Literary and Cultural Alternatives to Modernism

Unsettling Presences

Kostas Boyiopoulos, Anthony Patterson, Mark Sandy, Kostas Boyiopoulos, Anthony Patterson, Mark Sandy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032093345
• eBook ISBN: 9780429537431
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Our collection of essays re-evaluates the much critically contested term of Modernism that, eventually, came to be used of the dominant, or paradigmatic, strain of literary discourse in early-twentieth-century culture. Modernism as a category is one which is constantly challenged, hybridised, and fractured by voices operating from inside and outside the boundaries it designates. These concerns are reflected by those figures addressed by our contributors' chapters, which include Rupert Brooke, G. K. Chesterton, E.M. Forster, Thomas Hardy, M. R. James, C.L.R James, Vernon Lee, D.H. Lawrence, Richard La Galliene, Pamela Colman Smith, Arthur Symons, and H.G. Wells. Alert to these disturbing voices or unsettling presences that vex accounts of an emergent Modernism in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century literary cultures predominately between 1890-1939, our volume questions traditional critical mappings, taxonomies, and periodisations of this vital literary cultural moment. Our volume is equally sensitive to how the avant garde felt for those living and writing within the period with a view to offering a renewed sense of the literary and cultural alternatives to Modernism.

Part I

Unsettled Voices

Imaginative and Cultural Encounters

1Rhetoric and Feeling in Rupert Brooke

Andrew Hodgson

Trying to account for the faculty by which modern poets had ‘avoided rhetoric’, T. S. Eliot arrived at his celebrated remark about ‘the exercise of intelligence, of which an important function is the discernment of exactly what, and how much, we feel in any given situation’. The insight rounds off a review of Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson’s 1917 anthology The New Poetry, a volume Eliot welcomes tepidly for being representative, as much as for being any good. The book, as Eliot observes, gathers a rabble of ‘incongruous allies’ in a generational effort to ‘wring the neck of rhetoric’—a phrase of Verlaine’s that ricocheted from writer to writer in the earlier years of the century, and indicated, in the terms of the anthology’s editors, an effort to puncture Victorian sonorities on the thorns of ‘concrete and immediate realisation of life’ and ‘absolute simplicity and sincerity’.¹ Enlisted in its ranks are figures of lasting and varied achievement, including Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound, alongside many long and justly forgotten: Skipwith Connell, Grace Hazard Conkling and Adelaide Crapsey are among those whose names contain more poetry than their works, and that is only the Cs. Eliot runs through the contents with an eyebrow raised, discriminating favourably (Robert Frost’s New England ‘is not a New England of ghosts; Mr Frost has done something of his own’) and more equivocally (as when he describes Maxwell Bodenheim as having ‘not all the qualities of a poet, but some of them in an exceptionally high degree’), before a final, tart survey of the English contribution: ‘Of the English poets, Mr [Ford Madox] Hueffer is well illustrated by the only good poem I have met with on the subject of the war; Harold Monro is at his best in the “Strange Companion”; Lawrence, a poet of quite peculiar genius and peculiar faults, comes off badly; and Rupert Brooke is not absent’.²

The Rupert Brooke present in the anthology is the poet of the patriotic 1914 sonnets, a group whose defining poem, ‘The Soldier’, depends upon the opposite of ‘intelligence’ as Eliot defined it. The famous sonnet twice invites its reader to ‘think’, but, not in the service of discerning ‘exactly what, and how much, we feel in any given situation’:

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England.

[…]

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;³

It does not matter whether what this poem asks the reader to think is true, only that the reader convinces himself that it is. Brooke offers a patriotic ideal seductive precisely because it repels and eludes thought (‘think only this’), and because it does not demand ‘exactness’ at all (‘gives somewhere back’ [emphases added]). The fact that the poem’s patriotic blandishments should segue seamlessly into Churchill’s Times eulogy for Brooke, which praised a man ‘willing to die for the dear England whose beauty and majesty he knew’ and who ‘advanced towards the brink in perfect serenity, with absolute conviction of the rightness of his country’s cause’,⁴ only affirms its proficiency in just the sort of rhetoric whose ‘neck’ Eliot and his contemporaries were seeking to ‘wring’.

But the urge to deride Brooke’s sentimentality should be restrained. ‘The Soldier’ indulges sentimental rhetoric, but there are times when sentimental rhetoric can be sustaining, and at the time of its inclusion in Monroe and Henderson’s anthology in 1917, Brooke’s sonnet offered thousands of readers consolation. Moreover, the poem shows Brooke’s ear for popular feeling; and while ‘The Soldier’ submits to that feeling with dangerous ease, the way the poem licences sentiment points to a tendency which in Brooke’s best poetry becomes part of a more complex mix. At times, Brooke succumbs to sentimentality, but he is also responsive to the human tendency to succumb. The closing lines of ‘The Night Journey’ envision human life as a flow of delirious individuals, each in an accelerating quest ‘to meet the light or find his love’ (l. 10):

The white lights roar; the sounds of the world die;

And lips and laughter are forgotten things.

Speed sharpens; grows. Into the night, and on,

The strength and splendour of our purpose swings.

The lamps fade; and the stars. We are alone.

(ll. 24–8)

The final sentence affirms the fruitlessness of the impulse. But Brooke speaks as one of ‘end-drunken huddled dreamers’ (l. 23) he describes, and the way his rhythms and syntax become whipped up in their excitement generates a vigour which transcends rhetoric through its very liberation from ‘intelligence’, and which causes the final realisation to arrive with an almost terrifying frisson. The lines expose a sentimental delusion but they also show the thrill of partaking in it. In an essay characteristic of the generally low estimation of Brooke’s achievement that followed Eliot into the remainder of the twentieth century, Samuel Hynes records how ‘In a rare moment of self-criticism Brooke composed a table of contents for an imaginary anthology, to which his own contribution was to be “Oh, Dear! oh, Dear! A Sonnet”’, remarking that it is ‘very perceptive, for nearly half of his poems are conventional sonnets, and most of them […] say little more than “Oh dear!”’.⁵ The exercise would more profitably be regarded not as a ‘rare moment of self-criticism’ but as an instance of characteristic self-awareness. Brooke is often knowing about his abandon. His poems court ‘rhetoric’, in the OED’s sense of ‘artificial, insincere, or ostentatious expression’ in subtle as well as unsubtle ways: a line like ‘the strength and splendour of our purpose’ is the more stirring for the way it strains against Brooke’s consciousness of its grandiloquence. A supple intelligence, human susceptibility and surrender to feeling lies behind the wit, sympathy and daring of his best writing.

The fact that Brooke should write poetry so antithetical to Eliot is in one respect odd, since Brooke, like Eliot, was an enthusiastic champion of the Metaphysicals, Donne in particular; and the qualities he admired bear striking similarity to the passionate ‘intelligence’ Eliot held up for approval. The terms of Brooke’s enthusiasm in his reviews of Grierson’s edition of The Poems of John Donne (1912) might well have been Eliot’s own: ‘He belonged to an age when men were not afraid to mate their intellects with their emotions’; ‘He was the one English love-poet who was not afraid to acknowledge that he was composed of body, soul, and mind’; and again: ‘when passion shook him, and his being ached for utterance, to relieve the stress, the expression came through the intellect’.⁶ This in 1913, eight years before Eliot’s ‘The Metaphysical Poets’. All of which may be to say no more than that Eliot condensed ideas about English poetry that already existed in the intellectual atmosphere early in the century. And it is true that Brooke’s poems never really aim at a Donne-like fusion of thought and passion. The poem in which Donne’s influence on Brooke is most apparent, ‘Dining-Room Tea’, makes clear the difference in their manners. The very un-Donne-like title attests to Brooke’s filtering of metaphysical speculation through a distinctively Edwardian setting and sensibility (the poem dates from 1909). ‘One imagines a young man who has been reading Donne’s “The Ecstasy” in a room upstairs […] being summoned by a decorous bell to join the family for a meal. He goes down to the dining-room with one of the great love poems of the world still murmuring in the back of his head, enters the Edwardian social scene […] and walks straight into an imaginative experience which makes a deep impression on him’, comments Christopher Hassall.⁷ This is helpful as an account both of the action of the poem and its creation, as Brooke translates Donne’s impassioned intricacy and intimacy to a more sociable idiom. Brooke’s speaker encounters a girl across the table, and the poem catches her impression of him in couplets which are at once graceful and agile:

And lifted clear and still and strange

From the dark woven flow of change

Under a vast and starless sky

I saw the immortal moment lie.

One instant I, an instant, knew

As God knows all. And it and you

I, above Time, oh, blind! could see

In witless immortality.

I saw the marble cup; the tea,

Hung on the air, an amber stream…

(ll. 17–26)

Comparison between the two poems might seem to prove Eliot’s point about ‘intelligence’. Donne’s poem thinks through an experience that ‘Interinanimates two souls’ (‘The Ecstasy’ (l. 42))⁸ with an intensity which drives him to forge a new language for feeling; Brooke’s speaker is in thrall to his passions, his voice modulating between genuine wonder and a stock language of ‘vast and starless’ skies. Rather than scrutinising ‘exactly what, and how much, he feels’, Brooke celebrates a moment of ‘witlessness’—a movement beyond thought of more Keatsian than Metaphysical cast.

But ‘Dining-Room Tea’ is not straightforwardly rhetorical, or without emotional complexity. The fact that Brooke should have thought admiringly of Donne in the terms that he did hardly suggests a poet blind to the possibilities of bringing the intellect to bear on the emotions; and some of his most suggestive commentators have wondered with more even-handedness than Eliot about his poetry’s combination of the head and the heart. Edward Thomas, for instance, wrote to Robert Frost that Brooke ‘was a rhetorician’ because he ‘could only think about his feeling’, rather than think through it—or indeed actually feel it⁹; yet Thomas also described Brooke’s poetry in a review as ‘full of the thought, the aspiration, the indignation of youth; full of the praise of youth’,¹⁰ which implies that if anything Brooke felt his feelings all too readily. One route to reconciling the contradiction is to say that Brooke’s poems are often interested in the spectacle of feeling, an argument that Peter Howarth has pursued in relation to Brooke’s engagement with Roger Fry’s idea in his ‘Essay in Aesthetics’ (1909) that ‘In the imaginative life […] we can both feel the emotion and watch it’.¹¹ Howarth takes up Fry’s argument as a way of thinking about Brooke’s poems’ ‘tacit internalisation’ of audience in relation to nascent ideas of celebrity;¹² but Brooke’s interest in Fry’s conception of art as an agent of detachment as well as expression gestures towards the peculiar self-consciousness of his poetic voice, too. Brooke glimpses the ironic possibilities of self-observation in a whimsical contemplation of his own cannibalisation sent to Violet Asquith in 1913: ‘Of the two eyes that were your ruin, / One now observes the other stewing’.¹³ ‘Dining Room-Tea’ is the fruit of a more sustained application of Fry’s notion: the poem itself is about the elevation of experience to the status of art, a process which enables its speaker simultaneously to ‘feel’ and ‘watch’ his emotions and to speak out of ‘witless’ rapture while avoiding self-indulgence—preserving what Bernard Bergonzi called Brooke’s ‘saving irony and detachment of mind’.¹⁴ Brooke’s voice marries exuberance with elusive self-irony. The lines above surrender to feeling with an authenticating dexterity which makes it difficult to know how to respond. The rhythms of ‘I, above Time, oh, blind! could see’ discompose the metre almost e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Alternatives to Modernism: Dissonant Voices and Multiple Modernities, 1890–1939
• Part I Unsettled Voices: Imaginative and Cultural Encounters
• Part II Dissenting Voices: Aestheticism, Gender and the Art of Identity
• Part III Double Voices: Central and Peripheral Transactions
• Part IV Popular Voices: Questions of Realism, Politics and Modernity
• Index