A Lecture On Modern Poetry
Hulme, A Lecture On Modern Poetry
Hulme, A Lecture On Modern Poetry
art of abstraction. If literature (realistic) did really resemble life, it A Lecture on Modern Poetry 1
I wish you to notice that this was not the kind of unfortunate acci- they believed in absolute truth. Hence they put many things into
dent which has happened by chance to a number of poets. This check verse which we now do not desire to, such as history and philosophy.
to the Parnassian school marked the death of a particular form of As the French philosopher Guyau put it, the great poems of
French poetry which coincided with the birth and marvellous fertility ancient times resembled pyramids built for eternity where people
of a new form. With the definite arrival of this new form of verse in loved to inscribe their history in symbolic characters. They believed
1880 came the appearance of a band of poets per haps unequalled at any they could realise an adjustment of idea and words that nothing could
one time in the history of French poetry. destroy.
The new technique was first definitely stated by Kahn.' lt consisted Now the whole trend of the modern spirit is away from that;
in a denial of a regular number of syllables as the basis of versification. philosophers no longer believe in absolute truth. We no longer believe
The length of the line is long and short, oscillating with the images in perfection, either in verse or in thought, we frankly acknowledge the
used by the poet; it follows the contours of his thoughts and is free relative. We shall no longer strive to attain the absolutely perfect form
rather than regular; to use a rough analogy, it is clothes made to order, in poetry. Instead of these minute perfections of phrase and words, the
rather than ready-made clothes. This is a very bald statement of it and tendency will be rather towards the production of a general effect; this
I am not concerned here so much with French poetry as with English. of course takes away the predominance of metre and a regular number
The kind of verse I advocate is not the same as vers-libre, I merely use of syllables as the element of perfection in words. We are no longer
the French as an example of the extraordinary effect that an emanci- concerned that stanzas shall be shaped and polished like gems, but
pation of verse can have on poetic activity. rather that some vague mood shall be communicated. In all the arts, we
The ancients were perfectly aware of the fluidity of the world and seek for the maximum of individual and personal expression, rather
of its impermanence; there was the Greek theory that the whole world than for the attainment of any absolute beauty.
was a flux. But while they recognised it they feared it and endeavoured The criticism is sure to be made, what is this new spirit, which finds
to evade it, to construct things of permanence which would stand fast itself unable to express itself in the old metre? Are the things that a
in this universal flux which frightened them. They had the disease, the poet wishes to say now in any way different to the things that former
passion, for immortality. They wished to construct things which poets say? I believe that they are. The old poetry dealt essentially with
should be proud boasts that they, men, were immortal. We see it in a big things, the expression of epic subjects leads naturally to the
thousand different forms. Materially in the pyramids, spiritually in the anatomical matter and regular verse. Action can best be expressed in
dogmas of religion and in the hypostatised ideas of Plato. Living in a regular verse, e.g., the Ballad.
dynamic world they wished to create a static fixity where their souls But the modern is the exact opposite of this, it no longer deals with
might rest. heroic action, it has become definitely and finally introspective and
This I conceive to be the explanation of many of the old ideas on deals with expression and communication of momentary phrases in
poetry. They wish to embody in a few lines a perfection of thought. Of the poet's mind. It was well put by Mr G.K. Chesterton in this way -
the thousand and one ways in which a thought might roughly be that where the old dealt with the Siege of Troy, the new attempts to
conveyed to a hearer there was one way which was the perfect way, express the emotions of a boy fishing. The opinion you often hear
which was destined to embody that thought to all eternity, hence the expressed, that perhaps a new poet will arrive who will synthesise the
fixity of the form of poem and the elaborate rules of regular metre. It whole modern movement into a great epic, shows an entire miscon-
was to be an immortal thing and the infinite pains taken to fit a ception of the tendency of modern verse. There is an analogous change
thought into a fixed and artificial form are necessary and under- in painting, where the old endeavoured to tell a story, the modern
standable. Even the Greek name JCOL'Y]a4 seems to indicate the attempts to fix an impression. We still perceive the mystery of things,
thing created once and for all, they believed in absolute duty as but we perceive it in entirely a different way- no longer directly in the
64 T .E. HULME A LECTURE ON MODERN POETRY 65
form of action, but as an impression, for example Whistler's pictures.' express oracles and maxims in an impressive manner, and rhyme and
We can't escape from the spirit of our times. What has found expres- metre were used as aids to the memory. But why, for this new poetry,
sion in painting as Impressionism will soon find expression in poetry should we keep a mechanism which is only suited to the old?
in free verse. The vision of a London street at midnight with its long The effect of rhythm, like that of music, is to produce a kind of
rows of light, has produced several attempts at reproduction in verse, hypnotic state, during which suggestions of grief or ecstasy are easily
and yet the war produced nothing worth mentioning, for Mr Watson and powerfully effective, just as when we are drunk all jokes seem
is a political orator rather than a poet. Speaking of personal matters, funny. This is for the art of chanting, but the procedure of the new
the first time I ever felt the necessity or inevitableness of verse, was in visual art is just the contrary. It depends for its effect not on a kind of
the desire to reproduce the peculiar quality of feeling which is induced half sleep produced, but on arresting the attention, so much so that the
by the flat spaces and wide horizons of the virgin prairie of western succession of visual images should exhaust one.
Canada. Regular metre to this impressionist poetry is cramping, jangling,
You see that this is essentially different to the lyrical impulse which meaningless, and out of place. Into the delicate pattern of images and
has attained completion, and I think once and forever, in Tennyson, colour it introduces the heavy, crude pattern of rhetorical verse. It
Shelley and Keats. To put this modern conception of the poetic spirit, destroys the effect just as a barrel organ does, when it intrudes into the
this tentative and half-shy manner of looking at things, into regular subtle interwoven harmonies of the modern symphony. It is a delicate
metre is like putting a child into armour. and difficult art, that of evoking an image, of fitting the rhythm to the
Say the poet is moved by a certain landscape, he selects from that idea, and one is tempted to fall back to the comforting and easy arms of
certain images which put into juxtaposition in separate lines, serve to the old, regular metre, which takes away all the trouble for us.
suggest and to evoke the state he feels. To this piling-up and juxtapo- The criticism is sure to be made that when you have abolished the
sition of distinct images in different lines, one can find a fanciful regular syllabled line as the unit of poetry, you have turned it into
analogy in music. A great revolution in music when for the melody prose. Of course this is perfectly true of a great quantity of modern
that is one-dimensional music, was substituted harmony which moves verse. In fact one of the great blessings of the abolition of regular metre
in two. Two visual images form what one may call a visual chord. They would be that it would at once expose all this sham poetry.
unite to suggest an image which is different to both. Poetry as an abstract thing is a very different matter, and has its
Starting then from this standpoint of extreme modernism, what are own life, quite apart from metre as a convention.
the principal features of verse at the present time? It is this: that it is To test the question of whether it is possible to have poetry written
read and not chanted. We may set aside all theories that we read verse without a regular metre, I propose to pick out one great difference
internally as mere verbal quibbles. We have thus two distinct arts. The between the two. I don't profess to give an infallible test that would
one intended to be chanted, and the other intended to be read in the enable anyone to at once say:'This is, or is not, true poetry', but it will
study. I wish this to be remembered in the criticisms that are made on be sufficient for the purposes of this paper. It is this: that there are,
me. I am not speaking of the whole of poetry, but of this distinct new roughly speaking, two methods of communication, a direct, and a
art which is gradually separating itself from the older one and conventional language. The direct language is poetry, it is direct
becoming independent. because it deals in images. The indirect language is prose, because it
I quite admit that poetry intended to be recited must be written in uses images that have died and become figures of speech.
regular metre, but I contend that this method of recording impressions The difference between the two is, roughly, this: that while one
by visual images in distinct lines does not require the old metric arrests your mind all the time with a picture, the other allows the mind
system. to run along with the least possible effort to a conclusion.
The older art was originally a religious incantation; it was made to Prose is due to a faculty of the mind, something resembling reflex
66 T.E. HULME A LECTURE ON MODERN POETRY 67
action in the body. Ifl had to go through a complicated mental process character is entirely changed. It is not addled as a pessimist might say,
each time I laced my boots, it would waste mental energy; instead of but has become alive, it has changed from the ancient art of chanting
that, the mechanism of the body is so arranged that one can do it to the modern impressionist, but the mechanism of verse has remained
almost without thinking. It is an economy of effort. The same process the same. It can't go on doing so. I will conclude, ladies and
takes place with the images used in prose. For example, when I say gentlemen, by saying, the shell must be broken.
that the hill was clad with trees, it merely conveys the fact to me that
it was covered. But the first time that expression was used was by
a poet, and to him it was an image recalling to him the distinct visual
analogy of a man clad in clothes; but the image has died. One might
say that images are born in poetry. They are used in prose, and
finally die a long lingering death in journalists' English. Now this
process is very rapid, so that the poet must continually be creating
new images, and his sincerity may be measured by the number of
his images.
Sometimes, in reading a poem, one is conscious of gaps where the
inspiration failed him, and he only used metre of rhetoric. What
happened was this: the image failed him, and he fell back on a dead
image, that is prose, but kept an effect by using metre. That is my
objection to metre, that it enables people to write verse with no poetic
inspiration, and whose mind is not stored with new images.
As an example of this, I will take the poem which now has the
largest circulation. Though consisting of only four verses it is six feet
long. It is posted outside the Pavilion Music-hall. We instinctively
shudder at these clichs or tags of speech. The inner explanation is
this: it is not that they are old, but that being old they have become
dead, and so evoked no image. The man who wrote them not being a
poet, did not see anything definitely himself, but imitated other poets'
images.
This new verse resembles sculpture rather than music; it appeals to
the eye rather than to the ear. It has to mould images, a kind of spiri-
tual clay, into definite shapes. This material, the V.YJ6 of Aristotle, is
image and not sound. It builds up a plastic image which it hands over
to the reader, whereas the old art endeavoured to influence him phys-
ically by the hypnotic effect of rhythm.
One might sum it all up in this way: a shell is a very suitable
covering for the egg at a certain period of its career, but very unsuit-
able at a later age. This seems to me to represent fairly well the state of
verse at the present time. While the shell remains the same, the inside