Introduction
Irrational autumn? How autumn can be irrational? What are you trying to say? Since, you have somehow come across this title, by further reading this article you get answers to your questions.
Earlier in February, I uploaded a video where I recited the poem titled This is just to say. By further exploring the Wikipedia article on that poem, I came across the facts that the poem was written by William Carlos Williams and it is an imagist poem, which favors imagery and clear sharp language.
I read the wikipedia article on Imagism. Imagism is considered to be the first organized, modernist literary movement in English language. One of Williams' poems is also mentioned in the book by Ezra Pound, named Des Imagistes. While digging further into the details of Imagism, I found the name Thomas Ernest Hulme or T.E. Hulme, and I read the wikipedia article on Hulme.
At that time, I knew very little about this poet. So, I took upon myself this project to understand the poem I had uploaded earlier and also exploring the world of imagism, since Hulme is mentioned as the "father of imagism" in the Stanford University Press book named Imagism and Imagist from the year 1931. So, I uploaded another video where I recited Hulme's poem, "Autumn", published in 1909.
If you have played the videos, you would find that how short were they. The poems that are too short, the imagist poems written in the early twentieth century.
About Hulme
It is mentioned in the wikipedia article on T.E. Hulme that he became the secretary of The Poet's Club in 1908, founded by Henry Simpson, a banker in the Royal Bank of Scotland and a fellow of Royal Society of Literature. It stated that Hulme's poems "Autumn" and "A City Sunset" were published in an anthology by the club. These poems have been mentioned as the catalyst to imagist movement in the book The Lives of Poets by Michael Schmidt, 1998.
The article also mentions that another five of his poems were published in Alfred Richard Orage's magazine, The New Age, in 1912. The poems laid the foundation for the imagist movement, since these were first poems of that sort.
The magazine called The New Age by Orage is also mentioned in the book by Ioan Ratiu, named The Milner-Fabian Conspiracy. It states under the section Reinventing culture: The Fabian New Age, "The Fabians' stated aim to remold and reconstruct society from its foundation inevitably involved the total reinvention of culture. The Fabian view was that culture had to be "modified" to accommodate itself to progressive conditions, i.e., to Socialism"
It further states, "In 1905, the Fabians George Holbrook Jackson and Alfred Richard Orage set up the Leeds Arts Club with the object "to affirm the mutual dependence of art and ideas". The experiment being successful, Jackson in 1906 suggested the formation of groups that would exploit art, philosophy, science and politics for the advancement of Socialism."
It continues, "In the same year (1907) Orage and Jackson, with financial assistance of Shaw (George Bernard Shaw), bought up the influential Socialist magazine The New Age and re-oriented it along Fabian lines with regular contributions by leading Fabian ideologists like Shaw himself, Cole, and H.G. Wells."
Since 1907, this magazine was being re-oriented along Fabian Socialist lines and in 1912, T.E. Hulme's poems, written in 1909, appear in it. Therefore, two statements can be made. First, the first imagist poems by the father of imagism, Hulme, were those oriented along the Fabian Socialist lines in order to re-mold and reconstruct the society and the total reinvention of culture. Second, those poems were exploited to further the project for the advancement of Socialistic ideas, for "promoting Modernist Movement which subverted traditional values in favor of "progressive" concepts of social and sexual "freedom".
If the above statements are true, which they are, then it raises a question that what triggered the publishers to publish the imagist poems? Why are those poems in the magazine for which Bernard Shaw regarded as "good statesmanship" to blow every cathedral in the world to pieces with dynamite without concern about the opposition from art critics or "cultural voluptaries"?
To begin answering the questions, we need to dive into Hulme's world view, accordance to which the poems were written in the first place. To repeat, the poems were written in 1909.
According to the essay The Evolution of T. E. Hulme's Thought, in his childhood, Hulme enjoyed the neo-Darwinian materialism, the overall intellectual attitude of the society surrounding him, a deterministic tradition that he saw extend back to Baruch Spinoza. As the time went by, he started questioning the idea that everything is controlled by rigid necessity, which is the core tenant of deterministic materialism that further rules out the notion of the human free will. Thus, he started challenging the social and moral order that continued throughout his life.
In his youth, he lost his faith in the logical order and claimed that all systems of analysis were false, challenging both the scientific method and the idealist philosophy. In his document named Cinders around 1906-1907, Hulme rejected empirical science and idealism because he wanted an unmediated way of experience, without any mediation by science and philosophy. This became the core idea for Hulme.
During this time, he further looked into language where he emphasized its role in forming conceptual systems. He came under influence of French writers and philosophers, especially that of Remy de Gourmont and Henri Bergson. Their writings supported Hulme's rejection of scientific and philosophical systems with the idea of language ordering our experience that it originates as metaphors for what we sense in our experience and then becomes sophisticated as complex structures of thought and finally becomes the concepts to such extent that we lose contact from the tangible experience. The French theorists supported the use of language as poetic and intuitive, which would be in touch with the actual tangible experience.
Here Bergson&39;s philosophy of intuition had become a great significance to Hulme, combined with the new, post-Symbolist poetic style by Remy de Gourmont, where he advocated for the use of metaphors and avoiding abstractions and cliches. Hulme believed actual experience to be beyond language but the use of metaphor was the closest one could get to recreate the actual experience. Thus, Hulme found this notion satisfying to his new belief and used metaphor in his poems to experience sense impressions.
On Bergson's Philosophy
One of Hulme's first published poems, titled "Autumn" appeared in the 1909 anthology by the Poets' Club. Henri Bergson was a dominant influence on him before and during that year. He believed that the Symbolist terms aimed at capturing "some vague mood" and only through metaphor that intuition could be represented to recreate the direct experience. In 1909, he published an article for The New Age titled "New Philosophy" an article on the subject of Henri Bergson.
Thus, it becomes important to discuss the aspects of Bergsonian philosophy, which actually influenced the poem "Autumn". The use of metaphor to unmediated, direct experience through intuition is the central concept of this poem, which can be explained more vividly knowing the underlying Bergsonian philosophy.
Apart from the context of the Fabian magazine, and Hulme, Henri Bergson is mentioned in Carroll Quigley's book Tragedy and Hope. It is stated, "The third generation of the nineteenth century (1850-1895) was in an age of rationalism whose typical figure were Darwin and Bismarck. While emphasizing the empirical and rational aspects of science, it tried to apply these to biology and to history in terms of a scientific materialism that could explain biology and change as Newton's science had explained mechanics." This is the same mindset Hulme had in his early years.
It further states, "By the end of the century, man was frustrated and disillusioned with scientific method and materialism and with emphasis on the nonhuman world and was turning once again to the problems of man and society with a conviction that these problems could be handled only by nonrational methods and by clash of contending forces, since the problems themselves were too complex, too dynamic, too irrational to be settled by science or even by human thought." Hulme challenged the existing orders and losing his faith in scientific method and idealism.
It continues, "The result was a new period, the Age of Irrational Activism. It began with men, like Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, who emphasized the nonrational nature of universe and of man, quickly shifted Darwin's doctrines of struggle and survival from nonhuman nature to human society, and rejected rationalism as slow, superficial, and an inhibition on both action and survival." The Age of Irrational Activism, to reiterate was not only the survival and struggle within nature but also more specifically among human societies. As Bergson said in his Creative Evolution (1907): "The intellect is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life. Instinct, on contrary, is molded on the very form of life."
This suggests that the struggle of societies based solely upon irrational instincts is justified. "This period felt that man, the nature, and human society were all basically irrational. Reason, regarded as a late and rather superficial accretion in the process of human evolution, was considered inadequate to plumb the real nature of man's problems, and was regarded as an inhibitor on the full intensity of his actions, an obstacle to the survival of himself as an individual and of his group (the nation)." Where the actual sense-impression experience could be accessed by using metaphor, a figure of rhetoric, rather than formally conceptualizing to judge what is good or bad.
The implications of such practice in poetry to bring about and make this irrationalism concrete is stated in Tragedy and Hope. "Any effort to apply reason or science, based on rational analysis and evaluation, would be slow and frustrating effort: slow, because the process of human rationality is always slow, frustrating because it cannot plumb into the real depths and nature of man's experience, and because it can always turn up as many and as good reasons for any course of action as it can for the opposite course of action. The effort to do this was dangerous, because as the thinker is poised in indecision, the man of action struck, eliminated the thinker from the scene, and survived to determine the future on the basis of continued action. "
Hence, the statement, Bergson's philosophy did help in bringing the Age of Irrational Activism. The loss of faith in the rational apparatus is clear from Quigley's analysis of Bergson in Tragedy and Hope, and in agreement with the aim of the Fabians to remold and reconstruct the society by destroying every existing cultural institution and without the concern of the opposition from the critics. The poem titled Autumn, guided by the underlying Bergson's philosophy of intuition which claims to be linguistically inexpressible. Thus, it becomes a mystical experience or delusional. This view is opposed to the fact that epistemological criteria can make sure that a person has knowledge about an object.
Conclusion
Therefore, to conclude that the observations from Ratiu's Milner-Fabian Conspiracy that the first imagist poems by Hulme, were those oriented along the Fabian Socialist lines in order to re-mold and reconstruct the society and the total reinvention of culture. Second, those poems were exploited to further the project for the advancement of Socialistic ideas, for "promoting Modernist Movement which subverted traditional values in favor of "progressive" concepts of social and sexual "freedom". Both statements get validated with the fact that such poems were used to bring upon the age of irrationalism upon the society in general that Quigley states "justified class conflicts and national warfare, and formed the background of the cult of violence" and the "culmination of the process of total irrationalism and total violence" was "The Revolution of Nihilism". Thus, by "mid-twentieth century, the popular press, literature, the cinema, sports and all major human concerns had embraced this cult of violence. "
The inference that all the violence and irrationality, in order to shape the world along the Fabian lines becomes crystal clear through war, indoctrination (public schooling), propaganda (news and social media), and rationally unjustified physical (lockdowns), chemical and biological interventions (GMO's, forced vaccination, etc.) seems the most plausible. Therefore, the irrational autumn.