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STEPHEN SPENDER
and even perversion of a tradition into expression of ideas that may
seem its opposite, is Baudelaire's
Fieurs du M ai.
The traditionally
catholic consciousness of Baudelaire realizes itself in the pursuit of
evil. Grace is discovered in damnation, and the only part of the
faith that does not seem to have undergone a terrible transmutation,
is the doctrine of Original Sin. The process by which the little flowers
of St. Francis become in the late nineteenth century the flowers of
evil, can also be reversed, and a certain intensity of corruption or
debauchery can be taken as a sign of grace. Claudel was converted
to catholicism by reading the poems of Rimbaud,
poete maudit, par
excellence.
The justification of this conversion of traditions into art which
seems almost their opposite is, of course, that for the person who
has been really born into the true life of the tradition the modern
world produces the distortion.
If
Ulysses were a wanderer on the
stage of the twentieth century, he would be Leopold Bloom. Such
a view may seem too sophisticated, too much part of a world, in
which the poet, or man of letters, has become so isolated from
everything except literature, that there is something dubious about
his claiming to have beliefs in the same sense as ordinary human
beings might have them. One may suspect that the beliefs of poets
who are
also
critics and who have made profoundly intellectual
analyses of the effects of the world around them on their situations
as poets may have been improvised to bolster up their own vocation.
This is especially so, I think, when the poet appears to see nothing
else in the sum of human progress than its undermining of the
traditional positions of art.
But when one turns to writers like Gerard Manley Hopkins in
whom faith seems undoubtedly more important than literary voca–
tional self-interest, one sees the necessity of revolutionizing traditions
in order to express faith in terms of modern life, as directly arising
out of the need for expression. And in a poet like Wilfred Owen, in
whom the human individuality predominates over the thought-out
position of the strategic man of letters, one notes an irony towards
the traditional view of poetry as beauty, which compares with
that of Leopold Bloom being the incarnation of Ulysses in his modern
Dublin setting.
