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 like _Queen Mab_, and
would probably have felt less need of concentrating his work into the
narrow limits of such formalistic poems as _The West Wind_.
Let it be understood that all the principles suggested in this monograph
are intended only for the true devotee of _vers libre_. One can have
nothing but contempt for the poet who, using generally the old-fashioned
metres, turns sometimes to _vers libre_ as 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 encouraging _vers 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 produce _vers libre_ of the quality that appears in the
choruses of _Sampson 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 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 of _vers libre_ can 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.
The Decorative Straight-Jacket: Rhymed Verse
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 sometimes be 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.
Harriet Monroe’s Poetry
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
magazine _Poetry: A Magazine of Verse_, which might almost, so far as
Chicago is concerned, be called the spiritual older sister of THE 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 title _You
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 I_ is 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 of _State Street at Night_ or the simpler but more
profound poignancy of the _Elegy 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 IT
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 flee
Afoot, awing, and shake the deep with cries—
Oh, far away—yo hay!
What moony mask, what arrogant disguise
That life should be!
Scharmel Iris: Italian Poet
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, entitled _Lyrics 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 in THE LITTLE REVIEW
brought 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 radiance
From boughs of dusk;
The day was a chameleon;
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;
You are the body-house of lust;
Where twilight-peacocks lord the place
Spendthrifts of pride and grace;
And lo, at Heaven’s blue-windowed house
God sets the moon for lamp;
The sunbeams sought her hair,
And rested there;
These mute white Christs—the daily crucified;
Lucretia Borgia fair
The poppy is.
The sunbeams dance in dawn’s ballet;
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,
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. In _The Visionary_ a 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 January_ is an
excellent landscape—interpretive rather than descriptive.
_Scarlet—White_ is struck at the double standard, and is a strong and
powerful utterance. _April_, _Canzonette_, _Lady of the Titian Hair_ are
exquisite and charming lyrics. Three graceful compositions are _The
Heart-Cry of the Celtic Maid_, _Tarantella_ and _Song for a Rose_. _The
Ugly Woman_ will cause discussion, but it is good art. The trio of
_Spring Songs_ and _Her Room_ are well nigh perfect. _Mary’s Quest_ is
very tender, as is also the _Twilight Lullaby_. _The Leopard_, _Fantasy
of Dusk and Dawn_, _The Forest of the Sky_ are 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. _Heroes_ treats
of the nameless heroes, daily met and overlooked. The love poems are
sincere as all love poems must be. In _Foreboding_ the 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 hands
Will be as iron bands
Around her lover’s heart;
and
O’er thee will winter through the sky’s gray sieve
Sift down his charity of snow.
_The Mad Woman_ (printed in _Poetry_) 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 (as
THE LITTLE REVIEW remarked) 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.
The Poetry of T. Sturge Moore
In an early number of THE LITTLE REVIEW a 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 of THE LITTLE REVIEW to 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 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 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-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 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.
Amy Lowell’s Contribution
_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 of _vers 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 in _vers
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’s _White and Green_, for example:
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.
Or _Absence_:
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 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.
Star Trouble
HELEN HOYT
A little star
Came into the heaven
At the close of even.
It seemed not very far,
And it was young and soft.
But the gray
Got in its way,
So that I longed to reach my hand aloft
And push the clouds by
From its little eye,
From its little soft ray.
Parasite
CONRAD AIKEN
Nine days he suffered. It was in this wise.—
He, being scion to Homer in our time,
Must needs be telling tales, in prose or rhyme;
He was a pair of large blue hungry eyes.
Money he had, enough to live in ease;—
Drank wine occasionally; would often sit—
Child and critic alternate—in the Pit:
Cheap at a half-crown he thought feasts like these.
Plays held him by the throat—and cinemas too—
They blanched his face and made him grip his seat;
And oh, fine music to his soul was sweet—
He said, “His ears towards that music _grew_!”
And he kept watch with stars night after night,
Spinning tales from the little of life he knew.—
Of modern life he was the parasite.
Subtle his senses were—yea, like a child,
Sudden his spirit was to cry or laugh;
Strange modern blending of the tame and wild;
As sensitive to life as seismograph.
His sympathies were keen and sweet and quick,
He could play music subtly in your mood;
Raw life, to him, was often strange and rude—
Slight accidents could make him white and sick.
Unreasoning, but lovable was he;—
Men liked him, he was brave; and yet withal
When brute truth stunned him, he could cringe and crawl;
When most he loved the world, he least could see.
Now let him speak himself, as he well can,
In his queer modern style of poesy.—
Then judge him, you, as poet and as man.
* * * * *
There was a woman lived by Bloomsbury Square,—
She was not all that womankind can be,—
Yet she was good to me, I thought her fair,—
I loved her, she was all the world to me;
O, I was adoration, she divine,
And star or moon could not so sweetly shine.
I will say little—it was neither’s fault—
Yet to a bitter time my loving came,
A time of doubt, of faltering, of halt,
A time of passionate begging and of shame,
When I threw all life’s purpose at her feet,
And she stood strange to me, and cold and sweet—
Child that I was! for when it came, that hour,
It was in no wise as my heart had thought—
For comic devils had me in their power,
She laughed at me, we wrangled, and I fought,
And there was hot breath gasped in murderous words....
It was at dusk, when sweetly sang the birds....
Then there was silence—oh, how still and cold!
Without good-bye I went; for she had said—
“Young fool!”—that was a rapier-turn that told;
I could have killed her, for she knew I bled—
And smiled a little, as I turned away;
We have not known each other since that day.
I had expected, if my love went wrong,
The world in sympathy; I suffered pain
That evening when I heard the birds in song,
And stars swam out, and there was no hope for rain,
And the air was dense with lilac-sweet.... I walked
In sullen way; fierce with my soul I talked—;
And knew what knave I was; yet I devised,
Being still too angry for sincerer grief,
Some pain,—appropriate for a soul despised,—
In simulated venom crushed a leaf,—
And glared at strangers, thinking I would kill
Any that dared to thwart my casual will.
So, passing through dark streets, with heedless eyes,
I came upon a beggar, who had drawn
Pictures, upon the stones, of ships, and skies;
The moonlight lay upon them, grey and wan—
And they seemed beautiful, alive they seemed;
Beside them, cap in hand, their maker dreamed.
Above him there a long, long while I stood,
Striving to go, like dream-stuff, to his heart;
Striving to pierce his infinite solitude,
To be of him, and of his world, a part;
I stood beside his seas, beneath his skies,
I felt his ships beneath me dip and rise;
I heard his winds go roaring through tall trees,
Thunder his sails, and drive the lifted spray;
I heard the sullen beating of his seas;
In a deep valley, at the end of day,
I walked through darkness green along with him,
And saw the little stars, by moon made dim,
Peer softly through the dusk, the clouds between,
And dance their dance inviolable and bright;
Aloft on barren mountains I have seen
With him the slow recession of the night,
The morning dusk, the broad and swimming sun,
And all the tree-tops burn, and valleys run
With wine of daybreak; he and I had kept
Vigil with stars on bitter frosty nights:
The stars and frost so burned, we never slept,
But cursed the cold, and talked, and watched the lights
Down in the valleys, passing to and fro,
Like large and luminous stars that wandered slow....