Philip Hobsbaum

SOURCE: "The Growth of English Modernism," in Tradition and Experiment in English Poetry, Rowman and Littlefield, 1979, pp. 289-307.

[In the following excerpt, Hobsbaum examines Modernism in English poetry.]

A conventional account of the rise of modern poetry would, I suppose, run something like this. The Georgians of Sir Edward Marsh's anthologies represented the last lap of Victorianism; sheltered subjects and literary diction. English poetry was shocked out of such torpor by the Imagists; insistence on experiment, free verse. The resistance to 'modernism', so called, was overcome by the mature work of T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land and of Ezra Pound in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. But their work has never been satisfactorily implemented in English poetry. Hence the thin poetic haul of the last thirty years.

There is a lot in this that one can agree with. Yet it seems to me far from the whole truth. And, indeed, a certain amount of dissatisfaction with this account has been shown already. In a broadcast of 1961, George MacBeth clearly showed that the Georgians were not so whimsywhamsy as popular accounts, and popular anthologies, have suggested. He maintained that the links between the Georgians, such as Lascelles Abercrombie, and the modernists, such as Eliot, were closer than had been suspected. In Mr MacBeth's opinion, the true division was in terms of subject matter—whether, for example, the poet was committed to violence as a mode of purgation or whether he was himself half in love with it.

But this, again, may be only part of the truth. It is one thing to show that both Eliot and Rupert Brooke were influenced by the Metaphysicals. It is quite another to demonstrate that they made comparable use of that influence. One may suggest, too, that Pound's attitude towards the First World War was a very different matter from that of his fellow non-combatant Lascelles Abercrombie.

There is a third account of the rise of modernism which has become rather fashionable. It can be located in the critical work of academics who are also practising poets. Examples that come to mind are John Holloway (The Colours of Clarity, 1964) and Graham Hough (Image and Experience, 1960). Their account of modernism would suggest that it was interesting while it lasted, and even salutary, but that its impetus is now spent. For them, this is an age of consolidation rather than experiment. From this view, it is only a step to regarding Eliot and Pound as eccentric side issues. Yet, in a sense, they are—at least, as far as English poetry is concerned.

It is not often enough remembered that Eliot was an American by birth and upbringing. Of course, he lived in England for many years, was a naturalised citizen and had associated himself with a number of characteristically English institutions. Even his intonation was impeccably English—and, in its way, this was a disadvantage. One could say, for example, that Eliot's urbane reading of his own verse rather muffled its colloquial, experimental and, I would add, very much American qualities.

For one thing, Eliot characteristically wrote in free verse. This form has never sat very happily on the English language, as the nineteenth-century attempts of Southey, Arnold and Henley show. Yet Eliot brings it off. How?

Again, Eliot's work exhibits the characteristic American qualities of free association or phanopoeia and autobiographical content. English verse, however, has been at its best as fiction: an arrangement of what is external to the poet to convey the tension or release within. Yet Eliot's work succeeds. Why?

Associated with the problem of Eliot is that of Ezra Pound. This poet has a name for being erudite, cosmopolitan. Yet even in his most polyglot cantos he is most himself in colloquial American speech. For instance, in Canto XCVI (ante 1959) Pound describes Justinian's law reforms in the tones of the Idaho of his boyhood.

It may well be that both Eliot and Pound have been read with too English an accent. To my ear, the rhythms of 'Sweeney Agonistes' (1924-7) are akin not only to those of demotic American speech but also to the attempt of the Beat poets to write a genuinely popular poetry. And doesn't such a lyric as 'My little island girl' very much anticipate the innovations of 'Poetry and Jazz'?

To go further than this: one could say that the experiments of Eliot and Pound have not fallen on stony ground in the United States. R. P. Blackmur (Language as Gesture, 1952) has demonstrated the influence of the Four Quartets (1936-42) on Wallace Stevens's 'Notes toward a Supreme Fiction' (1941-2). The grinding personal verse of Pound, in Mauberley (1920) as in the Pisan Cantos (1948), seems to me, raised to the nth power of concentration, to be right behind Lowell's Life Studies (1959). But, of course, American poets have always excelled in the public presentation of the minutely personal. One thinks of Whitman, who wrote in what has always been agreed to be a distinctively American language. I would never deny that Eliot and Pound, who derive so much from Whitman, are fine poets. But is it not time to insist that they are fine American poets? And that therefore the influence they may be expected to have on English poets is limited?

Certainly it is true to say that the influence of Eliot and Pound on English poetry has, so far, been damaging. The American language lends itself peculiarly to the assemblage of images in an emotional rather than a logical connection. Whitman's catalogues (and, indeed, those of F. Scott Fitzgerald) would convey next to nothing if compiled by an Englishman—or even an Irishman, as so many dead pages in Joyce's Ulysses only go to show. Yet free association in free verse was what was recommended to a rising generation of poets in the 1930s by that most astringent critic of modern poetry, F. R. Leavis.

New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) is a model of approach to the modern poets with which it deals—in many respects. But it was written at a chaotic period in English literature. That we are now able to challenge some of Leavis's formulations is, in no small part, due to the efficacy of his work as a critic. He must, however, be held responsible for the view that English poets could do nothing better than to learn from the experimentalism of the modernists; by which he particularly meant Eliot and Pound. And, although he has deprecated the talent and influence of W. H. Auden, Leavis must be seen as part of the same movement—a movement which sought to graft Eliot's essentially American experimentalism on to English poetry.

And so we have Auden writing long poems such as 'Easter, 1929' with a distinctively Waste Land mood and landscape; Louis MacNeice, closest of all the 1930s poets to Eliot technically, trying to produce a spiritual diary (1938) in the mode of Four Quartets; and the weakest of them, Day Lewis and Spender, sticking odd Eliot properties on to a characteristically Georgian nostalgia, traditionalism—even patriotism. The 1930s poets adapted Eliot's vatic utterance to their own leftish brand of doom; but they all grew out of it.

Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis—how did their reputations come about? More important, how did they, along with Louis MacNeice, come to be joined with W. H. Auden, a poet of really considerable talent? Most important of all, how did the work of these four come to be acclaimed as a renaissance in English poetry?

The renaissance, it is now plain, was stillborn. A revaluation of the 1930s would establish William Empson, Robert Graves, Norman Cameron and perhaps John Betjeman as the most interesting new poets then writing; that is, apart from Auden himself. And the whole does not amount to more than an orbit of rather minor satellites. What is most immediately noticeable is that they lack any sort of a sun.

Auden himself was incapable of supplying the necessary energy. For one thing, he himself was poorly chanced for survival. Some of his early poems are at once synthetic and impenetrable:

Between attention and attention
The first and last decision
Is mortal distraction
Of earth and air,
Further and nearer,
The vague wants
Of days and nights,
And personal error.…

('Easy Knowledge', 1930)

The tone is, in cant phrase, 'significant'—but significant of what? Do all these abstractions really refer to anything beyond themselves? And this riddling nicety—'Between attention and attention'—is it really making any sort of valid distinction? It is easy enough to see where it all derives from:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

—For Thine is the Kingdom.…

Eliot's 'Hollow Men' (1924-5), no less. And Eliot's hollow men were what the poets of the renaissance were to become.

For, if we look at the periodicals of the time, we shall find singularly few of the rave notices that literary historians have led us to expect. On the contrary, it seems as though the editor of The Criterion had a busy private line to Oxford and Cambridge—spying the coming man before he had come, as A. S. J. Tessimond, a neglected poet of the time, was to write.

Auden's play Paid on Both Sides, dedicated to Cecil Day Lewis, appeared in The Criterion in January, 1930; 'Four Poems' by Stephen Spender, dedicated to W. H. Auden, appeared in October, and were followed by three more a year later. Meanwhile reviews by the coming men began to appear: Auden on psychology, Spender on belles lettres. It was not a revolution in the palace so much as a tacit capitulation. The Editor of The Criterion, of course, was T. S. Eliot.

Not all the new young men were untalented. The reviews by Empson and James Smith are still worth looking up, and Paid on Both Sides has a sustained brilliance that Auden never was to achieve again. What one objects to is the way these reputations were made: there is about it all a distinct air of fait accompli. Whatever F. S. Flint or Peter Quennell said in The Criterion's poetry chronicles, Auden had come to stay. And with him came a good deal else.

Because, it's no good pretending, a great deal of bad verse was published, and not so much held up to acclamation as passed by default. There it was, the new writing, and that was all there was to say about it. Even the more traditionalist London Mercury had an article solemnly discussing the young poets in terms of a new range of emotion: 'the reader's receptive faculties, then, have to be sharpened'. But what one may question is the whole mode of reading involved.

There is no doubt that Eliot did a great deal to disrupt English poetry, as distinct from that of the Americans. He claims descent from the Jacobean playwrights and Laforgue, but the most evident ancestor is Walt Whitman. Whitman's abstractions and random collocations have a raw life of their own, a form even through their formlessness; and this has remained highly characteristic of American poetry ever since. The Waste Land (1922) is, indeed, a heap of broken images: this is its meaning, and, to some extent, its distinction. But that kind of writing has never worked well in England. And so Eliot's revolution seems nowadays not so much modernistic as alien.

This is borne out by a look at English poetry written before his influence became a sine qua non for young poets. Who wrote this, for example?:

Sixty odd years of poaching and drink
And rain-sodden waggons with scarcely a friend,
Chained to this life; rust fractures a link,
So the end.…

(c. 1923)

Hardy? Edward Thomas? In fact, it is the earliest Auden—Auden before the influence of Eliot. And I do not think that it is accidental that this gifted poet showed himself at the very first in the direct line of Hardy and the war poets; that is to say, in the mainstream of English poetry. But in the absence of any strong direction—Hardy was very old and the war poets had not survived—English poetry became Americanised, and the result was the brilliant obscurity of Auden's first (1930) volume.

Auden himself came out of it all rather well, which only goes to show how difficult it is to extinguish an original talent. Many of his 1930s poems have a warmth of moral indignation that irradiates the distorted language in which he felt constrained to write. There are moving passages in 'Easter, 1929', in The Orators (1932), even in The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935). He is seen at his best in an interim selection, Some Poems (1940). And it seems to me that Auden's reputation will have to rest mainly upon the poems which exist as finished wholes. Many of these are to be found in his sequences, 'In Time of War' (1938) and 'The Quest' (1940). Not surprisingly, they are couched in the unEliotesque—and very unAmerican—form of the sonnet.

Other poets were not so lucky: at least in their achievement—for their success, of course, was assured. The earliest Spender reads like Eliot's 'Preludes' sucked in and spat out again:

Moving through the silent crowd
Who stand behind dull cigarettes…
The promise hangs, this swarm of stars and
flowers,
And then there comes the shutting of a door.…

(1933)

But Auden soon replaced Eliot in his work, and it gained a new—but suspiciously general—exaltation:

oh young men oh young comrades
it is too late now to stay in those houses
your fathers built where they built you to build to
breed
money on money it is too late.…

(1933)

This is shrill, and the sense is governed by the sound, as witness the functionless outbreak of alliteration in the third line quoted. Compare it with the Auden poem from which it obviously derives:

Seekers after happiness, all who follow
The convolutions of your simple wish,
It is later than you think.…

('Consider', 1930)

One would have thought that such a comparison would have stamped Spender as a second-rate derivative, but nothing of the sort. The resemblance assured him of a currency among those who wanted to know what, in poetry, was the latest thing. Even his anthology pieces do not very much transcend the sort of verse I have quoted. Image after image defies visualisation, and offers little to any other kind of reading. The end of 'I think continually' is characteristic in its evasive rhetoric:

Bora of the sun they travelled a short while
towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

(1933)

The reputation of Cecil Day Lewis seems to have grown less rapidly, though it is interesting to see that the London Mercury backed him most heavily of all the new young poets. Perhaps this was an involuntary tribute to his Georgian temperament: the modernism of his work never seems more than a superficial overlay. Transitional Poem (1929) came out with the usual Waste Land sort of notes, but, in spite of its pretensions, was quite evidently a collection of harmless lyrics:

It is becoming now to declare my allegiance,
To dig some reservoir for my springtime's pain,
Bewilderment and pride, before their insurgence
Is all sopped up in this dry regimen.…

The allegiance is most immediately, of course, to Auden; but the quatrains and rhymes take us back to a world before Eliot. Day Lewis mentions charabancs as well as hedgerows, but then so did Sir John Squire, and it is open to doubt whether either of them realised that there were more subtle ways of being modern. Later on, Day Lewis was to coarsen the fabric of his verse and produce this sort of claptrap:

Look west, Wystan, lone flyer, birdman, my bully
boy!
Plague of locusts, creeping barrage, has left earth
bare:
Suckling and centenarian are up in air,
No wing-room for Wystan, no joke for kestrel
joy.…

(The Magnetic Mountain, 1933)

But, towards the end, Day Lewis gave up what must always have been an unequal battle. Those who thought him one of the new modernists lived to see him read and remembered for poems such as his later 'Sheep Dog Trials in Hyde Park' and 'View from a Window' (1961): gentle, discursive, countrified in that urban way beloved of Squire and the London Mercury.

Louis MacNeice is something of a different proposition. Unlike his two contemporaries, he seems to have been able to go direct to Eliot. Just as early Auden sometimes reads like Edgell Rickword's parodies of Eliot, so early MacNeice often looks like those of Henry Reed:

But I, Banquo, had looked into the mirror,
Had seen my Karma, my existences
Been and to be, a phoenix diorama,
Fountain agape to drink itself for ever
Till the sun dries it.…

(Blind Fireworks, 1929)

However, to do MacNeice justice, he seldom in his later work takes himself as solemnly as this. His last volume, The Burning Perch (1963), is a craftsmanlike collection. One reason why even his work of the 1930s has worn better than that of his contemporaries is because he is, on the whole, unsentimental and often genuinely witty:

The country gentry cannot change, they will die in
their shoes
From angry circumstances and moral self-abuse,
Dying with a paltry fizzle they will prove their
lives to be
An ever-diluted drug, a spiritual tautology.…

('An Eclogue for Christmas', 1933)

But, one's tempted to remark, Auden did this sort of thing much better; and this brings us to the crux of the whole problem.

The renaissance of the 1930s rested largely on the shoulders of one man: W. H. Auden. And, as we have seen, he himself had ignored his earliest influences and embarked upon a misdirected course. His consequent idiosyncrasies were therefore erected into a style for modern poetry, and one has only to look at the Preface to Michael Roberts's Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936) to see how rooted the misconception became. Modern poetry was to be obscure, condensed, fantastic in diction, freed from logic. The result was that a lot of minor talents, such as Kenneth Allott and Charles Madge, wrote themselves out for want, among other things, of a viable tradition; and the revolution ended in Dylan Thomas and the New Apocalypse, when poetry in England ceased to mean anything even to an educated reader.

The conventional account of the last fifty years would suggest that the social realism of the 1930s was succeeded by the romanticism of Dylan Thomas, George Barker and the New Apocalypse. In fact, of course, the resemblance between these two 'schools' is obvious. Both indulged in longish autobiographical poems full of private allusion, usually in free verse, often of considerable obscurity, indulging in a scolding rhetoric unparallelled since the best days of Shelley. Pound could get away with this; in the Usura Canto (ante 1937), for example, or in 'Pull down thy vanity' (Canto LXXXI, ante 1948). And Eliot could admit his reader to his inner vision in 'Burnt Norton' (1935) and not for a moment seem posturing or rhetorical. But then Eliot and Pound are Americans; and their 'modernism' is only suited to an American language. In English poetry of the 1940s, obscurity grew so fast and rhythms broke down to such an extent that the whole attempt at modernism collapsed in the nerveless verse and chaotic imagery of the New Apocalypse. Hence, of course, what came to be known as the Movement.

This was largely academic in origin—an attempt by several poets who were also critics to consolidate English verse. In comparison with Dylan Thomas, or even with early Auden and Spender, the poems of the Movement were self-contained, formal, and sought to be unrhetorical. Like most schools of poetry, the Movement proved too constricting for its more talented members. Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie and Thorn Gunn wrote in the 1960s better than they ever did before, but not in a Movement style. That style, abstract and gnomic, produced little of real value. But the Movement was a necessary spring-cleaning whose real achievement may have been to arouse interest in a number of poets of the 1930s who had been unjustly neglected. The most impressive of these is probably William Empson. His verse represents a concern for form, and this is an integral quality in the best English poetry. Without it, it turns into something very like prose.

This concern for form is a characteristic of a development in our poetry which has not, I think, been separately recognised. Perhaps it is best called English modernism—as opposed to the American brand of Eliot, Pound, Stevens and Lowell.

The chief heroes of English modernism died sixty years ago, in the First World War. I am thinking particularly of Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg. They seem to me quite distinct from the Georgians, on the one hand, and the modernists, on the other. Their deaths were probably as great a set-back as those of the young Romantics, Shelley, Keats and Byron, even though, it is true, their achievement is less. And their deaths were a set-back for much the same reason. Their uncompleted work was not sufficient to prevent the tradition of which they were the latest development from falling into misunderstanding and neglect.

Only a superficial classification would relate Edward Thomas to the Georgians. His poems certainly belong to an English tradition. But it was one that had been much misunderstood, as was shown by the cool reception of Hardy's Wessex Poems in 1898. This tradition was as much one of prose as of verse: the tradition of Cobbett and Jefferies—on whom, as a critic, Thomas had written most eloquently. Indeed, it was Thomas's own prose that led his friend, Robert Frost, to suggest that he should try his hand at poetry. Thomas never actually followed Frost's advice to write up his nature studies into free verse. But there is no doubt that much of Thomas's strength is that he has no time for the merely 'poetic'. His poetry really is 'a valley of this restless mind'. He objectifies his inner emotions in terms of landscape, or even fiction. That is to say, Thomas will often act out his feelings in terms of story, scene and character, rather than state it in his own person. And this brings him close to the writings of the finest poetic realists—Wordsworth, for example, whose best work is in narrative form, and is akin to the great nineteenth-century novelists, themselves the heirs of Shakespeare. This inclination towards fiction rather than autobiography or lyric is characteristic of much good English poetry.

Palgrave's attempt to exclude all but lyric from the canon of English verse gave us a singularly denuded Golden Treasury (1861). Hardy, who had grown up in the age of Palgrave, was concerned to point out rather deprecatingly—in his introduction to Wessex Poems—the fictional element in his own verse. And perhaps it was this element of fiction in Thomas's work, as well, that disturbed the Georgians. It is notable that the lyric 'Adlestrop', rather a conventional production, was for years Thomas's prime anthology piece, as "The Darkling Thrush' was Hardy's. There is nothing so decisively great in Thomas's output as Hardy's cycle 'Veteris vestigia flammae' (1912-13). But no more than for Hardy does the countryside represent for Thomas an escape. Thomas has been much admired for his powers of observation and presentation of particulars. And they are remarkable. But more remarkable still is Thomas's placing of war as a senseless evil against the life-giving rhythms of the countryside. This can be seen in his poem entitled 'As the Team's Head-brass' (1916). Here, the certainty of the ploughman's coming and going is contrasted with the delays and uncertainties of the war. The lovers going into the wood, the ploughman harrowing the clods, are an assertion of life against maiming and death. And the war's encroachment on these rhythms is symbolised by the fallen tree that, if the ploughman's mate had returned from France, would have been moved long ago. The relationship with Hardy's war poems is clear enough. One thinks most immediately of 'In Time of "The Breaking of Nations'" (1915)—where there is also a pair of lovers and a ploughman.

The difference between Thomas and even the better Georgians is that his work is an advance on that of the poetry of a previous generation. His is a genuinely modern sensibility. His view of life has none of the heroics easily assumed by those who never saw action, or who joined the army in a spirit of public-school patriotism. But Thomas had little chance to produce trench poetry. His best work was written before leaving for France, while training as an officer. He had time to contrast the English countryside he was forsaking with the Front—known only by hearsay and implication—to which he was going. And he was killed soon after reaching it.

There were Georgians who saw more action than Thomas; most notably Siegfried Sassoon. And Sassoon's poems certainly include much first-hand reaction to experience. But I am not so sure that his technique is equal to his sensibility. In 'Break of Day' (1918) he presents an escape from battle into the memory of a happy day's hunting. Here we have the detailed realism for which Sassoon was to become famous. No doubt this is a strong poem if compared with the early, and now suppressed, war poems of Graves. Graves is prone to smother his action in whimsy and allusion. But, if we think of Edward Thomas, Sassoon's tone seems over-insistent; and perhaps the most telling comparison is with Wilfred Owen.

It cannot be too often stressed that Owen's technique is not just a matter of half-rhyme. Half-rhyme had been used before in English; though not, it is true, so systematically. Owen's genius can be localised in the actual function of the play of the vowels. They mute those over-confident metres which Owen, in common with other war poets, inherited from the previous, more peaceful, generation. He makes them as exploratory and tentative as his feelings about war. In comparison, Sassoon's verse seems too assured for its content. It is impossible to feel that "Strange Meeting', for example, will ever date.

Owen's verse, like Thomas's, is akin to fiction rather than lyric. He will adopt a persona, as in 'Strange Meeting' (1918), where he acts as interlocutor; or he will don the mask of narration or of dramatic monologue. Even when he seems to be speaking more directly, as in his poem 'Exposure' (1917), he will use the first person plural rather than singular. So that he seems to be speaking for all the soldiers of the war, not just himself. His details are never merely descriptive. In 'Exposure', they are selected to create an atmosphere and a human attitude—the cold, and the soldiers waiting. It is rather too simple to regard Owen as the poet who hated war. His verse has a distinctively modern ambivalence. In 'Exposure', as well as a grim endurance on the part of the troops, there is a desire for action—a desire which is mocked by the way in which the weather is presented in this poem through a metaphor of war: dawn massing in the east her melancholy army.

Owen recognises with startling modernity that death can be as certain out of battle as in it, and dispiritingly inglorious. His poems are the defeat of lyric; anything but a subjective cry of pain. We are not asked to take an interest in something just because it was happening to Wilfred Owen. A point is made, through the evocation of a war, about war itself. Owen's landscape has all the conviction of Sassoon's with a dramatic quality which Sassoon never achieved. Not one death is expressed in Owen's work, but many:

Tonight, His frost will fasten on this mud and us,
Shrivelling many hands, puckering foreheads
crisp.
The burying-party, picks and shovels in their
shaking
grasp,
Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are
ice,
But nothing happens.

('Exposure')

Like Owen, Isaac Rosenberg characteristically uses the plural first person. But he appears to use words, as D. W. Harding remarked (Scrutiny, 1935), without any of the usual couplings—as though the poetry were formed at a subconscious preverbal level. Although as authentic as Owen's stretcher-party, that of Rosenberg is alarmingly unexpected:

A man's brains splattered on
A stretcher-bearer's face;

His shook shoulders slipped their load,
But when they bent to look again
The drowning soul was sunk too deep
For human tenderness.…

('Dead Man's Dump', 1918)

One can see why Gordon Bottomley, Rosenberg's first editor, was so hesitant about publishing this poetry. And why, even when it was published, it took so long to make its way. Even the iambic metres have been abandoned in this plasm of verse.

Rosenberg's technical innovations cannot be so readily discussed in terms of a past norm as those of his fellows. One can hear in the lines of Owen's 'Strange Meeting' the rhythms of the Induction to 'The Fall of Hyperion' (1819); but muted down, made tentative by the half-rhyme. The poem gains much of its strength through adapting familiar material to an utterly new situation. Keats's goddesses occur, too, in Rosenberg's 'Daughters of War'. But that is as far as resemblance goes. The myth is created in strikingly individual terms—a kind of sprung verse, for example, developed quite independently of Hopkins. To find Rosenberg's antecedents, one has to look at the juvenilia, as one does with Hopkins's surprisingly Keats-like fragments (c. 1866). The mature poems resemble nothing but themselves—though there are signs that gifted poets of our own time, such as Ted Hughes and Peter Redgrove, have learned from them. It would be absurd, then, to call Rosenberg a traditionalist, except in the sense that he is in the tradition of Keats and Shakespeare. His sprung verse, use of myth, are wholly unlike anything produced by the 'traditional' Georgians. It is as though an overmastering experience had blasted out a new form:

The old bark burnt with iron wars
They blow to a live flame
To char the young green days
And reach the occult soul; they have no softer
lure—
No softer lure than the savage ways of death.…

('Daughters of War', 1918)

Nobody could call this traditional in manner or content. Yet it is certainly not modernist, if by modernist one thinks of a play of images, a montage in free verse. If Rosenberg's verse has affinities, it is not with Eliot or Pound but with the apocalyptic prose of Lawrence. Not, indeed, with Lawrence's verse, which seems to go more diffuse as it gets further from Hardy and nearer to Whitman. Rosenberg, unlike the modernists, does not go in for phanopoeia or free association. His poems exist through images, but never for them. And the poems are not autobiographical, though they may be a projection of his inner feelings, in terms of myth. Rosenberg projects outwards. As in 'Daughters of War', he creates a fiction in which feelings are acted out. Like Thomas and Owen, he conveys his emotion through poems about something other than himself.

These poets used forms and, at the same time, changed them. Thomas used Wordsworthian blank verse that had also learned from nineteenth-century novelists, and could absorb further narrative and symbolic properties. Owen muted the rhythms of the Romantics by the use of pararhyme, and applied the Romantic sensuousness to a new and grimmer end. Rosenberg manipulated events even more resourcefully than the others, and revitalised dramatic blank verse into a sprung rhythm that has not been fully exploited even now. They all marked an advance not only in technique but in sensibility. The world of 1911 must have seemed very remote in 1915. A glance at the newspapers of the time would establish the difference in terms of an increased sense of strain, a wedge driven between the generations, criticism of hitherto accepted values by the young. But it was only the exceptional writers who could get much of this into their verse. In the last analysis, the success of Thomas, Owen and Rosenberg as poets could be attributed to their recognition of the need to adapt the old forms to express new experience.

This should differentiate them on the one hand from the American modernists, who broke forms down, and, on the other, from the Georgians, who relied on them even when they proved inapplicable to modern experience. But Thomas, Owen and Rosenberg died young, and, after the war in which they died, a debate broke out about which was the right path for poetry. The alternatives offered were American modernism, as represented by Eliot, Pound and the Imagists, and traditionalism, as represented by Abercrombie and Squire. As Mr MacBeth has reminded us, this debate was quite irrelevant to the facts. This, indeed, was seen at the time by that most penetrating reviewer, John Middleton Murry. In reviewing two volumes, one from each of the opposed schools {Athenaeum, 1919), Murry said that there was no distinction between them, and the only distinction he himself would be prepared to recognise was one of quality. Such quality was found in the only good poem in either of the volumes: it was Owen's 'Strange Meeting'.

But this distinction was not made by Leavis in New Bearings or Michael Roberts in the influential anthology The Faber Book of Modern Verse. Leavis and Roberts got rather taken in, it seems to me, not by Eliot's poetry, but by his position vis à vis tradition. They thought that Eliot would be more of a healthy influence than he could possibly be, at least on Englishmen. Leavis and Roberts were examples of progressive opinion at the time. Other loci classici are the contemporary undergraduate magazines, such as Cambridge's Experiment (c. 1929), edited by Empson and Bronowski. And this, in its turn, led to the misapplication of the talent of many young poets, notably the so-called Auden group. Out of this came me misunderstanding of the stream of consciousness which eventu-ally led to the confused writings of the 1940s; when it became the fashion for writers, even some of undeniable talent, to switch off their intellect before they started composing.

Poets of Auden's generation could have saved themselves by learning less from Eliot and Pound and more from Thomas, Owen and, perhaps especially, Rosenberg. But history was against them. My main thesis, I suppose, is that English poetry in the twentieth century has had four atrocious strokes of luck. They are worth enumerating. First of all, that the wrong emphasis should have been placed on the work of one great Victorian who could have had a useful influence—I mean Hardy. Secondly, that the Georgians, for the most part, should have chosen to regard tradition as a resting-place rather than a launching-pad. Thirdly, that three of the poets who were developing an essentially English modernity should have been killed in the war—their publication, too, was delayed and incomplete. And, lastly, that Eliot and Pound should have chosen to start an essentially American revolution in verse technique over here rather than in the United States, and so filled the gap which the death of the war poets left with an alien product whose influence has been a bad one.

But, over the period since the First World War, some talented poets stuck out against this. John Betjeman ignored Eliot and did what no Georgian ever really managed: married a modern sensibility to a Victorian verse technique. Andrew Young carried on the Georgian mood, but with a first-hand reaction to experience and a meta-physical wit most of the Georgians lacked. Of these poets, Norman Cameron now seems to be one of the most valuable. But his hard economical verse excludes so much of life that he hardly seems to be a man of our own time. And what I have said of Cameron would do very well for Robert Graves too. There has been a tendency to erect Graves into a great modern poet. But he does not seem to me to have done much more than refine the Georgian techniques. Much of what Mr MacBeth finds to admire in the Georgians at their best will be found in the work of Graves. His place is with Sassoon and Blunden rather than with Owen and Rosenberg. What one misses in Graves is a real sense of the world we live in. His keen eye is directed inwards. His verse represents, for all its formal toughness, a retreat from a concern with man as a social animal into a species of pastoralism. Though more skilled than Cameron, he seems to me inferior in sensibility.

Auden could have saved himself by learning more from Owen and less from Eliot. But William Empson is a different case entirely. His imitators in the Movement laid stress on all the wrong aspects of his verse—the tedious refrains, the occasional stiffness of form. Empson's better poems are probably his early ones: for example, 'To an Old Lady', and 'Part of Mandevil's Travels' (c. 1928). His best later poems are those like 'Let it Go' and 'Success' (c. 1935) which were not imitable by the technical means at the disposal of most of the Movement writers. Empson is not a straightforward traditionalist. As Owen did, he uses forms in such a way as to make them new. With all this, his subject matter is restricted and his oeuvre, though intense, is narrow.

Neither those who passively imitated Eliot nor those who explicitly reacted against him have produced a very rich crop of poetry. But Empson, who did neither, is an example for the poet of today in more ways than the obvious one. The work of a gifted poet who owes little directly to him, Philip Larkin, shows many of the qualities one finds in Empson's work and in the sonnet sequences of Auden. Larkin is a formalist in so far as he uses rhymes and writes in regular metres. But his rhyme is not the clanging full rhyme which suited the self-confidence of a Swinburne rather more than the self-doubt of a Francis Thompson, let alone of an Elroy Flecker. Larkin uses mainly pararhyme in his poem 'Church Going' (c. 1951), creating, in the varying degrees of rhyme he utilises, the unease in church, not of a worshipper, but of an agnostic.

This is done even more subtly by a rather younger poet, Peter Porter. He uses degrees of pararhyme to secure different degrees of emphasis. Here is an example, from his poem "Metamorphosis' (1959):

This new Daks suit, greeny-brown,
Oyster-coloured buttons, single vent, tapered
Trousers, no waistcoat, hairy tweed—my own:
A suit to show responsibility, to show
Return to life—easily got for ten pounds down
Paid off in six months—the first stage in the
change.
I am only the image I can force upon the town.

The town will have me: I stalk in glass,
A thin reflection in the windows, best
In jewellers' velvet backgrounds—I don't pass,
I stop.…

Notice the pattern of pararhyme here. In the remainder of the stanza, 'glass' rhymes with 'mask' and 'last'—mocking the assurance of his attitude, I am myself at last'. In the same way, the vowel of the 'town' echoes throughout the first stanza before it comes clanging in on the keyline, 'I am only the image I can force upon the town'. The rhyme here is made all the more blatant by alternating with unrhymed lines. The rhythms, too, are flexible. The basic unit is a five-stress line, but there is no syllable count. The first line of the first stanza, 'This new Daks suit, greeny-brown', has only seven syllables for its five stresses, while the last line, 'I am only the image I can force upon the town', has fourteen—from diffidence to brash self-confidence, one might say.

There is a poem by another contemporary, Peter Redgrave, called 'Bedtime Story for my Son' (1955), which chases a rhyme through many kinds of assonance and half-rhyme, just as the couple in the poem chase the ghost of a child, and catches up with it only in the last two lines, as the couple do:

Love pines loudly to go out to where
It need not spend itself on fancy, and the empty air.

Of course, it is cruel to isolate metre and rhyme in this way, particularly when one is sure the poet himself did not. But it is a way of bringing home a point: that what is best in English poetry generally and in the present generation of English poets is this vigour within the discipline of shape—freedom through reshaping a form rather than breaking it down. Inevitably, there are poets such as Charles Tomlinson who are trying to carry on the technique of the American modernists, just as there are poets, like David Holbrook, who have pushed traditionalism further than ever the Georgians did. But they seem to me to be fighting against the genius of the time and the language. D. J. Enright, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Peter Porter and Peter Redgrove—to name only five of our best contemporary poets—did not get together in a huddle to find out which form they ought to write in. Their feeling and experience come out in the way I have described, a way that is neither modernism nor traditionalism—perhaps because it is the only way it can come out in English poetry at present. It is a way that relates back to Owen, master of the half-rhyme, and through him back to the Keats of the 'Fall of Hyperion' and back to Shakespeare. Another line could be traced through Redgrove and Hughes through Thomas and Rosenberg to the blank-verse fictions of the Romantics, Shakespeare and even back to the medieval poets. Either way, it is the central line of English poetry. And I cannot see much good work being done far away from it. Like any tradition, however, it is alive only as long as it can be re-created. But I am not being optimistic when I say that it seems to be in process of re-creation, after a long quiescence, at the present time.

Martin Esslin

SOURCE: "Modernity and Drama," in Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives, edited by Monique Chefdor, Ricardo Quinones, and Albert Wachtel, University of Illinois Press, 1986, pp. 54-65.

[In the following essay, Esslin provides an overview of the sources and characteristics of Modernist drama.]

Concepts, it must be said at the outset, like modernity, modernism, and the avant-garde fill me with apprehension and doubt. They are, after all, concepts of relation rather than fact. To ask, "What is the avant-garde? What is modern?" is rather like asking: "How long is a piece of string?" In relation to yesterday's art, today's art is modern, or avant-garde. As the great illuminator Oderisi tells Dante in the eleventh canto of the Purgatorio:

Credette Cimabue nella pittura
tener lo campo, ed ora ha Giotto il grido,
sì che la fama di colui è scura.

Così ha tolto l'uno a l'altro Guido
la gloria de la lingua; e forse è nato
chi l'uno e l'altro caccerà del nido.

(Once Cimabue held sway in painting, but now does Giotto have the cry, so that the fame of the former is obscured. Similarly has the one Guido taken from the other the glory of the language, and perhaps one has been born who will chase both from the nest.)

"Modern," after all, only means "le dernier cri." In German it can even mean no more than "fashionable." The term, I suppose, entered discourse about art and literature with the Renaissance, when there were disputes as to the relative merit of works produced in Greek and Roman antiquity as against those of the period; Swift later dramatized this conflict in his Battle of the Books.

And yet, in the course of the nineteenth century the concept of modernity did acquire a special significance, at least for the people then experiencing what to them seemed a truly epochal change of lifestyle and thinking. With the coming of the industrial revolution, the introduction of the steam engine, powerlooms, railways, the telegraph, and photography, and the new uses of electricity, together with the rise of new ideologies (Darwinism, Marxism, positivism) and the decline of belief in revealed religions, it must have seemed to these people that an age had truly come to an end. As it happens—and this is particularly true of the drama—there had previously been a longish period during which academicism, i.e., a fairly rigid adherence to what seemed immutable standards of excellence and technique in the writing and performance of plays, was prevalent, so that it really seemed that these orthodoxies were destined to undergo the fate of all the others that were being swept away. In fact, of course, this was merely an optical illusion: the rigid standards of the French Academy or the English Augustans were themselves fairly recent phenomena and by no means immovably fixed as absolutes, as then appeared.

Seen from this angle, the beginnings of Modernism, in our present sense, in drama dates from the rise of the romantic movement, or, in Germany, from the Sturm und Drang. As such, initially, it was a revolt against formal restraints, the tyranny of the three unities, and the rigid rules of seemliness that governed the art of acting, the restraints on what could and what could not be shown on the stage.

When absolutes are dethroned, everything becomes relative; and the beginnings of Modernism in this sense are intimately linked with the growth of a sense of the differences between cultures synchronically and between historical epochs diachronically. Different standards of ethics, different values of beauty are suddenly perceived as possible. With the rapid technological changes of the nineteenth century the historical sense became dominant. As Nietzsche put it in Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886):

Der historische Sinn… auf welchen wir Europäer als auf unsre Besonderheit Anspruch machen, ist uns im Gefolge der bezaubernden und tollen Halbbarbarei gekommen, in welche Europa durch die demokratische Vermengung der Stände und Rassen gestürzt worden ist—erst das neunzehnte Jahrhundert kennt diesen Sinn, als seinen sechsten Sinn. Die Vergangenheit von jeder Form und Lebensweise, von Kulturen, die früher hart nebeneinander,übereinander lagen, strömt dank jener Mischung in uns "moderne Seelen" aus, unsre Instinkte laufen nunmehr überallhin zurück; wir selbst sind eine Art Chaos.… Durch unsre Halbbarbarei in Leib und Begierde haben wir geheime Zugänge überallhin.

(The historical sense… which we Europeans claim as our specialty, has come to us as a consequence of the enchanting and mad semi-barbarism into which Europe has been plunged by the democratic commingling of social classes and races—the nineteenth century is the first to know this sense, as its own sixth sense. The past of every form and way of life, of cultures, that previously had lain in hard distinction side by side, or one above the other, now, thanks to that commingling streams into us "modern" souls, our instincts now run back to everywhere; we, ourselves, are a kind of chaos.… Through our semibarbarism, in body and in desire, we have secret access everywhere.)

And, significantly, among the examples Nietzsche quotes for this semibarbarity, caused by the newly acquired historical sense, is the renewed vogue of Shakespeare, whose drama he calls an

erstaunliche spanisch-maurisch-sachsischen Geschmacks-Synthesis, über welchen sich ein Altathener aus der Freundschaft des äschylos halbtot gelacht oder geärgert haben würde: aber wir—nehmen gerade diese wilde Buntheit, dies Durcheinander des Zartesten, Gröbsten und Küntstlichsten, mit einer geheimen Vertraulichkeit und Herzlichkeit an, wir geniessen ihn als das gerade uns aufgesparte Raffinement der Kunst und lassen uns dabei von den widrigen Dämpfen und der Nähe des englischen Pöbels, in welcher Shakespeares Kunst und Geschmack lebt, so wenig stören als etwas auf der Chiaja Neapels: wo wir mit alien unsren Sinnen, bezaubert und willig, unsres Wegs gehn, wie sehr auch die Kloaken der Pöbel-Quartiere in der Luft sind.

(astonishing Spanish-Moorish-Saxon synthesis of tastes, about which an ancient Athenian from among the friends of Aeschylus would have almost died of laughter or anger: but we—we accept this very wild proliferation of colors, this mixture of the most tender with the most coarse and artificial, with a secret connivance and heartiness, we savor him as the highest refinement of art that has been specially vouchsafed to us; and in doing so we are as little disturbed by the noxious exhalations, and the proximity, of the English mob, in which Shakespeare's art is at home, as we are when walking down the Chiaia in Naples: where we go on our way, enchanted and willing with all our senses, however much the cloacas of the slums are in the air.)

And to complete this analysis Nietzsche—who, while obviously deploring what he describes, yet must reckon himself one of the semibarbarians of the modern age, with its sense of history—adds:

Das Mass ist uns fremd, gestehn wir es uns; unser Kitzel ist gerade der Kitzel des Unendlichen, Ungemessnen. Gleich dem Reiter auf vorwärtsschnaubendem Rosse lassen wir vor dem Unend-lichen die Zügel fallen, wir modernen Menschen, wir Halbbarbaren—und sind erst dort in unsrer Seligkeit, wo wir auch am meisten—in Gefahr sind.

(Let us admit it: we are strangers to the concept of measure; what tickles us is precisely the tickle of the infinite, the unmeasured. Like a rider on a horse that is bolting we drop our reins, confronted with the infinite, we modern human beings, we semibarbarians—and we are in our greatest ecstasy where we also are most—in danger.

I have quoted this passage of Nietzsche's at such length because I believe that he more than anyone else was the true prophet of modernity, whose wild, extravagant thought perceived and penetrated the nature of the epochal change that the nineteenth century brought to human history, and predicted with astonishing insight many of the terrible and cataclysmic events that inevitably followed from that change of human destiny. It is ironic that Nietzsche is just now being discovered by the currently fashionable intellectual gurus in France, for already in his own time he was very much perceived, even by the popular imagination, as the embodiment of all that was dangerous in modernity. I remember how as a child I got hold of some pious piece of popular fiction—alas, I have forgotten its author and title—published in Germany around the turn of the century. When its heroine confessed to her parents that she had fallen in love with a young man, her father sternly said, "I hope he is not one of those who reads Ibsen and Nietzsche."

And indeed, Ibsen and Nietzsche have much in common. It is sometimes as though Ibsen, outwardly the sober, well-regulated bourgeois, embodied basic traits of Nietzsche in his characters; Nietzsche, for example, wrote the passages I have just quoted in the highest village of the Swiss Alps, Sils-Maria, at the foot of a glacier, shortly before madness engulfed him—as though he was living out the destiny that Ibsen had given Brand; and Ibsen's Stockmann rages against the rule of the mob as much as Nietzsche ever did. Above all, Ibsen, like Nietzsche, denounced the false morality of a dying world. This, to my mind, is the essence of Modernism in the sense in which we are discussing it here: the "revaluation of all values" of which Nietzsche spoke, the quest for a new morality beyond the old concepts of Good and Evil; and the rejection of the philosophical and religious, metaphysical, basis of those beliefs. If Ibsen, in The Lady from the Sea, created the first truly, and consciously, existential heroine in drama, who can make her choice only after she has been given total freedom to make it (and whether Ibsen got this existentialism from Kierkegaard or not is as yet a matter of dispute), Nietzsche also clearly prefigured the drama of existential choice:

Wenn ich den Vorgang zerlege, der in dem Satz "ich denke" ausgedrückt ist, so bekomme ich eine Reihe von verwegnen Behauptungen, deren Begründung schwer, vielleicht unmöglich ist,—zum Beispiel, dass ich es bin, der denkt, dass ilberhaupt ein Etwas es sein muss, das denkt, dass Denken eine Tätigkeit und Wirkung seitens eines Wesens ist, welches als Ursache gedacht wird, dass es ein "Ich" gibt, endlich, dass es bereits feststeht, was mit Denken zu bezeichnen ist—dass ich weiss, was Denken ist.

(If I dismantle [perhaps today we should translate "deconstruct"] what happens that is expressed in the phrase "I think," I'll get a series of daring assertions, that are difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove: for example that it is I who is thinking; that, indeed, it must be something that is thinking: that thinking is an activity and an effect on the part of an entity that can be regarded as a cause; that, finally, there is such a thing as I; and that it is already established what it is that can be called thinking—that I know what thinking is.

Much of Beckett is prefigured in these ideas, as it is, even more clearly, in this passage in which Nietzsche deals with the concept of the soul:

Man muss zunächst auch jener andern und verhängnisvolleren Atomistik den Garaus machen, welche das Christentum am besten und längsten gelehrt hat, der Seelen-Atomistik. Mit diesem Wort sei es erlaubt, jenen Glauben zu bezeichnen, der die Seele als etwas Unvertilgbares, Ewiges, Unteilbares, als eine Monade, als ein Atomon nimmt: diesen Glauben soll man aus der Wissenschaft hinausschaffen! Es ist unter uns gesagt, ganz und gar nicht nötig, "die Seele" selbst dabei loszuwerden und auf eine der ältesten und ehrwürdigsten Hypothesen Verzicht zu leisten: wie es dem Ungeschick der Naturalisten zu begegnen pflegt, welche, kaum dass sie an "die Seele" rühren, sie auch verlieren. Aber der Weg zu neuen Fassungen und Verfeinerungen der Seelen-Hypothese steht offen: und Begriffe wie "sterbliche Seele" und "Seele als Subjekts-Vielheit" und "Seele als Gesellschaftsbau der Triebe und Affekte" wollen fürderhin in der Wissenschaft Bürgerrecht haben.

(We must give a coup de gräce to that other and even more fatal atomism that Christianity has been teaching best and longest, the atomism of the soul. Let us be permitted to use that term to denote the belief that regards the soul as something ineradicable, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, an atomon: that belief must be thrown out of science. It is, let it be said among ourselves, quite unnecessary to get rid of the soul itself in doing so… as happens through the clumsiness of those naturalists who, hardly have they touched the soul, immediately lose it altogether. But the way to new versions and refinements of the hypothesis of the soul is open: and concepts like "a mortal soul" or "the soul as the multiplicity of the subject" and "the soul as the social edifice of drives and emotions" should in future have their right of citizenship without science.)

If the little play by Yevreinov, The Theater of the Soul, which was produced at the Claremont Colleges Comparative Literature Conference on Modernism, is almost a word-for-word translation of this passage from Nietzsche's Jenseits von Gut und Böse into theatrical terms, how much more so is the whole mighty oeuvre of Samuel Beckett, who never ceases to dismantle and deconstruct the Cartesian "cogito ergo sum." And, if we turn to another giant among the creators of Modernism in drama, Antonin Artaud, we find that he, too, in his own way, followed on a path that Nietzsche, as the first thinker to gain an insight into the meaning of what was happening in his time, had opened up and prescribed:

Man soll über die Grausamkeit umlernen und die Augen aufmachen; man soll endlich Ungeduld lernen, damit nicht länger solche unbescheidne dicke Irrtümer tugendhaft und dreist herumwandeln, wie sie zum Beispiel in betreff der Tragedie von alten und neuen Philosophen aufgefüttert worden sind. Fast alles, was wir "höhere Kultur" nenne, beruht auf der Vergeistigung und Vertiefung der Grausamkeit—dies ist mein Satz; jenes "wilde Tier" ist gar nicht abgetötet worden, es lebt, es blüht, es hat sich nur—vergöttlicht. Was die schmerzliche Wollust der Tragödie ausmacht, ist Grausamkeit; was im sogenannten tragischen Mit-leiden, im Grunde sogar in allem Erhabnen bis hinauf zu den höchsten und zartesten Schaudern der Metaphysik, angenehm wirkt, bekommt seine Süssigkeit allein von der eingemischten Ingredienz der Grausamkeit.

(We have to revise our notions of cruelty and open our eyes; we should at last be eager to prevent such immodest and gross mistakes to run about virtuously and impertinently, as, for example, those that have been bred up by ancient and new philosophers about tragedy. Almost everything that we call "higher culture" is based on the spiritualization and deepening of cruelty—that is my verdict; that "wild beast" has not been deadened, it lives, it flourishes, it has even been made divine. What determines the sorrowful lust of tragedy is cruelty; what is felt as pleasurable in the so-called tragic pity and essentially even in everything sublime right up to the highest and most tender tremors of metaphysics, gets its sweetness solely from the ingredient of cruelty that is mixed up with it.)

I apologize for quoting Nietzsche so copiously, but I feel that his diagnosis of the nature and consequences of the sea-change that European culture had undergone in his time is a profound help in understanding the quality of that change. And, of course, Nietzsche has an intimate connection with drama, not only because he started on his career as a brilliant and original interpreter of the nature of Greek tragedy, but also because he was intimately associated with another of the great creators of the modern theater, Richard Wagner. Wagner, I believe, is as important as Ibsen and Strindberg in the genesis of the Modernist drama. It is no coincidence that the man who did most to naturalize the concept of Modernist drama in the English-speaking world, George Bernard Shaw, was an Ibsenite as well as a Wagnerian, and, of course, philosophically decidedly a Nietzschean. What is Shaw's life force but an English version of Nietzsche's vitalism, his will to power? Shaw's love of paradox is comparable to Nietzsche's revaluation of all values with the addition of an Anglo-Irish sense of humor. (If we wanted to bring Strindberg into the Nietzschean orbit we would only have to mention Nietzsche's insane anti-feminism, so religiously echoed by Strindberg. But, of course, Strindberg's de-atomization of the human soul and his take-off into introspective expressionism also echo Nietzsche's insights about the ultimate consequences of the abandonment of the Christian concept of the immortal soul, one and indivisible.)

But to go back to the beginnings: the revolt of the romantics and their precursors against the classical ideal and the tyranny of the unities and the Alexandrine was initially a revolt against worn-out forms. That the whole movement ultimately arose from an endeavor to reinstate Shakespeare as the model of great drama shows not only the modernity of Shakespeare but that ultimately the "Modernist" movement was a return to the roots of drama before the academicism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries seemed to have put a stop to all development by decreeing a perfect model to be followed (and in painting and sculpture as much as in drama).

But once the formal bounds had been broken, new subject matter, new substance, could stream into the drama. And it must not be forgotten that of all forms of art the drama is most closely linked with technology, back to the deus ex machina, the God who appeared by courtesy of a machine in ancient Greece. Throughout history drama has been highly technological. In fourteenth and fifteenth-century Florence elaborate machines enabled the angels in mystery plays to fly high above the worshippers in some of the great churches of the city. The baroque age luxuriated in machinery for transformation scenes, flying clouds inhabited by Gods, and other spectacular effects. The coming of gas and then electric light, hydraulically operated stage machinery, and the cinema and other means for mechanically reproducing and electronically distributing drama have put drama into the very center of a whole series of industrial revolutions. And each of these innovations and technological advances has, in turn, opened the floodgates for the new contents, the new things that drama could say, that Nietzsche had so brilliantly discerned.

If romanticism was the initial revolt, naturalism seems to me the actual root of all our Modernist drama. As Otto Brahm, the German apostle of Ibsen, put it in one of the earliest manifestos of his Freie Bühne:

Der Bannerspruch der neuen Kunst, mit goldenen Lettern aufgezeichnet… ist das eine Wort: Wahrheit; and Wahrheit, Wahrheit auf jedem Lebenspfade ist es, die auch wir erstreben und fordern. Nicht die objektive Wahrheit, die dem Kämpfenden entgeht, sondern die individuelle Wahrheit, welche aus der innersten Überzeugung frei geschöpft ist und frei ausgesprochen: die Wahrheit des unabhängigen Geistes, der nichts zu beschönigen und nichts zu vertuschen hat. Und der darum nur einen Gegner kennt, seinen Erbfeind und Todfeind: die Lüge in jeglicher Gestalt.…

… Die moderne Kunst, wo sie ihre lebensvollsten Triebe ansetzt, hat auf dem Boden des Naturalismus Wurzel geschlagen. Sie hat, einem tiefinnern Zuge dieser Zeit gehorchend, sich auf die Erkenntnis der natürlichen Daseinsmächte gerichtet und zeigt uns mit rücksichtslosem Wahrheitstriebe die Welt wie sie ist. Dem Naturalismus Freund, wollen wir eine gute Strecke Weges mit ihm schreiten, allein es soll uns nicht erstaunen, wenn im Verlauf der Wanderschaft, an einem Punkt, den wir heute noch nicht überschauen, die Strasse plötzlich sich biegt und überraschende neue Blicke in Kunst und Leben sich auftun. Denn an keine Formel, auch an die jüngste nicht, ist die unendliche Entwickelung menschlicher Kultur gebunden; und in dieser Zuversicht, im Glauben an das ewig Werdende, haben wir eine freie Bühne aufgeschlagen, für das moderne Leben.

(The slogan that the new art carries in golden letters on its flag… is one word: truth; and truth, truth on every path of our life is what we strive for and demand. Not objective truth, which escapes anyone engaged in a fight, but individual truth, which is freely arrived at from deepest convictions and freely uttered: the truth of the independent spirit who has nothing to embellish or conceal. And who, therefore, has only one opponent: his hereditary and mortal enemy: the lie in any form whatever.…

… Modern art, where it is developing its most vital shoots, has put its roots into the soil of naturalism. It has, obeying a deep inner feature of our time, directed its attention to gaining knowledge of the powers of nature and it shows us the world as it is, with ruthless truthfulness. Friends as we are of naturalism we want to travel a good deal of the road with it, but it should not surprise us if, in the course of our wanderings, at a point we cannot as yet see, the road should suddenly bend and unexpectedly disclose new vistas in art and life. For the infinite development of human culture is not bound to any formula, not even the most recent; and in this hope in continuous growth we have established a free stage for modern life.)

This openness of the naturalists, indeed, their eagerness to branch out into an infinity of new, as yet undiscovered paths, is often overlooked by those whose own ideas originated in a rejection of the original, primitive forms of naturalism as a photographic reproduction of reality, as life in a room without its fourth wall. In fact, just as, in the novel, it was a consequent application of the desire for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth that led Dujardin, Schnitzler, and Joyce into the realms of the internal monologue, so in the case of Strindberg and the expressionists it was introspection and the desire to represent the world as it was perceived by an individual (this being the only verifiable experience of reality available to anyone) that led to the dramatization of dreams, hallucinations, fantasies, and nightmares.

"Der mittelpunkt den Welt ist in jedem ich" (The center of the world is inside each ego), said Theodor Däubler in one of the early manifestos of German expressionism, which contains what I find to be one of the pithiest definitions of that style:

Der Volksmund sagt: wenn einer gehängt wird, so erlebt er im letzten Augenblick sein ganzes Leben nochmals. Das kann nur Expressionismus sein!

(Popular belief has it: when someone is being hanged he relives his whole life in his last moment. And that can only be Expressionism!)

That is how realism turned into surrealism; it was Apollinaire who coined the term in his preface to Les Mamelles de Tirésias. He felt that the reality, the truth, of walking was best expressed in the invention of the wheel, which did not look like walking legs but performed the same action more efficiently and therefore more truly. Yvan Goll, the bilingual French and German poet, formulated the same thought when he said, in his preface to one of his Ü berdramen (superdramas) in 1922:

Überrealismus ist die stärkste Negierung des Realismus. Die Wirklichkeit des Scheins wird entlarvt, zugunsten der Wahrheit des Seins. "Masken," grob, grotesk, wie die Gefühle, deren Ausdruck sie sind. Nicht mehr "Helden," sondern Menschen, nicht Charaktere mehr, sondern die nackten Instinkte. Ganz nackt.

Der Dramatiker ist ein Forscher, ein Politiker und ein Gesetzgeber. Als Überrealist statuiert er Dinge aus einem fernen Reich der Wahrheit, die er erhorchte, als er das Ohr an die verschlossenen Wände der Welt legte.

Alogik ist heute der geistige Humor, also die beste Waffe gegen die Phrasen, die das ganze Leben beherrschen. Der Mensch redet in seinem. Alltag fast immer nur, urn die Zunge, nicht um den Geist in Bewegung zu setzen. Wozu soviel reden, und das alles so ernst nehmen!

(Surrealism is the strongest negation of realism. The reality of appearance is unmasked in favor of the truth of being. "Masks," coarse, grotesque, like the feelings of which they are the expression. No longer "heroes" but human beings, no longer "characters" but naked instincts. Totally naked.

The playwright is an explorer, a politician and a legislator. As a surrealist he decrees things that come from a distant realm of truth, that he has overheard when he laid his ear against the closed walls of the world.

Nonsense [Goll calls it "Alogik"] is today the humor of the spirit, and thus the best weapon against the clichés that rule all of our lives. Human beings in their everyday existence almost always merely talk to move their tongues, not their intellects. Why should one talk so much and take everything seriously!)

So here too the argument for surrealism, for what we later came to call "the absurd," is derived from the same search for the truth that animated the early naturalists, who had rejected the concept of beauty, or seemliness, measure, and control. Thus had the scientific spirit turned a somersault into the absurd.

How then does that other self-proclaimed scientific impulse, that of Marxism, which lies behind the work of Brecht and the Brechtians—another important sector of Modernist drama—fit into this picture? Well, surely Marxism, out of Hegel, is a blatant case of the historicism, that sense of history, that Nietzsche had diagnosed as the essential characteristic, the sixth sense, of the modern world. And what is more: Brecht's theory of epic theater and the Verfremdungseffekt, his rejection of introspective psychology in favor of a behavioristic model of man as the product of his social environment, is another variant of Nietzsche's rejection of the soul as a monad, of character as an indivisible whole. If the introspection of the expressionists, surrealists, and absurdists dissolves that unity of the soul from the inside, Brecht's insistence that all that matters is what is observable on the outside dissolves it from the opposite end of the spectrum. There is no such thing as one individual human character, Brecht claimed, there is only one human being in social contact with another; the same person will be utterly different when confronted with his boss from what he is when confronted with a social inferior. Human character, Brecht once said, is not like a grease stain that you can't get out of a garment however much you rub it.

The point I am trying to make is simply this: behind the vast diversity, the proliferation of forms and -isms, the seemingly diametrical opposition between the different strands of contemporary drama, there still lies that one single impulse, born of the nineteenth century's rejection of the traditional world system that had seemed to contain and explain the ways of the world and to justify the ways of God to Man. The impulse behind all this modernity to this day is thus essentially a negative one—a rejection of any closed worldviews, any closed world systems. Hence the curious paradox, for example, that totalitarian countries, whether Marxist or fascist, reject Modernist art, because they need to constitute a closed system, however simplistic and primitive it might be. Hence Brecht's Marxist dramatic theory and practice had to struggle against the totalitarian orthodoxies of the Stalinist aesthetics and prevailed in the end in that world only after it had been rigidified into a lifeless exhibit in a museum of prestigious artifacts.

The original negative impulse of Modernism, however, that rejection of formal rules that arose with the romantics and broke through with naturalism, has by no means exhausted itself: the contemporary avant-garde in drama, whether political or aesthetic, environmental or street-theatrical, whether in performance art or Grotowskian intensity, is still nourished by that impulse.

Where will it end? Have we not reached the limits, the point at which even the definition of what drama, what theater, is has been almost totally dissolved by the tearing down of the distinction between actor and spectator, audience and participant-in-the-action? Are we not reaching an area of total negation, total anarchy?

I must confess that I do not know the answer to these questions. What is undoubtedly the case, however, is that the proliferation of new forms and theories (that all, ultimately, go back to the same root concept) has not obliterated all previous forms; we still have classical drama, well performed today, perhaps better than at any previous time; and we still have, in the mass media, an almost obscene profusion of the most old-fashioned premodernist comedy and melodrama. All that is still drama, and indeed we have today more old-fashioned, premodernist drama than at any time in human history: it has become omnipresent. The revenge of the philistines, of the fathers who did not want their sons to find their own ways, is all around us. Perhaps in light of this fact, the cavortings of the heirs to the Modernist impulse, those knights in shining armor who see themselves as the advance guard of a new and better humanity, are reduced to their true proportion and their true function: to continue hammering at the fossilized rules of form and seemliness that spread a simplistic and primitive worldview and thus carry an obtuse and outmoded content into the consciousness of the people of a homogenized mass culture and an atomized society.

Or is it that it was the destruction of those old formal structures that has created the present state of affairs? It is at least possible that this is the case, and it would be the ultimate irony.

What, to my mind, is essential is that in the area of serious endeavor at the frontiers of the art of drama there should be a powerful desire to maintain the highest standards of quality. In fields where new soil is being broken, where rules have been overthrown and new conventions are being sought, it is inevitable that there should be much that is pretentious, silly, stupid, and untalented. That is inevitable and will always remain so; it lies in the very nature of mings. All the more important then has the function of the critic become; all the more crucial is it that his or her endeavors should be pursued without pretentiousness, censoriousness, or pedantry, but with insight, humility, openness of mind, rejection of all prejudice, and above all with the maximum of intelligent self-awareness and self-criticism.