14 - Modernism and the Hymn

Summary

WHAT COULD BE further from modernism than the hymn? A congregation’s song of praise, the sincere expression of shared values and beliefs, the hymn has little of modernism’s irony or shock. The collectivity of the hymn and its broad popularity seem to oppose, say, the individualism of The Egoist and limited or deluxe editions published by small presses. The ongoing life of old hymns in public memory and public practice, their authors and their original contexts often forgotten, appears to differ radically from modernist investments in making it new and in the distinctive style of each individual talent. To be popular, the hymn must be accessible, deploying a common language and familiar concepts, but modernism famously spurns simplicity for difficulty, for rebarbative forms and the critique of modernity. Most of all, the hymn seems an instrumental genre, framed by institutions, tethered to particular occasions and didactic purposes, while modernism promises the autonomy of art.

But that is a caricature, both of the hymn and of modernism. Some modernist works also offered sincere expressions of shared values and beliefs, some were very popular and some were occasional or didactic. Modernism’s novelties and experiments emerged out of and in relation to traditions and conventions. Modernism’s autonomy was always partial or compromised. And modernism engaged actively with the hymn, variously adopting and adapting its history and its forms. The hymn itself was, in the early part of the twentieth century, a diverse genre, or set of related genres. In this chapter, I first sketch the situation of the hymn at this time, and then explore what the hymn meant to modernist poetry. My focus is not on broad spiritual and intellectual narratives, whether the rise of secularism or the shifting relation between religion and art. Instead, I focus on specific negotiations with generic conventions and connotations, and I argue that modernism turned to the hymn to work through two central problems: the difficulty of collective thinking and feeling, and the difficulty of finding someone or something worthy of praise or responsive to appeal.