Modern American Poetry

(^60) Hugh Kenner
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.
and closes with a quick evocation of the pullulating new artistic soil,
entrapping the artist in an opportunity for defined and significant passions
that all but swamp his Flaubertian criteria:
frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.
Poem V intensifies the antithesis between sacrifice and gain:
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
The cultural heritage has been reduced to the status of a junkman’s inventory
by the conservators of tradition mobilized behind the epitaph of poem I; the
superimposed tension of the apparent incommensurability, at best, of human
lives and civilized achievements brings the sequence to a preliminary climax
that prepares for the change of the next six sections into a retrospective key.
‘Yeux Glauques’ poises the pre-Raphaelite purity,
Thin like brook water,
With a vacant gaze
against the bustle of Gladstone and Buchanan (whose attack on ‘The Fleshly
School of Poetry’ was answered by Rossetti and Swinburne). The painted
woman of the poem contains in her ‘questing and passive’ gaze the complex
qualities of passion, between the poles of Swinburne and Burne-Jones, which
the aesthetic movement of the nineteenth century mobilized against a world
in which ‘The English Rubaiyat was still-born’. The picturesque
reminiscences of the nineties in the next poem intensify the personal
tragedies of the inheritors of that movement; ‘Dowson found harlots cheaper