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Title: My life in poetry

Author: Stanton A. Coblentz

Release date: December 6, 2025 [eBook #77413]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Bookman Associates, 1959

Credits: Tom Trussel, Tim Lindell, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY LIFE IN POETRY ***

My Life in Poetry

OTHER BOOKS IN THE SAME FIELD

by STANTON A. COBLENTZ

Poetry

- THE PAGEANT OF MAN

- TIME’S TRAVELERS

- OUT OF MANY SONGS

- FROM A WESTERN HILLTOP

- GREEN VISTAS

- SONGS OF THE REDWOODS

- WINDS OF CHAOS

- ARMAGEDDON

- THE LONE ADVENTURER

- SHADOWS ON A WALL

- THE ENDURING FLAME

- THE MOUNTAIN OF THE SLEEPING MAIDEN

- THE MERRY HUNT AND OTHER POEMS

- SENATOR GOOSE AND OTHER RHYMES

- THE THINKER AND OTHER POEMS

Prose

- AN EDITOR LOOKS AT POETRY

- THE RISE OF THE ANTI-POETS

- NEW POETIC LAMPS AND OLD

- MAGIC CASEMENTS

- THE TRIUMPH OF THE TEAPOT POET

Anthologies

- MODERN AMERICAN LYRICS

- MODERN BRITISH LYRICS

- THE MUSIC MAKERS

- UNSEEN WINGS

MY

LIFE

IN

POETRY

by

STANTON A. COBLENTZ

BOOKMAN ASSOCIATES —:— New York

© Copyright 1959 by Stanton A. Coblentz

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 59-14624

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY

UNITED PRINTING SERVICES, INC.

NEW HAVEN, CONN.

If I were a flutist and found the concert hall forsaken,

With only a few in the wide and staring rows,

Still I would stand and play, and keep my faith unshaken

That music was more than a wind that wails and goes.

Contents

Chapter

Page

Introduction

9

I

“I Pant for the Music Which Is Divine”

13

II

Path of Stones and Thorns

21

III

Incentives and Lucky Shots

30

IV

A Tale of Two Eyes

39

V

Builders and Wreckers

46

VI

Poetry by Prescription

52

VII

A Mote in the Metropolis

62

VIII

The Magic World between Covers

75

IX

Blood Brother to the Epic

85

X

Poets I Have Known

94

XI

Shadows on a Wall

107

XII

The Depression, the Sea, and the Redwoods

113

XIII

Year of Miracles

122

XIV

Trials and Rewards of an Editor

135

XV

A Challenge to Giants

152

XVI

A Recruit for Publishers’ Row

161

XVII

A Place to End

172

Transcriber's Note

Introduction

During my entire adult life and even back into the vivid, brooding days of adolescence, one subject has had for me a light, an allurement, and a loveliness beyond all others. And as this subject happens to be that of poetry and hence is apt to be regarded as something of an eccentricity if not an aberration by the steel-hard practical world, I believe that some facts about my preoccupation may be worth explaining, less to my fellow poets than to those general readers who wonder how that strange creature from another world, the writer of verse, thinks and functions.

None of us, no matter what our field, find it easy to break through the dimness of misunderstanding that settles between man and man. But the mists are deeper and harder to penetrate when the subject is so remote from the usual experience as poetry. Myths are in danger of flashing to view like toadstools, and of being swallowed whole by those without access to the truth; and myths have actually, I sometimes suspect, come down to us beneath the label of history in the case of more poets than one. I have had reason to observe how even I, though surely much less victimized than persons more widely known, have been the target of reports which, if not always unflattering, have seldom erred on the side of reasonableness.

In one statement, published years ago in a small magazine, I was made the proud owner of a summer mansion in California and a winter villa in Florida (a State which, on my nearest approach, I once glimpsed remotely from a ship at sea). In another assertion, I was honored with counting Lord Dunsany as assistant editor of my magazine Wings (a bit of information which would have surprised Dunsany as much as it did me). In still another report, it was related that every afternoon, having obtained my mail at the post office in Mill Valley, I would hike with it into the hills and there proceed to answer it (the account did not state whether or not I carried a typewriter in my vest pocket). And in a somewhat less amusing instance, after a reporter for a newspaper in a small city had spent an hour interviewing me, I had the dubious pleasure of seeing myself awarded a doctor’s degree without benefit of any university, while several years were added to my age (a minor matter, to be sure), and the writer invented for me a statement implying that my lifelong objection to extremism in verse was a case of sour grapes gathered in later life. Doubtless other pronouncements, of an equally preposterous nature, have been circulated where I have not heard and never will hear them, though they could crop up at any time as parts of an “authentic” story.

From the larger point of view, of course, it may not matter what tales are told about anyone: all that counts about a writer is his work; by this he must rise or fall. Nevertheless, being in some measure subject to the ancient bias in favor of truth, I should like to set the record straight, insofar as I am able. One thing I do know, and can state unequivocally: no one, no one at all, not even my closest friend, knows much of what has happened to me, and particularly what has happened inside me. Whether this is worth knowing is another question entirely; but for whatever incidental interest it may have, and to the extent that is humanly possible, I should like to set down a plain report of the facts. I am the more anxious to do so, not because I regard the personal element as important, but because of the stand I have taken in poetry, the cause to which I have devoted much of my life—a stand which has earned murmurs of encouragement and even shouts of cheer in certain quarters, but has been misunderstood in others, and has been the source of misrepresentation, ridicule, abuse, and even personal vilification in a battle already more than three decades old. I am certain that nothing I say will bring clarity to those, if there be any such, who are determined not to see clearly; but to the great majority, who come with open minds, these pages may tell something of why one of that dwindling tribe, the tribe of poets, has written verse and prose, hoped and despaired, clutched at invisible barricades, and fought for what seemed to be the light, amid a world so wide-awake on the superficial levels that it realized little and cared little about those depths wherein all art, all creation, and all inspiration have found strength and sustenance.

CHAPTER

ONE

“I Pant for the Music Which Is Divine”

Seated in a rocking-chair in the upper story of an old high-ceilinged house in San Francisco’s “Western Addition,” a mild-looking, bespectacled woman of thirty-four was reading to a boy of eight. He followed her with an absorbed gaze as, bending her near-sighted eyes close to the book, she let her tongue roll over the lines of The Children’s Hour, The Wreck of the Hesperus, and other poems more popular in a former generation than today. Years later the lines of some of those poems—“Between the dark and the daylight,” “Grave Alice and laughing Allegra,” etc.—were to remain in the boy’s mind.

“These are all by a man named Longfellow,” said the woman, turning to the child with a smile. “He was a great poet and died a long time ago.”

The name impressed the boy—he thought of someone very tall and thin, a sort of walking two-legged pole.

“Did all great poets die a long time ago, Mamma?” asked the boy.

The woman smiled again.

“I don’t know. But I don’t think we have any Longfellow today.”

At this she sighed, ever so slightly.

Instantly a resolution formed itself in the boy’s mind. Looking up with the blissful confidence possible only to the very young, he clenched his small fists and promised, “You wait, Mamma! You wait! When I grow up, I’ll be a poet—just like Longfellow!”

The years were to pass, and the boy’s ambition to become Longfellow the Second was to be forgotten amid more exciting desires: for example, the aspiration to be the motorman of a streetcar, or, better still, a locomotive engineer. And the woman, who had only five years remaining of her busy life, was not to see the day when her eldest son was to put pen to his first crude verses. But in after years the thought was often to come to him that the poems he wrote, though hardly such as Longfellow would have produced, would have brought her an immense satisfaction.

Poetry was to mean little to the boy (whose identity the reader will have guessed) during his remaining years of childhood. You might, in fact, have judged that it never would mean anything, if you had known how he felt about certain verses he was forced to memorize at school. Of these, the only ones I still remember are those often-quoted lines of Scott,

Breathes there the man with soul so dead

Who never to himself hath said,

“This is my own, my native land,”

Whose heart within him ne’er hath burned

As home his footsteps he hath turned

From wandering on a foreign strand.

How I detested this passage! It was enough to give me a permanent bias against Scott, and an anti-poetic impulse that might have been lifelong. Doubtless, never having been so much as a hundred miles from my birthplace, I was not ideally fitted to appreciate the sentiments of a man just returning “from a foreign strand.” Besides, perhaps my earliest bit of unconscious literary criticism was not wholly misguided—either that, or the blind spot of childhood is still with me, as I remain unable to warm to these lines.

A few years later, when I was thirteen and had the assignment of writing a ballad in High School, you would have been sure that I was a pre-destined non-poet. How I struggled with this magnum opus! all the more so as I knew no more of the principles of meter than of the laws of spherical geometry. That might not be deemed a disadvantage nowadays, when ignorance enacts its role beneath the banners of freedom, and when the writer daunted by form need but strike a pose, and proclaim the merits of formlessness. But since, in those pristine days, a ballad was expected to sound more like a ballad than like a news report, I found myself face to face with a problem, as did all my fellow students. I have no reason to suppose that I was any less unsuccessful than any of the others.

How was it then that, a mere two years later, I was making spontaneous efforts at poetry? Had this not been the beginning of a lifelong habit—a bad habit, many will say—you might consider it but that adolescent poetic burgeoning which marks so many youths of both sexes before life calls them into more sober fields. Looking back, I should say that adolescence awakens the impulses and potentialities of the deeper self; summons out of hiding profound spiritual forces that have no place in childhood. To me it is inconceivable that the reading at my mother’s knee, though encouraging an interest in poetry, could have created that interest as it was later to develop; many another child, I feel safe in assuming, has listened to similar readings, and grown up to be a good stockbroker, grain merchant, or realtor.

Even after all the years, it is easy for me to trace the source of my first attempted poem. The death of my mother, a few months after I reached thirteen, had brought me shockingly close to life’s everlasting problems; had made it inevitable that I should wonder as to the end and aim of existence—a problem that did not seem answered by religion as it had been taught to me. Then one day I read some lines by Robert Ingersoll—ringing, oratorical lines whose exact wording I no longer recall, though the general meaning is that man is a traveler between two great darknesses. And the result was that I burst forth into verse which was little more than a paraphrase of Ingersoll, though not for a moment did it occur to me that it was not original. Understanding no more of the laws of blank verse than I had known of ballad writing two years before, I set out boldly to wield one of the greatest and most difficult of the English meters. While the completed product has (fortunately) been lost, my memory retains the opening lines:

A boundless ocean of eternity

Stretches on all sides of a tiny isle.

The island is called life; the sea is death;

From its broad bosom mortal ne’er returns.

Not exactly an unusual thought, nor a distinguished expression of that thought! But like most writers, even of the most execrable trash, I had the illusion that my work was good—an illusion no doubt necessary to keep up one’s spirits if more and perhaps less incompetent work is to be produced. In any case, more work was indeed forthcoming, much more—and I wish I could be so confident as to believe most of it less incompetent. But for several years, I am sure, the greater part of it was on exactly the same level of banality and unaccomplishment. Yes, even those lines which I doted upon in my teen-aged zeal, and assumed to be on so high a poetic plane!—

On the sunny isle of wishes,

On the mountain peaks of hope....

I could not have known that a time would come when I would blush even to repeat this doggerel. I quote the lines now only because of the marvelous fact—and it does seem marvelous—that I should ever have thought them good. If tastes and perceptions change with age, the ways in which they change are sometimes a little saddening—saddening, at least, when we observe how mistaken the clear, pure fervor of youth may be. I am happy, in any case, to report that you would search in vain for the rest of the masterpiece about the “sunny isle of wishes”—the two quoted lines are the only two that somehow, perversely, have clung to my memory, and the written copies have gone to a deserved limbo.

Ah, long and hard, and with many turns and windings, and dips no less than rises, and devotions and heartbreaks beyond my imagining, was to be the path that led toward poetry! But this I could not have foreseen nor imagined in my sanguine, halcyon youth.

At this time I did not know any poet; and it did not occur to me that I ever could know anyone so far above the plodding, commonplace world—one of those divine creatures whom I imagined as having been born old and gray-bearded, with a great shock of grizzled, unkempt hair, blazing eyes, and perhaps long, trailing, patriarchal robes. But there came a day when I would meet a poet in the flesh. And what a disillusionment! Why, he seemed not to be beyond his twenties! And he had no beard—in fact, not even a mustache; he talked and looked like any ordinary man! And he had some unromantic name like Harold Spring—or Springer, I forget exactly which. The place of our meeting was not one of the palisades of Parnassus, but my father’s insurance office, which he had entered not with the purpose of spreading his wings, but of selling his book. In this he evidently succeeded, through what arts of salesmanship I cannot imagine, since I cannot remember my father ever investing in another book of verse, though he did have many books of other kinds. I know that the slim volume was in our possession for some time, and that I eagerly perused it, but all I can recall of the contents is that there was one poem with a rousing anapestic rhythm, in which the author, looking for a rhyme for “golden,” ingeniously enlarged “days of old” into “days of olden”—a combination that especially struck me, as I had never seen it before, just as I have never encountered it since.

“Mr. Spring,” remarked my father—or maybe it was “Springer”—“says that he is unappreciated today, but monuments will be raised to him a hundred years after he dies.” Ah, the perennial hope of so many!—I did not then realize the pathos of it; I was confident that the day would come when the name of Spring—or Springer—would be honored beside those of Keats and Tennyson.

Keats and Tennyson and Coleridge and some others, but Shelley more than any of the rest, had spun their magic about me before I was out of High School. I use the term “magic” advisedly; no other word so fully conveys the enchantment I felt, the feeling of being uplifted, illuminated, and transported to some world which was not that of our common earth of streets and houses, but was more real, more vivid, more radiant. Not only the thought and the imagery but the ring and rhythms of the lines, the mellifluousness and sonorousness of the words bewitched me. I would repeat over and over to myself passages from The Cloud, or some melodious stanza like this from To Night:

Swiftly walk o’er the western wave,

Spirit of Night!

Out of thy misty eastern cave,

Where all the long and lone daylight

Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,

Which make thee terrible and dear,—

Swift be thy flight!

With Shelley, I would have said that “I pant for the music which is divine.” But sound effects and sorcery do not begin to express the awards I looked for in poetry; I also sought, sought with a passionate intensity, for something that may be called consolation. “Consolation for what?” you will ask. That, however, is something not to be answered as definitely as the question, “What is a brick wall?” I do not know if the experience is a general one, but I do know that for years during my adolescence I was obsessed with strange nostalgic longings, a vague sadness as for something irrecoverably lost long before, a sense of doom and of pain and parting in some far shadowy past. These feelings were with me particularly in the loneliness that fell upon me when, just before my seventeenth birthday, I went to live with an aunt and uncle in Oakland while attending the University at Berkeley. Then I would linger with relish over lines such as

Like the ghost of a dear friend dead

Is Time long past,

and,

Rarely, rarely cometh thou,

Spirit of Delight!

Wherefore hast thou left me now

Many a day and night?

and,

Unfathomable sea, whose waves are years,

Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe

Are brackish with the salt of human tears!

In these serener later days, poetry of this sort has lost much of its attraction for me; it strikes me as somewhat morbid. Moreover, there was nothing in my life so tragic as to justify concentration upon bleakness, sorrow, and longing. But I mention my feelings as a psychological fact; perhaps they were merely part of the melancholy so frequently associated with youth. Sometimes, however, I have liked to speculate—though this can never, of course, be more than speculation—that what I felt was a vague upsurging of recollection: recollection of some former life of sorrow and separation, which came dimly back to me through the mists of distance before the swift current of years had drowned it.

My special consolation, when I was lonely or depressed, was a huge anthology found in few homes nowadays: Bryant’s A Library of Poetry and Song, an inheritance from my mother, a compilation which, issued in 1870, and divided into sections such as “Poems of the Affections,” “Poems of Sorrow and Adversity,” “Poems of Nature,” “Poems of Peace and War,” contained hundreds of selections from the standard poets along with not a few by once popular but now little-remembered writers such as Felicia Hemans and Jean Ingelow.

Over the pages of this book I would linger for hours, making new friends and resuming acquaintance with old ones, in whom I found a companionship of thought and mood which, especially during the difficult period just after I left home, I did not meet anywhere in the human world about me.

CHAPTER

TWO

Path of Stones and Thorns

Early in my apprenticeship to poetry, I was to learn that the path was not entirely one of daisies and primroses, but was beset with stones, thorns, and pitfalls—a tortuous trail, where you had to sweat and strain in order to satisfy yourself even for a time.

There may be those whose inspiration needs no afterthought; who can dash off poems with a perfection that would make revision as superfluous as an attempt to paint the sky blue. But I have met no such super-gifted persons, and have seen no evidence that they ever existed; on the contrary, I have observed proof of the meticulous and often radical revisions made by many, including Milton, Gray, Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Fitzgerald and others. Possibly now and then a poem does spring forth full-fledged, like fabled Minerva from the head of Jove; I can even testify from experience that this does occur, though I make no claim as to the quality of the product. But this is the rare exception; usually the poet must labor with a chisel. After all, the words of the English language are so many, their combinations so innumerable, the shades and nuances of thought so varied, and the possibilities of technical adjustments and figurative embellishments so rich! Surely, only by a rare intuitive stroke could a poet immediately pick the truest and best phrasing! The original impulse, which may be too urgent to allow the writer to debate with himself over the sound of a syllable or the choice of an adjective before the thought has been caught on paper, would not be well-served if the poet strove for instant perfection. Let the essence of the poem be caged in words before its fragile and delicate substance vanishes; then let the details be strengthened, rearranged, and purified.

To be sure, I may smile now to recall how zealously I toiled to improve lines that not even the genius of a Milton could have redeemed from the waste basket. I may smile, also, to think of the epic in heroic couplets, which, sometime during my High School days, I started to confide to a notebook; it had a fabulous Spenserian theme, as allegorical as The Faerie Queene, and eventually met its deserts, and was lost to sight. Similarly, I may smile to think of the still longer poem on which I embarked somewhat later, under the egregious title, The Key to the Universe—which will doubtless sound as funny to the reader as it does to me today, though it was not actually so presumptuous as the wording might indicate. I really did not imagine that I had the key to the universe; on the contrary, I was impressed then, as today, by the fathomless and awesome mystery of all created things; and in pursuance of this feeling of wonder and bewilderment, the poem dealt with a man who merely sought the objective mentioned in the title. I recall that I wrote this would-be masterpiece during one of my summer school vacations: in the heat of the Stockton days, when 100 degrees in the shade was not unusual, creative work was impossible; and therefore, in order to find the necessary coolness as well as uninterrupted quiet, I would go at about seven every morning to my father’s office on the fifth floor of a downtown building, where I would be undisturbed until his arrival at eight-thirty or nine—at which time, creation would end. But by then I had ordinarily completed about fifty lines of blank verse, which I would revise later in the day.

So far as I am aware, no eyes but mine have ever glanced at The Key to the Universe, which occupied me all of one summer. It was not that I was exceptionally secretive; it was that I had discovered that few people in this matter-of-fact world, even among those closest to one, are interested in seeing poems, and especially long poems, unless out of curiosity, or because they are impressed by something quite apart from the work itself, such as the prospect of gain, or the trailing effulgence of some chance honor. Like everyone, I want to have my work read and appreciated; but in my later years, as in my earlier, I have found the writing of poetry a lonely, a very lonely task; in my later years, as in my earlier, I have never shown my work to anyone who did not ask to see it (my wife and editors alone excepted); and it rarely happens that anyone does ask to see it.

When just under seventeen, I saw the first glimmerings of what looked to me like success. I say “looked” like success, for appearances are more illusory than I, in my juvenile ardor, could have realized. An essay in rhymed couplets, entered in a state-wide contest for High School students, won me a free trip to the Yosemite Valley (a trip which, for reasons I need not enter into here, I was unable to take); and this was the more extraordinary since I had never seen the Yosemite, although I wrote in glowing terms about “this masterpiece of nature’s art.” The prize-winning offering, so far as I can recall it, was an execrable concoction in which words like “grand,” “superb,” “majestic,” “splendid,” and “magnificent” took the place of poetry; but I was elated at the recognition, and did not realize that recognition of itself is a bubble, prizes are bubbles, and are apt in the end to mock you, unless your work itself is good—in which case you need no prizes.

Nevertheless, that prize did give a spur to my spirits and at the same time it offered my father and others about me their first faint hope that perhaps after all the young scapegrace of a poet was not altogether a squanderer of time. But I doubt whether it had any more effect than an April shower upon my future.

This was, indeed, the only encouragement I was to have for a long, long time. Instead, I took my tuition in the form of slaps in the face. One of the hardest came during my second year in college, when for the first time I did meet a real poet—Leonard Bacon, a tall, waggish reed of a man, then much less known than later, though he had some real poetry to his name, and was available where you could actually see and talk with him; in fact, he was a member of the staff of the English Department. Even if he was no older and no more bearded than my one-time acquaintance Mr. Spring (or Springer), I had by now lost some of my romantic ideas as to the required looks of poets. What I did have was a high aspiration to enter Bacon’s class in verse-writing, a class limited to fifteen members. With unabashed temerity, I submitted what I regarded as my best poems—in all probability, my most bombastic; and confidently awaited the word of the great man. In due time, this word came—and like unexpected thunder, it left me stunned. I was refused! This in itself would have been devastating enough; but still worse was Mr. Bacon’s comment when he returned my manuscripts. “If you want to write soporifics for the entertainment of your friends, by all means go on. Otherwise, I’d advise you to turn to some other line of work.”

This advice, like much other good counsel I have received, was not taken; and a time was to come, as we shall see, when Mr. Bacon would soften his verdict. Looking back today, however, I cannot doubt that his opinion was justified by the possibly facile but quite unillumined verses I had submitted. But at the time, his decree pounded me like a sledgehammer. Had it not been that even sledgehammers could not break my tie to poetry, I might truly have turned to some less difficult subject, like mathematics or astrophysics.

Other blows also were in store for me. In the beginning, I had written just in order to write—in order to fulfill some vague and nameless but powerful impulse, which caused me to take strange satisfaction in smooth-flowing words and lines and in the rhythmical expression of the thoughts surging over me. To write was enough! The possible fate of the output was something I did not even consider. But in time a new element was to be injected. And the date, as nearly as I can place it, was sometime after my eighteenth birthday.

At the beginning of the second semester of my second college year, a great change came into my life. To an outsider, the difference would have seemed a routine one; yet it was as if the fabled magic carpet had taken me to new continents on that day when I left my uncle and aunt in Oakland, and came to live in Berkeley, where I shared a room and sleeping porch with my cousin Stanley. Stanley, a clever and kindly youth about three and a half years my senior (now a lawyer in Los Angeles) had something of a penchant for leadership; and one of the ways in which this penchant manifested itself was in connection with my poetry. Now I have no reason to suppose that he had then, or at any time, any interest whatever in poetry as such; but he did show an interest in my poetry, at least to the extent of trying to market it. What he did was to constitute himself, in a sense, my literary agent, though I doubt if either of us had ever heard this term. I typed out the poems (having just received from my father the gift of a reconditioned typewriter, for which I was more grateful than if it had been the wealth of Croesus). And Stanley compiled a list of periodicals, and sent my none-too-skillful typescripts to most of the leaders of the day: the Atlantic, Scribners, Harpers, the Century, the North American Review, the Forum, and other magazines, many of them now long departed from this mortal life.

With the publication fever thus aroused, I eagerly awaited the results. Poor deluded hopeful! I did not yet know that even with the most accomplished work, and the arduous labors of a practiced hand, the road to editorial favor is often long, sinuous, and spiny. And with verse as amateurish as mine—well, the outcome was inevitable. When my treasures started coming back, I was disappointed, and disappointed again, and disappointed once more, and so on and on, scores of times. I could not believe that the editors, all editors, were too shortsighted to see the merits so luminously evident to me. To be sure, their printed slips were invariably worded politely: they “had had pleasure in reading the submissions,” rejection “did not necessarily imply any lack of merit,” and the author was thanked for “his courtesy” in permitting the editors to turn down his work. Sometimes the rejection slips even invited further submissions—with the result that I would acquire duplicate slips, soliciting still further submissions. But not a single penned or pencilled line suggested that editors were human! I began to doubt if they were.

What Stanley thought of the debacle I do not know; in the end, when he saw that his efforts brought nothing but a waste of time and postage stamps, he probably told himself that his verse-writing cousin would do well to cease his scribblings and settle down to some good, solid occupation, like that of a schoolteacher or a filing clerk.

Still, to my own way of thinking, the score was not quite absolute zero. One of the final submissions did bring me a ray of hope. No, more than a ray! a blaze! The poems, submitted to a Boston literary magazine, came back exactly in the way of their predecessors, but this was not because they were not good—oh, not at all, said the glowing letter that accompanied them, on an imposing letterhead, with a subheading that particularly impressed me, Books in Belles Lettres. The return of my “splendid poems” was greatly regretted by Mr. Scottfield, the editor, and was due only to the unhappy fact that he was overstocked. However, if I had poems enough to make a book, he would be glad to recommend the manuscript to the consideration of the other editors associated with him in The Poet-Craft Publishing Company.

The fact that I had never heard before of the Poet-Craft Publishing Company made no difference whatever. I pictured it as an immense concern, occupying the whole of some noble building in downtown Boston, where a learned knot of editors and scores of able assistants were devoted to the uplifting task of giving poetry to the world.

Riding cloud-high on the wings of such thoughts, I let my eyes range again and again over those magical lines. If I had poems enough to make a book! To think that my work was wanted by that great publishing house, the Poet-Craft Company! So then all the editors who had returned my work had been wrong! Of course! I had known that from the beginning! And now those eminent authorities at Poet-Craft would prove it by publishing my book! That they actually would publish it I did not doubt—all that was necessary was for me to pick out my best, and send them to Mr. Scottfield.

Having dispatched the manuscript, which contained most of the poems that Stanley had sent out with such unanimous lack of success, I could hardly wait for the letter that would tell me when Mr. Scottfield would publish the book. But the suspense was not to be long, considering that there were no air mails in those days. Hardly two weeks had passed before the postman delivered a long blue envelope whose upper left-hand corner bore that enchanted inscription, The Poet-Craft Publishing Company. My fingers trembled as, during that breathless instant, I tore open the envelope.

The first lines brought me a thrill: Mr. Scottfield was “delighted” with my poems! His fellow editors agreed with him in recommending publication. The book would be printed on a “special laid paper” and bound in “antique boards.” (I had, to be sure, no idea what laid paper or antique boards might be, but they sounded magnificent.) A publication date could be set almost immediately, and I would have proofs in a few weeks, dependent, however, upon one small condition.

By the time I had read this far, my pulse was beating fast, but my heart was beginning to sink. The “one small condition” did not look small to me: it was that I must forward to Mr. Scottfield “the nominal sum of $575.”

He might as well have asked “the nominal sum” of five hundred and seventy-five millions. Not that I would not have paid the money, and eagerly, if I had had it; but in my impecunious student’s life, in which a dollar looked as large as a pumpkin, an item of five or six hundred dollars surpassed my wildest dreams of wealth. Some fantastic ideas did, indeed, flit through my head: I might borrow the money. But nobody whom I knew had that much money to lend, except possibly a certain uncle, who ran a retail clothing store and was regarded as the rich man of the family. However, he was not known to be so free-handed as to throw money away (which, I had just sense enough to realize, would be how he would look upon the proposed investment). No, I had nowhere to turn, nowhere at all! I must give up the dream—my book would never be published, on laid paper and with antique boards, by that distinguished concern, the Poet-Craft Publishing Company!

Little did I realize the shoals I was avoiding! I have often thought how unfortunate it would have been if some obliging relative, with more money than literary judgment, had come forward to provide Mr. Scottfield with the requested sum. Surely, it would not have been easy to live down the appearance between boards (even antique boards!) of the juvenilia that I regarded as poetry.

CHAPTER

THREE

Incentives and Lucky Shots

Curious notions have taken root in some minds as to the poet’s aims and ambitions. Most people do not, indeed, have the illusion that the average verse-writer expects to get rich—no, poets are still popularly associated with rags and garrets. On the other hand, it is often assumed that the poet goes about trailing after glittering spangles of immortal glory, eager to forfeit the bread of today for the fame of a posthumous tomorrow. There may, for all I know, be poets with such super-mundane ideas, but I am not aware of having met any, though I do remember one well-known rhymester who modestly hoped that some small sheaf of all his writings would be read a hundred years after he died; while I have seen others, like Mr. Spring or Springer, whose sense of present frustration has led them to dream of a golden post-mortem renown.

To me the important thing has always been the work itself; I have always found something a little ridiculous, not to say amusing, in the man who pictures himself dancing a splendid rigadoon before the eyes of posterity. Posterity doubtless will have its own interests and preoccupations; and if it has a small amount of time to spare for any of us now alive, that will be exclusively its own concern, since presumably we will no longer know or care. This does not mean that the poet does not wish his work to be read and appreciated. Of course he does! Its very purpose in being is to be read and appreciated; and, besides, the greater the attention given to any of his poems, the easier the path for his subsequent work.

It may seem strange, but if you were to ask me why I have written verse—and this applies to my latest no less than to my earliest—the most accurate answer I could give would be, “For the joy of creation.” Yes, for that same joy in creation which the sculptor finds in carving a bust, the composer in constructing a sonata, or the architect in designing a monument. There is not only the satisfaction which any artist takes in the completed product; there is the glow, the passion, the ecstasy of composition, in which one virtually enters a different sphere of being.

There are, it seems to me, two levels on which rhymes may be put together or other writings produced: the first, the same superficial level that suffices for ordinary activities, may be adequate for a jingle in which the chief feat is the rhyming of “house” with “mouse.” But this level, apparently the only one ever reached by many rhymesters, is not the fountainhead of poetry or of any inspired writing. The spirit of the writer, amid the absorption of composition, is withdrawn from the world; it is as if a veil had been pulled down between it and mundane concerns and it had sunk into some realm of deeper apprehension in which the facts of ordinary existence are screened from view, while it draws upon insights and intuitions, sources of knowledge and facilities of invention foreign to its everyday experience. Literally, it is as if the creator has entered into a trance—a trance in which thoughts and images and even completed expressions may flash before him with a speed, a vividness, and an aptness impossible on the ordinary plane of consciousness.

In such a trance, moreover, his awareness of the external world may be blunted or disconnected. Just how deep this creative isolation may be, and how it may literally switch one off from contact with common affairs, may be illustrated by an incident of many years ago. Late one afternoon I was in my third-floor New York apartment, composing a poem, and in the midst of the creative effort I was vaguely aware of a thumping noise from outside, followed by a confusion of sounds. But these came to me remotely, and as if from far away, and I went on uninterruptedly with the poem, while the sounds gradually died down. Not until the next day did I learn that our janitor, trying to get into the fifth-floor window of an apartment not far from mine, had fallen to the cement court, and been killed.

I do not mean to imply that one’s absorption is always as deep as this, although it is ordinarily so intense that the buzzing of a doorbell, the clanging of the telephone, or even the entry of another person into the room will come as a shock, after which it will be difficult and in some cases impossible to return to the creative mood. But the state of creation, when not unnaturally interrupted, is an experience from which one may emerge with something like rapture, the sense of having touched the fringes of heaven and been brushed by angels’ wings. Maybe it is all only a sort of drugging effect, like that of opium or hashish; but it has always been my view that only during creation is one most alive, most able to reach out to the full length and depth of one’s own personality.

Behind the imperfect offerings of youth, as behind the skilled productions of maturity, the same overmastering creative spirit may lie. Let me give an example. One day, during the early years of the First World War, I was idling over a college textbook, when for some reason my thoughts were diverted to the innumerable war dead. Immediately the book was forgotten; in a trance-like detachment, I seemed to see the disembodied warriors moving protestingly in uncountable legions across a stormy sky. And out of this vision, a sonnet had birth. I quote the opening lines:

I saw an army of the newly dead

Come stalking by like clouds before the blast.

More numerous than autumn leaves they passed,

With War, their slayer, marching at their head.

The impulse behind this was real, quite as much so as if the poem had been more accomplished. In later years, I would have known better than to have presented the picture so starkly and obviously; I would have recognized that mention of “the newly dead” and of “War, their slayer” was superfluous; I would have tried to think of a more original image than “autumn leaves”; and I would have concentrated more on the picture, from which the reader would more powerfully have received the intended dread impression. But these are matters of technique, which come with study and practice.

In my Junior year in college, I was honored with the privilege I had previously sought in vain: admission into Leonard Bacon’s verse-writing class. Sometimes I have wondered at the temerity that led me to try again, after having been so signally rebuffed; and I have also wondered whether my acceptance was not due to something extraneous: the fact that the members of my class, aside from myself, consisted of two males and twelve females—not that I suspect Mr. Bacon of any prejudice against the distaff side, merely that I suppose that he had a sense of proportion, or of disproportion.

Now, in any case, I was in! And being in, I received, for the first time, some schooling in verse-writing. I also met, for the first time, another youth with whom to discuss poetry—a genial, raw-boned Scotsman named MacMorrow, with whom my acquaintance was to be unhappily brief: not long afterwards, he left to be a volunteer ambulance driver in the European War, and neither I, nor any of my fellows, so far as I know, ever had word from him again. I have always hoped that he remained something more than a ghost.

As for the instructor—the tall, angular Leonard Bacon, perpetually working his mobile face into contortions, perpetually bubbling over with ideas, was interesting not only as a poet and teacher but as a man. Later, when under his guidance I wrote my Master’s thesis on The Poetic Revival in America, I was to know him somewhat better; but for the present he was redeeming himself in my eyes for that insulting rejection of my work a year earlier; at the semester’s end, he expressed the idea that “if I worked like the devil”—the words may not be precisely his, but the thought is—I “might possibly be able to get somewhere.”

If there be any down-looking powers with eyes for us poor versifying mortals, they know that I assuredly have worked, though perhaps not exactly “like the devil”; but whether I have been able to “get somewhere”—ah, that is another matter entirely!

I am sure that Mr. Bacon would not have conceded that I had gotten anywhere at all at the time when the first magazines wasted good space on my rhymes. The earliest of them all was a small Eastern religious sheet, which a preacher of my acquaintance had recommended; I have forgotten its name, but let us call it The Biblical Visitor. Lo and behold, one day I received several free copies (I had, of course, never even thought of the possibility of other compensation), and had the charming experience of seeing my own name beneath a beautifully framed poem, under whose title I read the surprising line, “Written especially for The Biblical Visitor.” Of course, it had not been written especially for The Biblical Visitor, whose very existence had been unknown to me at the time of composition! But little difference that made to the budding author who stood there bemused before the sight of his own words and his own name in print. Ah, never again in all later life that same pure rapturous joy!

To be sure, the world went on its accustomed way, quite as if nothing revolutionary had happened. The sun shone just about as usual, and the birds twittering in the trees seemed to have no idea at all of the great transformation. The doors of fame, which I saw just faintly beginning to sway on their hinges, were visible to me alone.

My next published poems, likewise, seemed to make no indentation at all on the stolid world. They appeared in the college monthly, The Occident, though not before I had reached my Senior year. And never think that this did not strike me as an accomplishment; more than a few of my previous offerings had entered the doors of that august publication, from which they had ignominiously made the return journey to my drawer. Not one, however, but a whole succession of my verses did take up space in The Occident under the editorship of Genevieve Taggart—then an engagingly lovely, animated creature, looking every inch the poetess that she was.

But fame, as represented by a gateway to Parnassus such as The Occident, had its pangs as well as its satisfactions. I remember one particular pang, when one of my sonnets made its bow beneath a byline such as “Jenny J. Robinson,” while—crowning insult!—my own byline was appended to a poem that was not mine at all. Knowing what I do today of the printing process, I realize that this could have been due to the mere transposition of two lines of type; but at that time, I did not understand. I was desolated. I felt disgraced, then and forever. The worst was not to have my poem accredited to Jenny J. Robinson; the worst was to have her poem ascribed to me. It was like seeing somebody else introduced as yourself. Not that Miss Robinson’s poem was any worse than mine; it may have been much the better of the two; and I have no doubt that she felt equally aggrieved.

But having long ago lived down this disaster, I have learned that sadder confusions and surprises await the adventurer along literary byways. I had quite forgotten this unhappiness when, a year or two later, the high gods of Olympus stooped down to bless me. Ending the long, long run of rejections from the larger publications, the New York Times accepted To A German War Helmet—a bit of blank verse which, beginning “Ironic censor of the ways of men!”, expressed something of the revulsion always aroused in me by everything connected with war. And not only did the Times give space to my creation; a still greater surprise awaited me. One evening, thumbing over the magazines at a newsstand in the Ferry Building in San Francisco, I opened the pages of Current Opinion to the section devoted to reprints of poetry. And there—wonder of wonders!—I saw my own name! My own poem from the Times! I could hardly believe it. The same poem in two national publications! I had ascended the pinnacles!

True, there was a slight fly in the ointment. The proofreaders for Current Opinion had been a little careless, and the phrase “Who was this man?” had become “Why was this man?” This was by no means the last typographical error I was to suffer from, nor the worst, but it did rub a bit of the bloom from that miraculous discovery.

At about the same time, an even sweeter whiff of success blew to my nostrils. Shortly after the Armistice of November 11, 1918, the San Francisco Chronicle offered a number of prizes for poems on peace, and I made several submissions, including a quatrain on The Day That Brought Peace, the idea of which had come to me on a sudden one noon when I was having a solitary lunch at a Berkeley cafeteria:

Blest is this day, past any other day

The world has ever seen; yet must we pray

The world hereafter may so blesséd be

Never another day like this to see.

If I were writing this today, I should try to avoid the inversions in sentence structure, particularly in the last two lines. But inversions or no inversions, I did not think much of the quatrain when I wrote it, particularly as it had taken me only about five minutes to compose it; I merely happened to add it to my other entries because it could travel conveniently in the same envelope. Picture, then, my surprise a few weeks later, when a letter from the Chronicle informed me that The Day That Brought Peace had won the third prize of twenty-five dollars in the Peace Poem Contest!

This, surely, was but one of the lucky flukes that sometimes influence a career. The first result, though perhaps not the greatest, was that it enabled me, after some personal solicitation, to obtain work reviewing books for a long-established San Francisco weekly, The Argonaut. And this work put me in touch with many new books in the realm of poetry. One such was Amy Lowell’s Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, one of the first symbols of the revolt that was to turn poetry in America upside down; still another was John G. Neihardt’s engrossing rhymed narrative, The Song of Three Friends; and a third was a volume of verses by Ezra Pound, my first acquaintance with this writer, from which I formed the impressions that subsequent experience was to confirm: that here was merely a poseur, a pseudo-sophisticate, an exhibitionist whose interest was not in poetry but in self-display.

Another effect of that four-line lucky shot in the Chronicle was an event of the sort supposed to happen only in fiction. One day a letter reached me from the San Francisco Examiner, bearing the signature of its managing editor, Edmond D. Coblentz (no relation of mine, despite his name). He mentioned the poem in the Chronicle, and stated that if I should drop into his office sometime when I happened to be in the vicinity, he would be pleased to meet me.

Needless to say, it was not long before I “happened to be” in the vicinity. But when I stepped in to visit Mr. Coblentz, it was with more trepidation than joy. I was greeted by a round-faced middle-aged man, more than half bald, with a genial smile and a rather business-like manner; he was something of a legend in the city, and was much liked by his associates, among whom he was familiarly known as “Cobby.” He received me pleasantly, and after a brief talk, asked my plans and purposes upon my graduation from college. I acknowledged that my plans and purposes were a little hazy, except that I intended to follow a writing career after getting my Master’s degree in English at the Summer Session at Berkeley. Meanwhile, however, some of my relations were trying to induce me to take up teaching as a means of support, but the idea fired me with no great eagerness.

“Cobby” smiled.

“Well, you go on, finish your schooling—get your degree,” he advised. “Then, if you’re looking for a job, step in here again—we’ll see what we can do for you.”

The telephone rang; he snapped up the receiver, and mumbled into it. Someone came in with a rush, and slapped a paper down on his desk. Through the half-open door, the city editor could be heard bawling at a reporter. “Cobby” had barely put down the receiver when the telephone started clanging again. I could do no more than snatch at his hand, mutter a word of thanks, and leave.

But I left in a dazed and altered world. The walls about me were reeling; flashes of unexpected brilliance dazzled my eyes.

CHAPTER

FOUR

A Tale of Two Eyes

While I was still at college, a situation arose which would affect my whole life, and would cast its reflections across my writing and particularly over my poetry. It is something that I hesitate to speak of, as I tend to squirm at recitals of personal ailments, in which there may be an element either of morbidness or of self-pity, if not of both. However, in this case the facts must be told if the story is to be kept in perspective. While in most ways I have been blessed with excellent health all my life, in one respect the record has been less than perfect: with regard to my eyes. Indeed, the facts have, I can say without exaggeration, been unusual.

Multitudes, particularly among students, are known to suffer from optical complaints; therefore, when my eyes began to bother me I had no reason to suspect anything out of the ordinary. There had, it is true, been some disagreement among specialists as to the source of the complaint: one had prescribed glasses for far-sightedness, and another had, confusingly, ordered lenses for near-sightedness. But the disturbances did not become acute until my first graduate year, when, at my father’s urging, I was studying law (which I was to abandon with a sigh of relief that I can almost hear even now). I would have the alarming experience of walking down a street at night and seeing a lamp-post split into two. Or I would stare at a man, and he would divide into twins. True, the twins would always be reassociated, after some queer shifting, wavering, and dancing. No! do not suspect that I had been drinking; my headiest beverage was milk. The gift of double sight was, however, annoying, though perhaps little more than annoying; what was more alarming was that, at the same time, I was developing an inability to do close work. Pains would shoot through my eyeballs; the muscles would quiver and flicker and refuse to focus on the page; there came a time when I could not so much as glance at the morning paper. College work was, of course, now out of the question, though by special dispensation I was permitted to take my examinations on the typewriter, which I could use with but little eye-strain.

Several oculists, consulted in swift succession, attempted different remedies. One did the obvious, and prescribed new glasses; another ordered eye exercises; a third recommended prisms—lenses of a special type, which, I was told, would act as crutches for my eyes. But nothing was of any avail. During an entire summer, since I could not read, I worked at my father’s behest as a life insurance agent (a vocation for which I showed an incapacity that was all but total, though I did have many delightful conversations with interesting people, none of whom had any intention whatever of ordering policies). When the summer was over, and my eyes gave more cause for concern than ever, a Stockton physician told my father of a specialist in San Francisco who might help me. And thus it came about that, accompanied by my parent, I paid my first visit to Dr. O (whose full name I withhold, for reasons that will soon be apparent).

Dr. O was a square-faced, beefy-cheeked man of about forty, who wore glasses, just like every other eye doctor I have ever seen. He lost no time in diagnosing my case, and appalled me with the announcement, “Young man, you are suffering from exophoria.”

“X O what?” I asked, my heart sinking.

“Exophoria. It’s what the man on the street knows as being wall-eyed.”

In other words, my eyes were not working together; they were diverging from each other, or turning outward, and at times each formed a separate image, which accounted for my seeing double. But what was the remedy? There was only one possibility, unless I wished the malady to get worse and worse until I had virtually lost the use of one eye. The cure—which should be applied as soon as possible—was an operation or series of operations to draw the muscles together; for this Dr. O had developed a special technique, which he often applied with entire success.

The prospect of getting back the full use of my eyes, the hope of being able to read again, was something for which I would have pawned my future, if anyone would have put up money on so doubtful a commodity. And so, after some deliberation, Dr. O was commissioned to perform the operations.

I need not go into the details. The first of the series was scheduled at a hospital, to which I hopefully walked one morning after a hearty breakfast (no one had advised me that the very worst thing to do before an operation is to eat, or that the resulting digestive disturbances would cause me more distress than the after-symptoms of the incision itself). During the operation something seemed to go wrong, or it may be that the local anaesthetic was not far-reaching enough, for at one point it felt exactly as if the surgeon was trying to pull off the top of my head. However, this was but a momentary sensation; finally, to my vast relief, the operation was over; and subsequently two other operations were carried out, one of them a minor one, performed at Dr. O’s office.

In general, as I can thankfully testify, Dr. O did achieve his objective. The “exophoria” was sharply reduced; the long hoped-for, long-coveted time did arrive when I could once more concentrate on a book. But just at this point fate, with sly secret wiles, had her little trick in store for me.

As I sat in a college classroom not long after the bandages of the last operation were removed, the frosted lamps above began to hurt my eyes. Yet these lights were not particularly bright; they were, in fact, of a kind I had long been used to and had never noticed before. This was my first intimation that my eyes could no longer endure direct exposure to ordinary artificial light. But the knowledge was to grow upon me in the days and months that followed. Somewhere, somehow, something had gone wrong in one of the operations; Dr. O had cut too deeply into the muscles; had ruined their delicate natural balance, and impaired forever their accommodation to light and motion.

This was proved not only by the marked new sensitiveness to light; it was shown by the fact that my eyes could not adjust to rapid movements, as of a bird darting before my face; while light in motion, and especially flickering light, could cause me acute pain. It may seem strange to those who have not had the experience, but I have never since been able to see a match struck half a block away without a prick of pain; no one (unless I am forewarned and have closed my eyes) can switch on a light, nor pull a shade up or down without making it feel as if little hands tear and clutch at my eye-muscles; flickering candles at a dinner party may cause me pain in the eyeballs and partial inability to use my eyes for as much as two weeks; the spurt of a flashlight or the glare of automobile headlamps may stab me like daggers; while bright lights of any kind are a torture. Thus, though I lived in New York for years, I avoided all artificially illuminated streets whenever possible, and my definition of hell was Broadway at night—this was, indeed, not the least of my reasons for exchanging New York in 1938 for the wood-lanes of a small California suburban town.

A recent incident may illustrate my predicament. Not long ago I attended a writers’ conference, which opened with a panel discussion in which I was expected to participate. But upon reaching the discussion room, I found it dominated from above by a flood-light like a locomotive headlamp, making it impossible for me to enter. My wife Flora, therefore, stepped in where I could not tread, and tried to explain the situation to the hostess; but the latter (like most people) failed to understand, and made no offer to dim the quite superfluous glare. Hence I had no choice but to absent myself from the meeting which I had come two thousand miles to attend.

Other incidents in a similar vein come back to mind. I remember, for example, the case of the usually considerate old lady who (at considerable cost to my eyes) decided to keep a purely ornamental blaze burning in her fireplace because “otherwise the fuel would be wasted.” Likewise, there was the case of the lady, a friend of many years’ standing, who had invited Flora and me to a Christmas Eve party, and who—though she well knew the state of my eyes—had decorated the table with lighted candles. I made no comment or request; but as we sat down at the table, I adjusted a pair of dark glasses, which would reduce though they would not eliminate the irritation. At this the hostess turned to me defensively. “Sorry, Stanton, you’ll have to get used to those candles. We just can’t put them out—it wouldn’t be the Christmas spirit.” I had occasion to wonder about her idea of the Christmas spirit during long subsequent evenings when I lay with closed eyes in a dark room.

Still another case—not injurious to my eyes, though it did not leave me quite unruffled—was that of the old friends, the Grillers, who had invited Flora and me to their home for the evening. All went well until Mary Griller remembered some moving pictures of last summer’s vacation trip. “I know Stanton can’t look at them,” she said, regretfully, “but I’m sure he wouldn’t want to deprive Flora of the opportunity.” Being foolishly polite, I admitted that I was not such a brute as to deny Flora anything so precious (she afterwards confessed to me that she could have missed the pictures without loss). The hostess then led me out to the only available room, the kitchen. And there, without even a book or paper to help while away the time, I passed a somewhat-less-than-sociable hour, in company with the colored maid, who glowered at me as if resenting this invasion of her private terrain, or as if wondering what offense I had committed to subject me to this peculiar punishment.

But did I make no efforts to overcome the ailment? Ah, yes, I made many efforts; eye specialists on both coasts have tried remedies, tests, and drugs without stint—and without success. Long ago, I resigned myself to the fact that the condition is one I must live with, though it has altered my life in little ways and great. It is a mere trifle that my house, unlike most others in the area, must do without a fireplace; it is likewise of no importance, though occasionally a source of embarrassment compelling my temporary withdrawal from a company, that I have been unable to face photographers’ flashlights. I do not too greatly regret that, for me, motion pictures and television are out of the question; nor that my inability to face headlights and sun-flashes has made it inadvisable to drive a car—though in the suburban town where I have lived ever since 1938 and where even the most impecunious family has at least one broken-down four-wheeler and most have two or three, the lack of a car is regarded, if not as a proof of miserliness, at least as an eccentricity that no one but a poet would commit.

However, these are mere minor deprivations. I have sometimes more deeply regretted the fact that I can go out at night only very sparingly, if at all; and that I am debarred from many literary and other gatherings. This has, inevitably, cut down my connections and contacts, and may even give the false impression that I am anti-social. But nothing, absolutely nothing, has seemed of any importance beside the fact that my eyes, with all their impairments, have served and are still serving my main life-purpose; for this I have been deeply thankful.

Moreover, I sometimes wonder if the balance is not on the positive side. I wonder if some overseeing power, planning to keep me on the track of my major interests and make it impossible to yield to frequent diversions, could have devised a more serviceable disability than mine. Many a night, lying in the dark in order to rest my eyes, perhaps listening to the soft music drifting to me from the phonograph or tape recorder, I have meditated on matters that have given rise to poems, poems I might not otherwise have written. And those poems have been created without the use of eyes, since I developed long ago an ability to compose as much as two sonnets in my mind without putting any word on paper, and can even revise the stanzas, which in many cases have not been jotted down until the next day.

And so it may be that that error, that unnoticed slip of the knife made long ago by Dr. O, has been my poetic salvation.

CHAPTER

FIVE

Builders and Wreckers

It may not have been a part of the curriculum, but I was widening and deepening my knowledge of poets all during my years at college. I was borrowing books not only from the University library, but from the Berkeley Public Library, where exploring on the open shelves was possible. Thus I became aware of a great fervor of poetic activity in the United States, and in the course of time became acquainted with many writers, including Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Arthur Davison Ficke, George Sterling, John Hall Wheelock, Vachel Lindsay, Sara Teasdale, Jessie B. Rittenhouse, Clinton Scollard, Charles Hanson Towne, Dana Burnet, Margaret Widdemer, Hermann Hagedorn, Conrad Aiken, and many others, some of them now forgotten or almost forgotten, others still shining in a glitter of fame. In the course of time it came to me that these poets, in their combined strength, represented a resurgence of poetic power such as our country had not seen in a long while; and it was this realization that prompted me to write my Master’s thesis on The Poetic Revival in America.

Just now, for the first time in many years, I have glanced at this manuscript; and am startled by the similarity of many of its pronouncements to my more recent ones. Then, as now, I was convinced that there was a menace to poetry in those writers who, for the sake of seeming different or because they found it easier or lacked background or appreciation, were content to lapse into a formlessness that denied poetry’s basic principles and made verse virtually indistinguishable from prose. My attitude is expressed on page 3 of The Poetic Revival:

Now whether they realize it or not the vers librists are perpetrating a tremendous joke. There is nothing they cannot stamp as poetry so long as they give it a “jagged appearance”; they have taken singularity of form as the chief poetic criterion, and there are many who accept this criterion without even a smile. I confess that it does not make all the difference in the world what a thing is called; that literature will not come to an end if we entitle prose poetry, and that the songs of Burns and the sonnets of Keats will survive unaffected even by the “polyphonic prose” of Amy Lowell and the imagistic ebullitions of Ezra Pound. Yet if a hoax is being perpetrated, I believe in exposing that hoax; and if a group of poetic charlatans are drawing attention to themselves by juggling cleverly with words, I consider it right to say that they are charlatans. And it seems that a whole school of poets is imitating on a larger scale the “Spectric Poems” of Mr. Bynner and Mr. Ficke, which were issued as a joke, and seriously commended by the critics.

Surprisingly, there is not one word of this that I would alter today. What, therefore, does this prove? That I am mulishly stubborn in my views, and have shown myself to be incapable of growth? That I early underwent a form of petrifaction? Perhaps. But let us suppose, just for the sake of argument, that I was justified in those ideas expressed in my early twenties. Then what excuse for changing them? Certainly, it is possible to argue that I was justified, in view of later developments, which have resulted in a poetic disintegration far beyond anything I ever imagined in those hopeful days of youth, and have brought applause and honors to offerings of which an extreme example (but not the most extreme) is the piece by E. E. Cummings beginning:

&(all during the

dropsin

king god my sic

kly a thingish o crash dis

appearing con ter fusion ror collap

sing thatthis is whichwhat uell itfull o

f cringewiltdrollery i

mean really th

underscream of sudde

nly perishing eagerly everyw...

To work of this nature, though it postdates The Poetic Revival, I would apply every syllable of the passage quoted above. Work of this nature has always filled me a cold fury, which I experienced when I was twenty, and feel in like measure today. For work of this nature, now as then, strikes me as a profanation, a desecration, a deliberate mockery of the true and beautiful, a spewing of mud and filth upon things precious and holy. It is as if an obscene reveller came to the consecrated white doors of a temple, and spattered them with carrion and dung. What acolyte would not writhe at such abuse? And to me, a life-long worshipper before the shrine, poetry has indeed been a divinity; and nothing has been more painful than to see it flung down and its radiance trampled while idols of paste were exalted. Here, it has always seemed to me, there can be no compromise, any more than we can compromise clean water by mixing it with muddy and expect a pure drink. If we allow the profaners one inch, they will take a yard; if we permit them to enter the temple, they will never rest content until they have kicked down the very altar-stones.

This, however, was not a thing that I needed to debate with myself. It was a thing which I felt profoundly, with that deeper sense which is sometimes keener than logic; my attitude, for better or worse, was formed for me by the native shape of the personality I was born with. Poetry to me was a thing so dear, so precious that I could no more consciously have betrayed it than I could have contemplated treason against my own father and mother. To seek self-advancement, publication, prizes, notoriety by yielding here and there to the supposed tendencies of the times, though at the cost of poetry itself—I have since learned that this is possible to many, for I have seen many, oh, very many, who have surrendered to just this temptation. That I have taken a contrary direction indicates no special merit on my part; to many, indeed, it may merely prove my persistent wrong-headedness and folly. But I know that, whatever the cost, I could not help being as I am.

Thus, before my college days were over, I was planted solidly—too solidly, my critics will say—in the poetic attitudes that were to dominate my later years.

One thing I should explain. While I have always fought with whatever strength was in me against those innovators who conceal the tools of wreckers beneath the costumes of saviors or clowns, this has not implied opposition to change as such. I know that change is one of the laws of nature; that most things, unless they have stagnated or crystallized or are merely lying dormant, are in a state of fluctuation; that movements constantly occur in living matter, in the sky above and in the earth beneath; and that human productions, including those of art, must share in the universal law.

On the other hand, most change, like a variable star, fluctuates within prescribed limits; the sea within boundaries of the shore, the seasons in orbits of a timeless recurrence—otherwise, utter disaster would strike. Within most change in the natural world there is a pattern: the blue sky yields to the gray of fog or the purple of thunderheads, but gray and purple give place again to blue; the bird that ceases its song in the evening twilight resumes it in the morning dusk. Anything short of cataclysmic innovation, in other words, does not obliterate any underlying design. But not so with most “new directions” in poetry, as in the arts generally: these have attempted less to add than to destroy; instead of seeking to build upon the achievements of the past, in the healthy and normal way of growth, they have denied or ignored the achievements of the past, along with the laws and the technique proved by the experience of the past. In any other field—chemistry, mathematics, law, medicine, even economics or statecraft—such contempt for knowledge and experience would not go by the name of progress.

I doubt whether my views on poetry took any particular slant from my contact with Leonard Bacon, or from the later contact with another notable poet, Witter Bynner, who for one memorable term conducted a class in verse-writing at Berkeley. As in the case of Bacon’s classes, the young hopeful had to submit some of his work before being accepted; but Bynner—or “Hal,” as we familiarly and affectionately called him—was unusually tolerant, and accepted my ticket of admission: a long, involved, and uncompleted allegorical play in verse (it never was completed, and the only copy long ago slipped from sight, which probably is just as well). In any case, I was one of the nineteen who on fine days foregathered for an open-air session beneath the trees near the Greek Theatre, though on less fine days we met in a conventional college classroom (perhaps the only conventional thing about that gathering and its amiable leader).

Hal, who may be described as a liberal traditionalist, did his best to acquaint the class with every species of work classified as poetry; and even made assignments of exercises to be written in vers libre. Now I have always believed that nothing is easier than to write vers libre as it is usually composed (that is, with no marked rhythms, and not even the controls demanded in prose); and when the subject assigned was Whitman, I had no difficulty in expressing myself in Whitman’s chosen medium. All that I remember of my submission is the first two lines:

O prince of hyphenated poets!

O neutral between poesy and prose!

I should mention that Hal liked my offering, though in this regard our tastes differed. I have no reason to suppose, however, that I have missed the opportunity to follow a great prize-winning career as a latter-day Walt.

My opinion of Bynner was embodied in the not very poetic sonnet which I contributed to the privately printed brochure, W. B. in California, in which he was eulogized by the various members of the class, and which was presented to him at a dinner on May 27, 1919. “The truest teacher is the truest friend,” I began, didactically, “And you were friend to us in thought and deed.” This was the truth as I saw it, even if uninspired in utterance as a stone pavement. Others addressed him in similar though perhaps more colorful tones, including the Chinese poet Moon Kwan, who waxed figurative, and spoke of him as “a weaver of the petal-speech.” But I believe, truly, that no teacher was ever more beloved, for no teacher was ever less pedagogical or more human.

CHAPTER

SIX

Poetry by Prescription

When the Spring semester of 1919 had been followed by the fleeting Summer Session, I remembered my interview with Edmond Coblentz of the Examiner and his invitation to see him again.

By way of equipment, I armed myself with a sequence of short poems which I had been writing—at least, I may call them poems by courtesy, though “satirical rhymes” would be a more appropriate designation. They were all based on animals, birds, fishes, or insects: one, for example, told of a “chimpanzee of science,” who expressed the belief that the apes were descended from mankind, and provoked “sneers and jeers and hoots” from his hearers, who did not wish to consider themselves the offspring of brutes. Another, no less in a vein of mockery, described a mole who had gained his eyesight, frolicked in the sun, and shouted to his fellows to join him, since it was good to have one’s sight. However,

The other moles responded,

“Your theories are unsound.

There is no sun or moon, for none

Have seen them underground!”

The mole with eyesight therefore suffered the penalty for seeing too well; was put in jail, tried, and hung.

I do not know if these particular two offerings were among those which I showed to “Cobby” on that memorable second visit to the Examiner, but I do know that he seemed impressed by the ones I did show him.

“You say you have others like these?” he asked, bending toward me across his paper-strewn desk with an affable smile.

“About a hundred and fifty.”

His smile broadened. “Well, that’s a few too many for the present. But if you want to pick out twenty or thirty of the best, I’ll take time to look them over. When did you say you’re through college?”

“A week from Friday.”

“Well, step in here a week from Monday, at one o’clock, if you’d like to start work with us. Your salary, to begin with, will be twenty a week.”

I started to murmur my acceptance, my gratitude. But he had arisen; had cut me short with a hasty gesture; and had turned to receive a gaunt, bespectacled man, who, wearing a green eyeshade, and with a pencil cocked across one ear at the angle of a badly listing vessel, entered in rolled-up shirtsleeves and with suspenders showing from beneath his open vest, and waved a paper at “Cobby” as excitedly as one who has just discovered that the city is afire.

During the next week or two, I spent all my spare time selecting about thirty of my too-numerous animal satires; resisting the temptations of the tennis courts during the daylight-saving hours of the long summer evenings, I sat studiously typing out the chosen pieces. These I brought to “Cobby” when I began my new duties; and he took them with a noncommital grunt, but perhaps not with entire dissatisfaction, for during the next several months fifteen of them were to appear in the paper, with illustrations and a display two or three columns wide, beneath the caption—which I had no part of choosing—“Think it over!”

At this point, coincidence appeared very long-armed indeed. Many readers of the paper, on seeing these verses, chose to regard “Stanton A. Coblentz” not as a real person, but as a synthetic individual, formed by the collaboration of Managing Editor Edmond Coblentz with the publisher, whose surname happened to be “Stanton”—as for the “A.,” it was neatly accounted for as representing the “and” which linked the two.

Meanwhile, at regular intervals, the paper was printing other verses under the same confusing byline. I say “verses,” for though they looked like poems, it would be an unjustified exaggeration to call them that. As the clippings have long ago slipped into limbo, I can offer no documentary proof; and I can hardly think my obsolete doggerel would justify the labors of research required by a search of the old newspaper files. Perhaps, under the circumstances, I came as near to writing poems as most persons could have done; but the circumstances were not exactly propitious.

“Coblentz,” City Editor Hines would bawl, glaring at me where I sat in the City Room five or six rows of typewriters away, “here’s an item for you!” Knowing that haste was of the essence of discretion, I would hurry to Hines’ desk. And he would point to something in the day’s news—perhaps a sentimental note about a memorial to some war mothers, or perhaps a report in lighter vein, that a burglar alarm had been rung, and the police, upon arriving breathlessly, had found the culprit to be a stray dog who had wandered in through an open rear door. “Write me a poem on this, Coblentz!” he would prescribe, somewhat as he might say to a carpenter, “Build me a work-bench!”, or to a cook, “Make me some hash!” Not for a moment did he seem to doubt that the prescription would be filled.

And in all cases, the prescription was filled, though I am not saying how well. Rhyme and meter were, assuredly, supplied; and I tried as well as I could to turn on the required sentiments, whether of awe or pity, applause or comedy. Under any circumstances, this would have been difficult if not impossible, at a moment’s notice, and with the finished product demanded the same afternoon; but in the frantic atmosphere of a newspaper office, to the accompaniment of clicking typewriter keys, shouts and calls and laughter, shuffling of hasty feet, telephone bells and fire alarms, it demanded a feat of concentration which, I fear, I would be unable to duplicate now.

Even in those budding days, despite the pleasure I took in my frequent appearances in print, I perceived the dangers of my position—a position in which my occasional reporting duties were subordinate to my specialty of writing verses on demand. I was not ungrateful for my job; I realized that I had, in fact, a privileged position, for how many youths just out of college are given an opportunity to make a living by weaving rhymes together? Nevertheless, this verse-writing to order, if long continued, could be deadening, stultifying; one might become little more than a poetic hack, a rhyme-machine.

At about this time, I was receiving other encouragements—slight ones, but enough to give me a real spur and stimulus. At last, after the many rejections, various poems had been accepted by different media: two by Sunset, then a general magazine; one or two more by the New York Times; and several by Judge and Life, both of them leading national magazines of humor (the latter unrelated to the present periodical of the same name). Also, an article on poetry had been taken by the university quarterly, The Texas Review (now long defunct), and the new-born magazine True Stories had sent me a check for one of my narratives. With these and one or two other marks of favor from the editorial gods, I began thinking of wider fields.

But perhaps I was becoming too confident. I had not yet learned that most permanence is in appearance only; I did not foresee that my position with the Examiner, if I desired, might not be forever. A raise in salary to a princely twenty-five a week had assured me that my employers were not dissatisfied with my performance; and it may be that except for something quite extraneous—a by-product of the late war, in the nature of a paper shortage, which cut down the space available for newspaper features—I could have continued turning out custom-made poems for the Examiner as long as I chose, which surely would not have been forever.

In any case, the serenity of one blue day was shattered by an unexpected blow. An innocent-looking little note informed me that my continued services were not required.

“Ah well,” I philosophized, “I suppose one goes through life as on a long stairway, first up two steps, then down one, or maybe even two or three. Now I’ll have to set about to climb again.”

My situation was far from desperate: I had saved a little money, and was still making a little from the book reviews which I continued to contribute to the Argonaut, at a gratifying five dollars a column. The question now was to find another job, at least temporarily. For some weeks I had a position on the Call, as editor in a limerick contest, until my eyes gave out beneath the reading of thousands of daily submissions—I mean, literally, thousands!—and I had no choice except to resign. I have sometimes thought that, except for the state of my eyes, this would have led to a permanent connection; but perhaps it is well that it did not, for this might have held out attractions that would have trapped me in San Francisco, when the route of destiny lay elsewhere.

But in San Francisco or its vicinity I must remain until I could see my path more clearly. And since the literary opportunities there were strictly limited, it is not surprising that my footsteps led me to the doors of that once-popular but now decrepit magazine, The Overland Monthly, which had boasted the work of Bret Harte, Jack London, Mark Twain, and many another notable, and which continued publication as if by force of habit, though now little more than the ghost of its old-time self.

The office of the Overland, significantly, was located in a back street half blocked with great drays and trucks, and much less redolent of the odor of printers’ ink than of brewing and manufacturing. And there I had a successful interview with the editor, a portly Irishman whom I may call Finnegan, a man of sixty-seven or sixty-eight, with a round bespectacled face that was perpetually red. There was something I immediately liked about him, though his slouching ungainly figure, with the frayed collar and soiled shirt, did not conform to my notions of how an eminent editor should look.

I began, tentatively, by showing him a poem—or rather, a rhymed satire on a political theme. And he liked it well enough to accept it on the spot—which surprised me less when I came to know more about the magazine, and learned how little in the way of worthwhile material it ordinarily received. What was most astonishing was that Finnegan eventually let me have five dollars for the poem.

After this encouraging start, I went on to divulge my principal reason for visiting him.

“Oh, so it’s work you’re looking for, is it?” he demanded, running a set of gnarled stubby fingers through the scanty remnants of his gray hair. “Well, young man, there’s lots better places to look than here. Why don’t you go somewhere where they pay wages?”

“Don’t you pay wages?”

His owlish, inflamed eyes looked out at me half seriously, half humorously from their sunken sockets.

“Pay wages, young man? Now you’re expecting too much. Do you think I’d be staying here myself if I could get a job anywhere else?”

“But you’re the editor!”

“Sure I’m the editor! Also, managing editor, assistant editor, chief make-up man, manuscript reader, proofreader, stenographer, and office boy. I don’t have one job, young man. I have a dozen.”

“In that case,” I contended, seeing my opportunity, “you need someone to take part of the burden off your shoulders.”

He fumbled unconsciously at his left shoulder, where there was a conspicuous rip in his coat.

“Right you are, young man! I could use half a dozen to take the burden off my shoulders. There’s only one trouble. People in this town don’t like working without wages.”

“Surely, you could pay something.”

“Our something would be almost nothing.”

“How much, for example?”

His eyes wrinkled together and narrowed, and he stared at me in silence, as if debating with himself. Several seconds passed ... then, with an air of a man proposing the magnificent, he announced, “Well, all we could afford would be afternoons only, at two dollars a half-day.”

“Two dollars? But you couldn’t expect a man to live on that!”

“Just what I’m telling you,” he agreed, turning back to the huge shears and pastepot on his untidy, paper-strewn desk. “I’d advise you not to take it.”

“Maybe it’s good advice, but I don’t intend to follow it,” I decided, with a smile.

And thus I made my connection with the Overland, and simultaneously with the News Letter, a local weekly published under the same management, and for which I served as dramatic critic, copy reader, and general office hand.

In part my tasks were connected with poetry, since in my capacity as chief manuscript reader I had the duty of picking any acceptable verses as well as acceptable stories, and of writing to inform the lucky contributor that he would have a free two-year subscription to the Overland (payment of cash, as in the case of my rhymed satire, was an extravagance not repeated so long as I remained with the magazine).

Before I had been in my new post a month, Mr. Finnegan inaugurated a poetry contest. Readers of the Overland were to send in their favorite poetic quotations, not exceeding four lines each; cash prizes were to be given for the five best submissions, and free subscriptions were to be awarded for the twenty-five runners-up. There were to be three judges: two designated writers of local reputation, and the assistant editor—namely, myself. However, as things worked out, all the labors of selection fell upon the assistant editor, the two local celebrities being congenial souls, willing to utter a loud approving “YES!” in return for the honor of some free publicity.

My problem was, to say the least, peculiar. It is hard enough to decide among the submissions of unknown contributors: but here I was, obliged to say which was the best from among selections by Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Landor, Keats, Browning, and other outstanding poets. Should first prize go to Shelley or to Byron? Should Tennyson come out third, or only fifth? Should Burns be placed above Coleridge, or Blake above Emily Dickinson? Questions like these, of course, would defy the judgment of any critic, and certainly would not be answered alike by any two readers. But I unblushingly had to give the correct answer.

At last, however, after much brain-racking and sifting and weighing and comparing, I showed Finnegan my choices for the five winners of cash prizes.

He glanced over them, and groaned. His heavy puffy form sagged forward at his desk in discouragement.

“My God, Cob,” he complained, “this is awful!”

“Awful? What’s awful?” I protested, prepared to defend my choices. “Aren’t the quotations good enough?”

“Good enough, be damned!” he snorted, shoving the papers at me in disgust. “Look at these winners, will you! Just look at them! Four from California, and the fifth from Arizona!”

“That’s natural enough,” I reminded him, “considering that ninety-nine per cent of our subscribers are westerners.”

“Hell, but do we have to let that be known?” he growled back. “We claim a national circulation, don’t we? How the deuce we going to make good that claim if we award all the prizes to Californians? Here, let’s see those poetry contributions!”

For the next twenty minutes, Finnegan was busy exploring the piles of manuscripts. Finally he looked up, his big round face beaming his triumph, and thrust five papers toward me. “There—that’ll do it!”

I glanced hastily over five contributions of indifferent quality, and saw that only one was from California. The others came from Wyoming, Texas, New York, and Wisconsin.

For a few months I remained with the Overland, and doubtless could have stayed as long as the tottering old magazine retained the breath of life, which was not to be very long. But my two dollars a day, even with the addition of various stray earnings, were barely enough to keep me alive in the style to which I was accustomed (which required a monthly expenditure of all of sixty or sixty-five dollars). Here, I saw more clearly than ever, there was no future. And so once again my thoughts ranged to wider horizons.

“Go East, young man!” was the injunction whispered into my ears by my hopes and ambitions; and the East, of course, meant New York, that Rome to which all literary aspirants sooner or later make their pilgrimage of reverence. By degrees my plans took shape; and on one never-to-be-forgotten day of September, 1920, I bade a heart-wrenching farewell to my father and to the younger brother who stood beside him at the railroad station in Stockton. I shall never forget how my father’s words clutched at me as I saw him approach the porter, slip a crumbled bit of paper into his hand, and mumble, brokenly, “Take good care of the boy, Sam. Take good care of the boy.”

Then, safeguarded by a round-trip ticket, I had boarded the train that was to bear me toward new poetic and personal adventures.

CHAPTER

SEVEN

A Mote in the Metropolis

The city to which I was winging my way was not on the surface a poetic one. Among its long, traffic-clogged defiles, its endless miles of five- and six-story residential buildings, its fabulous skyscrapers, and its slums laden with pushcarts, evil odors, and dangling washing, there was indeed picturesqueness and interest; but the tints were mostly the drab and gray of prose. Here indeed, as time went by, I was to find the subject-matter of poetry, which may bloom in the small weed struggling to life beside a cobblestone quite as much as in the free-blowing flowers of the fields. But here in the beginning my verses reflected the solitude of the lonely wanderer among the swarm rather than the enthusiasm of the visitor stirred by the physical or human panoramas of the metropolis. I would write nostalgically of friends and loved ones in the West, in lines which show less distinction of utterance than poignancy of feeling:

Oh, that there gleamed some searchlight of the soul

To let us view the cherished far away,

And intimately follow, day by day,

Loved ones that dwell where alien oceans roll.

The need for personal friendship was expressed in another sonnet of about this time:

Oh, why do friends, like meteors of the dark,

Gleam to the sight, then go some hidden way?

Like lingering music cheer us for a day,

Then vanish swiftly as a chance remark?

These pieces, and others like them, including poems on more general themes—to none of which I would now grant the nod of critical approval—I find written out in a crumbling old notebook, some with notations showing that they had been printed in papers such as the New York Sun and Herald (then not yet absorbed by the Tribune). But they are numerous enough to prove that, in the lonely room which I occupied—first, the gas-lit cubbyhole on the top floor of an ancient brownstone building on West Eighty-Fourth Street, and later the more modern quarters not a block from the little Fordham park containing Poe’s famous cottage—I had by no means forgotten my Muse. And this despite the dire necessity to earn my way if I wished to remain in New York.

I had set out blithely enough to conquer the great city, my pockets bristling with ammunition in the shape of letters of introduction from friends in the West. But I was soon to learn that most of my high-powered shells were really duds. This I began to suspect after my first interview, with a Nassau Street lawyer whom I will give the name of Frederick Horton—a man said to have extensive connections in Manhattan.

Mr. Horton received me courteously in a room lined with great leather-bound tomes, and glanced at me amiably through his horn-rimmed spectacles across the polished width of his great oaken desk.

“Ah, Mr. Coblentz!... But you’ll let me call you Stanton? Glad you stepped in! George wrote me you were coming. I’ve a number of things to talk to you about.”

I would hardly have been human if I had not felt a flash of hope at this cordial, not to say chummy reception. Doubtless Mr. Horton, with his wide associations, knew of some literary openings.

The lawyer’s ferret eyes narrowed in a face seamed with the wisdom of fifty winters; all the amiability had been drained from them while he surveyed me appraisingly, as if I were a client approaching him with a questionable case.

His swivel chair creaked as he swung slightly to one side, and, thrusting his bullet-head toward me, threw his questions like a cross-examiner.

“So, Stanton! You’re out to earn your way in the big city?”

“That’s right,” I acknowledged, with the sinking feeling of one entering a plea of guilty.

“You want to be a writer—a poet?”

“Guess your brother George has told you all about that?” I countered, thinking a direct answer unnecessary.

“Yes, indeed.”

He sat inspecting me solemnly, and unconsciously shook his head, in the way of one who says, “Too bad! Too bad!”

“Of course,” he went on, slowly, picking his words with difficulty, “you understand that the writing game isn’t exactly as easy as falling downstairs. Still, I wonder—do you realize how very hard it is?”

I sat staring at him gravely.

“You’re tackling something so tough that one hundred thousand persons in New York are starving at it,” he went on in warning tones, drawing his features together darkly. “It’s darned lucky you came to me, Stanton; I can give you more pointers than most fellows. You see I’ve known so many good writers who went under. There was Bill Arlington—if I had more time, I’d tell you about poor Bill. Then there was Joe McBride—poor devil, met him in the Village just the other day—looked like he needed the loan of a dime. And Jim Callender—well, a million dollars wouldn’t help him where he is now, and I always say it’s a merciful release. There are others, too, lots of them.”

By this time I felt as if a leaden bar were pressing down upon my head.

“You see, Stanton,” Horton finished, puffing out his chest like a paterfamilias who has done his painful duty by the younger generation, “I believe in being frank. Better for you that way in the long run. Why not pick some graft where the pace isn’t quite so hard? I’d suggest—”

I thanked him, and rose to leave.

“Just one point more,” he added, as he escorted me warmly, almost affectionately toward the door, “I have a friend, Dick Grosset, who used to be a writer himself, before he found he had to make a living and turned to real estate. He’s with Dunstall, Grosset, and Brown—a million-dollar firm. Knows a lot more than I do about the literary humbug. Suppose we all have lunch together some day?”

Without waiting for my acquiescence, which he took for granted, Horton went on to request, “Here, give the girl over there your address! I’ll let you know just as soon as I’ve been in touch with Dick.”

But that was the last I ever heard from Horton.

My enthusiasm was just a little subdued as I went to visit the next man on my list.

My second letter of introduction was to a prominent preacher, who was courtesy personified, and promptly sat down and wrote two further letters of introduction. One of these was to the editor of a literary monthly, with which I had hopes of a connection; but all that this great man could do was to dictate still another letter of introduction, to a friend who volunteered to send me yet further on my travels with an additional letter of introduction.

By this time I was feeling just a little like a rat in a treadmill. “The best way,” I decided, “is to make the introductions myself.”

And so, armed with no passport but my own resolution—or, if you wish to call it that, my own effrontery—I began visiting the editors of my choice. In the beginning I found reason to fear that Mr. Horton might be only too correct in his gloomy prognosis: from office to office I took my way, seeking an opening in an editorial staff; and openings in editorial staffs appeared about as easy to find as free passageways into armored cars. At every office they were “completely staffed”; but at every office they were obligingly willing to take down my name and address, just in case.... However, this did not delude me.

For an endless two weeks the merry search went on, while the nest egg I had brought with me to New York became noticeably thinner and more sickly looking. Clearly, I must do something—and soon. It was but natural, therefore, that I should think of book reviewing, in which I had had well over a year’s experience on the Argonaut. I remembered a letter from the magazine’s editor, Sidney Corwyn, To Whom It May Concern; and I decided that it might concern the editors of the New York reviewing sections. The first one whom I approached was Robert Jermain Cole, a gentle and sensitive being, then book editor of the old Herald, a job in which he would not remain much longer. (Years later I was to be briefly in touch with him again, when he wrote from Paris to send me some poems for my magazine Wings shortly after its establishment in 1933.) Cole received me pleasantly; glanced over my letter To Whom It May Concern; scrutinized several clippings of my reviews from the Argonaut; and then, to my boundless delight, made the first dent in the solid wall surrounding me ever since my arrival in New York. He reached into one of the crowded bookshelves behind him, pulled out a huge tome, and suggested, “Maybe you’ll let me have six hundred words on this?”

“Copy due on Thursday,” he went on, as, after profuse thanks, I turned to leave.

This, as it happened, was only the beginning. Before long, as will appear a little later, I was reviewing books for other media also; was writing articles (when I could get them assigned to me) for the Sunday Herald and other publications; and was interviewing for Success Magazine.

The connection with Success (an “inspirational” magazine that was to prove a notable failure, and was to be followed by a new failure called The New Success) would not have come to me except for my poetic interests. The dean of American poets at that time, a man whose work I greatly admired (as I still do) was Edwin Markham; and through some mutual acquaintance I had obtained the one letter of personal introduction that brought me much except gainless footwork. Having written Markham at his home in Staten Island, I was invited to visit him on a specified Sunday afternoon; and you may be sure that, even had my engagements been innumerable (which was far from the case), nothing short of the necessity of swimming the distance would have kept me away.

My recollections of the visit are most pleasant: the large old-fashioned house, in agreeable rustic surroundings; the spirit of amiability and hospitality that pervaded the small gathering; the Markhams themselves, Mrs. Markham a kindly elderly woman with a heart-warming manner, and still personally attractive; and Mr. Markham looking every inch the poet, white-bearded as a patriarch, with cordial, twinkling eyes, and a voice that could roll like that of one of the old bards when intoning his own poems.

Unlike a host of this latter-day age, who would have made it a point of honor not to let his guests stretch their legs further than between their car-doors and his house-door, Markham took his visitors on a stroll down a wooded lane, then dreamily beautiful with the first tan and crimson of the autumn foliage. I remember that I was privileged to walk at his side for a good part of the time; he took my arm, in a fatherly way, and discoursed to me on matters connected with poetry, though not only with poetry, for I recall his advice to read Carlyle, and his appraisal of the great moral strength and conviction behind the famous Scotsman’s writing.

One of the visitors that afternoon was a bald middle-aged man who was introduced to me as “Mr. Mackay,” and who, I was told, was the editor of Success Magazine. It was at his own initiative, and not owing to any suggestion of mine, that he said to me, before the meeting broke up that evening, “Listen, Coblentz. If you’re in the neighborhood of 1133 Broadway some day before long, drop in to see me. Bring some of your writings—enough to give me an idea what you can do. Don’t forget!”

As I shook his hand, I assured him heartily that I would not forget. Nor did I. Not many days had passed before I had seen the inside of the offices of Success Magazine; and not many additional days had gone by before Mr. Mackay, after looking over some samples of my prose and verse, made me a proposition.

“Ever done any interviewing?”

“A little for the Examiner.”

“Well, we need something better than newspaper interviewing. Every now and then some celebrity passes through town, and we arrange for one of our writers to visit him and get his views on some important subject—such as the prospects of the League of Nations, or the position of women in India, or the future of air travel. Think you could handle an occasional assignment?”

To this question I gave the expected answer.

“We can’t pay very much,” he drawled on, his stubby fingers drumming meditatively at his desk. “Twenty-five dollars an article is as high as we can go.”

Since twenty-five dollars looked as big to me as the side of a mountain, I assured him that this would be satisfactory.

And thus it came about that I interviewed various notables, of whom far from the least was Einstein, as modest a man as you could meet, who spoke through an interpreter, and tried his obliging best to make plain to me some of the root principles of relativity, though he was less receptive to certain other reporters, one of whom wanted to know what he ate for breakfast and was told that the question was too trivial to answer.

Of all whom I interviewed, only two were poets: the huge, bluff Gilbert Chesterton; and Rabindranath Tagore, who struck me as no other human being has ever done. I am at a loss, even after many years, to explain my awesome feeling upon being ushered into the presence of the saintly-looking, white-bearded figure—the sense of having come into contact with a superior being. But it is not enough to say that he was saintly-looking, and might have been mistaken for one of the patriarchs of Biblical times; nor would it help to try to repeat any of the wise things he said. It was simply that, from the man himself, from his very surroundings, there seemed to emanate spiritual greatness. Even in memory, it is not hard for me to recapture something of the peculiar, fascinating spell of his presence, although, among all the people I have subsequently met, this feeling has never been duplicated, nor even approached.

In view of the amount of time which I gave to the miscellaneous jobs necessary to meet room and restaurant bills, it is hard for me now to see how I could have found much leisure for poetry. My principal work, in the course of time, came to be book reviewing; regularly I brought home piles of the latest fiction and non-fiction; I remember a friend telling with a chuckle how he once met me on a downtown street, my arms so full of brand-new volumes that I looked like a book salesman. Until the Herald was merged with the Tribune in 1924, I was one of its most frequent reviewers, most of the time under Mr. Cole’s successor, the severe-looking but friendly Arthur Bartlett Maurice; I also was permitted to do feature reviews and smaller items for the Times, first under Dr. Clifford Smyth and then under Brooks Atkinson, a thin, wiry, whimsically smiling man later to be better known as dramatic critic. At the same time, I reviewed for the Literary Review of the Post under Dr. Henry Seidel Canby; for the Tribune under Burton Rascoe, the Bookman under John Farrar, the Sun, the Dial, and subsequently the International Book Review, which was published for some years by the ill-fated Literary Digest. Never let it be said that the great, callous city of New York is cold and unreceptive to the unknown newcomer. I, at least, did not find this to be the case.

Among the multitudes of books which passed through my hands—sometimes as many as twenty-five or thirty unreviewed works stood simultaneously on my shelves—there was everything from a cookbook for cafeterias to a monograph on the intelligence of insects. Books of poetry and books about poetry were much in the minority, though they did come to me occasionally. But I continued to write poems, and not only short ones but long, including seventeen hundred lines of blank verse, The Light Beyond the Sunset, which I completed sometime during my first two years in New York, and which, whatever else you may say about it, did not exactly pick a tried and familiar theme; it dealt with the imagined experiences of one who had survived death. This lengthy composition, so far as I can remember, was not permitted to bore many publishers, though I recall one who told me he could not publish it because it was too short for a saleable volume—ah, if only I had spun out another thousand lines! But from later experience, I now suspect that, if it had had the extra thousand lines, he would have found it too long for publication.

I also remember submitting the poem to a Boston publisher, who had himself written many poems, as well as a number of translations in verse. Since his publishing house (now long out of existence) issued occasional books of poetry, I hopefully mailed him The Light Beyond the Sunset. And, a short time afterwards, my hope expanded from a flicker to a blaze, upon the receipt of a letter: “Dear Mr. Coblentz: I will be in New York on Thursday the eighteenth. If you can meet me at 2:30 that afternoon in the lobby of the Bryant Hotel, I should like to talk over your poem with you.”

Truly, a case of the mountain coming to Mahomet! So the great publisher Mr. Bruce (to give him a name which was not his) was to be in New York! Not that I flattered myself that his visit was for the sole or even the principal purpose of seeing a nobody like myself. But how could I help being elated that so important a man would take up time with my poem? What could this mean? Naturally, that he wanted to publish the poem. Nothing less, surely, could prompt a personal interview.

Precisely at two-thirty on Thursday the eighteenth, I entered the lobby of the Bryant, so excited that it never even occurred to me to remove my topcoat in the overheated room. I found Mr. Bruce as good as his word: he seemed to recognize me by something in my looks or manner as I stared about the lobby with an anxious, appraising glance. There he was, dressed in dull brown, a spindly man, in his sixties, with a thin goat-like face and a wispy gray beard. He greeted me enthusiastically; and trembling just a little now that the great occasion was upon me, I dropped into a seat beside him.

His opinion of The Light Beyond the Sunset was not long in coming out. He regarded it as “almost a great poem”—a view which I can report without a blush, since I consider it about as flattering as if he had credited me with being “almost intelligent” or “almost honest.” He would be proud to publish the work, but there were, unfortunately, some little difficulties—he coughed, and hesitated—some little difficulties, mostly of a financial nature, which should not even be mentioned in connection with so fine a poem. But if I could manage a mere few hundred dollars—

Alas, I could not manage a mere few hundred dollars! All at once my rainbowed cloud castles collapsed. I had to console myself with the thought that my “almost great poem” had been almost published. Mr. Bruce and I, after a long talk about poets and poems generally, said our goodbyes with mutual cordiality, though nothing more was mentioned as to The Light Beyond the Sunset. This was not to be my last contact with the man, for sometime later, when he learned that I was compiling the anthology Modern American Lyrics, he sent me an enormous tome of his sumptuously printed Collected Poems from which to make selections; and when I could find only one short piece that seemed to deserve admission, he was sorely disappointed, not to say aggrieved at my lack of critical discrimination, and probably never forgave me.

Mention of Modern American Lyrics brings me back to the subject of contemporary poetry in general, which I was following insofar as my reviewing jobs permitted. I still felt that America was witnessing a poetic revival, just as I felt this when I wrote my college thesis; and I wished to do whatever I could to proclaim that great fact, and to make the poets of the new age known to a public to whom poets still did not seem important. At the same time, I wanted to warn of dangers that seemed ever-present and ever-increasing. One method was by means of articles, and in this I was fortunate: the New York Times Book Review under Brooks Atkinson on several occasions allowed me a full page. Referring again to the old clippings, at which I have not glanced for dozens of years—not, in fact, since they were first culled from the paper—I see that on February 25, 1923, under the heading of Oases and Mirages of the Poetic Desert, I declared that “It is stimulating to observe how much good poetry is being written in America today, and depressing to witness how much poor poetry is being applauded.” As an example of the “poor poetry,” I quoted from a contribution to Professor Howard Willard Cook’s critical anthology, Our Poets of Today:

I grasped the greasy subway strap

And read the lurid advertisements,

I chewed my gum voraciously,

Inhaled strange fumes pugnaciously,

I heard the grating of the wheels

And felt that the chords

Of my city soul

Were in perfect tune.

Worse than this, far worse, has since been perpetrated, but back in the innocent early twenties, this was bad enough to be noted as an example of misbranded poetry, and an indication of the perils ahead—perils recently all too fully realized. By way of contrast to such barren prose, however, I devoted the greater part of the article to more capable poems, including Fog, by John Reed, the exquisite early sonnets of David Morton, several offerings by Hermann Hagedorn and Arthur Davison Ficke, and the now unfortunately forgotten lyricist Kendall Banning. Alas, it required far more than any mere article of mine to keep these things of beauty before the eyes of a world that concentrated furiously on the things of utility, the things of luxury, and the things of finance. It is a strange and not a heartening thought that my very article has no doubt long been lost to the mind of every being on earth except myself, probably even to the memory of the editor who accepted the material.

But realizing the fugitive quality of all periodical publication, I early gave my chief thought to books, a medium that might preserve—at least, a little longer than the fluttering pages of papers—such things as I could offer in poetry or prose.

CHAPTER

EIGHT

The Magic World between Covers

One day late in 1923 or early in 1924, I walked into the offices of a newly established publishing firm, and spoke with Earle H. Balch, later to be editor-in-chief of Putnams—a handsome young man of about thirty, with one of the most ingratiating smiles I can remember. Also, I met Melville Minton, the future President of Putnams, whose death not long ago caused widespread regret in publishing circles; at the time of our meeting, he was a debonaire book salesman in early middle life, and had joined forces with Balch to form the firm of Minton, Balch and Company.

My object in seeing Balch was to present an idea for an anthology of poetry. In the course of my reviewing and miscellaneous reading, I had come across many poets, some of them unknown or virtually unknown, whose work seemed worthy of preservation; these, published along with examples from the writings of more celebrated authors, would provide a valuable cross-section of contemporary American poetry. At the same time, I hoped to avoid a confusion already becoming common: the confusion of bracketing indisputable poetry together with work not recognizable as poetry by any standard known before the second decade of this century.

Balch was sufficiently interested to ask me to draw up a prospectus and a list of tentative inclusions, which, needless to say, I did very gladly. And there came a happy day, not many weeks later, when I was told that my prospectus had been approved, and that I would be commissioned to compile an anthology, for which Balch proposed the title, Modern American Lyrics.

Alas, on that bright day, I was still to be educated in the trials, heartaches, and problems of an anthologist.

Those trials, heartaches, and problems were by no means to be exclusively literary. On the contrary, they were primarily as non-literary as a contract to buy wheat or potatoes. And this was because you could not simply dig into the bin of contemporary poetry, and pick whatever you wished without reference to copyright holders. None, of course, will question that this is as it should be; the author and the publisher must be protected in the use of their product. On the other hand, this makes the compilation of an anthology something like the running of a hurdle race; and the roadblock it establishes may be less damaging to the anthologist than to the poets he hopes to represent. Back in the twenties, however, the situation was less discouraging than it has since become. Permissions to reprint were easier to obtain, and the requested fees were fewer and more moderate; in later years the very making of anthologies—one of the chief means by which less known poets may gain an audience and a chance for survival—has been all but prohibited except to compilers and publishers with wide resources.

As a verse-writer, I endorse the principle that poets should be paid for the use of their material in compilations; but as an anthologist, I can testify that this is not always possible. My publishers did agree to allow a certain sum to be deducted from royalties and applied to fees for permissions; I cannot recall whether the amount was one hundred dollars, or two hundred; in any event, it was small enough. When I asked permission, for example, to reprint a poem by Robert Frost—not then, nor at any time, one of my favorite poets—the requested price of twenty-five dollars gave me such a budgetary headache that I saw no choice except to do without Frost. And when I wrote to a certain writer, whose poem in a current magazine was one of those borderline cases that had caused me much hesitation, the author solved all my doubts when he wrote in from Europe, asking the compensation of twenty dollars—his poem, so far as I know, remains unanthologized until this day.

This occurrence, however, was wholly exceptional; every other poet I consulted was willing, even eager to have his work appear regardless of remuneration; it was the publishers who gave the trouble, when there was trouble (though many of them were most cooperative). Thus, there was the case of the poet who wrote me, “I’d be delighted to have you use my poems, without charge. But the copyright, unfortunately, is owned by the publishers; and they are certain to ask fees, maybe more than you are prepared to pay.” It occurred to me, therefore, that it would be poor strategy to consult the publishers; and so I wrote back to the author: “I notice that your book was published years ago. If it is no longer selling, the publishers probably have no further use for the copyright, and will release it to you upon request. After that, I can apply directly to you for reprint permission.” Sometime later, I had a letter from the author, stating that he had followed my suggestion, that the copyright was now his, and that he granted me permission to reprint his work.

In another instance, in which I wished to use several poems by one writer, I applied to the publishers who had issued his books years before; and was asked a fee that would have made my budget totter. Being in communication with the author, I notified him of the request, and he wrote back hotly: “The publishers you mention no longer have any rights in my work. The rights were taken over by K, my present publisher, who has stipulated that I have absolute disposition of the reprint privileges. I therefore grant you the permission you ask—and don’t be foolish enough to pay the first publishers a fee.”

Still another writer granted permission with this peculiar warning: “Don’t under any circumstances write to my publishers to confirm this consent, though you should, of course, print the usual acknowledgment to them. This letter is sufficient and final.” It was indeed sufficient and final; neither in this case, nor in any other connected with any of the four anthologies I have compiled, has any person challenged my right of inclusion.

An anthologist, I found, has to be nothing so much as a letter-writer; my correspondence was voluminous, far more so than I could have foreseen, and seemed never-ending. Letters began coming in from all variety of sources, along with manuscripts, magazines, and books of poems with suggestions for inclusion. But how did this happen? Did I advertise for material? Naturally not. Nevertheless, a sort of underground publicity campaign was at work, and one not of my deliberate making. When I wrote, for example, to poet Phil Brown asking permission to reprint his sonnet Midsummer, Phil might be so elated that—with no thought at all of advertising my forthcoming compilation—he would mention my letter to his verse-writing friends Joe Thompson and Ed Williams; and Joe and Ed, seeing no reason to go unrepresented when Phil was to be included, would write me nominating themselves as candidates for anthologizing, and would send quantities of their work in support of the nomination, in some cases whole floods of volumes. The result was not, I am sorry to say, a vast increase in acceptable material; the result was an immense addition to my own labors, since most of the volunteered material was of poor quality, some of it atrociously bad. Already, I fear, though I had set out with the best of intentions, I was making enemies among poets—the editor’s inevitable lot, since no way yet has been invented of making every submitted manuscript acceptable.

Errors of judgment in selection do, of course, occur, and must occur, though no two persons may agree as to what the particular mistakes have been. Other errors, too, as I learned with deep pain, may creep in, though there was nothing to parallel the case of one of my own subsequent printed poems, in which “flashing reel” became converted into “fishing reel.” But things seemed bad enough when an author wrote me with a justifiable sense of injury that her sonnet had appeared in thirteen lines. This, indeed, was true, as I confirmed upon consulting the book; and it hardly helped matters that, so far as the sequence of ideas was concerned, the poem seemed not to have lost by the omission of the line. I did not know, and do not know to this day, whether the fault lay in an inexcusable error in proofreading, or in the careless last-minute dropping out of a bar of type by the printer, who was unaware that sonnets should come in fourteen lines; in any event, that error, though corrected in later editions, probably tormented me as much as it did the author.

There were actually two subsequent printings of Modern American Lyrics as such, in addition to a joint printing with Modern British Lyrics, which first appeared in 1925. In connection with the combined volume—whose year of publication I cannot readily determine, since I lent my only copy to a friend, who never returned it—an incident occurs to me, doubtless a little irrelevant to the present discussion, but perhaps worth telling. One summer several years after the birth of the two anthologies, I was browsing in a bookstore in San Francisco; and my eyes fell upon a volume entitled Modern Lyrics. Automatically I picked it up, and lo and behold! I saw my own name as compiler! What was that? Did I suffer from acute amnesia, causing forgetfulness of my own actions? How could I be the editor of an anthology that I did not even know I had compiled?

A hasty examination, however, showed that the book was nothing more nor less than Modern American Lyrics and Modern British Lyrics united under a single cover. But what was this firm of Loring and Mussey, whose name I read on the title page? A combine of pirates?

Considerably confused, I wrote to Earle Balch, and in the normal course received the explanation. His firm had sold the reprint rights to Loring and Mussey, as it was entitled to do by contract, but had forgotten to notify me of the deal. In due time, I would receive my share of the returns, as provided by our agreement.

As I look back over the preface of Modern American Lyrics, I find that same effort to distinguish poetry from pseudo-poetry which, rightly or wrongly, has remained one of my preoccupations throughout the years. In referring to pseudo-poetry, I was chiefly concerned, then as now, with certain innovators who, it seemed to me, were abandoning poetry for the sake of novelty, were turning out transparently disguised prose, and so were spreading confusion over the poetic world, and tending to make all poetry look ridiculous. Referring to certain modern compilations then recommended as good, I remarked:

Page after page ... is devoted to formless effusions whose music is less than the music of dignified prose; page after page is filled with the sordid things of everyday, with kitchen sinks and bathtubs and cobblestones and loveless adulteries. And if in the interlude—as frequently occurs—one comes across a glowing sentiment or memorable melody or flash of imagination that reveals wide vistas of the sun-tinged storm-clouds or of the starry night-skies, then one is likely to be plunged in the next page into the monologue of a real estate agent if not into an epic of the hog-pens.

If I were to write this in regard to the anthologies of today, there would not be a word I would have to reconsider, except that the phrase “as frequently occurs” might now seem an overstatement.

Even before the appearance of Modern American Lyrics, I had made my bid for recognition in a collection, The Thinker and Other Poems. Doubtless I was as proud of this as most writers are of their first published masterpieces; but let me hasten to add that I am proud of it no longer, nor have I been for many a year. I would perhaps not go so far as one poet I once heard of, who offered a handsome price for copies of his first book; and having retrieved quite a few at considerable cost and trouble, disposed of them all in one great bonfire, in the hope of thus extirpating all trace of his youthful folly. But if I would not seek to emulate this holocaust, the reason is that I see no need for the poet himself to weed out what time is certain to obliterate. I will not say that The Thinker does not truthfully embody much of the thought, feeling, and imagination of my youth. But in glancing back over the poems (a form of self-chastisement I rarely submit myself to), I find few if any that I would not present in different garments were I writing them today. Then why do I not revise them? Because life goes on to new impulses and expressions, and it would be as difficult to return to the mood and outlook of yesterday as to go back to the haunts of one’s childhood.

I must not give the impression that any publisher was waiting with outstretched hands for this early darling of my heart. Then, as now, no publisher was enthusiastic about the chance to lose money; then, as now, it was difficult to find a market for poetry, though markedly less so than it has since become. Even while in California, I had been in contact with the firm of James T. White and Company, which issued occasional books of verse, though its chief publication, if I remember rightly, was an encyclopedia of American biography (which, I believe, it still issues). One day sometime after my arrival in New York, I stepped into the offices of the firm at 70 Fifth Avenue, and saw Mr. White, a thin, aged, learned-looking man, whose hair matched his name; and also met his amiable editor, James B. Kenyon, probably then in his late sixties—the author of no less than nine books of verse and three of prose not unfamiliar to an earlier day, though I suspect that few nowadays remember him. The tone of his poems, which were not without quality even though lacking that supreme element which makes one poet soar above a thousand and surmount the generations, is indicated by these lines from Reed Voices (James T. White, 1917):

’Mid the dusk reeds that fledge the twilight streams,

Nature’s wild troubadours, the breezes, make

Such strange sweet songs as echo through our dreams,

And haunt our baffled memories when we wake.

To Mr. Kenyon, who received me in a friendly way, I showed some of my own poems; and his approval, while perhaps over-generous, naturally led to a discussion of the possible publication of a collection. It was some time before a way could be worked out; but finally it was decided that, if I could dispose of a certain number of copies, the firm would undertake the publication. Do not suppose that there was anything unusual or degrading about such an arrangement; it was then and has since become even more decisively the rule among first books of verse, most of which would otherwise never see the light—and if the first book does not see the light, what of the second, and the third? As a matter of fact, I did not stand to lose much (nor was I financially able to lose much), for I knew where I could dispose of numbers of copies, even though I did not yet realize that many acquaintances who will buy a first book out of good will or curiosity would no sooner purchase a second than they would subscribe for shares in a company dedicated to raising white elephants. I did not, of course, personally solicit sales; but the company circularized a list of names provided by me. Bookstore sales counted for little if anything; but there was one store that did sell quite a few copies—a store such as, I would hazard a guess, has rarely if ever, before or since, dealt in books of verse. A cousin of mine, a bright and literate woman who was always especially kind to me, ran a sort of emporium of ladies’ goods on Washington Heights; and what should be added to the stock in trade but The Thinker and Other Poems! Recommended by the sagacious proprietor, this book went off into more than one home where poems were ordinarily in no great demand.

But already I was learning some of the trials of the young author. In my inexperience, I had given no thought to so important a matter as the size of the type to be used; and when I saw the proofs, I observed with a shock that the print was minute (actually, eight point, whereas nowadays I would approve nothing less than eleven or twelve point). So hard was the book to peruse that its author, after it came out, could never read more than a poem or two at a time, and rarely subjected his eyes to this much strain. You may say that this had the advantage of keeping down the number of readers, but I am sure no such precaution was necessary. It may have been the small type, or it may have been mere ineptitude that caused me to miss a number of errors; one of them, in particular, seems considerably more amusing to me now than when I originally discovered it: my poem of tender sentiment, On My Mother’s Photograph, had come out, “On My Mother’s Phonograph.”

Despite the small print, despite the typographical errors, despite the amateurishness of many of the poems, The Thinker was extensively and on the whole favorably reviewed; I received a gratifying wealth of clippings from papers ranging from New York to Puget Sound. I mention this, however, not with any sense of personal triumph, but because similar good luck does not befall books of verse by unknown writers today; a traditional collection such as mine, issued without advertising and under the imprint of a relatively obscure publisher, could now be certain to be ignored altogether outside the author’s home town, or at most would be honored by one or two three- or four-line notices from secondary organs. In this difference one can measure the extent to which poetry, in the course of several decades, has fallen in critical and general esteem.

CHAPTER

NINE

Blood Brother to the Epic

Certain writers, such as Poe and Baudelaire, have contended that there is no such thing as a long poem. And these writers, consistently, have never written any long poems—that is to say, compositions running to many hundreds or thousands of lines; the cynical critic might, indeed, accuse them of sharing the common blindness of men to accomplishments beyond the scope of their own aptitudes. In any event, the case for the long poem need not be argued, for it has been proved in action by not a few writers, including Homer, Virgil, Dante, Ariosto, Camoëns, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Goethe, and many others. An extended theme, after all, requires extended expression; and it is hard to see why a long poem may not bear the same relationship to a short one, as a novel does to the short story or a full-length play to a skit or a sketch.

That long poems are unpopular nowadays is another matter; (what else can be expected in a day when all poetry is unpopular?). But the question of popularity never entered my head when I launched into more than one composition whose lines could be numbered in four figures. Truly, I wrote what I wanted to write, and naturally hoped for the best, but never gave much thought to the possible reception of the work (which might show the impractical nature of poets, if their impracticality were not already proved by the fact that they write verse at all). Nevertheless, what joy to pick a theme on which you might sail away into gorgeous cloud-lands, filling page after page with the ever-expanding story, setting down in succinct rhymed lines your views on life and on man, and creating something which (to you, at least) is vivid and living where previously nothing at all has been! Characters that arise out of the mist to take on flesh and blood! Scenes and places that assume visible outlines, though to be found nowhere on earth except in one poet’s imagination! And the rhymes themselves—they were a challenge and a delight: the challenge of problems to master, and a delight when they seemed deftly to say just what you wanted, even if sometimes you had not known you wished to say precisely this until the words formed themselves in your mind!

Day after day, I learned, one can invoke the necessary mood of detachment. Indeed, this mood comes the more easily for being sought regularly, and sought at about the same time each day, seven days a week; an interruption of even a day or two will make it more difficult to regain. I found this to be the case when engaged, all one carefree summer, in putting together the first of my long poems ever to see print. This composition, The Lone Adventurer, was written mostly in California, where Flora and I had gone in July and August of 1926 to visit my father in the hot but delightfully green and spacious city of Stockton. The preceding months had been among the most painful and wearing in my experience: Flora’s father had died; she herself had undergone a major operation; and I had been subjected to long-drawn torments of dental surgery. And so the writing of the poem, “For him who would forget awhile the noise / Of careworn cities, drenched in sweat and steam,” constituted an inexpressible relief, though I would not use the word “escape,” since to be in a quiet California town, with its long elm-shaded streets, its unfenced gardens, and its walnut, fig, and oleander trees, was to enjoy all the escape the city-wounded wanderer needed.

Morning after morning, while I lay stretched out with pen and paper on the lawn of the unfrequented block-square city park at Eldorado and Acacia Streets, looking up at the palm trees or down at the robins and sparrows hopping inquisitively about the grass, I spun out the seven-line stanzas of the poem, which told of the search of Prince Lodalga for the magical pool:

High on the highest peak of all the range,

In a chill fastness far from human sight,

Walled from the ruinous touch of Time and Change,

There is a pool that sparkles mirror-bright.

And he who peers in it, and sees aright,

May catch a phantom gleam, a flash of wings,

And read the hidden meaning of all things.

While I lay on the lawn in a far-off mood, letting the lines of the poem tumble into my mind, Flora sat near me with a book. But her presence caused no distraction; though not a poet herself, she had an understanding of the needs of creation and never broke in with an unnecessary remark. Ah, patient wife of a poet, who could restrain herself and contentedly walk the ways of silence, when others less sensitive would have burst out in irrelevant and destructive speech!

It was a rare morning when I did not put out seven, eight, nine, or ten stanzas, which would be revised at my leisure later in the day (and then revised again and again before their final typing). Hence it is not surprising that the end of the summer saw the completion of the poem, well over two thousand lines in all.

Having written Finis, I naturally thought of finding a publisher. This might seem impossible in these later days, when many publishers frankly proclaim that they are not interested in poetry of any type, while others, apparently on the theory that if poetry must be endured at all it had better be taken in small doses, throw up their hands hopelessly at the very thought of a long poem.—Even if Paradise Lost were to be submitted, or Prometheus Unbound, or The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems, the verdict would be the same, without benefit of one stray glance at the unpromising manuscript. But back in the pristine days of 1926, the situation was different—at least, if I may judge by the results. The Lone Adventurer was not ready for submission before my return to New York in September; and I do not recall, nor do any records inform me, what publishers, if any, during the next month or two, declined with thanks the privilege of adding it to their responsibilities. But what I do know is that, as early as December, publishing arrangements had been made.

One day I invaded the offices of the newly founded Unicorn Press, on West Forty-Second Street (not to be confused with the entirely unrelated more recent establishment of the same name). There I had the opportunity of interviewing the young proprietors, Messrs. Kline and Blum; and having entrusted them with the precious manuscript, I was delighted—what poet would not have been?—to learn of the eventual acceptance of my magnum opus. My joy, I should add, sprang largely from the fact that the Unicorn Press was not—at least, not so far as my own experience taught me—one of the so-called vanity publishers, which act as purveyors of books financed by their authors. It was a legitimate royalty house—too bad, therefore, that I did not foresee the knots and tangles into which such a house can entrap an author!

Obviously, one reason for the acceptance of The Lone Adventurer was that the new and unknown Unicorn Press needed writers—prose writers much more than poets. The following may seem a little apart from our main theme, though there is a connection: within three or four months, Kline and Blum offered me a contract for a long book dealing with the history of warlike methods, of which at that time I had written only about fifty pages. The title was to be Marching Men, The Story of War, and I had to face a deadline only a few months ahead—a deadline which I met after a concentrated seven-day-a-week effort that need not be described here. Alas for an author’s hopes! the book was indeed issued, in a handsome format, nearly five hundred pages of it, embellished with copious illustrations by Arthur Zaidenberg; and it was a book which, I was informed by persons in a position to know, should have had a wide sale. But even before it was in print, events of which I was then unaware were casting the shadow of disaster.

The owners of the Unicorn Press, as I was subsequently told, were mired in deep financial straits. So desperately did they need immediate cash that they committed the unpardonable, the ruinous act of selling over a thousand copies of my book at reduced rates to used-book dealers even before it had been placed on the regular market or reviewers had had a chance to see a copy (they could afford to do this, since they had omitted the formality of paying the printers). No book could survive such a calamity; the least of my losses was that I received none of the expected royalties. No other publisher would handle a book whose market had been so undermined, though more than one told me that he would have published it had it been submitted to him originally (actually, one small publisher did offer me a contract for the book several years later, but financial difficulties prevented him from carrying out the agreement); while long afterwards, in 1946, an offer to reissue the work came to me out of the void from a New York reprint publisher; but the plates having been destroyed, the deal was never consummated.

All of this may seem like a digression, but it will indicate what sort of a publisher I had found for The Lone Adventurer. Blithely unaware of anything less than perfect in my new connection, I saw the book appear, appropriately green-covered, with an appealing red and black jacket, and large type; and if a poet’s chief aim is a published volume, I had at least one satisfaction. The months went by; there were reviews, comments from friends, and letters from readers (though not many letters); but as in the later case of Marching Men, never a penny in royalties. I am not suggesting that the sales were great enough to pay for a steam yacht or a mansion on Fifth Avenue; but large or small, I was treated to no definite report. The most that I could obtain, after some unhappy sessions with Kline and Blum, was a document signing all rights to the poem back to me. But sometime later, I had reason to be glad even for this concession; chancing to observe the books on the bargain counter of a large New York drug store, I was astonished to see a familiar face: The Lone Adventurer, in a new edition, with the original type and paper, but a reduced page-size and a reduced price!

On inquiry, I was able to unravel the mystery. The cheap edition had been put forth by the binders, who, being in possession of 500 or 1000 unbound copies which they had seized in partial satisfaction of the debts owed by the Unicorn Press, had bound these at their own expense and thrown them on the market. The last person to be considered, of course, was the author; but as the author happened also to be the copyright owner, he wrote to the binders, pointing out that they had committed a copyright violation by an unauthorized act of publication; and the binders, conceding the point, agreed to pay a royalty on the books they had sold. Thus I came into possession of a small sum, no more than fifty or a hundred dollars—the only case I have ever known in which a poet, after going unpaid by his publisher, received royalties from the publisher’s binders.

But perhaps all the above will further explain why I sought my living by other forms of writing than poetry.

The Lone Adventurer, I will acknowledge, is a much less accomplished work than I could wish; its theme and style, besides, would have harmonized better with the age of Tennyson than with the staccato pace of the day of jet planes and atomic power. Yet most themes and styles are adjudged by the tastes of individuals rather than by absolute standards; and this poem, with its basis in the quest for truth, has always had a place in the affections of that highly prejudiced person, its author. He has sometimes thought that he might someday revise it; in fact, in Garnered Sheaves (1949), he did present new versions of a few short passages. Just in order to note the difference, whether for better or for worse, it may be interesting to compare some of the original stanzas with their later incarnations. Here, to begin with, is an excerpt as printed in 1927:

Among the ice-crowned mountains to the west

Of Helmud’s empire, where the peaks of snow

Surmount the cloud-peaks, battered crest on crest,

And crookèd canyons ramble miles below,

Sometimes a sleety wind would snarl and blow

Round a slim figure that pursued alone

The snake-meanderings of a trail of stone.

And forlorn forests knew him, where the boughs

Made a dim twilight roof; and he would toil

Up rock-strewn summits, with a cave for house,

Where spitting geysers would erupt and boil

Amid scrub pines that sucked a beggared soil;

And in green bouldery gorges he would wander,

Where twisted streams poured with the roar of thunder.

And here are the same stanzas in the edition of 1949:

Among the ice-beaked mountains to the west

Of Helmud’s kingdom, where the spires of snow

Surmount the cloud-spires, pendent crest on crest,

And crab-armed canyons ramble worlds below,

Sometimes the sleet-wind and the rain would blow

Round a slim traveler who traced alone

The snaky wanderings of a trail of stone.

Wolf-threaded forests knew him, where the boughs

Gave noon a roof of twilight; he would toil

Up to the summits, with a cave for house,

Where spitting geysers bubble and fountains boil

Beneath scrub-pines that suck a beggared soil;

And in green gorges eagle-spaces under

Cascading streams that pour with the drone of thunder.

Another stanza may show the difference even more clearly:

And had he headed some rapacious band

To save the kingdom from its smaller foes,

And driven happy peoples from their land,

Slain babes and women with victorious bows

And left but ruins where had bloomed the rose—

Then fond disciples would have reared a shrine

Inscribed to “King Lodalga, the Divine.”

In the later form, this became:

And had he headed some fire-hurling band

To save the kingdom from its smaller foes,

Whipped screaming peoples from a smoking land,

Slain babes, felled women with bowel-ripping bows,

And left but ash-heaps where he found the rose,

Then fond disciples might have reared a shrine

Sacred to “King Lodalga, Lord Divine.”

There may be readers who would prefer the first versions, but these examples will give some idea of the effect of revisions after more than twenty years.

CHAPTER

TEN

Poets I Have Known

Inevitably, in the course of my adventures in poetry, I met other poets, some of whom come back to mind with particular vividness—not necessarily those I knew best or longest, but those whose individuality makes them stand out most sharply.

To begin with, I think of a man whom I shall call Morris, and who has, unhappily, made himself notorious. I first met him back in the fall of 1920, shortly after my arrival in New York. He was then the owner of a small bookshop, near where the Sixth Avenue “L” trains thundered to a halt at the station at Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. A proud, handsome, insolent-looking, big-browed intellectual, he impressed me with his announcement that a novel of his was to appear in the spring, and that he was writing a book on current poetry (in what spring the novel was published I do not know, but I am sure that the book on poetry never made its bow). In the loneliness of my first months in New York, I paid several visits to his shop, where I saw (but was not introduced to) a number of literary celebrities, including Edna St. Vincent Millay. I then lost track of Morris, until several years later, when compiling Modern American Lyrics I met him again in the office of Earle Balch, who mentioned that he had some poems which might be worth considering for my contemplated anthology.

Indeed they were worth considering! a series of well-wrought and feeling sonnets dealing with remembrances of his native village in Russia. These, I knew, were an acquisition for the anthology; and here, I also knew, was a poet of unusual promise—promise, unhappily, not to be fulfilled. For Morris chose to follow other roads than those of poetry—roads leading toward ruin and disgrace. What was the flaw, the weak link, the fatal trap within the personality of this intelligent and capable man? That his thoughts should turn toward publishing was not unnatural, in view of his bookish interests—but why, of all fields of publishing, should he choose pornography as his particular area? In his appearance, and in his conversations, he gave no suggestion of any perverse tendencies—was it then that he was looking for an especially lucrative source of income? I only know that he underwent successive trials, convictions, and prison sentences, while perhaps the force of circumstances or his own fierce and defiant nature forbade him to turn to other channels—a good life and an able intellect largely lost, and one more poet cast into the abyss.

Another memorable verse-writer, whom I never knew well but cannot forget, was Anton Romatka—a man whose death some years ago was the subject of wide newspaper publicity, not because his poetry was notable, but because the facts of his life were extraordinary.

He was a man certain to impress you on sight: like a picture straight out of a Victorian album, with his small figure, his round ruddy face, his gold-rimmed spectacles over watery eyes, his blond side-whiskers and long, drooping blond mustache, his small bow-tie, and high stiff celluloid collar that gave a sort of European rigidity and formality to his appearance. Romatka was a man who took poetry seriously—would that there were more of his kind! Though his own offerings may have been nothing to boast of, he did a real service for poets by the forum which he provided for them in a hall on Fourteenth Street, somewhere near Third Avenue. I can still see him, as he gravely, even ponderously officiated, introducing the various poets in an English that perhaps left something to be desired, but with a zeal in which nothing was lacking: he was that rare poet who was less interested in reading his own work than in providing means for others to read theirs. I can recall various meetings, perhaps not greatly attended, but pervaded by that spirit, that enthusiasm which is more important than numbers; he made it possible for many different groups to be represented, as on the occasion when Henry Hazlitt (then literary editor of the Sun, but later known as a writer on economics) appeared in order to introduce some of the Sun’s local poets.

Alas, I fear that Romatka, though a good saint of poetry, was not always appreciated. I know that he was a bit discouraged, as I was, on that Sunday afternoon when he had asked me to appear at a Third Avenue location to address a poetry group, and I found an audience of three in addition to Romatka and myself. That was the last I ever saw of him; but I know that he, with little or no means and handicapped by his foreign appearance, speech, and mannerisms, did more in his humble way for poetry than could be claimed by most of those who laughed slyly at his oddities.

A man whom I knew far better, over a longer term of years, is likewise a definite and memorable individual. In this case, for fear of embarrassing him, I will not give the actual name, but will christen him Jim Maynor. I first met him in the early twenties, and I knew from the beginning that he was a real poet—though one whose production was exceedingly scanty, and who would give more time to polishing a phrase than other poets will take in completing a sonnet. At the time of our first meeting, he had published a brochure of poems, one copy of which he proudly presented to me—only to request its return sometime later when, being engaged, he found that he had no copy to inscribe to his fair one. His engagement, incidentally, had come about in true romantic fashion: he had met the young lady in the lamp factory in which they were both employed (he for a period of weeks only); and being treated to a harrowing tale of how she was about to be locked out of the house by a cruel stepfather named (believe it or not!) Proudfit, he rushed to the rescue of her imperilled innocence, and promptly wooed and married her, though neither of them had a penny put aside for bread or rent.

Jim Maynor, as you will divine from the above, was not one who cared too much for the ways of this grubbing, mundane world. Not that he had not tried often enough to conform with the dull laws of society, but that something in his own nature forbade him to continue in any of a long succession of jobs as librarian, postal carrier, book salesman, department store clerk, caretaker in a city park, choir singer in a church, and other occupations more numerous than I can recall. Finally, during the depression days of the thirties, he found his vocation. At least, he will swear to you that it is his vocation; and, certainly, it has given him greater contentment than any conventional job. More than once, walking on the streets of New York, I have heard a strong tenor voice wafted across a distance; and drawn toward the source of the sound, I have seen Jim on a street or in the court of an apartment house, an unsought minstrel bowing as he collected the pennies, dimes, or quarters thrown him by passers-by or from windows above. On one occasion, in a subway train, I heard that same voice; listened to the strains of a sentimental song strangely competing with the crashing tumult of the cars; and saw Jim approaching, raggedly dressed, and smiling at me out of his thin, slightly worn, not unintelligent face. In the eyes of the unappreciative world, this may seem like begging, but not to Jim, who insists that he repays the people in pleasure for every cent they throw to him—he is like one of the roving troubadours of old, though born, unfortunately, a few hundred years too late.

The ways of the modern world, to be sure, are hard; the returns of itinerant singing have not sufficed to cover the expenses of an apartment in the Bronx, plus a wife and two children; and Jim has had to supplement his income by occasional night-club singing and by his wife’s wages from a downtown department store. But somehow he has managed to exist. When I last saw him, a year or two ago, he was browned from his outdoor activities; and looked well and happy. Meanwhile he continues to write a rare poem, and never one without quality.

A poet of a more volatile disposition, whom I knew even before my first acquaintance with Maynor, became my friend owing to a letter of introduction given me by a man I was never to see again, to a woman I was to see but once. During my lonely first autumn in New York, I did not refuse any chances for possible human contacts; one Sunday afternoon found me in Brooklyn, at the home of the middle-aged Sophie, whom a certain Jackson in California had insisted that I must know. At Sophie’s apartment I met her much younger sister Bertha, a quick-witted, dark-eyed, vivacious girl who might have passed for an Italian, though she was actually a Russian Jewess; and there also I met the tall, straight-limbed, flaming-eyed youth who, two or three years later, was to become Bertha’s husband: Ignace M. Ingianni—the “Ignace” being a mere decoration so far as I was concerned, for, like all our mutual acquaintances, I never called him by any other name than “Johnnie.” The son of an immigrant family, he had come to New York in early childhood; and he showed all the volcanic fire of his Sicilian origin. Despite our common poetic interests, he met me with prejudice, I should almost say passionate antagonism; he had recently read one of my poems in a Sunday paper, and had (doubtless justifiably) conceived an intense dislike of it. Having disapproved of the poem, he likewise disapproved of its author, even before seeing him; and his hostility found expression in a roof-shaking argument, though not on poetry—no, on warfare, whose advantages Johnnie defended in a tumult of words that was almost like private warfare; while I, who have never been able to see the militaristic point of view, answered him blow for blow during a long, overheated debate. And what was the result? That we went our way in mutual disgust, and saw no more of each other? Or that we became lifelong enemies? On the contrary, the result was that we went our way in mutual pleasure, and became lifelong friends.

Johnnie was, at the time I met him, a writer of free verse; my analysis of his work, which I did not keep from him, was that it contained the raw material of poetry but not the finished fabric. He would be able, I suggested, to write good rhymed lyrics—and this proved to be the case, as was shown by his subsequent poems that appeared in various magazines, and in the volume Songs of Earth. Johnnie, who had passed the bar examination but never practiced law, and earned his living in the unlikely-seeming occupation of title examiner for the City of New York, sometimes discussed with me the possibility of our joint launching of a poetry magazine; but we never advanced further than to decide on a title, Flame. When I actually did become the editor and proprietor of a magazine, it was not known as Flame (a title, incidentally, later used by another poetry journal); and Johnnie was not concerned with the enterprise except as an interested bystander and occasional contributor.

But he himself was eventually to start his own magazine, and therein rests an irony. Years later, after I had left New York and he had come under new influences, he returned to the vers libre of his earlier days, but went beyond the freedoms of his earlier days, and embraced that very extremism which I have always battled against. And he launched the avant-garde magazine, Symbolica, a mimeographed periodical of irregular publication, to which he gives himself devotedly, and for which he serves as typist and mimeographer no less than as editor. Since therefore we are poetically at opposite extremes—as far apart, let us say, as an atheist and a fundamentalist, though I do not mean to compare us to either—what has happened to our friendship? Nothing at all. I still see Johnnie from time to time (for he has retired from his services to New York City, and moved to California), and we still hold discussions with reminders of the old-time fervor; but poetry is not among our topics of debate.

Whereas Johnnie has moved westward, another poet, whom I met in the west, has since gone east. Our meeting was, I think, one of the strangest and grimmest that ever paved the way for a friendship. During the summer of 1930, Flora and I had come to California for our annual vacation; and remembering the redwood forests and the far-looking hills of Mill Valley, among which I had occasionally hiked while a youth at college, I suggested that we rent a cottage there for a month. Flora, little suspecting that she was to fall so deeply in love with the environment as to wish to live there all the rest of her life, seemed to think that two weeks would suffice; nevertheless, we did pass a month, which seemed all too short, in two furnished rooms in the upper story of a reconverted old church, from which we had a gratifying view across a tree-clad range. Toward the end of our stay, we spent a pleasant day with Anne Heller and another young woman, friends of a New York friend of Flora’s, who were passing by on a hitch-hiking expedition; and I remember how gay and carefree we were on the long walk to Muir Woods via the green windings of the Pipe Line Trail, then undesecrated by the demands of that modern devourer, the automobile. We bade the travelers a hearty good-bye, little forseeing the sequel.

Two mornings later, as I picked up a San Francisco paper at a newsstand, I was startled by the headlines: “HITCH-HIKER KILLED.” With a shock, I glanced at the bold letters staring from the top of the first page, and was almost felled to read—the name of Anne Heller.

That very evening, Anne was to reach out to us as if from beyond the grave. I had gone to look for mail at the post office, when Flora heard a rapping at the door, and opened to see two immaculately dressed strangers: one a slender, tall, conspicuously handsome youth of about twenty-seven; the other a short, dark-complexioned man in his forties, severe and dignified of aspect, and with a European formality of manner.

Having made sure that they had come to the right door, the younger man held forth an envelope. “Here,” he said, “is a letter of introduction from Anne Heller.”

Flora gasped. “But don’t you know,” she blurted out, “don’t you know Anne Heller is no longer here?”

The men gaped at her, speechless. Their eyes narrowed; tears trickled down; they seemed ready to weep as Flora told the dread tidings in the morning’s paper.

The letter from Anne—probably the last she ever wrote—had been given to the younger man after a chance meeting with him the day before, the very day that was to see her stretched bleeding and lifeless beneath the wheels of a speeding automobile on a northern California highway.

Reeling, the men left with a few mumbled words, but not before promising to get into further touch with us. This promise they kept; and thus began a close friendship with them both, a friendship cemented all the more firmly because of the sorrowful circumstances surrounding its inception. The older man, the Portuguese Vice-Consul and for long periods Acting Consul at San Francisco, bore the formidable name of Guillermo de Amaral, but we got around the difficulty by simply calling him “Bill”; the younger man, at that time an assistant at the Consulate though he had no Portuguese blood, was Douglas V. Kane, who was truly the poet that he looked, a sensitive being whose beauty-loving poems have deservedly appeared in many magazines, and whom we have ever since numbered among our dearest friends. Strange, strange that we should have been brought together by Anne Heller, whom neither of us knew very well, and who so suddenly and tragically departed from this earth so many years ago.

Tragedy is also connected with another poet, whom I knew under totally different circumstances. Not long ago a letter from Mary, the wife of LeGarde S. Doughty, saddened us with the news of the death of her husband—shot by his own hand. Perhaps it was only fitting that this man, who lived turbulently, amid struggle and difficulty, should have died violently. Across more than twenty years, a picture comes back to me of a forceful, intelligent face, already deeply crisscrossed and corrugated by life though the man could not have been beyond his early forties. I see him in the only environment that somehow seems appropriate: the pines of the Georgia hill-lands rising all about him on soil too badly exhausted to bear any other crop; the red slash of a road, which he told me was the celebrated “Tobacco Road,” rambling among wild jasmine and honeysuckle and past houses that were mostly mere unpainted shanties.

It was Wings that brought me into contact with LeGarde, as with many another able poet. During the early days of the magazine, I noticed the strikingly original poems sent me under his name, and a correspondence between us arose. At that time he was literary editor of the Augusta Chronicle (a post he subsequently lost owing to his free expression of published opinion). Sometime in 1937 he first invited Flora and me to visit Mary and himself in their home a few miles out of Augusta; and in April, 1938, we were finally induced to accept. Neither of us will ever forget those two days spent with them amid the pine-woods, in a four-room cottage that lacked every modern invention from running water to electricity, but that glowed and bubbled with laughter, good cheer, and good talk, while we and LeGarde and Mary and their hospitable southern friends and neighbors lingered over our coffee until the early morning hours, poems were read, and heated discussions held. LeGarde, a lover of nature, showed me with pride a young redwood and an acacia which I had sent him from California, and which had taken root in the southern soil; and as we rambled together past a beggarly field of undernourished wheat or out along the rutted road, he took as much joy in the red earth of his pine-lands as if they had represented Eden itself.

But how did he manage to subsist in that infertile territory? I never knew for certain. I do recall his delight, at the very hour of our departure, when a letter from a mid-western magazine contained a check for $75 for a story just accepted; and I know that he published other stories and one novel. But could he support himself on the slim reed of literature? I am afraid that he could not; and I suspect that the many rebuffs he received, along with the never-healing wound from the loss of a dearly beloved son in an air accident in World War II, lay in the background of his tragic end. His one published book of poetry, a slim collection of quatrains issued in 1934, bears the suggestive title, With Lips of Rue—a title expressive not only of the man’s work but of the man himself. Yet I have always believed that here was one who, had life been a little less difficult and fortune a bit more beneficent, might have been among the luminaries of American poetry if not of American prose.

Now and then, while making new poetic friends, I was being reintroduced to old. I recall an occasion in the early thirties when some members of Hal Bynner’s one-time poetry class held a reunion with Hal in an old farmhouse at Nyack, where we all stayed overnight. This event, perversely, stands out in my memory not so much because of the reestablishment of old bonds as for a certain ride which I would not re-enact for the joy of all the reunions on earth. Now that I look back upon it, it seems almost incredible, and I know that it might have been disastrous—but great are the risks and trials that one will undergo in the name of poetry, particularly when one is young and not too wary!

It was a cold evening in early February, and the snow lay on the ground. At an appointed time after dinner, Flora and I went to an address on Forty-Second Street, where we met two other guests, who were to drive us to Nyack. So far, so good! and having the inconvenient habit of being on time, we arrived at the agreed hour, and were rewarded with a long wait before the journey began. We were, I must admit, just a little taken aback when we saw the intended means of transportation! a broken-down old two-seated automobile, repainted a chilly aluminum, and completely open and exposed in the rear. Had we known then what we knew an hour or two later, one or both of us would instantly have developed chills, or pains in the stomach, or some other appropriate indisposition. But no! two complaisant if somewhat dubious people took their assigned back seats in the automobile.

The beginnings of the trip, before we had reached the New Jersey side of the Hudson, are drowned out of memory by what happened after we had crossed the river and began following the curves of the road along the ridge of the Palisades. We had never before had the faintest idea how cold a February night could be. It may be that the temperature was not many degrees below freezing, but I would have sworn that sixty below zero could not have seemed colder as the unimpeded north winds, edged like the shivery blades of knives and amplified in effect by the speed of the car, swept over us from across the wide dark vacancies of the river. Flora and I shrank down as low as possible, trying to sink into our seats, so as to lessen the cutting power of the gale; we huddled together, beat each other on the back so as to bring back some semblance of warmth. Though dressed in our heaviest—Flora in a thick brown beaver-cloth coat that made her look like a bear but was really not fur at all, and I in my most ponderous woolen coat—we both felt clad in cheese-cloth, if not actually naked in that boundless cold. The frigid air beat at our skins, caressed us, numbed us, and there was no defense, no way of escape. For what seemed hours, endless hours, that tormented drive continued. They tell me that the distance to Nyack is not more than about forty miles; but it seemed hundreds, it seemed infinity itself; each second of torture was minutes long, and the seconds were innumerable. Comparing notes afterwards, we found that our thoughts were similar. “This is hell,” Flora had been saying to herself. “This truly is hell.” And I had been trying to comfort myself with the bleak reflection, “The fundamentalist preachers were all wrong. Hell is not heat and fire. Hell is ice and cold.”

But terrible as was the puffing, panting progress of that tumbledown old car against the blasts of the polar night, a still more appalling possibility lowered before us. What if the ancient engine should break down, and we should be stranded here on the frozen plateau? Automobiles, I knew, had a habit of stalling at the most inconvenient times—as, for example, the one that had balked in mid-journey when bearing Flora and me to the railroad station just after we were married. And if we were to face the full force of the wind, perhaps for hours, unprotected on that lonely night-road—

Here, however, imagination outleapt reality. Finally, after crawling ages, we did reach our destination, so numb that we could hardly walk; we did share in the joy of the expected reunion; we did warm ourselves before a blazing fire, whose heat we could hardly get enough of—a fire that was our salvation, though I have always marveled that neither of us came down with pneumonia.

Ever since that night, it has been my view that there are torments which it is not worth while to endure even for the sake of poetry. And it has likewise been my belief—with which, I am sure, Flora would concur—that when the devil wishes to punish some especially wicked sinner, he entices him forth to the top of a cliff in an open car on an icy night in February.

CHAPTER

ELEVEN

Shadows on a Wall

Publishing mishaps, as more than one writer will testify, do not always occur singly. This was true in my own case in 1927, the year that saw my misadventures with The Lone Adventurer. In that same year, I put forth another book, The Literary Revolution, a critical work dealing with the changes that had overcome literary standards, both in poetry and prose. This volume, which has assuredly fled long ago from everyone’s memory (and almost from that of its author) was issued by an establishment called Frank-Maurice, Inc.—one of those concerns which are not necessarily less worthy or successful because the same man is owner, manager, and editor, and may in fact insure closer author-publisher relationships and better attention to the individual book. But the one-man house suffers from this serious drawback: it is in danger of paralysis if anything happens to its guiding spirit.

And that is just what, unhappily, did befall Frank-Maurice. The head of the firm—it would be no exaggeration to say, the firm itself—was an aging, scholarly man named Rosenblatt; but he was not too old, nor apparently in bad health. Therefore it was with a stunning shock that one day, shortly after the appearance of my book, I stepped into his office and learned that Rosenblatt was dead. His passing had been very sudden—perhaps due to a coronary occlusion, though I doubt if that term was much in use then. But whatever the cause, he was gone; and with him died the firm of Frank-Maurice. There were, it is true, some lawyers and others to supervise the post-mortem, and give what accounting they could to authors; but the wheels had ground to a halt; sales campaigns had ended, and so had sales, and the whole organization was rapidly dissolved. I was, of course, not the only author affected, nor probably the one most affected, and it is unlikely that The Literary Revolution would in any circumstances have kindled more than the mildest of blazes. But the effect was a little like that of having a horse in a race, even though not an expected prize-winner, and of seeing it stumble and fall just after the starting signal. This, of course, was just one of the occupational hazards of authors. And occupational hazards, as I think everyone will agree, are easy to endure—when they overtake others.

In The Literary Revolution, I said much the same things about poetry as in my unpublished Poetic Revival in America; and aimed my blows, as often in later days, against those persons who either wilfully or out of ignorance were confusing poetry and prose, and so threatening to destroy poetry as a separate form of creation. A typical passage follows:

If Mark Twain, as a whimsical bit of humor, had chopped one of his prose articles into fantastic form, commenced each line with a capital letter, and labelled the whole poetry, he would have been attempting in jest what some of the writers of today are undertaking seriously. And if he had declared that he was guided by rules known only by himself, and that the ear which could take pleasure in Shelley and Swinburne was not always delicate enough to value him correctly, he would have been foreshadowing the attitude of the free versifiers. The difference is that he would have been greeted with laughter, whereas the free versifiers are sometimes accorded a more sober approval.

In another passage, I call attention to the basic distinction between prose and poetry. I point out that “Prose is the vehicle for the ordinary expression of ideas, poetry for their artistic expression”; that “Artistic creation must always imply restraint,” the remoulding of “the gross material of inartistic expression into the sharply defined and chiselled product of art.” Always before our own day, poetic technique has been the means of consummating this end. But this fact never seems to occur at all to the apostles of the new school:

They ask for freedom, and forget that freedom is not the way of art; they clamor to express an idea untrammeled by convention, and fail to remember that the only vehicle permitting such liberty is prose. They demand all the rights of the prose writer, and shrink from all the duties of the poet—and yet they call their productions poetry.

If called upon to amend these lines today, I should not limit myself to saying that the spokesmen of the new freedom “demand all the rights of the prose writer.” I should add that they ask rights no prose writer has ever required, sometimes including the privilege of expressing themselves with an incoherence, a turgidness, or a ranting effusiveness that would earn nothing but laughter if offered as straight prose. Imagine, for example, what would happen to any writer of prose who took the liberties assumed by Dylan Thomas in lines such as these:

Altarwise by owl-light in the halfway house

The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;

Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,

And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,

The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,

Bit out the mandrake with tomorrow’s scream....

My point, of course, is that our verse writers have claimed such additional liberties since 1927 that criticism which might then have seemed startlingly radical is much too tame to express the present situation.

After The Literary Revolution—which produced far less than a revolution in literature—about three years went by before I attempted any further book publication connected with poetry. Then one day I entered the office of The Poet’s Magazine and Poetic Publications in a large downtown building, and had a talk with the proprietor, George Sakele, a dark-skinned somber man with an Oriental cast of countenance. Looking back on Poetic Publications, I think that it was truly the most curious institution that ever attempted to purvey poetry to an indifferent public. Was Mr. Sakele himself a poet or critic? If he was—at least, in anything but the most private way—that fact never came to my attention. He ran his poetic enterprises, if the strange truth must be confessed, in connection with his sale of cosmetics; his speciality was some sort of an alleged Egyptian cream for women’s skins, which he advertised over the radio as akin to that in which Cleopatra used to bathe (price, five dollars a bottle). I shall never forget the sickly sweet odor with which it pervaded his office. Poetry to him was evidently a hobby, though I have always wondered why he did not pick something simpler, such as stamp-collecting; in any case, he did indubitably publish a magazine, with the aid of a young employee named Dorothy Gretzner; and he did also publish books—which was the occasion of my visit to him.

Even in those days, a young poet in search of a publisher could not always be too critical—not if the publisher was willing to assume the financial responsibility. Just now I have been wondering just what sort of a contract Sakele could have offered me; and burrowing back in my files, I have looked for the first time in many years at the one-page agreement, which, mercifully free of small-print provisos and legal ifs, whats, and moreovers, proceeds in the simplest language to state that the publisher will issue the book in an edition of not less than 1,000 copies, take out the copyright in the author’s name, and “pay the author a royalty of 10% on the retail price of all copies sold.”

On the basis of later experience, I cannot help wondering how many of the stipulated “edition of not less than 1,000 copies” Mr. Sakele ordered to be bound. I also wonder how he expected to sell any copies at all—a department in which his success appears to have been much less notable than in the distribution of Egyptian face-creams. Nevertheless, in order to obtain an agreement such as he gave me, many an aspiring poet would, I am sure, overlook all dubious factors, including the face-creams.

True, there were several peculiarities about my second collection of short poems, Shadows on a Wall. The least was that the binder, evidently running out of cloth or wishing to get rid of some scraps, completed various copies in different shades of blue and brown. Another peculiarity, which likewise troubled me but little, sprang from Sakele’s theory that no poem should occupy more than one page; in consequence of this unique idea, which would have run into difficulties in the case of Locksley Hall or The Ancient Mariner, a sequence of three sonnets was crowded into page 27 in minute unspaced eight-point type, whereas most of the poems were printed in amply spaced ten-point. But what really did annoy me was the typographical error in the poem, A Thousand Years From Now. Preceding the first line, “Above the ruins that were once New York,” these irrelevant words from another poem appear: “Whose blade was sharp and strong.”

I was sure that, whatever mistakes may have escaped my proofreading eyes—and many have escaped them, before and since—such an intrusion would have glared at anyone not wholly blind. And I was not at all consoled when a friend, commenting on the error, assured me that some day this flaw would make the book all the more valuable—as a collector’s item. If there is any logic in this reasoning, I ought to regret that the book did not commend itself to collectors by more disfigurations, and more serious ones.

The title of the collection, which was never one of my favorites, was supplied by the opening quatrain:

Our lives are shadows cast along a wall

By writhing flames that wave-like rear and fall.

The shadows deepen, and the flames droop low;

The embers smolder, and the shadows go.

I quote this not as anything I take pride in, but on the contrary, because it is something I should not be disposed to write today. It represents a pessimistic—and, I believe now, a shallow view which I was inclined to take sometimes in my brooding earlier days. I believe now, and believe profoundly, that there is more to life than the leaping and subsiding of flames and of the shadows they throw on a wall; but the fact that I could once have written these lines, and even picked them as the title poem of a collection, strikes me as an indication of the extent of the changes that have overtaken some of my general views during a period when my ideas as to poetry and the making of poetry have been little altered.

CHAPTER

TWELVE

The Depression, the Sea,

and the Redwoods

The great worldwide depression, beginning in 1929, cast few immediate visible reflections in poetry. I was but one of many who had no idea of letting our crumbling economic foundations undermine their poetic foundations. Like others, I continued writing verse, gratified whenever any magazine saw the light clearly enough to open its doors to me.

The names of some that did open their doors—The Bookman, The Independent, The World Tomorrow, Shards, The Wanderer, etc.—read like a list of the bygone and forgotten. But even then, as more recently, I sent a majority of my offerings to the metropolitan newspapers. And why? First, as a matter of convenience. The typing of poems, the keeping of records, the very selection of manuscripts to send, require more time and effort than you would suppose. And when one is preoccupied with multitudes of duties, it is sometimes impossible to find time for repeated submissions—particularly as manuscripts, when they come back, are usually dogeared, soiled, dented with paper clips, or even burned by cigarettes, though not many of them may suffer the fate endured by one of my book manuscripts, which was dropped down an elevator shaft. In most cases, poems must be retyped: that is, unless one wishes to say to the editor, in effect, “Others didn’t think these worth keeping, but maybe you’re an easier target.”

Because of such difficulties, the poet naturally submits where his chances are greatest. And if his chances are, let us say, anywhere from about twenty-five to ninety-eight per cent or more with newspapers where his work is known, but perhaps no more than two or three per cent with large magazines that use but few poems and hence reject more, the decision may be automatically made for him. In the course of the years, I contributed literally hundreds of poems to the New York Sun (a luminary that, unfortunately, has long gone out), while the editors of the Times and other papers were very receptive.

You may say, of course, that newspaper publication is ephemeral—come today, gone tomorrow! And this no doubt is true, but it is likewise true to a degree of all periodical publication. And, besides, there is always the possibility of reprints; and many people will clip the poems they like and preserve them for years. I do not, in any case, share the supercilious, the almost snobbish contempt which some poets profess toward newspaper publication; no means of distribution that reaches a wide general audience should be disdained. And knowing what I do of poets, and of literary sour grapes, I may perhaps be pardoned for wondering if those who cry out loudest may not have built their scorn on a deep foundation of rejection slips.

But to turn back to the depression era. During this very period my own work, as if perversely ignoring the world’s dejected state, burst forth in new veins, and with a character which, in my own biased opinion, it had not had before—a character that arose largely from my new contacts with nature.

To begin with a transient phase, there was my response to the sea during a particular voyage—a voyage whose exceptional circumstances were directly concerned with the depression. There are millions who will never forget how President Roosevelt, almost immediately after taking office in 1933, closed the banks of the country, and thereby averted national catastrophe. There are also millions who will remember how, even if they had money in theory, they had none in practice except what their pockets contained, since they could not draw upon their bank accounts. That such a situation, with all its painful accompaniments, could have had any connection with the writing of poetry, and particularly of poetry of the sea—this, surely, would seem among the most fantastic of impossibilities. Yet the connection, at least in my own case, did exist.

It happened that Flora and I had elected March of that very year for a badly needed vacation, and decided upon the extravagance of a cruise into southern waters. We had reserved, but still had not paid for, accommodations on the Swedish liner Kungsholm, and were expecting to leave sometime in the second week of the month ... when lo! the bombshell exploded. The banks faced us with shut doors! For all practical purposes, we were penniless! I remember counting all our available cash, which came to no more than twenty dollars. As for paying for the tickets—that was impossible; checks could not pass through the clearing house, and therefore, for the time being, were worthless. Under these circumstances, most travelers did the obvious, and cancelled their passages. But Flora and I did not quite so easily give up our precious vacation; I telephoned the steamship line, and was informed, to my surprise, that the Kungsholm would sail at the scheduled time; the company would accept my check in payment of our passage; and would cash any further checks for any reasonable amounts so that we might have pocket money en route.

Flora and I, accordingly, were among the passengers—the very few passengers—who stood staring shoreward from the Kungsholm on that bitterly cold morning when she sailed. The vessel, a capacious liner of around 30,000 tons, was all but deserted; it was possible to stroll completely around the promenade deck without encountering a soul. And this, though it did not make for sociability, was ideal for poetry; one could read and muse and dream, undisturbed as if one were the steamer’s sole owner, while day after day she made her way across the glorious cobalt-blue Caribbean. I remember that my almost constant companion was A. E.’s Collected Poems; and the lyrical and mystical mood of these verses helped to put me into the right state of mind for writing. The fruit of the voyage, therefore, was a series of Sea Sketches, eleven of which were to appear in my book The Merry Hunt. The mood of these poems, though no two are alike, may be illustrated by the opening of the ninth of the sequence:

A sadness rises in my breast,

I cannot answer how nor why,

When, low against a shoreless sky,

A ship goes down into the west

Beneath the day’s red closing eye.

Slowly it turns from dusk to dark,

With dwindling masts and hull a-gleam,

And, where the firelit hazes stream,

Fades in the vastness, spark by spark,

And passes softly as a dream....

Such stanzas can be written only in a mood of detachment. And detachment is not possible amid the chatter of crowds and the riot of merrymaking. Therefore I have always held that the great depression, culminating in the national financial disaster that forced the closing of the banks, was responsible for something seemingly so remote from economic affairs as my lyrics of the sea.

But deeply as the sea has moved me, my poetry found richer sustenance in the great earth-world of growing things, of hills and mountains, forests and streams. These, ever since I have come to know them, have seemed my natural domain; more than once, coming west on the train after a long stay in New York, I have glowed at my first glimpse of the great snow-line of the Rockies as at the sight of approaching home. Strangely, though I lived in a mountainous state, I did not know the mountains in childhood—not until, just before my seventeenth birthday, I registered as a student at Berkeley, and almost immediately headed for the hills, and took long walks, companioned or alone—though more often alone—to the far-looking eminence of Grizzly Peak and its rolling neighbors.

But while these invigorating strolls did result in some attempts at poetry, nature reserved her greatest gifts until the years beginning with 1930, when Flora and I came every summer to Mill Valley (where we finally settled in 1938). Our daily routine, enforced only by our own desires during those charmed months when we were free from the grind of a great city, was ideal for verse-writing. Nearly every morning, after two or three hours which I devoted to various writing tasks, Flora and I would set out with a bag containing a lunch of sandwiches and fruit, one or more books, and a second bag holding paper, pens, and pencils. For an hour or two we would wind in fog or sunlight or beneath the shadow of leaves along one of the many trails looping among the redwoods or across the bush-grown slopes to Muir Woods or to some point high on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais, where we might have lunch in some sheltered ferny grotto to the purling music of clear waters, or stare across wide vistas of tawny hill and blue sea and bay, or up at the two-hundred-foot towers of the sequoias, with their cinnamon-brown boles and down-slanting scented limbs. The clear exhilaration, the shining joy of those walks, is something I have tried, perhaps not successfully, to put into verse. And the many sights and sounds of the wayside offered material for poetry—a dragonfly, a crested bluejay, a crawfish in a stream, a water Strider, a mountain flower, a rock, a weed, a redwood grove.

My poems of the woods, in the vast majority of cases, were written in the woods, with my eyes on the objects described. Many a day, while Flora sat not many feet off with a book or with pen and letter paper, I lay stretched out beneath the trees, in a state of relaxation in which I was as close as possible to being unaware of my physical being; and let the lines of a poem form themselves in my mind—lines which I would never put down until the complete composition had come to me. Whatever the quality of the resulting verses, I know that I could reach into depths rarely if ever plumbed in the city, and could write with an undistracted absorption that made it possible to call upon the inmost reserves of my being.

Among the products of those summer strolls, I number the lyrics in Songs of the Redwoods, and most of the poems of nature in subsequent books. In those poems there is a simplicity that may be deceptive, a simplicity my earlier work had not always possessed, as when I express my gratitude and relief at returning to nature:

I have been long an exile from the sod,

The firm gray earth that dusty feet may tread,

The earth where one may lay a tired head

As on the lap of God.

My sense of the timelessness of the woods and hills, in contrast to the impermanence of man, is expressed in various offerings, as in the lyric from Green Vistas, beginning:

The woods shall not be lonely

When man has slipped away,

Leaving no token, only

Dark timbers that decay,

and in the sonnet that opens:

These hills, where silence with her ancient humming

Speaks to the green-plumed ridge and picture-sky,

Echo no creeds of getting or becoming,

No Parliaments that shout, no men that die.

Amid the gratifying vastness of nature, I have often had the sense of the loss of personal identity in a greater, more meaningful identity:

Firm-pillowed on the earth, with head to grass,

And all the hot sky arching over me,

Almost I seem to merge with the great mass

Of root, and rock, and pinnacle, and tree.

Almost I seem to lose the “I,” the one,

And blend with currents of the bush and stóne,

And with the flowing air, the soil and sun,

And be no more self-clouded and alone.

The reader will, I hope, bear with me for thus quoting my own verses, since these lines express the nature of my experience and the sources of my poetry much more vividly than my prose could do.

For eighteen successive summers, during some of which my time was absorbed by long poems—from 1930 to 1947—Flora and I took those long and stimulating, almost daily walks into the hills; in the latter years we were accompanied by our romping black-tan-and-white toy shepherd dog, “Sheppie,” herself the unwitting source of more than one poem. Only with our removal to a home higher in the hills and further from the hiking trails did our regular pilgrimages to the woods come to an end; and then my poems of nature, while not ceasing, became much less frequent.

There is today, I realize, a movement away from poetry of nature—a movement only to be expected in a world which is itself withdrawing from nature, a world of concrete strips and macadamized landscapes, a world of super-highways that rip down the wilderness as a gardener pulls out a weed, a world of power-madness symbolized by the bulldozer that slashes out the very soil and makes deserts of once-blossoming fields and green hillsides. What communion with nature can be expected by the worried dweller in an apartment house, who sees nature at most for two or three weeks a year through the windshield of a sixty-mile-an-hour car on a six-lane freeway, or in the overcrowded camps of one of our national parks? How much of nature is observed by the dweller among the skyscrapers of New York, Chicago, Houston, or St. Paul? How much of nature even among the methodically trimmed lawns and neatly curving concrete roads of our suburban districts? Lovers and viewers of nature there may still be, but they are a dwindling minority. And that is why city sophisticates, bleary-eyed with gazing at neon lights and television screens, increasingly tend to scoff at poetry of nature as something unreal, unfelt, sentimental, or derivative; they do not realize that no man has the right to deny another man’s experience, nor that in a world where color-blindness was the rule, the majority would consider themselves wise for mocking the viewers of rainbowed tints.

But poetry of nature is real, and will continue to be real, because it is built upon realities that antedated man and will no doubt outlast him; we can no more forbid it by critical mandate than we can proscribe poetry of joy or sorrow, religion or love. What we have a right to ask of the poet of nature, as of all writers, is that the impulse behind his work be genuine; that the poems be based upon actual experience, actual observation, actual feelings, and not be drawn from his readings of other poets. But whether or not he is able to communicate the impressions that come to him, whether his incentive is equalled by his skill, or whether his message is acceptable or even understandable—these are questions to be decided by that great eventual arbiter to whose judgment all creators must yield themselves.

CHAPTER

THIRTEEN

Year of Miracles

Probably for most of us, certain years are more eventful than half a dozen others. Such a year, in my own case, was 1933—a year notable particularly for its poetic happenings. It was in 1933 that Flora and I obtained our little four-room cabin among the redwoods of Mill Valley—a log-walled, garden-surrounded cottage, with the great sequoias forming a wall of protection in front, and maples and a giant mountain laurel and an ever-flowing stream in the rear. This house, originally built as a summer home, was procured at a price that now seems impossibly low, but was to repay us in blessings for years to come; and was to open the way to our eventual removal to California, where it would be a fountainhead of inspiration, a perfect place in which to write, think, and breathe poetry.

The year 1933, also, saw the appearance of my Songs of the Redwoods, which was not entirely devoted to the redwoods, but did pay its respects to those great trees, “Close-massed as brothers in some mystic rite, / With prayerful heads that search the blue unseen.” The publisher was Arthur H. Chamberlain, who ran “Overland-Outwest Publications” in conjunction with the revived Overland Monthly, of which he was the editor, and into which he vainly tried to breathe new life. I had never met Chamberlain prior to the acceptance of my book, but was to meet him many a time afterwards, and was to number him among my friends until his death sometime in the forties. I can still picture him clearly: a small, slight figure, gray-haired and thin-faced, with an overflowing, singularly ingratiating smile as he hobbled forward to greet me in his hotel in San Francisco (he suffered from a chronic foot complaint). Chamberlain was one of those gentle, lovable souls who are willing to embrace the world in the circle of their confidence and affection; he was also, like other magnanimous persons I have met, the hatcher of rather grandiose undertakings, as when he planned to resurrect the Overland as a large national literary magazine, offered to bring me into the scheme as partner and co-editor, circulated a handsome prospectus, and failed—as was almost preordained—because we lacked funds to put into the project and because no financier could be induced to risk scores or hundreds of thousands of dollars in the interests of literature.

The year 1933, again, marked the launching of my most ambitious poem. Having gone to Mill Valley for the summer (this year we had come early, at the end of May), I had begun a series of character sketches in sonnet form, which turned out to be of indifferent quality, and were eventually discarded. But one day, while I was still engaged on the series, a message came to Flora by automatic writing—a method which she had been employing for several years, and which, no matter what one’s theories as to its source, has produced some extraordinary results. “Tell your mate to discontinue the child’s play he is now engaged on,” the message said in effect—I cannot quote it word for word, but distinctly recall its import. “There is a bigger work waiting for him, if he will but reach out and find it.”

How was that possible? I wondered. What bigger work could be waiting for me? Was the message not merely the product of my wife’s subconscious imagination? Yes, perhaps this was the explanation; even now, I cannot prove the contrary; it may be that the message had put me into the frame of mind to look for some other theme, and that this accounts for the new train of ideas. In any case, something strange and novel did overcome me an evening or two later as I stood on the porch of the barnlike rickety old house we had rented for a short while before moving into our redwood cabin. It was a weirdly beautiful night; and the incoming sea-fog, flowing across the redwood-clad slopes, threw luminous witches’ shawls about a moon that was near its full. As I stared at the swift-changing fantastic scene, the plan for a poem leapt into my mind—a poem of epic proportions, in which the present, past, and future of man might be surveyed. The whole hatched itself full-born, almost without effort; the outline of the entire work had come to me before I stepped back into the house.

And thus it was that I began my most elaborate poem, The Pageant of Man. Several months more than two years were to pass before its completion; the whole of three summers would be given to the project, in addition to all the time I could find during the rest of the year while engaged in other types of writing (though the better part of the work, in every sense of the term, was written in California). I did not at first realize how much work lay ahead; I was to pass endless hours in revising; and was to type the whole of the 11,000 lines three times before I was satisfied to write Finis. On the other hand, there was compensations; I can hardly describe the expansive feeling that comes from contact with higher and wider planes of being, while panoramas of wonder and pathos and glory spread out before one on a many-colored tapestry. From the opening passage, this feeling never ceased to possess me:

For half of man’s allotted years and more

I ranged the highways of this worried earth

Like some long pilgrim from a distant shore,

Baffled by men of foreign speech and birth.

I scarcely seemed to share

The fires, the swords and fevers of my land,

Was blinded when they saw, and saw when they were blind.

Because rhyme has real and sometimes invaluable advantages, and because blank verse tends to descend to the level of prose—as a reading of some of our best poets will convince you—I had decided to rhyme the poem throughout. But since I wished to express a great variety of themes and moods and to avoid the rigidity of any one pattern, I aimed to employ lines of varying lengths, and to let the rhymes fall wherever they best suited my purpose. Thus, while not sacrificing the advantages of rhyme, I would have almost unlimited freedom and flexibility. This method, while it had been used by others in occasional shorter poems, was, I believe, an innovation in a poem of epic length. And it has therefore always seemed to me that The Pageant of Man might be called experimental in technique—experimental not in the sense of going back to Adam and starting the art of poetry all over again, but in building in unexplored directions upon known and tried devices.

All this, to be sure, will not interest those who maintain that the day of the long poem is over—those who hold that, in this hurdy-gurdy age of motor fever, television monomania, and the wear-and-tear of grab-and-get, we no longer have time for verses of more than fifteen or twenty lines if even that. For the proponents of such views, poems of fifteen or twenty lines are doubtless too long (by fifteen or twenty lines). Yet it may be that the very furor and distractions of the age highlight the need for long, contemplative works in which the mind may find repose and the spirit may refresh itself at fountains old as time.

But to return to 1933. The spring of that year brought me still another poetic event which, in the course of the decades, has had repercussions upon many another verse-writer.

Occasionally, as I have mentioned, a friend and I had discussed the possibility of starting a poetry magazine, though our talks had never reached the stage of serious intention. But it was quite otherwise in the case of a man who came to me with a proposition early in 1933; for reasons that will be obvious and because he still moves in the publishing world (when I last heard of him, he was connected with a large subsidy house), I will not give his actual name, but will christen him Melvin J. Post. He was a thin-faced, wily-looking man, with something just a little hungry in his aspect; our acquaintance had begun in 1932, when his small firm published, in book form, at its own expense, a sequence of forty of my sonnets, The Enduring Flame (sonnets that, revised and reduced in number to thirty, were reprinted years later in my book of selected poems, Garnered Sheaves). Though I do not know how many copies Post bound and distributed, and though this project, like most poetic ventures, was fruitful neither in money nor in fame, I had cause to be grateful to him—what poet is not grateful to the man who has opened new paths for him amid the great world of print? Therefore, when he came to me with his project, I was receptive.

The idea, he told me, was to start a poetry magazine, one of national scope, which would mark a milestone in its field. He would be the publisher, and assume all the financial responsibility; and he hoped that I would officiate as editor. The thought did, I must confess, appeal to me, though the position, like most tasks in the poetic world, was to be without benefit of a salary. However, a question thrust itself upon me. If I was to be the editor, I must really be the editor; I must formulate the policy, and must decide the contents of the magazine beyond possibility of contradiction. Would Mr. Post agree? Definitely! stated Mr. Post. He would control the publishing end, and I would be the editorial Lord Absolute. Under such circumstances, the arrangements were quickly made. Post and I held several conferences, at which plans were threshed out: the magazine was to be a quarterly, for which he accepted my suggested title, Wings; and the first issue would contain thirty-two pages in addition to covers, and would be printed on a good grade of heavy book paper. All that remained, therefore, so far as the editor was concerned, was to plan the various departments, and obtain contributions.

In the case of a long-established magazine, contributions flow in, sometimes with embarrassing profusion; but not so with an unborn periodical, which no one has ever heard of before. Therefore I wrote to friends and acquaintances in the poetic world, and obtained suitable poems from Witter Bynner, David Morton, and other established poets, as well as from a number who were still to earn their laurels. I also planned a prose section; applied to publishers for books for review; and wrote an editorial of about three pages setting out the policy of the magazine, in addition to a note on Reviews and Reviewers, and a five-page article, the first of a series on Neglected Poets (the author chosen in this case was Arthur O’Shaughnessy). Finally my labors were completed, and I turned all the material over to the publisher, who had been advertising the forthcoming magazine by means of circulars. By now it was early March, and I was ready to leave on that Caribbean cruise already mentioned; upon my return sixteen days later, the magazine would be awaiting me.

At the scheduled time I returned, but the magazine was not awaiting me. With vague and all too justified premonitions, I telephoned Mr. Post, who assured me that an oversight must have occurred; Wings was indeed out, and copies should have been sent me—he would put some immediately in the mails; I should receive them next day.

Mr. Post was as good as his word—the copies did reach me next day. But what a blow as I took them out of their envelope! There are, as we all know, some shocks that cannot be absorbed all at one stroke. Those pale-blue covers, printed in dull black and looking like a drug store’s wrapping paper—were they actually the covers of my Wings? And what had happened to the part of the magazine between the covers? The least was that the paper was thinner than Post and I had agreed upon, and the type smaller, making certain portions and particularly the prose difficult to read. But how had the poems come to be printed with such originality?—sonnets divided after the seventh line, and four-stanza poems with no divisions at all? And how had it happened that our stipulated thirty-two pages had shrunk to twenty-two?

A swift survey of the contents told me that Post had omitted six of the eight book reviews (a fact more painful to me than a series of needle thrusts, since I had assumed a responsibility to one or two authors, and had obtained their books under promise of comments on the work). And as if to add insult to injury, the Neglected Poets had been still further neglected, and had been left out, along with the editorial note setting forth the reviewing policy of the magazine.

My fury was slow in dying down as I contemplated the sadly clipped Wings. After all I had expected, after all the labor I had given to that first issue, I felt compromised and betrayed. But two things, amid all the confusion, were luminously clear. The first was that Mr. Post’s motives for cutting down the magazine had been financial rather than literary. And the second was that, by deleting material without my knowledge or consent, he had himself been acting as editor, and therefore had violated his agreement. Moreover, in beginning our association with this gross breach of his word, he had proved that the two of us could never harmonize. Therefore the sooner I disconnected myself from him, the better.

But to disconnect myself would not be easy. I was weighed down with obligations—obligations to the contributors who had confided their poems to me, to the authors whose books I had promised to review, and to the subscribers (an unknown number, aside from several of my friends) who had sent in their dollar a year, perhaps in part because of the belief that I was to be the editor. If I were merely to resign, and leave all these persons to the tender attentions of Mr. Post, I would be betraying them, almost as he had betrayed me. However, I had no desire or intention to resign. The fault, in the maimed and mutilated version of Wings that lay before me, had not been mine; therefore, if there was to be any resigning, let it not be on my part.

After a sleepless night, I rushed down to the offices of the Authors’ League, whose representative, upon deliberation, informed me that I had some legal rights—yes, undoubtedly I had, though unfortunately they were not worth asserting. Then, at wits’ end, I telephoned Mr. Post; and he, obliging and amiable as always, consented to visit me on a specified evening. I do not know just how much intimation he had of what was in my mind; but when he arrived, it was with profuse apologies for the curtailment of the magazine, which, he said, had been unavoidable owing to a temporary financial embarrassment which he was suffering. I reminded him, in reply, of my own embarrassment in regard to a broken contract, and broken promises to authors. And I proposed that, since he was embarrassed financially and I was embarrassed editorially, he resign to me all rights to the magazine. This demand he at first violently resisted; but two hours later, after one of the stormiest sessions of my life, he had capitulated on every point. And before leaving my home that evening, he had put his signature to an agreement. I have managed to unearth my copy, typed on my private letterhead, and dated March 31, 1933:

- 1. Whereas the Editor agrees to undertake the financial control and management of the magazine known as “Wings, A Quarterly of Verse,” the Publisher agrees to relinquish all property and other rights in the said magazine and all claims against it and to turn over to the Editor the full and unqualified right of publishing said magazine, and furthermore,

- 2. The Editor agrees that the Publisher shall retain all funds hitherto turned over to him for subscriptions. But it is specifically understood that all moneys turned in to the Publisher henceforward, will be turned over by him to the Editor, and that all subscription lists held by the Publisher will be turned over to the Editor.

- 3. The Editor agrees to discharge all obligations to subscribers, and to relieve the Publisher of all responsibility to such subscribers.

There was, I thought, a measure of justice in permitting the publisher to retain all sums theretofore received for subscriptions, since he had made a considerable financial outlay. And there was, besides, the practical consideration that the amounts received were certainly not large, and that by no conceivable means, short of an undesired lawsuit, could I have forced Mr. Post to part with them.

What was I planning now that the magazine—or, rather, the half-born magazine—was exclusively my own? My one clear intention was to reissue the first number as I had originally conceived it; beyond that, I had vague ideas of continuing publication as long as seemed practicable. But that Wings would still be printed, with unswerving regularity, ten years later, twenty years later, twenty-five years later; that a total of many tens of thousands of copies would be distributed during this time, that contacts would be established with poets and poetry lovers in many lands—these were possibilities that never for a moment occurred to me.

My immediate task now was the publication of the second version of Volume I, Number 1, which I wished to distribute to all who had received the first edition, as well as to newspapers and libraries, and as sample copies to all poets and lovers of poetry whose addresses I could obtain. A thousand copies in all were to be printed—truly, a formidable number, though actually all but a handful would be sent out, and even this handful would be reduced by requests that would come in for years to come.

What, however, did I know about publishing a magazine? Very little—nothing, in fact, aside from what I had learned during my disillusioning experience under Mr. Finnegan on the Overland. Here, indeed, was a case of the tyro leaping in where experienced men might have feared to tread. I did not even know any printer, and was not at all familiar with printing methods; but at this point, as I must record to Mr. Post’s credit, my erstwhile partner on Wings came to the rescue by putting me in touch with his own printer (whom I was to employ only for the first issue), and also voluntarily stepped over to the new editorial office—in my apartment—in order to give me some valuable pointers when I made up the issue.

I wish that I could add that he was equally helpful in all other respects. Weeks later, and in fact months later, an occasional letter to the following effect was to arrive: “Dear Editor: A long while ago I sent your business office a dollar for a subscription, and have never received a copy. What has happened?” Unfortunately, I could have answered what had happened. The “business office,” before the time of our final agreement, had been Mr. Post’s establishment; and later, when any stray dollars reached him, he had presumably been too preoccupied to remember to turn them or the subscribers’ names over to the new editor. In all such cases, of course, I would put the person on the list without further charge; but I was never to know how many failed to make a report.

In any event, the reconstructed first issue did appear, with a cover design contributed by my friend Ignace M. Ingianni, and with all the material originally intended; glancing at it today, I see that it contrasts most favorably in appearance with the earlier edition. For a long while I was busy answering letters from subscribers (though subscribers were still far from numerous) who wished to know why they had received two quite different-looking copies of the same issue.

In the first number, I set forth the goal of the magazine:

... to achieve its full power and effectiveness ... poetry must have an audience schooled to receive it—and it is precisely here that the modern world fails most signally, and that a magazine such as Wings may play its most beneficial role....

So far as possible, Wings will devote itself ... to the encouragement of the poetic spirit; it will provide a medium for the publication of the best poetry, and the best poetry only, regardless of the name or reputation of the author; it will open a critical arena for views and reviews on subjects pertaining to its special field....

But more significant, perhaps, was the statement which appears on page 1, and has been reprinted in every subsequent issue: “Wings is an independent poetry magazine, without patrons or outside supporters.” Unless the magazine was independent, it seemed to me, it would be valueless; Wings, whose birth-throes had witnessed a struggle for independence, had better go down with colors flying than capitulate and survive in bondage. It is understandable, of course, that many little magazines should seek patrons, should even find patrons indispensable; subscription lists, for such journals, are invariably small; advertising revenues are slight or non-existent; and unless there is some outside financial source, the printer cannot be paid. But all this, if unavoidable, is highly unfortunate. Very few human beings are so constructed that, having given with a free hand, they will not expect some return: even though Mr. X has provided funds with benevolent intentions, he may happen to remember a niece or a cousin or a grandson who has written some “wonderful poetry”—and how many editors would be over-scrupulous about fine points of literary quality when a large, deeply desired annual donation is hanging in the balance? The only way to avoid such problems, it impressed me, was to avoid donors and patrons. And if the magazine could not exist without such benefactors—then let it be decently interred.

Another point—which I mention only because I have frequently been questioned about it—was my decision to publish none of my own verse in Wings. This decision was not made because of false modesty, or because none of my work was available; the reason was that, when there is competition for space, the editor who picks his own poems is in effect acting as a judge between himself and other aspirants—with results hardly likely to err in favor of the others. With prose the case was different; no great quantity of competitive prose was ever to be submitted—and, besides, it is the function of an editor to contribute articles setting forth his views and policies.

These were, of course, but preliminary considerations. When I embarked blithely on the new venture in the spring of 1933, how much I could not foresee!—the long, slow, wearisome ordeals of manuscript-reading, and the eye-wearing strain of proofreading! the wrestling with problems of make-up, when forty-six lines of type would not squeeze themselves into a forty-three-line space! the letter-writing, the never-ceasing letter-writing; the answering of questions; the acknowledgments of courtesies; the commenting on submitted poems! the keeping of records; the typing of envelopes; the sending out of the hundreds of copies of each issue! But while much of this was tedious and irksome, how much would be gratifying!—the contacts with other poets, by letter and in person! the occasional unearthing of promising new talent! the satisfaction of exerting an influence (a good influence, I naturally hoped, even though a small one) amid the turmoil, the striving, and the confusion of the modern poetic scene! It may, indeed, be that I had come down with a form of insanity, which psychiatrists have not yet analyzed; but if so, it was a form of insanity that could not only be wearing and costly, but at times could add considerably to the variety and even to the enjoyment of life.

CHAPTER

FOURTEEN

Trials and Rewards of an Editor

Men of experience will tell you that nothing is much more difficult than launching a new periodical. With a large staff, persistent efforts, capable planning, and an ample budget, including immense sums for advertising, it is sometimes possible to put a new magazine into the field. But what, when no staff at all is available, and no funds for advertising except through occasional circulars? This, in general, is the situation for all poetry magazines, at least those not backed by bountiful grants; and Wings, therefore, represented the rule and not the exception. Of course, no poetry magazine aims at corralling its readers by the millions; hundreds of subscribers look as numerous to its publishers as hundreds of thousands would appear to the proprietor of a more popular sheet; and there is no thought of the vast business arrangements necessary for its larger cousins.

The distinction, however, runs even deeper than this, for whereas the profit motive rules in most periodicals, it does not apply at all for a poetry magazine. There is no profit motive, since there is no prospect of a profit—I would not say, “no possibility,” for I know that Wings, which for long periods has achieved the feat of breaking almost if not quite even, one year actually earned a surplus of $95.13. Of course, such a banner success is rare; and the publisher, not expecting much if anything but debts to be left when the year is over, must necessarily subordinate the profit motive to the as-little-loss-as-possible motive.

Having made this dire confession, I must go on to report that Wings was from the first an unexpected success. I say “unexpected,” for I had not known what to anticipate, and had listened just a little doubtfully to Flora’s prediction that the magazine would succeed. But let me point out that it seems to me that the idea of success has been grossly, vulgarly, ignorantly entangled in modern thought with the concept of financial gain: few of the great successes of history, from Confucius to Kant, and from Homer to Goethe, and Galileo to Einstein, and Gautama to Gandhi, are in any way memorable for monetary triumphs. Not that the motive behind a poetry magazine may be compared with the impulse that ruled any of these great figures, but that they all have at least one thing in common: their guardian star has been something other than money. The pecuniary status of a poetry magazine is, of course, irrelevant—irrelevant, that is, to anything but the owner’s pocket, a matter of no importance at all to the world at large. What is relevant is whether the effort has helped the cause of art or creation, whether it has broadcasted pleasure or inspiration, whether it has aided aspiring and worthy writers and given them a platform from which to be heard.

Before many issues of Wings were out, approving letters, often accompanied by subscriptions, were arriving from all parts of the country; and floods of contributions, many of them from persons I had never heard of before, began to be addressed to “Editor, Wings.” Not that the great majority were of much value; but how eagerly I pored through the piles, hoping to unearth the rare divine contribution! I will not say that my search brought to light any latter-day Milton, or any new Ode on a Grecian Urn or Ode to the West Wind; but many gratifying contributions were contained in those growing heaps of long envelopes, including poems that, I still believe, are of enduring value, though often the author was unknown and in some cases remains unknown.

I shall never forget, for example, the glow of discovery when Mary Cecile Ions, writing from Coral Gables, Florida, submitted to a Wings contest her twelve-stanza poem, Letter to the Dead in Spring, beginning:

Do not be fretful of your old repose

Though April sunlight warm your hearts’ dust through

And fragrance of the everlasting rose

Assail the grave and penetrate to you.

Who was Mary Cecile Ions? I do not know, except that she had graduated from the University of Alabama with Phi Beta Kappa honors, and subsequently taught English and French. But I cannot say what else she has accomplished, and in fact have seen little of her work. Nevertheless, the poem, which the judges agreed in putting first of all the submissions, has clung to my memory. I was gratified when the well-known British anthologist Thomas Moult confirmed our good opinion by reprinting it in The Best Poems of 1935; and ten years later, I had no hesitation in giving it a place in my own anthology, The Music Makers.

Or take the case of Otto Freund. Although he had contributed to various magazines, I had known nothing of him or his work until he began sending me, from Portland, Oregon, a series of poems of unusual depth and accomplishment. Rarely, for example, does one come across four lines with the finality of Requiescat, written in memory of John Barrymore:

Unanswered encores, rue, and requiems sung,

Forgetful dust, the turning of a page,

But still the voice of Hamlet rings among

The silent galleries and an empty stage.

Whole elegies are contained in the above; and whole volumes of grief are compressed in Heart Wound:

The wound is healed, but still the pain is there,

And stabs with anguish, like a sudden sword,

When sunlight feigns the spun gold of her hair,

Or music finds her lost voice in a chord.

With sorrow I report that Otto Freund has silently dropped out of the fold. One day, many years ago, he wrote me that he was leaving for the east; he did not mention any reason, nor give any forwarding address—and that is the last I have heard of him or his work, though I have never ceased to regret his disappearance.

Or consider Francis Vaughan Meisling. All that I know of him is that he was a journalist and foreign correspondent, who sent me a single poem from Los Angeles. And yet this poem, I Dreamt She Came, has a real lyrical quality—the sort that makes an editor feel that his labors have not been wholly in vain:

I dreamt she came as fire and as rose,

Fragrance and light, and leaning o’er my head

Whispered those burning words none other knows

And took between her hands my peaceless head;

And kissed. There was a movement in the air

As if the blossoms of the year had blown

Their petals and their odors round us there,

As I awoke, as I awoke alone.

Next my mind goes back to Celia Keegan, a Long Island girl whose work, as in the case of Miss Ions, I first noticed among the submissions in a contest, though I afterwards met her at a gathering of Wings contributors in my apartment in New York. She sent Wings some of the most poignant poems of love I can remember; I cannot forbear quoting the whole of Renunciation:

How more than blind the hooded fates to weave

So sere a skein; to wing two hearts with fire

Of ecstasy and melody ... then leave

To human wills the quenching of desire!

I did not hide love from your loving eyes,

Nor do I whisper nobly, “I will go,”

Then teach my lips such trite and songless lies

As, “Happiness will come through doing so.”

This way I give you up: Against the blades

Rebellion lifts in myriad array,

I raise a sword whose clean strength surges ... fades ...

And wins again ... till I have cut my way

Past you, and love, and toward Tomorrow’s mark

Go stumbling, stricken, blinded, through the dark.

Miss Keegan, like Mr. Freund, vanished suddenly from my ken, and likewise from that of some mutual friends, who heard their last from her about twenty years ago. Whither has she gone? To join the songbirds of last spring?

Then there was the case of Florence Wilson Roper, formerly of Petersburg, Virginia, but now deceased, whose poems had first attracted me in the pages of the Dallas verse magazine, Kaleidograph, and who won one of the annual book-publishing awards of that periodical. She too contributed many moving poems of love, and many reflective pieces, as in the sequence of five sonnets, Retrospect, with some exquisite lines, such as

Remembering! It has a pleasant sound

Like water falling softly over stone—

A phantom hand that holds with fleshless bone

The present, past and future firmly bound!

But I have set out to write a narrative, and not to compile an anthology, and cannot go on to quote other excerpts. In any case, the occasional discovery of such material, more than anything else, made me feel that Wings was indeed serving a purpose, and might be accounted a modest success.

Meanwhile, with the feeling of an inexperienced rider clutching at a balky steed, I was attempting to manage the new enterprise. The second and third issues were put forth in California, by a printer recommended by Arthur Chamberlain; but the following issues, during my remaining five years in New York and even for a time afterwards, all proceeded from the metropolis. But in New York, aside from Mr. Post’s connections, I knew no printer. I tried one who, due to an error, trimmed the magazine down so far as to give it a truncated appearance; I tried another, who inked the pages so badly that they were painful to read; and then one day, not knowing where to turn, I walked into the office of a small establishment in Washington Heights, the Artype Press, and made arrangements with its proprietor, Paul Grossman. Though picked merely by chance, he proved to be conscientious and capable, and did a good job so long as geographical considerations made it possible to leave the printing in his hands.

I need hardly add that our agreement provided for a price which, in these more expensive days, would hardly suffice for printing more than a few pages of Wings. Had present-day rates prevailed, I would have been blocked by unscalable walls, even before I started. And this makes me wonder as to the fate today of editors in approximately my former position. I should like to know just how the development of art, literature, and culture in general may be affected by our “higher” standards of living and the accompanying higher standards of inflation.

But let me go back to my problems as an editor. They were to be many, and seasoned with curious vicissitudes. Not a few of them, as I suppose is true for most editors, were to proceed from the daily mailbag, which was in a sense a grab-bag, since I never knew what I would pull out of it. In the course of the years, there were to be many sweet and beautiful letters, which I would value as among the chief compensations of an editor’s task; but there were also to be letters of various other types.

I will never forget, for example, the lady who mailed me a sentimental lyric on The Old Plush Sofa, and accompanied the manuscript with a strip of purple velvet. “I thought you might appreciate the poem better,” she obligingly wrote, “if you had a piece of the sofa before you.”

Again, there was the correspondent who, having sent me a page-long list of all the places where his work had appeared, from the Newtown High School Quarterback to the Green Plains Meteor, followed it two days later with an air-mail apology: one of his poems had not actually seen the light in the New Age Hardwareman, as he had absent-mindedly declared; it had blossomed forth in the New Era Hardwareman.

Another case, which also earned an editorial smile, was that of the verse-writer who wrote in from a small Canadian town. He hoped I would publish his poems, but if so, would I not kindly pick a nom de plume? The reason, he explained, was that he could not let it be known that he wrote poetry: he was one of his city’s policemen.

Then occasionally a would-be contributor has sent a letter of several single-spaced typewritten pages, or, worse still, in largely illegible handwriting, devoted to personal reminiscences interlarded with questions. As well as I could, I have usually answered the questions, if they pertained to poetry; but time and eye-power are limited—and more than once an oversight has brought me another letter, of almost equal length, in which I am properly reproved: “Dear Editor: You have not answered the question in the third paragraph of the fourth page of my last note....”

The editor of a poetry magazine, I soon discovered, is regarded as the chief clerk of a public bureau of consultation and criticism, whose duty is not only to answer questions, but to give advice, and comment on manuscripts—all, of course, absolutely without compensation (not even in gratitude, since frank criticism is likely to win one nothing but an enraged correspondent). To an extent, the editor is willing, even glad to accept the mantle laid upon his shoulders—but there are, unfortunately, limits to his endurance. Those limits are reached, for example, when he receives a bulky manuscript, accompanied by a note: “Dear Sir: I am sending you herewith Ruminations, an epic of 4,700 lines, some considerable parts of which I hope you will publish in your next issue. If not, will appreciate detailed criticism.”

Again, one’s patience is severely tested by a letter such as this:

Dear Mr. Editor: I am a subscriber and well-wisher. I have sent you poems several times, but do not hold it against you that you have returned them. Of course, poetry is only a sideline with me; my business is fire and casualty insurance. I have just written a book of 179 pages on my experiences in this line, and am mailing it to you under separate cover. Would appreciate your going over it, and correcting all the mistakes in grammar and style.

Ah, if these people would only realize that the editor is not only engaged in running a magazine, but incidentally is trying to earn a living!

Beyond all the above, there is the aspiring contributor who goes out of his way to find ingenious means of attracting attention. An occasional method is to send a poem (one such, received not long ago, was exactly two lines long) in a huge envelope by special delivery; this usually arrives just when the editor is in the middle of dinner, and does succeed in drawing attention to itself—though not always the attention that results in an acceptance. Again, there is the versifier who mails a poem on each successive day for two or three weeks. One does, indeed, note the fact that he exists, and even gets used to him in a way; one rather misses him when at length the daily submissions cease. But alas for the assiduous poet! he gets just the same attention as everybody else, and if he stands out in any way, it is as just a sort of amiable pest.

More common are the decorative means of attracting attention. One poet, invariably a lady, will adorn her manuscript with graceful water colors in pastel tints—all very pleasant to look at, but, unfortunately, not in the least improving the quite hopeless verses. Another rhymester will submit poems in lavender or purple ink on goldenrod-yellow paper; still another will send poems typed in a glaring red, or typed all in capitals, or oddly letter-spaced—all of which do, indeed, give the poems a unique appearance, though the authors seem not to realize that their chances of acceptance are not improved by anything that makes the work harder to read.

But these are minor matters, which I can pass over with a smile. There is, however, one type of letter that causes me to glare. It arrives periodically, and is usually worded about as follows:

Dear Editor: Enclosed find three poems, entitled Spring Flowers, April Sunshine, and First Love. Immediately upon acceptance of any of them, my subscription will follow....

I need only say that the poems Spring Flowers, April Sunshine, and First Love do not long clutter up the editorial office. Though I may be fiendishly eager for subscriptions, I am not quite so hungry for them as the correspondent evidently supposes. No, though I may be corrupt as old Boss Tweed himself, I am not to be tempted by bribes of one dollar. The author, by his supposed shrewdness, has insured an action I would not otherwise willingly take. Since I could not accept the poems without the imputation of having done so for ulterior motives, I have no choice but to return them without even a reading, and usually with a printed rejection slip.

In one of the several variations of the above letter, the author notifies me that he has just put out a book, and is sending it for review; immediately upon the appearance of the article, he will join the subscription list. He might be surprised to know that, after this letter, his chances for a review would be as great if the book were printed in Chinese.

Then there is the versifier—comparatively rare, it is true—who seems to imagine that a subscription dollar automatically provides a ticket of admission to the pages of the magazine. She (for I cannot recall any men who committed this particular indiscretion) begins with a fulsome letter of praise, telling how much the quarterly means to her, and how she would not be without it—no, not for the world. Accompanying the letter, is a dollar bill, and five or six poems. The dollar bill is accepted by the subscription department; the poems, being unworthy of acceptance, go back to the author, along with a polite note of thanks and regret. And thus the tempest is unleashed. By return mail, another letter arrives—one which, somehow, has lost the admiring tone of the earlier epistle:

Sir: What do you mean by sending my poems back? In your last issue, you published some poems that were not half as good as mine. Besides, better magazines than yours are glad to get my work So from now on I want nothing whatever to do with you. Return my dollar at once, and cancel my subscription.

Since it is worth more than the price to have the writer off the list, I do indeed return the dollar and cancel the subscription.

A less infrequent type of correspondent is the one who waits till the year’s end before making his feelings known. Then he vents his stored-up disappointment:

Dear Editor: I have just received a renewal notice. I am not renewing, and this is why. During the past year, I sent you six batches of manuscripts. They have all come back. That being the case, I am saving my subscription dollars for magazines that will print my work.

There is, of course, nothing for the editor to say in reply. But he cannot help asking himself why writers seem invariably to blame editors for the lacks in their own work; and he is inclined to wonder how many readers would be claimed by magazines such as Harpers, the Atlantic, and the Saturday Review if they were expected to rely upon the subscriptions of contributors.

The sad fact is that there actually are some poetry magazines that publish only subscribers’ poems; I know of one that, some years ago, promised to print one poem a year by every subscriber. Such magazines, which cannot possibly maintain any standards whatever, have apparently given certain verse-writers the idea that they should be taken as models. And the results have not always been happy for other periodicals, as will be seen not only from the examples given above, but from a letter which reached me just today from a writer who, though never published in Wings, began by lauding the magazine, and went on to say:

When I get ahead of several subscriptions obliged by recent acceptances, I will certainly add Wings to my wanted ones.

The thing I particularly note here is the word “obliged.” I can safely attest that no writer, whatever his complaints, has ever been able justly to use that word in connection with Wings.

Along with the pricks and prods of those who would like to see the editorial and subscription departments merged, there have been the problems of submitted manuscripts in general. One of the first duties of an editor, of course, is to say “No!”; after all, it is difficult to find room for all the available good material. But “No!” is at all times a painful syllable to utter; the editor knows what warmth, hope, and even devotion have gone into many of the poems, and what a chilling blow a rejection can be. And if this is normally true, there are times when “No!” literally sticks on the lips. One of those times is when manuscripts are submitted or a book is sent in for review by an old acquaintance or friend, a writer whom one especially likes, or to whom one feels a personal obligation. Nevertheless, “No!” must be said just as firmly in these cases as in others—though the after-effects are sometimes disheartening. Thus, I remember that some poems were once submitted by another editor, toward whom I felt warmly disposed, and who had, some years before, accepted some of my own work for a college publication. But his own verses were not good—and so what could I do but return them with a friendly note, meant to be disarming? I had thought that an ex-editor, even though an editor only in a small way, would understand, but perhaps he was moved by higher principles, beyond my comprehension. In any event, I know that when, sometime later, I had occasion to speak to him over the telephone, he suffered a sudden attack of amnesia in regard to my name.

Another time when it hurts one to say “No!” is when an expectant contributor has been submitting again and again, trying very, very hard to produce acceptable material. “Why, why do you not keep any of my work?” he may ask, plaintively. But can the editor help it if the writer has not mastered the problems of his craft? True, the editor can and does give hints and suggestions—at least, when the work seems promising. But there are many, very many cases in which hints or suggestions would be of no avail.

This brings me to the problem of criticism in general. Many contributors ask for it, and seem to look for it almost as a matter of course, as in the case of a letter (sent in with insufficient postage) in my current mail: “Enclosed please find copies of some poems. I do not necessarily expect that you would consider publishing any of them, but would appreciate criticism.” Unfortunately, if the editor heeded all the requests, he would not have time to eat or sleep. Even in the few cases in which he does attempt criticism, he proceeds at his peril—that is, when he deals with inexperienced writers (the “arrived” or professional author is invariably receptive to criticism). More than one beginner, having asked me for comments, has flared into fury upon receiving them, and has written in indignantly to put me in my place, assuring me, in effect, that I could not distinguish a poem from a potato. No wonder that editors become wary about criticizing!

Then there was the woman whose poem would have been acceptable except for one grossly inept word, for which it was easy to suggest a suitable substitute. Hence I wrote her, commending the poem, and returning it to her with the promise to accept it if it were changed as recommended. Back came the poem in an early mail, along with the author’s outraged assertion that her poems were put down just as God dictated them, and that to change a syllable would be sacrilegious. Of course, it is impossible to argue with God. And so the poem made its second return trip to the divinely inspired author. So far as I know, it has still not been shared with the reading public.

I shall never forget, likewise, the young man who, in the early days of Wings, made an impromptu and uninvited visit to my apartment, accompanied by a sheaf of poems, which he asked me to glance over. Being still greener than a cucumber, I took him at his word, and literally did glance over the material; a glance, in most cases, was all that was needed, since it is no more necessary to read all of a bad poem in order to know it is bad than it is necessary to swallow all of a bad apple in order to be sure it is not honey-sweet. But perhaps my speed of reading displeased the young author, or perhaps something in my expression was to blame (for I have never learned the art of the poker-face, a desirable acquisition for editors). Whatever the cause, he sprang to his feet, his cheeks flaming red; snatched the manuscript from my hand; and stormed toward the door. “If that’s how you read manuscripts, Mr. Coblentz—” was all he could sputter. Then, inarticulate with rage, he went stamping out, and slammed the door behind him. Since that day, I have made it a rule never, never to read a manuscript in the author’s presence.

And while on the subject of criticism, let me tell about Mr. Cooley. Who he was, I cannot say; I have never seen him, and do not even know if I spell his name correctly; all that I can say is that, during the fledgling days of Wings, he introduced himself to me by telephone as a native of the Bronx, and proceeded to read one of his poems, on which he solicited my comments. No one but a newcomer at editing, I am sure, would have given the comments: nowadays I would ask the writer to send the manuscript through the mails. However, I did yield to Mr. Cooley’s request, and thenceforth, unhappily, whenever he committed a poem, he would hastily telephone me. As his favorite time of composition was late at night, the telephone usually rang just as I was in the process of retiring; more than once, having no clairvoyant perception of who was at the other end of the line, I rushed out of bed, and hastily donned my dressing gown. But I was less elated than Cooley may have supposed when I heard his hearty voice, “I’ve just written another, and will read it to you!” Poor Cooley! I had then, as ever since, a great amount of sympathy for the creative fervor. But there were times when, yawning and hardly able to keep awake while he read some interminable bit of blank verse, I devoutly wished that the telephone had never been invented.

Another problem, affecting Wings in its early days, was connected with another magazine, an aviation monthly which went by the same name. Whether it antedated my publication I do not know, but I have an impression that it had existed before, had been discontinued, and had been revived after the establishment of my own magazine. Though neither periodical ever questioned the other’s right to use the name, both were put to much inconvenience—I know this from the sets of poems occasionally forwarded to me from the other Wings (which did not publish poetry), and from the long stories on flying experiences that sometimes added to my own mail, along with articles on subjects such as The Problem of Air-Cooled Engines and Projected Explorations of the Upper Stratosphere. Many years later, after the rival Wings had ceased to be, I still received an occasional letter inquiring in which issue we had published a discussion of High Octane Gasoline and Cargo Planes or Air Flight Records in the Southern Hemisphere.

As if such problems did not add sufficiently to life’s spice and variety, there was the recurrent dilemma of the racketeer. You would suppose that, in a field like poetry, where idealism is supposed to rule and the prospects for financial profit are slight, the racketeer would be as unknown as the hired assassin. But such, I discovered, was far from the case. In a page of short comments and news items entitled Wing Beats, I like to give publicity to new enterprises of possible advantage to poets; but it was always difficult to be sure whether or not a given project would actually be beneficial. And in the callow early years of the magazine, I had several unfortunate experiences.

One case was that of the publisher who announced a forthcoming anthology, for which he was seeking contributions. He mentioned several well-known poets who would be represented, and requested a brief notice, which I was constrained to grant. What he had neglected to say, however, was that while the well-known poets did indeed appear and of course were not asked to pay, the rank and file of the contributors were required to subscribe for half a dozen copies each, at four dollars a copy.

A similar scheme, for which I was repeatedly asked to give space, involved composers who set poems to music, as the basis for promised public concerts that were never held; and collected fees of about ten dollars for each selection. This, it must be said, was hardly more reprehensible than the action of the publisher who, also inviting a free notice, issued a Who’s Who in American Poetry; it turned out that this “indispensable directory,” aside from listing a few of the obvious leaders, acknowledged the importance only of bards who would dole out four dollars and seventy-five cents each for a copy. I fear that I smiled just a little wrily to discover that many devotees of the Muse, who “just could not afford” one dollar to support a legitimate enterprise, had apparently no hesitation about investing in rackets of this type.

But for unblushing chicanery, the publishers of the alleged Who’s Who were scarcely equal to a certain mid-Western authors’ review which solicited an exchange advertisement. As it claimed a considerable circulation and I knew of no good reason to distrust its statements, I thought it to my advantage to accept the advertisement—which announced that it would begin publishing poetry with its next issue, and would pay a specified sum. So far, so good! not only Wings, but six or eight other poetry magazines, ran the advertisement. And how deeply we were all to regret our rashness! Before long, our mailbags began to bear almost daily complaints; many readers had submitted manuscripts to the authors’ review—and invariably with the same result. One poem by each writer was accepted, but not by the magazine to which it had been submitted. The poem enjoyed the still more inviting fate of being kept for the Thornwall Anthology, a “beautiful volume” in preparation “on a cooperative basis”—which is to say that each contributor must cooperate to the extent of purchasing twelve dollars’ worth of copies.

I should add that the authors’ review, now long out of existence, never did publish or pay for any poem whatever.

CHAPTER

FIFTEEN

A Challenge to Giants

There are magazines whose policies are as devious as a river; there are others that, like the proverbial arrow, aim straight toward their destination. Certainly, it is no exaggeration to say that I have tried to keep Wings in the latter category, particularly with regard to the perennial controversy between traditional and “modernistic” verse. In this controversy Wings has played a part that some would call conservative, or even ultra-conservative—which is a little strange, in view of the fact that the editor is not in other things a conservative. He has sometimes wondered, also, whether the true conservative is not he who drifts with the crowd; whether, in a world where the vast majority proclaims itself in favor of “modernism,” the independent who stands out against “modernism” is not the actual radical.

I will not deny that in some ways the situation in contemporary poetry is deeply confused. But in other regards, everything has impressed me as pellucidly clear. First of all, it has always struck me that certain elements are necessary in poetry, in this age as in all others. One is the ingredient of music: “She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die,” has a musical sound, as much today as when Keats wrote it, and therefore has at least one of the qualities of poetry; but “She dwells with ash-cans—ash-cans by a brick wall,” has no more music than the thumping of a garbage truck. In much the same way, poetry creates, and always has created, a magic or suggestiveness which is not that of prose; and in this respect also the line about beauty qualifies, but that about the ash-can does not. And, finally, poetry—like all writing—should be as clear as the subject-matter and the skill of the writer make possible; which does not imply that the meaning must always stand out like a steel engraving, but that it must be as lucid as the theme and the author’s ability permit, and that murkiness must not be sought for its own sake.

These are, in brief, the principles that I have espoused in editorials and reviews in Wings ever since its first issue. But these principles, though they might seem simple and self-evident, run counter to the accepted mandates of the age, which have tended to abandon music, and to make poetry uninspiring as a cement mixer, and unclear as a fog-bank. And what do I mean by the “accepted mandates” of the age? I mean the mandates of the group in power—those who control the policies of our leading literary and sophisticated magazines, those who sit in authority in prize committees, those who act as poetry advisers for some of our major publishers, those who compile anthologies, and write articles and reviews for some of the more influential media. At no time have I denied that many of these are honest, capable, and convinced men; but it seems to me that not a few are bewildered, and ignorant of poetry, its nature and its history; not a few are but following the normal human tendency to embrace whatever happens to be fashionable, and commit the error of mistaking fashion and right.

Yet the fact is that much that is in style nowadays, and much that is generally called poetry, has none of the qualities by which poetry in past ages was recognized. Which majority, therefore, shall one be aligned with?—the great preponderance of all the poets and critics who have lived before our own century, or the few who within the past several decades have striven to undermine yesterday’s accumulated lore and skills? For my own part, I consider one thing self-evident: if “modernistic” critics and verse-writers are right in their dominant attitudes, then all of our famous predecessors, from Chaucer to A. E. Housman, were in error. But if all the latter were in error, that fact must be demonstrated by more cogent arguments than have yet been adduced.

Yet can it be that all the proponents of “modernism” are wrong? Before attempting to answer this question, let us ask whether history shows no other cases of mistaken majorities. What of the belief in witchcraft several centuries ago, when savants and nobles and common men alike, from King James I of England down to the most ignorant serving maid, were convinced believers in the reality of black magic? What of slavery, whose abolition, it was honestly believed by many a good man in England, America, and elsewhere, would bring inevitable ruin to the world? What of headhunting, ceremonial cannibalism, human sacrifice, widow-burning, and other dread rites, all of which were accepted by large masses and even fervently defended, in some cases in comparatively civilized lands? I do not, of course, mean to compare modernism in verse to any of these horrors; but I do wish to emphasize that mass acceptance of any theory, belief, or principle does not prove the validity of the doctrine.

And in the case of recent poetry, what do we find? That some, like Amy Lowell and John Gould Fletcher, came over to the new camp after unskillful efforts to write in the older forms; that others, like Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore, revolted against traditional verse without ever having shown that they could write it; that others again, such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, formed an entente cordiale of mutually expressed admiration; that still others, always ready to embrace the new, endorsed the “advanced” principles for the sake of showing themselves to be different and emancipated; that certain others, like “e. e. cummings” with his typical lines such as “goo-dmore-ning(en” and “sing thatthis is which what yell itfulls o,” performed the antics of circus clowns, and finding themselves taken seriously, performed still more bizarre antics; that many opportunists, of the sort who exist at all times and in every circle, joined the procession for the sake of personal advantage; that more and more bystanders trailed along out of fear or in order not to appear behind the times; and that the great majority, deeming themselves incompetent to judge and not daring to deny the word of authority, stood by in apparent acquiescence though actually in profound bewilderment and even in secret disgust.

Such, in a word, is my own interpretation of the rise of “modernism” in verse, and indeed in all the arts. And such has been the conviction behind the editorial policy of Wings. From the first, I realized that my stand was challenging giants. I realized that I might put myself under a personal cloud. But in the long run, all that counted was the truth, and the only truth I could defend was truth as it appeared through my own eyes. My judgment, like that of any human, might be blurred, distorted, or perverted; but such as it was, it was my own; it was all I had to go by, and it would have been despicable and cowardly to stand by and muffle the convictions burning within me. And what if I were to be penalized for speaking? In what period of history, and in what land, have men not been penalized for speaking? Not that I had any taste for martyrdom; but that I was convinced that the game of poetry, like every other game, was not worth playing except in one way. There may be those who can complacently accept whatever they believe to be the mood of the age, and adapt their style to that mood; but I must unhappily confess that I am not one of those pliable souls, and that I should hide my face in shame even were the high honor of a Pulitzer Prize or a Nobel Prize to come to me for work that I knew to represent a compromise with standards that were not my own, and a truckling to mere vulgar acceptability.

On the road which I have followed, followed perhaps with a mulish intractability but certainly without wide meanderings, there have been both penalties and compensations. The penalties have been those of shut doors—and of occasional abuse and misrepresentation. Once or twice a small “modernistic” magazine has honored me with a long article in which my purposes, principles, and methods were entirely misstated. And more than once a larger magazine has lent its pages to the controversy; in one case the writer even descended to language of the gutter in counter-attack when logic evidently failed him. And in other cases, as in Randall Jarrell’s widely circulated Poetry and the Age, my statements are subjected to a deliberate or unconscious distortion that make them look about as a man’s image would appear through a convex mirror. I do not wish to harp upon this point, but let me give an example. Mr. Jarrell, referring to the preface of my anthology The Music Makers, reports that I say that any poem must be, among other things, “easy to understand.” This could logically be taken to mean that I think that every poem should be on the level of Mother Goose; and if I meant anything like that, I would be even more of a fool than nature has made me. But what I say is the following:

Poetry may have both a satisfying rhythm and a touch of magic and yet not be completely satisfying if it be without a third factor, which for want of a better term we may call clarity. This is not to say that it need have the simplicity of a kindergarten exercise; complex themes by their very nature require complexities of utterance, yet since the purpose of all expression is communication, whether of a thought, a mood or an emotion, the consummate writer in any field will phrase his messages as clearly as is consistent with their thorough presentation.

There are more ways than one of damaging a reputation; and not the least effective is by misstating a writer’s position so as to make him appear silly. I should add that Mr. Jarrell’s publisher, though a man of the highest reputation in his profession, and though writing me that “I certainly would not want any reputable person like yourself to feel that a book published by us did him substantial injustice in any way,” refused my request for changes in the offending passages in subsequent editions of the book; nor did Mr. Jarrell at any time apologize or offer to make even partial amends.

In quite another way, I was to have a glimpse into the sharp and biassed discrimination that occurs in the supposedly high-minded and idealistic realm of poetry. The incident was a minor one, of no intrinsic importance; and would not be worth reporting except for its implications. There was a certain man (let me call him “Jones”) who had once briefly visited me at my home, and was editing a magazine of free verse—to which, naturally, I did not seek admittance. But one day I read that Jones had started a new magazine, to be devoted exclusively to traditional poetry. Since this was in my field, I had no hesitation about mailing him two or three poems, along with the usual stamped return-envelope. Sometime later the poems came back, along with a note: “Dear C.: I rather like your verses entitled Compensation and would have ordinarily accepted them; but in view of what is being said as to the position you have taken in poetry, I am afraid I must send them back.”

Whether or not my poem was published by this particular magazine was, of course, a matter of no importance; I would not under normal circumstances have given a second thought either to its acceptance or its rejection. But Jones, by his naive words, had made immense disclosures; had unwittingly bared things which a shrewder editor would have hidden beneath a gloss of words. That any man could be such a craven as to refuse a manuscript because of what someone else was saying as to the position in poetry taken by the writer!—this to me was a notion so new, so startling that I had to read the sentence several times in order to make sure it was real. I doubt whether Jones had any idea at all how bitterly offensive his comment was; I will even give him credit for meaning the statement by way of a friendly explanation. But his attitude of mind, I thought, was exactly that which has been too familiar in the past, when men have been sent to the dungeon or the stake because of what someone else has said about their heretical views.

Then, for the first time, I fully realized that I too was guilty of heresy—yes, guilty of heresy because I had tried to uphold poetic standards against those who, I was firmly convinced, were the true heretics. I have since had reason to suppose that other editors, and more influential ones, have followed the same principles as Jones. But I still have not learned just “what was being said” as to the position I had taken in poetry. Against known and spoken charges I have never felt any incapacity to defend myself. But against unknown and concealed accusations I am helpless.

Sometimes I have wondered what is really desired by those critics and editors who seem to feel that the devil himself has smoked his way into any attitude of mind that happens to oppose their own. Perhaps their ideal is that which Matthew Arnold expresses in two lines—not, however, as an ideal, but in despair at the modern lack of faith:

Light half believers of our casual creeds,

Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will’d.

These “light half believers,” surely, never find anyone who objects to their position strongly enough to blacklist them.

But whatever the costs of uttering ones convictions, the rewards have been considerable. These rewards have been all the richer for not being of a concrete or material nature; they have come in friendships formed, usually by correspondence only; and in letters that have drifted in from men and women all over the country, and even from Canada and England; many from unknown persons, but some from noteworthy poets. Thus I learned that there was an undercurrent of support for my views, a wide opposition and resentment against “modernistic” perversions, and a simple longing for the poetry that sings, and that speaks to the imagination and the heart. But most of the lovers of the older poetry, I found, could not make themselves vocal; they had no organ for their opinions, which they usually expressed by ceasing to buy or even to read contemporary poetry. Hence Wings filled for them a long-felt need.

I wish that I had space to quote from some of the many letters of commendation. Not, of course, that I took them all seriously; I soon learned to recognize the honeyed words that besought a honeyed favor, the sugary speech that accompanied submitted manuscripts or books forwarded for review—experience was to teach me that the writers would be as likely as not, at the next winking of an eye, to turn to the opposite camp, if this seemed to suit their purposes. But the honest approbation of persons who had no axe to grind, and who wrote from remote places to tell how they had been helped or elated (and who often accompanied their letters with tangible proof in the way of unsolicited subscriptions) has been heart-warming, and has made it easier to keep on at times when I was inclined to wonder why any man in his right mind would run a poetry magazine.

Beyond this, I have been urged on by the knowledge that Wings has provided a medium of publication for poets in a world where media of publication are fast fading out. Perhaps this will seem no great thing; but without the springs that supply the streams, the streams will dry up. True, the poets themselves frequently seem not to realize this, and too often will not support the very magazines that encourage their own efforts to fly; but this is not true of all, nor nearly all. And many of them—though the editor knows that he will never look into their eyes, nor shake their hands—have made themselves as dear to him and as real as persons actually seen.

It is for this reason, more than for any other, that I have never regretted the strange and devious unraveling of fate that has taken me along the road of editorship. And it is for this reason that I would not, even if I could, change one inch of the route I have traveled.

CHAPTER

SIXTEEN

A Recruit for Publishers’ Row

In those innocent early days when I blandly assumed the ownership, editorship, and management of a poetry magazine, I did not foresee that my new duties were to lead toward the great world of book publication, even in its more limited phases. But he who winds along unknown roads may expect to arrive at strange destinations.

Had it not been for my long poem, The Pageant of Man, I might never have made the beginnings. This extensive work, finished in the early fall of 1935, duly made its visits to several editorial offices—how many, my records do not tell me; but the number, within a mere few months, could not have been great. I do recall that one or two publishers professed interest; but when the reports came in, I listened to the old, old story: the editorial department approved, but the sales department was less sanguine; it could see no sufficient market, hence the manuscript was coming back to me with regrets, etc. Now I would not for a moment imply that the sales departments, from their own point of view, were not quite right; certainly, there were more promising investments than a poem of Gargantuan length (one which eventually would cover 319 well-filled octavo pages). Nevertheless, the verdict was not gratifying to the author.

It may be that I was growing impatient; it may be that some publisher, had I persisted, would have uttered the fervently desired “Yes!” But it is a curious thing that a writer, having toiled at a book with painstaking patience over a period of years, may all at once squirm with impatience after the results of his labor have been confided to paper. I had produced what was certainly (and not in bulk only, I thought) my most considerable effort; and I wanted doors to open upon it, I wanted it to breathe the fresh air and see the light. Therefore it was exasperating to have the sales departments keep it in darkness.

My exasperation, however, was to be short-lived. In the winter of 1936, an unexpected windfall came to me from a never-to-be-repeated source—a mountainous sum, slightly more than a thousand dollars. And with money comes temptation. Almost instantly, an insidious thought thrust itself into my mind. Perhaps this would enable me to publish The Pageant of Man on my own account. I knew that authors far more celebrated than myself had published their own work, occasionally with notable success; the names of Upton Sinclair and others were in my mind. Even if the saddest of sad luck were to pursue me, and I were to lose my thousand dollars—at least, the book would be in print, and I would be no worse off than before receiving the money. True, the craft of writing should, ideally, remain distinct from the business of publishing; authors should devote their time to writing, and publishers should be specialists in book production and distribution. So I should have said, even a short while before—but now, on the contrary, my attitude was: why hold back?—never venture, never succeed!

At least, I would explore the possibilities. The first problem, therefore, was to find a printer. Mr. Grossman, the printer of Wings, with his small establishment, had not the facilities for a book such as The Pageant of Man, and I knew no other reliable person. But there are times when fate, with all the appearance of intelligent intention, puts one into touch with just the needed person at precisely the desired time. While I was wondering as to printers, a letter reached me from a man I had never heard of before, Joseph A. Wennrich, who represented an establishment known as The Guild Bookcrafters; he had seen Wings, and wished to bid on printing it. As it happened, I was quite pleased with The Artype Press, and needed no bid on printing Wings; but Wennrich’s letter put a thought into my mind: the Guild Bookcrafters, to judge from their name, might be able to print The Pageant of Man. In any case, I would find out.

A telephone call brought immediate action. Mr. Wennrich, assuring me that book printing was his specialty, arranged to visit me that evening. I looked forward to the interview; but strangely, the appointed hour came and went, and no visitor rang my bell. “Well, that ends that,” I thought. “So this Wennrich is just another of those unreliables, whom I’d better not get entangled with.”

But I had done him an injustice. Next morning he telephoned; explained that, at the last minute, something unavoidable had prevented his coming, and even made it impossible to notify me; and asked to be excused, and permitted to visit me the coming evening. And he did visit me as requested—and all through the years of our ensuing relationship he proved to be not only highly capable, but dependable almost to the point of punctiliousness.

He turned out to be a tall, nervous-mannered, explosively enthusiastic man in his late thirties. His chief interest was less in printing for its own sake than in book designing, and he soon convinced me that he had taste, inventiveness, and originality, as well as abounding energy and a thorough knowledge of his craft. From him I was to receive what was in effect a private course in the making of books.

But for the present, the one question was The Pageant. That Wennrich could print it, and print it well, was evident from the expert samples of his work which he displayed—but what about the price? He would have to take the manuscript with him, he said, and try to reach a figure. Several days went by, during which I was half resigned to the belief that he would quote an amount far beyond my reach. And then, on one never-to-be-forgotten evening, he paid me another visit. And as I bent above the paper scrawled with his jottings, my heart gave a leap. The quotation, for an edition of a thousand copies, was less than I had feared; it would indeed be possible to bring out the book, even leaving a little over for advertising!

I will not go into the problems that confronted a novice like myself, except to say that since the new publishing medium would need a name and would inevitably be connected with Wings, I hit at once upon the obvious designation, The Wings Press. By June of 1936, The Pageant of Man was in print, though publication had not been set until September; in the interval, copies were to be sent to various persons of note in the poetic world, in order to get their comments for possible use on the jacket. And comments were forthcoming, more pleasingly than anticipated; and the reviewers also, after the book’s appearance, were more generous, far more so, than I had felt any reason to hope; and even the sales were not bad—that is, not for a book of poetry, and one issued without the means of distribution available to a large publisher. I felt fortunate that a hundred copies had been sold before publication day, and that copies continued to sell year after year, though of course at a slower rate. And while this experience would not lead me to recommend self-publication as a means of getting rich, never for a moment did I regret my plunge.

Originally I had thought of this publication as a single, never-to-be-repeated venture; I did not realize that it would set off a chain reaction, which would involve me more deeply and ever more deeply. After the appearance of the book, which had been advertised in Wings and elsewhere, I began receiving letters from subscribers and contributors: “Dear Editor: I have a book of poems, and hope you will consider publishing it for me. If so, what would your price be?”

Though this was more than I had contemplated, it did give me pause. And then I put the question to myself: Why, indeed, not publish a book every now and then, provided that it was of good quality, and something I could feel gratified to sponsor? True, I could not afford to publish at my own expense—but had the authors themselves not indicated that they did not expect this?

Before I go any further, let me make matters plain as to what has come to be variously known as “subsidy,” “cooperative,” and “vanity” publishing. While some persons, without knowledge of the facts, might accuse me of being in the position of the thief who proclaims, “All those other robbers are bad—I’m the only honest one,” I think that any discriminating judge will admit that there are two kinds of publishing projects which rely upon authors’ subsidies. The first, which has become notorious, is practiced by firms—usually large firms—that advertise extensively in magazines and by brochures. These firms, a number of which the Federal Trade Commission recently found guilty of deliberate misrepresentation, have no standards whatever, and accept virtually everything—at least, everything that is paid for, and can be distributed without danger of interference by the postal authorities. Publishing of this kind cannot be condemned too strongly; and I, who have examined book after book of verse of almost unbelievable ineptitude, have more reason than most for joining in the denunciation.

But there is another sort of subsidy publication of worthwhile titles; and this has been undertaken at times by specialized houses, by university presses, and even, if I have not been misinformed, by general trade publishers. I will admit that, ideally, this should not be; ideally, no writer should be required to do more than write; it is repugnant, and surely not in the best interests of literature, that only the solvent author should be published. Yet what is one to do when the work is something which—like certain scholarly monographs or like long poems or collections of verse—may have high merits but small sales possibilities? What when the prospective publisher is financially unable to shoulder the responsibility? Is such work to remain in oblivion? Or is it better that it be issued, under discriminate and ethical auspices, even at the author’s expense? I think that there can be no two answers to these questions when it is remembered that it was this form of publishing that gave to the world the early work of Shelley, Browning, and many another author now renowned.

When we turn to contemporary poetry, we find some special problems. Paradoxically, while the art no longer enjoys its old-time popularity with the reading public, it has apparently lost little if any of its vogue with writers. It may not be that, as is sometimes asserted, “everybody” is trying to write poetry; nor need we suppose that, as has also been alleged, there are “millions” of poets in America. But it does seem unquestionable, based upon the packs of manuscripts submitted to editors, that thousands of people are seriously setting out to write poetry; and out of this multitude, a fair proportion are producing work worthy of being read and remembered. Even if the number of readers had kept pace with that of writers, the facilities of all the recognized trade publishers would be taxed to bring out the deserving books; but under present conditions, when publishers either shun poetry as if it were a bad debt, or issue it as if it were a bad habit (rarely more than two or three books a year, and these often by writers already on their lists), there is inevitably a large and worthy surplus that could not conceivably find a home with any of the big royalty-paying houses. What, then, shall the authors do with their intensely imagined, their passionately conceived works, which in many cases represent the most delicate and the most fervent and perfect flowering of their lives?

The authors themselves have answered this question; they have answered it by their readiness to seek subsidy publishers. It is at this point that the small publisher, who acts with an eye to poetic quality and to writers’ needs, may perform a real service. In a negative way, he may accomplish something by the very act of saving some of the poets from the pirates. And in a positive way, he may aid by insuring the author the joy and stimulation that can come only from seeing his work in print; he may obtain for him a certain attention, even if not celebrity; he may give him a memorial to hand down in pride to his children and grandchildren. And he may—who knows?—rescue some capable poet, even some outstanding poet from otherwise inevitable oblivion.

It may be worth adding that, apart even from the views of the authors themselves, I am far from alone in this opinion. Consider the following from an article by Aron M. Mathieu (Writer’s Digest, July, 1957):

One obvious category of writing that seldom finds a publisher, even though it may be outstanding, is poetry. A poet, therefore, can have much pleasure and gratification from a self-published book, well-bound, often beautifully designed, and through which he will reach at least a limited audience. There is always for him the hope, too, that having reached print, posterity might wake to him.

There are, of course, possibilities of abuse in all subsidy publishing; and for this reason, there were certain principles which, from the beginning, The Wings Press felt bound to establish. It picked its books, first of all, on the basis of merit already mentioned, that the book must deserve publication for its own sake; rejections have greatly outnumbered acceptances, as many writers throughout the country will testify. It has never solicited any author for manuscripts; nor has it ever advertised (except in a limited way, for one brief period years ago, when Wennrich and I acted in virtual partnership, and announced in Wings that we would consider book manuscripts of verse). Not less important! I have felt it necessary to dispel all illusions in the poet’s mind; I have always stated frankly that fame is not to be expected, that financial gain is unlikely, and financial loss the normal thing; and I have left it for the writer to decide whether the non-commercial advantages would offset the commercial losses. I have not concealed the fact that bookstores, except sometimes in the author’s home town, will not stock books by unknown versifiers, and that, unless the poet has been widely published, he cannot expect much of an audience outside the circle of his personal connections. But while mentioning all this, I am not unaware that even the large publishers could do little by way of sales, since not even they can create a market where there is no reading interest. I remember cases such as that of a certain skilled poet, whose work had been widely published and who had just won a $5000 prize (the largest offered in the world of poetry); despite the publicity attendant upon the award, and despite the audiences presumably developed by her previous books, her Collected Poems was issued by a leading publisher in an edition of only 750 copies, of which a considerable number were distributed gratis to the press—and this, incidentally, must not be taken to mean that all the remaining copies were sold.

With such comparisons in mind, I do not think that The Wings Press has done very badly by its authors. I know, in fact, that a great majority, after publication, have professed themselves highly and even enthusiastically pleased. And the complaints—for there have been complaints, a very few—have mostly concerned minor matters. One author, quite a few years ago, was understandably irked when a careless binder smeared glue over the covers of many books (we overcame the trouble by having the books rebound). Another author was justifiably annoyed when a printer, disregarding a correction made in the proofs, endowed her name on the book’s front cover with an extra letter. And still another, whose book had in my opinion been beautifully made, voiced two objections, the first of which she excitedly rushed to me by long-distance telephone: the title of the book (which consisted of four short words) had not been gold-stamped in three lines on the face of the cover, as she would have liked, but consisted of one line only! The other complaint, which occurred to her sometime later, was entrusted to a letter: the jacket blurb had said that her poems were “unpretentious.” This, after consultation with some friends, she took as an insult, though the fact was that the poems were simple and unaffected, and had the merit of making no pretensions.

With most of the authors, however, my relations have been pleasant, even cordial; the publications of The Wings Press have earned me many friends-by-correspondence. However, on two occasions they have brought me sharp grief, when the respective authors—Grace Nixon Stecher and Garth Bentley, both of them able poets, and the latter a man of exceptional promise—died suddenly before publication of their books. The case of Bentley shocked me particularly: he fell dead of a heart attack just two days before the first copies of his Behold the City reached his office in Chicago.

After printing one or two Wings Press books, Joseph Wennrich made a proposal: he would cooperate with me in bringing out certain subsequent books, he to provide the printing, I to pay for materials and incidentals, and any returns to be divided on a stated basis. This proposal, as I look back on it, could hardly have been more impractical had he himself been a poet; however, though he and I were to reap nothing financially, we did have the satisfaction of much enthusiastic conferring and planning. The first book to see the light under the new agreement was Flame Against the Wind, by Florence Wilson Roper, the Virginia writer whose work had first attracted me several years before in the verse magazine Kaleidograph: in this case, the author had to make no payment. Subsequently, Wennrich printed one or two other books under the same arrangement, though neither of us, in view of the limited sales, would have been able to endure the wear and tear indefinitely. And then, in 1941, my association with Wennrich was interrupted as an aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Though in his forties, he was subject to conscription, for he was then unmarried; and being drafted, he gave up his business, disposed of his equipment, and never did return to book printing. After his discharge from the army, he obtained work as the foreman of a printing plant in Middletown, New York; but this plant did not produce books, hence we could not resume our old relationship—a casualty of the war which I, for one, have always regretted.

Today I feel that there is greater need than ever for publication of the kind undertaken by The Wings Press and by the presses of several other poetry magazines, whose editors are actuated less by the desire to grow rich than by the wish to help poets. Though some of the university presses have sponsored books of current verse, and though here and there a prize committee has come to the rescue by providing book publication, and though one or two publishers have been experimenting with paper-backed editions of contemporary work, the position of poets as a whole is darker than ever—particularly those poets who honor the traditions of the ages. I think it not too much to say that if Gray or Keats, Byron or Shelley were to come back under other names, their work would be unceremoniously refused in the present book market, perhaps without even a reading: not because the work was not good (though few can recognize good poetry unless it is neatly tagged and labelled), but because it lacked appeal to the sales department. Under these conditions, Gray or Keats, Byron or Shelley would remain in obscurity unless someone provided the financial wherewithal. True, they might remain in obscurity even after such publication; but the world of print is a miraculous world, and there is always a chance that what has passed through its gateways will be seen and heard, if not today, then possibly tomorrow. And if even one Gray or Keats, Byron or Shelley is preserved (though incidentally a thousand books sail down the waters to oblivion), then surely a service has been performed which has more than justified all the agonies of publication.

CHAPTER

SEVENTEEN

A Place to End

Since this story is one to which no one can write “Finis!” so long as I live, it will be as logical to end at one place as at another. And having already written about as much as I have any interest in reporting, I will bow my exit after trying to shed light on a few concluding matters.

Of the various books pertaining to poetry which I have put forth since the appearance of The Pageant Man in 1936, I shall mention only one, not for its own sake, but for what it tells of other poets. In the twenty years following publication of Modern American Lyrics, I had observed a considerable amount of excellent new American poetry, much of it by recognized poets, and much by little-known or unknown writers. But whether it proceeded from established versifiers or from the unestablished, it was insufficiently read; indeed, a large part of it was not available at all except to the limited audiences of “little magazines” and of minor presses. It seemed to me that this work, or at least a representative portion of it, should be made accessible to a wider public; and therefore, despite the horrors of obtaining permissions and the mountains of clerical labor, I conceived the idea of compiling an anthology—provided, of course, that a publisher could be found to back it.

Such a publisher, fortunately, did present himself—and presented himself on the first attempt, so far as I can recall, in the person of Mr. Thomas Yoseloff, head of the New York firm of Bernard Ackerman, Inc. (and, incidentally, Director of the University of Pennsylvania Press). I had never met Mr. Yoseloff (though years later I was to have that pleasure during a brief visit to New York), and I had no introduction to him except through my letter; but he was interested in the idea I suggested, and contracts were soon drawn up for the appearance of the book under the title of The Music Makers—the first of a series of volumes, both in poetry and prose, for whose publication I am indebted to this gracious and able man.

In the introduction to The Music Makers, I point out that “the number of published volumes of capable poems was not great compared with the amount of such poetry written,” and “that many even of our better known poets did not enjoy a public matching their merits.” Looking back upon my remarks after the passage of years, and seeing how many poems of real beauty written by Americans twenty or thirty years ago have been overshadowed or forgotten, I feel more strongly than ever the justification for these further statements:

Every reader of current verse will recognize, for example, the names of Arthur Davison Ficke, Robert Nathan, Cale Young Rice, David Morton, Witter Bynner, John Hall Wheelock and Jessie B. Rittenhouse; but how many have stopped to consider that these authors may have written poems deserving to be read and remembered a hundred years from now? How many have wondered if William Ellery Leonard’s Two Lives, issued a score of years ago, may not be among the immortal long poems of the language? How many have asked themselves if, in the whole history of American literature, any sonneteer has written more nobly or any lyricist more tenderly than George Sterling, who died in 1926? At best, little more than a half recognition crowns many who are regarded as among the most soundly established of recent American poets; a half recognition of occasional praise and publication, but of small audiences.

Unfortunately, an anthology such as The Music Makers, even if it could do something for these poets, could do much less than they deserved. And the reason, as I saw it, was twofold: first, a materialism in the very age, which turned men’s thoughts outward rather than inward, and diverted them from poetry to prose; and secondly, the obscuring and confusing tendencies within literature itself, so that opaque and rhythmless work could be exalted as poetry thanks to the very fact that it was opaque and rhythmless, while an offering could be defended as poetic on the ground, for example, that it gave a perfect imitation of a drunkard at a bar (as in a critical note in one of our widely circulated literary media). Faced with such a degeneration of standards, how could one expect that the honorable singers of the ancient high profession would continue to be respected?

In connection with The Music Makers, a curious incident occurred—one showing how far afield and in what unforeseen directions a book of verse may spread its seeds. I quote from the New York Times of November 25, 1952:

HONG KONG, Nov. 24. After spending almost two years in a Chinese Communist jail, the Rev. Francis Olin Stockwell, a Methodist missionary from Oklahoma, left Hong Kong for the United States with a Bible and a book of poetry, to which he attaches special value.

While he was imprisoned in China, the 52-year-old Mr. Stockwell wrote a 50,000-word manuscript on his prison experiences between the lines of the poetry book—“The Music Makers,” by Stanton A. Coblentz.

When I read these lines—which were sent to me by several correspondents—I knew that even if The Music Makers had failed in all other respects, it would not have been compiled in vain. However, had Mr. Yoseloff not provided the book with a generous format including exceptionally wide margins, it might not have served quite so well!

Because of the degeneration of standards which I mention above, and which The Music Makers aimed to combat at least in part, a group of staunch traditionalists, in the mid-forties, formed an organization known as The League for Sanity in Poetry. I have always thought the name a poor one; one cannot, of course, obtain sanity by means of a league or any other form of organization; a more appropriate designation would have been, The League for Standards in Poetry. I remember an earnest letter from Albert Ralph Korn, of New York (of whom more later), pointing out that the principles of the poetic world were degenerating as never before, and urging me to take the lead in a counter-movement. At about the same time, a letter to a similar effect arrived from Lilith Lorraine, the editor of a Texan verse magazine, The Raven, and later to be editor of Different; she was then one of the most convinced advocates of traditional poetry, a devoted and energetic worker. I cannot say which of us originally conceived the idea of the League; but certain it is that it was conceived, and was established, with a committee consisting of Albert Ralph Korn, Lilith Lorraine, Etta Josephean Murfey, and Lawrence Neff (the latter two, former editors of poetry magazines) in addition to myself. (Mr. Korn subsequently withdrew owing to a disagreement with one of the other members, and his place was taken by Juliet Brooke Ballard). The League began by putting forth a pamphlet, The Need for Sanity in Poetry, and for a time it issued regular bulletins, under the title of Pinnacle, which expressed itself as “For the Preservation of Poetry at Its Topmost Pinnacle,” and printed these words of Shelley beneath its masthead: “Poetry ... makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world.”

As an example of the sort of thing we opposed, we quoted the following, from the beginning of a “poem” by the well-known “modernist” E. E. Cummings, which the equally well-known anthologist Oscar Williams had valued highly enough to include in his compilation, New Poems, 1943:

ygUGuh

ydoan

unnuhstan

ydoan o

yunnunstan dem

ygudug ged

unnunstam dem doidee

gyudug ged ruduh

dyoan o nudn

LISH bud LISN

I believe that the average reader will agree that when gutter trash such as this is palmed off as poetry, and—worse still!—seriously commended and anthologized, it is time that something be done, if not by a league for sanity, at least by a disinfecting squad.

The League was not, as some of its opponents liked to imply, an organization of bearded antediluvians established for the specific purpose of choking freedom and bringing back the good old days of Queen Victoria. It did, however, favor law as opposed to anarchy. Its principles as to experimentation are summarized in two of the ten items of belief listed in the second issue of Pinnacle:

While experimental forms of verse can and sometimes do serve their purposes adequately, it must be borne in mind that experimentalism is never permissible as a mere mask to hide ignorance of time-honored and achievement-honored patterns.

Intelligent experimentation by competent craftsmen should be encouraged, but it is insane to advocate junking the forms made famous by the greatest masters of the ages. Experimentation can be justified only for the purpose of adding to, not destroying, the forms whose value has been proved by time and usage.

If this is conservatism, it is sober, moderate, and forward-looking conservatism, of the sort that only the absolute iconoclast—which too often means the absolute wrecker—can rationally oppose.

Letters, showering into the League offices from all parts of the country, showed a widespread sympathy with our objectives. A typical communication was one received from Chicago, from the managing editor of the national magazine of a large fraternal organization:

From the nauseous messes which constantly appear in newspapers and magazines on the pretense that they are poetry, I have been forced to the conclusion that many editors do not know poetry from doggerel.

If your League is prepared to do something about it, if only to call public attention to the situation, and ridicule the pretenders who call themselves poets, and the ignorant editors who print their outgivings, I am for you.

Though obliged to reject suggestions that I serve as its National President, I did give considerable time to the League over a period of years, and wrote quite a few—though far from all—of the longer articles in Pinnacle. Other contributors included Robert Avrett, a Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Tennessee, and later, for a time, acting editor of The Lyric; Cullen Jones, Ruth Crary Clough, Anna T. Harding, Donald Parson, and other writers of excellent verse. A number of regional directors were appointed throughout the country, and for several years a real organization existed. But that organization, as happens in many cases, did in time break down, less because of waning enthusiasm than for lack of the considerable funds necessary to print and distribute Pinnacle and other releases, and to carry on the various campaigns; many small contributions continued to come in, but they were inadequate to meet expenses on the original scale. Eventually, therefore, Pinnacle was embodied as a department in Lilith Lorraine’s magazine, Different—and with the ultimate discontinuance of Different, this whole phase of our activities came to an end. Yet I am sure that all persons associated with the League felt that, during its several years of life, the organization did do something to combat the tides of chaos. And if it did not do enough—after all, what other force has done enough?

As these pages draw toward their end, I think it fitting to pay tribute to the many fine men and women whom I have known personally or by correspondence, and who have worked in various ways in the interests of poets and of poetry. Some of these have served the League for Sanity in Poetry, some have lent the aid of their advice, their suggestions, their contributions, and their encouragement in my sometimes arduous duties on Wings; some have edited other poetry journals or poetry columns, or served as poetry editors for newspapers or magazines, or written books or compiled anthologies, or conducted poetry programs over the radio, or sponsored prize contests, or merely stood by in the much-needed capacity of lovers and readers of poetry. These persons have been far too numerous to mention by name; indeed, for fear of discriminating unconsciously, I should not care to cite most of them by name. I shall, therefore, refer personally only to a few who are no longer living.

The first who occurs to me is the celebrated Irish author, Lord Dunsany, whose poems, stories, and plays I have enjoyed for many years. My first contact with him occurred some years ago, when I sent him a copy of The Pageant of Man. This gift he might have received in silence, or with a polite and meaningless note of thanks, while filing the book away in the great library of the unread. On the contrary, however, he did read my lengthy poem, and wrote me in enthusiastic terms. The correspondence between us continued, and subsequently he did me the favor of contributing a preface to my series of rhymed narratives, Time’s Travelers.

Meanwhile he was waging a valiant fight against the inanities and the insanities of “modernism” in verse. And this fight he took to America, during several lecture tours that brought him before large audiences on both coasts. His point of view is reported by an interviewer for the California magazine Fortnight for April 13, 1953:

These people who write so-called modern verse don’t have anything approaching the rhythm of moderate prose; they have no meter, no rhyme and not always decency that would be permitted in any drawing room....

The Irish writer is angry with people who instead of saying “I don’t make head or tail of it” which according to his lordship would be the truth, say: “I see it’s very clever but I’m not quite clever enough to see all of it.”

“Take a dirty roll of paper,” Lord Dunsany said, “roll it up, hand it over the counter and ask for a hundred dollars. The paper ‘might’ be a $100-bill, but the cashier won’t give anything for it. Why then should a dirty meaningless line be accepted as thought which is more valuable than money?... If writers of so-called modern verse are sincere, they’re insane.”

From the above, the reader will judge that I was heartily glad to cry “Amen!” to all that Lord Dunsany said. I was, in fact, delighted that so wise and witty a fighter in the cause of poetry had come to America; and I was naturally eager to meet this man whom I had known for so many years through his work, and more recently, by correspondence.

To my joy, a meeting was arranged for one memorable evening at the Alta Mira Hotel in Sausalito, where Flora and I had dinner with Dunsany along with his hostess Mrs. Hazel Littlefield Smith and her secretary, who, despite his distaste for long motor trips, had driven him up from the South. In the old-world atmosphere of this hotel, overlooking the wide glittering waters of San Francisco Bay, we chatted for several hours. I shall never forget my first glimpse of the man whom I had come to consider my friend, as well as a friend of poetry: the dominating tall figure, with the frame still lithe and active despite his seventy-four years, and the impression he gave as if some redoubtable old warrior chief had stalked upon the scene; the Shavian face, with the keen and resolute features, the hair gray with traces of reddish brown, the mustache and the pointed small beard, and the live twinkling greenish eyes that shone with the vivacity of his energetic personality.

But perhaps even the word “energetic” does not fully express the verve and vigor, the scintillating and bubbling enthusiasm of his speech and manner. He seemed ageless to me as his words rushed on with a vivid flow in sparkling tales or in more sober discussion. I thought, as I heard him, that it was unfortunate that he had been born a “Lord”; for the title, extraneous and artificial as it is, may have tended to divert people’s minds from the rare and genuine qualities of the man himself and from the accomplishment of his prose and poetry. Of the things he said, one remark stands out particularly in my mind; he was speaking of the discovery of unknown genius, and paused to say, “Would it not be a dreadful thing if there were one among us, a Milton or a Keats, and he should pass unknown?” I have often thought the same thing.

But let me pass on to other persons. I think that I should call at least brief attention to two or three, who likewise should be remembered for their devotion to poetry and their services to poets.

One of these was Alice Hunt Bartlett, for years American Editor of the Poetry Review of London, a supporter of that excellent journal, compiler of several anthologies, and author of a bimonthly column, The Dynamics of American Poetry. I remember her clearly as she received me on several occasions in the drawing room of her Park Avenue apartment—a gracious, distinguished lady, her hair streaked with gray, her eyes bright and animated as she discussed her favorite subject.

Like Mrs. Bartlett, in her appreciation of poetry and her efforts to encourage it, was another lady, whom, however, I knew only by correspondence: Virginia Kent Cummins, also of New York, who at an advanced age established the Lyric Foundation for Traditional Poetry, which took over and supported one of the best of our verse magazines, The Lyric, and made an annual award of one thousand dollars to a chosen poet: a provision in her will has made it possible for The Lyric not only to continue as an organ of traditional poetry, but to offer substantial prizes to contributors.

Finally, let me refer again to Albert Ralph Korn. Although, as in the case of Mrs. Cumming we never met, he and I did have a long correspondence; and I know that, during the ten or twelve years of our contact, he was making constant benefactions for poetic causes; offered innumerable prizes through magazines and organizations both here and in England; wrote articles, put forth pamphlets, and sponsored campaigns in favor of what he aptly called “clarity in poetry.” It was he who suggested the departments, This Is Poetry and This Is Not Poetry, which for several years attracted attention in Wings; it was he who voluntarily, at his own expense, distributed more than twelve hundred copies of the pamphlet, Poetry Today, Fire or Fog? containing reprints of the first two years of This Is Poetry and This Is Not Poetry. Unlike many poets—for in his modest way he did write verse, though he never obtruded his work upon others—he was less concerned with the fate of his own offerings than with the welfare of poetry in general; and it was for this reason, more than any other, that his death in 1956 caused widespread regret.

It may be that, amid the great panorama of coming events and the multitudes of humanity, benefactors such as Mr. Korn, Mrs. Bartlett, and Mrs. Cummins will be obscured or forgotten. But to them, as to many another, we can apply Vachel Lindsay’s words on John Peter Altgeld:

To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name,

To live in mankind, far, far more ... than to live in a name.

Whatever the flares of personal publicity along our paths, this in the long run must be the consolation of those of us who dream and suffer, toil and sing and interpret and aspire, beat at blank walls and float among splendid vistas, and conceive visions of doom and of magnificence in the glorious, unworldly, or otherworldly kingdom of poetry.

THE END

Transcriber’s Note

Missing punctuation has been silently added.

The following alterations have been made:

- In chapter one: hundred to hundreds

- In chapter eleven: three to these

- In chapter fourteen: expansive to expensive

- In chapter fifteen: martydom to martyrdom

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Table of Contents

My Life in Poetry

Contents

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE “I Pant for the Music Which Is Divine”

CHAPTER TWO Path of Stones and Thorns

CHAPTER THREE Incentives and Lucky Shots

CHAPTER FOUR A Tale of Two Eyes

CHAPTER FIVE Builders and Wreckers

CHAPTER SIX Poetry by Prescription

CHAPTER SEVEN A Mote in the Metropolis

CHAPTER EIGHT The Magic World between Covers

CHAPTER NINE Blood Brother to the Epic

CHAPTER TEN Poets I Have Known

CHAPTER ELEVEN Shadows on a Wall

CHAPTER TWELVE The Depression, the Sea, and the Redwoods

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Year of Miracles

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Trials and Rewards of an Editor

CHAPTER FIFTEEN A Challenge to Giants

CHAPTER SIXTEEN A Recruit for Publishers’ Row

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN A Place to End

Transcriber’s Note

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