This volume, like its predecessor, “The Haunted House, and Other
Poems,” No. 578, contains selections from “Nineveh and Other Poems,”
“The Candle and the Flame,” “Songs of Armageddon,” in addition to a
number of poems not previously published in book form. The second
volume embraces a number of lyric ballads, being on the whole less
intensely personal, if no less intensely passionate than volume one.
However, such differences are superficial. Wherever we touch a book, we
touch a man. If we but search an author, we always discover a master
key! Every manifestation of the Life Force is a confession. It is
impossible to write a treatise on radio without revealing one’s self.
The libido, however disguised, will always assert itself.
It was my original intention to divide my poetry into certain well
defined psychological groups. There are clusters of thought and
emotions, “complexes,” to use the vocabulary of psycho-analysis, which
seem to occur again and again in my verse. Eros and Jesus, Lilith and
Eve, constitute my chief lyric “complexes.”
Almost every poem owes its inspiration to one of these four fundamental
types. However, no symbol is entirely adequate. At every step the
complexes grow more complex. Frequently one merges into the other.
“The Three Sphinxes” visualizes the conflict between Jesus and Eros,
between heavenly and earthly love; between Lilith and Eve, love,
sweetly human, and “woman wailing for her demon lover.” The antagonism
between Eros and Jesus appears in “Spring”: an attempt to synthesize
the two conceptions enlivens the finale of “Jesus in New England.”
In “Children of Lilith,” we catch a glimpse of Lilith in the
countenance of Eros. Both Lilith and Eve appear in “A Vision of Woman,”
but no attempt is made to reconcile the irreconcilable. The Eve-Lilith
conflict is the struggle between Helen of Troy and the blonde
Marguerite. The desire to achieve a new synthesis of woman, dissolving
the Eve-Lilith conflict, lends significance to “Dr. Faust’s Descent
from Heaven.”
It would be necessary to play with divers combinations and permutations
in order to make the grouping psychologically correct. This task is too
pedantic for me. I leave it to the psycho-analysts and to the ingenuity
of the reader. Perhaps I may change my mind some day when I publish my
collected poems or my autobiography. Most of my books of verse are out
of print. The two little volumes in the Pocket Series are the only form
in which my verse is, at present, accessible.