Well a book of poems is a damned serious affair. I am only
objecting that a book that contains your particular quality
should contain anything else and suggesting that if the quality
were carried to a communicable extreme, in intensity and
volume, etc.… I see it all over the book, in your landscapes
and portraits, but dissipated and obscured. Bouquets for brides
and Spencerian compliments for poets.… There are a very few men
who have anything native in them or for whose work I’d give a
Bolshevic ruble.… But I think your tantrums not half mad enough.
(I am not quite clear about the last sentence but I presume
he means that I do not push my advantage through to an
overwhelming decision. What would you have me do with my Circe,
Stevens, now that I have doublecrossed her game, marry her? It
is not what Odysseus did).
I return Pound’s letter … observe how in everything he does he
proceeds with the greatest positiveness etc.
_Wallace Stevens._
I wish that I might here set down my “Vortex” after the fashion of
London, 1913, stating how little it means to me whether I live here,
there or elsewhere or succeed in this, that or the other so long as I can
keep my mind free from the trammels of literature, beating down every
attack of its _retiarii_ with my _mirmillones_. But the time is past.
I thought at first to adjoin to each improvisation a more or less opaque
commentary. But the mechanical interference that would result makes this
inadvisable. Instead I have placed some of them in the preface where
without losing their original intention (see reference numerals at the
beginning of each) they relieve the later text and also add their weight
to my present fragmentary argument.
* * * * *
V. No. 2. By the brokeness of his composition the poet makes himself
master of a certain weapon which he could possess himself of in no other
way. The speed of the emotions is sometimes such that thrashing about in
a thin exaltation or despair many matters are touched but not held, more
often broken by the contact.
* * * * *
II. No. 3. The instability of these improvisations would seem such that
they must inevitably crumble under the attention and become particles of
a wind that falters. It would appear to the unready that the fiber of
the thing is a thin jelly. It would be these same fools who would deny
touch cords to the wind because they cannot split a storm endwise and
wrap it upon spools. The virtue of strength lies not in the grossness of
the fiber but in the fiber itself. Thus a poem is tough by no quality it
borrows from a logical recital of events nor from the events themselves
but solely from that attenuated power which draws perhaps many broken
things into a dance giving them thus a full being.
* * * * *
* * It is seldom that anything but the most elementary communications can
be exchanged one with another. There are in reality only two or three
reasons generally accepted as the causes of action. No matter what the
motive it will seldom happen that true knowledge of it will be anything
more than vaguely divined by some one person, some half a person whose
intimacy has perhaps been cultivated over the whole of a lifetime. We
live in bags. This is due to the gross fiber of all action. By action
itself almost nothing can be imparted. The world of action is a world of
stones.
* * * * *
XV. No. 1. Bla! Bla! Bla! Heavy talk is talk that waits upon a deed.
Talk is servile that is set to inform. Words with the bloom on them run
before the imagination like the saeter girls before Peer Gynt. It is talk
with the patina of whim upon it makes action a boot-licker. So nowadays
poets spit upon rhyme and rhetoric.
* * * * *
* * The stream of things having composed itself into wiry strands that
move in one fixed direction, the poet in desperation turns at right
angles and cuts across current with startling results to his hangdog mood.
* * * * *
XI. No. 2. In France, the country of Rabelais, they know that the world
is not made up entirely of virgins. They do not deny virtue to the rest
because of that. Each age has its perfections but the praise differs. It
is only stupid when the praise of the gross and the transformed would
be minted in unfit terms such as suit nothing but youth’s sweetness
and frailty. It is necessary to know that laughter is the reverse of
aspiration. So they laugh well in France, at Coquelin and the _Petoman_.
Their girls, also, thrive upon the love-making they get, so much so that
the world runs to Paris for that reason.
* * * * *
XII. No. 2 B. It is chuckleheaded to desire a way through every
difficulty. Surely one might even communicate with the dead—and lose
his taste for truffles. Because snails are slimy when alive and because
slime is associated (erroneously) with filth the fool is convinced that
snails are detestable when, as it is proven every day, fried in butter
with chopped parsely upon them, they are delicious. This is both sides
of the question: the slave and the despoiled of his senses are one. But
to weigh a difficulty and to turn it aside without being wrecked upon
a destructive solution bespeaks an imagination of force sufficient to
transcend action. The difficulty has thus been solved by ascent to a
higher plane. It is energy of the imagination alone that cannot be laid
aside.
* * * * *
* * Rich as are the gifts of the imagination bitterness of world’s loss
is not replaced thereby. On the contrary it is intensified, resembling
thus possession itself. But he who has no power of the imagination cannot
even know the full of his injury.
* * * * *
VIII. No. 3. Those who permit their senses to be despoiled of the
things under their noses by stories of all manner of things removed and
unattainable are of frail imagination. Idiots, it is true nothing is
possessed save by dint of that vigorous conception of its perfections
which is the imagination’s special province but neither is anything
possessed which is not extant. A frail imagination, unequal to the tasks
before it, is easily led astray.
* * * * *
IV. No. 2. Although it is a quality of the imagination that it seeks to
place together those things which have a common relationship, yet the
coining of similies is a pastime of very low order, depending as it does
upon a nearly vegetable coincidence. Much more keen is that power which
discovers in things those inimitable particles of dissimilarity to all
other things which are the peculiar perfections of the thing in question.
But this loose linking of one thing with another has effects of a
destructive power little to be guessed at: all manner of things are
thrown out of key so that it approaches the impossible to arrive at an
understanding of anything. All is confusion, yet, it comes from a hidden
desire for the dance, a lust of the imagination, a will to accord two
instruments in a duet.
But one does not attempt by the ingenuity of the joiner to blend the
tones of the oboe with the violin. On the contrary the perfections of the
two instruments are emphasized by the joiner; no means is neglected to
give to each the full color of its perfections. It is only the music of
the instruments which is joined and that not by the woodworker but by the
composer, by virtue of the imagination.
On this level of the imagination all things and ages meet in fellowship.
Thus only can they, peculiar and perfect, find their release. This is the
beneficent power of the imagination.
* * * * *
* * Age and youth are great flatterers. Brooding on each other’s obvious
psychology neither dares tell the other outright what manifestly is the
truth: your world is poison. Each is secure in his own perfections.
Monsieur Eichorn used to have a most atrocious body odor while the odor
of some girls is a pleasure to the nostril. Each quality in each person
or age, rightly valued, would mean the freeing of that age to its own
delights of action or repose. Now an evil odor can be pursued with
praise-worthy ardor leading to great natural activity whereas a flowery
skinned virgin may and no doubt often does allow herself to fall into
destructive habits of neglect.
* * * * *
XIII. No. 3. A poet witnessing the chicory flower and realizing its
virtues of form and color so constructs his praise of it as to borrow no
particle from right or left. He gives his poem over to the flower and
its plant themselves that they may benefit by those cooling winds of the
imagination which thus returned upon them will refresh them at their task
of saving the world. But what does it mean, remarked his friends?
* * * * *
VII. _Coda._ It would be better than depriving birds of their song to
call them all nightingales. So it would be better than to have a world
stript of poetry to provide men with some sort of eyeglasses by which
they should be unable to read any verse but sonnets. But fortunately
although there are many sorts of fools, just as there are many birds
which sing and many sorts of poems, there is no need to please them.
* * * * *
* * All schoolmasters are fools. Thinking to build in the young the
foundations of knowledge they let slip their minds that the blocks are of
grey mist bedded upon the wind. Those who will taste of the wind himself
have a mark in their eyes by virtue of which they bring their masters to
nothing.
* * * * *
* * All things brought under the hand of the possessor crumble to
nothingness. Not only that: He who possesses a child if he cling to it
inordinately becomes childlike, whereas, with a twist of the imagination,
himself may rise into comradeship with the grave and beautiful presences
of antiquity. But some have the power to free, say a young matron
pursuing her infant, from her own possessions, making her kin to Yang
Kuei-fei because of a haunting loveliness that clings about her knees,
impeding her progress as she takes up her matronly pursuit.
* * * * *
* * As to the sun what is he, save for his light, more than the earth is:
the same mass of metals, a mere shadow? But the winged dawn is the very
essence of the sun’s self, a thing cold, vitreous, a virtue that precedes
the body which it drags after it.
* * * * *
* * The features of a landscape take their position in the imagination
and are related more to their own kind there than to the country and
season which has held them hitherto as a basket holds vegetables mixed
with fruit.
VI. No. 1. A fish swimming in a pond, were his back white and his belly
green, would be easily perceived from above by hawks against the dark
depths of water and from below by larger fish against the penetrant light
of the sky. But since his belly is white and his back green he swims
about in safety. Observing this barren truth and discerning at once
its slavish application to the exercises of the mind, a young man, who
has been sitting for some time in contemplation at the edge of a lake,
rejects with scorn the parochial deductions of history and as scornfully
asserts his defiance.
* * * * *
XIV. No. 3. The barriers which keep the feet from the dance are the same
which in a dream paralyze the effort to escape and hold us powerless in
the track of some murderous pursuer. Pant and struggle but you cannot
move. The birth of the imagination is like waking from a nightmare. Never
does the night seem so beneficent.
* * * * *
* * The raw beauty of ignorance that lies like an opal mist over
the west coast of the Atlantic, beginning at the Grand Banks and
extending into the recesses of our brains—the children, the married,
the unmarried—clings especially about the eyes and the throats of our
girls and boys. Of a Sunday afternoon a girl sits before a mechanical
piano and, working it with her hands and feet, opens her mouth and sings
to the music—a popular tune, ragtime. It is a serenade. I have seen a
young Frenchman lean above the piano and looking down speak gently and
wonderingly to one of our girls singing such a serenade. She did not seem
aware of what she was singing and he smiled an occult but thoroughly
bewildered smile—as of a man waiting for a fog to lift, meanwhile lost in
admiration of its enveloping beauty—fragments of architecture, a street
opening and closing, a mysterious glow of sunshine.
* * * * *
VIII. No. 1. A man of note upon examining the poems of his friend and
finding there nothing related to his immediate understanding laughingly
remarked: After all, literature is communication while you, my friend,
I am afraid, in attempting to do something striking, are in danger of
achieving mere presciosity.——But inasmuch as the fields of the mind are
vast and little explored, the poet was inclined only to smile and to
take note of that hardening infirmity of the imagination which seems
to endow its victim with great solidity and rapidity of judgment.
But he thought to himself: And yet of what other thing is greatness
composed than a power to annihilate half-truths for a thousandth part
of accurate understanding. Later life has its perfections as well as
that bough-bending time of the mind’s florescence with which I am so
discursively taken.
* * * * *
I have discovered that the thrill of first love passes! It even becomes
the backbone of a sordid sort of religion if not assisted in passing. I
knew a man who kept a candle burning before a girl’s portrait day and
night for a year—then jilted her, pawned her off on a friend. I have been
reasonably frank about my erotics with my wife. I have never or seldom
said, my dear I love you, when I would rather say: My dear, I wish you
were in Tierra del Fuego. I have discovered by scrupulous attention
to this detail and by certain allied experiments that we can continue
from time to time to elaborate relationships quite equal in quality,
if not greatly superior, to that surrounding our wedding. In fact, the
best we have enjoyed of love together has come after the most thorough
destruction or harvesting of that which has gone before. Periods of
barrenness have intervened, periods comparable to the prison music in
Fidelio or to any of Beethoven’s pianissimo transition passages. It is at
these times our formal relations have teetered on the edge of a debacle
to be followed, as our imaginations have permitted, by a new growth of
passionate attachment dissimilar in every member to that which has gone
before.
It is in the continual and violent refreshing of the idea that love and
good writing have their security.
* * * * *
Alfred Kreymborg is primarily a musician, at best an innovator of musical
phrase:
We have no dishes
to eat our meals from.
We have no dishes
to eat our meals from
because we have no dishes
to eat our meals from
…
We need no dishes
to eat our meals from,
we have fingers
to eat our meals from.
Kreymborg’s idea of poetry is a transforming music that has much to do
with tawdry things.
Few people know how to read Kreymborg. There is no modern poet who
suffers more from a bastard sentimental appreciation. It is hard to get
his things from the page. I have heard him say he has often thought in
despair of marking his verse into measures as music is marked. Oh, well—
The man has a bare irony, the gift of rhythm and Others. I smile to
think of Alfred stealing the stamps from the envelopes sent for return
of MSS. to the Others office! The best thing that could happen for the
good of poetry in the United States today would be for someone to give
Alfred Kreymborg a hundred thousand dollars. In his mind there is the
determination for freedom brought into relief by a crabbedness of temper
that makes him peculiarly able to value what is being done here. Whether
he is bull enough for the work I am not certain, but that he can find his
way that I know.
* * * * *
A somewhat petulant English college friend of my brother’s once remarked
that Britons make the best policemen the world has ever witnessed. I
agree with him. It is silly to go into a puckersnatch because some
brass-button-minded nincompoop in Kensington flies off the handle
and speaks openly about our United States prize poems. This Mr.
Jepson—“Anyone who has heard Mr. J. read Homer and discourse on Catullus
would recognize his fitness as a judge and respecter of poetry”—this is
Ezra!—this champion of the right is not half a fool. His epithets and
phrases—slip-shod, rank bad workmanship of a man who has shirked his job,
lumbering fakement, cumbrous artificiality, maundering dribble, rancid as
Ben Hur—are in the main well-merited. And besides, he comes out with one
fairly lipped cornet blast: the only distinctive U. S. contributions to
the arts have been ragtime and buck-dancing.
Nothing is good save the new. If a thing have novelty it stands
intrinsically beside every other work of artistic excellence. If it have
not that, no loveliness or heroic proportion or grand manner will save
it. It will not be saved above all by an attenuated intellectuality.
But all U. S. verse is not bad according to Mr. J., there is T. S. Eliot
and his, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
But our prize poems are especially to be damned not because of
superficial bad workmanship, but because they are rehash, repetition—just
as Eliot’s more exquisite work is rehash, repetition in another way of
Verlaine, Beaudelaire, Maeterlinck,—conscious or unconscious,—just as
there were Pound’s early paraphrases from Yeats and his constant later
cribbing from the renaissance, Provence and the modern French: Men
content with the connotations of their masters.
It is convenient to have fixed standards of comparison: All antiquity!
And there is always some everlasting Polonius of Kensington forever
to rate highly his eternal Eliot. It is because Eliot is a subtle
conformist. It tickles the palate of this archbishop of procurers to a
lecherous antiquity to hold up Prufrock as a New World type. Prufrock,
the nibbler at sophistication, endemic in every capital, the not quite
(because he refuses to turn his back), is “the soul of that modern land,”
the United States!
Blue undershirts,
Upon a line,
It is not secessary to say to you
Anything about it—
I cannot question Eliot’s observation. Prufrock is a masterly portrait of
the man just below the summit, but the type is universal; the model in
his case might be Mr. J.
No. The New World is Montezuma or since he was stoned to death in a
parley, Guatemozin who had the city of Mexico levelled over him before he
was taken.
For the rest, there is no man even though he dare who can make beauty
his own and “so at last live,” at least there is no man better situated
for that achievement than another. As Prufrock longed for his silly lady
so Kensington longs for its Hardanger dairymaid. By a mere twist of the
imagination, if Prufrock only knew it, the whole world can be inverted
(why else are there wars?) and the mermaids be set warbling to whoever
will listen to them. Seesaw and blind-man’s-buff converted into a sort of
football.
But the summit of United States achievement, according to Mr. J.—who can
discourse on Catullus—is that very beautiful poem of Eliot’s, La Figlia
Que Piange: just the right amount of everything drained through, etc.,
etc., etc., etc., the rhythm delicately studied and—IT CONFORMS! ergo
here we have “the very fine flower of the finest spirit of the United
States.”
Examined closely this poem reveals a highly refined distillation. Added
to the already “faithless” formula of yesterday we have a conscious
simplicity:
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.
The perfection of that line is beyond cavil. Yet, in the last stanza,
this paradigm, this very fine flower of U. S. art is warped out of
alignment, obscured in meaning even to the point of an absolute
unintelligibility by the inevitable straining after a rhyme, the very
cleverness with which this straining is covered being a sinister token in
itself.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
So we have no choice but to accept the work of this fumbling conjurer.
Upon the Jepson filet Eliot balances his mushroom. It is the latest touch
from the literary cuisine, it adds to the pleasant outlook from the club
window. If to do this, if to be a Whistler at best, in the art of poetry,
is to reach the height of poetic expression then Ezra and Eliot have
approached it and _tant pis_ for the rest of us.
The Adobe Indian hag sings her lullaby:
The beetle is blind
The beetle is blind
The beetle is blind
The beetle is blind, etc., etc.
and Kandinsky in his, _Ueber das Geistige in der Kunst_, sets down the
following axioms for the artist:
Every artist has to express himself
Every artist has to express his epoch.
Every artist has to express the pure and eternal
qualities of the art of all men.
So we have the fish and the bait, but the last rule holds three hooks at
once—not for the fish, however.
I do not overlook De Gourmont’s plea for a meeting of the nations, but I
do believe that when they meet Paris will be more than slightly abashed
to find parodies of the middle ages, Dante and Langue D’Oc foisted upon
it as the best in United States poetry. Even Eliot, who is too fine an
artist to allow himself to be exploited by a blockheaded grammaticaster,
turns recently toward “one definite false note” in his quatrains, which
more nearly approach America than ever La Figlia Que Piange did. Ezra
Pound is a Boscan who has met his Navagiero.
One day Ezra and I were walking down a back lane in Wyncote. I contended
for bread, he for caviar. I become hot. He, with fine discretion,
exclaimed: “Let us drop it. We will never agree, or come to an
agreement.” He spoke then like a Frenchman, which is one who discerns.
Imagine an international congress of poets at Paris or Versailles, Remy
de Gourmont (now dead) presiding, poets all speaking five languages
fluently. Ezra stands up to represent U. S. verse and De Gourmont sits
down smiling. Ezra begins by reading, La Figlia Que Piange. It would be a
pretty pastime to gather into a mental basket the fruits of that reading
from the minds of the ten Frenchmen present; their impressions of the
sort of United States that very fine flower was picked from. After this
Kreymborg might push his way to the front and read Jack’s House.
E. P. is the best enemy United States verse has. He is interested,
passionately interested—even if he doesn’t know what he is talking
about. But of course he does know what he is talking about. He does not,
however, know everything, not by more than half. The accordances of which
Americans have the parts and the colors but not the completions before
them pass beyond the attempts of his thought. It is a middle aging blight
of the Imagination.
I praise those who have the wit and courage, and the conventionality, to
go direct toward their vision of perfection in an objective world where
the sign-posts are clearly marked, viz., to London. But confine them in
hell for their paretic assumption that there is no alternative but their
own groove.
Dear fat Stevens, thawing out so beautifully at forty! I was one day
irately damning those who run to London when Stevens caught me up with
his mild: “But where in the world will you have them run to?”
* * * * *
Nothing that I should write touching poetry would be complete without
Maxwell Bodenheim in it, even had he not said that the Improvisations
were “perfect,” the best things I had ever done; for that I place him,
Janus, first and last.
Bodenheim pretends to hate most people, including Pound and Kreymborg,
but that he really goes to this trouble I cannot imagine. He seems rather
to me to have the virtue of self absorbtion so fully developed that hate
is made impossible. Due to this, also, he is an unbelievable physical
stoic. I know of no one who lives so completely in his pretences as
Bogie does. Having formulated his world neither toothache nor the misery
to which his indolence reduces him can make head against the force of
his imagination. Because of this he remains for me a heroic figure,
which, after all, is quite apart from the stuff he writes and which only
concerns him. He is an Isaiah of the butterflies.
Bogie was the young and fairly well acclaimed genius when he came to
New York four years ago. He pretended to have fallen in Chicago and to
have sprained his shoulder. The joint was done up in a proper Sayre’s
dressing and there really looked to be a bona fide injury. Of course
he couldn’t find any work to do with one hand so we all chipped in. It
lasted a month! During that time Bogie spent a week at my house at no
small inconvenience to Florence, who had two babies on her hands just
then. When he left I expressed my pleasure at having had his company.
“Yes,” he replied, “I think you have profited by my visit.” The statement
impressed me by its simple accuracy as well as by the evidence it bore of
that fullness of the imagination which had held the man in its tide while
we had been together.
Charlie Demuth once told me that he did not like the taste of liquor,
for which he was thankful, but that he found the effect it had on his
mind to be delightful. Of course Li Po is reported to have written his
best verse supported in the arms of the Emperor’s attendants and with a
dancing-girl to hold his tablet. He was also a great poet. Wine is merely
the latchstring.
The virtue of it all is in an opening of the doors, though some rooms
of course will be empty, a break with banality, the continual hardening
which habit enforces. There is nothing left in me but the virtue of
curiosity, Demuth puts in. The poet should be forever at the ship’s prow.
An acrobat seldom learns really a new trick, but he must exercise
continually to keep his joints free. When I made this discovery it
started rings in my memory that keep following one after the other to
this day.
I have placed the following Improvisations in groups, somewhat after the
A. B. A. formula, that one may support the other, clarifying or enforcing
perhaps the other’s intention.
The arrangement of the notes, each following its poem and separated from
it by a ruled line, is borrowed from a small volume of Metastasio, _Varie
Poesie Dell’ Abate Pietro Metastasio_, Venice, 1795.
_September 1, 1918_