Terry Eagleton once remarked that the art of literary criticism, like clog dancing, is dead on its feet. That might be the case. But if the whole tradition of analysing works of literature in the manner termed by Nietzsche as ‘slow reading’ is indeed in danger of sinking without trace, many of the ideas of theorists like Lacan, Barthes and Derrida remain as indispensable as ever, even though, in some ways, we have moved beyond them. Not too long ago, one could be hailed for doing soulless abstractions with Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet and spotting a metonym somewhere in those pages, today it is more likely that you will be regarded as a ‘looser’ for having heard of either metonyms or Pessoa to begin with. The lines that follow may be excruciatingly unappealing for most, but for the few of you that perseveres until the end of my ‘study’, something of value will hopefully emerge from the reading.

F.S. Flint’s Malady is an archetypical Imagist poem. It urges its readers to visualize objective images, but Flint’s radical principles of ‘clarity, cadence and exactness’ characteristic of his poetic method, suggest something rather more antithetical – a blinding, disorientating subjective condition. In the beginning of the twentieth century, just the same kind of ontological anxiety, alongside an irreverent crisis in artistic representation took the form of Modernism. In this context, the pragmatic question of what kind of event is really happening in Malady is inseparable from Flint’s shifting contrast between objective binary oppositions, from his ‘unrhymed cadence’ technique and from the graphic image of the poem on the page. The Imagist paradigm the poem represents is inextricably aligned with the shared aesthetics of Modernist narrative. Malady represents a kind of phenomenology of language, one in which the meaning of the words in the poem is closely bound up with the image of these on the page and the experience of them in the reader’s mind. The blindness of the speaker is indeed a metaphor for the blindness of the modern human subject, where dissolubility and fragmentation are part its aesthetic.

Such is the case that Malady signals a radical development in poetic perspective. If it is true that the poem rejects verbal inventiveness, ‘nearly-exact’ or ‘decorative words’, it is also true that it tersely draws attention to this fact. It does so by continuously posting signifiers that refer unambiguously to material objects, making the poem strikingly visual and forcing the reader to ‘ideate’ such visions in the imagination: ‘this is a bed;/this is a room; and there is light…/Darkness!’, (lines 3-6). The poet depicts external objects in an astonishingly compacted manner and by repeatedly questioning their stability in relation to the speaker and to their binary oppositions (‘But up is harder. Down!’, line 19), the author engraves the subjective experience of this ‘man’ (who ‘is ill and cannot see’) at extraordinary length in the mind of the reader.[1] This powerful imagist effect is enhanced with a combination of language precision, emphatic punctuation and sharp line breaks. The poem’s self-conscious sculpturedness not only allows for, but also imposes pause, silence and mental elaboration. In addition, the words are direct and, in my view, emotionally blank, which fuelled by a circumspection of thought become a kind of emotional response in itself, increasing thereby the destabilizing, dizzying effect: ‘Stairs, banisters, a handrail:/ all indistinguishable.’ (lines 15-16). As a result, the speaker’s vertiginous perplexity becomes palpable and strikingly visible.

These formal innovations extend also to prosody. Like end-rhymes, regular metre is peculiar to most poetry which preceded Flint’s generation. These are precisely the features that Malady rejects. Instead, the images are compressed into short lines of distinctive syllabic count: ‘I move: / perhaps I have wakened; /this is a bed;/ this is a room;/ and there is light . . .’ (line 1-5). The iambic foot with which the second line begins echoes the metrical rhythm of the opening line and this pattern operates to mutually reinforce the mood of both lines. Perhaps the reader would be expecting after that some kind of regularity, something like a rising, bouncing iambic rhythm. But being undisputedly of a Modernist strand, the poem is not bound to regularity. Significantly, the pattern is broken in the third line where a sudden rhythmic modulation occurs. The stress falls from the second syllable (‘I move’ and ‘perhaps’) to the first syllable ‘this’, a strategy which in turn, is reproduced in the following line, thus generating another kind of regularity, one that will be equally displaced subsequently. By diverting the rhythm of the language from its anticipated course the poet infuses the words with new content and function. Indeed, in my view, he invites the reader to participate in the composition by generating his or her own personal pauses, inflection and intonation. It becomes then plausible to suggest that these cumulative verbal effects endow the straightforward scenario depicted with dizzying emotional color. Notably, Flint’s poetic method is structured in Imagist concerns with expressing ‘new moods’ by figuring out new prosodic relations.

This method has another nuance. With an insightful brushstroke Flint subjects the space described – a universally ordinary bedroom (in the sense that it could be anyone’s bedroom) – to a powerful transformation. In replacing a few words (‘a’ bed, ‘a’ room – lines 3,4, by ‘my’ room, ‘my’ books – lines 30,31), the meaning radically changes, and the space becomes distinguishably personal, the speaker’s own recognizable bedroom. Interestingly, this semantic shift is performed with a grammatical one: the substitution of the impersonal indefinite articles by definite personal ones. Indeed, this aesthetic denouement has the overpowering effect of changing the psychological landscape of the speaker from painful to peaceful.

There is an abiding paradox operating in the poem: this is the fact that Flint makes ubiquitous, forceful and artificial use of conventional punctuation and in making these typographical signs so promptly conspicuous, the poet highlights the very artifice that the Imagists wish to clear poetry from. Except for the third stanza, which is a four-line sentence with three enjambments, every other line of the poem is a strictly independent clause terminated by an emphatic punctuation mark (reticent only in line 5, ‘and there is light…’). For a critic like T.S. Eliot, speaking about poetry in general, such punctuation signs are naïve, usually superfluous and overemphatic. In truth, far from being a grammatical solecism, the incisive punctuation in Malady becomes a formal staple upon which the poetic image can be assembled by the reader.

The special pathos in this is that intervening repeatedly on the poem’s phrasal movement and graphic shape, Flint allows the audience to experience the images at different lengths and intensity. Sometimes by stumbling towards points of arrival (‘But up is harder. Down!’, line 19), sometimes by moving away from points of departure (‘Me?’, line 22), the reader is able to emulate, to enact the experience of the speaker. It has been observed by some critics that these typographical incisions are trivial and highlight the critical fallacy on which Imagism has been built. For me, if this showcase of ink marks betrays Imagism and places practice and theory in dialectic, it does so by sharply materializing a form which seeks simultaneously to contain and extend the speaker’s complex emotional drama on the page. In this way, Flint experiments with new poetic forms for contemporary concerns.

The closing movement of Malady starkly stages a defamiliarizing device. It explores, rather unexpectedly, an external image that is apparently unrelated to the speaker’s mood: ‘A parrot screeches.’ (line 35). Flint’s final line abruptly disrupts the poem’s semiotic situation and leaves the reader intrigued, perplexed and puzzled. It is not hard to conceive that the sentence is embroidered into the piece as a kind of sophistry, linking more or less desultorily the sensations of the speaker with the squealing sound of the parrot. For some the critics, the line is spurious and appears to be meaningful, but it is actually meaningless. But for me, far from being self-indulgently senseless, the sudden appearance of the parrot imbues the poem with a redemptive quality. It restores beauty, brightness, hope and insight, if momentarily, to the life (or indeed death) of the individual speaking in the poem. Pushing the image to an extreme, it can be metaphorically understood as representing some kind optimism for the collapsing, shattered modern subjectivity. In one way, lurking on the surface of the poem is both the personally chaotic, dissolute interiority of the poet’s persona and the universally fractured state of modern sensibility. In another, the poem functions to foreground key concepts of Modernist aesthetics with affected awareness.

Malady typifies, rather magnificently through the blindness of its speaker, the modernist disbelief that traditional poetic conventions could capture the experience of the modern world. I have argued that the relationship between form and content in the poem is typically a modernist one. If Flint’s poetics is suffused with recurrent, sharp, clear-cut images of everyday life, it is also punctuated with the painstaking drama of human disintegration and meaninglessness, an inherent condition of modernity and one which the modernists have been profusely concerned with representing. For Flint, and for the modernists in general, literature is about complicating ideas of form so far that these ideas reflect the subjective apprehension of modern literature.

Note

In a letter to the editor of The Nation Flint explains, after being called ‘Prose-impressionist’ and accused of confusing ‘white blur’ with significance by one of the periodical critics, that ‘the man is ill and cannot see; and there is no impressionism therefore, but exact rendering.’ This is also evidence that the speaker in the poem is a male figure. In Copp, Michael (ed.). Imagist Dialogues: Letters Between Aldington, Flint and Others. Lutterworth Press, 2009.

Malady

I MOVE:
perhaps I have wakened;
this is a bed;
this is a room;
and there is light . . .

Darkness!

Have I performed
the dozen acts or so
that make me the man
men see?

The door opens,
and on the landing --
quiet!
I can see nothing: the pain, the weariness!

Stairs, banisters, a handrail:
all indistinguishable.
One step farther down or up,
and why?
But up is harder. Down!
Down to this white blur;
it gives before me.

Me?

I extend all ways:
I fit into the walls and they pull me.

Light?

Light! I know it is light.

Stillness, and then,
something moves:
green, oh green, dazzling lightning!
And joy! this is my room;
there are my books, there the piano,
there the last bar I wrote,
there the last line,
and oh the sunlight!

A parrot screeches.

***

Available in https://www.poeticous.com/f-s-flint/malady

Elton Uliana is a Brazilian writer, literary critic and translator based in London. He is the co-editor of the Brazilian Translation Club at University College London (UCL), where he is also a guest lecturer on Translation Theory. He is a member of Out of the Wings Theatre Translation Collective at King’s College London, and a reader with the Royal Court Theatre London for their International Plays in Translation project 2023. His work has been published in multiple anthologies including Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction (UCL Press, 2024), Daughters of Latin America: An International Anthology of Writing by Latine Women (HarperCollins, 2023) and Oxford Anthology of Translation (Oxford Press, 2022). His work is also featured in multiple other specialised journals, including Art in Translation (Routledge), Massachusetts Review, Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, West Branch, and Tablet. Uliana was part of the judging panel for the 2023 PEN American Translation Prize. He is currently working on the translation of a volume of plays by Howard Barker into Brazilian Portuguese.