A Study of Rhymers' Club Poetry

A STUDY OF RHYMERS' CLUB POETRY By DANIEL RUTENBERG A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE COUNCIL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA December, 1967 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to many professors at the University of Florida, not only for the assistance extended me in writing this dissertation, but for their encouragement and understanding. I am especially indebted to Professor John Tyree Fain for the blend of scholarship and tact that made working under his direction so beneficial an experience. Professors Gordon Ellsworth Bigelow and A. L. Lewis, Jr. have also been most helpful. In addition, I may here express my appreciation to the staffs of the libraries of the University of Florida, the University of South Flor- ida, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina for their helpfulness. Finally, I should like to thank my wife and children for their inexhaustible patience. D.R. 11 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I. SOME PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS: ORIGIN, MEMBERSHIP, PUBLICATIONS, AND CONTEMPORARY REPUTATION 5 II. THE INTELLECTUAL MATRIX OF THE RHYMERS' CLUB 38 1. The Triangle of Escapism: God, the Flesh, and the Devil 38 2. The Major Influences: Pater and the French Poets 43 3. The Pursuit of Unreality: The Rhymers and Their Poems 62 4. Science, the Enemy: Conclusion 77 III. THE POETIC OF THE RHYMERS' CLUB 88 1. Ubiquitous Music 88 2. Key Sources of the Musical Analogue 91 3. Music and the Rhjoners' Poetry 110 IV. THE RHYMERS IN PERSPECTIVE 143 1. Isolation and the Image 143 2. Symbolism and Decadence 150 3. The Legacy of the Rhymers 166 BIBLIOGRAPHY 183 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 191 111 INTRODUCTION Efforts to regard the Rhymers' Club as a coherent movement have been generally unsuccessful; the critical consensus is that the thirteen- odd writers were individuals united by nothing more than their common love of poetry and that their achievements were separate and slight. Scholarly interest in the Rhymers has tended to focus on such diverse matters as Arthur Symons' introducing William Butler Yeats to French symbolism, the narrow range of Ernest Dowson's poetry, the importance of Yeats and Lionel Johnson to the Irish literary renascence, and, above all, the tortured lives of the poets of Yeats' s "tragic generation." Yet, although the Rhymers were never programmatic and articulated no poetic, they played a significant transitional role in the development from the didactic limitations of Tennyson and Browning to the integrated art of Pound, Eliot, and the later Yeats. It is perhaps attributable to the fact that the Rhymers were poets of retreat — artists who rejected the contemporary scene in a futile quest for sanctuary— that their achievement, modest that it was, has seldom been marked. The problem of the Rhymers' Club is analogous to that of the second generation of English romantic poets, whose tempestuous lives and early deaths tended to distract attention from their work. But the poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Keats is so compelling that critical attention inevitably shifts to its rightful object: their poetry. With the Rhymers this has not always been the case. That the poetry of the Rhy- mers' Club has been subordinated to biography is perhaps an adverse reflection on the Rhymers' art, but that art is of sufficient importance to merit a full-length study. The members of the Rhymers' Club read their poetry aloud to each other. Although only a few of the poems published in the Club's anthologies were first presented before the assembled group, every poem a Rhymer composed was written by someone especially sensitive to the aural effect of poetry. To the Rhymers poetry was a public art, the beauty of which was its euphony. We are reminded by Herbert Read of how lost this art is in our century: "Poetry as an art has become a secret and shame- faced activity: people are even shy of being seen reading poetry in a train, whereas the public declamation of poetry, as it was practised even in the nineteenth century, and as it is still practised in Russia, is 2 quite unknown." As declaimers of poetry the Rhymers were intent on its An unpublished dissertation, "The Rhymers' Club (Founded 1891): a Study of Its Activities and Their Significance," by Norman William Al- ford of the University of Texas, was completed late in 1965. However, its emphasis is more on the literary achievements of the members and how the Club influenced their careers than is the case in my study, in which the poetry itself is the focus. Furthermore, I have chosen to stress the intellectual and aesthetic assumptions common among the group and to show how these assumptions influenced their poetry, whereas Mr. Alford adopts the traditional critical position that the Rhymers' Club "comprised men of differing outlook and purpose who met simply from a shared con- cern for the craft of poetry at a time when it was out of fashion." This attitude toward the Rhymers is in keeping with the 1931 statement of Albert J, Farmer: "C'est dans un commun amour de la poe'sie que ses membres trouvent le principe d'unite' necessaire a 1' existence de leur groupe." (Le Mouvement esthetique et "decadent" en Angleterre [Biblio- theque de la Revue de litterature comparee, t. 75, Paris: H. Champion, 1931], p. 263.) Inasmuch as my research was essentially completed before Mr. Al- ford' s dissertation became available, I have made no further explicit reference to it in this study. 2 The Innocent Eye (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1947), pp. 93-94. "music," and it is the "music of poetry" that is the focal point of this essay. The Rhymers were not well known to their contemporaries, nor have they they been a posthumous literary success. Wliat little reputation which facts have had has been more notoriety than fame, an environment in this seldom thrive. With this sullied background in mind, I have begun study with a review of the history of the Club and of some pertinent biographical and bibliographical facts about its members. I have then their described the publication of the Club's two anthologies and reviewed critical reception. Those are the preliminary considerations. as The first question generally asked about a writer is an inquiry of less im- to what he said. Even though ideas have traditionally been portance in bellestristic than in expository prose, and of still less consequence in poetry, it is only natural to look to the discursive and therefore the intellectual content of any verbal structure. But close scrutiny of the Rhymers' poetry for new ideas leaves the reader in the position of the little boy asked to compliment the emperor on his new perplexing that poets clothes: he can find nothing at all I It seems whose intellectual endowment is unimpeachable should have written such to"puri- vacuous poetry. The explanation is to be found in their attempt the aes- fy" poetry of ideas, a notion which they derived chiefly from symbol- thetic of Walter Pater and the theory and practice of the French negativism ists. Therefore, in an attempt to understand this intellectual on the and its corollary, escapism, we shall consider these influences with those Rhymers and then compare the ideas of Pater and the Symbolists found in the Rhymers' own work. The traditional alternative to content is form. The Rhymers equated form with music, which in their poetic ramified into subject and metaphor. The replacement of painting by music as the poetic analogue for the nineteenth century was a part of the larger shift from mimetic to expressive aesthetics. "Music" became the ubiquitous term for the Rhymers, the key term of an implied poetic that they never articulated, but which influenced their great successors of the twentieth century. Just as Pater and the French were the seminal factors in the formulation of the ideas found in the Rhymers' poetry, they were also the forerunners and perhaps the ar- chitects of an aesthetic never before so fully expressed in English literature: poetry as music, and, especially, as euphony. The work of the Rhymers' Club will be presented here as the embodiment of the "music" inhering in these poems as form, subject, and metaphor. Finally, we must view the Rhymers in perspective. We must recon- cile the biographical fact of their alienation from society with the literary fact of their non-rhetorical poetry. Although these facts are apparently in different universes of discourse, they are related through the tension of the "Image, ... a radiant truth out of space and time," a locution and concept for which I am indebted to Mr. Frank Kermode. The relationship of the Rhymers' poetry to the Symbolist movement and its corollary, decadence, will next be considered. Then, having treated the Rhymers' poetry in the contexts of the past and the present, we shall see how the men of the "tragic generation" helped to create the condition that made the poetic achievement of the twentieth century possible. We will then have done justice to Yeats's "Companions of the Cheshire Cheese." CHAPTER I SOME PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS : ORIGIN, MEMBERSHIP, PUBLICATIONS, AND CONTEMPORARY REPUTATION Two slender sixteenmo anthologies published in the 1890' s, The Book of the Rhymers' Club and The Second Book of the Rhymers' Club , re- main as monuments to an ephemeral organization. It was a fugitive club of mainly young and little known London poets. Yet one of its members, William Butler Yeats, became perhaps the greatest modern poet in the Eng- lish language. Three others, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and Arthur Symons, earned minor, but secure, reputations.

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