The Object-Poem: In Defence of Referentiality

Abstract

IThe history of poetry after Romanticism may be - and has been seen as a direct development out of it. The three conceptions which Rene Wellek has claimed make it possible to speak of Romanticism as one European movement - imagination, nature and symbol (1963:128-198) - can be shown to be equally central to the poetry that succeeded it. They may be said, moreover, to have become even more extreme in their claim for totality. The omnipotence of the imagination, moulding the facts of the world according to its own esemplastic vision, is nowhere as total as in French Surrealism; the vitalistic, anthropomorphic idea of nature is nowhere as violent as in German Expressionism; and the use of symbol and myth for poetic style is at least as central to Rilke or Yeats as it is to Shelley. But if post-Romantic developments can be shown to continue and reinforce the Romantic mode, they can also be said to move in the opposite direction. It is this opposite direction, moreover, that may be regarded - as for instance by T.S. Eliot in an aside on the imagistsI - as more central to Modernism. For if the subordination of world to mind, eye to I, facts to symbols, is the common ground of Wellek's three criteria, this ground is often abandoned in the poetry of the last hundred and fifty years. An awareness of the dangers of over-subjectivity, a felt need to return from the flights of the imagination to a cleaner, closer look at extra-human facts, seems important - though in very different ways - to Hopkins or Hulme in England, to Leconte de Lisle or Francis Ponge in France, to Liliencron or Rilke in Germany, to William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens in the U.S. Its motivation varies from case to case: