Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Comments on Examples of Twentieth-Century Poetry

Stephen Spender

Here is a poem by Stephen Spender, one of the most promising of the young modernist poets, in The New Statesman and Nation of November 4, 1933:

Perhaps

the explosion of a bomb

the submarine — a burst bubble filled with water —

the chancellor clutching his shot arm (and that was Perhaps

a put-up job for their own photographers)

the parliament their own side set afire

& then our party forbidden

& the mine flooded, an accident I hope ...

In his skidding car he wonders

when watching landscape attack him

“is it rushing? (I cannot grasp it) or is it

at rest with its own silence I cannot touch?”

Was that final when they shot him? did that war

lop our dead branches? are my new leaves splendid?

is it leviathan, that revolution

hugely nosing at edge of antarctic?

only Perhaps. Can be that we grow smaller

donnish and bony shut in our racing prison:

headlines are walls that shake and close

the dry dice rattled in their wooden box.

Can be deception of things only changing. Out there

perhaps growth of humanity above the plain

hangs: not the timed explosion, oh but Time

monstrous with stillness like the himalayan range.

Aren’t the emotion and the rhythm all in a rather subdued key — but that appears to be universal among up-to-date poets?

It seems to me they are so subdued as hardly to be there except at places. A certain subdued force of statement getting less subdued and more evidently powerful at the close — this there is, but it is the only power there.

How did the poem impress you?

I am afraid it made no impression on me — no poetical impression. I cannot persuade myself that this kind of writing has any chance of survival once the mode is over.

On consideration I should say that whatever merits there are in Perhaps lie in the last four stanzas. The first three seem to me distinguishable from a strong prose only by the compression of the language and the stiffness of the movement — too stiff for prose, in quite another way too stiff for the fineness and plasticity there should be in poetic rhythm — especially needed, it seems to me, in free verse. From the fourth line of the fourth stanza I begin to find what seems to me the real poetic touch. The fifth and seventh have the substance and diction of very fine poetry — what I miss is the rhythm that would carry it home to the inner consciousness and leave it with its place permanently there. There seems to be in this technique an unwillingness to get too far away from the characteristic manner of prose rhythm, an unwillingness either to soar or run, as if either would be an unbecoming and too ostentatious action — in three or four lines only the poet is just about to let himself go. Or perhaps there is the same tendency as in some modern painting and architecture, a demand for geometric severity and precision? But the result is the same. It may be that this kind of writing cuts into the intellect — it touches only the surface of the vital, the life-spirit which after all has its rights in poetry, and does not get through into the soul. That at least is the final impression it leaves on me.

1933