A class of young men who seem to look upon themselves as revolutionary
poets has arisen, chiefly in Chicago; and they are putting forth the
most astonishing stuff in the name of free verse that has probably
ever appeared anywhere. In a late number of "Current Opinion," Carl
Sandburg, who, I am told, is their chosen leader, waves his dirty
shirt in the face of the public in this fashion:
"My shirt is a token and a symbol more than a cover from sun and rain,
My shirt is a signal and a teller of souls,
I can take off my shirt and tear it, and so make a ripping razzly
noise, and the people will say, 'Look at him tear his shirt!'
"I can keep my shirt on,
I can stick around and sing like a little bird, and look 'em all in the
eye and never be fazed,
I can keep my shirt on."
Does not this resemble poetry about as much as a pile of dirty rags
resembles silk or broadcloth? The trick of it seems to be to take
flat, unimaginative prose and cut it up in lines of varying length,
and often omit the capitals at the beginning of the lines--"shredded
prose," with no "kick" in it at all. These men are the "Reds" of
literature. They would reverse or destroy all the recognized rules and
standards upon which literature is founded. They show what Bolshevism
carried out in the field of poetry, would lead to. One of them who
signs himself H. D. writes thus in the "Dial" on "Helios":
"Helios makes all things right--
night brands and chokes,
as if destruction broke
over furze and stone and crop
of myrtle-shoot and field-wort,
destroyed with flakes of iron,
the bracken-stone,
where tender roots were sown
blight, chaff, and wash
of darkness to choke and drown.
"A curious god to find,
yet in the end faithful;
bitter, the Kyprian's feet--
ah, flecks of withered clay,
great hero, vaunted lord--
ah, petals, dust and windfall
on the ground--queen awaiting queen."
What it all means--who can tell? It is as empty of intelligent meaning
as a rubbish-heap. Yet these men claim to get their charter from
Whitman. I do not think Whitman would be enough interested in them to
feel contempt toward them. Whitman was a man of tremendous
personality, and every line he wrote had a meaning, and his whole work
was suffused with a philosophy as was his body with blood.
These Reds belong to the same class of inane sensationalists that the
Cubists do; they would defy in verse what the Cubists defy in form.
I have just been skimming through an illustrated book called "Noa
Noa," by a Frenchman, which describes, or pretends to describe, a
visit to Tahiti. There is not much fault to be found with it as a
narrative, but the pictures of the natives are atrocious. Many of the
figures are distorted, and all of them have a smutty look, as if they
had been rubbed with lampblack or coal-dust. There is not one simple,
honest presentation of the natural human form in the book. When the
Parisian becomes a degenerate, he is the most degenerate of all--a
refined, perfumed degenerate. A degenerate Englishman may be brutal
and coarse, but he could never be guilty of the inane or the
outrageous things which the Cubists, the Imagists, the Futurists, and
the other Ists among the French have turned out. The degenerate
Frenchman is like our species of smilax which looks fresh, shining,
and attractive, but when it blooms gives out an odor of dead rats.
I recently chanced upon the picture of a kneeling girl, by one of the
Reds in art, a charcoal sketch apparently. It suggests the crude
attempts of a child. The mouth is a black, smutty hole in the face,
the eyes are not mates, and one of them is merely a black dot. In
fact, the whole head seems thrust up into a cloud of charcoal dust.
The partly nude body has not a mark of femininity. The body is very
long and the legs very short, and the knees, as they protrude from
under the drapery, look like two irregular blocks of wood.
To falsify or belie nature seems to be the sole aim of these
creatures. The best thing that could happen to the whole gang of them
would be to be compelled to go out and dig and spade the earth. They
would then see what things are really like.