My life in poetry

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:

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:

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.