In 1910 Mr. Manning published, with the almost defunct and wholly
uncommendable firm of John Murray, "Scenes and Portraits," the opening
paragraph of which I can still, I believe, quote from memory.
"When Merodach, King of Uruk, sat down to his meals, he made
his enemies his footstool, for beneath his table he kept an
hundred kings with their thumbs and great toes cut off, as
signs of his power and clemency. When Merodach had finished
eating he shook the crumbs from his napkin, and the kings
fed themselves with two fingers, and when Merodach observed
how painful and difficult this operation was, he praised God
for having given thumbs to man.
"'It is by the absence of things,' he said, 'that we learn
their use. Thus if we deprive a man of his eyes we deprive
him of sight, and in this manner we learn that sight is the
function of the eyes.'
"Thus spake Merodach, for he had a scientific mind and was
curious of God's handiwork. And when he had finished
speaking, his courtiers applauded him."
Adam is afterwards discovered trespassing in Merodach's garden or
paradise. The characters of Bagoas, Merodach's high priest, Adam, Eve
and the Princess Candace are all admirably presented. The book is
divided in six parts: the incident of the Kingdom of Uruk, a
conversation at the house of Euripides, "A Friend of Paul," a
conversation between St. Francis and the Pope, another between Thomas
Cromwell and Macchiavelli, and a final encounter between Leo XIII and
Renan in Paradise.
This book is not to be neglected by the intelligent reader (_avis
rarissima_, and in what minute ratio to the population I am still unable
to discern).
* * * * *
"Others" Anthology for 1917. This last gives, I think, the first
adequate presentation of Mina Loy and Marianne Moore, who have, without
exaggerated "nationalism," without waving of banners and general phrases
about Columbia gem of the ocean, succeeded in, or fallen into, producing
something distinctly American in quality, not merely distinguishable as
American by reason of current national faults.
Their work is neither simple, sensuous nor passionate, but as we are no
longer governed by the _North American Review_ we need not condemn poems
merely because they do not fit some stock phrase or rhetorical
criticism.
(For example, an infinitely greater artist than Tennyson uses six "s's"
and one "z" in a single line. It is one of the most musical lines in
Provençal and opens a poem especially commended by Dante. Let us leave
the realm of promoted typists who quote the stock phrases of
text-books.)
In the verse of Marianne Moore I detect traces of emotion; in that of
Mina Loy I detect no emotion whatever. Both of these women are, possibly
in unconsciousness, among the followers of Jules Laforgue (whose work
shows a great deal of emotion). Or perhaps René Ghil is the "influence"
in Miss Moore's case. It is possible, as I have written, or intended to
write elsewhere, to divide poetry into three sorts: (1) melopoeia, to
wit, poetry which moves by its music, whether it be a music in words or
an aptitude for, or suggestion of, accompanying music; (2) imagism, or
poetry wherein the feelings of painting and sculpture are predominant
(certain men move in phantasmagoria; the images of their gods, whole
countrysides, stretches of hill land and forest, travel with them); and
there is, thirdly, logopoeia, or poetry that is akin to nothing but
language which is a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas and
modifications of ideas and characters. Pope and the eighteenth-century
writers had in this medium a certain limited range. The intelligence of
Laforgue ran through the whole gamut of his time. T.S. Eliot has gone on
with it. Browning wrote a condensed form of drama, full of things of the
senses, scarcely ever pure logopoeia.
One wonders what the devil any one will make of this sort of thing who
has not in their wit all the clues. It has none of the stupidity beloved
of the "lyric" enthusiast and the writer and reader who take refuge in
scenery, description of nature, because they are unable to cope with the
human. These two contributors to the "Others" Anthology write logopoeia.
It is, in their case, the utterance of clever people in despair, or
hovering upon the brink of that precipice. It is of those who have
acceded with Renan "La bêtise humaine est la seule chose qui donne une
idée de l'infini." It is a mind cry, more than a heart cry. "Take the
world if thou wilt but leave me an asylum for my affection," is not
their lamentation, but rather "In the midst of this desolation, give me
at least one intelligence to converse with."
The arid clarity, not without its own beauty, of _le tempérament de
l'Américaine_, is in the poems of these, I think, graduates or
post-graduates. If they have not received B.A.'s or M.A.'s or B.Sc.'s
they do not need them.
The point of my praise, for I intend this as praise, even if I do not
burst into the phrases of Victor Hugo, is that without any pretences and
without clamors about nationality, these girls have written a distinctly
national product, they have written something which would not have come
out of any other country, and (while I have before now seen a deal of
rubbish by both of them) they are, as selected by Mr. Kreymborg,
interesting and readable (by me, that is. I am aware that even the poems
before me would drive numerous not wholly unintelligent readers into a
fury of rage-out-of-puzzlement.) Both these poetriæ have said a number
of things not to be found in the current numbers of _Everybody's,_ the
_Century_ or _McClure's_, "The Effectual Marriage," "French Peacock,"
"My Apish Cousins," have each in its way given me pleasure. Miss Moore
has already prewritten her counterblast to my criticism in her poem "to
a Steam Roller."
The anthology displays also Mr. Williams' praiseworthy opacity.