prose articles into fantastic form, commenced each line with a
capital letter, and labelled the whole poetry, he would have been
attempting in jest what some of the writers of today are undertaking
seriously. And if he had declared that he was guided by rules known
only by himself, and that the ear which could take pleasure in
Shelley and Swinburne was not always delicate enough to value him
correctly, he would have been foreshadowing the attitude of the free
versifiers. The difference is that he would have been greeted with
laughter, whereas the free versifiers are sometimes accorded a more
sober approval.
In another passage, I call attention to the basic distinction between
prose and poetry. I point out that “Prose is the vehicle for the
ordinary expression of ideas, poetry for their artistic expression”;
that “Artistic creation must always imply restraint,” the remoulding of
“the gross material of inartistic expression into the sharply defined
and chiselled product of art.” Always before our own day, poetic
technique has been the means of consummating this end. But this fact
never seems to occur at all to the apostles of the new school:
They ask for freedom, and forget that freedom is not the way of art;
they clamor to express an idea untrammeled by convention, and fail to
remember that the only vehicle permitting such liberty is prose. They
demand all the rights of the prose writer, and shrink from all the
duties of the poet--and yet they call their productions poetry.
If called upon to amend these lines today, I should not limit myself to
saying that the spokesmen of the new freedom “demand all the rights of
the prose writer.” I should add that they ask rights no prose writer
has ever required, sometimes including the privilege of expressing
themselves with an incoherence, a turgidness, or a ranting effusiveness
that would earn nothing but laughter if offered as straight prose.
Imagine, for example, what would happen to any writer of prose who took
the liberties assumed by Dylan Thomas in lines such as these:
Altarwise by owl-light in the halfway house
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,
And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
Bit out the mandrake with tomorrow’s scream....
My point, of course, is that our verse writers have claimed such
additional liberties since 1927 that criticism which might then have
seemed startlingly radical is much too tame to express the present
situation.
After _The Literary Revolution_--which produced far less than a
revolution in literature--about three years went by before I attempted
any further book publication connected with poetry. Then one day I
entered the office of _The Poet’s Magazine_ and _Poetic Publications_
in a large downtown building, and had a talk with the proprietor,
George Sakele, a dark-skinned somber man with an Oriental cast of
countenance. Looking back on _Poetic Publications_, I think that it was
truly the most curious institution that ever attempted to purvey poetry
to an indifferent public. Was Mr. Sakele himself a poet or critic? If
he was--at least, in anything but the most private way--that fact never
came to my attention. He ran his poetic enterprises, if the strange
truth must be confessed, in connection with his sale of cosmetics;
his speciality was some sort of an alleged Egyptian cream for women’s
skins, which he advertised over the radio as akin to that in which
Cleopatra used to bathe (price, five dollars a bottle). I shall never
forget the sickly sweet odor with which it pervaded his office. Poetry
to him was evidently a hobby, though I have always wondered why he did
not pick something simpler, such as stamp-collecting; in any case, he
did indubitably publish a magazine, with the aid of a young employee
named Dorothy Gretzner; and he did also publish books--which was the
occasion of my visit to him.
Even in those days, a young poet in search of a publisher could not
always be too critical--not if the publisher was willing to assume the
financial responsibility. Just now I have been wondering just what sort
of a contract Sakele could have offered me; and burrowing back in my
files, I have looked for the first time in many years at the one-page
agreement, which, mercifully free of small-print provisos and legal
_ifs_, _whats_, and _moreovers_, proceeds in the simplest language
to state that the publisher will issue the book in an edition of not
less than 1,000 copies, take out the copyright in the author’s name,
and “pay the author a royalty of 10% on the retail price of all copies
sold.”
On the basis of later experience, I cannot help wondering how many
of the stipulated “edition of not less than 1,000 copies” Mr. Sakele
ordered to be bound. I also wonder how he expected to sell any copies
at all--a department in which his success appears to have been much
less notable than in the distribution of Egyptian face-creams.
Nevertheless, in order to obtain an agreement such as he gave me,
many an aspiring poet would, I am sure, overlook all dubious factors,
including the face-creams.
True, there were several peculiarities about my second collection
of short poems, _Shadows on a Wall_. The least was that the binder,
evidently running out of cloth or wishing to get rid of some scraps,
completed various copies in different shades of blue and brown.
Another peculiarity, which likewise troubled me but little, sprang
from Sakele’s theory that no poem should occupy more than one page; in
consequence of this unique idea, which would have run into difficulties
in the case of _Locksley Hall_ or _The Ancient Mariner_, a sequence of
three sonnets was crowded into page 27 in minute unspaced eight-point
type, whereas most of the poems were printed in amply spaced ten-point.
But what really did annoy me was the typographical error in the poem,
_A Thousand Years From Now_. Preceding the first line, “Above the ruins
that were once New York,” these irrelevant words from another poem
appear: “Whose blade was sharp and strong.”
I was sure that, whatever mistakes may have escaped my proofreading
eyes--and many have escaped them, before and since--such an intrusion
would have glared at anyone not wholly blind. And I was not at all
consoled when a friend, commenting on the error, assured me that
some day this flaw would make the book all the more valuable--as a
collector’s item. If there is any logic in this reasoning, I ought
to regret that the book did not commend itself to collectors by more
disfigurations, and more serious ones.
The title of the collection, which was never one of my favorites, was
supplied by the opening quatrain:
Our lives are shadows cast along a wall
By writhing flames that wave-like rear and fall.
The shadows deepen, and the flames droop low;
The embers smolder, and the shadows go.
I quote this not as anything I take pride in, but on the contrary,
because it is something I should not be disposed to write today. It
represents a pessimistic--and, I believe now, a shallow view which I
was inclined to take sometimes in my brooding earlier days. I believe
now, and believe profoundly, that there is more to life than the
leaping and subsiding of flames and of the shadows they throw on a
wall; but the fact that I could once have written these lines, and
even picked them as the title poem of a collection, strikes me as an
indication of the extent of the changes that have overtaken some of my
general views during a period when my ideas as to poetry and the making
of poetry have been little altered.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
The Depression, the Sea,
and the Redwoods
The great worldwide depression, beginning in 1929, cast few immediate
visible reflections in poetry. I was but one of many who had no idea
of letting our crumbling economic foundations undermine their poetic
foundations. Like others, I continued writing verse, gratified whenever
any magazine saw the light clearly enough to open its doors to me.
The names of some that did open their doors--_The Bookman_, _The
Independent_, _The World Tomorrow_, _Shards_, _The Wanderer_,
etc.--read like a list of the bygone and forgotten. But even then, as
more recently, I sent a majority of my offerings to the metropolitan
newspapers. And why? First, as a matter of convenience. The typing of
poems, the keeping of records, the very selection of manuscripts to
send, require more time and effort than you would suppose. And when one
is preoccupied with multitudes of duties, it is sometimes impossible to
find time for repeated submissions--particularly as manuscripts, when
they come back, are usually dogeared, soiled, dented with paper clips,
or even burned by cigarettes, though not many of them may suffer the
fate endured by one of my book manuscripts, which was dropped down an
elevator shaft. In most cases, poems must be retyped: that is, unless
one wishes to say to the editor, in effect, “Others didn’t think these
worth keeping, but maybe you’re an easier target.”
Because of such difficulties, the poet naturally submits where his
chances are greatest. And if his chances are, let us say, anywhere from
about twenty-five to ninety-eight per cent or more with newspapers
where his work is known, but perhaps no more than two or three per cent
with large magazines that use but few poems and hence reject more, the
decision may be automatically made for him. In the course of the years,
I contributed literally hundreds of poems to the New York _Sun_ (a
luminary that, unfortunately, has long gone out), while the editors of
the _Times_ and other papers were very receptive.
You may say, of course, that newspaper publication is ephemeral--come
today, gone tomorrow! And this no doubt is true, but it is likewise
true to a degree of all periodical publication. And, besides, there
is always the possibility of reprints; and many people will clip the
poems they like and preserve them for years. I do not, in any case,
share the supercilious, the almost snobbish contempt which some poets
profess toward newspaper publication; no means of distribution that
reaches a wide general audience should be disdained. And knowing what I
do of poets, and of literary sour grapes, I may perhaps be pardoned for
wondering if those who cry out loudest may not have built their scorn
on a deep foundation of rejection slips.
But to turn back to the depression era. During this very period my own
work, as if perversely ignoring the world’s dejected state, burst forth
in new veins, and with a character which, in my own biased opinion, it
had not had before--a character that arose largely from my new contacts
with nature.
To begin with a transient phase, there was my response to the sea
during a particular voyage--a voyage whose exceptional circumstances
were directly concerned with the depression. There are millions who
will never forget how President Roosevelt, almost immediately after
taking office in 1933, closed the banks of the country, and thereby
averted national catastrophe. There are also millions who will remember
how, even if they had money in theory, they had none in practice except
what their pockets contained, since they could not draw upon their bank
accounts. That such a situation, with all its painful accompaniments,
could have had any connection with the writing of poetry, and
particularly of poetry of the sea--this, surely, would seem among the
most fantastic of impossibilities. Yet the connection, at least in my
own case, did exist.
It happened that Flora and I had elected March of that very year
for a badly needed vacation, and decided upon the extravagance of
a cruise into southern waters. We had reserved, but still had not
paid for, accommodations on the Swedish liner _Kungsholm_, and were
expecting to leave sometime in the second week of the month ... when
lo! the bombshell exploded. The banks faced us with shut doors! For
all practical purposes, we were penniless! I remember counting all
our available cash, which came to no more than twenty dollars. As for
paying for the tickets--that was impossible; checks could not pass
through the clearing house, and therefore, for the time being, were
worthless. Under these circumstances, most travelers did the obvious,
and cancelled their passages. But Flora and I did not quite so easily
give up our precious vacation; I telephoned the steamship line, and
was informed, to my surprise, that the _Kungsholm_ would sail at the
scheduled time; the company would accept my check in payment of our
passage; and would cash any further checks for any reasonable amounts
so that we might have pocket money _en route_.
Flora and I, accordingly, were among the passengers--the very few
passengers--who stood staring shoreward from the _Kungsholm_ on that
bitterly cold morning when she sailed. The vessel, a capacious liner
of around 30,000 tons, was all but deserted; it was possible to stroll
completely around the promenade deck without encountering a soul. And
this, though it did not make for sociability, was ideal for poetry; one
could read and muse and dream, undisturbed as if one were the steamer’s
sole owner, while day after day she made her way across the glorious
cobalt-blue Caribbean. I remember that my almost constant companion was
A. E.’s _Collected Poems_; and the lyrical and mystical mood of these
verses helped to put me into the right state of mind for writing. The
fruit of the voyage, therefore, was a series of _Sea Sketches_, eleven
of which were to appear in my book _The Merry Hunt_. The mood of these
poems, though no two are alike, may be illustrated by the opening of
the ninth of the sequence:
A sadness rises in my breast,
I cannot answer how nor why,
When, low against a shoreless sky,
A ship goes down into the west
Beneath the day’s red closing eye.
Slowly it turns from dusk to dark,
With dwindling masts and hull a-gleam,
And, where the firelit hazes stream,
Fades in the vastness, spark by spark,
And passes softly as a dream....
Such stanzas can be written only in a mood of detachment. And
detachment is not possible amid the chatter of crowds and the riot of
merrymaking. Therefore I have always held that the great depression,
culminating in the national financial disaster that forced the closing
of the banks, was responsible for something seemingly so remote from
economic affairs as my lyrics of the sea.
But deeply as the sea has moved me, my poetry found richer sustenance
in the great earth-world of growing things, of hills and mountains,
forests and streams. These, ever since I have come to know them, have
seemed my natural domain; more than once, coming west on the train
after a long stay in New York, I have glowed at my first glimpse of the
great snow-line of the Rockies as at the sight of approaching home.
Strangely, though I lived in a mountainous state, I did not know the
mountains in childhood--not until, just before my seventeenth birthday,
I registered as a student at Berkeley, and almost immediately headed
for the hills, and took long walks, companioned or alone--though more
often alone--to the far-looking eminence of Grizzly Peak and its
rolling neighbors.
But while these invigorating strolls did result in some attempts at
poetry, nature reserved her greatest gifts until the years beginning
with 1930, when Flora and I came every summer to Mill Valley (where we
finally settled in 1938). Our daily routine, enforced only by our own
desires during those charmed months when we were free from the grind
of a great city, was ideal for verse-writing. Nearly every morning,
after two or three hours which I devoted to various writing tasks,
Flora and I would set out with a bag containing a lunch of sandwiches
and fruit, one or more books, and a second bag holding paper, pens,
and pencils. For an hour or two we would wind in fog or sunlight or
beneath the shadow of leaves along one of the many trails looping among
the redwoods or across the bush-grown slopes to Muir Woods or to some
point high on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais, where we might have lunch in
some sheltered ferny grotto to the purling music of clear waters, or
stare across wide vistas of tawny hill and blue sea and bay, or up at
the two-hundred-foot towers of the sequoias, with their cinnamon-brown
boles and down-slanting scented limbs. The clear exhilaration, the
shining joy of those walks, is something I have tried, perhaps not
successfully, to put into verse. And the many sights and sounds of the
wayside offered material for poetry--a dragonfly, a crested bluejay,
a crawfish in a stream, a water Strider, a mountain flower, a rock, a
weed, a redwood grove.
My poems of the woods, in the vast majority of cases, were written in
the woods, with my eyes on the objects described. Many a day, while
Flora sat not many feet off with a book or with pen and letter paper, I
lay stretched out beneath the trees, in a state of relaxation in which
I was as close as possible to being unaware of my physical being; and
let the lines of a poem form themselves in my mind--lines which I would
never put down until the complete composition had come to me. Whatever
the quality of the resulting verses, I know that I could reach into
depths rarely if ever plumbed in the city, and could write with an
undistracted absorption that made it possible to call upon the inmost
reserves of my being.
Among the products of those summer strolls, I number the lyrics in
_Songs of the Redwoods_, and most of the poems of nature in subsequent
books. In those poems there is a simplicity that may be deceptive, a
simplicity my earlier work had not always possessed, as when I express
my gratitude and relief at returning to nature:
I have been long an exile from the sod,
The firm gray earth that dusty feet may tread,
The earth where one may lay a tired head
As on the lap of God.
My sense of the timelessness of the woods and hills, in contrast to the
impermanence of man, is expressed in various offerings, as in the lyric
from _Green Vistas_, beginning:
The woods shall not be lonely
When man has slipped away,
Leaving no token, only
Dark timbers that decay,
and in the sonnet that opens:
These hills, where silence with her ancient humming
Speaks to the green-plumed ridge and picture-sky,
Echo no creeds of getting or becoming,
No Parliaments that shout, no men that die.
Amid the gratifying vastness of nature, I have often had the sense of
the loss of personal identity in a greater, more meaningful identity:
Firm-pillowed on the earth, with head to grass,
And all the hot sky arching over me,
Almost I seem to merge with the great mass
Of root, and rock, and pinnacle, and tree.
Almost I seem to lose the “I,” the one,
And blend with currents of the bush and stóne,
And with the flowing air, the soil and sun,
And be no more self-clouded and alone.
The reader will, I hope, bear with me for thus quoting my own verses,
since these lines express the nature of my experience and the sources
of my poetry much more vividly than my prose could do.
For eighteen successive summers, during some of which my time was
absorbed by long poems--from 1930 to 1947--Flora and I took those long
and stimulating, almost daily walks into the hills; in the latter years
we were accompanied by our romping black-tan-and-white toy shepherd
dog, “Sheppie,” herself the unwitting source of more than one poem.
Only with our removal to a home higher in the hills and further from
the hiking trails did our regular pilgrimages to the woods come to an
end; and then my poems of nature, while not ceasing, became much less
frequent.
There is today, I realize, a movement away from poetry of nature--a
movement only to be expected in a world which is itself withdrawing
from nature, a world of concrete strips and macadamized landscapes,
a world of super-highways that rip down the wilderness as a gardener
pulls out a weed, a world of power-madness symbolized by the bulldozer
that slashes out the very soil and makes deserts of once-blossoming
fields and green hillsides. What communion with nature can be expected
by the worried dweller in an apartment house, who sees nature at
most for two or three weeks a year through the windshield of a
sixty-mile-an-hour car on a six-lane freeway, or in the overcrowded
camps of one of our national parks? How much of nature is observed
by the dweller among the skyscrapers of New York, Chicago, Houston,
or St. Paul? How much of nature even among the methodically trimmed
lawns and neatly curving concrete roads of our suburban districts?
Lovers and viewers of nature there may still be, but they are a
dwindling minority. And that is why city sophisticates, bleary-eyed
with gazing at neon lights and television screens, increasingly tend
to scoff at poetry of nature as something unreal, unfelt, sentimental,
or derivative; they do not realize that no man has the right to deny
another man’s experience, nor that in a world where color-blindness was
the rule, the majority would consider themselves wise for mocking the
viewers of rainbowed tints.
But poetry of nature is real, and will continue to be real, because
it is built upon realities that antedated man and will no doubt
outlast him; we can no more forbid it by critical mandate than we can
proscribe poetry of joy or sorrow, religion or love. What we have a
right to ask of the poet of nature, as of all writers, is that the
impulse behind his work be genuine; that the poems be based upon actual
experience, actual observation, actual feelings, and not be drawn
from his readings of other poets. But whether or not he is able to
communicate the impressions that come to him, whether his incentive
is equalled by his skill, or whether his message is acceptable or
even understandable--these are questions to be decided by that great
eventual arbiter to whose judgment all creators must yield themselves.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
Year of Miracles
Probably for most of us, certain years are more eventful than half a
dozen others. Such a year, in my own case, was 1933--a year notable
particularly for its poetic happenings. It was in 1933 that Flora
and I obtained our little four-room cabin among the redwoods of Mill
Valley--a log-walled, garden-surrounded cottage, with the great
sequoias forming a wall of protection in front, and maples and a giant
mountain laurel and an ever-flowing stream in the rear. This house,
originally built as a summer home, was procured at a price that now
seems impossibly low, but was to repay us in blessings for years to
come; and was to open the way to our eventual removal to California,
where it would be a fountainhead of inspiration, a perfect place in
which to write, think, and breathe poetry.