Feathers in the Canyon

THE STRUGGLE OF THE MODERN by Stephen Spender. 266 pages. University of California. $5.

In the words of Wordsworth, Milton had a "voice whose sound was like the sea." So, in their own way, did Wordsworth or Pope or Walt Whitman. But today the roar of the sea has subsided to a whisper; poets are so soft-spoken that they are often not noticed. Stephen Spender, a poet who is a bit becalmed himself, offers some provocative reasons for the sea change in modern poetry.

Poetry fell on difficult days at the end of the last century, writes Spender. It grew obscure as the world grew obscure. Science presented a picture of a universe in flux; nothing solid seemed left for metaphor. The traditional poetic symbols--house, horse, church, state --had been undermined. As was their duty, the poets reflected their time's unease--and exaggerated it. Yeats' last poems, Eliot's Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses portray a world of chaos.

When life, in spite of wars, went on pretty much as before, poets had to retreat from their "apocalyptic" position. Their aims became more modest, their poetry more subdued, coherent, and less exciting. Moreover, poets could only go so far out. There is no end to avant-gardism in music and the plastic arts, because there are an infinite number of materials for shape and sound. But poetry is stuck with old materials: words. They can only be stretched so far; Pound, Eliot and Joyce stretched them to the breaking point. Thus Stravinsky and Picasso continue to dazzle the world with their innovations, while Eliot has retreated from the experiments of The Waste Land to the more conventional language of the verse plays.

But modern poets, writes Spender, have become too modest. In the face of the great impersonal, inhuman forces at loose in the world, there has been too much "shrinking of the imagination." The typical modern poet, says Spender, "launching his slim volume of verse, is like a person dropping a feather over the edge of the Grand Canyon and then waiting for the echo." If values are missing or in decay today, it is the poet's traditional task to help re-create them. He must not take shelter in his private world, but attempt to "personalize" in his work the outside world he often fears. Like the poets of old, he must write with the "same mixture of hope and despair in the face of history."

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