your eyes, you will see that each is dressed after the manner of his
age--the Elizabethans in starched ruffs; the men of the Eighteenth
Century in knee-breeches; the men of today in Homburg hats. And if
you listen to their verses you will hear that each composes, too,
after the manner of his age. For there have been fashions in poetry
as there have been fashions in dress, and you can tell the period of
a poem not only by the name and date of the poet but by the style and
flavour of the poetry.” From this thought J. F. Roxburgh has written
“a beginner’s introduction to English poetry” with the charming title,
_The Poetic Procession_. His brief review of the poets from the
Elizabethans to the men now writing is felicitous enough. But although
I am sure his intention in the sentences quoted was not literal, the
image of present-day poets in Homburg hats is very disconcerting.
Don Marquis has probably worn one, thus inviting the visitation of
insurance agents. But I am sure some of his poems have been written
with the wind blowing through his hair. Such poems as “The Name,” in
his _Dreams and Dust_, for example, or those “Premonitions” in his
_Poems and Portraits_. It is as difficult to say, with Marquis, where
the humourist stops in his poetry and the thinker steps in as to mark
the same exit-entrance in the man’s prose. _Sonnets to a Red-Haired
Lady and Famous Love Affairs_ and a part of _Poems and Portraits_ are
supposed to belong to Marquis the jester; but, of the second-named
book, which part? “The man who has laughed lest he should weep, the
clown of the seven times broken heart” is Richard Le Gallienne’s apt
characterisation of Marquis. I am not sure that “The Tom Cat” in _Poems
and Portraits_ is a bit less “serious” than such a poem as “Inhibition”
in the same collection.
Behind the placid front of use
The baffled whims move to and fro;
We fear to let these genii go....
Sober-faced, we carry hidden within us something for which the poet has
found one of those rare things in the language, the perfect phrase; it
is
The golden nonsense of the heart.
Perhaps we also are like the Tom-cat and, on our occasions, “chant the
hate of a million years.”
He will lie on a rug to-morrow
And lick his silky fur,
And veil the brute in his yellow eyes
And play he’s tame, and purr.
But at midnight in the alley
He will crouch again and wail,
And beat the time for his demon’s song
With the swing of his demon’s tail.
I am as certain that Marquis admires and condones the Tom-cat as I am
that he has sought the troubling and elusive “Name” which has variously
seemed, as he tells us in his fine poem, to be Love, and Beauty, and
God.
The Boston Evening Transcript spoke not long ago of “the unhurried
ascent of John Hall Wheelock to the highest rank among contemporary
American poets.” The statement seems to me free from any exaggeration;
and it is encouraging to think that Mr. Wheelock is in a way to reach
the height more conspicuously than did Edwin Arlington Robinson, of
whom, until his unveiling a few years ago by fellow poets, the larger
public seems to have remained in a lamentable ignorance. Mr. Wheelock’s
_Dust and Light_ (1919) and his _The Black Panther_ (1922) have a
beauty and sentience best illustrated by quotation. Here are some lines
from “Earth,” in _Dust and Light_:
Deftly does the dust express
In mind her hidden loveliness,
And from her cool silence stream
The cricket’s cry and Dante’s dream;
For the earth that breeds the trees
Breeds cities too, and symphonies.
Equally her beauty flows
Into a saviour, or a rose--
Looks down in dream, and from above
Smiles at herself in Jesus’s love.
Christ’s love and Homer’s art
Are but the workings of her heart;
Through Leonardo’s hand she seeks
Herself, and through Beethoven speaks
In holy thunderings around
The awful message of the ground.
The thought is Emersonian, but with Emerson lyricism was a doubtful
and an inconstant capture. Here is “The Lion-House,” from _The Black
Panther_, a poem, I cannot but think, that any poet would be proud to
sign:
Always the heavy air,
The dreadful cage, the low
Murmur of voices, where
Some Force goes to and fro
In an immense despair!
As through a haunted brain--
With tireless footfalls
The Obsession moves again,
Trying the floor, the walls,
Forever, but in vain.
In vain, proud Force! A might
Shrewder than yours, did spin
Around your rage that bright
Prison of steel, wherein
You pace for my delight.
And O, my heart, what Doom
What warier Will has wrought
The cage, within whose room
Paces your burning thought,
For the delight of Whom?
The black and silver of cover and jacket on Elinor Wylie’s second book
of poems, _Black Armour_, were not so much to match the title as to
convey the colour impression of a number of readers who had studied
the book in manuscript. The poems, grouped under the names of the
parts of a suit of armour--Breastplate, Gauntlet, Helmet, Beaver Up,
Plumes--perhaps require study, not in the sense of textual analysis
(though they will repay that) but in the sense of returning to them
several times, so that their compressed emotion may fully expand
itself. I had almost said, explode itself. Indeed, it may sometimes
produce nothing short of an explosion of feeling in the sensitive
reader. I am thinking now of such works as “Now That Your Eyes Are
Shut” (which opens the section called Plumes). I have heard the poem
“Peregrine” called the best in the book, the dryly concise account of a
Liar and bragger,
He had no friend
Except a dagger
And a candle-end
and whose career, the narration of which includes a dozen feats of
rhyming, was summed up when
He spoke this sentence
With a princely air:
“The noose draws tighter;
This is the end;
I’m a good fighter,
But a bad friend:
I’ve played the traitor
Over and over;
I’m a good hater,
But a bad lover.”
But “Fable,” with its effects in twenty-four lines as powerful as
Coleridge’s in his _Ancient Mariner_, and “Lucifer Sings in Secret” are
to me finer than “Peregrine” because more individual. I mean that I
could imagine a later Browning writing “Peregrine,” but cannot imagine
anyone but Elinor Wylie writing “Lucifer.” Much stress has been laid
on Mrs. Wylie’s gift for bright, strange images in her poetry, and this
is no small item in her genius; but the steeled emotion, the unearthly
cry that is heard under the burnished and metallic surfaces, sometimes
in not instantly intelligible words, is her voice as a poet. In “Now
That Your Eyes Are Shut,” which I quote, there is one stanza that might
have been written by a poet of a long-past century--I leave you to name
him--but there are two stanzas, the most important, which I can imagine
no one but Elinor Wylie writing:
Now that your eyes are shut
Not even a dusty butterfly may brush them;
My flickering knife has cut
Life from sonorous lion throats to hush them.
If pigeons croon too loud
Or lambs bleat proudly, they must come to slaughter,
And I command each cloud
To be precise in spilling silent water.
Let light forbear those lids:
I have forbidden the feathery ash to smutch them;
The spider thread that thrids
The gray-plumed grass has not my leave to touch them.
My casual ghost may slip,
Issuing tiptoe, from the pure inhuman;
The tissues of my lip
Will bruise your eyelids, while I am a woman.
ii
The title poem in Amanda Hall’s book, _The Dancer in the Shrine_,
tempts to quotation, but there seems to me something unfair in
reprinting it complete and to cut lines from it is to mutilate both
what is taken and that which is left. There is a good deal of the life
of the countryside in the book; Miss Hall’s New England is that of
Thoreau but her lyrical gift is distinctly personal. A characteristic
mood and treatment is shown in “I’ll Build My House of Sticks and
Stones,” from which the following couplets are taken:
I’ll build my house of sticks and stones,
Of lollypops and herring bones,
None other than myself to please--
Of fine, fresh straw or green sage cheese;
I’ll build my house of this and that
To suit my pleasure and my cat--
I’ll clothe myself in cast-off rags,
In cobwebs or in barley bags,
The shabbier I am encased
The fruitier my joy will taste.
I’ll set my two lips to the air
And carol to the birds’ despair....
Some musing morning as I sing
Perhaps I’ll catch God listening,
In soft enchantment at His sill.
He’ll tell His angels to be still,
He’ll say to them in tones discreet
That there is singing in the street...
The pagan quality keeps its joyousness while transmuting it into
something reverent and beautiful in such lines as “The Dancer in the
Shrine.” The religious note, differently accented, may be found in
the work of Alice Meynell, whose complete verse is now available in
_The Poems of Alice Meynell_. Mrs. Meynell’s death has brought a sharp
emphasis upon the rare character of her poetic gift. Alfred Noyes says
she has left to the world a volume “containing only masterpieces,” but
I like better the words of J. L. Garvin: “Not one of her poems but
was the music of a thought as most of her essays were the fruit of
perception.” Let me not quote “The Shepherdess,” so widely known and so
self-expressive, but “Chimes” with its changing image and its “music of
a thought” sung to perfection:
Brief, on a flying night,
From the shaken tower,
A flock of bells take flight,
And go with the hour.
Like birds from the cote to the gales,
Abrupt--O hark!
A fleet of bells set sails,
And go to the dark.
Sudden the cold airs swing.
Alone, aloud,
A verse of bells takes wing
And flies with the cloud.
Mrs. Meynell was one of a group of contemporary Catholic poets of whom,
it may be, Aline Kilmer is the most widely known and read in America.
Of the others of that group I should like especially to mention two
whose new books of verse have just appeared--Sister M. Madeleva, a
nun in the congregation of the Holy Cross at Holy Rosary Academy,
California, and Wilfred Rowland Childe, who is English. Sister M.
Madeleva’s collection called _Knights Errant_ contains verse highly
spiritual in type, clear and strong in emotional expression, and
admirable for the manner in which the author has adhered to subjects
and thoughts strictly within the limits of her clearly defined
experience. Mysticism is natural to these Catholic singers, and will be
found strongly in Mr. Childe’s _The Gothic Rose_, a book of poems quite
Gothic in spirit, sometimes wistful, sometimes marked with melancholy
and obviously the outgrowth of a loving adoration. Although such poems
as “The Dirge for Westminster” and “The Virgin of Flanders” are the
body of _The Gothic Rose_, there is a range including an Oxford poem
(“Idylle Oxonienne”), one or two classical subjects, such as “Daphne,”
and the modern verse of “The Austrian River.”
Like Amanda Hall, Josephine Daskam Bacon is both novelist and poet,
but it is as a poet that Mrs. Bacon will arrest our attention for her
_Truth o’ Women_, which has been described as a _Spoon River Anthology_
for women. The book consists of a group of “Epitaphs for Women” in free
verse; this one being characteristic:
I was sorry to leave you,
Because I knew you needed me.
But are there no women who are sorry to die
Because they need their husbands?
I wanted, dying, to be one of them!
Forty of these “Epitaphs” are followed by a series of dramatic
monologues under the general title, “Truth o’ Women.” The monologues
are spoken by the mother of Joan of Arc, Lincoln’s mother, Dante’s
wife, Milton’s daughters, the wife of Judas, one of Bluebeard’s wives,
the mother of Mary and Martha and the wives of Columbus, Sir Isaac
Newton, Cadmus, Adam, Shakespeare, Socrates, Pilate and Julius Cæsar.
No, evidently realism in poetry is not through! Look, here is “an epic
of insignificance” called _The Life and Death of Mrs. Tidmuss_, by
Wilfrid Blair. Pursuing the Spoon River comparison for Mrs. Bacon’s
book, one is on the verge of calling Blair’s work a _Main Street_ of
England in verse. In subject matter it is more like John Masefield’s
_Widow in the Bye Street_, I should say. We start with Selina as the
young daughter of a greengrocer, see her as a slow and bashful girl
leading a drab existence and wooed finally by Tom Tidmuss, who is
interested in poultry-raising. He is a printer by trade. They plan to
marry and get a cottage. Then, for the first time, Selina lives:
She had a ring, and roses in her cheek.
A year’s wait reaps the reward of her wedding day.
She had no wedding bells. Her well-oiled sire
Led her in tribal veilings up the aisle
To where a curate, impatient for his hire,
Hovered, and Tom in his stiff Sunday style.
Things went through quick. It mattered not. She moved
In a mazed phantasmagoria all the while.
Thereafter births, deaths, a subdued drudgery, old age, the selling
of the house and furniture and the going to live with her daughter,
where she is not very happy. The poet concludes on a swift crescendo,
_maestoso_:
Death sets free: it is Life that holds in thrall ...
Blow up, O trumpets of eternity!
Shout, souls of God, from starry sea to sea!
Stars, clash your shining shields--a soul is free!
iii
Of George Santayana as a poet I have incidentally spoken in Chapter
9, quoting one of his superb sonnets, but I think I neglected to call
attention to the preface he has recently provided for his _Poems_. It
is an omission that must be repaired. I can scarcely give an idea of
the preface’s excellence as vigorous and beautiful prose, but aside
from Santayana’s explanation that the subject of these poems is “simply
my philosophy in the making,” it is just to quote this passage: “A
Muse--not exactly an English Muse--actually visited me in my isolation;
the same, or a ghost of the same, that visited Boethius or Alfred
de Musset or Leopardi. It was literally impossible for me then not
to re-echo her eloquence. When that compulsion ceased, I ceased to
write verses. My emotion--for there was genuine emotion--faded into a
sense that my lesson was learned and my troth plighted....” I cannot
resist quoting from the closing poem, the lines on Art that count as a
translation from Theophile Gautier but are actually so much more than
that:
All things are doubly fair
If patience fashion them
And care--
Verse, enamel, marble, gem....
--All things return to dust
Save beauties fashioned well.
The bust
Outlasts the citadel.
The gods, too, die, alas!
But deathless and more strong
Than brass
Remains the sovereign song.
How W. E. Henley would have loved this! (But perhaps he saw it, and
was not silent). Henley, whose _Poems_ in my copy are the nineteenth
edition--and my copy is far from new. Henley and Francis Thompson and
Kipling go on; few of us need any urge or even any reminder to re-read
them; their poetry gains its fresh recruits with every season of the
young men, and old men have been known to resume their youth over the
pages....
Youth! That is the cargo that sails on those perilous seas forlorn we
looked upon from John Keats’s casements opening on the foam. What a
frank title for a first book of verse is Robert Roe’s _Here You Have
Me!_ The title poem and a few others in the Whitmanesque tradition are
followed by a group of poems derived from experiences as a sailor,
verses that break free of any tradition known to me; and by poems
ripened out of an intimate contact with the Arizona desert. I have
liked some of these greatly, just as I like, for another reason,
Vachel Lindsay’s _Going-to-the-Sun_, which is suitably fantastic. Some
way must be devised for everyone to hear Lindsay recite or chant his
verses, since in no other way can the reader possibly get more than
half their effect. I think if all could hear him in a half dozen,
the awakened instinct and quickened imagination in most of us would
accomplish the rest. We should then be able merely to read him and feel
the elixir.
In a later chapter of this book devoted to Christopher Morley there is
mention of his poem, “Parson’s Pleasure,” which gives title to his new
and by all odds best collection of verse. The remarkable change and
growth in Morley as a prose writer has been attended by chemistries
in the poet, and I expect the large popularity gained by his poems in
_Chimneysmoke_ will accrue without delay to the poems in _Parson’s
Pleasure_. But are you familiar with the poetry of Franklin P. Adams?
I only partly mean the F. P. A. of the daily breakfast table and
occasional short lyric or bit of versification heading a newspaper
column. I mean the author of _Tobogganing on Parnassus_, and _Weights
and Measures_, and _Overset_, and _So There!_ Light, satiric verse,
most of it; but how finished and perfect in its form, how penetrating
in its arrowy indirection! Whether he is penning the address of the
passionate advertiser to his love or doing for Horace what Edward
Fitzgerald did for a certain Persian singer, Mr. Adams is constantly
curing the evils of civilisation, freeing those “baffled whims” Don
Marquis tells about and generally making life more livable by making it
more singable.
iv
Among studies of contemporary poets we have had none so valuable, I
think, as Lloyd Morris’s _The Poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson_.
The first and most important inspiration that came to Mr. Morris was
undoubtedly the divisions of his subject, so that he brings us to
the consideration of a difficult master under the headings natural
to the poet, his “Men,” his use of “History,” and “Legend,” his two
prose “Plays,” and as the crown, his “Ideas” or intellectual content.
It is hard to see how any reader of poetry can do without this
lucid discussion and exposition of one who may well be, and is by
competent critics adjudged to be, the greatest living American poet. A
biographical note, following the careful bibliography of Mr. Robinson’s
works by W. Van R. Whitall, rounds out the usefulness of the little
volume.
The popularity of anthologies of verse is now proverbial, and I
expect that there will be plenty of attention for the _Anthology of
American Verse_ which J. C. Squire, poet and editor of the London
Mercury, has completed. The work shows the advantages gained by the
onlooker’s standpoint, who can bring to bear a sense of perspective
better than our own. The selection also shows Mr. Squire’s fine taste
which, so far as I know, has no superior and very few equals among
those whose knowledge of poetry would qualify them to be anthologists
at all. Another collection of extreme importance but necessarily from
a different angle has been completed by Margery Gordon and Marie B.
King, and just published under the title _Verse of Our Day_. As
the compilers had distinctly in mind school use of this book in a
special edition, as well as the wide popular audience in an edition
from which certain textbook features would be omitted, their aim
was for inclusiveness and a highly representative quality above
all else--though a rigid selection was inevitable, too. The result
is a book presenting 347 poems, 225 by American poets and 122 by
British. Ninety-two of the Americans and 42 of the British poets are
modern--that is, they lie between Eugene Field and Amy Lowell on the
one hand, between W. E. Henley and Alfred Noyes and John Masefield on
the other. Biographies of the poets, reading lists and, in the school
edition, certain guides to study have been included. The popularity of
_Verse of Our Day_ ought to be sure and of some permanence.
Henry van Dyke, assisted by Hardin Craig and Asa Don Dickinson, has
edited _A Book of British and American Verse_ rather from a standpoint
like J. C. Squire’s. “This is not an attempt to make another historical
anthology of English verse,” Dr. van Dyke explains. “I have looked
only at the value and beauty of the poems themselves.” If some poets
were unrepresented, it was not to be helped. “Those that seemed the
best have been chosen out of many, not to illustrate a theory, but for
their own sake, because they are good to read.” And for those who loved
Roosevelt as well as for those who have the anthologist’s interest,
there is _Roosevelt as the Poets Saw Him_, edited by Charles Hanson
Towne and containing poems by Kipling, Edith Wharton, Richard Le
Gallienne, William Watson, Edgar Lee Masters, Owen Wister, John Hay,
Vachel Lindsay, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Bridges.
v
Leaving aside all disputes on the score of the drama, one of the best
moments of our contemporary literature came a few years ago when it
was first known that J. M. Barrie had consented to the publication
of his plays. And then when the published plays began to come along,
the moment enlarged itself. Here was a man who was practically
inventing something, a curious but felicitous compound of novel and
drama, a mixture of narrative and dialogue, something that extended
far beyond the irrepressible wit and satire of G. Bernard Shaw’s
stage directions, priceless as those had been. There was a feeling,
with good reason, that by this step Barrie had done more to instate
himself with posterity than by anything heretofore. For about the plays
themselves, as plays, the controversy is already active; but about the
success of the plays as published I know of no dispute or objection.
_Dear Brutus_ is the eighth volume in a series which already included
_A Kiss for Cinderella_, _Alice Sit-by-the Fire_, _What Every Woman
Knows_, _Quality Street_, _The Admirable Crichton_ and two collections
of the shorter plays, _Half Hours_ (“Pantaloon,” “The Twelve-Pound
Look,” “Rosalind,” “The Will”) and _Echoes of the War_ (“The Old
Lady Shows Her Medals,” “The New Word,” “Barbara’s Wedding,” “A
Well-Remembered Voice”). There are good things to come yet, including
_Peter Pan_, and these are in preparation; but much of the best Barrie
and best-agreed-to Barrie is now ready to go on the bookshelf (where
it won’t stay put very well)--and the best of Barrie is good in any
company. For example, _The Admirable Crichton_, which even the most
critical have found strong words to praise. The printed version avoids
the fault of the 1918 stage revival in which, as has been said, Barrie
dulled or allowed some one else to dull the edge of his perfect satire.
For a short and appreciative yet discriminating account of Barrie the
playwright, one could not do better than read the chapter upon him in
John W. Cunliffe’s _English Literature During the Last Half Century_
(Macmillan: Revised Edition, 1923).
John Galsworthy, the subject of the first chapter of this book, will
not, of course, be overlooked by anyone concerned in knowing the best
plays of our time. His plays are to be had, complete at present, in
five volumes (_Plays: First Series_; _Plays: Second Series_, etc.) and
a supplementary volume, _Six Short Plays_. Or, with the exception of
the six short plays, each may be had separately. Probably a consensus
would select _Loyalties_, _Justice_, _Strife_, _The Silver Box_, _The
Pigeon_ and _The Skin Game_ as his most important and representative
dramas.
Arnold Bennett’s new play, _Don Juan de Marana_, represents one
fulfilment of a threefold ambition. Don Juan, together with the legend
of the Wandering Jew and the story of Tannhäuser, had attracted him
for years as great subjects for drama. A good deal of preliminary
work on the Wandering Jew theme was wasted by news that somebody
else had written a play on the theme and obtained a production. “I
put the Wandering Jew aside for ten years,” explains Bennett. “With
regard to Tannhäuser, I am still wondering how to cure Elizabeth of
her insipidity, and how to get into the heads of a twentieth century
audience the surely obvious fact that music is not an essential
ingredient of the tale.” Don Juan Tenorio proved impossible as the
basis of a play, but finally Bennett came upon the other, later version
of the Don Juan story. “And then I discovered what I wanted in a work
on my own shelves, the plays of Dumas _père_ in twenty-five volumes. I
ought to have divined that since Dumas wrote plays on everything, he
must have written a play on the Don Juan de Marana variation of the Don
Juan legend.”
At last all of W. Somerset Maugham’s plays are available for the
reader, some ten volumes that include not only _The Circle_, but _Lady
Frederick_, _The Explorer_, _Jack Straw_, etc. It should perhaps
be noted here that the play _Rain_ is not a Maugham play, but an
adaptation of Maugham’s tremendous short story, “Rain,” included in his
book of South Sea tales, _The Trembling of a Leaf_.