Pastoral Patterns in the Early Poetry of T. Sturge Moore

Pastoral Patterns in the Early Poetry of T. Sturge Moore GROSVENOR POWELL University of British Columbia T. STURGE MOORE began writing in the 1890s just before the late romantic poetry of the Symbolists and the English Decadents gave way, largely under the guidance of Ezra Pound, to various forms of experimental Modernism. Moore continued to write throughout the period dominated by Pound, Yeats, and Eliot, and died in 1944, as Anglo-American poetry was entering an entirely new phase. Despite the long career, however, it is Moore's early work, the poetry produced in the Nineties and during the first few years of the new century, that gives us the fullest insight into his remarkable contribution to our understanding of major poetic and theoretical problems of the twentieth century. This early work was frequently praised by Pound, and Moore's advice and example influenced Yeats.1 Moore's poetry has been ignored in part because it has seemed to have no special relevance to the twentieth century. This conclusion has been reached by critics who see revolutionary and revisionist thinking in poetry largely in stylistic terms. The great revolutionists of early Modernism were writers who radically altered the formal and stylistic procedures of literature. This is not what Moore did. Working largely within the limits of nineteenth-century conventions and formal procedures and the nineteenth-century models that were still dominant when he was developing his early technique, Moore arrived, nevertheless, at imaginative solutions to the problem of how poetry was to continue into the twentieth century. These solutions not only influenced the development of Yeats but also prefigured many of the innovations of Wallace Stevens. In addition, Moore explored epistemological and ontological questions fundamental to nineteenth-century romanticism and to the hyper-romanticism of Jacques Derrida and his American imitators. It is perhaps because he did not adapt his style to the taste of the new century as did Yeats that he has been so totally ignored in our time. During the 55 ELT : VOLUME 35:1 1992 first ten years of the twentieth century, one would not have guessed that Moore was virtually to disappear from the canon and that it would be Yeats who was to dominate the next several decades and to become a major figure. But Moore's appearance of conservativism in technique is very misleading: he actually used the conventions that he inherited from the nineteenth century innovatively as instruments of thought and of what I can only call, with some misgivings, moral evaluation. Despite the Modernist critique of romanticism, we are still in a period that is continuous with the nineteenth century. Post-Structuralism, as has been widely noted in recent years, is a kind of hyper-romanticism.2 We can now see that Modernism and post-modernism did not constitute truly radical revolutions. Rather, they gave a continued existence to romantic values and patterns of feeling while seeming to clothe those values and patterns in a new language. And so, we arrive at a kind of paradox: Moore appears to be a reactionary poet who has hardly entered the twentieth century. The evidence provided by a close reading indicates , however, that his poetry, plays and criticism constitute a major critique of values that still dominate our literature and to a large extent our culture.3 Even more, his works point to other possibilities of development from the late nineteenth century than those that our century has pursued, possibilities that are realized through a version of pastoral. There are moments in Moore's early poetry that exhibit a settled fullness of being, a pastoral vision of peace and health, as in the following lines from "On a Picture by Puvis de Chavannes": A patriarchal people dwell in peace And plenty, perfect without wealth's increase; Nursed in the lap of lowland hills, their homes Are gay with flowers; both mom and evening airs Are guests within their doors; and for their prayers Cows safely calve, bees build big honey-combs.* This is an expression of the classical ideal of otium that informs much of Elizabethan pastoral and that provides the backdrop in some sense for all versions of pastoral.5 In this particular...