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Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde

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Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde Children of the Mire The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1971-1972 Children of the Mire Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde OCTA VIO PAZ Translated by Rachel Phillips Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England © Copyright 1974 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Second printing 197 5 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 73-88498 ISBN 0-6 74-116 25-9 (cloth) ISBN 0-674-11626-7 (paper) Printed in the United States of America Preface In El area y Ia lira (Mexico, 1956), published many years ago, I tried to answer three questions about poetry. What is a poem? What do poems say? How do poems communicate? This book is an amplification of the response I tried to make to the third of these questions. A poem is an object fashioned out of the language, rhythms, beliefs, and obsessions of a poet and a society. It is the product of a defi nite history and a definite society, but its historical mode of existence is contradictory. The poem is a device which produces anti-history , even though this may not be the poet's intention. The poetic process inverts and converts the passage of time; the poem does not stop time­ it contradicts and transfigures it. Whether we are talking about a baroque sonnet, a popular epic, or a fable, within its confines time passes differently from time in history or in what we call real life. Contradiction between history and poetry is found in all societies, but only in the modern age is it so manifest. Response to and awareness of the discord between society and poetry has been the central, often secret, theme of poetry since the Romantic era. In this book I have tried to describe, from the perspective of a Spanish American poet, the modern poetic movement and its contradictory relationships with what we call "the modern." v Preface Despite language and cultural differences the Western world has only one modern poetry . It is hardly necessary to point out that "Western" em braces Anglo-American and La tin American poetic traditions (the latter with three branches: Spanish , Portuguese , and French). To illustrate the unity of modern poetry I have chosen those episodes of its history which I consider most relevant: its birth in English and German Roman­ ticism; its metamorphosis into French Symbolism and Spanish American modenzismo; and, finally, its culmination in the avant-garde trends of the twentieth century . From its earliest days modern poetry has been a reaction against the modern era, tugging first in one direction then another as the manifestations of the modern have changed-the Enlightenment, critical reason, liberalism, positivism, and Marxism . This explains the ambiguity of its relationships-almost always beginning with an enthusiastic devotion followed by a brusque rupture-with the revolutionary movements of the modern age, from the French Revolution to the Russian . In their opposition to modern rationalism poets rediscover a tradition, as ancient as man, which was kept alive by Renaissance Neoplatonism and the hermetic and occultist sects and tendencies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This tradition crosses the eighteenth century , penetrates the nineteenth, and reaches our own. I am referring to analogy, the vision of the universe as a system of correspondences, and of language as the universe's double. Analogy as the Romantics and Symbolists understood it is subverted by irony, that is to say, by the consciousness of the modern age and its criticism of Christianity and other religions. The twentieth century turns irony into humor-black, green , VI Preface or purple. Analogy and irony confront the poet with the rationalism and progressivism of the modern age ; at the same time and just as violently they put him face to face with Christianity. Modern poetry's theme is twofold : it is a con­ tradictory dialogue with and against modern revolutions and the Christian faiths; and within poetry and each poetic work, there is a dialogue between analogy and irony. The context within which this double dialogue unfolds is yet another dia­ logue: modern poetry can be seen as the history of contra­ dictory relationships, fascination and repulsion intertwined, between Romance and Germanic languages, the central tradition of Greco-La tin Classicism and the eccentric tradition of the individual and the bizarre represented by Romanticism; syllabic and accentual verse. Avant-garde movements in the twentieth century trace the same patterns as in the previous century, but in inverse direc­ tion. The "modernism" of the Anglo-American poets is an attempt to return to the central tradition of Europe-the exact opposite of German and English Romanticism-while French Surrealism carries German Romanticism to its furthest extreme. Our own period marks the end of the avant-garde, and thereby of everything which since the eighteenth century has been called modern art. What is in question in the second half of our century is not the idea of art itself, but the idea of the modern . At the end of this book I deal with poetry that has come into existence since the avant-garde. Those pages unite with Los sign as en rota cion, a poetic manifesto I published in 1965, which now serves as the epilogue to El area y !a lira. I wish to acknowledge my gratitude to the translator, Rachel vii Preface Phillips, to Ann Louise McLaughlin, and to the poet William Ferguson, who helped me revise the lectures (the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures) which make up this book. 0. P. Cambridge, Massachusetts June 28, 1972 viii Preface Contents 1 A Tradition against Itself 1 2 The Revolt of the Future 19 3 Children of the Mire 38 4 Analogy and Irony 58 5 Translation and Metaphor 78 6 The Closing of the Circle 102 Revolution/Eros/Meta-Irony 103 The Pattern Reversed 115 The Twilight of the Avant-Garde 148 Notes 165 Sources and Credits 177 Index 181 ix Contents Mais I'oracle invoque pour jamais dut se taire; Un seul pouvait au monde expliquer ce mystere: -Celui qui donna l'ame aux enfants du limon. Gerard de N erval (Le Christ aux Oliviers, V) 1 A Tradition against Itself The title of this chapter, "A Tradition against Itself," at first seems a contradiction. Can "tradition" be that which severs the chain and interrupts the continuity? Could this negation become a tradition without denying itself? The tradition of discontinuity implies the negation not only of tradition but of discontinuity as well. Nor is the contradiction resolved by · replacing the phrase "a tradition against itself" with words less obviously contradictory-such as "the Modern Tradition." How can the modern be traditional? Despite the implicit contradiction-sometimes with full awareness of it, as Baudelaire's reflections in L 'art romantique­ since the beginning of the last century modernity has been termed a tradition, and rejection considered the privileged form of change. To say that modernity is a tradition is slightly inaccurate; I should say the other tradition. Modernity is a polemical tradition which displaces the tradition of the moment, whatever it happens to be, but an instant later yields its place to still another tradition which in turn is a momentary manifesta­ tion of modernity. Modernity is never itself; it is always the other. The modern is characterized not only by novelty but by otherness. A bizarre tradition and a tradition of the bizarre, I A Tradition against Itself modernity is condemned to pluralism : the old tradition was always the same, the modern is always different. The former postulates unity between past and present; the latter, not content with emphasizing its own differences, affirms that the past is not one but many._ The tradition of the modern is thus radical otherness and plurality of pasts. The present will not tolerate the past; today will not be yesterday's child. What is modern breaks with the past, denies it entirely. Mqdernity is sufficient unto itself; it founds its own tradition."An example is the title of Harold Rosenberg's book on art, Th e Tradition of the New. Although the new may not be exactly the modern­ certain novelties are not modern-this title expresses clearly and succinctly the paradox at the root of the art and poetry of our time, the intellectual principle simultaneously justifying and denying them, their nourishment and their poison. The art and poetry of our time live on modernity-and die from it. In the history of Western poetry the cult of the new and the love of novelty appear with a regularity which I dare not call �------- -� �-.-..<...-- � cyclical, but which is not random either. There are periods when the rule is the "imitation of the Ancients," others which glorify novelty and surprise. The English "metaphysical" and the Spanish Baroque poets are examples of the latter. Both practiced with equal enthusiasm the aesthetics of surprise. Novelty and surprise are kindred terms, but they are not the same. The c9nceits, metaphors, and other verbal devices of the Baroque poem are designed to amaze : what is new is new if it is unexpected. But seventeenth-century novelty was not critical nor did it imply the negation of tradition. On the contrary, it affi rmed its continuity. Gracian says the Moderns 2 Children of the Mire are more witty than the Ancients-not that they are diffe rent. He enthuses over the works of certain of his contemporaries, not because their authors have abandoned an older style, but because they provide new and surprising combinations of the same elements. Neither Gongora nor Gracian was revo­ lutionary in the sense in which we use the word today ; they did not set out to change the ideas of beauty of their time-although Gongora actually did� For them n,ovelty was synonymous not with change but with\amazement.) To find this strange marriage of the aesthetics of surprise and rlegation, we must move to the end of the eighteenth century , to the beginning of the modern era.
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