My life in poetry

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:

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:

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.