The title new poetry has been granted to those
verses whose lexicon includes the words: cinema, motor, horsepower, aircraft,
radio, jazz-band, wireless communication, and, on the whole, to all those who
give a voice to science and contemporary industry, even though this lexicon
doesn’t correspond to an authentically new sensibility. What’s important are
words.
But we mustn’t forget that this isn’t new or old,
or anything. The material modern life offers to the artist has to be
assimilated by the spirit and converted into sensibility. Wireless
communication, for example, is destined more than to simply say “wireless
communication,” but to awake new moods, profound insights into feeling, widening
perception and dosing love: a concern grows, is heightened and the breath of
life revives. This is the true culture progress gives rise to; this its only
aesthetic sense and not simply to fill our mouths with blazing words. Often
these voices might lack something. A poem might not say “cinema” while still
possessing cinematic emotion in an obscure and tacit way but, all the same,
effectively and humanly. Such is truly new poetry.
At other times the poet just about manages to
combine new artistic material and achieve in this way an image or “rapport”
more or less perfect and beautiful. In such a case we aren’t dealing with
poetry based on new words, as in the preceding case, but a poetry based on new
metaphors. Even in this we are mistaken. New poetry may well lack new images or
a new rapport -- this being a matter of ingenuity not genius -- but its creator
enjoys or suffers a life in which these new relations and rhythms are made
blood, are cell-based, something in the end that has become vitally bound up
with sensibility.
New poetry based on new words or new metaphors
distinguishes itself in a pedantically novel way and, as a result, has a
baroque consistency and quality. New poetry based on a new sensibility is, on
the contrary, simple, human and, at first sight might seem old, not drawing
attention to itself as being modern or otherwise.
It’s very important to note these differences.
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