When a poet begins writing, and we begin liking his work, we own willingly
enough that we have not, and cannot have, got the compass of his talent.
We must wait till he has written more, and we have learned to like him
more, and even then we should hesitate his definition, from all that he
has done, if we did not very commonly qualify ourselves from the latest
thing he has done. Between the earliest thing and the latest thing there
may have been a hundred different things, and in his swan-long life of a
singer there would probably be a hundred yet, and all different. But we
take the latest as if it summed him up in motive and range and tendency.
Many parts of his work offer themselves in confirmation of our judgment,
while those which might impeach it shrink away and hide themselves, and
leave us to our precipitation, our catastrophe.
It was surely nothing less than by a catastrophe that I should have been
so betrayed in the volumes of Mr. Cawein's verse which reached me last
before the volume of his collected poems.... I had read his poetry and
loved it from the beginning, and in each successive expression of it, I
had delighted in its expanding and maturing beauty. I believe I had not
failed to own its compass, and when--
"He touched the tender stops of various quills,"
I had responded to every note of the changing music. I did not always
respond audibly either in public or in private, for it seemed to me that
so old a friend might fairly rest on the laurels he had helped bestow. But
when that last volume came, I said to myself, "This applausive silence has
gone on long enough. It is time to break it with open appreciation.
Still," I said, "I must guard against too great appreciation; I must mix
in a little depreciation, to show that I have read attentively,
critically, authoritatively." So I applied myself to the cheapest and
easiest means of depreciation, and asked, "Why do you always write Nature
poems? Why not Human Nature poems?" or the like. But in seizing upon an
objection so obvious that I ought to have known it was superficial, I had
wronged a poet, who had never done me harm, but only good, in the very
terms and conditions of his being a poet. I had not stayed to see that his
nature poetry was instinct with human poetry, with _his_ human poetry,
with mine, with yours. I had made his reproach what ought to have been his
finest praise, what is always the praise of poetry when it is not
artificial and formal. I ought to have said, as I had seen, that not one
of his lovely landscapes in which I could discover no human figure, but
thrilled with a human presence penetrating to it from his most sensitive
and subtle spirit until it was all but painfully alive with memories, with
regrets, with longings, with hopes, with all that from time to time
mutably constitutes us men and women, and yet keeps us children. He has
the gift, in a measure that I do not think surpassed in any poet, of
touching some smallest or commonest thing in nature, and making it live
from the manifold associations in which we have our being, and glow
thereafter with an inextinguishable beauty. His felicities do not seem
sought; rather they seem to seek him, and to surprise him with the delight
they impart through him. He has the inspiration of the right word, and the
courage of it, so that though in the first instant you may be challenged,
you may be revolted, by something that you might have thought uncouth, you
are presently overcome by the happy bravery of it, and gladly recognize
that no other word of those verbal saints or aristocrats, dedicated to the
worship or service of beauty, would at all so well have conveyed the sense
of it as this or that plebeian.
If I began indulging myself in the pleasure of quotation, or the delight
of giving proofs of what I say, I should soon and far transcend the modest
bounds which the editor has set my paper. But the reader may take it from
me that no other poet, not even of the great Elizabethan range, can
outword this poet when it comes to choosing some epithet fresh from the
earth or air, and with the morning sun or light upon it, for an emotion or
experience in which the race renews its youth from generation to
generation. He is of the kind of Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth and
Coleridge, in that truth to observance and experience of nature and the
joyous expression of it, which are the dominant characteristics of his
art. It is imaginable that the thinness of the social life in the Middle
West threw the poet upon the communion with the fields and woods, the days
and nights, the changing seasons, in which another great nature poet of
ours declares they "speak in various language." But nothing could be
farther from the didactic mood in which "communion with the various forms"
of nature casts the Puritanic soul of Bryant, than the mood in which this
German-blooded, Kentucky-born poet, who keeps throughout his song the
sense of a perpetual and inalienable youth, with a spirit as pagan as that
which breathes from Greek sculpture--but happily not more pagan. Most
modern poets who are antique are rather over-Hellenic, in their wish not
to be English or French, but there is nothing voluntary in Mr. Cawein's
naturalization in the older world of myth and fable; he is too sincerely
and solely a poet to be a _posseur;_ he has his eyes everywhere except on
the spectator, and his affair is to report the beauty that he sees, as if
there were no one by to hear.
An interesting and charming trait of his poetry is its constant theme of
youth and its limit within the range that the emotions and aspirations of
youth take. He might indeed be called the poet of youth if he resented
being called the poet of nature; but the poet of youth, be it understood,
of vague regrets, of "tears, idle tears," of "long, long thoughts," for
that is the real youth, and not the youth of the supposed hilarity, the
attributive recklessness, the daring hopes. Perhaps there is some such
youth as this, but it has not its home in the breast of any young poet,
and he rarely utters it; at best he is of a light melancholy, a smiling
wistfulness, and upon the whole, October is more to his mind than May.
In Mr. Cawein's work, therefore, what is not the expression of the world
we vainly and rashly call the inanimate world, is the hardly more
dramatized, and not more enchantingly imagined story of lovers, rather
unhappy lovers. He finds his own in this sort far and near; in classic
Greece, in heroic England, in romantic Germany, where the blue flower
blows, but not less in beautiful and familiar Kentucky, where the blue
grass shows itself equally the emblem of poetry, and the moldering log in
the cabin wall or the woodland path is of the same poetic value as the
marble of the ruined temple or the stone of the crumbling castle. His
singularly creative fancy breathes a soul into every scene; his touch
leaves everything that was dull to the sense before glowing in the light
of joyful recognition. He classifies his poems by different names, and
they are of different themes, but they are after all of that unity which I
have been trying, all too shirkingly, to suggest. One, for instance, is
the pathetic story which tells itself in the lyrical eclogue "One Day and
Another." It is the conversation, prolonged from meeting to meeting,
between two lovers whom death parts; but who recurrently find themselves
and each other in the gardens and the woods, and on the waters which they
tell each other of and together delight in. The effect is that which is
truest to youth and love, for these transmutations of emotion form the
disguise of self which makes passion tolerable; but mechanically the
result is a series of nature poems. More genuinely dramatic are such
pieces as "The Feud," "Ku Klux," and "The Lynchers," three out of many;
but one which I value more because it is worthy of Wordsworth, or of
Tennyson in a Wordsworthian mood, is "The Old Mill," where, with all the
wonted charm of his landscape art, Mr. Cawein gives us a strongly local
and novel piece of character painting.
I deny myself with increasing reluctance the pleasure of quoting the
stanzas, the verses, the phrases, the epithets, which lure me by scores
and hundreds in his poems. It must suffice me to say that I do not know
any poem of his which has not some such a felicity; I do not know any poem
of his which is not worth reading, at least the first time, and often the
second and the third time, and so on as often as you have the chance of
recurring to it. Some disappoint and others delight more than others; but
there is none but in greater or less measure has the witchery native to
the poet, and his place and his period.
It is only in order of his later time that I would put Mr. Cawein first
among those Midwestern poets, of whom he is the youngest. Poetry in the
Middle West has had its development in which it was eclipsed by the
splendor, transitory if not vain, of the California school. But it is
deeply rooted in the life of the region, and is as true to its origins as
any faithful portraiture of the Midwestern landscape could be; you could
not mistake the source of the poem or the picture. In a certain tenderness
of light and coloring, the poems would recall the mellowed masterpieces of
the older literatures rather than those of the New England school, where
conscience dwells almost rebukingly with beauty....