On Poetry

Llewellyn Jones

Poetry,we are often told, cannot be defined but—by way of consolation—can always be recognized. Unfortunately the latter half of that statement seems no longer true, especially of latter-day poetry. Fratricidal strife between makers ofvers libreand formalists goes on merrily, while the people whose contribution to poetry is their appreciation of it—and purchase of it—are not unnaturally playing safe and buying Longfellow in padded ooze.

I always thought I could recognize authentic poetry on most themes and even flattered myself that I had some little understanding of the psychology of its production. Latterly two voices have come to me, one affirming that I was right in my prejudice that all durable verse should have content as well as form, should have meaning as well as sound—though in closest union with the sound,—that, in short, the poet should be a thinker as well as a craftsman; an emotional thinker, of course, if that term be permitted, but not a mere clairaudient wielder of words. And then I heard a voice which bid me forget all that and list to

Long breaths, in a green and yellow din.

Hastening to give credit where it is due, let me remind the readers ofThe Little Reviewthat this is the last line of a poem by Maxwell Bodenheim in the last number of that periodical. I trust that Mr. Bodenheim will forgive me for using him to point a moral and adorn a critical article, especially as I shall have to compare him with Wordsworth before I get through, and shall have to ask him whether he is not carrying the Wordsworthian tradition just a little too far into the region of the individual and subjective, into the unknown territory of the most isolated thing in the world: the human mind in those regions of it which have not been socially disciplined into the categories which make communication possible between mind and mind.

The other voice which I have mentioned is that of Professor S. B. Gass, of the University of Nebraska, who writes on Literature as a Fine Art inThe Mid-West Quarterlyfor July.

Professor Gass takes the very sane position that words are the socially-created tools—arbitrary symbols, he calls them—to give us “not the thing itself, but something about the thing—some relationship, some classification, some generalization, some cause, some effect, some attribute, something that goes on wholly in the mind and is not sensuously present in the thingitself.” And that work, he continues, is thought, and it proceeds by statement. But undoubtedly words have sensuous sounds and sensuous denotations and connotations. Professor Gass admits this, but regards their sensuous properties—and especially, I imagine he would insist, their sensuous sounds based on physiological accident—as secondary. Hence, to him, Imagism would be a use of words for purely secondary results. And that is decadence: “Decadence arises out of the primary pursuit of secondary functions.” Now Wordsworth and the romantic school generally used words in this way, and so, logically enough, Professor Gass classifies Wordsworth as a decadent. In doing so we fear he exhibits an intellect too prone todichotomize. He cuts human psychology up into too many and too water-tight compartments. When he quotes Wordsworth’s

... I saw a crowd,A host of golden daffodils;Beside the lake, beneath the trees,Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

... I saw a crowd,

A host of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

he seems to forget that there is more in that poem than its imagism—as we would call it now; that it is record of a personal experience, that is not only a trespass on the domain of the painter (to speak as if we agreed with our critic) but that it is a personal reaction to the picture painted in those words, that it tells us something that no mere picture could do. The poem, in fact, is a picture plus a story of the effect of the picture upon a human soul.

But the point in which I agree with Professor Gass is that—whatever the ultimate purpose of literature, including the lyric; whether, as he says, it is “a reflection of human nature, intellectual in its mode, critical in its spirit, and moral in its function”; or whether it is legitimate to regard its rhythms in words and “secondary” connotations and associations of words as materials for an art rather than for a criticism of life—the point beyond all this that I think fundamental is that literature does what it does—inform, enlighten, or transport—by understandable statement.

Certainly all appreciation of literature that dares to voice itself—that is all criticism—must proceed on this supposition, and it is just this supposition that is flouted by some of Mr. Bodenheim’s poems.

Take the following, for instance:

TO ——You are a broad, growing sieve.Men and women come to you to loosen your supple frame,And weave another slim square into you—Or perhaps a blue oblong, a saffron circle.People fling their powdered souls at you:You seem to lose them, but retainThe shifting shadow of a stain on your rigid lines.

You are a broad, growing sieve.Men and women come to you to loosen your supple frame,And weave another slim square into you—Or perhaps a blue oblong, a saffron circle.People fling their powdered souls at you:You seem to lose them, but retainThe shifting shadow of a stain on your rigid lines.

You are a broad, growing sieve.

Men and women come to you to loosen your supple frame,

And weave another slim square into you—

Or perhaps a blue oblong, a saffron circle.

People fling their powdered souls at you:

You seem to lose them, but retain

The shifting shadow of a stain on your rigid lines.

Now obviously there is no sense in this in the ordinary intellectualistic meaning of the word sense. Unlike most poetry, it cannot be analyzed into a content which we might say was expressed suitably or unsuitably in a form. If, then, it be a good poem, we must look elsewhere for its excellence. I would hesitate to find that excellence in the mere sound of the words. Is it then in their associations? Arthur Ransome, the English critic, accounts for the peculiar effect of poetry by its use of what he calls potential language—of words which by long association have come to mean more than they say, that have not only a denotation like scientific words, but a sometimes definite, sometimes hazy, connotation, an emotional content over and above what is intellectually given in their purely etymological content. Does this help us here? I am afraid not. Personally I have always associated sieves with ashes and garden-earth (there is also a little triangular sieve that fits into kitchen sinks). Blue oblongs and saffron circles remind me of advertising posters and futurist pictures; while—I admit a certain poetic quality of a sort here—powdered souls remind me of Aubrey Beardsley.

But, perhaps, the ultimate objection to this poem as it stands is the fact that I have an uneasy suspicion that some printer may have transposed some of these expressions. For would it not really have made better sense if the poem had spoken of a saffron oblong and a blue square? Certainly if I choose to think that that is what it must have been originally no other reader, on the face of the matter, could convince me otherwise. While, if another reader told me that Mr. Bodenheim had once studied geometry and therefore could not possibly have written about a “slim square”, I would be quite unable to convince him otherwise.

But—it will be objected—it is quite unfair to any poem to analyze it word by word. It spoils its beauty. I challenge the assertion, and even assert the opposite. As a matter of fact, it is only by analysis that we can tell good poetry from bad poetry. For instance:

Crown him with many crownsThe lamb upon his throne.

Crown him with many crowns

The lamb upon his throne.

Analyze that and it straightway appears the nonsense that it really is. But, on the other hand, take this poem of Francis Thompson’s (I quote only a part):

Does the fish soar to find the ocean,The eagle plunge to find the air—That we ask of the stars in motionIf they have rumour of thee there?Not where the wheeling systems darken,And our benumbed conceiving soars!—The drift of pinions, would we hearken,Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.The angels keep their ancient places;—Turn but a stone, and start a wing!’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces,That miss the many-splendored thing.

Does the fish soar to find the ocean,The eagle plunge to find the air—That we ask of the stars in motionIf they have rumour of thee there?

Does the fish soar to find the ocean,

The eagle plunge to find the air—

That we ask of the stars in motion

If they have rumour of thee there?

Not where the wheeling systems darken,And our benumbed conceiving soars!—The drift of pinions, would we hearken,Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

Not where the wheeling systems darken,

And our benumbed conceiving soars!—

The drift of pinions, would we hearken,

Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

The angels keep their ancient places;—Turn but a stone, and start a wing!’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces,That miss the many-splendored thing.

The angels keep their ancient places;—

Turn but a stone, and start a wing!

’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces,

That miss the many-splendored thing.

Now that poem, it will be observed, is not unrelated in subject to the two lines quoted just above it. And yet, how it defies any effort to analyze it out into anything else than itself. Rhythm, cosmic picturings, the homely metaphors of the dusty road, all combine to place us in an attitude toward, to give us a feeling for, reality, which is different from, and nobler than, those of the man who has either never read this poem, never read the same message in other poetic language, or—what is more to the point—never managed to get for himself the same experience which dictated that poem.

For, after all, if I were to agree with Professor Gass that poetry (as a part of literature) is not a fine art, it would be because I think it more than a fine art. Because I think the function of poetry is not merely to be a verbal picture art or a verbal music art, but to be an organon of reconciliation between art and life. The best poems, I think, will be found to be those which alter our consciousness in such a way that our inward, and even our outward, lives are altered. The poet sees the world as we do not see it. Consequently, he can put a new complexion on it for us. The world is pluralistic, and so are we. Intellectually we may be of the twentieth century, but emotionally we may be born out of our due season. Then let the poet of that due season mediate to us the emotional life that we need. Living in America, we may, through him, reach Greece or India. By his aid we may conquer the real world; by his aid we may flee from it if it threatens to conquer us. By his aid alone we may get outside of our own skins and into the very heart of the world.

What, then, shall we say, when poetry offers to conduct us into a world of growing sieves, slim squares, powdered souls, cool, colorless struggles, the obstetrical adventures of white throats, and green and yellow dins?

I have heard of a book which explains the fourth dimension. If I ever get a chance to read that book, and if I find that I can understand the fourth dimension, I shall have another shot at the appreciation of this poetry. For I have a slumbering shadow of a pale-gray idea (if I, too, may wax poetic) that in the sphere of the fourth dimension a slim square would be a perfectly possible conception.

I shall arise and go home now and read some poems by the late Mr. Meredith who is popularly supposed to be obscure.

Arthur Davison Ficke

(A reply to “Spiritual Dangers of Writing Vers Libre” by Eunice Tietjens in the November issue of The Little Review)

The properly qualified judge of poetry can have no doubts aboutvers libre; if he doubts it, he is no judge. He belongs to that class of hide-bound conservatives who are unwilling to discard the old merely because it is old. He does not yet understand that the newest is always the best. Worst of all, he does not appreciate the value of Freedom.

Freedom is the greatest of boons to the artist. The soul of the artist must not be hampered by unnecessary constraints. The old fixed verse-forms—such as the sonnet, blank verse, and all the other familiar metres—were exactly as cramping to the free creating spirit of the poet as the peculiar spaces and arches of the Sistine Chapel were to the designing instinct of Michael Angelo. Lamentable misfortune! that his Sibyls had to occupy those awkward corners. How much would they not have gained in grandeur could they have had all outdoors to expand in!

All outdoors is just whatvers libreaffords the poet of today. He is no longer under the necessity of moulding his thought into an artificial pattern, compressing it to a predetermined form; it can remain fluent, unsubjugated, formless, like a spontaneous emotional cry. No longer need he accept such fatal and stereotyped bondage as that under which Milton labored when the iron mechanics of blank verse forced him to standardize, to conventionalize, his emotion in such lines as—

O dark dark dark amid the blaze of noon,Irrecoverably dark, total eclipseWithout all hope of day!...

O dark dark dark amid the blaze of noon,

Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse

Without all hope of day!...

To be honest, we must admit that there was something sickly and soul-destroying about the earlier verse-forms. The too-honeyed sweetness and metrical constraint ofParadise Losthas always secretly repelled the true judge of poetry; and Shakespeare’s Sonnets have never been thoroughly satisfactory just because of the fatal necessity under which the author worked, of rhyming his lines in conformity with a fixed order. How could spiritual originality survive such an ordeal?

It would be unwise, however, to condemn the whole body of past poets; for certain of the earlier practitioners did, in their rudimentary way, see the light. Milton inSampson Agonistes, in the midst of passages of the old-fashioned regular blank verse, introduced several choruses invers libre; and these could perhaps hardly be surpassed by any English or American poet now living. As everyone knows, Walt Whitman (seeThe Poets ofBarbarismby George Santayana) usedvers libreprofusely. In fact, there extends backward from us an unbroken chain of distinguishedvers libretradition, through Whitman, Matthew Arnold, Southey, Shelley, Milton, and many others; the chain ends only with that first “probably arboreal” singer just antedating the first discoverer of regular rhythm.Vers libreis as old as the hills, and we shall always have it with us.

The one defect of the earlier practitioners ofvers librewas that they did not have the wit to erect it into a cult. They used the free form only when it seemed to them essentially appropriate to the matter:—that is to say, they usedit sporadically, desultorily. Today we know better. Today we know that the free form must be used ever and always.In hoc signo vinces!

As a modern poet admirably says—

Those envious outworn soulsWhose flaccidacademic pulsesBeat to no rythms of more Dionysiac scopeThan metronomes,—Or dollar-twenty-five alarm-clocks,—They will foreverCavail at novelty, at beauty, at freshness;But, hell!—But, a thousand devils!—But,Henri Quatreand thePont Neuf!—We of the new age, who leap upon the mountains like goats upon the heaps of tin cans in the vacant lots, and butt the stars,—We know they are liars,And that we are what we are.

Those envious outworn souls

Whose flaccidacademic pulses

Beat to no rythms of more Dionysiac scope

Than metronomes,—

Or dollar-twenty-five alarm-clocks,—

They will forever

Cavail at novelty, at beauty, at freshness;

But, hell!—

But, a thousand devils!—

But,Henri Quatreand thePont Neuf!—

We of the new age, who leap upon the mountains like goats upon the heaps of tin cans in the vacant lots, and butt the stars,—

We know they are liars,

And that we are what we are.

Could that be expressed in a sonnet? I think not. At least, it could not be expressed so vigorously, so wisely, so well.

There is, however, one obvious peril against which the enthusiast must guard himself.Vers libreis not of itself a complete warranty of success; because a poem is in this form, it is not necessarily fine poetry. “Love is enough,” says William Morris; he would not have said the same aboutvers libre. A certain power of conception, beyond the brilliant and original idea involved in the very employing of the free verse-form, is requisite for real importance in the finished product.

Nor is the statement of the poet’s own unique and terrifying importance a sufficient theme to constitute the burden of all his work. Several of our most immortal livingvers libristshave fallen into such an error. This “ego über alles” concept, though profound and of a startling originality, lacks variety if it be indefinitely repeated. Should the poet, however, feel deep in his soul that there is nothing else worth saying except this, let him at least take care to beautify his idea by the use of every artifice. After saying “I am I, and great,” let him not forget to add variety and contrast to the picture by means of the complementary idea: “You, O world, are you,and contemptible.” In such minglings of light and shade lies poetry’s special and proper beauty.

Vers librehas one incontestable advantage over all those more artificial vehicles in which the poets of the past have essayed to ride into immortality. This newly popular verse-form can be used perfectly well when the poet is drunk. Let no one of temperate habits underestimate this advantage; let him think of others. Byron was drunk most of the time; had he been able to employ a form like this, how many volumes could he perhaps have added to the mere seventeen that now constitute his work! Shelley,—seldom alcoholicly affected, I believe,—was always intoxicated with ideas; he, equipped solely with the new instrument, could have written many more epics likeQueen Mab, and would probably have felt less need of concentrating his work into the narrow limits of such formalistic poems asThe West Wind.

Let it be understood that all the principles suggested in this monograph are intended only for the true devotee ofvers libre. One can have nothing but contempt for the poet who, using generally the old-fashioned metres, turns sometimes tovers libreas a medium, and carries over into it all those faults of restrained expression and patterned thought which were the curse of the old forms. Such a writer is beyond hope, beyond counsel. We can forgive Matthew Arnold, but not a contemporary.

Certain devoted American friends of poetry have been trying for some time to encourage poetry in this country; and I think they are on the right track when they go about it by way of encouragingvers libre. No other method could so swiftly and surely multiply the number of our verse-writers. For the new medium presents no difficulties to anyone; even the tired business-man will find himself tempted to record his evening woes in singless song. True, not everyone will be able at first trial to producevers libreof the quality that appears in the choruses ofSampson Agonistes:

This, this is he; softly a while;Let us not break in upon him.O change beyond report, thought, or belief!See how he lies at random, carelessly diffused,With languished head unpropt,As one past hope, abandoned,And by himself given over,In slavish habit, ill-fitted weedsO’er-worn and soiled.Or do my eyes misrepresent? Can this be he,That heroic, that renowned,Irresistible Sampson? whom, unarmed,No strength of man, or fiercest wild beast, could withstand?...Which first shall I bewail,Thy bondage or lost sight,Prison within prisonInseparably dark?

This, this is he; softly a while;

Let us not break in upon him.

O change beyond report, thought, or belief!

See how he lies at random, carelessly diffused,

With languished head unpropt,

As one past hope, abandoned,

And by himself given over,

In slavish habit, ill-fitted weeds

O’er-worn and soiled.

Or do my eyes misrepresent? Can this be he,

That heroic, that renowned,

Irresistible Sampson? whom, unarmed,

No strength of man, or fiercest wild beast, could withstand?...

Which first shall I bewail,

Thy bondage or lost sight,

Prison within prison

Inseparably dark?

That is indeed admirable, and not so easy to write as it looks. But some kind ofvers librecan be turned out by anyone; and to encourage the use of this medium will be to encourage and vastly increase that multitudinous body of humble and industrious versifyers who are at present the most conspicuous ornament of American literature.

Maxwell Bodenheim

The clamping of the inevitable strait-jacket, rhymed verse, upon the shrinking form of poetry has been the pastime of centuries. Those who would free poetry from the outworn metal bands and let her stretch her cramped limbs are labeled decadent, slothful, and futile. How easy it is to paste disagreeable labels upon the things one happens to dislike.

I admit that poetry freed from the bonds she has so long worn may become vulgar and over-demonstrative. A convict who has just been released from a penitentiary is perhaps inclined to caper down the road, and split the air with good red shouts. But after his first excesses he walks slowly, thinking of the way before him. With some poets free verse is still the boisterous convict; with others it is already the sober, determined individual. But I rather like even the laughing convict, looking back and flinging huge shouts at his imposing but petty prison.

Suppose I were a Bluebeard who had enticed a young girl into my dim chamber of poetic-thought. Suppose I took the little knife of rhyme and coolly sliced off one of her ears, two or three of her fingers, and finished by clawing out a generous handful of her shimmering, myriad-tinted hair, with the hands of meter. I might afterwards display her to the world, saying: “Look! Is she not still beautiful, still almost perfect?” But would that excuse my butchery? The lesson is perhaps fairly clear. Rhymed verse mutilates and cramps poetry. It is impossible for even the greatest poet completely to rise above its limitations. He may succeed in a measure, but that is due to his strength and not to the useless fetters he wears. But, say the defenders of the fetters, rhyme and meter are excellent disciplines. Does Poetry or does the Poet need to be disciplined? Are they cringing slaves who cannot be trusted to walk alone and unbound? These are obvious things, but one must sometimesbe obvious when speaking to those who still possess a childish belief. Poetry is not determined by the monotonous form in which it is usually clothed, but by the strength or weakness of its voice.Because men have foolishly placed this voice in the mouth of a child, wearing a dress with so many checks on it, and a hat the blackness of which matches the ebony of its ugly shoes, it does not necessarily follow that the voice becomes miraculously changed when placed in some other mouth, whose owner wears a different garb. Then there is the rhythm difficulty. If the little child, Rhyme and Meter, does not swing his foot in time to what he is saying, adding rhythm, his words, according to some, change from poetry to prose. What delightful superstitions!

Poets can undoubtedly rise to great heights, in spite of the fact that they must replace stronger words with weaker ones, because “passion” does not rhyme with “above,” but “love” does. But how much higher could they rise if they were free? I do not say that to eliminate rhyme, meter, and rhythm is to make the way absolutely clear. The Poet must still be a Poet to climb. Nor do I say that if the Poet finds that rhyme, rhythm, and meter happen almost to fit his poetic thoughts, he must not use them. I only say that the poet who finds that the usual forms of poetry confine and mar his poetic thoughts should be able to discard them without receiving the usual chorus of sneers, and that if he does he is not miraculously changed from a poet to a writer of prose.

Eunice Tietjens

You and I, by Harriet Monroe. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

Right here in Chicago, under our very noses, there is dwelling personified a Real Force. It is done up in a neat and compact little package, as most real forces are that are not of the Krupp variety, and it works with so little fuss and fury that it takes some discernment to recognize it for a force at all. Nevertheless it is a power which is felt throughout the length and breadth of the country, in California, in Florida, in Canada, and in England. And wherever it is felt it is a liberating force, a force that ruthlessly shatters the outworn conventions of the art in which it operates, that tears away the tinsel trappings and bids art and beauty spring forth clean and untrammeled, to forge for themselves new forms that shall be fitting for the urge of today.

The name by which this force is known in every day parlance is Miss Harriet Monroe, and its manifestations are twofold—as poet and as editor.As editor she has created and kept alive the courageous little magazinePoetry: A Magazine of Verse, which might almost, so far as Chicago is concerned, be called the spiritual older sister ofThe Little Review. It, too, in its own field, stands for the revolt of today against the hide-bound spirit of yesterday, and it, too, is a thorn in the side of the Philistines.

The most recent manifestation of Miss Monroe’s influence is, however, in her character as poet. She has collected together a large number of poems, most of which have already appeared in the leading magazines and have been widely copied, and has brought them out under the titleYou and I. Seeing them so collected, one is much better able to get a perspective on the poems themselves, and on the very interesting personality behind them. And they bulk large. Unquestionably this is one of the most important of the recent books of poetry.

You and Iis essentially modern in spirit and in treatment. Miss Monroe has the power of looking with the eyes of the imagination at many of our modern institutions.The Hotel,The Turbine,The Panama Canal,The Ocean Liner—these are some of the subjects she treats with a real understanding and a sweep of vision that quite transfigures these work-a-day objects. And she is equally at home when writing of the great emotional complexity ofState Street at Nightor the simpler but more profound poignancy of theElegy for a Child. Indeed, one of the noticeable things about the book is the unusually large range of themes treated.

There is also in this book the primal, but unfortunately rare, gift of wonder. This is one of the essential qualities of true poetry, and it furnishes Miss Monroe with the key-note of the book, an open-eyed, courageous facing of fate, and an unshakable belief in the redeeming power of beauty.

This little lyric may serve as an introduction to the spirit of the book:

THE WONDER OF ITHow wild, how witch-like weird that life should be!That the insensate rock dared dream of me,And take to bursting out and burgeoning—Oh, long ago——yo ho!——And wearing green! How stark and strange a thingThat life should be!Oh mystic mad, a rigadoon of glee,That dust should rise, and leap alive, and fleeAfoot, awing, and shake the deep with cries—Oh, far away—yo hay!What moony mask, what arrogant disguiseThat life should be!

How wild, how witch-like weird that life should be!That the insensate rock dared dream of me,And take to bursting out and burgeoning—Oh, long ago——yo ho!——And wearing green! How stark and strange a thingThat life should be!Oh mystic mad, a rigadoon of glee,That dust should rise, and leap alive, and fleeAfoot, awing, and shake the deep with cries—Oh, far away—yo hay!What moony mask, what arrogant disguiseThat life should be!

How wild, how witch-like weird that life should be!

That the insensate rock dared dream of me,

And take to bursting out and burgeoning—

Oh, long ago——yo ho!——

And wearing green! How stark and strange a thing

That life should be!

Oh mystic mad, a rigadoon of glee,That dust should rise, and leap alive, and fleeAfoot, awing, and shake the deep with cries—Oh, far away—yo hay!What moony mask, what arrogant disguiseThat life should be!

Oh mystic mad, a rigadoon of glee,

That dust should rise, and leap alive, and flee

Afoot, awing, and shake the deep with cries—

Oh, far away—yo hay!

What moony mask, what arrogant disguise

That life should be!

Milo Winter

Scharmel Iris, the first of the Italians in America to write poetry in English is a Florentine who was brought to Chicago when but an infant. Before his tenth year his poems attracted attention and were warmly praised by such men as Ruskin, Swinburne and Gosse. Later Francis Thompson and Richard Le Gallienne expressed appreciation. These poems which originally appeared in leading publications of England and America are gathered together for the first time and printed by the Ralph Fletcher Seymour Company (Fine Arts Building, Chicago; $1.00 net). The volume, entitledLyrics of a Lad, contains his most desirable and characteristic lyrics and is a serious contribution to our poetic literature. These poems came to be respected as art through their freshness and originality—there are no trite, worn-out, meaningless phrases, or words of an abstract, generalized significance. Immortal beauty is a vision in his eyes and a passion in his heart, and he has labored to reveal it to the world. Art is a creation of men’s minds, and because Mr. Iris’s creation is direct and spontaneous it becomes greater art. This volume is not post-Miltonic or post-Swinburnian or post-Kiplonian. This young poet has the good sense to speak naturally and to paint things as he sees them. Because this book is Scharmel Iris it is distinctive. It is without sham and without affectation. The announcement of its publication and his poems inThe Little Reviewbrought the publisher three-hundred orders. The book, slender and well-printed, has more real poetry than any volume of modern verse it has been our good fortune to read.

It is difficult to do an important book justice in a short article. Perhaps a miscellaneous quotation of lines will help:

The thrush spills golden radianceFrom boughs of dusk;The day was a chameleon;In sweat and pangs the pregnant, NightBrings forth the wondrous infant, Light;Within the sunset-press, incarnadine,The sun, a peasant, tramples out his wine;You are the body-house of lust;Where twilight-peacocks lord the placeSpendthrifts of pride and grace;And lo, at Heaven’s blue-windowed houseGod sets the moon for lamp;The sunbeams sought her hair,And rested there;These mute white Christs—the daily crucified;Lucretia Borgia fairThe poppy is.The sunbeams dance in dawn’s ballet;While sunset-panthers past her runTo caverns of the Sun;When from the husk of dusk I shake the stars;O dusk, you brown cocoon,Release your moth, the moon,Ah, since that nightWhen to her window, she came forth as light,Have I been Beauty’s acolyte;

The thrush spills golden radianceFrom boughs of dusk;

The thrush spills golden radiance

From boughs of dusk;

The day was a chameleon;

In sweat and pangs the pregnant, NightBrings forth the wondrous infant, Light;

In sweat and pangs the pregnant, Night

Brings forth the wondrous infant, Light;

Within the sunset-press, incarnadine,The sun, a peasant, tramples out his wine;

Within the sunset-press, incarnadine,

The sun, a peasant, tramples out his wine;

You are the body-house of lust;

Where twilight-peacocks lord the placeSpendthrifts of pride and grace;

Where twilight-peacocks lord the place

Spendthrifts of pride and grace;

And lo, at Heaven’s blue-windowed houseGod sets the moon for lamp;

And lo, at Heaven’s blue-windowed house

God sets the moon for lamp;

The sunbeams sought her hair,And rested there;

The sunbeams sought her hair,

And rested there;

These mute white Christs—the daily crucified;

Lucretia Borgia fairThe poppy is.

Lucretia Borgia fair

The poppy is.

The sunbeams dance in dawn’s ballet;

While sunset-panthers past her runTo caverns of the Sun;

While sunset-panthers past her run

To caverns of the Sun;

When from the husk of dusk I shake the stars;

O dusk, you brown cocoon,Release your moth, the moon,

O dusk, you brown cocoon,

Release your moth, the moon,

Ah, since that nightWhen to her window, she came forth as light,Have I been Beauty’s acolyte;

Ah, since that night

When to her window, she came forth as light,

Have I been Beauty’s acolyte;

and there are many other striking lines. InThe Visionarya poet steals the pennies on a dead man’s eyes to buy himself bread, and, after his death, the money denied him in life is in turn placed on his sightless eyes. It is irony of the bitterest sort.Late Januaryis an excellent landscape—interpretive rather than descriptive.Scarlet—Whiteis struck at the double standard, and is a strong and powerful utterance.April,Canzonette,Lady of the Titian Hairare exquisite and charming lyrics. Three graceful compositions areThe Heart-Cry of the Celtic Maid,TarantellaandSong for a Rose.The Ugly Womanwill cause discussion, but it is good art. The trio ofSpring SongsandHer Roomare well nigh perfect.Mary’s Questis very tender, as is also theTwilight Lullaby.The Leopard,Fantasy of Dusk and Dawn,The Forest of the Skyare wonderfully imaginative, and were written in Chicago,—in the grime and barrenness of Halsted Street. There is a poignant thing of five lines, a mother who is going blind over the death of a son. Her despair is hopeless and tragic—she makes a true and awful picture of realism in her grief.Heroestreats of the nameless heroes, daily met and overlooked. The love poems are sincere as all love poems must be. InForebodingthe note of sadness is emphatic—almost dominant; but there is more than mere sadness in it; it is not a minor note. It is tragedy, really, that speaks in such poetry:

Her cold and rigid handsWill be as iron bandsAround her lover’s heart;

Her cold and rigid hands

Will be as iron bands

Around her lover’s heart;

and

O’er thee will winter through the sky’s gray sieveSift down his charity of snow.

O’er thee will winter through the sky’s gray sieve

Sift down his charity of snow.

The Mad Woman(printed inPoetry) is as excellent as it is unusual, and few finer things have been done in any literature.

There is a fine flowing harmony about the poetry of Scharmel Iris that denotes a power far beyond that revealed by many of today’s singers. The poems are colorful and certainly musical and they display an adequate technique. Such a gift as his, revealed in a number of very fine achievements, gives promise of genuine greatness. After many years of discouragement and the hardest work, he has at last found a publisher who bears the cost of the edition, purely on the merit of the work. It contains a preface by Dr. Egan, American minister in Copenhagen, an attractive title-page decoration by Michele Greco, and a photogravure portrait of the author. By advancing the work of living poets like Mr. Iris one can repay the debt he owes to the old poets. This poetry (asThe Little Reviewremarked) is not merely the sort which interests or attracts; it remains in your mind as part of that art treasure-house which is your religion and your life.

In an early number ofThe Little Reviewa correspondent remarked that an article I had the honor of contributing sounded a rather curious note inasmuch as it was a piece of pure criticism in a magazine deliberately given over to exuberance.

Well, it is now my turn to stand up for exuberance as against a contributor, A. M., who gives the poetry of T. Sturge Moore criticism only, and, in my humble opinion, criticism as unfair as would be a description of Notre Dame rendered altogether in terms of gargoyles and their relative positions.

Would it not be more in the spirit ofThe Little Reviewto point out in the title poem of Mr. Moore’s book,The Sea is Kind, such passages as the two following:

Eucritos—Thou knowest, Menalcas,I built my hut not sheltered but exposed,Round not right-angled.A separate window like a mouth to breathe,No matter whence the breeze might blow,—A separate window like an eye to watchFrom off the headland lawn that prompting winkOf Ocean musing “Why,” wherever heMay glimpse me at some pitiable task.Long sea arms reach behind me, and small hillsHave waded half across the bay in front,Dividing my horizon many timesBut leaving every wind an open gate.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .There is a sorcery in well loved words:But unintelligible music stillProbes to the buried Titan in the heartWhose strength, the vastness of forgotten life,Suffers but is not dead;Tune stirs him as no thought of ours nor aughtMere comprehension grasps, can him disquiet.

Eucritos—

Thou knowest, Menalcas,I built my hut not sheltered but exposed,Round not right-angled.A separate window like a mouth to breathe,No matter whence the breeze might blow,—A separate window like an eye to watchFrom off the headland lawn that prompting winkOf Ocean musing “Why,” wherever heMay glimpse me at some pitiable task.Long sea arms reach behind me, and small hillsHave waded half across the bay in front,Dividing my horizon many timesBut leaving every wind an open gate.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Thou knowest, Menalcas,

I built my hut not sheltered but exposed,

Round not right-angled.

A separate window like a mouth to breathe,

No matter whence the breeze might blow,—

A separate window like an eye to watch

From off the headland lawn that prompting wink

Of Ocean musing “Why,” wherever he

May glimpse me at some pitiable task.

Long sea arms reach behind me, and small hills

Have waded half across the bay in front,

Dividing my horizon many times

But leaving every wind an open gate.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

There is a sorcery in well loved words:But unintelligible music stillProbes to the buried Titan in the heartWhose strength, the vastness of forgotten life,Suffers but is not dead;Tune stirs him as no thought of ours nor aughtMere comprehension grasps, can him disquiet.

There is a sorcery in well loved words:

But unintelligible music still

Probes to the buried Titan in the heart

Whose strength, the vastness of forgotten life,

Suffers but is not dead;

Tune stirs him as no thought of ours nor aught

Mere comprehension grasps, can him disquiet.

And these are parts of a dramatic poem full of fresh figures, colorful glimpses of the romance of ancient life, and what a school-boy would describe as a “perfectly corking” description of a sea fight with dead men slowly dropping through the green water—

As dead bird leaf-resistedShot on tall plane tree’s top,Down, never truly stopping,Through green translucence dropping,They often seemed to stop.

As dead bird leaf-resisted

Shot on tall plane tree’s top,

Down, never truly stopping,

Through green translucence dropping,

They often seemed to stop.

And how, again could any thorough searcher of this book fail to mention that delightful recipe for wine “Sent From Egypt with a Fair Robe of Tissue to a Sicilian Vine-dresser, 276 B. C.” And surely no obscurity nor any uncouthness of figure—such as your critic objects to, as if poets did not have the faults of their virtues—mar those beautiful child poems:

That man who wishes not for wings,Must be the slave of care;For birds that have them move so wellAnd softly through the air:They venture far into the sky,If not so far as thoughts or angels fly.

That man who wishes not for wings,

Must be the slave of care;

For birds that have them move so well

And softly through the air:

They venture far into the sky,

If not so far as thoughts or angels fly.

Were William Cory making a prediction rather than “An Invocation” when he ended his poem of that title with the line:

Two minds shall flow together, the English and the Greek.

I would feel like nominating Mr. T. Sturge Moore as its fulfillment.

Llewellyn Jones.

Sword Blades and Poppy Seed, by Amy Lowell. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

... And Amy Lowell’s new volume of verse refutes all the critical disparagement ofvers libre, imagism, or “unrhymed cadence,” as Miss Lowell herself chooses to call her work. For she demonstrates that it is something new—that it is a clear-eyed workmanship which belongs distinctly to this keener age of ours. Miss Lowell’s technical debt to the French—to the so-called Parnassian school—has been paid in a poetical production that will put to shame our hackneyed and slovenly “accepted” poets. Most of the poems in her book are written invers libre, and this is the way Miss Lowell analyzes them: “They are built upon ‘organic rhythm,’ or the rhythm of the speaking voice with its necessity for breathing, rather than upon a strict metrical system. They differ from ordinary prose rhythms by being more curved and containing more stress. The stress, and exceedingly marked curve, of any regular metre is easily perceived. These poems, built upon cadence, are more subtle, but the laws they follow are not less fixed. Merely chopping prose lines into lengths does not produce cadence; it is constructed upon mathematical and absolute laws of balance and time. In the preface to his Poems, Henley speaks of ‘those unrhyming rythms in which I had tried to quintessentialize, as (I believe) one scarce can do in rhyme.’ The desire to ‘quintessentialize,’ to head-up an emotion until it burns white-hot, seems to be an integral part of the modern temper, and certainly ‘unrhymed cadence’ is unique in its power of expressing this.”

Take Miss Lowell’sWhite and Green, for example:

Hey! My daffodil-crowned,Slim and without sandals!As the sudden spurt of flame upon darknessSo my eyeballs are startled with you,Supple-limbed youth among the fruit-trees,Light runner through tasselled orchards.You are an almond flower unsheathedLeaping and flickering between the budded branches.

Hey! My daffodil-crowned,

Slim and without sandals!

As the sudden spurt of flame upon darkness

So my eyeballs are startled with you,

Supple-limbed youth among the fruit-trees,

Light runner through tasselled orchards.

You are an almond flower unsheathed

Leaping and flickering between the budded branches.

OrAbsence:

My cup is empty tonight,Cold and dry are its sides,Chilled by the wind from the open window.Empty and void, it sparkles white in the moonlight.The room is filled with the strange scentOf wistaria blossoms.They sway in the moon’s radianceAnd tap against the wall.But the cup of my heart is still,And cold, and empty.When you come, it brimsRed and trembling with blood,Heart’s blood for your drinking;To fill your mouth with loveAnd the bitter-sweet taste of a soul.

My cup is empty tonight,

Cold and dry are its sides,

Chilled by the wind from the open window.

Empty and void, it sparkles white in the moonlight.

The room is filled with the strange scent

Of wistaria blossoms.

They sway in the moon’s radiance

And tap against the wall.

But the cup of my heart is still,

And cold, and empty.

When you come, it brimsRed and trembling with blood,Heart’s blood for your drinking;To fill your mouth with loveAnd the bitter-sweet taste of a soul.

When you come, it brims

Red and trembling with blood,

Heart’s blood for your drinking;

To fill your mouth with love

And the bitter-sweet taste of a soul.

—M. C. A.

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