forth with distinction, that artists like de Regnier and Fort devote
themselves, however secretly, or however openly to the sacred theme.
They had but one intention, and that to arrive at, and assist in the
realization of the best state of poetry, that shall have carried the
art further on its way logically, and in accordance with the
principles which they have created for their time; endeavoring always
to create fresh values, new points of contact with the prevailing as
well as with the older outlines of the classics. It was, then, a
spectacle, from our removed point of view, the gathering of the poetic
multitude around the café tables, over the Dubonnet, the grenadines,
and the café noir, of a Tuesday evening. It gave one a sense of
perpetuity, of the indestructibility of art, in spite of the obstacles
encountered in the run of the day, that the artist has the advantage
over the layman in being qualified to set down, in shapes
imperishable, those states of his imagination which are the shapes of
life and of nature.
We may be grateful to Amy Lowell for having assembled for our
consummation, in a world where poetry is not as yet the sublime issue
as it was to be felt at every street corner, much of the spirit of the
rue de Rome, the Café Novelles D'Athènes, and the Closerie de Lilas,
as well as the once famed corner of the Café D'Harcourt where the
absinthe flowed so continuously, and from which some very exquisite
poetry has emanated for all time. It is the first intimation we have
of what our best English poetry has done for the best French poets of
the present, and what our first free verse poet has done for the
general liberation of emotions and for freedom of form in all
countries. He has indicated the poets that are to follow him. He would
be the first to sanction all this poetic discussive intensity at the
curbside, the liberty and freedom of the café, the excellence of a
divine Tuesday evening.
EMILY DICKINSON
If I want to take up poetry in its most delightful and playful mood, I
take up the verses of that remarkable girl of the sixties and
seventies, Emily Dickinson, she who was writing her little worthless
poetic nothings, or so she was wont to think of them, at a time when
the now classical New England group was flourishing around Concord,
when Hawthorne was burrowing into the soul of things, Thoreau was
refusing to make more pencils and took to sounding lake bottoms and
holding converse with all kinds of fish and other water life, and
Emerson was standing high upon his pedestal preaching of
compensations, of friendship, society and the oversoul, leaving a
mighty impress upon his New England and the world at large as well.
I find when I take up Emily Dickinson, that I am sort of sunning
myself in the discal radiance of a bright, vivid, and really new type
of poet, for she is by no means worn of her freshness for us, she
wears with one as would an old fashioned pearl set in gold and dark
enamels. She offsets the smugness of the time in which she lived with
her cheery impertinence, and startles the present with her uncommon
gifts. Those who know the irresistible charm of this girl--who gave
so charming a portrait of herself to the stranger friend who inquired
for a photograph: "I had no portrait now, but am small like the wren,
and my hair is bold like the chestnut burr, and my eyes like the
sherry in the glass that the guest leaves," this written in July,
1862--shall be of course familiar with the undeniable originality of
her personality, the grace and special beauty of her mind, charm
unique in itself, not like any other genius then or now, or in the
time before her, having perhaps a little of relationship to the
crystal clearness of Crashaw, like Vaughan and Donne maybe, in respect
of their lyrical fervour and moral earnestness, yet nevertheless
appearing to us freshly with as separate a spirit in her verse
creations as she herself was separated from the world around her by
the amplitude of garden which was her universe. Emily Dickinson
confronts you at once with an instinct for poetry, to be envied by the
more ordinary and perhaps more finished poets. Ordinary she never was,
common she never could have been, for she was first and last
aristocrat in sensibility, rare and untouchable if you will, vague and
mystical often enough, unapproachable and often distinctly aloof, as
undoubtedly she herself was in her personal life. Those with a
fondness for intimacy will find her, like all recluses, forbidding and
difficult, if not altogether terrifying the mind with her vagueries
and peculiarities.
Here was New England at its sharpest, brightest, wittiest, most
fantastic, most wilful, most devout, saint and imp sported in one,
toying with the tricks of the Deity, taking them now with extreme
profundity, then tossing them about like irresistible toys with an
incomparable triviality. She has traced upon the page and with
celestial indelibility that fine line from her soul which is like a
fine prismatic light, separating one bright sphere from another, one
planet from another planet, and the edge of separation is but faintly
perceptible. She has left us this bright folio of her "lightning and
fragrance in one," scintillant with stardust as perhaps no other
before her, certainly not in this country, none with just her
celestial attachedness, or must we call it detachedness, and withal
also a sublime, impertinent playfulness which makes her images dance
before one like offspring of the great round sun, fooling zealously
with the universes at her feet, and just beyond her eye, with a
loftiness of spirit and of exquisite trivialness seconded by none. Who
has not read these flippant renderings, holding always some touch of
austerity and gravity of mood, or the still more perfect "letters" to
her friends, will, I think, have missed a new kind of poetic
diversion, a new loveliness, evasive, alert, pronounced in every
interval and serious, modestly so, and at a bound leaping as it were
like some sky child pranking with the clouds, and the hills and the
valleys beneath them, child as she surely was always, playing in some
celestial garden space in her mind, where every species of tether was
unendurable, where freedom for this childish sport was the one thing
necessary to her ever young and incessantly capering mind--"hail to
thee, blithe spirit, bird thou ever wert"!
It must be said in all justice, then, that "fascination was her
element," everything to her was wondrous, sublimely magical, awsomely
inspiring and thrilling. It was the event of many moons to have
someone she liked say so much as good morning to her in human tongue,
it was the event of every instant to have the flowers and birds call
her by name, and hear the clouds exult at her approach. She was the
brightest young sister of fancy, as she was the gifted young daughter
of the ancient imagination. One feels everywhere in her verse and in
her so splendid and stylish letters an unexcelled freshness,
brightness of metaphor and of imagery, a gift of a peculiarity that
could have come only from this part of our country, this part of the
world, this very spot which has bred so many intellectual and
spiritual entities wrapped in the garments of isolation, robed with
questioning. Her genius is in this sense essentially local, as much
the voice of the spirit of New England as it is possible for one to
hold. If ever wanderer hitched vehicle to the comet's tail, it was the
poetic, sprite woman, no one ever rode the sky and the earth as she
did in this radiant and skybright mind of her.
She loved all things because all things were in one way or in another
way bright for her, and of a blinding brightness from which she often
had to hide her face. She embroidered all her thoughts with starry
intricacies, and gave them the splendour of frosty traceries upon the
windowpane in a frigid time, and of the raindrop in the sun, and
summered them with fragrancing of the many early and late flowers of
her own fanciful conjuring. They are glittering garlands of her clear,
cool fancies, these poems, fraught in some instances, as are certain
finely cut stones, with an exceptional mingling of lights coursing
swiftly through them. She was avid of starlight and of sunlight alike,
and of that light by which all things are illumined with a splendour
not their own merely, but lent them by shafts from that radiant sphere
which she leaned from, looking out gleefully upon them from the window
of that high place in her mind.
To think of this poet is to think of crystal, for she lived in a
radianced world of innumerable facets, and the common instances were
chariots upon which to ride widely over the edges of infinity. She is
alive for us now in those rare fancies of hers, with no other wish in
them save as memorandum for her own eyes, and when they were finished
to send them spinning across the wide garden, many of them to her
favorite sister who lived far, far away, over beyond the hedge. You
shall find in her all that is winsome, strange, fanciful, fantastic
and irresistible in the eastern character and characteristic. She is
first and best in lightsomeness of temper, for the eastern is known
as essentially a tragic genius. She is perhaps the single exponent of
modern times of the quality of true celestial frivolity. Scintillant
was she then, and like dew she was and the soft summer rain, and the
light upon the lips of flowers of which she loved to sing. Her mind
and her spirit were one, soul and sense inseparable, little sister of
Shelley certainly she was, and the more playful relative of Francis
Thompson.
She had about her the imperishable quality that hovers about all
things young and strong and beautiful, she was the sense of beauty
ungovernable. What there are of tendencies religious and moral disturb
in nowise those who love and have appreciation for true poetic
essences. She had in her brain the inevitable buzzing of the bee in
the belly of the bloom, she had in her eyes the climbing lances of the
sun, she had in her heart love and pity for the innumerable pitiful
and pitiable things. She was a quenchless mother in her gift for
solace and she was lover to the immeasurable love. Like all
aristocrats she hated mediocrity, and like all first rate jewels, she
had no rift to hide. She was not a maker of poetry, she was a thinker
of poetry. She was not a conjurer of words so much as a magician in
sensibility. She has only to see and feel and hear to be in touch with
all things with a name or with things that must be forever nameless.
If she loved people, she loved them for what they were, if she
despised them she despised them for what they did, or for lack of
power to feel they could not do. Silence under a tree was a far more
talkative experience with her than converse with one or a thousand
dull minds. Her throng was the air, and her wings were the multitude
of flying movements in her brain. She had only to think and she was
amid numberless minarets and golden domes, she had only to think and
the mountain cleft its shadow in her heart.
Emily Dickinson is in no sense toil for the mind accustomed to the
labours of reading, she is too fanciful and delicious ever to make
heavy the head, she sets you to laughter and draws a smile across your
face for pity, and lets you loose again amid the measureless pleasing
little humanities. I shall always want to read Emily Dickinson, for
she points her finger at all tiresome scholasticism, and takes a
chance with the universe about her and the first rate poetry it offers
at every hand within the eye's easy glancing. She has made poetry
memorable as a pastime for the mind, and sent the heavier ministerial
tendencies flying to a speedy oblivion. What a child she was, child
impertinent, with a heavenly rippling in her brain!
These random passages out of her writings will show at once the rarity
of her tastes and the originality of her phrasing. "February passed
like a kate, and I know March. Here is the light the stranger said was
not on sea or land--myself could arrest it, but will not chagrin
him"--
"The wind blows gay today, and the jays bark like blue terriers."
"Friday I tasted life, it was a vast morsel. A circus passed the
house--still I feel the red in my mind though the drums are out."
"The lawn is full of south and the odors tangle, and I hear today for
the first the river in the tree."
"The zeros taught us phosphorus
We learned to like the fire
By playing glaciers when a boy
And tinder guessed by power
"Of opposite to balance odd
If white a red must be!
Paralysis, our primer dumb
Unto vitality."
Then comes the "crowning extravaganza.... If I read a book, and it
makes my whole body so cold no fire will ever warm me, I know that is
poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,
I know that is poetry. Is there any other way? These are the only ways
I know it."
No one but a New England yankee mind could concoct such humours and
fascinatingly pert phrases as are found here. They are like the
chatterings of the interrupted squirrel in the tree-hole at nut-time.
There is so much of high gossip in these poetic turns of hers, and so,
throughout her books, one finds a multitude of playful tricks for the
pleased mind to run with. She was an intoxicated being, drunken with
the little tipsy joys of the simplest form, shaped as they were to
elude always her evasive imagination into thinking that nothing she
could think or feel but was extraordinary and remarkable. "Your
letter gave no drunkenness because I tasted rum before--Domingo comes
but once," etc., she wrote to Col. Higginson, a pretty conceit, surely
to offer a loved friend. The passages offered will give the unfamiliar
reader a taste of the sparkle of this poet's hurrying fancy and set
her before the willing mind entrancingly, it seems to me. She will
always delight those who find it in their way to love her elfish,
evasive genius, and those who care for the vivid and living element in
words will find her, to say the least, among the masters in her
feeling for their strange shapes and the fresh significance contained
in them. A born thinker of poetry, and in a great measure a gifted
writer of it, refreshing many a heavy moment made dull with the
weightiness of books, or of burdensome thinking. This poet-sprite sets
scurrying all weariness of the brain, and they shall have an hour of
sheer delight who invite poetic converse with Emily Dickinson. She
will repay with funds of rich celestial coin from her rare and
precious fancyings. She had that "oblique integrity" which she
celebrates in one of her poems.
ADELAIDE CRAPSEY
One more satellite hurried away too soon! High hints at least, of the
young meteor finding its way through space. Here was another of those,
with a vast fund of wishing in her brain, and the briefest of hours in
which to set them roaming. Brevities that whirl through the mind as
you read those cinquains of Adelaide Crapsey, like white birds through
the dark woodlands of the night. Cameos or castles, what is size? Is
it not the same if they are of one perfection of feeling? Such a
little book of Adelaide Crapsey, surely like cameos cut on shell, so
clear in outline, so rich in form, so brave in indications, so much of
singing, so much of poetry, of courage.
"Just now,
Out of the strange
Still dusk--as strange, as still,
A white moth flew; Why am I grown
So cold?"
Isn't the evidence sufficient here of first rate poetic gifts,
sensibility of an exceptional order? Contrast in so many ways with
that perhaps more radiant and certainly more whimsical girl, with her
rarest of flavours, she with her "whip of diamond, riding to meet the
Earl"! I think geniuses like Keats or Shelley would have said "how do
you do, poet?" to Adelaide Crapsey and her verse, lamenting also that
she flew over the rainbowed edge of the dusk too soon, like the very
moth over the garden wall, early in the evening. It is sure that had
this poet been allowed her full quota of days, she would have left
some handsome folios bright enough for any one caring for verse at its
purest. Pity there was not time for another book at least, of her
verses, to verify the great distinction conferred. She might have
walked still more largely away with the wreaths of recognition. Not
time for more books, instead of so much eternity at her bedside. She
would surely have sent more words singing to their high places and
have impressed the abundant output of the day with its superficiality
by her seriousness. There is no trifling in these poetic things of
hers. Trivial might some say who hanker after giantesque composition.
Fragile are they only in the sense of size, only in this way are they
small.
Those who know the difficulties of writing poetic composition are
aware of the task involved in creating such packed brevities. Emily
Dickinson knew this power. "H. D." is another woman who understands
the beauty of compactness. Superb sense of economy, of terseness the
art calls for, excessive pruning and clipping. Singular that these
three artists, so gifted in brevity were women. There is little, after
all, in existence that warrants lengthy dissertation. Life itself is
epigrammatic and brief enough. No volumes needed by way of
explanation. The fascinating enigma diverts and perplexes everyone
alike. The simple understand it best, or at least they seem to do so.
Segregation, aloofness, spiritual imprisonment, which is another name
for introspection, the looking out from bars of the caged house, all
this discovers something through penetration. Walking with life is
most natural, grazing its warm shoulder. There is little room for
inquiry if one have the real feeling of life itself. Poetry is that
which gleans most by keeping nearest to life. Books and firesides
avail but little. Secretaries for the baggage of erudition do not
enhance poetic values, they encumber them. Poetry is not declamation,
it is not propaganda, it is breathing natural breaths. There is
nothing mechanical about poetry excepting the affectation of forms.
Poetry is the world's, it is everybody's. You count poetry by its
essence, and no amount of studied effect, or bulging erudition will
create that which is necessary, that which makes poetry what it is.
The one essential is power to sing, and the intelligence to get it
down with degrees of mastery or naturalness, which is one and the same
thing.
Real singing is unusual as real singers are rare. Adelaide Crapsey
shows that she was a real singer, essentially poet, excellent among
those of our time. She impresses her uncommon qualities upon you, in
the cinquains of hers, with genuinely incisive force. She has so much
of definiteness, so much of technical beauty, economy, all very
valuable assets for a true poet. She had never been touched with the
mania for journalistic profusion. She cared too much for language to
ride it. She cared too much for words to want to whip them into
slavery. She was outside of them, looking on, as it might be, through
crystal, at their freshness. She did not take them for granted. They
were new to her and she wanted the proper familiarity. She worked upon
a spiritual geometric all her own. She did not run to the dictionary
for eccentricities, she did not hunt words out of countenance. They
were natural to her. She wanted most their simple beauty, and she
succeeded. She had dignity, a rare gift in these times. She raises
herself above the many by her fine feeling for the precision. That is
her artistry, the word, the thing of beauty and the joy forever with
her.
It is to be regretted that Adelaide Crapsey had no more time for the
miniature microscopic equations, the little thing seen large, the
large thing seen vividly. She might have spent more hours with them
and less with her so persistent guest, this second self at her side;
ironic presence, when she most would have strode with the brighter
companion, her first and natural choice. Her contribution is
conspicuous among us for its balance and its intellectualism tempered
with fine emotions. She had so much to settle for herself, so much
bargaining for the little escapes in which to register herself
consistently, so much of consultation for her body's sake, that her
mind flew the dark spaces about her bed with consistent feverishness.
Reckoning is not the genius of life. It is the painful, residual
element of reflection. One must give, one must pay. It is not
inspiring to beg for breath, yet this has come to many a fine artist,
many a fine soul whose genius was far more of the ability for living,
with so little of the ability for dying. You cannot think along with
clarity, with the doom of dark recognition nudging your shoulder every
instant. There must be somehow apertures of peace for production.
Adelaide Crapsey's chief visitant was doom. She saw the days
vanishing, and the inevitable years lengthening over her. No wonder
she could write brevities, she whose existence was brevity itself. The
very flicker of the lamp was among the last events. What, then, was
the fluttering of the moth but a monstrous intimation. If her work was
chilled with severity, it was because she herself was covered with the
cool branches of decision. Nature was cold with her, hence there is
the ring of ice in these little pieces of hers. They are veiled with
the grey of many a sunless morning.
"These be
Three silent things;
The falling snow,--the hour
Before the dawn,--the mouth of one
Just dead."
Here you have the intensity once more of Adelaide Crapsey. It haunts
you like the something on the dark stairway as you pass, just as when,
on the roadway in the dead of night, the twig grazing one's cheek
would seem like the springing panther at one's throat. Dramatic
vividness is certainly her chief distinction. No playfulness here, but
a stout reckoning with austere beauty. The wish to record the element
at its best that played so fierce a rôle in her life. She writes her
own death hymn, lays her own shroud out, spaces her own epilogue as if
to give the engraver, who sets white words on white stone, the clue,
stones the years stare on, leaving the sunlight to streak the old
pathos there, and then settles herself to the long way of lying, to
the sure sleep that glassed her keen eyes, shutting them down too soon
on a world that held so much poetry for her.
The titles of her cinquains, such as "November night", "The guarded
wound", "The warning", "Fate defied", and the final touch of
inevitability in "The Lonely Death", so full of the intensity of last
moments, intimate the resolute presence of the grey companion of the
covering mists. It must be said hurriedly that Adelaide Crapsey was
not all doom. By no means. The longer pieces in her tiny book attest
to her feeling for riches, and the lyrical wonders of the hour. Her
fervour is the artist's fervour, the longing, coming really to
passion, to hold and fix forever the shapes that were loveliest to
her. That is the poet's existence, that is the poet's labour, and his
last distress. No one wants to give in to a commonplace world when the
light that falls on it is lovelier than the place it falls on. If you
cannot transpose the object, transport it, however simply, however
ornately, then of what use is poetry? It is transport!
Adelaide Crapsey was efficient in her knowledge of what poetry is, as
she was certainly proficient as workman. She was lapidary more than
painter or sculptor. It was a beautiful cutting away, and a sweeping
aside of the rifts and flaws. That is to say, she wanted that. She
wanted the white light of the perfect gem, and she could not have been
content with just matrix, with here and there embedded chips. She was
a washer of gold, and spared no labours for the bright nuggets she
might get, and the percentage of her panning was high. But the cloud
hung on the mountain she clomb, and her way was dimmed.
"In the cold I will rise, I will bathe
In the waters of ice; Myself
Will shiver, and will shrive myself
Alone in the dawn, and anoint
Forehead and feet and hands;
I will shutter the windows from light,
I will place in their sockets the four
Tall candles and set them a-flame
In the grey of the dawn; And myself
Will lay myself straight in my bed,
And draw the sheet under my chin."