My life in poetry

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:

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:

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:

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.