"KNOWLEDGE itself is power," Sir Francis Bacon wrote in classical Latin,
and in abbreviated form the proverb became a familiar in households
and universities alike. But knowledge of what? There is no power in
knowledge of mediocre verse.
I had rather flunk my Wasserman test
Than read a poem by Edgar A. Guest.
The power of great poetry lies not in knowledge of it but in
assimilation of it. Most talk about poetry is vacuous. Poetry can pass
no power into any human being unless it itself has power--power
of beauty, truth, wit, humor, pathos, satire, worship, and other
attributes, always through form. No poor poetry is worth reading. Taste
for the best makes the other kind insipid.
Compared with America's best poetry, most poetry of the Southwest is as
mediocre as American poetry in the mass is as compared with the great
body of English poetry between Chaucer and Masefield. Yet mediocre
poetry is not so bad as mediocre sculpture. The mediocre in poetry is
merely fatuous; in sculpture, it is ugly. Generations to come will have
to look at Coppini's monstrosity in front of the Alamo; it can't rot
down or burn up. Volumes of worthless verse, most of it printed at the
expense of the versifiers, hardly come to sight, and before long they
disappear from existence except for copies religiously preserved in
public libraries.
Weak fiction goes the same way. But a good deal of very bad prose in the
nonfiction field has some value. In an otherwise dull book there may
be a solitary anecdote, an isolated observation on a skunk, a single
gesture of some human being otherwise highly unimportant, one salty
phrase, a side glimpse into the human comedy. If poetry is not good, it
is positively nothing.
The earliest poet of historical consequence the only form of his
poetical consequence--of the Southwest was Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar. He
led the Texas cavalry at San Jacinto, became president of the Republic
of Texas, organized the futile Santa Fe Expedition, gathered up six
volumes of notes and letters for a history of Texas that might have been
as raw-meat realistic as anything in Zola or Tolstoy. Then as a poet
he reached his climax in "The Daughter of Mendoza"--a graceful but
moonshiny imitation of Tom Moore and Lord Byron. Perhaps it is better
for the weak to imitate than to try to be original.
It would not take one more than an hour to read aloud all the poetry
of the Southwest that could stand rereading. At the top of all I should
place Fay Yauger's "Planter's Charm," published in a volume of the same
title. With it belongs "The Hired Man on Horseback," by Eugene Manlove
Rhodes, a long poem of passionate fidelity to his own decent kind of
men, with power to ennoble the reader, and with the form necessary to
all beautiful composition. This is the sole and solitary piece of poetry
to be found in all the myriads of rhymes classed as "cowboy poetry."
I'd want Stanley Vestal's "Fandango," in a volume of the same title.
Margaret Bell Houston's "Song from the Traffic," which takes one to the
feathered mesquites and the bluebonnets, might come next. Begging pardon
of the perpetually palpitating New Mexico lyricists, I would skip most
of them, except for bits of Mary Austin, Witter Bynner, Haniel Long,
and maybe somebody I don't know, and go to George Sterling's "Father
Coyote"--in California. Probably I would come back to gallant Phil
LeNoir's "Finger of Billy the Kid," written while he was dying of
tuberculosis in New Mexico. I wouldn't leave without the swift,
brilliantly economical stanzas that open the ballad of "Sam Bass," and
a single line, "He came of a solitary race," in the ballad of "Jesse
James."
Several other poets have, of course, achieved something for mortals
to enjoy and be lifted by. Their work has been sifted into various
anthologies. The best one is_ Signature of the Sun: Southwest Verse,
1900-1950_, selected and edited by Mabel Major and T. M. Pearce,
University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1950. Two other anthologies
are _Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp_, by John A. Lomax, 1919,
reprinted in 1950 by Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York; _The Road to
Texas_, by Whitney Montgomery, Kaleidograph, Dallas, 1940. Montgomery's
Kaleidograph Press has published many volumes by southwestern poets.
Somebody who has read them all and has read all the poets represented,
without enough of distillation, in _Signature of the Sun_ could no doubt
be juster on the subject than I am.
Like historical fiction, drama of the Southwest has been less dramatic
than actuality and less realistic than real characters. Lynn Riggs of
Oklahoma, author of _Green Grow the Lilacs_, has so far been the most
successful dramatist.