Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

THE evolution of W. W. Gibson’s art is among the most remarkable and significant phenomena in the literary history of our generation. Beginning his career as a purveyor of romantic verse, glamorous and not unbeautiful stuff shot with the rainbow hues and woven of the fabric of dreams, for four years he sang, and sang sweetly enough, of knights and ladyes, jousts and tilting spears and the tourneys of love: exquisite and idle songs of all the dear dead delightful days that in truth never lived. Then came a two years’ silence, and then, realizing that the poetry of to-morrow, however great may be the heritage of beauty we have received from the past, will not be written by fixing our eyes upon the appearance of it, and shutting from our vision theappearancesof to-day, the perhaps seeming unrealities, but none the less actual facts of hunger and unemployment and wage-slavery, and, most devastating of all, the folly of fools who are satisfied with good intentions, the bitter and disastrous folly that judges a tree by its name and not by its fruit—he turned his back on fabled heroes and legends of old lands and all the lovely yesterdays of earth, and with Maeterlinck’s cry, “To-day misery is the disease of mankind,” ringing its terrible truth in his ears, he went down into mines and through factories and tenements and the squalor of sunless slums  - the disease-ridden, evil-smelling styes of humanity  -  and there, where little children perish of want because their worn-out mothers’ breasts are dry from hunger; there, where women, the mothers of the race, dying daily the dreadful death-in-life of souls and bodies bartered for bread, are battered and broken by the merciless grinding of the wheels of labour, the relentless and inhuman greed of manufacturer and consumer; there, in the places where strong men starve because they cannot get work, he listened for “the life-song of humanity.”
 
The Web of Life, a book with a significant title, and incidentally as beautiful a volume bibliographically as has been produced in England since the days of William Morris, marks his transitional period. It contains some thirty lyrical poems of very varying value, one or two of an extremely high value; a poetic drama in one act, which tells the story of an unhappy modern marriage and is, although poetically and dramatically unsuccessful, in spite of passages of considerable power, highly interesting nevertheless because it shows the direction in which the poet was moving at the time of its composition; and three long narrative poems in dignified and sonorous blank verse, richly wrought and handled with a fine technical skill comparable to that of Arthur Sabin in Medea and Circe, but, like the latter, exotic in style and setting. One is an Oriental romance; Pan’s death at the hour of the crucifixion is the subject of the second; and the third tells of Trojan Helen. Gibson, however, knew that for us to-day “the eternal Helen” is not to be found by looking backward, and the shorter poems, marked by an increasing lightness of treatment and conception, but still in his early manner and belonging rather to the world of romance than to that of reality, show the stages of his search for her as he passed from remote and unprofitable dreams to the actualities of life and death, the life and death of to-day. King Ormel, for example, is entirely typical of his first period; Between the Songs marks his parting of the ways, from dead Kings and Queens to living men and women; and in After Sunset he is seen standing in a dark world, awaiting the word that shall rekindle dawn. With the Web of Life the singer of twilight passes, the poet of night arid day arrives.
 
In 1907 two little volumes of poetic dramas crept very quietly into the world; inconspicuous twins, their birth was unheralded by meteors or comets or any of the customary events that presage destiny; not even a King died. But, for all the lack of pomp attending their nativity, it is not impossible that these model children who made so little noise were fated to mark the beginning of a new era in English poetry. The Stonefolds and On the Threshold each contain three little peasant-dramas in one act — their scene laid among the bleak and poverty-stricken fells — dealing with everyday events in the life of the very poor: the death of a lamb, the birth of a baby, and the like; they are written in a very flexible and free-moving blank verse, and their diction is quite amazingly simple, attaining throughout a level of direct and unadorned austerity, that is all the more astonishing when the intensely ornate and decorative character of Gibson’s first period is considered. The mandarins of criticism were naturally furious they had boggled a little at The Web of Life, but it had contained sufficient of the second-rate inane to satisfy them, and they had bespattered his earlier work with the mud of their praise: such work had been comprehensible — the lutes and rose-leaves and lovers of use and wont necessitated no violent intellectual effort on their part, and a poet’s business was to sing, comfortably of course, not distressingly. Independent critics, on the other hand, and the few readers who do their own thinking, realized that here was a new force in English letters, and waited eagerly for its next manifestation — the three little blue-covered volumes which can now be seen on the tables of every progressive bookseller from Yarmouth to Chicago, while stray copies may already be found scattered curiously about the Continent of Europe, with their strange and ominous title of Daily Bread:

“All life moving to one measure -
Daily bread, daily bread -
   Bread of life, and bread of labour,
Bread of bitterness and sorrow,
Hand-to-mouth, and no to-morrow,
   Dearth for housemate, death for neighbour.

"'Yet, when all the babes are fed,
Love, are there not crumbs to treasure?’"

Daily Bread contains seventeen one-act poetic dramas; the subjects of four of them may be taken as typifying all. In The Garret a country-girl follows her lover to the city, whither he has gone in search of work, and finds him starving in the slums; this is one of the very few that sound a note of hope: “Love, are there not crumbs to treasure?” The Night-Shift tells of the death of a coal-miner imprisoned in the pit, while his wife lies in childbirth; the effect of horror produced by the continual tapping of the rescuers’ picks which the mother overhears throughout the play is reminiscent of and not incomparable with the knocking on the gate in Macbeth: it is appalling and sublime. Summer-Dawn shows a hind and his wife getting up before three in the morning to hoe turnips, while their six children, all under the age. of seven, sleep: it may be commended to the notice of bishops who advocate fecundity. The Furnace describes the death in delirium of a stoker, burned at his furnace, while his wife and three children, whose ages range from three downwards, watch; human bodies cost less than protective appliances (and do not decrease dividends), however insistently poets may prophesy that human bodies are the most expensive, the most precious and priceless, of all things. Dangerous trades, ignorance, poverty, the preventable social diseases—these are the subject-matter of Daily Bread—and they have got to be stopped: that is the impression with which the reader is left by the plays’ crushing cumulative effect, wherein their greatest power consists. Nowhere however does the author obtrude himself or his message, but his message—arid the very fact that he has a message which is immediate and convincing may, perhaps not unsoundly, be used for an argument against him as an artist—is implicit and insistent: the Social Conscience is awake, and we know that for us and for our children happiness and, more important, well-being are things impossible, so long as one other member of our species suffers from the sins of our social order, which prevent the establishment of the Republic of the Future: we have accepted the gospel of personal responsibility.
 
While it is not exactly easy, when a child is crying from hunger, to discuss the best method of baking, still it is the critic’s business to evaluate baking-powders, so let it be said at once, with the proviso always that judgment reflects the judge and not the judged, that this is the poetry of To-day, not in Melpomene’s name—the poetry of To-morrow. The dramas are all written in an irregular unrhymed iambic metre, chosen by Gibson very deliberately; he has himself said:” I realized that it is a poet’s business to make poetry out of the life of his own day. . . . In Daily Bread I [discarded] conventional blank verse for a measure more dramatic and more expressive of the rhythm of emotion and the natural cadence of speech.” Now it may be stated frankly and without qualification that the metre not merely does not express the natural cadence of speech as overheard by the finer ear of the poet but is altogether ugly, and, in the truest sense, unpoetic. The diction, moreover, has passed from austere simplicity to baldness. It can hardly be questioned that all these plays would have gained immeasurably by being written - perhaps in prose -certainly in blank verse, a free and flexible blank verse such as Gibson employed in The Stonefolds and On the Threshold. As the metre stands, it is little else than such blank verse, chopped up into various lengths without sufficient justification, and for the most part actually falling as it is into such blank verse. One of the true marks of greatness in a poet is not his ability to break laws but his ability to keep them till their breaking becomes imperative (as has been done, for example, by Francis Burrows in The Green Knight); and it can be argued with reason that in this metre Gibson has broken laws not only unnecessarily, but to his own disadvantage. There is also another and a more serious objection to these dramas: they are raw chunks of life. Now poetry does not consist in the presentation of raw chunks of life; poetry consists in the presentation of life - a very different thing. The stuff of which “the life-song of humanity” is .made is not the stuff of which humanity is made. Art selects; and therefore, in the opinion of many, the finest art ennobles. The difference between the poet and the historian is that the historian records everything, the poet what is relevant; and his vision sees the object of its perception in relation to the whole. The poet does not perceive THINGS; the poet perceives the hitherto unperceived RELATIONS OF THINGS. Art is the illumination of life, and the great poets, dealing with just as vital and immediate realities as Gibson, have, by selection and combination, produced a rounded whole of beauty where he has only touched life’s raw and ragged edges. That being said, let it be added immediately that, whatever these dramas of Gibson may be, whether they are art or not - and, after all, an opinion is only an opinion - they are admirably complete in themselves, superbly direct and objective, magnificently restrained, and intensely poignant; and since they are on the one hand a new thing and no standard exists whereby to assess them, and since, on the other, they deal convincingly with actuality, they are, therefore, also incommensurably great. It is not difficult to think their form abominable; it is possible perhaps (but, one would imagine, highly difficult) to dislike them immensely, but their force, their virility, and, in the word’s exact meaning, their excellence, are above dispute; and it is beyond any reader’s power to foretell the scope and magnitude of the influence — and the influence for good — which they will exert on the future of English poetry, including not the least important part of it, that which Gibson himself has still to write.