Beauty is momentary in the mind—
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
The body dies; the body’s beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of Winter, done repenting.
So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden’s choral.
Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death’s ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory,
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.
_Alfred Kreymborg_
Alfred Kreymborg, one of the most original of the younger
insurgents, was born in New York City, December 10, 1883. His
education was spasmodic, his childhood being spent beneath the roar
of the elevated trains. At ten he was an expert chess player,
devoting practically all his time to a study of the game. Later, he
became a bookkeeper for a few years, but from the ages of seventeen
to twenty-five he supported himself by teaching chess and playing
exhibition games. His passion, however, was not mathematics but
music. He dreamed of extending the borders of poetry into the realms
of tonic art, experimented with new systems of notation,
technicalities of rhythm. At thirty, he began to turn to the theater
as a medium; finding, in this way, fresh contacts that enriched and
ripened his later work.
In 1914, he organized that group of radical poets which,
half-deprecatingly, half-defiantly, called itself “Others.” (He
edited the three anthologies of their work published in 1916, 1917
and 1919.) Meanwhile, he had been working on a technique that was a
fresh attempt to rid poetry of its too frequent wordiness and
rhetorical non-essentials. _Mushrooms_ (1916) was the first
collection in this vein. Here Kreymborg continually sought for
simplification, cutting away at his lines until they assumed an
almost naked expression. Often he overdid his effects, attaining
nothing more than a false ingenuousness, a sophisticated simplicity.
Often, too, he failed to draw the line between what is innocently
childlike and what is merely childish. One sees him frequently
trying to strike curious attitudes, tripping over several of his
buffooneries and sprawling ingloriously.
But Kreymborg, for all harlequin gestures, can do something better
than tumble and talk with his tongue in his cheek. An elfin fantasy
and no little beauty of thought are his when he wants to use them.
Surprising whimsicality and passages of bright color distinguish his
_Plays for Poem-Mimes_ (1918), in which the principles of modern art
are applied to poetry and acting, as well as the more developed
_Plays for Merry Andrews_ (1920).
Kreymborg’s most ambitious volume of poetry, _Blood of Things_
(1920), is, for all the surface oddities, the work not only of an
ardent experimenter but a serious thinker. Humor is in these pages,
but it is humor lifted to a sort of exaltation. Here, in spite of
what seems a persistence of occasional charlatanry, is a rich and
sensitive imagination; a fancy that is as wild as it is
quick-witted.