Kilmer. Perhaps you have heard of him. He is the author of charming
conceits, in verse, on trees and delicatessen stores. He has also
written some sweet roundels and ballades. Incidentally he is a member of
the staff of _The New York Times_. Occasionally he makes excursions to
Women’s Clubs and other intellectual organizations to tell them all he
knows about poetry. God save him! And God save me from ever hearing
another night of such criticism from ponderous youths and knowing old
maids!
After the reading of the poems, and the stupid remarks that followed the
reading, there came what was called the “social intermission”. During
this time insipid punch and silly little biscuits were served to as many
of the mob as could grab them, and a noise as of a host of parrots in a
small place filled the room. (Curious what bad punch will do to good,
respectable people!) Following the excitement of the jabber and the
near-wine the audience settled down to be sobered up by the reading of
two seeming epics by Cale Young Rice. Mr Rice is dull—oh, very dull he
is. Not only so, but his verse is—I won’t say; and he reads it with the
voice of the spirit of a one-time virtuous Methodist minister chanting a
prayer in the coolest part of Hell.
So he read his dreary interminable poems. So I had visions of all the
precious Sundays my Presbyterian parents had forced me to waste. That
vision passed and I still heard the whining drone. Back to my mind again
where I had vicious thoughts of the tortures I would like to play upon
bad poets who write bad verse and read it with bad accent and bad voice
to good harmless people. By the time I had thought out and perfected a
most amazing and subtle form of torture for such disturbers of human
happiness, the dismal noise had stopped. Some day....
After the effort of the Rice man, Laurence Houseman read some of his
fanciful poems. They were welcome. A Spring wind among the reeds after a
prolonged dull thaw.
Poetry flourishes in America.
The poets are paid well by the Magazines; and strange women dine and
wine them and pay them sweet homage.
The majority own and sport dress suits. They are eminently decent and
respectable.
Poetry readings are now a well-attended form of afternoon time-killing.
Poetry flourishes.
_THE PASSING OF FORBES-ROBERTSON_
The stops are in. The organ is closed. For forty years it has
“discoursed much excellent sweet music.” Now the organist is weary, and
would fain rest. He has played many things and played them well. A
gentle sweet melody like _Mice and Men_ was made more sweet by his
playing; and even if he did sometimes play a popular tune like _The
Third Floor Back_ were we not the more thrilled and moved when we heard
the beauty of his playing of the symphony of _Hamlet_?
On Saturday, April 22, I watched, now from the wings, now from a side
box, the last public performance of this artist’s _Hamlet_. Oh that I
could write as well as I feel; that my words had the strength and the
bursting keenness of my emotions. Then might I tell something.
Have you seen the sudden brilliant leap of a flame sometimes before it
finally goes out? There was the same sort of spurt in that past
performance. I had seen Robertson play Hamlet a year ago; in Brooklyn a
week before I had watched him wearily play his part, and by the
comparison I understood the effort involved in the brilliancy of his
playing that day. There was a heart-bursting poignancy about his swan
song. I cried with the Queen: “Oh Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in
twain!” And when at the end of it all he sat there on the throne of
Denmark with that unforgettable look, purged from all the suffering and
weariness; and when they bore him off to the music of Tchaikovsky’s
_Dead March_, what could a feeling mortal do but—but—I cannot tell what
I did.
“The rest is silence.”
“Good night, sweet prince.”
Amber Monochrome
MARK TURBYFILL
I pass
Outside into the amber night.
A lamp within
Prints shadow-flowers
On the stiffness of an amber screen.
My dream is like that—
An amber scheme
Straining through cold, stiff screens.
Three Imagist Poets
JOHN GOULD FLETCHER
I.
The question is being asked, re-asked and debated, What is Imagism? The
fact that this question is constantly raised anew proves that it is not
an academic one. For if we are to see clearly the underlying principles
of the new poetry, and to understand the relationship of the group which
call themselves the Imagists to those principles, we must first
disassociate Imagism, strictly speaking, from all that body of verse now
being produced in the free-verse forms. As a critic not long ago pointed
out, vers libre and Imagism are not to be confused. Vers libre can be
produced and has been produced which is not Imagistic, but realistic,
symbolistic, or merely dull. Imagism is an attitude of mind which can
appear just as well under the guise of metre and rhyme, or prose, as in
verse itself. What, then, is Imagism?
Briefly, the doctrine we call Imagism has four cardinal points or
principles. The first of these concerns presentation of the subject. The
Imagist aims to present his subject as an image; that is to say, he
presents the sum-total of the emotions in any given subject in such a
way that the reader experiences the self-same emotions from them. To do
this it is necessary for the Imagist to regard his subject-matter from
its most imaginative aspect, and to present it visually. For the reader,
not having experienced the emotion which moved the author to create his
poem, is incapable of grasping that emotion save through a direct and
complete appeal to his imagination through his higher senses of sight
and hearing. By stimulating these senses, through appropriate choice of
words, the Imagist aims to arouse the reader to such a pitch that the
reader re-creates imaginatively for himself the emotional complex which
gave birth to the poem. Imagism is, therefore, first of all a means of
arousing the emotions through the imagination. The Imagists must
therefore be sharply distinguished from the realistic school, and also
from the symbolists of the nineteenth century, from which latter they
have, in some sense, derived. Through the constant insistence on emotion
as the underlying essence of poetry, the Imagists approach closely to
the Elizabethans of the sixteenth and the early romantics of the
nineteenth century.
The second principle of Imagism concerns style. The Imagists desire to
accomplish that renovation of the English language which is always
periodically necessary if good poetry is to continue to be created in
it. The Imagists have certain prejudices against inversions, clichés,
journalese, highfalutin bombast, literary jargon, messy padding with
adjectives. Each word must be an exact word, that is to say the sole
word necessary for its particular place and purpose in the poem. This
careful consideration for style relates the Imagists to the classicists
of the eighteenth century, who undoubtedly rescued the English language
from the absurdities of the “metaphysical” school. The Imagists also
insist on it as a useful check to too great an exuberance of
imagination.
The third principle of Imagism concerns form. The rhythmical form of the
poem should not be a mere empty pattern, but should follow, as far as
possible, the ebb and flow of the emotion throughout the poem. It should
be an integral part of the poem itself, as indissoluble from it as the
substance of the words themselves. Therefore the Imagists hold that the
theory and practice of vers libre is necessary, although they do not go
so far as to demand it in every case, or to say that rhyme and metre
have not their uses. In their desire to create a full emotional range of
rhythmical nuances, inclusive of both rhyme and metre as well as freer
rhythmical figures, the Imagists derive direct from the first great
romantic poets of England—Blake and Coleridge.
The last principle of Imagism concerns the attitude of the artist to
life. The artist should realize that if he is not to be the slave of
life he must not attempt to be its judge. He must not obtrude his petty
personal judgments and vanities between the reader and the subject he
writes about. He must not, in short, moralise about life, or gush over
it, or make others feel anything else except what he has felt about it.
In this respect the Imagist poets are in very firm reaction against the
sentimental and pious optimism of the mid-nineteenth century, against
the equally sentimental and fallacious aestheticism of the eighties and
nineties, and—it may be added—against a good deal of the wishy-washy
suggestiveness and sex-obsession that seems to be getting the upper hand
of so many writers of today. The Imagist does not weight the balance,
either for “morality” or “immorality”: he states, and lets the reader
draw his own conclusion.
With these four principles in mind, we may now ask ourselves how the
Imagists have carried them into practice. For practice is, after all,
the supreme test of any theory of art. There are signs that Imagism is
getting itself taken more seriously, not as a mere passing fad, but as
something that has at least established certain guide-posts and
land-marks for future poets, who wish to renew the traditions of good
writing. I maintain that it has done more. It has permitted three poets,
at least, to start from the same principles and to produce among them a
very respectable body of poetry, which in each case is filled with the
individual flavour of the personality who wrote it. That the Imagist
principles should display such applicability and elasticity is, I
maintain, very remarkable. We shall now see who these three poets are.
II.
Mr Richard Aldington, the first of the three to be considered, has
recently brought together some thirty of his poems in a small volume,
entitled _Images_. That this selection does not represent all of Mr
Aldington’s work, must be apparent to all who are familiar with it. His
long poem, _Childhood_, is not here; nor is his other long poem on the
war, which surely deserves mention as being one of the few really
humorous war poems ever written. To come to the shorter pieces, surely
all admirers of Mr Aldington’s talent must deplore the absence of
_Daisy_, _Round Pond_ and _The Poplar_—the latter one of the most
beautiful poems he has ever written. But whether Mr Aldington has
omitted these pieces from a too severe critical judgment, or whether
because they seem to interfere with the unity of his book, the fact
remains that they were omitted, but that enough is left to give nearly
all sides of his achievement.
Mr Aldington is a sophisticated, a cultivated, even a bookish poet. He
has translated Anyte of Tegea, the Latin Poets of the Renaissance, and
even that astounding farrago of poetry and buffoonery called Les
Chansons de Maldoror. Recently he has given us, in the columns of _The
Egoist_, a glimpse at his library which ranges from Euripides, via
Apuleius, Hooker and Crowley, to Ford Madox Hueffer! “And is it for this
I have laboured?” he cries. “To be the object of derision of some
bibliophile looking at his books as cynically and disgustedly as I look
at mine?”
No, it is not for this. It is for a handful of strange and satisfying
poems that Mr Aldington has laboured. Every artist knows that it takes a
great deal of life, an immense amount of experience and appreciation, to
make even a little art. Life is like a many-faceted prism. We must walk
around it, observe it on every side, see it not as we ourselves would
care to see it, but as others have seen it, before we can induce it to
show a new side to our efforts, to cast a few rays which it has not
already cast before. Matthew Arnold, who was one of the few English
critics able to look at literature from the standpoint of its historical
development, declared that poetry was a criticism of life. And so it is.
The task of a modern poet is not to shut his eyes to the past, but to
see the work of the generations that preceded him as an uncompleted
structure, the living intention of whose builders is again born in him,
and seeks fruition in the additions he can make to it. In this sense Mr
Aldington is a modern poet. He is a poet for the well-read, intelligent,
cultivated man or woman.
The first poem of his I can remember seeing in print was the one
entitled _Choricos_:
The ancient songs
Pass deathward mournfully.
Cold lips that sing no more, and withered wreaths
Regretful eyes, and drooping breasts and wings,
Symbols of ancient songs,
Mournfully passing
Down to the great white surges
Watched by none—
And we turn from the Kyprian’s breasts,
And we turn from thee,
Phoibos Apollon—
And we turn from the fiery day,
And the lips that were over-sweet;
For silently,
Brushing the fields with red-shod feet,
With purple robe,
Searing the grass as with a sudden flame,
Death,
Thou hast come upon us.
O Death,
Thou art the silence of beauty,
And we look no more for the morning,
We yearn no more for the sun—
We kneel before thee;
And thou, leaning towards us,
Caressingly layest upon us
Flowers from thy thin cold hands,
And smiling as a chaste woman,
Knowing love in her heart,
Thou seelest our eyes
And the illimitable quietude
Comes gently upon us.
There is nothing in all the literature I know which can be safely set
beside this poem (of which I have only quoted a few fragments) except a
few lines of Leopardi:
In te, Morte, si pose
Nostra ignuda natura;
Lieto, no, ma sicura
Del antico dolor.
Other than that, it is unique. And since it is the fashion to despise a
poet because he does not write of aeroplanes and locomotives and
socialism, but of the eternal verities of life, death, beauty, irony,
let us first of all brush away the shallow assumption that Mr Aldington
is an imitator of the classics and that all his work seems a derivation
from the Greek.
The mood of the poem from which I have just quoted is not a mood which
can be found in any Greek poet, or which any Greek would ever have
understood. I have quoted enough to show what that mood is. It is a mood
of mutability, of the sadness that arises in us when we see the
instability of all earthly things. The first Occidental poet who ever
expressed this mood, to my knowledge, was François Villon. In the East,
of course, it was felt and expressed much earlier. For one must have
seen kingdoms pass away and empires crumble to the dust and “the owl
sing his watch-song from the towers of Afrasiab” before one can feel
this mood, which Mr Aldington has here so beautifully and poignantly
expressed.
Throughout his poetry Mr Aldington has frequently given us this emotion
of a civilized man, a modern, brought face to face with some beautiful
fragment of the past. Thus he cries to a Greek marble:
I am thy brother,
Thy lover of aforetime crying to thee,
And thou hearest me not.
Surely no one would contend that a Greek could ever have said this! And
in some quite recent poems we have the same feeling applied to the
Renaissance, and even to modernity:
I turn the page and read:
“I dream of silent verses where the rhyme
Glides noiseless as an oar.”
The heavy, musty air, the black desks,
The bent heads and the rustling noises
Vanish—
The sun hangs in the cobalt sky
The boat drifts over the bare shallows—
The oleanders drop their rosy petals on the lawns
And the swallows dive and swirl and whistle
About the cleft battlements of Can Grande’s castle.
Or take this:
London, (May, 1915)
Glittering leaves
Dance in a squall:
Above them, bleak immovable clouds.
A church spire
Holds up a little brass cock
To peck at the blue wheat fields—
A pear tree, a broken white pyramid,
In a dingy garden, troubles one
With ecstasy—
And I am tormented,
Obsessed,
Along all this beauty.
With a vision of ruins,
Of walls tumbling into clay.
Such a poet is not what we vulgarly choose to call an optimist. No! Let
us admit once for all, Mr Aldington is a pessimist. (So, by the way,
were Sophocles and Leopardi and Shakespeare when he wrote _King Lear_,
and Mr Thomas Hardy, to mention only a few; but I have never heard they
were worse poets for it.) At times he gives us a very bitter dose indeed
to swallow, as in his _Childhood_, _Cinema Exit_, or _In the Tube_. Yet
he is not devoid of humour, playful and fantastic. Witness _The Faun
Sees Snow for the First Time_, the _Interlude_, the _Evening_ (a
beautiful grotesque which I am tempted to quote), or for a grimmer note
the conclusion of _Lesbia_. He will not admit that life is altogether
without compensations. Herein he is honest. He even admits sentiment as
a compensation, and he treats it delicately, fastidiously, with an
unexpected touch of purely fourteenth-century feeling in the following
piece:
After Two Years.
She is all so slight,
And tender and white,
As a May morning.
She walks without hood
At dusk. It is good
To hear her sing.
It is God’s will
That I shall love her still
As he loves Mary.
And night and day,
I will go forth to pray
That she love me.
She is as gold;
Lovely, and far more cold.
Do thou pray with me,
For if I win grace
To kiss twice her face
God has done well to me.
Altogether an unusual poet. One who never takes up the pen except when
he has something individual to say, and whose utterance is at times so
varied as to make him almost bafflingly individual. But not a Greek,
although he has written finely on Greek themes. A modern? Yes; and not
only a modern but, au fond, a Romantic. Remember the conclusion of the
beautiful _Night Piece_:
“Very faint and shrill and far away the whistle sounds—more like
a wild bird than ever. And all my unsatisfied desires and empty
wishes and vague yearnings are set aching by that thin tremulous
whistle—the post-horn of the Coach of Romance.”
(_For lack of space, Mr Fletcher’s article will be concluded in
the June issue._)
Rossica
ALEXANDER S. KAUN
It is still on—the Russian invasion.
Across the ocean the triumphant Prussian drives a hedge into the heart
of Russia. With blood and iron and fire Efficiency celebrates its
victory over Nihilism.
And we, the neutrals, the note-writers, attempt to thwart the grand
march of Efficiency by delivering shells to the port of Vladivostok.
Shells that do not always explode, despite their “moderate” prices.
In exchange we are getting thoughts, ideas. Unobstructed by Krupps or
U’s or Zeppelins, they invade our peaceful shores, and intend to stay.
Woe to the Chambers and Herricks and Pooles and Dreisers and McCutcheons
and other best sellers! The enemy is raining in torrents, in avalanches.
What if the good, good public will be forced to taste the new food. What
if after having tasted it they will rebel and demand real meat
thereafter, rejecting as indigestible the canned affairs and the
oleomargarine surrogates. What if....
No danger, I am assured by my friend who has great faith in the
uncorruptible taste of the American public.
Surely no one will accuse the American publishers of being pure
idealists or Ford-like fanatics who are ready to squander their hard
dollars for propaganda purposes. Surely those gentlemen know their
market and adjust the supply to the demand. The extraordinary deluge of
Russian literature is evidently a paying proposition.
It is gratifying. We need the injection of new blood into our anemic
literature.
New blood. Not even Gogol is too old for us. No matter that he died in
1852. His _Dead Souls_, _Tarass Bulba_, and just published stories[2]
belong to the category of works that do not age in spite of their
technical flaws. If you use this perspective, _The Mantle_ will loom up
as the peak of Russian realism. “We have all come out of _The Mantle_”,
admitted Gogol’s disciple, Dostoevsky. If in that tale we recognize the
forerunner of the relentless soul-vivisectionists of the later days, we
get in the other stories a glimpse of the mystic Gogol, the poet of
Goyaesque witches and devils. Do not read _Viy_ before bed-time lest you
go through a heavy nightmare.
It is an enormous leap from Gogol to Korolenko[3], Gorky[4], and
Kuprin[5]. These are living authors, although they belong rather to the
past century in their motives and modes. Vladimir Korolenko is a writer
whose very name causes the heart of every Russian to beat with emotion.
Not for the greatness of his art: as an artist he ranks among the
lesser. It is the charm of his personality that places him far above all
his colleagues. His long years of exile in Siberia, his never-flagging
championship of the oppressed classes and races, his tireless
encouragement of the young beginners, and his smile, the deep, broad
smile that flows like a sunny stream through his writings, have endeared
him to his countrymen beyond parallel. Korolenko is the bridge between
the heroic, idealistic seventies and the ultra-individualistic moderns.
His stories are not idylls, yet they smile; he deals with tragedies,
describes horrifying situations, but he bears no ill feeling for the
universe, he loves it with all its evils and follies, loves it with that
keen understanding which spells forgiveness. Gorky tells us that he owes
to Korolenko not only his discovery and introduction to the public, but
also his style. I seldom trust an author’s self-criticism. Gorky differs
from his alleged teacher in his style as well as in his philosophy.
Korolenko is gentle, mild, refined, loving, forgiving. Gorky is rude,
loud, hating, revenging. Both have known misery and hardships, both have
rubbed shoulders with the humiliated and down-trodden. But Korolenko
came out of the crucible with a radiant smile, with universal compassion
and sympathy. Gorky neither forgets or forgives. His body and soul
shriek out vengeance for man enslaved, maimed, bestialized. Korolenko
and his “disciple” both exalt human personality, but the first does so
indiscriminatingly, wholesalely, while Gorky glorifies only the strong,
proclaims the “beauty of power”, and scorns the weak worms, the lazy
adders who are content to stagnate in the mire. Gorky’s philosophy may
appeal to us who have drunk from the waters of Zarathustra, but
Korolenko’s art is purer, free from preaching, and hence more
convincing.
Alexander Kuprin has been hailed as an anarchist, a free-love preacher,
a social reformer, a cynic, a retrograde, and what not. He may be all
these, or none, or more. Of all the Russian writers he is the only true,
unaffected Dionysian. His love for women, for wine, for horses, for
nature—in a word, for life, is spontaneous and elemental. None of the
hectic morbidity of the consumptive Artzibashev. Kuprin is a healthy
artist with an enormous eye. He sees to the bottom the mind of man and
animal, of the thief and the intellectual, of the empty military officer
and of the street-woman, of the artist and of the gambler, and he makes
us see what he sees with a cheerful gracefulness, with no other purpose
but the presentation of his sweetheart, life. His novel, _The Duel_,
stirred Russian society as a vigorous indictment of militarism, a
picture of the dehumanizing garrison life. Kuprin guffawed at that
accusation over a glass of vodka, as he is usually drawn by cartoonists.
Far be it from him to advocate or condemn. He rejoices in all his
heroes, whether they be garrison dummies, or artistic pickpockets (_The
Outrage_), or Japanese spies (_Captain Ribnikov_), or petty philistines
(_The River of Life_). He floats upon the “river of life”, observes,
absorbs, delights, and chuckles at the very fact of his existence. “Even
if I were to fall under a railway train, and were left lying on the line
with broken and bleeding limbs, and any one were to ask me if life were
beautiful, I should none the less, and even by summoning my last remains
of strength, answer enthusiastically, ‘Ah, yes, even now life is
glorious!’” (_The Duel_).