What has happened to one word has happened to many words and can happen to many more. And the causes are not, as is sometimes supposed, limited to a poor teaching of English, or a disregard of the dictionary. In this instance, the shift is probably involved in the radical trial which conventional morality has undergone in the last twenty-five years, and certainly there is also involved the influence of newspapers, the stage, the films, and the literary zest with which most people read of the sins of others.
This example does not make clear how a degradation in the meaning of a word can be fruitful as well as foolish. There is a shift of meaning and a new richness of meaning, of course, but some of the exactness has already been lost and more is going to be lost. Let me point out two more examples in which the complicated and mixed benefits and losses of the change may appear more fully. For a number of years I taught English composition. I taught because I was unable to support myself by writing poetry (for the most part, however, I like to teach very much). When I began to teach, I was confounded by simple misuses of languages of which intrigue is a fairly representative example. One student wrote that “swimming is my chief abstraction,” and another student said that “a certain part of my native city is slightly ugly.” A third student who was attempting to describe the salutary effects of higher education upon all members of the fairer and weaker sex said that it was good for a girl to go to college because “it makes a girl broader.” When I corrected the last word in accordance with my instructions as to the proper usage of English — and with a physical sense of one of the meanings of broader — the student protested that I had a peculiar mind; otherwise I would not object to the way in which she used broader instead of broadens.
These errors — errors at least from the point of view of conventional and prescribed usage — made me reflect upon the character I played as a teacher of composition. The students thought I was pedantic when they did not think I was idiosyncratic. The difficulty was that so many of them made the same errors that, in a way, they were no longer errors. Moreover, the longer I thought about some of the errors, the more they seemed to be possible enlargements of meaning and association which might be creative. There was a real sense in which swimming, for an urban human being, was an abstraction as well as a distraction. So too, to say that something was slightly ugly was to suggest that a word or words denoting degrees of ugliness from homeliness and plainness to what was utterly ugly were lacking in English. And finally, it was true enough that education might make a girl broader as well as broaden a girl’s outlook, although I doubt that this would have occurred to me if it had not been for this fruitful error.
The experience of teaching English literature and English poetry directly confronts the poet who teaches English with what can only be described as the most educated part of the population. Before the poet has taught English, he may well have been under the impression that no one except poets read modern poetry (with a few and misleading exceptions). When he teaches poetry in the classroom, he finds out something which may be a great hope or a great delusion. It may be a delusion now and a hope for the future. At any rate, he does discover that he can persuade any student to understand any kind of poetry, no matter how difficult. They understand it as long as they are in the classroom, and they remain interested in it until they depart from school. Since so many poets have more and more undertaken the teaching of English and of poetry, it does seem possible that this may be the beginning of a new audience trained in reading and aware of how marvelous and exalted the rewards of poetry can be. But this is a matter which must be realized in the future. In the present, it is true that as soon as the student leaves school, all the seductions of mass culture and middle-brow culture, and in addition the whole way of life of our society, combine to make the reading of poetry a dangerous and quickly rejected luxury. The poet who teaches has immediate experiences in the classroom which give him some reason to hope for a real literary and poetic renaissance. As soon as he departs from the pleasant confines of the university, he discovers that it is more and more true that less and less people read serious poetry. And the last straw may be the recognition that even poets do not read very much poetry: Edwin Arlington Robinson confessed that during the latter half of his life, he read hardly any poems except his own which he read again and again, and which may explain the paralysis of self-imitation which overcomes many good poets in mid-career. Here then is another trait which distinguishes the vocation of the modern poet from poets of the past: he not only knows how language is inexactly and exactly used, he also knows that for the most part only other poets will read his poems.
One reason that language is misused, whether fruitfully or not, is that in modern life experience has become international. In America itself the fact of many peoples and the fact that so large a part of the population has some immigrant background and cherishes the fragments of another language creates a multilingual situation in which words are misused and yet the language is also enriched by new words and new meanings. To make fun of errors in the use of language and to make the most comedy possible of foreign accents — or for that matter, an English accent — is an important and vital part of American humor, which is itself a very important part of American life. Moreover, the pilgrimage to Europe has for long been an important episode in the national experience. The American tourist in Europe, Baedeker in hand, has for generations spelled out the names of places, and works of art, and delicious foods. And most crucial of all, the experience of two world wars has made Americans conscious of the extent to which the very quality of their lives depends upon the entire international situation. Whether the danger is from Germany or from Russia, whether a banking scandal occurs in Paris, or Spain becomes Fascist, or the Vatican intervenes in American politics and American morality and American education, no one at this late date can fail to be aware of the extent to which the fate of the individual is inseparable from what is happening in the whole world.
These facts are, of course, in one sense platitudes; and yet it may not be clear how they affect the modern poet in his vocation as such. I want to resort to examples again before trying to define the way in which the international scene and an involvement with it affect the poet as a poet and have to do with his calling.
To quote once more from that truly modern poet, T. S. Eliot, here is a passage from one of his best poems, “Gerontion.” Christ, the protagonist says is:
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero
With caressing hands, at Limoges
Who walked all night in the next room;
By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;
By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
Shifting the candles; Fraülein von Kulp
Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door.
Let us think a little merely of the names of the people he remembers, Mr. Silvero, Hakagawa, Madame de Tornquist, Fraülein von Kulp. Is it not evident that the experience which provides the subject-matter of the poet or inspires him to write his poem is not only European, but international, since Hakagawa is presumably Japanese; and involves all history, all culture, since the reference here to Titian is matched elsewhere by allusions to ancient Egypt, Buddhist sermons, and the religion of classical Greece? Another aspect of the same involvement and of how it has a direct impact on the writing of the poetry is illustrated in “Sweeney Agonistes” where “two American gentlemen here on business” arrive in London and rehearse the clichés of colloquial American speech: London, one of them explains with great politeness to his English friends, is “a slick place, London’s a swell place,/London’s a fine place to come on a visit—,” and the other adds with equal politeness: “Specially when you got a real live Britisher/A guy like Sam to show you around/Sam of course is at home in London,/And he’s promised to show us around.” In the same work, at a moment of great anguish, another character reiterates the poet’s extreme sensitivity to and concern for language when he says: “I gotta use words when I talk to you.”