Part 21

For the sake of “communicative efficacy,” as the editors remind me, I should explain that transition is “an international quarterly for creative experiment,” edited in Paris by a group of young Americans and others.

From Trivial Breath, by Elinor Wylie, 1928. Reprinted by and with permission of and special arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., authorised publishers.

From Streets in the Moon, by Archibald MacLeish, 1926. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, Publishers.

From Tulips and Chimneys. Reprinted by permission of Alfred & Charles Boni, Inc., Publishers.

For a more elaborate analysis of such effects in Mr. Cummings’s poetry, see Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, Chapter I.

E. E. Cummings’s poem, previously referred to, is printed by him as follows (Tulips and Chimneys, New York, 1924, p. 78):

i was considering how within night’s loose sack a star’s nibbling in- fin -i- tes- i -mal- ly devours

darkness the hungry star which will e -ven tu- al -ly jiggle the bait of dawn and be jerked

into eternity. when over my head a shooting star Bur s (t into a stale shriek like an alarm-clock)

Such, for instance, as the poetry of John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson in the South, and of Wilbert Snow and Robert P. Tristram Coffin in New England.

From the poem “Earth,” in Dust and Light, 1919, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Mr. Robinson, of course, had been publishing poetry for nearly twenty years before the new movement got under way, but his work was regarded as belonging to it in temper and outlook.

Paul Elmer More, “Definitions of Dualism,” Section LXXIII, in The Drift of Romanticism (1913), p. 291. The next section is almost prophetic of what has happened in American poetry of the last few years:

“In some men, especially in an age of spiritual apathy, the sense of disillusion may spring up without the corresponding assurance of faith. To such men nothing is real; they walk in a place of shadows, and feel that life is continually slipping away from them into a bottomless abyss. All their labour is to re-create for themselves the illusion which has been shattered, or, by ceaseless occupation, to escape the dull horror of the void.”

I. A. Richards, Science and Poetry, 1926, p. 60.

From Last Poems, by A. E. Housman, 1922, published by Henry Holt and Company.

I. A. Richards, Science and Poetry, Chapter VII.

Richard Holt Hutton, Essays on Some of the Modern Guides to English Thought in Matters of Faith, 1891 (Second Ed., revised), p. 146.

Our Critical Spokesmen

GORHAM B. MUNSON

“Art,” I thought I heard a voice say as I sat down to my table, “aims to be something; while criticism aims first to clarify and then to value something. Criticism is talk about something with a view to passing judgment upon it. It is an aspect of man the valuer, weighing the actions, impulses, passions, thoughts, and imaginings of his fellow-men. Study the criticism of a period and it will show you the state of the general intelligence and the kind of values professed and in vogue, and above all it will enable you to divine the amount of consciousness of life’s processes and meanings which is current in this period.”

“So,” I remarked to the air, “the subject I have been thinking about has some importance? It has to do with man in his most human rôle, that of valuing, and it assists in indicating the range and depth and intensity of his awareness of life.”

But there was no reply to this, and perceiving that I must dig with my own mind, I scratched down what I had previously decided should be my opening sentence. I had been dwelling on the subject of American literary criticism from 1915 to the present. About 1915 a new phase in our national letters began to be manifest. Europe was well drenched in blood and the Lusitania was torpedoed in 1915--events that were vitally to affect us. Mr. Dreiser’s The “Genius” came out, and the next year, 1916, it was suppressed by its publishers out of deference to the power of a narrow censoring body soon to be effectively challenged. American liberals in the wake of Bull Moose Progressivism had hopefully established the New Republic. Mr. P. E. More in the year previous to 1915 had resigned from the editorship of the Nation.

Afterwards there came our participation in the war: the crushing of liberalism: post-war disillusion. There came a ferment of new magazines and new publishers, captivating the sons and leaving the fathers cold. There came a tide of naturalistic novels, a foam of vers libre, a roar of essays attacking the genteel tradition. Since 1915 the reputations have been made of Messrs. Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Waldo Frank, H. L. Mencken, and Eugene O’Neill--to name only enough to establish a contrast with the writers of the preceding period. Inevitably it happened that some excitable journalists in the midst of the uprising promptly called this decade and a half an American literary renaissance.

To me, on reviewing these years, they seem more like a tragi-comedy, almost a tragi-farce. So when I penned my premeditated first sentence I spoke of the tragi-comedy of American criticism. But even if our recent criticism has been very often foolish, we are to take it seriously for reasons outside itself,--if my voice out of the air is to be believed. I must now try to develop the line of thought that moves out from the opening sentence I wrote down when my aerial counsellor deserted me.

There have been no villains in the recent tragi-comedy of American literary criticism.

The leading critics of our nation have not been villains--that is, amazing men of initiative, strength, and will bent on destruction--but rather they make us think of well-intentioned bookish gentlemen gyrating in the fields of certain hidden sociological magnets and vociferating their reflexes to the magnetic attractions. On behalf of a potential human greatness, there are perhaps great errors in the present world of literary criticism to be opposed, but there are with us no great men, no geniuses, to be overthrown. In other words, our critics are not germinative but derivative.

I mean, of course, our professional critics. It is plain that I am not setting out to praise them--not even by calling them villains, for villains must, to satisfy my conception of the scale on which the intellectual drama of the race has been played, possess a certain epical character. There is another world of criticism, the academic world, whose faults have often been exposed scornfully and truthfully. Lying out of the eye of the reading public, it never bears any relation, according to the professional critics, with what is being currently written. Yet it has its virtues of course: there is a laudatory paper for some one to write on recent advances in American literary scholarship: within academic circles there has grown up the only critical movement in our land now worthy of international interest, and the leaders of this movement, Professors Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, are--I have several times committed myself to the assertion--the best living critics America can show. It is not with the academic world nor with humanism, however, that I am here dealing, but with the critics of the past fifteen years who have enjoyed something like popularity. First, let us follow the figure of the late Stuart P. Sherman, once a successful university professor, as he flies away from the campus into the full light of public attention beating upon the world of professional criticism.