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<b><font size="4">Modernist
Poetry</font></b></p>
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<BR>
</P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">A Modernist poet sings –</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;"><BR>
</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">O bright Apollo</span></P>
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<I><span style="font-size:12pt;">“Tin’ andra, tin' heroa, tina theon,&quot;</span></I></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">What god, man or hero</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Shall I place a tin wreath upon!</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;"><BR>
</span></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><span style="font-size:12pt;">and
a modernist critic acclaims it as a marvellous, aye, a stupendous
piece of poetic art; it figures, according to him, the very body of
the modern consciousness and resthesis. The modern consciousness, it
is said, is marked with two characteristics: first, it is polyphonic,
that is to say, it is not a simple and unilateral thing, but a
composite consisting of many planes and strands, both horizontal and
vertical. A modern con&shy;sciousness is a section of
world-consciousness extending in space as well as in time; there is,
on one hand, the bringing together and intermingling of diverse and
even disparate contemporary cultures, produced by free and easy and
rapid communication between different parts of the world; on the
other hand, there is the connection and communion with all the past
civilisations brought about by modern scientific researches. A modern
man, who is representative of the age, when he looks close into
himself, would find in him a texture of consciousness, the warp of
which is spread out from the culture of the Greenlander in the North
Pole to that of the Polynesian near the South Pole as well as from
the culture of the Anglo-Saxon in the far West to that of the Korean
and Nipponese in the far East; and the woof consists of traditions
and legends threading past the Egyptian, the Sumerian and Atlantean
glyphs and runes, and forward to present-day</span></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
191</span></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><span style="font-size:12pt;">ideologies
– totalitarianism and proletarianism or others like and unlike.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">A modern artist when he creates, as he cannot but create
himself, will have to embrace and express something of this peculiar
cosmopolitanism or universalism of today. When Ezra bursts into a
Greek hypostrophe or Eliot chants out a Vedic mantra in the very
middle of King's English, we have before us the natural and
inevitable expression of a fact in our consciousness. Even so, if we
are allowed the liberty of comparing the flippant with the serious,
even so, a fact of Anglo-vernacular consciousness was given graphic
expression in the well-known lines of the famous Bengali poet and
dramatist, D. L. Roy, ending in</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;"><BR>
</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Amara (we) ...</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">A queer amalgam of Sasadhar,*</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Huxley and goose.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Indeed it has been pointed out that the second great
characteristic of modern art is the curious and wondrous amalgam in
it of the highly serious and the keenly comic. It is not, however,
the Shakespearean manner; for in that old-world poet, the two are
merely juxtaposed, but they remain separate; very often they form an
ill-assorted couple. At best, it is a mechanical mixture – the
&aelig;sthetic taste of each remains distinct, although they are
dosed together. In a modern poet, in Pound, or to a greater degree,
in Eliot, the tragic and the comic, the serious and the flippant, the
climax and the bathos are blended together, chemically fused, as part
and parcel of a single whole. Take, for example, the lines from Ezra
Pound quoted above, the obvious pun (Greek </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">tin' </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">or </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">tina,
</span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">meaning &quot;some one&quot; and English &quot;tin&quot;), the
cheap claptrap, it may be explained, is intentional: the trick is
meant to bring out a sense of lightness and even levity in the very
heart of seriousness and solemnity. The days of Arnold's high
seriousness, of grand style pure and severe, are gone. Today the high
lights are no longer set on a high pedestal away and aloof, they are
brought down and immixed with the low lights and often the two are
indistin&shy;guishable from each other. The grand style rides always
on the 
</span></P>
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</span><FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">------------------------</span></FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=1 STYLE="font-size: 8pt">*Old style orthodox Pandit.</FONT><BR>
			</P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
192</span></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><span style="font-size:12pt;">crest
of the waves, the ballad style glides in the trough; but the modern
style has one foot on either and attempts to make that gait the
natural and normal manner of the consciousness and poetic movement.
Here, for example, is something in that manner as Eliot may be
supposed to illustrate:<BR>
</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Her stove, and lays out food in tins.</span><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">&sup1;</span></FONT><span style="font-size:12pt;"><BR>
</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Well, the question is, has it succeeded? For here, as in
every&shy;thing else, nothing succeeds like success. Any theory may
be as good as any other, but its test is only in the </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">fait
accompli. </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">Neither Pound nor Eliot has that touch of finality and
certainty, the definitiveness and authenticity beyond doubt, the
Q.E.D. that a major and supreme creator imposes.<BR>
</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Bottrall, a modernist poet himself, says in effect the
same thing. His poetic credo runs in this wise:<BR>
</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Nightingales, Anangke, a sunset or the meanest flower</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Were formerly the potentiates of poetry,</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">But now what have they to do with one another</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">With Dionysus or with me?</span></P>
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&nbsp;</P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Microscopic anatomy of ephemerides,</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Power-house stacks, girder-ribs, provide a crude base;</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">But man is what he eats, and they are not bred</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Flesh of our flesh, being unrelated</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Experientially, fused in no emotive furnace.&sup2;<BR>
</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">What Bottrall means is this in plain language: we reject
the old-world myths and metaphors, figures and legends, wornout
ornaments – moon and star and flower and colour and music – we
must have a new set of symbols commensurate with our present-day
mentality and environment – stone and steel and teas and talkies;
yes, we must go in for new and modern terms, we have certainly to
find out a menu appropriate to</span></P>
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<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=1 STYLE="font-size: 8pt">&sup1; <I>The Waste Land</I> &sup2;<I>The
Thyrsus Retipped</I></FONT></P>
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<BR>
</P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
193</span></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><span style="font-size:12pt;">our
own &aelig;sthetic taste, but, Bottrall warns, and very wisely, that
we must first be sure of digesting whatever we choose to eat. In
other words, a new poetic mythology is justified only when it is made
part and parcel, flesh and blood and bone and marrow, of the poetic
consciousness. Bottrall’s epigram &quot;A man is what he eats&quot;
can be accepted without demur; only it must also be pointed out that
things depend upon how one eats (eating well and digesting
thoroughly) as much as what one eats – bread or manna or air and
.fire and light.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">The modernist may chew well, but, I, am afraid, he feeds
upon the husk, the chaff, the offal. Not that these things too cannot
be incorporated in the poetic scheme; the spirit of poetry is
catholic enough and does not disdain them, but can transfigure them
into things of eternal beauty. Still how to characterise an
inspiration that is wholly or even largely pre-occupied with such
objects? Is it not sure evidence that the inspiration is a low and
slow flame and does not possess the transfiguring white heat?
Bottrall's own lines do not seem to have that quality, it is merely a
lesson – a rhetorical lesson, at best – in poetics.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">A poet – a true poet – does not compose to exemplify
a theory; he creates out of the fullness of an inner experience. It
may be very true that the modern poetic spirit is seeking a new path,
a new organisation, a &quot;new order&quot;, as it were, in the
poetic realm: the past forms and formulae do not encompass or satisfy
its present inner urge. But solution of the problem does not lie in a
sort of mechanical fabrication of novelties. A new creation is new,
that is to say, fresh and living, not because of skilful manipulation
of externals, but because of a new, a fresh and living inspiration.
The fountain has to be dug deep and the revivifying waters released.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">It is a simple truth that we state and it is precisely
this that we have missed in the present age. Chaucer created a new
poetic world, Shakespeare created another, Milton yet a third, the
Romantics – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byron –
each of them has a whole world to his credit. But this they achieved,
not because of any theory they held or did not hold, but because each
of them delved deep and struck open an unfathomed and unspoilt
Pierian spring. And this is how it should be. In this age, even in
this age of modernism, a few 
</span></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
194</span></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><span style="font-size:12pt;">poets
have actually shown how or what that can be, – a Tagore, a Yeats or
A.E., by the bulk of their work, others of lesser </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">envergure, </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">in
brief scattered strophes and stanzas - such lines, for example, from
Eliot 
</span></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; margin-left:2.2cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">Who are those hooded hordes swarming</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Ringed by the flat horizon –<BR>
</span></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">or such other out of even Cecil Day .Lewis:</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;"><BR>
My lover of flesh is wild,</span></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; margin-left:2.2cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">And willing to kiss again;</span></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; margin-left:2.2cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">She is the potency of earth</span></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; margin-left:2.2cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">When woods exhale the rain.</span></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; margin-left:2.2cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">
My lover of air, like Artemis</span></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; margin-left:2.2cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">Spectrally embraced,</span></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; margin-left:2.2cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">Shuns the daylight that twists her smile</span></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; margin-left:2.2cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">To mineral distaste.<BR>
</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">In general, however, and as we come down to more and
more recent times we find we have missed the track. As in the
material field today, we seek to create and achieve by science and
organisation, by a Teutonic regimentation, as in the moral life we
try to save our souls by attending to rules and regula&shy;tions,
codes and codicils of conduct, even so a like habit and practice we
have brought over into our &aelig;sthetic world. But we must remember
that Napoleon became the invincible military genius he was, not
because he followed the art of war in accordance with laws and canons
set down by military experts; neither did Buddha become the
Enlightened because of his scrupulous adherence to the edicts which
Asoka engraved centuries later on rocks and pillars, nor was Jesus
the Christ because of his being an exemplar of the Sermon on the
Mount.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">The truth of the matter is that the spirit bloweth where
it listeth. It is the soul's realisation and dynamic perception that
expresses itself inevitably in a living and authentic manner in all
that the soul creates. Let the modernist possess a soul, let it find
out its own inmost being and he will have all the newness</span></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
195</span></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><span style="font-size:12pt;">and
novelty that he needs and seeks. If the soul-consciousness is
burdened with a special and unique vision, it will find its play in
the most categorically imperative manner.</span></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">What the modernist usually expresses is his brain or a
part of it, his small vital desires and velleities, his sensational
re&shy;actions or some sections of these. He can do that certainly,
but he can do that well only when he has reached and touched the soul
that is behind them: for once this is found, those become vehicles
and instruments, echoes and sparks, symbols and signatures of that
one thing needful.</span></P>
<P ALIGN=CENTER STYLE="border-bottom:1px solid black; text-indent:0.34cm; padding-top:0cm; padding-right:0cm; padding-bottom:0.07cm; padding-left:0cm; border-top-style:none; border-right-style:none; border-left-style:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
196</span></FONT></P>
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