Songs without Music

Notes on Current American Poetry and Biography

EDMUND WILSON, JR.

IT in seems cutting to itself me that off so American completely poetry, from English, has saddled itself with a great handicap. There was much to be said in theory, to be sure, for a strictly indigenous poetical expression and one was willing to hail the Sandburgs and the Lindsays with the most hopeful enthusiasm. But now that a large body of their work is before us, does it not seem rather inferior stuff? It had its brief flickers, to be sure, but they have been extinguished under an avalanche of waste. Did Mr. Frost with his numb dry pickings at the frozen soil of New England, Mr. Lindsay with his Middle Western bellowings. Mr. Sandburg with his square juiceless blocks (he almost alone has at least a sound style) or any of the vers libre Parnassians with their avowals of allegiance to French ideals, ever in practice actually produce as good poetry as Miss Millay with her Shakespearean sonnets and her adaptation of Housman's formula or Mr. Eliot with his inveterate saturation in the grand manner of the Elizabethans?

I don't wish necessarily to deny the possibility of a 100% American idiom and culture; but it is evident that as far as poetry is concerned we have not as yet got very far with it. In fact, I believe that every achievement since Whitman's time has fallen short of Whitman in this regard. Whitman was certainly something different from English poetry and he was certainly poetry of the first rank, Yet his success would not seem a quite sufficient reason for leaving the great instrument of English poetry unused. What American now will really master the vowels and consonants which are the stops of this instrument?—the half-closes of the blank-verse line, the pastoral arias of "Wordsworth and The Winter's Tale, the thunderous bass of Paradise Lost and the storm scene in King Lear? You cannot learn these things from French poetry and they arc not natural to the American vernacular. We have spoken many rhythmic words but we have made very little music. Even Mr. Vachel Lindsay arouses noise rather than music. Rhythm by itself can never save us; it requires other things to make poetry. We have come to believe that if rhythm be proved, the work in question must be a poem, but the great English poets did more than keep time; they turned the disorderly syllables of the language into a melody to storm Heaven.

Two books which supply, in their separate ways, typical examples of our divorce from English tradition are John Dos Passos' A Pushcart at the Curb (Doran) and Raymond Holden's Granite and Alabasler (Macmillan). Mr. Dos Passos' book, curiously enough, turns out to be a great deal like Amy Lowell. It has, to be sure, more personal flavor and more feeling for life than Miss Lowell; but it is fundamentally very much the same sort of thing. It is a sharp record of things seen—things admirably and unmistakably described, but almost never—what seems to me essential for poetry—actually set to music. It is an agreeable enough volume to read, but it is a series, not of songs, but of sketches.

Mr. Holden represents a different school—though he, too, has no diapason, Mr. Dos Passos—perhaps partly by reason of some French or Hispanic influence—has arrived at a more pleasing version of the Parnassianism which reaches its least seductive phase in John Gould Fletcher. But Mr. Holden is still tilling the honorable, if rather arid soil of New England. In his preoccupation with the northern landscape and the daily life of its flora and fauna, and his eager search among them for moral ideas, in his combination of a pungent dryness with something not far removed from Transcendentalism, in his soberness and regularity and his devotion to a chilly hilly beauty, we recognize the descendant of Whittier and Lowell, of Longfellow and Bryant. And though he has evolved a style of his own, which is really not imitative of anybody, we hear occasional echoes of those two of his contemporaries who have carried on the same tradition most conspicuously—Mr. Robert Frost, who—in the present writer's opinion— has made the New England soil appear even poorer than it actually is, and Mr. Robinson, who, in his early days at least, sounded an authentic if autumnal music as he charmed the moonlit ruins of New England with his melancholy flute,

But the New England flute at its most powerful ranged no wider than one cold high octave. Mr. Holden knows this octave well and can sometimes do very charming things with it—but let him be careful how he relies on it too long lest night find him in the steep deserted pasture, piping to mullein-stalks and gray stones when the flocks and herds have removed elsewhere,

Boston in Gas-Light

IT is probably a special personal curiosity about the period which has made me read Mrs. James T. Fields' diaries (Memories of a Hostess—The Atlantic Monthly Press) with breathless fascination. I recommend the book only to people who want to know how life actuall}' felt among the closely-carpeted, bric-a-bracked, brown, gas-lit drawingrooms of Boston, when the circle of Holmes and of Hawthorne were thought to be very great men. Mrs. Fields was a sensitive, attractive and rather intelligent woman, who entered into the life about her with an imagination which still makes it vivid to us. To read the chapter about Dickens' visit to America is to relive a part of the nineteenth century— to come in contact with the recognizable human beings who left behind them those motionless masks. We see Emerson dismayed and dubious before the imaginative genius of Dickens, Longfellow chilled and disdainful, Mrs. Fields herself evidently infatuated and Dickens himself suffering strangely from the anguish of some spiritual maladjustment which keeps him sleepless and eternally uneasy in the face of his astounding triumphs.

Mrs. Patrick Campbell's My Life and Letters (Dodd Mead) contains revelations about another man of genius—Mr. Bernard Shaw. His correspondence with Mrs. Campbell, as originally published in an American newspaper, probably threw more light on his character and temperament than anything else ever written about him by himself or by anybody else, But as many of the letters have been suppressed in the book, it would probably be a mistake now to discuss the complete series. For the rest, Mrs. Campbell herself invests the book with a certain romantic glamor.