poetry-lovers' renaissance. He is no very arresting figure; and
therefore you, reader, are already considering a skip to chapter nine.
Well, if you are no more interested in him or his possibilities than
is the average American consumer of British poetry--I counsel you by
all means to skip in peace. But if you are one of the few who discern
the promise of a vast power latent in the American poet, and would
gladly help in releasing this power for the good of the race, I can
show you what is the matter with him and what to do about it.
Why has the present renaissance of the poetry-lover not brought with
it a renaissance of the American poet? Almost every reason but the
true one has been given. The true reason is that our poets are tired.
They became exhausted a couple of generations ago; and we have kept
them in this condition ever since. In the previous chapter we saw how
city life began abruptly to be speeded up in the seventies. At that
time the poet--like almost every one else in the city--was unable to
readjust his body at once to the new pace. He was like a six-day
bicycle racer who should be lapped in a sudden and continued sprint.
That sprint is still going on. Never again has the American poet felt
the abounding energy with which he began. And never has he overtaken
the leaders.
The reason why the poet is tired is that he lives in the over-paced
city. The reason why he lives in the city is that he is chained to it
by the nature of his hack-work. And the reason for the hack-work is
that the poet is the only one of all the artists whose art almost
never offers him a living. He alone is forced to earn in other ways
the luxury of performing his appointed task in the world. For, as
Goethe once observed, "people are so used to regarding poetic talent
as a free gift of the gods that they think the poet should be as
free-handed with the public as the gods have been with him."
The poet is tired. Great art, however, is not the product of
exhaustion, but of exuberance. It will have none of the skimmed milk
of mere existence. Nothing less than the thick, pure cream of
abounding vitality will do. The exhausted artist has but three
courses open to him: either to stimulate himself into a counterfeit,
and suicidally brief, exuberance; or to relapse into mediocrity; or to
gain a healthy fullness of life.
In the previous chapter it was shown why poetry demands more
imperatively than any other art, that the appreciator shall bring to
it a margin of vitality. For a like reason poetry makes this same
inordinate demand upon its maker. It insists that he shall keep
himself even more keenly alive than the maker of music or sculpture,
painting or architecture. This is the reason why, in the present era
of overstrain, the poet's art has been so swift to succumb and so slow
to recuperate.
The poet who is obliged to live in the city has not yet been able to
readjust his body to the pace of modern urban life, so that he may
live among its never-ending conscious and unconscious stimulations and
still keep on hand a triumphant reserve of vitality to pour into his
poems. Under these new and strenuous conditions, very little real
poetry has been written in our cities. American poets, despite their
genuine love of town and their struggles to produce worthy lines amid
its turmoil, have almost invariably done the best of their actually
creative work during the random moments that could be snatched in wood
and meadow, by weedy marsh or rocky headland. To his friends it was
touching to see with what wistfulness Richard Watson Gilder used to
seek his farm at Tyringham for a day or two of poetry after a
fortnight of furious office life. Even Walt Whitman--poet of cities
that he was--had to retire "precipitate" from his beloved Manahatta in
order fitly to celebrate her perfections. In fact, Stedman was perhaps
the only one of our more important singers at the close of the century
who could do his best work in defiance of Emerson's injunction to the
poet: "Thou shalt lie close hid with Nature, and canst not be afforded
to the Capitol or the Exchange." But it is pleasant to recall how
even that poetic banker brightened up and let his soul expand in the
peace of the country.
One reason for the rapidly growing preponderance of women--and
especially of unmarried women--among our poetic leaders is, I think,
to be found in the fact that women, more often than men, command the
means of living for a generous portion of the year that vital,
unstrenuous, contemplative existence demanded by poetry as an
antecedent condition of its creation. It is a significant fact that,
according to Arnold Bennett, nearly all of the foremost English
writers live far from the town. Most of the more promising American
poets of both sexes, however, have of late had little enough to do
with the country. And the result is that the supreme songs of the
twentieth century have remained unsung, to eat out the hearts of their
potential singers. For fate has thrown most of our poets quite on
their own resources, so that they have been obliged to live in the
large cities, supporting life within the various kinds of hack-harness
into which the uncommercially shaped withers of Pegasus can be forced.
Such harness, I mean, as journalism, editing, compiling, reading for
publishers, hack-article writing, and so on. Fate has also seen to it
that the poet's make-up is seldom conspicuous by reason of a
bull-neck, pugilistic limbs, and the nervous equipoise of a
dray-horse. What he may lack in strength, however, he is apt to make
up in hectic ambition. Thus it often happens that when the city does
not consume quite all of his available energy, the poet, with his
probably inadequate physique, chafes against the hack-work and yields
to the call of the luring creative ideas that constantly beset him.
Then, after yielding, he chafes again, and more bitterly, at his
faint, imperfect expression of these dreams, recognizing in despair
that he has been creating a mere crude by-product of the strenuous
life about him. So he burns the torch of life at both ends, and the
superhuman speed of modern existence eats it through in the middle.
Then suddenly the light fails altogether.
Those poets alone who have unusual physical endurance are able to do
even a small amount of steady, fine-grained work in the city. The rest
are as effectually debarred from it as factory children are debarred
from learning the violin well at the fag end of their days of toil. In
her autobiography Miss Jane Addams speaks some luminous words about
the state of society which forces finely organized artistic talent
into the wearing struggle for mere existence. She refers to it as "one
of the haunting problems of life; why do we permit the waste of this
most precious human faculty, this consummate possession of all
civilization? When we fail to provide the vessel in which it may be
treasured, it runs out upon the ground and is irretrievably lost."
I wonder if we have ever stopped to ask ourselves why so many of our
more recent poets have died young. Was it the hand of God, or the
effort to do the work of two in a hostile environment, that struck
down before their prime such spirits as Sidney Lanier, Edward Rowland
Sill, Frederic Lawrence Knowles, Arthur Upson, Richard Hovey, William
Vaughn Moody, and the like? These were poets whom we bound to the
strenuous city, or at least to hack-work which sapped over-much of
their vitality. An old popular fallacy keeps insisting that genius
"will out." This is true, but only in a sadder sense than the stupidly
proverbial one. As a matter of fact, the light of genius is all too
easily blown out and trampled out by a blind and deaf world. But we of
America are loath to admit this. And if we do not think of genius as
an unquenchable flame, we are apt to think of it as an amazingly hardy
plant, more tough than horse-brier or cactus. Only a few of us have
yet begun to realize that the flower of genius is not the flower of an
indestructible weed, but of a fastidious exotic, which usually
demands good conditions for bare existence, and needs a really
excellent environment and constant tending if it is to thrive and
produce the finest possible blooms. Mankind has usually shown enormous
solicitude lest the man of genius be insufficiently supplied with that
trouble and sorrow which is supposed to be quite indispensable to his
best work. But here and there the thinkers are beginning to realize
that the irritable, impulsive, impractical nature of the genius, in
even the most favorable environment, is formed for trouble "as the
sparks to fly upward." They see that fortune has slain its hundreds of
geniuses, but trouble its ten thousands. And they conclude that their
own real solicitude should be, not lest the genius have too little
adversity to contend with, but lest he have too much.
We have heard not a little about the conservation of land, ore, wood,
and water. The poetry problem concerns itself with an older sort of
conservation about which we heard much even as youngsters in college.
I mean the conservation of energy. Our poetry will never emerge from
the dusk until either the bodies of our city-prisoned poets manage to
overtake the speeding-up process and readjust themselves to it--or
until we allow them an opportunity to return for an appreciable part
of every year to the country--the place where the poet belongs.
It is true that the masters of the other arts have not fared any too
well at our hands; but they do not need help as badly by far as the
poets need it. What with commissions and sales, scholarships,
fellowships, and substantial prizes, the painters and sculptors and
architects and even the musicians have, broadly speaking, been able to
learn and practise their art in that peace and security which is
well-nigh essential to all artistic apprenticeship and productive
mastery. They have usually been able to spend more of the year in the
country than the poet. And even when bound as fast as he to the city,
they have not been forced to choose between burning the candle at
both ends or abandoning their art.
But for some recondite reason--perhaps because this art cannot be
taught at all--it has always been an accepted American conviction that
poetry is a thing which may be thrown off at any time as a side issue
by highly organized persons, most of whose time and strength and
faculties are engaged in a vigorous and engrossing hand-to-hand bout
with the wolf on the threshold--a most practical, philistine wolf,
moreover, which never heard of rhyme or rhythm, and whose whole
acquaintance with prosody is confined to a certain greedy familiarity
with frayed masculine and feminine endings.
As a result of this common conviction our poets have almost invariably
been obliged to make their art a quite subsidiary and haphazard
affair, like the rearing of children by a mother who is forced to go
out and scrub from early morning till late at night and has to leave
little Johnnie tied in his high chair to be fed by an older sister on
crusts dabbled in the pot of cold coffee. No wonder that so much of
our verse "jest growed," like Topsy. And the resulting state of things
has but served to reinforce our belief that to make the race of poets
spend their days in correcting encyclopædia proof, or clerking, or
running, notebook in hand, to fires--inheres in the eternal fitness of
things.
Bergson says in "Creative Evolution," that "an intelligence which
reflects is one that originally had a surplus of energy to spend, over
and above practically useful efforts." Does it not follow that when we
make the poet spend all his energy in the practically useful effort of
running to fires, we prevent him from enjoying the very advantage
which made man a reflective being, to say nothing of a poet?
Perhaps we have never yet realized that this attitude of ours would
turn poetic success into a question of the survival of that paradox,
the commercially shrewd poet, or of the poet who by some happy
accident of birth or marriage has been given an income, or of that
prodigy of versatility who, in our present stage of civilization,
besides being mentally and spiritually fit for the poet's calling, is
also physically fit to bear the strain of doing two men's work; or,
perhaps we had better say, three men's--for simply being a good poet
is about as nerve-consuming an occupation as any two ordinary men
could support in common--and the third would have to run to fires for
the first two.
It is natural to the character of the American business man to declare
that the professional poet has no reason for existence _qua_ poet
unless he can make his art support him. But let the business man bear
in mind that if he had the power to enforce such a condition, he would
be practically annihilating the art. For it is literally true that, if
plays were excluded, it would take not even a five-foot shelf to
contain all the first-rate poetry which was ever written by poets in a
state of poetic self-support. "Could a man live by it," the author of
"The Deserted Village" once wrote to Henry Goldsmith, "it were not
unpleasant employment to be a poet." Alas, the fatal condition! For
the art itself has almost never fed and clothed its devotee--at least
until his best creative days are done and he has become a "grand old
man." More often the poet has attained not even this reward.
Wordsworth's lines on Chatterton have a wider application:
"What treasure found he? Chains and pains and sorrow--
Yea, all the wealth those noble seekers find
Whose footsteps mark the music of mankind!
'T was his to lend a life: 't was Man's to borrow:
'T was his to make, but not to share, the morrow."
Those who insist upon judging the art of poetry on the hard American
"cash basis" ought to be prepared, for the sake of consistency, to
apply the same criterion as well to colleges, public schools, symphony
orchestras, institutions for scientific research, missions,
settlements, libraries, and all other unlucrative educational
enterprises. With inexorable logic they should be prepared to insist
that people really do not desire or need knowledge or any sort of
uplift because they are not prepared to pay its full cost. It is
precisely this sort of logic which would treat the Son of Man if He
should appear among us, to a bench in Bryant Park, and a place in the
bread-line, and send the mounted police to ride down his socialistic
meetings in Union Square. No! poetry and most other forms of higher
education have always had to be subsidized--and probably always will.
When wisely subsidized, however, this art is very likely to repay its
support in princely fashion. In fact, I know of no other investment
to-day that would bid fair to bring us in so many thousand per cent.
of return as a small fresh-air fund for poets.
We Americans are rather apt to complain of the comparatively poor,
unoriginal showing which our poets have as yet made among those of
other civilized nations. We are quietly disgusted that only two of
all our bards have ever made their work forcibly felt in Europe; and
that neither Poe nor Whitman has ever profoundly influenced the great
masses of his own people.
Despite our splendid inheritance, our richly mingled blood, our
incomparably stimulating New World atmosphere, why has our poetry made
such a meager showing among the nations? The chief reason is obvious.
_We have been unwilling to let our poets live while they were working
for us._ True, we have the reputation of being an open-handed, even an
extravagantly generous folk. But thriftiness in small things often
goes with an extravagant disposition, much as manifestations of piety
often accompany wickedness like flying buttresses consciously placed
outside the edifice. We have spent millions on bronze and marble
book-palaces which shall house the works of the poets. We have spent
more millions on universities which shall teach these works. But as
for making it possible for our few real poets to produce works, and
completely fulfill their priceless functions, we have always satisfied
ourselves by decreeing: "Let there be a sound cash basis."
So it came to pass that when the first exuberant, pioneer
energy-margin of our race began to be consumed by the new and abnormal
type of city life, it became no longer possible for the poets to put
as much soul-sinew as theretofore into their lines, after they had
toilfully earned the luxury of trying to be our idealistic leaders.
For often their initial efforts consumed their less than pioneer
vitality. And how did we treat them from the first? In the old days we
set Longfellow and Lowell at one of the most exhausting of
professions--teaching. We made Emerson do one-night lecture-stands all
winter long in the West--sometimes for five dollars a lecture and feed
for his horse. We made Bryant ruin a gift as elemental as
Wordsworth's, in journalism; Holmes, visit patients at all hours of
the day and night; Poe, take to newspaper offices and drink. We made
Whitman drive nails, set type and drudge in the Indian Bureau in
Washington, from which he was dismissed for writing the most original
and the most poetic of American books. Later he was rescued from want
only by the humiliation of a public European subscription. Lanier we
allowed to waste away in a dingy lawyer's office, then kill himself so
fast by teaching and writing railway advertisements and playing the
flute in a city orchestra that he was forced to defer composing
"Sunrise" until too weak with fever to carry his hand to his lips. And
this was eleven years after that brave spirit's single cry of
reproach:
"Why can we poets dream us beauty, so,
But cannot dream us bread?"
With Lanier the physical exhaustion incident to the modern speeding-up
process began to be more apparent. Edward Rowland Sill we did away
with in his early prime through journalism and teaching. We curbed
and pinched and stunted the promising art of Richard Watson Gilder by
piling upon him several men's editorial work. We created a poetic
resemblance between Arthur Upson and the hero of "The Divine Fire" by
employing him in a bookstore. We made William Vaughn Moody teach in a
city environment utterly hostile to his poetry, and later set the hand
that gave us "An Ode in Time of Hesitation" to the building of popular
melodrama. These are only a tithe of the things that we have done to
the hardiest of those benefactors of ours:
"The poets, who on earth have made us heirs
Of truth and pure delight."
It is not pleasant to dwell on the fate of those less sturdy ones who
have remained mute, inglorious Miltons for lack of a little practical
appreciation and a small part of a small fresh-air fund.
So far as I know, Thomas Bailey Aldrich is the only prominent figure
among the poets of our elder generations who was given the means of
devoting himself entirely to his art. And even _his_ fortune was not
left to him by his practical, poetry-loving friend until so late in
the day that his creative powers had already begun to decline through
age and over-much magazine editing.
More than almost any other civilized nation we have earned Allen
Upward's reproach in "The New Word":
There are two kinds of human outcasts. Man, in his march
upward out of the deep into the light, throws out a vanguard
and a rearguard, and both are out of step with the main
body. Humanity condemns equally those who are too good for
it, and those who are too bad. On its Procrustean bed the
stunted members of the race are racked; the giants are cut
down. It puts to death with the same ruthless equality the
prophet and the atavist. The poet and the drunkard starve
side by side.... Literature is the chief ornament of
humanity; and perhaps humanity never shows itself uglier
than when it stands with the pearl shining on its forehead,
and the pearl-maker crushed beneath its heel.... England
will always have fifteen thousand a year for some
respectable clergyman; she will never have it for Shelley.
Yes, but how incomparably better England has treated her poets than
America has treated hers! What convenient little plums, as De Quincey
somewhat wistfully remarked, were always being found for Wordsworth
just at the psychological moment; and they were not withheld,
moreover, until he was full of years and honors. Indeed, we owe this
poet to the poet-by-proxy of whom Wordsworth wrote, in "The Prelude":
"He deemed that my pursuits and labours, lay
Apart from all that leads to wealth, or even
A necessary maintenance insures
Without some hazard to the finer sense."
How tenderly the frail bodies of Coleridge and of Francis Thompson
were cared for by their appreciators. How potently the Civil List and
the laureateship have helped a long, if most uneven, line of England's
singers. Over against our solitary ageing Aldrich, how many great
English poets like Byron, Keats, the Brownings, Tennyson, and
Swinburne have found themselves with small but independent incomes,
free to give their whole unembarrassed souls and all that in them was
to their art. And all this since the close of the age of patronage!
Why have we never had a Wordsworth, or a Browning? For one thing,
because this nation of philanthropists has been too thoughtless to
found the small fellowship in creative poetry which might have freed a
Wordsworth of ours from communion with a cash-book to wander chanting
his new-born lines among the dreamy Adirondack lakes or the frowning
Sierras; or that might have sought out our Browning in his grocery
store and built him a modest retreat among the Thousand Islands. If
not too thoughtless to act thus, we have been too timid. We have been
too much afraid of encouraging weaklings by mistake. We have been, in
fact, more afraid of encouraging a single mediocre poet than of
neglecting a score of Shelleys. But we should remember that even if
the weak are encouraged with the strong, no harm is done.
It can not be too strongly insisted upon that the poor and mediocre
verse which has always been produced by every age is practically
innocuous. It hurts only the publishers who are constantly being
importuned to print the stuff, and the distinguished men and women who
are burdened with presentation copies or requests for criticism. These
unfortunates all happen to be capable of emitting loud and
authoritative cries of distress about the menace of bad poets. But we
should discount these cries one hundred per cent. For nobody else is
hurt by the bad poets, because nobody else pays the slightest
attention to them. Time and their own "inherent perishableness" soon
remove all traces of the poetasters. It were better to help hundreds
of them than to risk the loss of one new Shelley. And do we realize
how many Shelleys we may actually have lost already? I think it
possible that we may have had more than one such potential singer to
whom we never allowed any leisure or sympathy or margin of vitality to
turn into poetry. Perhaps there is more grim truth than humor in Mark
Twain's vision of heaven where Captain Stormfield saw a poet as great
as Shakespeare who hailed, I think, from Tennessee. The reason why the
world had never heard of him was that his neighbors in Tennessee had
regarded him as eccentric and had ridden him out of town on a rail and
assisted his departure to a more congenial clime above.
We complain that we have had no poet to rank with England's greatest.
I fear that it would have been useless for us to have had such a
person. We probably would not have known what to do with him.
I realize that mine is not the popular side of this question and that
an occasional poet with an income may be found who will even argue
against giving incomes to other poets. Mr. Aldrich, for instance,
wrote, after coming into his inheritance:
"A man should live in a garret aloof,
And have few friends, and go poorly clad,
With an old hat stopping the chink in the roof,
To keep the goddess constant and glad."