Modern Poetry

Introduction
F. R. Leavis, ‘Poetry and the Modern World’

• (from New Bearings in English Poetry)

• ‘Poetry matters little to the modern world.
That is, very little of contemporary intelligence
concerns itself with poetry. Late Victorian age:
no serious standards current, no live tradition
of poetry, and no public capable of informed
and serious interest. For the most part the
Victorian poetry is not so much bad as dead –
it was never alive.’
F. R. Leavis, ‘Poetry and the Modern World’

• It seems unlikely that the number of potential

poets born varies as much from age to age as
literary history might lead one to suppose.
What varies is the use made of talent. And the
use each age makes of its crop of talent is
determined largely by the preconceptions of
‘the poetical’ that are current, and the
corresponding habits, conventions, and
techniques
F. R. Leavis, ‘Poetry and the Modern World’

• Every age has its preconceptions and assumptions regarding

poetry: these are essentially poetical subjects, poetical
materials, poetical modes… The preconceptions coming down
to us from the last century were established in the period of
the great Romantics… Poetry, it was assumed, must be the
direct expression of simple emotions: the tender, the exalted,
the poignant and, in general, the sympathetic… Wit, play of
intellect, stress of cerebral muscle had no place: they could
only hinder the reader’s being ‘moved’ – the correct poetic
response. Nineteenth-century poetry was characteristically
preoccupied with the creation of a dream-world.
F. R. Leavis, ‘Poetry and the Modern World’

• Poetry tends in every age to confine itself by

ideas of the essentially poetical which, when
the conditions which gave rise to them have
changed, bar the poet from his most valuable
material, the material that is most significant
to sensitive and adequate minds in his own
day; or else sensitive and adequate minds are
barred out of poetry.
F. R. Leavis, ‘Poetry and the Modern World’

• Poetry matters because of the kind of poet who is

more alive than other people, more alive in his own
age. He is ‘at the most conscious point of the race in
his time’.
• Poetry can communicate the actual quality of
experience with a subtlety and precision
unapproachable by any other means. But if the
poetry and the intelligence of the age lose touch
with each other, poetry will cease to matter much,
and the age will be lacking in finer awareness.
F. R. Leavis, ‘Poetry and the Modern World’

• A significant modern poem will exhibit

modernity not by mentioning modern things,
the apparatus of modern civilization, or by
being about modern subjects or topics… All
that we can fairly ask of the poet is that he
shall show himself to have been fully alive in
our time. The evidence will be in the very
texture of his poetry.
F. R. Leavis, ‘Poetry and the Modern World’

• To invent techniques that shall be adequate to the ways

of feeling, or modes of experience, of adult, sensitive
modern is difficult in the extreme. This is the peculiar
importance of T. S. Eliot… Having a mind unquestionably
of rare distinction he has solved his own problem as a
poet, and so done more than solve the problem for
himself… It is mainly due to him that poets and critics
today realize that English poetry in the future must
develop along some other line than that running from the
Romantics through Tennyson and Swinburne… He has
made a new start, and established new bearings.
T. S. Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’
• Poets in our civilization must be difficult. Our civilization
comprehends great variety and complexity, and this
variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility,
must produce various and complex results. The poet
must become more and more comprehensive, more
allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if
necessary, language into his meaning… We are
sometimes told to ‘look into our heart and write’. But
that is not looking deep enough... One must look into the
cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive
tracts.
 S. Heaney, ‘Joy or Night’
• Discussion of W. B. Yeats (Modernist poet) and
P. Larkin (post-WW2)
• Heaney wants to ask whether Larkin’s famous
rejection of Yeats’s stance has not been too
long and too readily approved of
• ‘Yeats was always passionately beating on the
wall of the physical world to provoke an
answer from the other side’
 S. Heaney, ‘Joy or Night’
• Yeats' embrace of the supernatural was not at
all naive; he was as alive as Larkin to the
realities of bodily decrepitude and the
obliterating force of death, but he resisted the
dominance of the material over the spiritual
• Yeats: imagination carried beyond feeling into
the aboriginal ice – rejection of the body heat
symbolizing everything pathetic and personal
 S. Heaney, ‘Joy or Night’
• The fortitude and defiance of Shakespeare’s
heroes
• It is essential that the vision of reality which
poetry offers should be transformative; an act
of writing should outstrip conditions even as it
observes them. ‘We go to poetry to be
forwarded within ourselves’.
 S. Heaney, ‘Joy or Night’
• ‘The Man and the Echo’ (a poem by W. B.
Yeats): cliff-face symbolizing the limitations of
human existence. The echo communicates
man’s most exhausted reactions.
• The compulsion is to continue to do the ‘great
work’ of spiritual intellect in spite of the pain
which accompanies the cycles of life.
 S. Heaney, ‘Joy or Night’
• Positive effort of the mind against natural and
historical violence: ‘O Rocky Voice/ Shall we in
that great night rejoice?’