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.