My life in poetry

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:

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:

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

Another stanza may show the difference even more clearly:

In the later form, this became:

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.