THE LIFE OF LITERATURE
the virtuosity of form in W.
H.
Auden, the cross between journalism
and Gertrude Stein of Hemingway's
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Music
is perhaps always the most logical of the arts which most clearly
defines the searching for a style of a decade, and I think the char–
acteristic compromises
of
today are to be found in the great and sud–
den commercial successes of modem music: the British opera, the
American symphony.
So my original preoccupation with the poetry of the branch of
coral extended in the reader's mind, had been transformed. The
change had come about partly as a result of experience, partly as the
result of contemporary influences : the two are perhaps inseparable.
For the literary experiences of
Ulysses
and
The Waste Land
had
broken down in my mind the barriers which isolated a certain type
of purely poetic experience from an area of modern experience
which I thought to be unpoetic. When Auden said that the most
beautiful walk at Oxford was along the canal by the gasworks, I
knew there was sense in his affectation, for I knew that what he
meant was that the gasworks and the Oxford countryside were parts
of the same whole experience of modern life, and that the discovery
of beauty within experience was an act of
will.
As
he pointed out,
no landscape was beautiful without a human spectator: the beautiful,
the significant were created by minds: therefore the business of the
spectator w.as to make his environment significant, to act upon it.
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my fathers wreck
And on the king my fathers death before him.
When I read these lines, the barriers between an area supposedly
poetic and one supposedly unpoetic within the actual world, had
been broken down in my mind. The untainted poetic pure images
had -mingled with the images of the world, and to try to write the
pure poetry would now not be to enter a fortress but to abandon
poetic experience.
The change which had taken place in my consciousness at this
time was decisive, dangerous, perhaps even fatal to my work. For
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