Forward To The Past: Modern Sensibility And Mourning For The Past In Hardy, Robinson, Eliot, And Crane

Forward to the Past: Modern Sensibility and Mourning for the Past in Hardy, Robinson, Eliot, and Crane

The major works of modern poets Thomas Hardy and Edwin Arlington Robinson and modernist poets T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane, consult the wisdom of the past while attempting to usher in a future in which they all shared in feelings of uncertainty. Each of these poets worked to find new ways in which to write poetry with modern sensibilities, however, they also grieved individually for the times that had passed. Thomas Hardy and Edwin Arlington Robinson were pessimists whose points of view often came in the form of eulogies for the lost and the dead; T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane were both innovators of form, but their modernist ambitions were in contrast to their ambivalence for the future, most evident in works like “The Waste Land” and “The Bridge.” Together, these poets worked to break poetic conventions and set the stage for future modern poets, however, they were indebted to the past for wisdom, and fearful of the unknown future. The poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson has the major recurring theme of failure and solitude. Robinson’s characterization of men whose time has past suggests that the poet himself was caught between two worlds. “Miniver Cheevy” and “Mr. Flood’s Party” are character portraits of men who are spiritually lost, long for the past, and who have little hope for the future. Miniver Cheevy is about reverence for the past, and disgust with the state of both the present and future: “He wept that he was ever born / And he had his reasons” (Robinson 166, 3-4). Robinson’s nostalgic character dreams of legends, romance, and warriors, all of which are absent

in the modern world, according to Miniver Cheevy: “Miniver loved the days of old / When swords were bright and steeds were prancing / The vision of the warrior bold / Would set him dancing” (5-8). Miniver is confounded and depressed by modern life; a romantic, he shuns even modern dress, which he describes as a “khaki suit,” (22) in favor of “…the medieval grace of iron clothing” (23-24). Ultimately, Miniver, like Eben Flood, and Robinson himself, uses alcohol to stave off feelings of social disability. “Mr. Flood’s Party” is a heartbreaking portrait of an elderly man who is alone in the world; his friends have passed away and he is not embraced by the strangers in his town. Eben Flood throws a party for himself, alone in the street, with a jug of alcohol, his dearest friend: Alone, as if enduring to the end A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn, He stood there in the middle of the road Like Roland’s ghost winding a silent horn Below him, in the town among the trees, Where friends of other days had honored him, A phantom salutation of the dead Rang thinly till old Eben’s eyes were dim (16-23). Robinson’s modern verses, although traditional in form, with the use of equal line stanzas, lack the nature obsessed and religious and mythological themes of the romantics. His musical verses and pathos driven themes suggest a well-established modern sensibility towards poetry, however, with a keen reluctance to embrace the literal future. Robinson’s characters are modern men with modern troubles, and they all long for the things that have passed away, while being unprepared for the future. Robinson is a modern poet who does not quite reach modernity because of both a reverence for traditional poetry and, perhaps, an inability to let go of the past. Thomas Hardy is another innovator who was drawn to the past while eagerly transforming modern literature. Like Robinson, Hardy is deeply pessimistic, from his distrust of

Christianity to his poems that focus on loss, death, and the pain of solitude. As with Robinson, Hardy was also trapped somewhere between Victorian forms and the more relaxed architecture of modern poetry. Hardy is traditional in that he was true to form in his eulogies, epics, and sonnets, but he altered them and modernized them with the use of different dialects, regional mythologies, and the invention of new words (Ramanzi, et al. 42). Hardy was also considered to be the first poet who openly pronounced his agnosticism and he incorporated his lack of faith in many of his poems. In “Hap,” the speaker wishes to have a God to blame for the injustices not only in his own life, but also for those that afflict the world: Then I would bear it, clench myself, and die, Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited; Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I Had willed and meted me the tears I shed (Hardy 44, 6-8). “Hap” begins in traditional four line stanzas, and then breaks from form suddenly in the final stanza, which consists of six lines. Frequently, Hardy’s poems will begin with a set form and then take a sudden turn towards a more modern prose style, most evident with the use of awkward syntax: “…How arrives it joy lies slain / And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?” (8-10) In “Channel Firing,” the dead look on as the First World War is set to begin: So down we lay again. ‘I wonder, Will the world ever saner be,’ Said one, ‘than when He sent us under In our indifferent century!’ (52, 25-28) Here, the Poet fears a modern war and he speaks in the voice of the dead who find that the world is no more improved than when they passed away. The helpless passage of time resurfaces in “Going and Staying”:

Seasons of blankness and of snow, The silent bleed of a world decaying, The moan of multitudes in woe; These were the things we wished would go; But they were staying (62; 6-10). The speaker mourns the passage of nature’s splendor and resents the vigor of misfortune in an increasingly chaotic world. Time is symbolized by a ghastly creature who sweeps away both good and bad and who cannot be dissuaded from his task. Hardy’s linguistic innovations are in contrast to his distrust for the new and his preoccupation with a past that he cannot reclaim. If Thomas Hardy and Edwin Arlington Robinson were wary innovators of poetic form, T.S. Eliot was purposeful and methodical in his pursuit of disrupting conventions. Eliot’s intellectualism, like Ezra Pound’s, affected his prose and brought forth a new dimension to free verse. “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock” are unapologetically modernist poems, however, these poems share in Robinson and Hardy’s apprehension of the future and its impersonal advancements, symbolized by characters who are not growing with time but glancing backward towards her. In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Eliot’s stanzas are not restrained by a recurring number of lines, or meters, but they are written in a prose form that revolutionized modern poetry. Time gradually slips away from the insecure and solitary Prufrock; he is self-conscious of his old age and paralyzed by social ineptitude. Prufrock is reminiscent of Robinson’s dejected characters who are unable to find solace in personal relationships, and who look back on things that they have lost, rather than look forward to what lies ahead. Although Eliot’s free verse and doom-saying vision of the future is both modernist and prophetic, he cannot outrun his classical

education and overpowering intellectualism. Eliot is a modernist in form and diction, but he is also a scholar, and he is unable to articulate his ideas about the future without references to the long since past. Eliot relies on ancient mythologies, literature, and religion, to create his canvass of the modern world. Eliot wrote of “The Waste Land,” “The more seasoned reader… does not bother about understanding; not, at least, at first” (Ramazani et al 473). Without question, “The Waste Land” is a difficult poem; possibly an inaccessible poem to some readers. Latin, French, German, and Italian, can be found strewn throughout the poem in which Eliot himself commented, “…I wasn’t even bothering whether I understood what I was saying,” (Ramazani 473). While many modernist poets such as William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost leaned towards more accessible language free of references to arcane histories, Eliot remained highly dependent on the past, with elucidation being heavily dependent on footnotes: Unreal city, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many. I had not thought death had undone so many. (Eliot 476; 60-63). Here Eliot employs Baudelaire and Dante to devise a landscape of the lost. In this, the fourth stanza, Eliot would go on to resurrect the works of the Bible, a fifteenth century play by John Webster, a fourteenth century play by Thomas Middleton, and Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra.” Eliot’s futuristic vision of a world corrupted by impersonal technologies, war, and corruption, is a vision dependent on the past as its landscape. In Part V, Eliot once again uses a Biblical story, this time from Luke, to aid in his description of “the present decay of eastern Europe” (Eliot 484): After the torchlight red on sweaty faces After the frosty silence in the gardens After the agony in stony places

The shouting and the crying Prison and palace reverberation Of thunder of spring over distant mountains He who is living is now dead We who are living are now dying (332-339). Written in 1921, “The Waste Land” is an apocalyptic poem that Eliot conceived during World War I. The poet’s modernist innovations in both form and context were a revelation in free verse, unobstructed by Victorian poetic conventions, but which relied heavily on ancient history, mythologies, and parables, from which the artist derived his wisdom. Hart Crane shares Eliot’s tendency to compress historical events into visionary prose. “The Bridge” is an American love poem, one which does not exclusively focus on the artist’s experience in his own country, but on the historical facts that made her glorious. Christopher Columbus and Pocahontas make appearances in “The Bridge,” as do various references to Biblical passages, and, of course, the customary Greek myths. However, unlike Eliot’s purposeful obscurity and European sensibility, Crane’s language is more accessible, arguably because he was a self-taught poet and not a scholar like Eliot (Ramazani et al 605). Crane writes of modern America in a Victorian tongue: “And thee, across the harbor, silver-paced / As though the sun took step of thee, yet left / Some motion ever unspent in thy stride / Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!” (Crane 614, 13-16) Like “The Waste Land,” “The Bridge” is a sprawling and difficult poem, one that relies heavily on the wisdom of the past in order to pronounce its hope for the future. Eliot wrote, “London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down,” (487, 427) but Crane’s Brooklyn Bridge will not fall; it will stand and be the pulse and the heartbeat of America: “Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still” (614, 23). Crane is a modernist of content and form, but he does not quite embrace the language of the modern world.

Like Eliot, Crane is drawn to mythology, religion, and history, and he incorporates these into modern poetry, but he does not change their voices; they remain antiquated and somewhat inaccessible to the average reader. Crane and Eliot are modernists because they defy traditional poetic forms, and bring to their poems an intellectual approach to story-telling rather than compartmentalized stanzas of regular beats, overused themes, and archetype characters. Eliot and Crane, however, are indebted to the classics, and they speak to the modern world with voices from the dead. Thomas Hardy and Edwin Arlington Robinson are modern poets whose speaking voices were always on the cusp of pessimism and despair, and with a watchful eye on the ambitions of the future. Hardy and Robinson broke away from the Romantics’ love and nature dotted themes, in favor of the poetry of doubt and loss. However, they remained loyal to rhyme, meter, and stanzas of equal lengths, while introducing the concerns of the increasingly modern man. T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane are modernists in intellectual scope and innovations in free verse, a poetic device which would become increasingly popular in modernist poetry. Eliot and Crane achieve modernity while bowing to the past, and relying on her wisdom to portray the modern world. Each of these poets worked to break the conventions set in place by the Romantics, but none quite succeeds at speaking confidently in the voice of the present and the near future because their voices were intonated by the past.

Crane, Hart “The Bridge.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Vol. 1. Eds. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellman and Robert O’Clair. New York: W.W. Norton

and Company. 2003. 613-618.

Eliot, T.S. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Waste Land.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Vol. 1. Eds. Jahan Ramazani et al. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. 2003. 463-467. 474-487.

Hardy, Thomas. “Hap” and “Channel Firing.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Vol 1. Eds. Jahan Ramazani et al. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. 44, 51-52.

Robonson, Edwin Arlington. “Miniver Cheevy” and “Mr. Flood’s Party.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Vol. 1. Eds. Jahan Ramazani Et al. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. 166, 169-171.