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.155).He had reached what he describes asthe actual frontier position of modern speculation.The intellectualists, the lay theologians, having been violently expelled from the temple and the final admission made that logical thought is by its nature incapable of containing the flux of reality, what remains? Are we to resign ourselves to ignorance of the nature of the cosmos, or is there some new method open to us?Bergson says that there is – that of intuition.(CW, p.91)As Hulme goes on to say: ‘By intellect one can construct approximate models, byintuition one can identify oneself with the flux’ ( CW, p.91).For Hulme what isT.E.Hulme and the ‘Spiritual Dread of Space’ 99particularly valuable for his poetic theory is Bergson’s belief that art, which works through intuition and the imagination, can lead one back into contact with thecomplex, shifting mutability of experience.In his first book, Time and Free Will, published in 1889, Bergson had written:‘Now if some bold novelist, tearing aside the cleverly woven curtain of ourconventional ego, shows us under this appearance of logic a fundamentalabsurdity, under this juxtaposition of simple states an infinite permeation of athousand different impressions which have already ceased to exist the instant they are named, we commend him for having known us better than we knew ourselves’(Bergson, 1910, p.133).Whilst to some extent this is an illusion – Bergson says, because the novelist can only use words, we are only seeing the ‘shadow’ ofourselves – all the same we gain new insight into the complexity and contradictory nature of the self: ‘Encouraged by him’, Bergson concludes, ‘we have put aside for an instant the veil which we interposed between our consciousness and ourselves.He has brought us back into our own presence’ (1910, p.134).This partialovercoming of the nature of language, he suggests, can also be achieved – and this was particularly relevant for Hulme’s poetic theories – through the use of images, something Bergson discusses in Introduction to Metaphysics, a text that Hulme would translate.Having compared ‘duration’, the flux of the inner life as it unfolds in time, with the unrolling of a spool, the winding of thread into a ball, and the drawing out of a tiny piece of elastic, Bergson argues that although ‘no image can produce exactly the original feeling I have of the flow of my own conscious life’, it is still the case thatthe image has at least this advantage, that it keeps us in the concrete.No image can replace the intuition of duration, but many diverse images, borrowed from verydifferent orders of things, may, by the convergence of their action, direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to be seized.By choosing images as dissimilar as possible, we shall prevent any one of them from usurping the place of the intuition it is intended to call up.(Bergson, 1999, pp.27-8)For Hulme, of course, the image becomes central.As he puts it in ‘A Lecture onModern Poetry’, probably delivered in November 1908, ‘there are, roughlyspeaking, two methods of communication, a direct, and a conventional language.The direct language is poetry, it is direct because it deals in images.The indirect language is prose, because it uses images that have died and become figures ofspeech’ ( CW, p.55).Yet like Bergson, he emphasizes that poetry works through the bringing together of possibly very different images ‘in juxtaposition’, thecollage principle that underlines so much modernist art; ‘To this piling-up ofimages in different lines, one can find a fanciful analogy in music.Two visual images form what one may call a visual chord.They unite to suggest an imagewhich is different to both’ ( CW, p.54).Given that for Hulme poetry is the contrary of conventional language, it is scarcely surprising that he rejects theaccepted regular metric lines and traditional forms of poetry, turning to Gustave Kahn’s exposition of the principles of vers libre in order to effect ‘the100T.E.Hulme and the Question of Modernismemancipation of verse’ for English poetry that the French have achieved for theirs ( CW, p.52).Poetry, he says, must find ‘a new technique each generation.Each age must have its own special form of expression’ ( CW, p.51).‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ is the opening salvo – to add another military metaphor – in thedevelopment of modernist verse, and Hulme leaves one in no doubt that he intendsit to be verse fit for fighting men.7 He is insistent on transforming poetry from what he regards as the effeminate decadence of post-Victorian poetry into a manly art: ‘The latter stages in the decay of an art form are very interesting and worth study because they are peculiarly applicable to the state of poetry at the present day.They resemble the latter stages in the decay of religion when the spirit has gone and there is a meaningless reverence for formalities and ritual.The carcass is dead and all the flies are upon it.Imitative poetry springs up like weeds, andwomen whimper and whine of you and I, alas, and roses, roses all the way.Itbecomes the expression of sentimentality rather than of virile thought’ ( CW, p.51).I will return to this association of the whimpering women and thedecomposing, fly-ridden carcass later; but I want to end this section with a brief comment on the poetry that Hulme wrote.Hulme insists that he turned to poetry to capture ‘the peculiar feeling’ induced by the prairies, but little of his verse appears at first sight to do that in any straightforward way.Yet it is striking that most of his poems are about, or evoke, the sky, most often at night, recalling, I would suggest, the ‘wide horizons’ of the prairie skies.Of the eight poems published by Csengeri, for example, seven in some way or other are concerned with the sky.Those poems,however, rarely reflect that overwhelming sense of the incomprehensibility of the cosmos that the flats of Canada (according to ‘Cinders’) induced in him, although there are occasional dark moments in the poems that he chose not to publish.Alun Jones quotes a one-line image: ‘Down the long desolate street of the stars’, andalso reprints a bleak poem that begins, ‘At Night!/ All the terror’s in that’, and that ends with a reference to ‘the obscene gods/ On their flying cattle/ Roaming the sky prairie’ (Jones, 1960, p.24) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]