'The Poet Is a Noble Creature'

“. . . I am under the necessity of appearing as an ancient and more or less venerable figure; others may come in aeroplanes, but I arrive on a boneshaker; others may give a demonstration with electric stoves, but I freeze over my doleful brazier. Side-whiskers should have been worn. For tradition, in the eyes of many talented moderns, is what the comedians called ‘so much antimacassar’. She is the mother of the antiquarians . . .” 

Some may mistake the words as my own. Playing the backward-facing old fart is always a provocatively comfortable role, though when it comes to literature I favor neither the old nor the new. Rather, my preference is for the good of any age – the stylish, intelligent and emotionally compelling, rather than the dull, witless or strident. Whether a book was written two millennia ago or last week is irrelevant.

 

The English poet Edmund Blunden was thirty-three when he published the essay quoted above, “Tradition in Poetry,” in the December 1929 issue of The Bookman. During the Great War, Blunden had seen continuous action in the trenches from 1916 to 1918 and survived the fighting at Ypres and the Somme. His friend Siegfried Sassoon said Blunden was the Great War poet most obsessed with his memories of the Western Front. His essay, I suspect, is his reply to the Modernist poets who emerged after the war, specifically Eliot (whom he mentions) and Pound.

 

Blunden is not attacking innovation in the arts. Rather, he is defending the incorporation of tradition into new work. Every poet builds on the past. No one works entirely in self-imposed isolation. In his own poetry, Blunden honors John Clare and Coleridge, among other precursors. Seasoned readers will recognize his debt to the Romantic tradition in English poetry. He tells us “tradition silently and powerfully intervenes,” and writes:

 

“The poet is a noble creature, an epoch-making being, but behind him there is this mighty mother, and he is her poem. She brought him up, and in his impressible years gave him association, circumstance, sympathy, distaste, imagery, character—and probably bad handwriting. How much even of our emotions is our own? How much that stirs us is not due to the race, or family, or circle which sent us forward into the world?”

 

Not only is no man an island. At most he is a peninsula or a densely situated archipelago. Every poet – every writer – is part of a complex kinship arrangement. He may even be unaware of it. As with biological families, he may resent some of his family members, but he’s stuck with them. Here’s how Blunden puts it:

 

“I have said that the past can assure us how far poetical discovery and adventure is related to what was previously ascertained and imparted. Poetry is a family, and her genealogical tree may be investigated with patience and reward.”

 

A summary dismissal of the past, of the inherited tradition, is applied nihilism and adolescent presumption, the result is tedium and incoherence: “A relaxed generation contents itself with,” Blundren writes, “no, glories in, a farrago of vapid and dissonant expressions, which are applied more or less without alteration to all heads of interest.”