United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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built an ephemeral reputation by interpreting the rigmarole as “thinking raised to a more than ordinary intensity,” and society at large has disposed of the whole affair as a comparatively innocuous manifestation of that curious lunacy under which the world is furi¬ ously arming itself against its imminent suicide. I shall not bore you now by discussing Mr. Mencken’s little the¬ ory that modem art is simply the pastime of the spiritually decadent and the “intellectually immature,” but it does seem to me that un¬ less poetry hastens to revitalize itself at the Pierian fountain, it is destined rapidly to retrogress towards that primitive guttural in which it had its origin. As things stand at present, the man of let¬ ters would be well advised to draw the obvious moral from an ele¬ mentary survey of literary history. Pre-Socratic Magi made a haunt¬ ing melody of the most forbiddingly metaphysical of themes; Dante and Chaucer sang with a more than amateurish insight of the nature of humours and Hell; and even as late as the sixteenth century, in the post-Ptolemaic twilight before Scripture was wholly discredited, the moral Milton penned a fervent epic upon the adventures of an attractive Devil who darted nonchalantly around in the extra-mun¬ dane chaos and matched his wits with his God. These men made brilliant music of the intellectual currents of their times. Since the incorporation of empiricism, however, and the Royal Society’s in¬ sistence upon a “mathematical plainness” of speech, the dominant tendency has been for the paths of literature and science increasingly to diverge; and while the truth-seekers have described an ever changing absolute with all the verbal inflation of Kant Darwin, the poets have grown constantly more obscure and insipid until they threaten to outdo even the philosophers in the fine art of in¬ coherent profundity. What between Mr. Joyce and the Soviet cam¬ paign for social propaganda, art is today perched precariously with one foot in the grave and the other waving about in frantic icono- clasm in the hope of convincing itself that it is still alive. That, of course, presents a problem for the Euthanasians; but in the mean¬ time certain academic Isaiahs might at least clamber down from their lecterns and give us something more aesthetically significant than hysterical pacifism in a subterranean vault. We have already languished too long under the twofold delusion that poetry is a mere stimulus of 1 pleasurable emotion, while Mr. Poincare’s “con¬ venient conventions” have a more than pragmatic truth; and if we are ever to be freed from these popular fallacies .... Let us bow our heads and pray! [12]

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towards Stalinism. The new Bolsheviki were determined to “organ¬ ize the psyche of the toiling masses,” and their triumph was magni¬ ficent: they achieved an absolute stifling of all creative endeavour between the Urals and the Caspian Sea. While this tragic opera was being enacted in the Near East, the cognoscenti of post-war letters were tilting with a futile fury at imaginary windmills, or dashing madly about in the deserts of their own creation and hiding their heads in the sands. These juvenile gymnasts were vaguely aware of the menace of materialism and seized upon science as their bete noir; they resurrected the cele¬ brated disagreement between Arnold and Huxley and proclaimed the superiority of humane letters to empirical science as a way of wisdom. Darwin and Spencer had purged the universe of poetry, while Freud and Adler were explaining creative activity as the sub¬ limation of scatological desires; and the frantic dilletantes sought to exorcize the bogey men with an old-fashioned snobbery and a new species of black magic. Mr. T. S. Eliot, dabbled in Catholic classicism, decried the “curious Freudian — social — mystical — rationalistic — higher — Critical interpretation of literature,” and yearned for some unsanitary cloister in which the man of sense would have an un¬ limited opportunity to contemplate his navel and indulge in the meticulous dissection of metaphysical hairs. Prof. Irving Babbitt denounced “Naturalism” as preached by Francis Bacon and the thoroughly un-Baconian Rousseau, declared that “all the good things which are connected with manners and with civilization” were the work of pious gentlemen, and revamped the dix-huitieme ideal of the private salon in which the man of leisure might shut himself off from harsh reality and wallow in the amenities of culture and the felicitous exchange of social gossip. When it became evident that humanity was losing faith in such literary panaceas and swinging into step with the men of science, the literati withdrew into a world of personal experience and individual ecstasy, tilled the Pamassien weed of “l’art pour l’art,” and toyed with the inept theories of undis¬ ciplined punctuation and etymological gibberish; they played the sedulous ape to mr. e.e. cummings and wrote about “the Pytha¬ gorean sesquipedelia of the panepistemion, grunted and gromwelled, ichabod, habbakuk, opanoff, uggamyg, hapaxle, gomenon, pppppffff,” or what you will. The quotation is from James Joyce’s “Work in Progress,” and anyone’s guess is as good as mine. In any case the lone consequence of this verbal revelry has been that scores of delirious undergraduates and deluded farm boys are perpetrating “poetry” upon a bewildered public, a few critical opportunists have [113

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THE POETRY CONTEST This year’s poetry contest is disappointing. On the whole verse makers avoided the insipidity of smoothly turned conventional verse. But in most cases they failed to justify the attempt at freedom. Only one piece exhibited significance or distinction in either matter or manner. This may have been due to the nature of the contest. It might be wiser to define the re¬ quirements—to ask for humorous verses, for heroic couplets, for sonnets, or for poems on a specific theme. Contestants this year seemed to lack both direction and energy and there was little proof of labour performed under the discipline imposed by a sense of craftsmanship. Poetry is the intense expression of vital experience whatever else it may be. The ex¬ perience is surely among our students. Competent expression in the poetic medium seems yet to seek. An annual contest such as this may justify itself if it serves to reveal this latter fact and stimulate a desire to challenge it. The contestants may discuss the matter over a cup of tea. The awards are as follows: 1. To a Poet. 2. As Loved our Fathers. 3. Evening at Basswood Lake. Reported for the Department of English, —A. L. P. TO A POET Why do you sing still of solitude, And quiet places, Of woody slopes, a turbulent rill, Blue skies and seas, the robin’s trill, When all that I see is a multitude Of human faces? Here is the place where I must live My span of life. Is all the comfort that you can give Flee from this strife? Is there not beauty in crowds of men Of streets, of houses, and chimney stacks? Is this not a virgin forest too with Mobile vigour that Nature lacks: Then why do you leave me thus and stand Futile, alone. In the midst of green sand And sterile stone, Hymning the dead on the edge of the Promised land. —M. D. Gilchrist, ’37. 1131