Modern American Poetry

(^62) Hugh Kenner
The third exhibit is the genuine stylist in hiding, an anticlimactic
redaction of the Lake Isle of Innisfree:
The haven from sophistications and contentions
Leaks through its thatch;
He offers succulent cooking;
The door has a creaking latch.
These are not poèmes à clef; but the post-war fortunes of Ford Madox Ford are
entirely apropos. Ford, the collaborator of Conrad and in the decade pre-war
the lone enunciator of the Flaubertian gospel in England, on his discharge
from the army retired in disgust to Sussex to raise pigs, and ultimately, at
about the same time as Pound, left England. His detailed account of the
cultural state of post-war London in the first third of It Was the Nightingale
can be made to document Mauberleyline by line. The reviewing synod
hastened to write his epitaph, so effectively that his reputation is only
beginning to quicken a quarter of a century after the publication of his best
work. Pound has never made a secret of his respect for Ford, and Ford has
testified that Pound alone of the young writers he could claim to have
‘discovered’ about 1908 did not amid his later misfortunes disown and
castigate him. It pleases at least one reader to suppose that it is the spectacle
of Ford’s disillusion that animates these three extraordinary stanzas.
Poems XI and XII present a post-war contrast to the intricate
contemplative passion of ‘Yeux Glauques’. The twelfth closes the survey of
the London situation with an image of grotesquely effusive aristocratic
patronage; ‘Daphne with her thighs in bark’ dwindles to the Lady Valentine
in her stuffed-satin drawing-room, dispensing ‘well-gowned approbation of
literary effort’ in sublime assurance of her vocation for a career of taste and
discrimination:
Poetry, her border of ideas,
The edge, uncertain, but a means of blending
With other strata
Where the lower and higher have ending;
A hook to catch the Lady Jane’s attention,
A modulation toward the theatre,
Also, in the case of revolution,
A possible friend and comforter.