My Life in Poetry
OTHER BOOKS IN THE SAME FIELD
by STANTON A. COBLENTZ
_Poetry_
THE PAGEANT OF MAN
TIME’S TRAVELERS
OUT OF MANY SONGS
FROM A WESTERN HILLTOP
GREEN VISTAS
SONGS OF THE REDWOODS
WINDS OF CHAOS
ARMAGEDDON
THE LONE ADVENTURER
SHADOWS ON A WALL
THE ENDURING FLAME
THE MOUNTAIN OF THE SLEEPING MAIDEN
THE MERRY HUNT AND OTHER POEMS
SENATOR GOOSE AND OTHER RHYMES
THE THINKER AND OTHER POEMS
_Prose_
AN EDITOR LOOKS AT POETRY
THE RISE OF THE ANTI-POETS
NEW POETIC LAMPS AND OLD
MAGIC CASEMENTS
THE TRIUMPH OF THE TEAPOT POET
_Anthologies_
MODERN AMERICAN LYRICS
MODERN BRITISH LYRICS
THE MUSIC MAKERS
UNSEEN WINGS
MY
LIFE
IN
POETRY
by
STANTON A. COBLENTZ
BOOKMAN ASSOCIATES --:-- New York
© _Copyright 1959 by Stanton A. Coblentz_
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 59-14624
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY
UNITED PRINTING SERVICES, INC.
NEW HAVEN, CONN.
_If I were a flutist and found the concert hall forsaken,_
_With only a few in the wide and staring rows,_
_Still I would stand and play, and keep my faith unshaken_
_That music was more than a wind that wails and goes._
Contents
_Chapter_ _Page_
Introduction 9
I “I Pant for the Music Which Is Divine” 13
II Path of Stones and Thorns 21
III Incentives and Lucky Shots 30
IV A Tale of Two Eyes 39
V Builders and Wreckers 46
VI Poetry by Prescription 52
VII A Mote in the Metropolis 62
VIII The Magic World between Covers 75
IX Blood Brother to the Epic 85
X Poets I Have Known 94
XI Shadows on a Wall 107
XII The Depression, the Sea, and the Redwoods 113
XIII Year of Miracles 122
XIV Trials and Rewards of an Editor 135
XV A Challenge to Giants 152
XVI A Recruit for Publishers’ Row 161
XVII A Place to End 172
Introduction
During my entire adult life and even back into the vivid, brooding days
of adolescence, one subject has had for me a light, an allurement,
and a loveliness beyond all others. And as this subject happens to
be that of poetry and hence is apt to be regarded as something of an
eccentricity if not an aberration by the steel-hard practical world, I
believe that some facts about my preoccupation may be worth explaining,
less to my fellow poets than to those general readers who wonder how
that strange creature from another world, the writer of verse, thinks
and functions.
None of us, no matter what our field, find it easy to break through the
dimness of misunderstanding that settles between man and man. But the
mists are deeper and harder to penetrate when the subject is so remote
from the usual experience as poetry. Myths are in danger of flashing
to view like toadstools, and of being swallowed whole by those without
access to the truth; and myths have actually, I sometimes suspect,
come down to us beneath the label of history in the case of more poets
than one. I have had reason to observe how even I, though surely much
less victimized than persons more widely known, have been the target
of reports which, if not always unflattering, have seldom erred on the
side of reasonableness.
In one statement, published years ago in a small magazine, I was made
the proud owner of a summer mansion in California and a winter villa
in Florida (a State which, on my nearest approach, I once glimpsed
remotely from a ship at sea). In another assertion, I was honored with
counting Lord Dunsany as assistant editor of my magazine _Wings_ (a
bit of information which would have surprised Dunsany as much as it
did me). In still another report, it was related that every afternoon,
having obtained my mail at the post office in Mill Valley, I would hike
with it into the hills and there proceed to answer it (the account did
not state whether or not I carried a typewriter in my vest pocket). And
in a somewhat less amusing instance, after a reporter for a newspaper
in a small city had spent an hour interviewing me, I had the dubious
pleasure of seeing myself awarded a doctor’s degree without benefit
of any university, while several years were added to my age (a minor
matter, to be sure), and the writer invented for me a statement
implying that my lifelong objection to extremism in verse was a case of
sour grapes gathered in later life. Doubtless other pronouncements, of
an equally preposterous nature, have been circulated where I have not
heard and never will hear them, though they could crop up at any time
as parts of an “authentic” story.
From the larger point of view, of course, it may not matter what tales
are told about anyone: all that counts about a writer is his work; by
this he must rise or fall. Nevertheless, being in some measure subject
to the ancient bias in favor of truth, I should like to set the record
straight, insofar as I am able. One thing I do know, and can state
unequivocally: no one, no one at all, not even my closest friend, knows
much of what has happened to me, and particularly what has happened
inside me. Whether this is worth knowing is another question entirely;
but for whatever incidental interest it may have, and to the extent
that is humanly possible, I should like to set down a plain report of
the facts. I am the more anxious to do so, not because I regard the
personal element as important, but because of the stand I have taken
in poetry, the cause to which I have devoted much of my life--a stand
which has earned murmurs of encouragement and even shouts of cheer in
certain quarters, but has been misunderstood in others, and has been
the source of misrepresentation, ridicule, abuse, and even personal
vilification in a battle already more than three decades old. I am
certain that nothing I say will bring clarity to those, if there be any
such, who are determined not to see clearly; but to the great majority,
who come with open minds, these pages may tell something of why one of
that dwindling tribe, the tribe of poets, has written verse and prose,
hoped and despaired, clutched at invisible barricades, and fought
for what seemed to be the light, amid a world so wide-awake on the
superficial levels that it realized little and cared little about those
depths wherein all art, all creation, and all inspiration have found
strength and sustenance.
CHAPTER
ONE
“I Pant for the Music Which Is Divine”
Seated in a rocking-chair in the upper story of an old high-ceilinged
house in San Francisco’s “Western Addition,” a mild-looking,
bespectacled woman of thirty-four was reading to a boy of eight. He
followed her with an absorbed gaze as, bending her near-sighted eyes
close to the book, she let her tongue roll over the lines of _The
Children’s Hour_, _The Wreck of the Hesperus_, and other poems more
popular in a former generation than today. Years later the lines of
some of those poems--“Between the dark and the daylight,” “Grave Alice
and laughing Allegra,” etc.--were to remain in the boy’s mind.
“These are all by a man named Longfellow,” said the woman, turning to
the child with a smile. “He was a great poet and died a long time ago.”
The name impressed the boy--he thought of someone very tall and thin, a
sort of walking two-legged pole.
“Did all great poets die a long time ago, Mamma?” asked the boy.
The woman smiled again.
“I don’t know. But I don’t think we have any Longfellow today.”
At this she sighed, ever so slightly.
Instantly a resolution formed itself in the boy’s mind. Looking up with
the blissful confidence possible only to the very young, he clenched
his small fists and promised, “You wait, Mamma! You wait! When I grow
up, I’ll be a poet--just like Longfellow!”
The years were to pass, and the boy’s ambition to become Longfellow the
Second was to be forgotten amid more exciting desires: for example,
the aspiration to be the motorman of a streetcar, or, better still, a
locomotive engineer. And the woman, who had only five years remaining
of her busy life, was not to see the day when her eldest son was to
put pen to his first crude verses. But in after years the thought
was often to come to him that the poems he wrote, though hardly such
as Longfellow would have produced, would have brought her an immense
satisfaction.
Poetry was to mean little to the boy (whose identity the reader will
have guessed) during his remaining years of childhood. You might, in
fact, have judged that it never would mean anything, if you had known
how he felt about certain verses he was forced to memorize at school.
Of these, the only ones I still remember are those often-quoted lines
of Scott,
Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
“This is my own, my native land,”
Whose heart within him ne’er hath burned
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand.
How I detested this passage! It was enough to give me a permanent
bias against Scott, and an anti-poetic impulse that might have been
lifelong. Doubtless, never having been so much as a hundred miles from
my birthplace, I was not ideally fitted to appreciate the sentiments
of a man just returning “from a foreign strand.” Besides, perhaps
my earliest bit of unconscious literary criticism was not wholly
misguided--either that, or the blind spot of childhood is still with
me, as I remain unable to warm to these lines.
A few years later, when I was thirteen and had the assignment of
writing a ballad in High School, you would have been sure that I was
a pre-destined non-poet. How I struggled with this _magnum opus_! all
the more so as I knew no more of the principles of meter than of the
laws of spherical geometry. That might not be deemed a disadvantage
nowadays, when ignorance enacts its role beneath the banners of
freedom, and when the writer daunted by form need but strike a pose,
and proclaim the merits of formlessness. But since, in those pristine
days, a ballad was expected to sound more like a ballad than like a
news report, I found myself face to face with a problem, as did all
my fellow students. I have no reason to suppose that I was any less
unsuccessful than any of the others.
How was it then that, a mere two years later, I was making spontaneous
efforts at poetry? Had this not been the beginning of a lifelong
habit--a bad habit, many will say--you might consider it but that
adolescent poetic burgeoning which marks so many youths of both sexes
before life calls them into more sober fields. Looking back, I should
say that adolescence awakens the impulses and potentialities of the
deeper self; summons out of hiding profound spiritual forces that have
no place in childhood. To me it is inconceivable that the reading at
my mother’s knee, though encouraging an interest in poetry, could have
created that interest as it was later to develop; many another child, I
feel safe in assuming, has listened to similar readings, and grown up
to be a good stockbroker, grain merchant, or realtor.
Even after all the years, it is easy for me to trace the source of my
first attempted poem. The death of my mother, a few months after I
reached thirteen, had brought me shockingly close to life’s everlasting
problems; had made it inevitable that I should wonder as to the end
and aim of existence--a problem that did not seem answered by religion
as it had been taught to me. Then one day I read some lines by Robert
Ingersoll--ringing, oratorical lines whose exact wording I no longer
recall, though the general meaning is that man is a traveler between
two great darknesses. And the result was that I burst forth into verse
which was little more than a paraphrase of Ingersoll, though not for
a moment did it occur to me that it was not original. Understanding
no more of the laws of blank verse than I had known of ballad writing
two years before, I set out boldly to wield one of the greatest and
most difficult of the English meters. While the completed product has
(fortunately) been lost, my memory retains the opening lines:
A boundless ocean of eternity
Stretches on all sides of a tiny isle.
The island is called life; the sea is death;
From its broad bosom mortal ne’er returns.
Not exactly an unusual thought, nor a distinguished expression of that
thought! But like most writers, even of the most execrable trash, I
had the illusion that my work was good--an illusion no doubt necessary
to keep up one’s spirits if more and perhaps less incompetent work is
to be produced. In any case, more work was indeed forthcoming, much
more--and I wish I could be so confident as to believe most of it less
incompetent. But for several years, I am sure, the greater part of it
was on exactly the same level of banality and unaccomplishment. Yes,
even those lines which I doted upon in my teen-aged zeal, and assumed
to be on so high a poetic plane!--
On the sunny isle of wishes,
On the mountain peaks of hope....
I could not have known that a time would come when I would blush even
to repeat this doggerel. I quote the lines now only because of the
marvelous fact--and it _does_ seem marvelous--that I should ever have
thought them good. If tastes and perceptions change with age, the ways
in which they change are sometimes a little saddening--saddening, at
least, when we observe how mistaken the clear, pure fervor of youth may
be. I am happy, in any case, to report that you would search in vain
for the rest of the masterpiece about the “sunny isle of wishes”--the
two quoted lines are the only two that somehow, perversely, have clung
to my memory, and the written copies have gone to a deserved limbo.
Ah, long and hard, and with many turns and windings, and dips no less
than rises, and devotions and heartbreaks beyond my imagining, was to
be the path that led toward poetry! But this I could not have foreseen
nor imagined in my sanguine, halcyon youth.
At this time I did not know any poet; and it did not occur to me
that I ever could know anyone so far above the plodding, commonplace
world--one of those divine creatures whom I imagined as having been
born old and gray-bearded, with a great shock of grizzled, unkempt
hair, blazing eyes, and perhaps long, trailing, patriarchal robes.
But there came a day when I would meet a poet in the flesh. And what
a disillusionment! Why, he seemed not to be beyond his twenties! And
he had no beard--in fact, not even a mustache; he talked and looked
like any ordinary man! And he had some unromantic name like Harold
Spring--or Springer, I forget exactly which. The place of our meeting
was not one of the palisades of Parnassus, but my father’s insurance
office, which he had entered not with the purpose of spreading his
wings, but of selling his book. In this he evidently succeeded, through
what arts of salesmanship I cannot imagine, since I cannot remember my
father ever investing in another book of verse, though he did have many
books of other kinds. I know that the slim volume was in our possession
for some time, and that I eagerly perused it, but all I can recall
of the contents is that there was one poem with a rousing anapestic
rhythm, in which the author, looking for a rhyme for “golden,”
ingeniously enlarged “days of old” into “days of olden”--a combination
that especially struck me, as I had never seen it before, just as I
have never encountered it since.
“Mr. Spring,” remarked my father--or maybe it was “Springer”--“says
that he is unappreciated today, but monuments will be raised to him a
hundred years after he dies.” Ah, the perennial hope of so many!--I did
not then realize the pathos of it; I was confident that the day would
come when the name of Spring--or Springer--would be honored beside
those of Keats and Tennyson.
Keats and Tennyson and Coleridge and some others, but Shelley more
than any of the rest, had spun their magic about me before I was out
of High School. I use the term “magic” advisedly; no other word so
fully conveys the enchantment I felt, the feeling of being uplifted,
illuminated, and transported to some world which was not that of our
common earth of streets and houses, but was more real, more vivid,
more radiant. Not only the thought and the imagery but the ring and
rhythms of the lines, the mellifluousness and sonorousness of the words
bewitched me. I would repeat over and over to myself passages from _The
Cloud_, or some melodious stanza like this from _To Night_:
Swiftly walk o’er the western wave,
Spirit of Night!
Out of thy misty eastern cave,
Where all the long and lone daylight
Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,
Which make thee terrible and dear,--
Swift be thy flight!
With Shelley, I would have said that “I pant for the music which is
divine.” But sound effects and sorcery do not begin to express the
awards I looked for in poetry; I also sought, sought with a passionate
intensity, for something that may be called consolation. “Consolation
for what?” you will ask. That, however, is something not to be answered
as definitely as the question, “What is a brick wall?” I do not know if
the experience is a general one, but I do know that for years during
my adolescence I was obsessed with strange nostalgic longings, a vague
sadness as for something irrecoverably lost long before, a sense of
doom and of pain and parting in some far shadowy past. These feelings
were with me particularly in the loneliness that fell upon me when,
just before my seventeenth birthday, I went to live with an aunt and
uncle in Oakland while attending the University at Berkeley. Then I
would linger with relish over lines such as
Like the ghost of a dear friend dead
Is Time long past,
and,
Rarely, rarely cometh thou,
Spirit of Delight!
Wherefore hast thou left me now
Many a day and night?
and,
Unfathomable sea, whose waves are years,
Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe
Are brackish with the salt of human tears!
In these serener later days, poetry of this sort has lost much of
its attraction for me; it strikes me as somewhat morbid. Moreover,
there was nothing in my life so tragic as to justify concentration
upon bleakness, sorrow, and longing. But I mention my feelings as a
psychological fact; perhaps they were merely part of the melancholy
so frequently associated with youth. Sometimes, however, I have
liked to speculate--though this can never, of course, be more than
speculation--that what I felt was a vague upsurging of recollection:
recollection of some former life of sorrow and separation, which came
dimly back to me through the mists of distance before the swift current
of years had drowned it.
My special consolation, when I was lonely or depressed, was a huge
anthology found in few homes nowadays: Bryant’s _A Library of Poetry
and Song_, an inheritance from my mother, a compilation which, issued
in 1870, and divided into sections such as “Poems of the Affections,”
“Poems of Sorrow and Adversity,” “Poems of Nature,” “Poems of Peace and
War,” contained hundreds of selections from the standard poets along
with not a few by once popular but now little-remembered writers such
as Felicia Hemans and Jean Ingelow.
Over the pages of this book I would linger for hours, making new
friends and resuming acquaintance with old ones, in whom I found
a companionship of thought and mood which, especially during the
difficult period just after I left home, I did not meet anywhere in the
human world about me.
CHAPTER
TWO
Path of Stones and Thorns
Early in my apprenticeship to poetry, I was to learn that the path was
not entirely one of daisies and primroses, but was beset with stones,
thorns, and pitfalls--a tortuous trail, where you had to sweat and
strain in order to satisfy yourself even for a time.
There may be those whose inspiration needs no afterthought; who
can dash off poems with a perfection that would make revision as
superfluous as an attempt to paint the sky blue. But I have met no such
super-gifted persons, and have seen no evidence that they ever existed;
on the contrary, I have observed proof of the meticulous and often
radical revisions made by many, including Milton, Gray, Coleridge,
Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Fitzgerald and others. Possibly now
and then a poem does spring forth full-fledged, like fabled Minerva
from the head of Jove; I can even testify from experience that this
does occur, though I make no claim as to the quality of the product.
But this is the rare exception; usually the poet must labor with a
chisel. After all, the words of the English language are so many, their
combinations so innumerable, the shades and nuances of thought so
varied, and the possibilities of technical adjustments and figurative
embellishments so rich! Surely, only by a rare intuitive stroke could
a poet immediately pick the truest and best phrasing! The original
impulse, which may be too urgent to allow the writer to debate with
himself over the sound of a syllable or the choice of an adjective
before the thought has been caught on paper, would not be well-served
if the poet strove for instant perfection. Let the essence of the poem
be caged in words before its fragile and delicate substance vanishes;
then let the details be strengthened, rearranged, and purified.
To be sure, I may smile now to recall how zealously I toiled to improve
lines that not even the genius of a Milton could have redeemed from
the waste basket. I may smile, also, to think of the epic in heroic
couplets, which, sometime during my High School days, I started
to confide to a notebook; it had a fabulous Spenserian theme, as
allegorical as _The Faerie Queene_, and eventually met its deserts,
and was lost to sight. Similarly, I may smile to think of the still
longer poem on which I embarked somewhat later, under the egregious
title, _The Key to the Universe_--which will doubtless sound as funny
to the reader as it does to me today, though it was not actually so
presumptuous as the wording might indicate. I really did not imagine
that I had the key to the universe; on the contrary, I was impressed
then, as today, by the fathomless and awesome mystery of all created
things; and in pursuance of this feeling of wonder and bewilderment,
the poem dealt with a man who merely _sought_ the objective mentioned
in the title. I recall that I wrote this would-be masterpiece during
one of my summer school vacations: in the heat of the Stockton days,
when 100 degrees in the shade was not unusual, creative work was
impossible; and therefore, in order to find the necessary coolness as
well as uninterrupted quiet, I would go at about seven every morning
to my father’s office on the fifth floor of a downtown building, where
I would be undisturbed until his arrival at eight-thirty or nine--at
which time, creation would end. But by then I had ordinarily completed
about fifty lines of blank verse, which I would revise later in the day.
So far as I am aware, no eyes but mine have ever glanced at _The Key
to the Universe_, which occupied me all of one summer. It was not that
I was exceptionally secretive; it was that I had discovered that few
people in this matter-of-fact world, even among those closest to one,
are interested in seeing poems, and especially long poems, unless out
of curiosity, or because they are impressed by something quite apart
from the work itself, such as the prospect of gain, or the trailing
effulgence of some chance honor. Like everyone, I want to have my work
read and appreciated; but in my later years, as in my earlier, I have
found the writing of poetry a lonely, a very lonely task; in my later
years, as in my earlier, I have never shown my work to anyone who did
not ask to see it (my wife and editors alone excepted); and it rarely
happens that anyone does ask to see it.
When just under seventeen, I saw the first glimmerings of what looked
to me like success. I say “looked” like success, for appearances are
more illusory than I, in my juvenile ardor, could have realized.
An essay in rhymed couplets, entered in a state-wide contest for
High School students, won me a free trip to the Yosemite Valley (a
trip which, for reasons I need not enter into here, I was unable to
take); and this was the more extraordinary since I had never seen the
Yosemite, although I wrote in glowing terms about “this masterpiece
of nature’s art.” The prize-winning offering, so far as I can recall
it, was an execrable concoction in which words like “grand,” “superb,”
“majestic,” “splendid,” and “magnificent” took the place of poetry; but
I was elated at the recognition, and did not realize that recognition
of itself is a bubble, prizes are bubbles, and are apt in the end to
mock you, unless your work itself is good--in which case you need no
prizes.
Nevertheless, that prize did give a spur to my spirits and at the
same time it offered my father and others about me their first faint
hope that perhaps after all the young scapegrace of a poet was not
altogether a squanderer of time. But I doubt whether it had any more
effect than an April shower upon my future.
This was, indeed, the only encouragement I was to have for a long, long
time. Instead, I took my tuition in the form of slaps in the face.
One of the hardest came during my second year in college, when for
the first time I did meet a real poet--Leonard Bacon, a tall, waggish
reed of a man, then much less known than later, though he had some
real poetry to his name, and was available where you could actually
see and talk with him; in fact, he was a member of the staff of the
English Department. Even if he was no older and no more bearded than my
one-time acquaintance Mr. Spring (or Springer), I had by now lost some
of my romantic ideas as to the required looks of poets. What I did have
was a high aspiration to enter Bacon’s class in verse-writing, a class
limited to fifteen members. With unabashed temerity, I submitted what I
regarded as my best poems--in all probability, my most bombastic; and
confidently awaited the word of the great man. In due time, this word
came--and like unexpected thunder, it left me stunned. I was refused!
This in itself would have been devastating enough; but still worse was
Mr. Bacon’s comment when he returned my manuscripts. “If you want to
write soporifics for the entertainment of your friends, by all means go
on. Otherwise, I’d advise you to turn to some other line of work.”
This advice, like much other good counsel I have received, was not
taken; and a time was to come, as we shall see, when Mr. Bacon would
soften his verdict. Looking back today, however, I cannot doubt that
his opinion was justified by the possibly facile but quite unillumined
verses I had submitted. But at the time, his decree pounded me like a
sledgehammer. Had it not been that even sledgehammers could not break
my tie to poetry, I might truly have turned to some less difficult
subject, like mathematics or astrophysics.
Other blows also were in store for me. In the beginning, I had written
just in order to write--in order to fulfill some vague and nameless
but powerful impulse, which caused me to take strange satisfaction in
smooth-flowing words and lines and in the rhythmical expression of the
thoughts surging over me. To write was enough! The possible fate of the
output was something I did not even consider. But in time a new element
was to be injected. And the date, as nearly as I can place it, was
sometime after my eighteenth birthday.
At the beginning of the second semester of my second college year, a
great change came into my life. To an outsider, the difference would
have seemed a routine one; yet it was as if the fabled magic carpet
had taken me to new continents on that day when I left my uncle and
aunt in Oakland, and came to live in Berkeley, where I shared a room
and sleeping porch with my cousin Stanley. Stanley, a clever and
kindly youth about three and a half years my senior (now a lawyer in
Los Angeles) had something of a penchant for leadership; and one of
the ways in which this penchant manifested itself was in connection
with my poetry. Now I have no reason to suppose that he had then,
or at any time, any interest whatever in poetry as such; but he did
show an interest in _my_ poetry, at least to the extent of trying
to market it. What he did was to constitute himself, in a sense, my
literary agent, though I doubt if either of us had ever heard this
term. I typed out the poems (having just received from my father the
gift of a reconditioned typewriter, for which I was more grateful than
if it had been the wealth of Croesus). And Stanley compiled a list
of periodicals, and sent my none-too-skillful typescripts to most
of the leaders of the day: the _Atlantic_, _Scribners_, _Harpers_,
the _Century_, the _North American Review_, the _Forum_, and other
magazines, many of them now long departed from this mortal life.
With the publication fever thus aroused, I eagerly awaited the results.
Poor deluded hopeful! I did not yet know that even with the most
accomplished work, and the arduous labors of a practiced hand, the road
to editorial favor is often long, sinuous, and spiny. And with verse as
amateurish as mine--well, the outcome was inevitable. When my treasures
started coming back, I was disappointed, and disappointed again, and
disappointed once more, and so on and on, scores of times. I could not
believe that the editors, _all editors_, were too shortsighted to see
the merits so luminously evident to me. To be sure, their printed slips
were invariably worded politely: they “had had pleasure in reading the
submissions,” rejection “did not necessarily imply any lack of merit,”
and the author was thanked for “his courtesy” in permitting the editors
to turn down his work. Sometimes the rejection slips even invited
further submissions--with the result that I would acquire duplicate
slips, soliciting still further submissions. But not a single penned or
pencilled line suggested that editors were human! I began to doubt if
they were.
What Stanley thought of the debacle I do not know; in the end, when he
saw that his efforts brought nothing but a waste of time and postage
stamps, he probably told himself that his verse-writing cousin would
do well to cease his scribblings and settle down to some good, solid
occupation, like that of a schoolteacher or a filing clerk.
Still, to my own way of thinking, the score was not quite absolute
zero. One of the final submissions did bring me a ray of hope. No,
more than a ray! a blaze! The poems, submitted to a Boston literary
magazine, came back exactly in the way of their predecessors, but
this was not because they were not good--oh, not at all, said the
glowing letter that accompanied them, on an imposing letterhead,
with a subheading that particularly impressed me, _Books in Belles
Lettres_. The return of my “splendid poems” was greatly regretted by
Mr. Scottfield, the editor, and was due only to the unhappy fact that
he was overstocked. However, if I had poems enough to make a book, he
would be glad to recommend the manuscript to the consideration of the
other editors associated with him in The Poet-Craft Publishing Company.
The fact that I had never heard before of the Poet-Craft Publishing
Company made no difference whatever. I pictured it as an immense
concern, occupying the whole of some noble building in downtown Boston,
where a learned knot of editors and scores of able assistants were
devoted to the uplifting task of giving poetry to the world.
Riding cloud-high on the wings of such thoughts, I let my eyes range
again and again over those magical lines. If I had poems enough to
make a book! To think that my work was wanted by that great publishing
house, the Poet-Craft Company! So then all the editors who had returned
my work had been wrong! Of course! I had known that from the beginning!
And now those eminent authorities at Poet-Craft would prove it by
publishing my book! That they actually would publish it I did not
doubt--all that was necessary was for me to pick out my best, and send
them to Mr. Scottfield.
Having dispatched the manuscript, which contained most of the poems
that Stanley had sent out with such unanimous lack of success, I could
hardly wait for the letter that would tell me when Mr. Scottfield would
publish the book. But the suspense was not to be long, considering that
there were no air mails in those days. Hardly two weeks had passed
before the postman delivered a long blue envelope whose upper left-hand
corner bore that enchanted inscription, _The Poet-Craft Publishing
Company_. My fingers trembled as, during that breathless instant, I
tore open the envelope.
The first lines brought me a thrill: Mr. Scottfield was “delighted”
with my poems! His fellow editors agreed with him in recommending
publication. The book would be printed on a “special laid paper” and
bound in “antique boards.” (I had, to be sure, no idea what laid
paper or antique boards might be, but they sounded magnificent.) A
publication date could be set almost immediately, and I would have
proofs in a few weeks, dependent, however, upon one small condition.
By the time I had read this far, my pulse was beating fast, but my
heart was beginning to sink. The “one small condition” did not look
small to me: it was that I must forward to Mr. Scottfield “the nominal
sum of $575.”
He might as well have asked “the nominal sum” of five hundred and
seventy-five millions. Not that I would not have paid the money, and
eagerly, if I had had it; but in my impecunious student’s life, in
which a dollar looked as large as a pumpkin, an item of five or six
hundred dollars surpassed my wildest dreams of wealth. Some fantastic
ideas did, indeed, flit through my head: I might borrow the money.
But nobody whom I knew had that much money to lend, except possibly a
certain uncle, who ran a retail clothing store and was regarded as the
rich man of the family. However, he was not known to be so free-handed
as to throw money away (which, I had just sense enough to realize,
would be how he would look upon the proposed investment). No, I had
nowhere to turn, nowhere at all! I must give up the dream--my book
would never be published, on laid paper and with antique boards, by
that distinguished concern, the Poet-Craft Publishing Company!
Little did I realize the shoals I was avoiding! I have often thought
how unfortunate it would have been if some obliging relative, with
more money than literary judgment, had come forward to provide Mr.
Scottfield with the requested sum. Surely, it would not have been easy
to live down the appearance between boards (even antique boards!) of
the _juvenilia_ that I regarded as poetry.
CHAPTER
THREE
Incentives and Lucky Shots
Curious notions have taken root in some minds as to the poet’s aims
and ambitions. Most people do not, indeed, have the illusion that the
average verse-writer expects to get rich--no, poets are still popularly
associated with rags and garrets. On the other hand, it is often
assumed that the poet goes about trailing after glittering spangles of
immortal glory, eager to forfeit the bread of today for the fame of
a posthumous tomorrow. There may, for all I know, be poets with such
super-mundane ideas, but I am not aware of having met any, though I do
remember one well-known rhymester who modestly hoped that some small
sheaf of all his writings would be read a hundred years after he died;
while I have seen others, like Mr. Spring or Springer, whose sense
of present frustration has led them to dream of a golden post-mortem
renown.
To me the important thing has always been the work itself; I have
always found something a little ridiculous, not to say amusing, in
the man who pictures himself dancing a splendid rigadoon before the
eyes of posterity. Posterity doubtless will have its own interests
and preoccupations; and if it has a small amount of time to spare for
any of us now alive, that will be exclusively its own concern, since
presumably we will no longer know or care. This does not mean that the
poet does not wish his work to be read and appreciated. Of course he
does! Its very purpose in being is to be read and appreciated; and,
besides, the greater the attention given to any of his poems, the
easier the path for his subsequent work.
It may seem strange, but if you were to ask me why I have written
verse--and this applies to my latest no less than to my earliest--the
most accurate answer I could give would be, “For the joy of creation.”
Yes, for that same joy in creation which the sculptor finds in carving
a bust, the composer in constructing a sonata, or the architect in
designing a monument. There is not only the satisfaction which any
artist takes in the completed product; there is the glow, the passion,
the ecstasy of composition, in which one virtually enters a different
sphere of being.
There are, it seems to me, two levels on which rhymes may be put
together or other writings produced: the first, the same superficial
level that suffices for ordinary activities, may be adequate for
a jingle in which the chief feat is the rhyming of “house” with
“mouse.” But this level, apparently the only one ever reached by many
rhymesters, is not the fountainhead of poetry or of any inspired
writing. The spirit of the writer, amid the absorption of composition,
is withdrawn from the world; it is as if a veil had been pulled down
between it and mundane concerns and it had sunk into some realm of
deeper apprehension in which the facts of ordinary existence are
screened from view, while it draws upon insights and intuitions,
sources of knowledge and facilities of invention foreign to its
everyday experience. Literally, it is as if the creator has entered
into a trance--a trance in which thoughts and images and even completed
expressions may flash before him with a speed, a vividness, and an
aptness impossible on the ordinary plane of consciousness.
In such a trance, moreover, his awareness of the external world may
be blunted or disconnected. Just how deep this creative isolation may
be, and how it may literally switch one off from contact with common
affairs, may be illustrated by an incident of many years ago. Late
one afternoon I was in my third-floor New York apartment, composing
a poem, and in the midst of the creative effort I was vaguely aware
of a thumping noise from outside, followed by a confusion of sounds.
But these came to me remotely, and as if from far away, and I went on
uninterruptedly with the poem, while the sounds gradually died down.
Not until the next day did I learn that our janitor, trying to get into
the fifth-floor window of an apartment not far from mine, had fallen to
the cement court, and been killed.
I do not mean to imply that one’s absorption is always as deep as this,
although it is ordinarily so intense that the buzzing of a doorbell,
the clanging of the telephone, or even the entry of another person into
the room will come as a shock, after which it will be difficult and in
some cases impossible to return to the creative mood. But the state of
creation, when not unnaturally interrupted, is an experience from which
one may emerge with something like rapture, the sense of having touched
the fringes of heaven and been brushed by angels’ wings. Maybe it is
all only a sort of drugging effect, like that of opium or hashish;
but it has always been my view that only during creation is one most
alive, most able to reach out to the full length and depth of one’s own
personality.
Behind the imperfect offerings of youth, as behind the skilled
productions of maturity, the same overmastering creative spirit may
lie. Let me give an example. One day, during the early years of the
First World War, I was idling over a college textbook, when for
some reason my thoughts were diverted to the innumerable war dead.
Immediately the book was forgotten; in a trance-like detachment,
I seemed to see the disembodied warriors moving protestingly in
uncountable legions across a stormy sky. And out of this vision, a
sonnet had birth. I quote the opening lines:
I saw an army of the newly dead
Come stalking by like clouds before the blast.
More numerous than autumn leaves they passed,
With War, their slayer, marching at their head.
The impulse behind this was real, quite as much so as if the poem had
been more accomplished. In later years, I would have known better
than to have presented the picture so starkly and obviously; I would
have recognized that mention of “the newly dead” and of “War, their
slayer” was superfluous; I would have tried to think of a more original
image than “autumn leaves”; and I would have concentrated more on the
picture, from which the reader would more powerfully have received the
intended dread impression. But these are matters of technique, which
come with study and practice.
In my Junior year in college, I was honored with the privilege I had
previously sought in vain: admission into Leonard Bacon’s verse-writing
class. Sometimes I have wondered at the temerity that led me to try
again, after having been so signally rebuffed; and I have also wondered
whether my acceptance was not due to something extraneous: the fact
that the members of my class, aside from myself, consisted of two males
and twelve females--not that I suspect Mr. Bacon of any prejudice
against the distaff side, merely that I suppose that he had a sense of
proportion, or of disproportion.
Now, in any case, I was in! And being in, I received, for the first
time, some schooling in verse-writing. I also met, for the first time,
another youth with whom to discuss poetry--a genial, raw-boned Scotsman
named MacMorrow, with whom my acquaintance was to be unhappily brief:
not long afterwards, he left to be a volunteer ambulance driver in the
European War, and neither I, nor any of my fellows, so far as I know,
ever had word from him again. I have always hoped that he remained
something more than a ghost.
As for the instructor--the tall, angular Leonard Bacon, perpetually
working his mobile face into contortions, perpetually bubbling over
with ideas, was interesting not only as a poet and teacher but as a
man. Later, when under his guidance I wrote my Master’s thesis on
_The Poetic Revival in America_, I was to know him somewhat better;
but for the present he was redeeming himself in my eyes for that
insulting rejection of my work a year earlier; at the semester’s end,
he expressed the idea that “if I worked like the devil”--the words may
not be precisely his, but the thought is--I “might possibly be able to
get somewhere.”
If there be any down-looking powers with eyes for us poor versifying
mortals, they know that I assuredly _have_ worked, though perhaps
not exactly “like the devil”; but whether I have been able to “get
somewhere”--ah, that is another matter entirely!
I am sure that Mr. Bacon would not have conceded that I had gotten
anywhere at all at the time when the first magazines wasted good space
on my rhymes. The earliest of them all was a small Eastern religious
sheet, which a preacher of my acquaintance had recommended; I have
forgotten its name, but let us call it _The Biblical Visitor_. Lo and
behold, one day I received several free copies (I had, of course, never
even thought of the possibility of other compensation), and had the
charming experience of seeing my own name beneath a beautifully framed
poem, under whose title I read the surprising line, “Written especially
for _The Biblical Visitor_.” Of course, it had _not_ been written
especially for _The Biblical Visitor_, whose very existence had been
unknown to me at the time of composition! But little difference that
made to the budding author who stood there bemused before the sight of
his own words and his own name in print. Ah, never again in all later
life that same pure rapturous joy!
To be sure, the world went on its accustomed way, quite as if nothing
revolutionary had happened. The sun shone just about as usual, and
the birds twittering in the trees seemed to have no idea at all of
the great transformation. The doors of fame, which I saw just faintly
beginning to sway on their hinges, were visible to me alone.
My next published poems, likewise, seemed to make no indentation at
all on the stolid world. They appeared in the college monthly, _The
Occident_, though not before I had reached my Senior year. And never
think that this did not strike me as an accomplishment; more than a
few of my previous offerings had entered the doors of that august
publication, from which they had ignominiously made the return journey
to my drawer. Not one, however, but a whole succession of my verses
did take up space in _The Occident_ under the editorship of Genevieve
Taggart--then an engagingly lovely, animated creature, looking every
inch the poetess that she was.
But fame, as represented by a gateway to Parnassus such as _The
Occident_, had its pangs as well as its satisfactions. I remember one
particular pang, when one of my sonnets made its bow beneath a byline
such as “Jenny J. Robinson,” while--crowning insult!--my own byline was
appended to a poem that was not mine at all. Knowing what I do today
of the printing process, I realize that this could have been due to
the mere transposition of two lines of type; but at that time, I did
not understand. I was desolated. I felt disgraced, then and forever.
The worst was not to have my poem accredited to Jenny J. Robinson;
the worst was to have _her_ poem ascribed to me. It was like seeing
somebody else introduced as yourself. Not that Miss Robinson’s poem was
any worse than mine; it may have been much the better of the two; and I
have no doubt that she felt equally aggrieved.
But having long ago lived down this disaster, I have learned that
sadder confusions and surprises await the adventurer along literary
byways. I had quite forgotten this unhappiness when, a year or two
later, the high gods of Olympus stooped down to bless me. Ending the
long, long run of rejections from the larger publications, the New York
_Times_ accepted _To A German War Helmet_--a bit of blank verse which,
beginning “Ironic censor of the ways of men!”, expressed something of
the revulsion always aroused in me by everything connected with war.
And not only did the _Times_ give space to my creation; a still greater
surprise awaited me. One evening, thumbing over the magazines at a
newsstand in the Ferry Building in San Francisco, I opened the pages
of _Current Opinion_ to the section devoted to reprints of poetry.
And there--wonder of wonders!--I saw my own name! My own poem from
the _Times_! I could hardly believe it. The same poem in two national
publications! I had ascended the pinnacles!
True, there was a slight fly in the ointment. The proofreaders for
_Current Opinion_ had been a little careless, and the phrase “Who was
this man?” had become “Why was this man?” This was by no means the last
typographical error I was to suffer from, nor the worst, but it did rub
a bit of the bloom from that miraculous discovery.
At about the same time, an even sweeter whiff of success blew to my
nostrils. Shortly after the Armistice of November 11, 1918, the San
Francisco _Chronicle_ offered a number of prizes for poems on peace,
and I made several submissions, including a quatrain on _The Day That
Brought Peace_, the idea of which had come to me on a sudden one noon
when I was having a solitary lunch at a Berkeley cafeteria:
Blest is this day, past any other day
The world has ever seen; yet must we pray
The world hereafter may so blesséd be
Never another day like this to see.
If I were writing this today, I should try to avoid the inversions in
sentence structure, particularly in the last two lines. But inversions
or no inversions, I did not think much of the quatrain when I wrote it,
particularly as it had taken me only about five minutes to compose it;
I merely happened to add it to my other entries because it could travel
conveniently in the same envelope. Picture, then, my surprise a few
weeks later, when a letter from the _Chronicle_ informed me that _The
Day That Brought Peace_ had won the third prize of twenty-five dollars
in the Peace Poem Contest!