Since the disappearance of the latest survivors of that graceful and
somewhat academic school of poets who ruled American literature so long
from the shores of Massachusetts, serious poetry in the United States
seems to have been passing through a crisis of languor. Perhaps there is
no country on the civilized globe where, in theory, verse is treated with
more respect and, in practice, with greater lack of grave consideration
than in America. No conjecture as to the reason of this must be attempted
here, further than to suggest that the extreme value set upon sharpness,
ingenuity and rapid mobility is obviously calculated to depreciate and
to condemn the quiet practice of the most meditative of the arts. Hence
we find that it is what is called "humorous" verse which is mainly in
fashion on the western side of the Atlantic. Those rhymes are most warmly
welcomed which play the most preposterous tricks with language, which
dazzle by the most mountebank swiftness of turn, and which depend most
for their effect upon paradox and the negation of sober thought. It
is probable that the diseased craving for what is "smart," "snappy,"
and wide-awake, and the impulse to see everything foreshortened and
topsy-turvy, must wear themselves out before cooler and more graceful
tastes again prevail in imaginative literature.
Whatever be the cause, it is certain that this is not a moment when
serious poetry, of any species, is flourishing in the United States. The
absence of anything like a common impulse among young writers, of any
definite and intelligible, if excessive, _parti pris_, is immediately
observable if we contrast the American, for instance, with the French
poets of the last fifteen years. Where there is no school and no clear
trend of executive ambition, the solitary artist, whose talent forces
itself up into the light and air, suffers unusual difficulties, and
runs a constant danger of being choked in the aimless mediocrity that
surrounds him. We occasionally meet with a poet in the history of
literature, of whom we are inclined to say: "Charming as he is, he would
have developed his talent more evenly and conspicuously, if he had been
accompanied from the first by other young men like-minded, who would
have formed for him an atmosphere and cleared for him a space." This is
the one regret I feel in contemplating, as I have done for years past,
the ardent and beautiful talent of Mr. Madison Cawein. I deplore the
fact that he seems to stand alone in his generation; I think his poetry
would have been even better than it is, and its qualities would certainly
have been more clearly perceived, and more intelligently appreciated, if
he were less isolated. In his own country, at this particular moment,
in this matter of serious nature-painting in lyric verse, Mr. Cawein
possesses what Cowley would have called "a monopoly of wit." In one of
his lyrics Mr. Cawein asks--
"The song-birds, are they flown away,
The song-birds of the summer-time,
That sang their souls into the day,
And set the laughing hours to rhyme?
No cat-bird scatters through the hush
The sparkling crystals of her song;
Within the woods no hermit-thrush
Trails an enchanted flute along."
To this inquiry, the answer is: the only hermit-thrush now audible seems
to sing from Louisville, Kentucky. America will, we may be perfectly
sure, calm herself into harmony again, and possess once more her school
of singers. In those coming days, history may perceive in Mr. Cawein the
golden link that bound the music of the past to the music of the future
through an interval of comparative tunelessness.
The career of Mr. Madison Cawein is represented to me as being most
uneventful. He seems to have enjoyed unusual advantages for the
cultivation and protection of the poetical temperament. He was born on
the 23rd of March, 1865, in the metropolis of Kentucky, the vigorous
city of Louisville, on the southern side of the Ohio, in the midst of
a country celebrated for tobacco and whisky and Indian corn. These are
commodities which may be consumed in excess, but in moderation they
make glad the heart of man. They represent a certain glow of the earth,
they indicate the action of a serene and gentle climate upon a rich
soil. It was in this delicate and voluptuous state of Kentucky that Mr.
Cawein was born, that he was educated, that he became a poet, and that
he has lived ever since. His blood is full of the color and odor of his
native landscape. The solemn books of history tell us that Kentucky was
discovered in 1769, by Daniel Boone, a hunter. But he first discovers a
country who sees it first, and teaches the world to see it; no doubt some
day the city of Louisville will erect, in one of its principal squares,
a statue to "Madison Cawein, who discovered the Beauty of Kentucky." The
genius of this poet is like one of those deep rivers of his native state,
which cut paths through the forests of chestnut and hemlock as they hurry
towards the south and west, brushing with the impulsive fringe of their
currents the rhododendrons and calmias and azaleas that bend from the
banks to be mirrored in their flashing waters.
Mr. Cawein's vocation to poetry was irresistible. I do not know that
he even tried to resist it. I have even the idea that a little more
resistance would have been salutary for a talent which nothing could
have discouraged, and which opposition might have taught the arts of
compression and selection. Mr. Cawein suffered at first, I think, from
lack of criticism more than from lack of eulogy. From his early writings
I seem to gather an impression of a Louisville more ready to praise
what was second-rate than what was first-rate, and practically, indeed,
without any scale of appreciation whatever. This may be a mistake of
mine; at all events, Mr. Cawein has had more to gain from the passage
of years in self-criticism than in inspiring enthusiasm. The fount
was in him from the first; but it bubbled forth before he had digged a
definite channel for it. Sometimes, to this very day, he sports with
the principles of syntax, as Nature played games so long ago with
the fantastic caverns of the valley of the Green River or with the
coral-reefs of his own Ohio. He has bad rhymes, amazing in so delicate
an ear; he has awkwardness of phrase not expected in one so plunged in
contemplation of the eternal harmony of Nature. But these grow fewer and
less obtrusive as the years pass by.
The virgin timber-forests of Kentucky, the woods of honey-locust and
buckeye, of white oak and yellow poplar, with their clearings full of
flowers unknown to us by sight or name, from which in the distance are
visible the domes of the far-away Cumberland Mountains,--this seems to
be the hunting-field of Mr. Cawein's imagination. Here all, it must be
confessed, has hitherto been unfamiliar to the Muses. If Persephone
"of our Cumnor cowslips never heard," how much less can her attention
have been arrested by clusters of orchids from the Ocklawaha, or by the
song of the whippoorwill, rung out when "the west was hot geranium-red"
under the boughs of a black-jack on the slopes of Mount Kinnex. "Not
here," one is inclined to exclaim, "not here, O Apollo, are haunts meet
for thee," but the art of the poet is displayed by his skill in breaking
down these prejudices of time and place. Mr. Cawein reconciles us to
his strange landscape--the strangeness of which one has to admit is
mainly one of nomenclature,--by the exercise of a delightful instinctive
pantheism. He brings the ancient gods to Kentucky, and it is marvelous
how quickly they learn to be at home there. Here is Bacchus, with a spicy
fragment of calamus-root in his hand, trampling the blue-eyed grass, and
skipping, with the air of a hunter born, into the hickory thicket, to
escape Artemis, whose robes, as she passes swiftly with her dogs through
the woods, startle the humming-birds, silence the green tree-frogs, and
fill the hot still air with the perfumes of peppermint and pennyroyal.
It is a queer landscape, but one of new natural beauties frankly and
sympathetically discovered, and it forms a _mise en scene_ which, I make
bold to say, would have scandalized neither Keats nor Spenser.
It was Mr. Howells,--ever as generous in discovering new talent as he is
unflinching in reproof of the effeteness of European taste,--who first
drew attention to the originality and beauty of Mr. Cawein's poetry. The
Kentucky poet had, at that time, published but one tentative volume,
the _Blooms of the Berry_, of 1887. This was followed, in 1888, by _The
Triumph of Music_, and since then hardly a year has passed without a
slender sheaf of verse from Mr. Cawein's garden. Among these (if a single
volume is to be indicated), the quality which distinguishes him from all
other poets,--the Kentucky flavor, if we may call it so,--is perhaps to
be most agreeably detected in _Intimations of the Beautiful_.
But it is time that I should leave the American lyrist to make his own
appeal, with but one additional word of explanation, namely, that in
this introduction Mr. Cawein's narrative poems on medieval themes, and
in general his cosmopolitan writings, have been neglected of mention in
favor of such nature lyrics as would present him most vividly in his own
native landscape, no visitor in spirit to Europe, but at home in that
bright and exuberant West--
"Where, in the hazy morning, runs
The stony branch that pools and drips,
Where red haws and the wild-rose hips
Are strewn like pebbles; where the sun's
Own gold seems captured by the weeds;
To see, through scintillating seeds,
The hunters steal with glimmering guns.
To stand within the dewy ring
Where pale death smites the boneset's blooms,
And everlasting's flowers, and plumes
Of mint, with aromatic wing!
And hear the creek,--whose sobbing seems
A wild man murmuring in his dreams,--
And insect violins that sing!"
So sweet a voice, so consonant with the music of the singers of past
times, heard in a place so fresh and strange, will surely not pass
without its welcome from lovers of genuine poetry.